“Are you suggesting I sell my son?” asks Arthur in a tone of steel.
Blanche’s hands are gripping each other so hard her long nails are digging into her skin.
Jenny shrugs. “Keep him or don’t, is what I say. Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe.”
Blanche is trying to remember the glow she felt earlier in the evening, the conviction that she and Jenny were destined to be friends. Now she’s thinking: Why did I let this provocateur in the door again?
They’re all staring at Jenny, who remarks, “A Chinese fellow once told me that back in his village, there’s always a bucket ready.”
“What kind of bucket?” demands Arthur.
“Filled with water, you know? For inconvenient babies.”
The picture catches Blanche off guard, fills her with horror: P’tit, seen through water. The wavering image of that small face. “Stop,” she pleads with Jenny.
The woman’s eyes rest on her coolly. Then float back to Arthur. “You think you can’t do it, he told me, but you’d be surprised.”
No, Blanche insists to herself, no. I’d never—
“Listen, you stunted mule,” Arthur roars, “try having a child before you open your foutu mouth on the subject.”
“Time you left, Frog Girl,” growls Ernest, very much the gorilla as he lurches to his feet.
But Jenny’s already pulling on her waistcoat and jacket and then sliding her revolver into her trouser pocket. “Bonne nuit, mes amis,” she says, with a cordial bow.
Blanche puts her head around the bedroom door, silently, in case Arthur’s sleeping. He’s been laid low for the last three days. When he complained his back was bad again, and his head too, Blanche thought at first he was just suffering the effects of too much liquor or brooding over what Jenny’d said about P’tit—but then it turned into a scorching flu.
Blanche has been camped on the sofa beside the baby’s trunk so P’tit won’t disturb his father. Frankly, she’s sick of waiting hand and foot on this tiny, unsmiling stranger. She wouldn’t drown him in a bucket, but she can’t say much more than that. Guilt hangs on her like a lead apron. There are moments, tying a diaper or transferring P’tit from one arm to the other, when Blanche begins to feel competent at this kind of drudgery, but that doesn’t help; it only sharpens the feeling of estrangement from herself.
Ernest is at Madeleine’s, ostensibly taking refuge from the baby’s caterwauling, but really demonstrating how wounded his feelings were by Blanche’s suggestion that P’tit and a nursemaid should have the second bedroom. (She might just as well have held her tongue, because she hasn’t been able to hire anyone, despite hauling P’tit up and down all the grubbier streets of the Mission in search of hungry Irish girls, lying—with her best poker face—that there’ve been no smallpox cases within blocks of their apartment.)
Jenny hasn’t shown up again, which is a mercy. Was she trying to shame Arthur into taking some fatherly responsibility the other night? Blanche wonders. Or can Jenny just not resist the pleasure of picking a fight?
“How are you this afternoon, chéri?” she murmurs, seeing Arthur’s lashes flicker.
He leans up on one elbow and feels his forehead experimentally. “Quite restored.”
His smile loosens all the strings in Blanche’s body.
The apartment is as silent as some forest pool now P’tit’s finally dropped off. “Today I really must go out for a shave,” Arthur mentions, scratching the dark stubble that furs his cheeks.
So odd to catch him less than chic, unready for the world. “Some coffee first?”
His tongue explores his gums. “My mouth’s a little tender.”
“Breakfast?” offers Blanche.
Arthur’s eyes crinkle at the corners as they rest on her. “I can think of one or two things that might tempt me …”
Blanche comes closer. He takes hold of the edge of her nightgown and slides it up her legs. The touch of his thumbnail is all it takes to liquefy her.
A whimper goes up from the salon. She stiffens.
“Oh, give him a chance to settle,” murmurs Arthur, hands circling her thighs.
She lets him go on because it’s been days and days; the two of them haven’t had a chance to lay hands on each other since Sunday. This is more like it. The old Blanche, the ever-new Blanche, Blanche la Danseuse, seen and desired, stroked and seized and parted. Arthur pulls her onto his lap so fast that she loses her balance.
The wail repeats, still weak but penetrating, like a gull wheeling outside the window.
Blanche does her best to ignore it. She’s squirming, writhing, in a frenzied tarantella. “Chérie,” Arthur murmurs, and she thinks it’s an endearment but then realizes his hands are pivoting her, so it must be a request. He wants her facing away, so he can squeeze her breasts while she rides him, his hands conducting her movement. Allegro! His plump cock spearing her like a fish in a stream. Presto! Blanche gasps but Arthur won’t relent, and every movement feels so damnably good it makes her cry out, but not as loud as P’tit’s crying behind that closed door, keening in his battered tin box, sobbing his heart out for the salope who’s failed him one more time, choking on his own tongue by the sound of it while his mother gets her dirty bliss—
A crash in the salon. Blanche is off the bed with a single shove.
An exasperated groan from Arthur.
Blanche finds P’tit skewed on the floorboards between his trunk and the sofa. She wipes his wet purple face, shushes him, checks his head for new bumps.
Arthur calls from the bedroom. “What the hell—”
“Ça va,” she calls back quickly. Well, she hopes P’tit’s all right. He’s as sweaty as a pig, and she prays he hasn’t picked up his father’s fever. “Well done,” she whispers in one small ear. Climbing out of his trunk, that’s something new he’s learned: a sign of progress, surely? “A clever trick,” she murmurs, “but we won’t show Papa yet.”
P’tit’s calmer now, slobbering on his doorknob. The other hand creeps back to his hairline to scratch. A tuft of hair comes out in his fingers.
“Stop that,” says Blanche, too sharply.
He lets out another sob.
She wipes the hair out of his hand and soothes him with a little waltz.
By the time she returns to the bedroom, holding P’tit, Arthur’s pulling on his long silk socks and tucking his drawers into them. “Don’t bother with coffee, I’ll stop at a café,” he says, not looking up.
“Very well,” she replies, equally crisp, jiggling P’tit in her arms. It seems she’s always to blame. Because she impulsively rushed P’tit away from Folsom Street four days ago? Or because she gave birth to him in the first place?
Arthur scratches his face, and then one sole. “It’s tonight you dance, yeah?”
“Oh, will you be minding the baby?” she asks sarcastically instead of answering. Arthur’s lost track, because it was last night, Wednesday, that the Lively Flea should have been displaying her charms at the House of Mirrors. Blanche very much doubts Madame Johanna was able to rustle up another headline act half as appealing. Sal, in the hat shaped like a horse’s head? Scheherazade (born Mabel), gauzy veil over her nose, doing the hootchi-kootchi? Pleasurably, Blanche wonders whether anyone in the regular crowd demanded his money back.
Arthur’s eyes have narrowed. “Watch your mouth.” He’s tightening his waistband, adjusting the buckle at the small of his back.
Is some of Jenny’s cockiness rubbing off on her? Blanche wonders. Or is it just high time Blanche started standing up for herself?
The man’s still hard for her; she can see that through the fine cloth of his narrow trousers. Despite her irritation, she throbs to finish what they started. If it weren’t for P’tit on her hip, she’d push Arthur backward onto the bed and pull those trousers open again. Teach me to mind my manners, she’d tell him. Cram yourself into me, ram me, split me in two.
He pulls one sock off, rubs the bottom of his foot violently. “Come over here, would you?”
br /> “Oh, Arthur, it’s not a convenient time,” she begins, cross at the thought of starting all over again and getting interrupted before she comes off. “Once he’s asleep—”
“Just tell me what I’m looking at, if it’s not too inconvenient.”
She steps closer. Stares at the red marks clustering on Arthur’s yellowish sole. Almost laughs, because it’s incongruous: pimples on the flat of a foot. Or perhaps just a heat rash, like the one P’tit had when she brought him home. Her mind is circling, considering possibilities. All the things this spray of red on Arthur’s foot—and his face, she can see it there too, now she’s looking, the angry pattern rising through the stubble—all the things this kind of marking could mean …
“No.” Arthur says it with authority. Draws himself up, the magnificent artiste Blanche fell in love with almost a decade ago.
“No,” she chimes in. But instead of reassuring her man, reaching out to touch him, she finds her arms tightening around P’tit as she edges backward.
“Come to Chinatown? Are you mad, woman?” asks the doctor.
Blanche swallows a sob. She’s left Arthur alone at the apartment, speechless, swigging brandy to ease his panic. Her lungs hurt from hurrying up and down hills with P’tit in her sweaty arms like some badly folded blanket. The first three doctors she approached shied away from her as soon as she mentioned her man had a rash on soles and face. The third charged her a whole dollar for a bottle of something labeled Anti-Smallpox Specific, though she suspects it’s just sugared whiskey. This fourth fellow, an Irishman in a tiny room above an outfitter’s halfway up Nob Hill, is buttoned up to the throat, a rubber handkerchief pinned over his face, so all she can see are the wary, rabbity eyes. “Please,” she tries again. “Just to take a look—”
“I’ve seen what it looks like,” he says gruffly. “And it won’t get any prettier.”
“But can’t you—”
“He’ll need opium for the pain. Are you vaccinated?”
“We both got the scratch, years and years ago,” she protests.
“I’m sick to the back teeth of telling folks that the effect wears off.” The eyes above the creamy rubber tighten with irritation.
Blanche stares at him. So ever since the smallpox came to town, she and Arthur and Ernest have been swanning round believing they were protected when they were only ignorant?
“I’ll do you and the baby now, at least,” says the doctor with a sigh.
She’s too abashed to say no, though she flinches at the lancet he pulls out of his case.
He rubs the stuff into the cut on her arm with more force than seems required; Blanche chews her lip so as not to sob. He’s gentler with P’tit, though he still makes him cry. “You aren’t to be thinking this is a surefire thing,” the doctor warns her.
“You mean it won’t keep us safe?”
“Nobody’s safe, woman. Especially not a mite of a thing like this,” he comments, tying a bandage around P’tit’s spindly arm, “so keep the pair of you away from bad cases.”
This is the first genuine doctor’s office she’s been in on this side of the Atlantic; he’s got a certificate on the wall. She should ask, while she’s here. “Rickets.” Blanche makes herself pronounce the memorized word. “Is that what it would be called, Doctor, when a baby looks like this?”
The eyes above the mask flick between P’tit and Blanche’s peach silk skirt with what she recognizes as contempt. “That’s one word for it.”
Sunday morning, a tap at the door. Blanche lays P’tit down on the rug with his doorknob and rushes to intercept Gudrun. Measles, that’s what Blanche told all her lodgers yesterday when she went round to collect their rents. That seemed better than saying nothing. “Best not come in today either,” she tells the Swede now, as lightly as she can manage. “Arthur’s still rather unwell and can’t bear noise.”
A faint but ragged cry from the bedroom. Blanche wipes sweat out of her eyes. With all those sores in his mouth, Arthur can barely form a word. Ernest is with him, she reminds herself.
“Not measles,” says Gudrun, taking a step back on the landing.
The sore on Blanche’s upper arm is throbbing, and P’tit’s is swollen too. Their new vaccinations must have been from a bad batch. But does that mean they were fake, from some tube of slime a swindler sold the Irish doctor, or the opposite, that they were too virulent, in which case they should at least keep the disease at bay? That’s what’s distracting Blanche as she stares down Gudrun. “If you could boil up these sheets for me in your room,” she presses on.
“I don’t believe is measles.”
Their eyes lock hard.
“It’s not allowed to hide,” mumbles the Swede.
Is Gudrun threatening to report them to the board of health? Blanche sways closer and speaks softly. “Do you want this whole building quarantined, really? I suppose you imagine they’ll let the rest of you flee before they board us up? Huh! Have you enough food on your shelf for six weeks?”
Tears of terror in the seamstress’s milky-blue eyes. “Monsieur should go hospital.”
“Don’t you read the papers? Nobody’s coming out of hospitals alive.” Blanche loses control of her voice. “They’re slipping in each other’s merde or lashed to beds and left screaming for water in the dark.”
Gudrun shakes.
“All I’m asking is for you to keep your mouth shut. And boil laundry for us upstairs, morning and evening,” Blanche adds, pressing her advantage. “I’ll pay you good money. You’ll be perfectly safe if the water’s nearly scalding,” she improvises. A sting of conscience—but Blanche can’t manage without the girl’s help, she reminds herself, and nobody’s safe, anyhow. “Just add a cup of this—” She runs to fetch the enormous bottle of carbolic on the table, and pours a jugful for Gudrun. Then goes to fetch the basket full of stained sheets.
When Gudrun’s gone, Blanche stands frozen, straining to hear voices from the sickroom. P’tit’s fallen into a crumpled doze right on the floor. For a moment there’s nothing for Blanche to do: what an unnerving sensation. Nothing, meaning everything. So much she wants to do for Arthur but she mustn’t. Blanche remembers having him inside her on Thursday before he noticed the marks on his foot, and she shakes with dread. She mustn’t go within arm’s length of him now, because of that ache above her elbow, which means she may not be protected at all, and the same goes for P’tit. Keep the pair of you away from bad cases, the doctor said, looking at her as if she were the worst mother in the world, and this much is clear: Arthur’s case is about as bad as it can be.
Food. That’s something to do. What’ll she get? A stew, a hash, a pie? It doesn’t matter. Milk! Milk for P’tit, how could she have forgotten? But she can’t go out till P’tit wakes up, because then she can take him with her so he doesn’t bother the men.
This might be P’tit’s only nap today, so Blanche mustn’t waste this time. What can she do with it?
A creak of the bedroom door. Ernest, emerging with the covered dish he’s using as a bedpan. The hot smell clouds the air. Blanche doesn’t want him to catch her idle, so she busies herself over by the icebox filling another bottle of cold broth to have ready for P’tit. She glances at Ernest sideways to check his color: no sign of fever in the unshaven, concave cheeks. (She made him rush off to get a fresh scratch as soon as she told him the news about Arthur on Thursday.)
When he’s emptied the dish into the covered bucket, he adds carbolic to the water in the basin and rinses the dish, then scours his reddened hands. All this without looking in Blanche’s direction.
“Does Arthur want me?” she asks. Too high, like some vain girl.
“His blisters are swelling up,” he says, not dignifying her question with an answer.
Christ. After a minute, Blanche asks, “Do you need—shall I get more ice? More laudanum?”
“He can’t keep it down,” says Ernest, as if she should have known that. “I’m trying morphine.”
Has this man slept
at all? The words burst from Blanche. “You know I’d be helping you nurse him if it weren’t for the baby—”
Like a snake, he turns on her, practically spitting. “The same foutu baby you were content to stash out of sight, out of mind, for the past year?”
Blanche bites down on her lip so hard that her eyes water. That’s exactly why she must keep P’tit out of harm’s way now, why she has to go to such cruel lengths to stay out of range of Arthur’s infectious touch and breath. She owes the tiny boy that much, surely. “If I were to catch it, so would P’tit,” she wails.
A snort. “For all we know, it’s him who brought it.”
Blanche’s hands contract into fists. “What bull is this?”
“Do you deny he’s had a fever?”
“Only since his scratch!”
“The creature’s been all coughs, vomits, and itches since you carried him in the door,” snarls Ernest. “Too much of a goddamn coincidence, I say, that Arthur took to his bed not two days later …”
A vast rage fills Blanche. The City’s one great hotbed of contagion, and this connard blames P’tit?
Ernest grabs a bottle of wine and some folded cloths from the drawer. Pulls a thin, dripping slab of ice out of the insulated box and wraps it in cheesecloth. “Arthur knows why you won’t go near him. You want to save your own satané skin.”
For a second she doesn’t understand.
“Terrified of getting scarred, jeopardizing the porcelain perfection that is Blanche la Danseuse!”
“It’s not about my skin, you son of a bitch.”
Ernest puts his prominent jaw very close to her, now, and she smells his sweat. “Answer me this. Are you his woman or aren’t you?”
I am, Blanche wants to say. Always.
He steps back. “If it’s really the baby you’re so scared for, why not send him away?” he asks with a sneer. “He’d be safer anywhere else.”
“Send him where, back to Folsom Street?”
“Send him to the Dakotas, for all I care.”
“If he—if I dump my son in one of those places again, he won’t make it.”
Hissed through his teeth: “And what makes you so sure his father’s going to make it?”