Thursday evening, the fourteenth of September, Blanche goes back out to the saloon.
John Jr., who’s been reading a book by bad light at the bar, stares up at her.
In an undertone, she asks his mother for some ice.
“What for?” says Ellen.
The whole family must have heard the women’s quarrel just now, and Blanche punching Jenny in the face. The Irishwoman’s just trying to humiliate her by asking. “Jenny got a black eye earlier, riding,” Blanche lies blankly.
A sniff. “Dangerous business, riding.”
“So do you have a bit of ice?”
“I do not, so. The last cold thing in San Miguel melted a month ago.”
“A fresh steak, then?”
“Would you be having pommes frites with that, miss?” A dry laugh. “Where do you think you are?”
This isn’t a cathouse, that might be what Ellen’s hinting. Take your filthiness elsewhere.
Blanche keeps her mouth shut. She returns to the bedroom and shuts the door behind her.
Jenny’s flat on her back on the bed.
“You more than half deserved it,” says Blanche, but all the fight’s gone out of her.
“Take that as an apology, shall I?”
“I thought apologies weren’t worth the candle,” she says, risking quoting Jenny’s line back at her.
“Yours aren’t, that’s for sure.”
The flesh all around Jenny’s eyes is puffy when she sits up. It’ll be black and blue by morning, Blanche reckons.
Sorry. Blanche is so sorry, for the blow and for everything else, for all she’s dragged Jenny into this summer—but she can’t say the word.
“Guess the frogs will have to play Scheherazade,” Jenny remarks.
Blanche stares at her. “This is one of those moments when I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“They’re reprieved for one more night,” explains Jenny.
“Ah.”
“Though, does it count, I ask myself, if they’re living in a dark sack?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” says Blanche.
“Well, as the fellow says, never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till the day after …”
Blanche is not sure which of them lets out the first yawn, but there seems no reason to stay up any later.
Jenny sheds her layers and shakes the dust out of them. In McNamara’s long nightshirt, she wrestles with the window shade, then calls their host in to take a look at it, and bring them a drop of cognac while he’s at it.
Mary Jane comes in with the glasses while her father’s tinkering with the blind and stays lolling on the bed after he’s gone.
“What do you mean to make of yourself, Mary Jane?” Blanche wants to know.
Her eyes narrow. “When I get out of here?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. All I think about is the getting out.”
The distant whistle of a passing train.
Jenny opens her tobacco pouch. “Twenty-minute ride,” she says, nodding north, “you could be a whole different person.”
“What happened to your face?” Mary Jane asks in a way that shows she knows already.
“Qu’importe,” says Jenny with a grin.
“Is that French for something?”
“Yeah, French for ‘mind your own damn business,’” says Blanche.
The girl flounces out to the saloon.
Jenny watches Blanche over the pipe she’s filling.
“Take that stinky thing outside, would you?”
“It keeps off the skeeters,” says Jenny, but she steps out on the porch with her pipe and matchbox.
Blanche can hear Mary Jane in the back room talking to her mother. Jenny, just outside the window, gives the dog a good scratch and talks to him in a pretend-fierce voice. The candle flame’s straight and steady; there’s not a hint of breeze to stir the heavy air. Blanche remembers the night they met. How she sang a snatch of “Au Clair de la Lune” as they climbed up the dark stairwell. “‘Ma chandelle est morte,’” she croons now, “‘Je n’ai plus de feu.’” My candle’s dead and I’ve no more fire.
From just outside the window, the familiar refrain, in Jenny’s lighter, melodic voice:
Ouvre-moi ta porte,
Pour l’amour de Dieu.
Open up to me, for God’s sake.
Blanche would prefer to leave the window up an inch or two but the bugs are starting to whine their way in, drawn to the candle. She struggles with the frame and lowers it with a thud. Her hand brushes against the green baize and it droops on one side, goddamn it. Nails come out of these chalky walls as easily as teeth out of an old skull. Blanche peers out through the narrow gap and sees Jenny wrestling with the dog in the moonlight, everything weirdly silver.
Nearly a month since Jenny crashed into Blanche’s life and—it could be said—Blanche crashed into hers. If you meet an obstacle you can jump free, Jenny boasted. But not always. You have to allow for some damage.
Jenny comes in then, sets her empty pipe on the bureau, and jumps into bed.
“Moon’s up,” says Blanche, yawning.
“Everyone’s a moon, as the fellow says.”
“Huh?”
“With a side nobody sees,” adds Jenny. She’s leaning back on her elbows, her swollen face turned toward Blanche. Who, undoing her chemise, feels the familiar sensation of eyes on her. Something could happen or not, it could go either way, and who’s to say it much matters? Maybe the two of them came closest to each other yesterday evening. Or even tonight, at the moment when Blanche punched Jenny in the face. Maybe they’ve started to diverge again, drifting apart, two twigs in a stream.
On the edge of the bed, Blanche stoops to unlace her borrowed gaiters. A train hurtles north, close enough to shake the Eight Mile House. She bends to undo her second gaiter, ripping at the laces. Tries an old Picard air under her breath, though why is she singing a lullaby when there’s no baby to hear it?
Dors, min p’tit quinquin,
Min p’tit pouchin,
Min gros rojin …
Sleep, my little child, my little chick, my fat grape. The laces are snagged. Blanche hauls up her mauve skirt and sets her right ankle on her left knee, the canvas printing her skin with grit. The gaiter clings to her round calf like some old skin that won’t be sloughed. Mud flecking the floorboards, the dingy sheets … this whole four-room shack is probably crawling with fleas and lice, but somehow Blanche doesn’t care. Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.
Blanche plucks at the gaiter with her longest nail. One second and she’ll have it undone.
Dors, min p’tit quinquin,
Min p’tit pouchin—
That’s Jenny joining in, her voice clean as a bird’s, her eyes wide open. “And the rest, how does it go?”
“Like this.” Blanche bends right over to wrestle with the lace, her lungs filling, stretching rib cage, muscles, seal-plump skin, corset, dress, as she sings a mother’s warning to a baby who just won’t sleep:
Te m’fras du chagrin
Si te n’dors—
The cracks come so hard Blanche thinks they’re thunder. The candle’s out.
A sulfurous tang in the dark, less like a thunderstorm than fireworks, but who could be setting off fireworks? What is there to celebrate on the fourteenth of September? Outside, the dogs of San Miguel Station bark in furious chorus.
“Qu’est-ce—” Is that what Jenny says, or just a gasp, a hiss?
And Blanche says, “Wait.”
“Let’s count our silver,” she says to P’tit now in the quietest private compartment, the one at the swaying end of the slow Sunday train heading inland to Sacramento. “There’s a dollar. See Lady Liberty? And this one’s an Indian head.” Never too early for a child to learn his coinage. “Here’s a half eagle. Have a chew on that, but don’t swallow it …”
Blanche has t
he impression P’tit appreciates hearing her talk, or hearing talk of any kind. One of these days, she supposes, the child will begin to figure out what she’s saying. He sits stiffly, looking absurdly small against the adult-size seat. His movements aren’t random spasms anymore. It’s as if he’s conducting an unseen orchestra. His gaze seems more ambitious as he mouths the dollar. She wonders if P’tit even remembers his doorknob, the one Blanche lost to the drunken rioters. What does it mean to miss something you can’t hold in your memory? Children learn to do without the things they used to weep for. They move on, as everyone has to.
What a fraud Blanche has felt, ever since she picked him up and ran down Madeleine’s stairs this afternoon. Like a woman who’s stolen a baby.
But no looking back. No giving a rat’s ass about bygones. Blanche doesn’t intend to pronounce the name of Arthur Deneve ever again. She suited him very well for his salad days—his years in the circus, and even after the fall that ended them. She was a witty, tipsy companion who earned her own money, asked little of him, and never said no. Who made just one mistake—called P’tit—but then kept that mistake out of his sight for the best part of a year. Yes, Blanche can see now that she was never the girl Arthur would end up marrying. And though she has regrets, that’s not one of them. Good luck to this French bride of his, who can have no idea what she’s taking on. “It turns out he didn’t care enough about me to order my murder,” she remarks to P’tit.
The child glances her way.
“At least you don’t have killer’s blood in you, that’s something.” Blanche gives him her biggest grin.
His mouth twitches.
A smile. A goddamn smile! Gone as quick as a mouse, but still.
She feels the glow for a long minute before she remembers that it was probably Madeleine who taught P’tit to smile, a week ago. Madeleine who saw him take a first step, with fawn-shaky legs. Blanche missed it. One way or another, she’s missed most things. Well, too bad. P’tit will just have to forget Madeleine, and Ernest, and number 815, and the farm on Folsom Street; everything that came before. Blanche will make him believe he’s always lived in the city of Sacramento. She means to lock the past up in her heart and never let this boy guess he was ever anything other than treasured.
Blanche rubs her bruised arm and stares out the window at the baked land. They’ll see something of America at last. Ninety miles of it, at least. Why Sacramento, of all destinations? Perhaps simply because Jenny told her about it: booming, growing upward as well as out, almost literally pulling itself out of the mud. There should be room for enterprising newcomers there. Room for Blanche and P’tit. Or perhaps it’s simply because Blanche has spent a year and a half living on Sacramento Street, which gestures toward—and is named for—that upstart city. It seems like some kind of sign, and she doesn’t have any other to follow.
The hot air’s half water this evening; it’s as if they’re breathing in steam. P’tit’s cheeks trickle with sweat, and Blanche wipes them with a new handkerchief. Less than a hundred dollars of the silver left, because she had to buy so many things this afternoon, with no time for bargaining before the train left. A valise for each of them, bottles and clothes and diapers for him, new dresses for herself—sober by her standards, but chic, and her new bustle’s the dernier cri in fashion: high, with ramrod-flat front and sides.
Also, of course, a two-dollar gold ring as evidence of Blanche’s loss in the epidemic. (She’s got her story ready, with its sniffs and sobs. My late husband was such a good provider.) By the time she steps down in Sacramento, she means to be every inch the lovely widow. One whose dancing academy will be known from the start for its emphasis on ballroom etiquette. (Well, Blanche might as well make a feature of being a lady, if she’s to steal customers away from all those so-called Professors.) Jenny would approve of this plan, even if she was more grasshopper than ant herself. Would approve of the blood money getting spent this way.
Blanche makes a stack of the coins now and shows P’tit how to knock it over. Here’s where a normal child would laugh, surely? Blanche laughs, to show him how it’s done.
P’tit gives her a look that strikes her as wry.
And it occurs to her that he may be smarter than he’s willing to show, too smart to laugh on cue.
Arthur stole this money and more from her in the first place and shared it with Ernest, who hired Louis with some of it, and Louis took his cut and passed two hundred of it on to John Jr. The look in that boy’s eyes when he held out the bag to her. Think what such a sum could do for the McNamaras, and yet the boy couldn’t bear to keep it.
Is that why Blanche didn’t seek out Cartwright at the Chronicle before she left? She told herself that she was too busy getting ready so she could leave San Francisco by nightfall. That the newsman wouldn’t be at his office on a Sunday evening. That Blanche can write to him as soon as she’s settled in Sacramento. But it occurs to her now that she never will.
Because Jenny wouldn’t give two bits for justice. Not that kind of justice. Not a blundering boy, whom she cared for, packed off to that grim so-called school for having let himself be bribed and pushed to the point of doing something so terrible that he’s never going to forgive himself, anyhow. Instead Blanche has paid John Jr. back with the crushing weight of his own future.
Some crimes are better not solved, maybe. Some scars better kept covered up. Blanche lets herself pretend that blurry reflection in the spattered glass is Jenny, pedaling along beside the train. I don’t forgive him, though, Blanche tells her.
A shrug.
Don’t expect me to forgive, not one single bullet.
A grin.
To let John Jr. get away with murder means doing the same for the other two, Ernest and Louis. That’s not fair, but what is? Life brings all manner of punishment and Blanche just hopes those men will get their share. Ernest’s already lost everything he loves best: Arthur and Arthur’s son.
Blanche’s face is turned away from the past, toward the city of Sacramento, where it sounds like citizens rise above grim realities, winching their whole lives into the sky. She’s not going to drift into things anymore, because her life is no longer only her own. She’ll be a boss, but not a tyrant. She’ll rent rooms above her dancing parlor and hire a girl to mind P’tit during classes. He’s light on his feet, so maybe Blanche can teach him to dance. How do you know until you try?
She drops the coins back into the bag one by one. P’tit makes a thrusting motion that she decides to take as an attempt at doing the same. “That’s right, in the bag,” she says, putting his fist over the opening. “Now let it go. Go on, drop it.”
But P’tit keeps a hard grip on the coin. It must be easier to grab than to let go. She watches him gnaw on it. “Very good,” she says. “Cut some more teeth. You’re going to need them.”
He’s got three already, three sharp little wedges Blanche managed to count on the railroad platform in the City before he had enough and bit her finger. To think that they must have been lying in wait all these months, ready to spring up. Ten days with a murderer and his harlot have done P’tit nothing but good, Blanche has to admit. His features are still melancholic—the heavy forehead, the huge sunken eyes—but at moments he strikes her as somehow beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, of course. That’s Blanche: his beholder.
The bag’s as heavy as a heart. Before this was blood money, it was fuck money. Cash Blanche earned from her dancing or michetons and tossed into the green chamber pot in the fireplace or stuffed in her old boot or bought her building with—and then Arthur liquidated that money again when he sold the place to Low Long. (Blanche won’t sneer, anymore, at the folks who keep their heads down and toil, because they’re earning themselves a kind of liberty, a dollar at a time.) Like water, money springs up, trickles down, picks up soil, and sheds it again. Still, the coins shine when she rubs them on her black-and-white skirt. This is hers and P’tit’s, earned over and over, and she’ll spend it on what they need, and wha
t they fancy: train tickets, meals, rent, a bird-shaped musical rattle that P’tit’s going to love more than he ever did that old knob.
She bobs to kiss his humid forehead, one of those automatic gestures to ward off evil. That’s what Blanche is going to do whenever she gets an impulse to shake her son or smack him: kiss him instead. She means to pay P’tit back for all her past crimes, one moment at a time. Her best strength is a terrier one: bite the rope and don’t let go. She’s going to bind P’tit to her with indefatigable love. One hundred percent enamored, and more. Each day a cliff she’ll climb again from the base.
Never mind how she and her son got to this point, speeding along toward the city of Sacramento. Keep him or don’t, isn’t that what Jenny advised Arthur that night in the apartment? Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe. Blanche has lost this child twice, but she’s damned if there’ll be a third time. She and P’tit have wreaked such havoc in each other’s lives, come through so much blood and shit, paid so high for each other—this bargain’s got to hold.
Your Maman’s a flawed jewel, she could tell him, and there’s no fixing that. There’ll be no overnight metamorphosis—but certain things about her are changing already. Perhaps, at twenty-four, she’s growing out of being so stupid. Blanche will always like her drink, but she’ll try to make big decisions in the sober light of day. She’ll probably always require a good deal of fucking, but from now on she’s going to hold on to her independence. She will be fierce in P’tit’s defense. Ambitious for his happiness, and hers.
P’tit’s feet curl in their little boots. He doesn’t like them, but Blanche is going to make sure he’s always got good leather between him and the splinterish world. “‘Who gonna shoe yo’ pretty little feet?’” she croons, clapping her hands softly.
A flash on the horizon. Blanche looks out the window. Could that have been lightning? She listens for a rumble, but all she can hear is the thunder of the wheels. Rain spits at the glass. She almost laughs to think how Maman back in Paris would scold: Stop singing, you’ll bring on a storm!