Frog Music

  “It’s gone dark,” Blanche wails.

  Jenny glances at the window. “It does that, come evening.”

  “But—” Can she and Jenny really have slept the whole day away, since after breakfast at Durand’s? And where could the men be? They can’t have been lugging P’tit around all these hours. Blanche thinks of Ernest’s blandly smiling Madeleine and wonders if they’ve gone to her place—above a grocery on Dupont, is that right? Free love; it occurs to Blanche to wonder whether the boon companions are sharing the ripe blonde now. With P’tit sniveling in some box in a back room. “I have to find him.”

  “Arthur?” says Jenny.

  “My son!” Blanche is halfway out the door when she stops, realizing that she should pack some things, just in case. She hauls out an old orange carpetbag from under the bed and throws in a few items: a spare corset, boots, a parasol, face paint, her pocketbook. Diapers for P’tit, for if—when—she finds him. An empty bottle with a cleanish teat. The doorknob (though the sight of it makes her face scorch). That’s all she needs for now.

  The hours of the evening go by in a blur of sweat. Hours of trailing from café to bar, tapping at the doors of opium shops to inquire about a Frenchman with a bad back and a freshly pocked face, enduring the nosy questions, the satire, asking if anyone has seen two men with a baby. Blanche finds she has to tip a quarter each time she puts her head in a door because of some nonsensical new bylaw banning women from bars in the evening.

  It’s nearly midnight when, after ponying up a full half-dollar to the jet-faced doorman of one of the better-class gaming saloons, she finally spots Ernest’s long black-jacketed back tilted over an oval faro table. And Arthur beside him, his face still looking as if it’s been splashed with acid.

  On the little stage, a fat soprano is giving “Una Voce Poco Fa” her best shot. Blanche makes her way through the crowd, which is pretty mongrel: a few black players, Mexicans, women, even Chinese—who must be high rollers for the white men to have let them in. She wishes she were wearing a less motley outfit, because the grubby blue bodice does nothing for the brown skirt or the egg-yellow mules. Blanche knows faro—one deck only, and the rules are child’s play: you just set your stake on or between the cards you fancy on the board with its pasted layout—but she finds it about as entertaining as picking her teeth. Like all banking games, it’s technically illegal in this town. It’s her private conviction that if it weren’t, nobody would bother playing it.

  Standing in the table’s cutout, the Scottish dealer wears its green baize like a skirt. “L’une pour l’autre,” he calls out, “the game’s drawn.”

  Blanche summons her nerve and touches Arthur on the shoulder. He doesn’t turn his head from his shaky columns of checks, which tells her that he saw her coming through the room. He sucks on his cigar, though it’s gone out. His olive cheeks are still rimed with white patches, the longing fingerprints of death. He’s been shaved, but not well. Perhaps Ernest did it for him, because no barber would take the risk? Mustache greased but askew. All in all, like a papier-mâché head in some Mexican fiesta.

  Blanche looks for Jenny—who’s still stuck at the door, she sees, in some kind of altercation with the doorman. “Arthur,” she tries again. He’s wearing a fob charm she’s never seen before, snakes coiling around a bloodstone. Who gave him that?

  “Double paix-paroli,” the winner of that round calls in the dealer’s direction, bending his cards in half.

  “Arthur!” Urgent, but still quiet. Her temper shakes off the reins. “Where have you left P’tit while you’re out carousing?”

  “Well, if that don’t beat all,” murmurs Arthur.

  “Monsters, the pair of you,” she hisses.

  “Oh, that’s rich. This slut abandons her child,” he remarks to Ernest—Blanche blushes despite herself, because the other gamblers are overhearing all this, and one diamond-studded old widow in particular is smirking—“and when I take steps to ensure his—my child’s—well-being, she calls me a monster?”

  His child now?

  “May we proceed, gentlemen?” inquires the dealer.

  “Steps,” repeats Blanche in his ear, “what steps?” The two of them got tired of the wailing and stinks in a matter of hours, that’s what he must mean, so they’ve dumped P’tit with someone else like Doctress Hoffman.

  “What do you care?” asks Arthur.

  “Masque,” says a Mexican.

  “Sept-et-le-va,” decides the fat man beside him.

  “I didn’t abandon him,” Blanche insists. “Just one night I was gone, that’s all, and only because you made it impossible for me to stay, you disgusting animals! So tell me, who the hell is looking after P’tit?”

  Jenny pushes through the crowd to Blanche’s side.

  “Que ça pue!” Ernest sniffs the air. “Brought in something on your shoe, did you, Blanche? Something froggish?”

  “Oh, you’re hilarious,” Blanche tells him.

  “I treated her too well, I believe,” Arthur remarks to his friend, straightening his stacks of checks. “Spoiled her.”

  “If we were to let her come back,” says Ernest, nodding judiciously, “it would have to be on certain conditions.”

  “She’d have to make up with the Prussian, for one,” proposes Arthur. “And two, she’d have to start earning again, pronto.”

  “Treat you with respect,” adds Ernest, counting on his fingers.

  “And my friend the same,” says Arthur, nodding at Ernest.

  “And any visitors of ours.”

  Blanche’s eyes meet Jenny’s.

  “Joke’s over. Where’s the kid?” demands Jenny in a voice that suddenly expands to dominate the table.

  “You’re interrupting the game,” warns the dealer.

  “And she’d have to begin by shaking this mischief maker off her tail, of course,” adds Arthur.

  Blanche is a pot boiling over. “Va te faire foutre,” she spits; he can go fuck himself. “Jenny’s my only friend in the world.”

  Jenny turns her face toward her with a curious expression that Blanche has no idea how to read. Blanche looks back at her, refusing to qualify or explain what she’s said.

  “It’s entirely up to you, of course,” says Arthur. “But if you want your precious P’tit …”

  Until this moment, Blanche was sure she was going to come back to Arthur. She’s always been his, ever since she was a girl who gaped up at Castor and Pollux flying across the vast painted ceiling. But now, hearing his implied threat, that conviction falls away from her like a bracelet with a broken catch. She leans in very close to his puckered temple. “You’re a no-account son of a bitch,” she says, “and I would beg on the streets before I’d live with you again.”

  There’s a second, a single second, when she could swear it hits Arthur, the fact of losing Blanche. And then—

  “As it happens,” he says, eyebrows tilting in the old confident way, “I’m thinking of going home.”

  Ernest pulls out his watch by the thick gold chain. “The night’s still young, mon vieux …”

  “Funny he calls it home,” Jenny remarks to Blanche, “when the whole building belongs to you.”

  The dealer raps dully on the baize. “Play or settle up, gentlemen.”

  “Home to France, I mean,” says Arthur.

  The world splinters. Blanche looks at Ernest to see if this is his doing and reads shock on his hollow cheeks. Clearly it’s the first he’s heard of it.

  “This foutu town, it’s turned you into one of these American harpies,” Arthur remarks to Blanche. “Back in Paris, I’ll get myself a real woman like that.” Snapping his fingers.

  This is a stage trick, she’s sure of it. Arthur’s always singing the praises of the City of Liberty, so why would he ship back to the old country with his mangled looks and no prospects there? It’s an utterly implausible volte-face, improvised to startle Blanche into falling to her knees and groveling for forgiveness, unbuttoning his pants and kissing his
stubby cigare.

  “With that face? You reckon you’d get another woman?” inquires Jenny mildly. She comes up close to examine Arthur, grimacing. “Whew, what an eyesore! String yourself with sparkles, but that won’t make a Christmas tree.”

  Arthur pushes her an arm’s length away and growls, “Why don’t you crawl back to your swamp?”

  “Bon voyage, then, and good riddance,” says Jenny, “but first give the lady back her goddamn son.”

  “My son, you mean,” Arthur corrects her.

  “What makes you so sure of that?” asks Blanche through her teeth.

  His expression tightens as he understands her.

  A lie, of course, but one she couldn’t resist throwing in his face, just to see how he’d take it.

  “Salope, are you daring to suggest—” Ernest begins.

  But Arthur cuts him off with a gesture. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed who’s behind Blanche’s new caprices,” he says, turning his glittering gaze on Jenny. “What kind of freak barges around breaking up happy ménages?”

  Is that what it was, Blanche asks herself, a happy ménage? Their life, the one they shared until that bicycle hit Blanche one Saturday night in the middle of August, seems centuries ago, far out of reach.

  The tight-lipped dealer’s gesturing over their heads to the doorman.

  “She’s a whore too, you know,” Arthur remarks to Ernest.

  Blanche turns to tell him that the word holds no sting for her anymore.

  But it’s Jenny he’s nodding at. “That’s how she earned her crust, folks say, back when she wore skirts.”

  Oh, this is fatuous. Why do men assume that every female in the world who draws the least attention to herself is theirs for hire? “You credit everything folks say?” Blanche scoffs.

  “You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet there,” Jenny remarks with a slight grin.

  “Jamais de fumée sans feu,” intones Arthur. “No smoke without fire.” He sniffs the air as if he smells it.

  “Imagine paying cash for a chew of that leather.” Ernest hoots.

  They don’t believe this ludicrous rumor, Blanche sees now, they just want to cut Jenny down to size.

  “May the rest of us please get on with the game?” demands the fat man.

  The dealer’s eyes are on the bouncers, who are working their way through the crowd toward the table. Blanche takes hold of Jenny’s elbow.

  “Gelding,” Arthur barks, loud enough for half the saloon to hear. “Swaggering around town in muddy pants … don’t forget you still have to sit down to make water.”

  Jenny bursts out laughing. “That’s your trump card, really? You believe I lie awake at night wishing I could piss standing up?”

  Arthur breaks out in a falsetto.

  You will be all the rage with the girls,

  If you’ll only get a mustache …

  “You reckon I pine for what you fellows have?” asks Jenny.

  He sings on, getting shriller.

  You will suit all the girls to a hair,

  If you’ve only got a mustache.

  “Oh, trust me, I could glue one on if I thought it was worth a dead rat,” says Jenny, stepping up and bending one wing of his waxed mustache.

  Arthur’s fist comes up fast, but Jenny’s already ducked. She dances out of range, her eyes exuberant, and then the bouncers are herding the two women toward the door.

  One week later, on the fifteenth of September. Blanche is scuttling away from the building that used to belong to her. Slow down, she tells herself. It seems that no one’s planning to shoot you today. Arthur’s gone, she doesn’t know where, but he’s abandoned the City, that’s what Ernest said just now, in a tone too wounded for him to be lying.

  She passes a whole gang of pigtailed workmen carrying planks and ropes. Low Long’s bunks, she realizes, as she turns her head and sees the carpenters filing through the door of number 815. Their denim overalls remind her of Jenny.

  Old lodgers gone, Low Long told her a quarter of an hour ago, new lodgers coming. She wonders where the old lodgers scattered to when Low Long evicted them without notice, the Corfu men and the Irish and Chinese, the two Scotswomen and Gudrun; have they somewhere to lay their heads tonight? And Blanche, their stylish, top-of-the-bill landlady, is no different from them.

  P’tit. His the one face that she can hold on to. Jenny’s dead but P’tit’s only lost. Ernest spoke—in the apartment just now—as if P’tit was alive, as if that went without saying. Blanche has no reason to trust him, but her years of familiarity with his every tone tell her to believe him. So she might get her baby back if she can somehow fix what she so clumsily broke this morning by blabbing about Arthur’s guilt. All Ernest seems to require of her is that she walk into that inquest tomorrow and untell her story—whitewash Arthur’s name, persuade the jury that everything she told Detective Bohen about vengeful macs was just the improvisation of a hysterical female. Easy! Blanche la Danseuse has never been afraid of an audience.

  The heat’s taken on the solid quality of a sponge. Thunder faintly rolls, and she keeps thinking she feels a drop, but it’s only sweat squeezing out of her skin. Surely the weather must break soon and grant San Francisco the mercy of a storm? The cool mists for which Fog City is nicknamed must be hovering out there in the Bay, waiting to reclaim their peaks. So close, so close, like ecstasy just out of reach when you’re riding the wrong man …

  Where is Blanche to go? This toast of the town lacks the cash even to rent a room. Jenny would laugh. (So many things made Jenny laugh.) Blanche is the vagabond now. No home, not a friend in the world except a corpse lying in Gray’s deadhouse a few blocks away, where Blanche can’t summon the nerve to go. Nothing left to her but the hope of seeing her child again.

  A baby on a woman’s shoulder babbles and sucks its fist. Younger than P’tit, but fatter, healthier, pink-faced in the heat. Blanche looks away. Somewhere, down one of these sloping streets, hidden in some apartment in a skinny alley: P’tit. Only eight days since Blanche raced out of the apartment to escape the macs and their rich American and forgot to take him with her. Be honest: she’d briefly forgotten, in her panic and rage, that she had a child at all. That was eight days ago, which is a blink for a woman but a long stretch of sleepings and wakings for a baby. Eight days since she’s held P’tit—not that he’s ever been entirely fond of her touch. Does he retain any memory of Maman who plucked him away from Folsom Street and minded him night and day for a grand total of, what, two and a half weeks? Her thoughts strain toward him.

  Tonight. She drags herself back to practicalities. Where will she spend tonight?

  Of course she has resources to draw on. It’s just a matter of picking one of her michetons and tracking him down in a way that doesn’t stink of desperation. The answer’s obvious at once: Lamantia, L’amant de Blanche, as the Sicilian likes to call himself, her most devoted admirer, who’s been offering Madame Johanna considerable sums just to discover her whereabouts. Blanche already knows his.

  She runs along the tracks following the next horsecar and jumps onto the step, almost catching the heel of her grubby white mule in her hem. She readjusts her carpetbag on her arm with a surge of revulsion for the few pieces of clothing inside it. They’re all she owns in the world now, so she mustn’t chuck the whole bag in the gutter and ride off with light arms.

  Blanche gets down on Market. Lamantia’s office is right opposite the fountain a former child star donated for the City’s horses last year. (She thinks of young Jenny, in ribbons and a crinoline, dancing for the miners. What else didn’t Blanche know about Jenny? What kind of a friendship do you call it when one party omits to tell the other the simplest facts about her life?) Under the monstrous column in faux bronze, the basin’s full of boys today, men too, shoving one another aside to duck their heads under the lion’s-mouth spouts. San Franciscans used to take pride in pissing in this fountain, but these hot days they’re crowding in to slurp the water as if it’s the finest brandy.
/>
  Blanche tips back her green parasol and stares up at the long windows of the granite building where she knows the Sicilian must be sitting, sweating over imports and prices at his mahogany desk, as he does every day except Sunday, when he visits his mamma. Is Lamantia daydreaming of his bella bianca, his beautiful white flower? Has he already read about Blanche in the news reports about San Miguel Station?

  Two Specials lean against the wall. Blanche thinks for an awful moment that they’re the same ones she and Jenny had to bribe last Monday on Waverly Place. She grabs a passing boy, his head soaked from the fountain: “Take a message for me?”

  He puts a dripping paw out right away.

  “You’ll be paid when you’ve earned it,” she snaps. “Go in those big doors and ask for Signor Lamantia. Don’t give the message to anyone but the boss, you hear?”

  “What message?” He’s wiping his hands on his shirt.

  She doesn’t have paper or pen, and besides, Lamantia prefers to put nothing in writing. “Tell him that … that there’s a white flower outside his window.”

  The gamin sniggers.

  Blanche clips him around the ear. “Say it.”

  “White flower outside his window.”

  “Nobody but the boss, mind, or you won’t get a cent.”

  Blanche stands waiting where she can be seen from the window, her carpetbag tucked behind her skirt. She tries to twirl her parasol charmingly, as if she just happens to be in the neighborhood.

  “Company, miss?” mutters a passerby in a bowler.

  She ignores him. Pretends to be listening to a dipso who’s yowling cheerfully in the fountain, some gospel song.

  She jumps when she feels a touch. It’s the boy, tugging at her sleeve; she shakes him off.

  “I said, I said, ‘Miss,’ but you didn’t hear.”

  “All right,” says Blanche, steadying her breath. “What’s the answer?” She steels herself in case it’s humiliating: pressure of business, or some more convenient occasion … Perhaps Lamantia will be too horrified by this showgirl’s entanglement in a sordid murder to risk being seen with her?