Arthur’s moaning something in the bedroom. And? Could that be what he’s saying? And what?
Ernest claps his hands by her ear, making her jump. “He’s calling your name, putain.”
Blanche, that’s the sound. Blanche, through lips too lesioned to articulate.
She throws a glance at P’tit, still snuffling in shallow sleep on the floor of the salon. Then hurries as far as the door. If she goes into the bedroom but holds her breath—if she doesn’t touch anything—
Ernest pushes in past her.
Blanche pulls out a handkerchief and presses it over her nose as she follows him, foot by foot, into the stinking room. “Chéri?” Muffled by the cloth that she hopes will somehow shield her.
The bare windows let in a merciless light. The man on the bed, wearing nothing but sweat-darkened drawers, is unrecognizable. Hair pushes through the scarlet pustules on his face and neck: a mask of burning wood. Dimpled red pearls, densest on his feet and hands and all across what used to be his lovely face. No, they’re a swarm of bloated ants up his legs and arms, converging on the plains of his chest and belly.
Ernest, his face blank as any stoic’s, starts to cover Arthur with cloths dipped in ice water. He lifts one of his friend’s feet—so the swollen sole won’t chafe against the sheet, she supposes. The muscular legs are bowed froggishly now. Ernest wets a rag with carbolic solution and very slowly wipes the seeping pustules on the foot. Even from the doorway, she can see the opalescent slime. He bunches the rag up, tosses it into a bucket, and begins again.
Blanche is trying not to gag. “I’m here, mon amour,” she says. The line sounds stagy. “Right here.” Technically true: about six feet from where Arthur lies.
A strange droning comes from his throat for an answer. It goes higher. Descant variations on a tune of pain.
“Time for another morphine suppository,” Ernest mutters under his breath.
It’s clear to Blanche now that this is not just the camaraderie of two members of an old double act who keep each other company on the streets of San Francisco. Nothing could make someone do what Ernest is doing except love.
“What can I—”
“See to the brat,” barks Ernest.
Only then does she realize that P’tit’s wailing in the other room.
Side to side, forward and back, Blanche shuffles across the apartment on the first day of September, humming in P’tit’s minute ear.
For a week and a half Arthur’s seemed on the verge of death, yet the days stumble on. Blanche still eats, moves, even sleeps on and off, and babies always need looking after, especially this one, whose unfathomable eyes gaze on the world expecting the worst. You’re here now, she wants to tell P’tit with a little shake. Here’s Blanche, a woman who’s willing to pick him up when he cries in the middle of the night. His mother. (The word still doesn’t trip off her tongue.) A woman who’s been neglecting her beloved as he lies ill, all for this disconsolate baby’s sake. So why does P’tit still have the air of a parcel forgotten at a train station? She hums on. Scraps of opera, gutter choruses, sea chanteys, rhymes from the crowded little schoolroom on the Ile Saint-Louis that Blanche didn’t know she remembered, any old piety or filth that might distract him: the whole repertoire of her quarter century.
Even hotter today. How can that be? Has the whole climate of the Bay been knocked off balance somehow?
Toward evening, Blanche thinks she hears a roll of thunder, but her ears might be tricking her. Her arm muscles are getting hard from nearly two weeks of carrying P’tit around. At this point she’d hire Satan himself as a nursemaid, but nobody will come near a yellow-flagged building, let alone move into it.
Her lodgers mutter together on the landings. They won’t forgive Blanche for the measles story. She’d better not knock on their doors for their rents tomorrow. Blanche has no idea whether it was Gudrun or someone else who reported Arthur’s case to the board of health; all she knows is that last time she went downstairs to the faucet and stepped out onto Sacramento to take a breath, there was a gaudy yellow flag hanging over the front door. But why haven’t the inspectors turned up at the apartment door with all their fumigation apparatus demanding that Arthur be handed over? Perhaps the hospitals are all full. Blanche doesn’t know because she hasn’t bought a paper in days.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but Arthur and P’tit. Arthur because he’s so ill; P’tit because she mustn’t let him get ill. Her man and her child. How can Blanche weigh them against each other, and why should she have to?
P’tit’s had enough of his bottle now, and he’s slobbering over his doorknob. (She washes it when his grip loosens, in sleep, but she still hates the sight of the thing.) He must be teething, Blanche supposes. But then again, maybe teething’s just what you call it when a child is cantankerous.
Ernest comes out with another bucket of rags to soak. He’s a walking corpse. She tries to remember the last time she saw the young man eat more than a bite of anything. Oddly enough, they’ve never spent such a stretch of time together; they go about their different duties like an old married couple, with Arthur the child they dread to lose. But no, Ernest’s more like the mother who sees to all the dreadful, intimate requirements of the sick. Blanche just goes out to buy whatever he asks or hauls water from the faucet downstairs, afraid to say a word to him.
The silence in the salon jars her nerves. Perhaps she’ll go in and say a word, at least, to Arthur, while Ernest’s busy.
Blanche plants P’tit beside the sofa. He can sit up these days. That’s something, she thinks glumly.
She turns the door handle. Every day she thinks Arthur can’t get any worse. She never knew the body could endure such changes. Today his hands are embroidered with huge rubies each half an inch across, globes so thick on his right lid that he can’t open his eye. Blanche presses her handkerchief over her mouth and nose not because she thinks it’ll keep out the invisible germs but to shut out the sweet, rotten stench. She gags, and it’s not just the smell, it’s the thought of the unbearable pressure Arthur must be suffering as each globe bloats and leaks. Is her lover going to burst apart in the end, dynamited from inside his own skin?
“It’s Blanche,” she says, though it comes out so husky she’s not sure Arthur can hear her. Her eyes prickle with tears. Perhaps he’s past hearing, so far away in his opiate nightmare that nothing reaches him from this shore. Besides, is there any truth left in that claim, It’s Blanche? Is this still her, or is it some shoddy copy of the lively petite amie who followed him all the way to America? She is different these days, she knows that. Was it meeting Jenny Bonnet that began the metamorphosis? Or taking P’tit away from Folsom Street? Or has this different, older, somehow harder Blanche been hidden inside her all along?
She stands very still, watching for the slight rise and fall of Arthur’s breath.
A hard rat-a-tat: the front door. She bolts out to the salon.
Ernest, tugging an obstinate shard out of the icebox, is ignoring it.
After a moment, Blanche decides he’s right. Too risky to answer the door, especially at this time of the evening.
P’tit has slid to an uncomfortable angle. He’s patting the carved leg of the sofa as if it’s a pet. Blanche plucks him off the floor and walks him up and down, just for something to do, so Ernest can’t accuse her of doing nothing.
“Hou-hou!” A muffled call through the door.
Blanche unlocks it one-handed to find Jenny, her smile a little softened with drink. Blanche hasn’t seen her for the best part of two weeks. The tanned face looks as if it’s never been battered, and her suit’s even been laundered. She steps in jauntily, not waiting to be asked.
Blanche is suddenly aware of the danger for the visitor. “Didn’t you notice the yellow flag?”
“I tore that down,” mutters Ernest, still wrestling with the icebox.
She expects him to tell Jenny to get the hell out, but he reverts to silence.
“City’s so carpet
ed with the things, it might be Carnival,” remarks Jenny. “Who’s sick? Not the baby?”
“Arthur,” says Blanche, the name a stone in her throat.
Jenny grimaces and holds up a half-empty bottle. “Anyone fancy some rye?”
Blanche realizes that she does, very much.
Ernest comes over with two glasses to be filled. Then he carries them into the sickroom, shutting the door behind him.
“Wouldn’t have credited that dandy man for a nurse,” Jenny remarks under her breath.
“I can’t do it—I’ve got to—” Blanche’s voice fractures, and she gestures down at the baby.
Jenny nods, and drains her glass in one. “Phew, it stinks in here. Let’s get out for some air.”
There’s nothing Blanche would like more, but she has P’tit to look after.
“High time he saw something of his hometown,” says Jenny, reading her mind.
She’s right, Blanche decides. They need some air. “Keep an eye on him, then, while I make myself presentable,” she says, parking P’tit on the floor, where he immediately starts to cry.
“Presentable for whom, pray tell?”
Jenny’s mocking line follows Blanche into the little lavatory, where she scrabbles in her bag for her rouge. She’s not going out without a bit of paint and a freshly pinned chignon, at least. The half-melted kohl keeps getting in her eye, so she blinks the flecks of black away.
When she emerges to choose a fluted wrapper from the trunk of clothes behind the sofa, she finds Jenny clapping for the baby. P’tit’s expression is grave, as if he’s listening for the melodic line in some almost inaudible symphony. But he is clapping along: slow, silent pats, palm to palm.
Blanche, dressed now, scoops P’tit up and follows Jenny toward the door. The strains of a melancholy violin rise from the bedroom.
“Ernest?” murmurs Jenny, eyebrows up.
“It soothes Arthur,” Blanche whispers.
“Wouldn’t soothe me, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Chut,” she shushes her, with an appalled grin.
Jenny leaves her bicycle where it’s resting in the stairwell, and they step out onto Sacramento Street. The air’s as baking hot as ever, but more breathable than in the apartment—or maybe it just seems that way because Blanche hasn’t been out in days. The gaslit sidewalks are as crowded as if it’s broad daylight.
“How long’s Arthur had it?” asks Jenny.
“Tomorrow’s the twelfth day,” says Blanche.
“The fever hasn’t come back?”
“No.”
“Still breathing easily?”
“I suppose.” Breathing’s about all Arthur can manage.
“The Chinese call them beautiful flowers.”
“What?”
“The blisters,” says Jenny. “To flatter the goddess, don’t you know—so she’ll spare them and move on.”
“Which goddess?”
“The smallpox goddess.”
“They’ve got a goddess of goddamn smallpox?” asks Blanche.
Suddenly they’re both giggling like children.
Blanche sobers fast. “The thing is, I heard from an iceman—and Ernest read it, somewhere too,” she adds, “that if a smallpox case is going to make it, you’ll know on the twelfth day, because the blisters start scabbing over.”
“When,” says Jenny.
“What?” asks Blanche, confused.
“No need for ifs. When they scab over.”
Blanche gnaws her lip and tastes blood. “You haven’t seen Arthur.”
“Still, I say your fancy man’s going to come through.” Jenny spins a stick and catches it on the back of her hand. “He’s getting good care.”
“Not from me.” Guilt webbing in her throat.
“You’re keeping his son safe. He’ll understand.”
Blanche wishes she believed that.
“How about his eyes, are they white?”
“Brown,” answers Blanche, startled.
“The whites of them,” Jenny clarifies.
Blanche is too ashamed to admit that she hasn’t been close enough to Arthur to check his eyeballs.
“Most folks are surviving this, I heard, eyesight and all,” says Jenny. “Sometimes barely a mark on them.”
“I don’t care if Arthur ends up with a few marks,” Blanche snaps.
P’tit’s getting heavy; she should have thought to bring a shawl to tie him on her back or hip, the way country women do. Though, now that Blanche pictures it, she realizes she can’t bear the notion of looking like one of them. She’d rather shift him from shoulder to aching shoulder. It doesn’t seem to occur to Jenny to offer to carry him awhile. Sometimes it strikes Blanche that she might be better off with an ordinary friend.
A pungent reek makes her glance sideways down the next alley. After a stall where two men in long aprons are gutting fish, there’s a run of narrow buildings with those sliding door panels that display the blank faces of mui jai, Chinese girls standing ready for hire. “I wonder what they charge,” says Blanche with professional curiosity.
“Don’t you know the rhyme? Two bittee lookee, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee.”
“Really?” Six bits; that’s only seventy-five cents. “You wouldn’t get a white girl or a Mexican for less than a dollar,” says Blanche a little disapprovingly.
“Of course, the mui jai don’t see a cent of that. So much for the abolition of slavery,” adds Jenny, sardonic.
They’re heading east, without discussion, as if a glimpse of the Bay promises an evening breeze, though they should know better, thinks Blanche. A Chilean in a poncho walks right into her as if he doesn’t see her, almost knocking P’tit out of her arms. The baby doesn’t make a sound. He seems stunned by the colors and cries of the passing multitude. This is said to be the foreignest city in America; almost none of these people were born here. Back in Paris, Blanche remembers, there are so many protocols, so many ways to behave comme il faut, “as things are done,” because that’s how things have always been done. But San Francisco’s a roulette wheel, spinning its citizens and depositing them at random. Blanche has been driven around by cabbies who’ve claimed to be gentlemen temporarily down on their luck, and she’s spent well-paid nights with michetons who’ve boasted that they began as coal miners.
Jenny lifts her hat at a one-man band in faded stripes, who nods at her. He’s got pipes on a wire bracket around his neck, a fiddle in his hand, a large bass drum on his back. His elderly whine barely mounts over the skirmish of his instruments.
I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys,
I’ll drain the rivers dry,
A pocketful of rocks bring home—
So brothers don’t you cry!
No ears, curiously, just little nubs; it must be that you need only the holes to hear with. “I never saw anyone earless in Paris. I wonder why so many Americans are born that way,” remarks Blanche, jerking her thumb at him. “Something in the diet here?”
Jenny cackles.
“What?”
“That’s how they dealt with thieves back in the Rush. Miners hadn’t got time to spare for jurifying. Just lopped the guilty party’s ears off”—with a nod in the direction of the old musician—“and went back to panning.”
A year and a half here, Blanche thinks, disconcerted, and there’s so much she still doesn’t know about this country. The chorus fades behind them:
Oh, California,
That’s the land for me!
I’m bound for San Francisco
With my washbowl on my knee.
“This way,” says Jenny, suddenly ducking down Battery Street.
“Why?” asks Blanche, but she follows.
“Specials.” Jenny glances over her shoulder to check that the pair of private guards is going the other way.
It amuses Blanche to see Jenny even slightly rattled. “I thought it was only the cops who bother you—actual patrolmen.”
“Well, as a point of law
, they’re the only ones with the power to arrest me,” mutters Jenny, “but Specials like to impress their employers and earn tips by rounding up riffraff and handing them over to the patrol.”
Her gray coat, waistcoat, pants, soft hat—they seem so ordinary to Blanche now, it’s hard to remember that Jenny’s wearing them constitutes a crime. “And it’s all worth the candle?”
“Come on,” Jenny groans, “don’t tell me you wouldn’t put up a fight if someone tried to make you swap your tight frills for a grain sack …” She tugs at Blanche’s mauve wrapper.
They pass an enormous organ on a cart: hundreds of pipes, and sinister-looking automata dancing on top to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The grinder cranks on with his right arm, which Blanche notices is nearly twice the size of his left, and with barely a pause the tune changes jarringly to the Habanera from Carmen.
Then they’re going up a hill so steep she can’t talk and carry P’tit at the same time. She should be turning back soon. What if Arthur needs something? “I’m bushed,” she says at the top, panting, as she transfers P’tit to her other arm.
“Already? I like to stroll from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Mission and right over to the Panhandle, just to see what’s new,” says Jenny. “The City’s always growing like blazes, doubling every decade.”
Blanche finds the thought unsettling. “Sounds like some ugly fungus.”
“That’s the fun of it. Take the loveliest spot on earth,” says Jenny, arms out to encompass hill after hill, the Bay, the Pacific, “and scatter a litter of sooty old shacks all over it … It’s a striking contrast for the eye, wouldn’t you say? Then, for novelty, give the whole place the DTs.”
Blanche laughs, nodding. “There was a bad tremor back in January that woke me up.”
“You thought that little shimmy was bad?” Jenny crows. “Should have been here for the big one eight years back, when the City fell down around our ears. I’d been out on a bender, so I was half convinced I was seeing things. Cracks in walls opening and shutting like mouths … a four-story frontage dropped right off while I was watching.”
Blanche winces.