Belle Cora: A Novel (69 page)

He gave me a look that reminded me that it was none of my business, and, as if speaking to someone past my shoulder, he said, “I haven’t decided.”

It was pathetic, really, this show of indifference, and only to be expected after the bile I had spent the last hour feeding him, but it angered me. “Well,” I said. “Well, well, well. You sure pulled a fast one.” He realized that I was about to shower him with abuse and started walking away. Herbert tipped his hat and followed. I spoke in a normal conversational tone to their backs. “You sure fooled the California Missionary Committee. Here you are, sitting pretty, where everyone wants to be. And those fools paid for it.”

They had turned the corner before I was done, and I didn’t say the last two sentences out loud. I only thought them. Just the same, he heard me.

IN THE END, I REMEMBERED HOW EFFECTIVE
the threat of staining the family name had been with my grandfather, and I decided not to go by “Mrs. Jeptha Talbot.” Better to keep a weapon like that in reserve. For that reason, I gave myself a new name and a new past when I became a madam a second time. I became Arabella Ryan, a clergyman’s daughter from Baltimore. My precautions did not need to be elaborate. On occasion, someone would tell me the beloved story of the man who threw his wife into the bay when he found out that she had been a parlor-house madam back in the States, and if the storyteller dared to ask me if I had been the wife, I would reply, “Would you like me to say I was?” Often the husband in the story was a minister. But Jeptha was never named. So it did not link us, or link me to my old name. The few people who knew had various reasons to keep quiet. It has remained for me to reveal the truth.

XLVIII

THERE WAS A RESHUFFLING OF CABINS
on the
Flavius
as boarders were ejected. Captain Austin and his wife, who remained together, moved into a smaller cabin. I moved into theirs. I let them take their bed, but kept Captain Austin’s writing desk and his whale-oil lamp. I also kept the chair. Sitting there, amid the noise of water beating the hull and footsteps on the deck and the hammering of carpenters I had hired to change the boat into a floating palace, I thought and thought. Every item in my world put up its hand, asking for re-examination, and as I made each decision I felt a little better, a little stronger, the voice of my old self saying: Fool, fool, so you thought you could be a minister’s wife? Aren’t you ashamed? Isn’t this better after all? And though I was starting up a new place from scratch, inevitably much about the experience was familiar. It was like returning to a room you had left six months before, and while the servants take the sheets off the furniture and draw the drapes, it all comes back to you, and there is a spurious feeling of immortality in the proof that you can so easily reassume your old life. I bit my lip and chewed on the pen. I wrote to Jocelyn, assuring her that she would be treated like a queen here and I would pay her fare. And I asked her to bring a friend or two—the most beautiful she could find, and they must have wardrobes, and I would pay their fares as well.

Since I did not want my old friend to get yellow fever while waiting for a boat in Panama City or Chagres, I told her to come round the Horn. If she followed my advice, it might be six months or even eight before I saw her. I would have to find my first girls nearer to hand.

Charley, I suddenly realized: I had to see Charley. I went to the Parker House, where I was recognized immediately—not as Harriet Knowles, but as someone like her, as a prosperous denizen of the sporting world—and was treated with friendliness and professional courtesy. When I said the name Charles Cora, there were smiles of fond recognition. He was a legend among gamblers as the man who, in one six-month period, had broken the biggest faro banks in New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Natchez. But Charley wasn’t in San Francisco anymore, and his forwarding address had been lost with the burning of a previous incarnation of the Parker
House in the December fire. “Ask Big Pete Hughes, at the El Dorado,” I was told. “Big Pete will know.”

I went up the street and walked into the El Dorado. Its atmosphere was an agreeable assault on the senses, like a friend grabbing your hand and pulling you onto the dance floor without a by-your-leave. I was enveloped by the music of fiddles and concertinas, by the aromas of slow matches, cigars, and whiskey. Past the hats and heads and shoulders of the crowd, I glimpsed, to my left, a massive bar. Its far end was lost in smoke, and it was accompanied along its vanishing length by the customary appointments of crystal chandeliers, mirrors, and oil paintings of reclining odalisques. A row of slender columns ran down the center of the room; another, crosswise, row supported a balcony. Hung on ropes from the ceiling, rings of globular lamps lit up the gambling tables. The faces of the dealers were childlike and innocent. The faces of the suckers, clutching the dollars they insisted on gambling away, were determined. Pretty French girls sat at some of the tables, not doing anything, merely present, like the wallpaper and the crystal, as reminders of what money can buy.

It was a nice place. I liked it, and I felt at home there right away.

I came in, chin up, back straight, the hook of my parasol lifting my skirts over the sawdust. I sat at a vingt-et-un table, ordered wine and a cigarita, drank and smoked, and lost two hundred dollars with a shrug.

By and by, a fashionably dressed woman—pretty, quite small, red-haired, with freckles and green eyes—sat beside me. She introduced herself as Irene Grogan and said she was the close friend of Mr. Peter Hughes, who was the owner of this establishment, as I might already know. She pointed to a mustachioed ruffian at a table on the mezzanine not far above us; he tipped his hat and nodded. Would I like to meet him? she asked. Yes, I said, and we went up the stairs to his table. He rose to greet me, and I saw that he stood well over six feet. He wore a Prince Albert frock coat with a fur collar, and a crisp white shirt and silk cravat and striped waistcoat and striped trousers, all clean, which was the biggest luxury of all in San Francisco in 1850. On his head was a misshapen, worn-out leather slouch hat, the brim permanently turned up here and down there, so ugly and in such contrast to the rest of his outfit that it couldn’t just be his favorite hat; it had to be his lucky hat.

The two of them began feeling me out by asking if I had ever been
to New Orleans or New York, and if I knew this or that street or person, and by what route I had come. I answered truthfully but evasively, and finally said I was looking for Charles Cora, who was a friend of mine. Big Pete said he was well acquainted with Charley, a fine feller, “straight as a string,” and last he heard he was at the Belle Vista Hotel in Sacramento City. I thanked him.

Then Irene invited me to live and work at her parlor house, a few blocks away from the El Dorado. It was the best in town. I said, “Let’s see it,” and we walked there. It smelled of sawdust and paint. The girls were pretty, but otherwise it wasn’t much. She explained that the previous house had perished in the big fire; curtains and carpets were on order. I told her I would think about it, and she said, “Damnit, I knew it. I told Pete. You’re a madam.”

“I’m not going to lie,” I said.

“You want my honest opinion? Don’t do it. We don’t need another house here. Go to Sacramento City. They’re growing fast. You can get in on the ground floor.”

“Sacramento. Oh. Sounds like good advice. I’m glad we met.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Her face got red. “You’re not taking any of my girls. My girls are loyal. I treat them like daughters. They’re like daughters to me.”

“Your daughters are lovely, but I’m not going to get anywhere here with girls from another house. Gentlemen want fresh girls, and getting them is my lookout. Irene, don’t be sore. We shouldn’t have to start out this way, but I’m new here, and I had to look things over from the inside before I started throwing my money around.”

She said that if I had been honest with her she would have told me anything I needed to know. That was nonsense. Even so, eventually, we became friends. We were competitors, but we also had a community of interest and outlook.

I got to know Big Pete and Irene pretty well. He ran a square gambling house, as such places went. He considered it bad luck to possess a coin smaller than a silver dollar; so every morning, at four o’clock, he collected all the small change the El Dorado had taken in the night before and threw it out among the Indian boys who had come to feed their goats on the refuse of the vegetable market. Irene was volatile but sweet. She and Big Pete were famous for their fights, and once, after a big one, she
drugged his wine and shaved his head. That was her idea of vengeance. Big Pete eventually moved to Denver without Irene, and finally I lost track of both of them. Many times, years apart, I have thought that I saw her face, hurt by time, in a restaurant, or among the bathers at an oceanside resort, or in the run-down lobby of a hotel full of aged, indigent women.

SOON AFTER MEETING PETE AND IRENE
, I dressed in clothes selected with the intention of dazzling Charley and took the Pacific Mail steamer to Sacramento City, a monstrously overgrown trading post which announced itself with a stench of rotten groceries a few minutes before it came into view. It struck me as a lonelier variation on the theme of San Francisco. Recently, the river had overrun its banks, drowned the city, and receded, leaving dead fish and burlap sacks in the branches of the sycamores. The hillside was littered with heaps of lumber—shacks carried and then abandoned by the swell—and on every standing edifice, a flood line of mud and small leaves like a bathtub ring told me where the waters had reached their highest level. Yet in the streets, by now dry, men were hammering, carrying sacks, leading mules, unloading covered wagons. The gold rush was a flood, too. There had never been anything like it, and there was no stopping it.

The Belle Vista Hotel was a two-story building with a façade that made it look a yard taller than it was. I stood before it, readying myself. At last, I walked in. There was the usual gaudy interior, as though a genie had transported a piece of Monte Carlo onto the unpaved main street of a scrubby town in the middle of nowhere. When I mentioned Charley’s name to the bartender, he directed me to a back room, and there he was, in darkness and lamplight in the early afternoon, in the middle of a card game.

“Belle,” he said quietly, and put his cards down and gave me a little smile that acknowledged the time that had passed since we had last seen each other. “Gentlemen, this is my old friend Belle.” He stood up, and the other men followed his example. He bowed, and looked at them as though a little surprised to see they weren’t bowing, too, and so they did.

I sat at the big table in a seat that was brought for me, and he spoke about me in flattering terms in a tone that put me under his protection. I needed to know what was going on with Charley, and I needed to know
how I felt about him. Something told me not to pause for one long look but to gather information in a series of glances, from various angles in various lights. His shirt and his vest were of the finest silk, but they were stained; when he put an arm around me, I could smell a history of meals, drinks, cigars, and all-night card games, along with the distinctive smell of Charley’s sweat, which I had once grown to like, but not in so highly concentrated a solution. He was a dandy, and in New York he had kept himself immaculate; I wondered if he was down and out, as I knew he was every so often, or if this was the effect of the gold rush, a world of men, a shortage of laundresses. I burrowed into him, not only for comfort but to answer the important question—could he comfort me?—and to help him find a way into my heart. “Papa,” I surprised myself by murmuring. It seemed to surprise him, too. I felt him startle and relax, and gradually he pulled away and looked at me quizzically. Perhaps it was then he remembered that he was indeed a papa. We were mother and father together. But what else did I mean by “papa”? I don’t think I really knew.

Behind me, the door of this little room opened and shut, changing the light for a moment, and I heard one of the gamblers call for whiskey, and another for sandwiches and a fresh deck. I had another look at Charley. He was past forty now. His face was etched by his habits, by several cigars daily, and whiskey drunk like water from the moment he awoke (generally in the afternoon) to a nightcap just before his eyes closed in sleep (a little before sunrise, sometimes a little after). Fine lines webbed the corners of his eyes. He never did a lick of manual labor. His body was soft. The impression of strength it gave, the strength it actually had in an emergency, was entirely a product of his character.