The door squeaks slightly.
“That wasn’t five minutes,” she barks.
But the face that comes around the door is not Low Long’s.
Blanche leaps to her feet so fast her heels slam like a flamenco dancer’s.
“I’ve been in the café across the street watching for you,” remarks Ernest.
Blanche’s mind chatters to keep the terror at bay. He’s twenty-one, but with the face of a skeleton. If this man is Arthur’s shadow, it’s the distorted, serpentine shadow of the end of the day.
Ernest takes a step closer.
“Low Long!” Blanche screeches like a parakeet. Perfect, she groans internally; first she threatens to set the cops on the man, and then she calls on his gallantry for protection.
“Stop that racket,” says Ernest.
“Low Long!” No furniture to put between her and this elongated ape.
“Have you no shame, salope?”
“Shame?” She repeats the word in confusion, keeping her eyes on the impeccable curves of Ernest’s dark jacket. Could he be hiding a pistol? A stiletto, more likely. Won’t spoil the line of a suit. Why didn’t Blanche pay attention over the years when the two friends made jokes like that? What stopped her from glimpsing what they’ve always been capable of?
“Telling the papers such conneries,” he growls. “As if Arthur knows or cares what happened in some dive at the end of the railroad track!”
Blanche blinks at him. Is this really a declaration of his friend’s innocence? The last thing she was expecting. Her eyes keep searching for any hint of that stiletto. Of course, all Ernest really needs are his steely fingers around her throat.
“Probably one of those boozy hicks set off his varmint gun by tripping over it.”
She nods, to pacify him.
“It could have been anyone,” Ernest barks at her. “With a history like Bonnet’s—the fool made enemies wherever she went. She couldn’t go a block without running into a fight.”
Blanche considers sprinting to the door, reckons her chances of reaching it before Ernest can grab her skirts.
He takes a step closer.
“Don’t hurt me,” Blanche says, softly. Despising herself, even as she knows there’s no other way to play it. Ernest is hardly going to throttle her here and now, with the building full of carpenters, she tells herself. If he meant to, he’d have done it right away, because killers don’t waste time lecturing. Which means it’s worth lowering herself to beg. “I’ll leave town, tonight,” she murmurs. “I’ll go so far away, you’ll never have to—”
“You won’t go anywhere till you’ve cleared my friend’s name, putain!”
She’s nodding automatically, head bobbing like a toy on a spring.
“You had Arthur Deneve,” Ernest marvels, leaning in very close to her. “You cold piece of veal, to turn your back on such a man at his lowest hour! To make him so sick of this city that he abandoned it—”
So that much of what the paper said is true, it occurs to her. Arthur’s really gone. Absurdly, she feels the faintest pang of loss.
“—whereupon you defamed him in print, for sheer spite, as a murderer!”
Blanche is lost for words. What can she say, what can she do, to buy herself out of this? She’d get on her hands and knees and bare herself for this raging man if she had anything to offer that he hasn’t had a dozen times before.
“So tomorrow,” he growls, “you’re going to walk into that inquest and tell the jury how wrong you were.”
“Yes,” Blanche breathes.
Ernest turns on his polished heel.
Relief floods her. She can’t believe that’s all it took: one magic word.
The young man spins around as if he’s heard Blanche’s thoughts. “And if you shilly-shally or equivocate—” Ernest is almost on top of her now, his breath heating her cheeks, the rope of tendons in his neck standing out. But he doesn’t touch her. Strange, when you think how familiar he is with every inch of Blanche, that he can’t seem to bring himself to so much as lay a hand on her now. “If you mess this up, goddamn it—”
Here it comes. Blanche waits for the threat as for a blade parting her skin.
“—I swear you’ll never see the kid again.”
Her mouth falls open.
Ernest doesn’t notice her shock because he’s spun away. Out the door already, shoes thundering on the stairs. He’s gone.
She breathes in, so sweet it hurts her chest. Terrible hope hooks her.
P’tit!
He must be alive. How could Ernest threaten never to let Blanche see her baby again if her seeing him again is not at least a possibility? The man wasn’t being crafty and calculating, just now; she’s known Ernest long enough to read his tone, and she’s convinced that he spoke from the heart. A malevolent, jealous, septic heart, but still. This much she’d bet: P’tit’s alive, and Ernest knows where he is.
V
VIVE LA ROSE
Arthur gets stronger fast once his scabs form. On the fourth of September, he hobbles out of the bedroom on his friend’s arm, looking like some mummy from a pyramid. Patches of scalp show through his hair. His nose wasn’t this big before, was it? Two weeks of dark beard obscures some of the lesions, making him even less recognizable to Blanche.
She runs over to him, to hide her reaction. The almost sugary stench of his scabs.
“Watch out, it might still be catching,” Arthur says, deep in his throat.
She falls back.
He seems to have lost all the lashes on his right eye. Blanche tries to smile. Arthur’s dark pupils see right through her.
“Are you hungry?” she asks, to fill the silence. She tries to remember what there is: butter but no bread … “I could go out for something.” She rakes through the detritus on the sideboard for that strip of twenty meal tickets for the corner noodle house.
“He won’t be able to eat anything solid,” Ernest rebukes her. “Is there soup?”
“I’ll get some.” Durand’s horse-meat soup, perhaps: that delicious broth would restore any Frenchman to health.
“And more ice. Lake ice,” he orders. “That factory-made stuff leaves a nasty residue.”
Blanche watches Arthur letting himself down onto a cane chair by the window, as if everything hurts him.
P’tit sobs from the skirting board. He’s just figured out how to roll, but only one way, so he always ends up with his face mashed against the wall. Every day, some inconvenient new skill, as if he’s catching up on a whole year’s worth of tricks.
Blanche snatches him up and hovers, looking at his pallid scalp through the wisps of hair. She can’t carry him and a tureen of soup at the same time.
“This place reeks,” Arthur remarks.
She’s strangely embarrassed; she thought they were all going to pretend that they couldn’t smell his illness.
“It’s the baby,” says Ernest.
Oh, that. “This morning’s diapers,” Blanche corrects him. Arthur lets out a bearish roar.
She thinks it’s about the diapers. Then she registers that he’s rubbing his jaw savagely. A scab flakes off, leaving a puckered white hollow, as if some ghostly assailant has gouged him with a fingernail.
Ernest leans over and locks Arthur’s hand in his own as if they’re sailors arm-wrestling in a bar, but very gently, putting no pressure on the lumpy palm.
Arthur hisses. “I have to just—”
“You were a handsome man,” his friend cuts in, “and you will be again, but only if you don’t scratch.”
Blanche looks at the place on the floor where the flake fell. Her own skin itches.
Arthur breathes out, his wasted muscles shifting under his shirt. Closes his eyes and moves his teeth as if he’s biting an invisible rope.
P’tit starts to keen again, industriously.
“‘There’s a good time coming, boys,’” Blanche carols in his ear, swaying him from side to side,
A good time coming,
A good time coming.
How does the rest of it go? What’s so good about the good time, and when exactly is it going to come? she wonders. Blanche doesn’t even know where she picked this song up. She repeats what she remembers, hoping to recall the next line:
A good time coming,
A good time coming …
“You’re making my head ache as much as he is,” remarks Arthur, eyes still shut.
“Your son likes music,” she tells him. But switches to a waltz.
Arthur groans.
“Pick another satané tune,” snaps Ernest.
Blanche breaks off, realizing what she’s humming: He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease, / A daring young man on the flying trapeze … She wishes she had the courage to carry on. To persuade Arthur that P’tit should know that his father once flew, that Papa was a god among men. She longs for Arthur to look up and nod, let her sing the song as proudly as Léotard’s young acolytes always used to sing it. Past times, long gone, but does that mean they have to be forgotten? You’ve survived, Blanche wants to tell him. Let’s celebrate that much.
But Arthur’s altered face remains locked like a safe.
Blanche is swinging P’tit from side to side now, fast enough to make him dizzy, and it’s hushed the child; she suspects she’s happened on a sensation he really enjoys. Doesn’t it make sense that the son of circus folk should have a taste for whirling? Even if he’s inherited none of his parents’ grace.
“Soup,” Ernest reminds her, jerking his head toward the street.
It’s the tone that pushes Blanche over the edge. She stares at Ernest. “Whose apartment—whose damn building do you think you’re living in?” she demands.
His eyes flare, then slide to Arthur.
Who’s looking up now, with eyebrows that cut arcs in the knobbled mask of his face. “My friend here,” he says quietly, “has saved my life by risking his own while you’ve been playing at motherhood.”
“Playing?” She screeches the word.
He winces, holds up one misshapen hand. “But what’s past is past. What worries me is that you’re so besotted with this baby, you seem to have forgotten the need to earn a living.”
Ernest is nodding like a puppet. “It must be more than three weeks since she’s danced at the House of Mirrors,” he points out.
“You know why I won’t go back to that bitch,” says Blanche, addressing Arthur only. “Besides, I don’t need Madame to peddle my cul for me.”
He shrugs, a movement that she can tell pains him. “That’s the spirit. So why don’t you go ahead and peddle it yourself?”
“The chamber pot’s not empty yet, is it?” she demands.
“It’s certainly not full.”
“I thought you preferred to live for the day,” Blanche mocks.
“Arthur prefers to live in style,” Ernest tells her.
“Oh, he does? You mean you both do, and at my expense.”
Arthur clears his throat exhaustedly. “Let’s stick to practicalities. Why haven’t you looked up some of the silver men? Or that railroad fellow, or that big Sicilian—what’s his name, Lament? Lemon?”
He knows Lamantia’s name perfectly well. “I’ve been busy looking after your son,” says Blanche.
“Ticktock, ticktock,” murmurs Arthur. “Let’s not forget”—with a rueful, spasmodic gesture at himself—“how fast looks can be lost.”
Get out of the room, Blanche tells herself. Ernest can fetch their satané soup.
She stamps her way into the bedroom, baby on her hip. Her room, or it used to be, before it had the reek of death. She pushes the window ajar and takes some long breaths. Arthur’s inching back from the very brink, she reminds herself. He has a right to be bitter. No wonder he doubts her love, considering. She does love him, of course she loves him; Blanche has loved Arthur since she was old enough to know what the word meant. Their fondness has just gone temporarily astray. These are not ordinary times.
“Look,” she says, staring down at a passing cart, “horsies.”
But P’tit’s turning his head away from the window, sniveling again. “Chut, chut,” Blanche hushes him, trying to make her voice sound more fond than weary. Besotted? What a joke, when Blanche is often as maddened by this baby as by a sliver under the skin.
Mothers in the street who caress their children—they may all be faking it, it occurs to her now. Like the girl in the story who was forced to open the door to the frog, let him feed off her plate, even allow him into her bed. The horror of it: the slime trail across the sheets.
All week, heat continues to fill the apartment like an invisible gas. Blanche’s clothes seem to soak through the minute she puts them on. Ernest comes and goes, reeking of strange smoke; he’s burning all the sheets and cloths in an oil drum in the street outside. Arthur shuffles around or lies in the bedroom in more or less speechless convalescence, fingers locked in his armpits to prevent them from scratching the remaining scabs.
Blanche is always yawning. Always on the verge of sleep, but P’tit won’t let her have more than an hour at a time; it’s the heaven she can never quite reach.
Soon all Arthur’s scabs have fallen off. Ernest’s steamed the bedroom so thoroughly that it reeks of sulfur, and the bedding’s all new, but Blanche is still afraid to sleep in there somehow. She tells herself that she might disturb the convalescent if she brushes against him in the night, and she stays on the sofa, beside P’tit’s trunk.
One evening, the seventh of September, Arthur asks if there’s any wine, and Blanche fills his glass, as courteous as a stranger. If they’re very careful, she believes, they should be able to edge their way back to where they were. Before the smallpox, before Blanche went to Folsom Street, before Jenny Bonnet and her questions. (Jenny hasn’t turned up in a week, not since that walk they took, that sticky evening when Blanche didn’t know if Arthur was going to live or die. That’s the sort of friend Jenny is, Blanche reminds herself; no more to be counted on than a leaf on the breeze.)
Arthur dresses to the nines tonight—shakily, with Ernest tying his cravat for him, and doing his pearl waistcoat buttons, and hanging his gold watch just so. When Arthur practices a smile, the effect is grotesque. Still blackly forested all over his leprous face, because Ernest won’t let him shave yet.
Blanche is not invited. She doesn’t even know where the macs are going. She wonders whether Madeleine will be with them tonight. The woman has to be pushing thirty, but she’s still angel-faced, Blanche thinks with a twinge of envy. Being saddled with a baby, Blanche feels as if she doesn’t quite count as a woman anymore.
A sudden loud crack: another blasted lamp! Blanche spots the one with the shattered chimney and hurries over to blow the flame out. Cleaning the burners, that’s one of those tasks that don’t get done now. Blanche has assured all the lodgers that Arthur’s no longer contagious, but they look askance at her if they pass her on the stairs, and Gudrun still refuses to step across the threshold.
Instead of falling asleep as he should this evening, P’tit gets more and more frantic. Returning from the lavatory, Blanche finds him on his feet—he’s hauled himself up by one of the sofa buttons, of all things. She supposes a proper mother would be proud of him, and for a moment she tries to be. But one of the many things about babies that nobody told her is that every incremental advance makes them harder to handle. And the next moment he falls hard, of course, walloping his shoulder on the floorboards and then honking like some clubbed seal.
Blanche picks him up and props him, sitting, against some cushions. But before she can get away, P’tit is clawing himself to his feet again, heaving himself up on her brown polka-dot skirt like a sailor climbing rigging. Or, no, like Quasimodo straining at the ropes of the great bells …
She disengages his fingers. “Hold that,” she says, standing him up against a table and pressing his small hands around the leg.
P’tit stares at her suspiciously. Blanche steps away, smiling.
He wails even before he topples like a felled tree.
Every time she tries to bed him down in his trunk for the night, P’tit leans over the tin rim as if plotting a jailbreak. Blanche can’t leave him because he might fall right out. She crouches there in the dark room, on the edge of the sofa. “Go to sleep,” she chants softly. “Go the hell to sleep.”
P’tit’s cry goes up a jagged notch, and suddenly Blanche can’t bear the injustice of it. She crouches, putting his goblin face up against hers, and shouts, “Ta gueule!”
The obscenity makes him freeze for a moment. Massive dark eyes fixed on hers. Then he shrieks even harder, and his hands shoot out. Such an unfamiliar gesture that at first she flinches away from the thickened wrists, thinking he’s trying to throttle her. And then she understands. This is what breaks Blanche’s heart, that even as P’tit’s sobbing with fright, he’s reaching out for her in a way he’s never done before, a way she didn’t know he could. How could the tiny boy want a hug from her right now with the tears she’s caused still dancing on his red cheeks? Who begs for comfort from a tyrant? But P’tit is wrapping his arms around Blanche’s head the way a drowning man might embrace a log.
And if she can’t look after him properly, do this one thing right, then Blanche has no business making a hash of it. She should carry P’tit to Portsmouth Square and set him down on the grass. Walk away, leaving him to the mercies of whoever will take him. Never say she had a baby, never dare to call herself a mother …