Breath and Bones (25 page)

So here she was, on a Colorado evening, looking for one man in a territory pockmarked with small towns and deep shafts that could hide anyone, even an artist featured in Frank Leslie's magazine, for weeks. It was a daunting task. But walking like Albert had given her an idea; she knew what he liked.

The first saloon she entered was much like the beer hall she'd once visited with him in Copenhagen. It was louder, yes, and it looked dirtier to her; but it was a place to start. Pitching her voice deep, she asked for a glass of the cheapest and some information about strangers in town.

The man behind the bar rolled his eyes. “Brother,” he said, “everybody in this town's a stranger.”

“I'm looking for an artist,” she said stubbornly. “A painter. His name is Albert Castle.”

“What's your interest?” He looked dubiously at her slender form, around which the obviously new jacket and trousers bagged. “If you're a Pinkerton, I'm a dancing girl.”

Famke had read of those detectives—brutal men. “I am his brother.”

“Well, I ain't heard of any Albert Castle,” he said, and turned to rinse some glasses in a sinkful of brown water. When he set one of the glasses in front of her, she shuddered, paid him the nickel he seemed to expect, and left.

It was the same story in every saloon she visited: Famke asked after a brother called Albert and was told that no one knew anything about a particular stranger or an artist. There were many saloons, and she grew terribly thirsty. After a while she began to have a few sips of beer in each place and soon felt giddy; then she stopped drinking and her head began to ache. Finally, when the beer halls closed with the sunrise, she walked into a pharmacy and asked for a bromide, anything to relieve the pounding in her skull.

“Want summat for that cough, too?” asked the pharmacist, and she shook her head. In fact, she was hacking so much from fatigue and the city fumes that she couldn't have answered.

While she waited for him to fill a bottle, she managed to calm her lungs enough to ask, without any real hope, if the pharmacist had had any dealings with an artist called Albert Castle.

“He the one that's painting Amy Oggle's girls?” the man asked, and Famke's heart stopped.

“Painting girls?” she croaked, holding back another cough.

“The soiled doves, the fair but frail, the ladies as paints themselves. Amy's got some feller making up a portrait of them all.” He pushed the bright green bottle toward Famke and stared at her curiously, flushed as she was beneath the drooping hat. She must have appeared very young or very naive, for he said finally, “Holladay Street at Fourteenth. It's a bagnio, my friend—one of the very places causing the Holladay family to agitate for a name change.”

Famke did not know that word,
bagnio
, but she recognized the street name.

“He came in here for white lead and arsenic to help the girls' complexions,” the pharmacist concluded, with an early-morning yawn. “That's Amy Oggle's. And yours'll be nine cents.”

“Thank you,” Famke murmured in a voice not at all like a man's. She was so distracted by this information that she pulled a dime from her pocket and did not wait for the change.

One feels a sense of exhilaration in the atmosphere of Denver. The bland but bracing breezes cool the fevered pulse and the abundant oxygen of the air thrills one like a draught of effervescing champagne
.

S
TANLEY
W
OOD
,
O
VER THE
R
ANGE TO THE
G
OLDEN
G
ATE

The contagion of soul, says the ancient philosopher, is quicker than that of the body, and I have yet to see the one with soul so dead as to refuse a venture in mines, and wholly resist the fever which spares neither age nor sex, yet is not fatal or even unpleasant
.

S
USAN
E. W
ALLACE
,
T
HE
L
AND OF THE
P
UEBLOS

L
OTS OF BOARDERS—ALL THE COMFORTS OF HOME. WELCOMING GUESTS FROM THREE O'CLOCK ONWARD
: That was the legend above the door of Mrs. Amy Oggle's house, which was further identified with her name tricked out in red tiles on the step, glowing lurid in the afternoon sun. And yet, with her thighs rubbed nearly raw and her feet blistered from walking like Albert—and most of all because the prospect of seeing Albert himself made her tremble—Famke hesitated. What if he didn't recognize her as a man? Well, she might take care of that in a hurry—but what if she found him . . . painting another woman? Certainly she, Famke, had the prior claim, and naturally she would forgive him, but still—

“What's keeping you, brother?” asked a man behind her. His battered boots had obscured the
Oggle
on the doorstep, and his dark hand, too, was poised to knock. But he seemed to expect her to do it, and so she did.

The door was opened immediately by a tall, bulge-browed man who somewhat resembled Brother Erastus Mortensen and introduced himself as “The Professor.” He looked down at the two ragged and unpromising
customers, and he sighed. But nonetheless he held the door open for them and offered to take their hats. Famke kept hers and even clamped a hand on the crown, as the irrepressible curls threatened to send it flying.

So this was a bagnio, a house of sin,
et Bordel
; the kind of place the nuns had hinted about and that Sariah had bewailed but never described. It was not what Famke had expected. It wasn't lush or velvety, was not swagged or gilded; though the madam had made an effort to decorate it luxuriously in pink brocade, every cushion and chair was of a slightly different hue, and all were shabby around the edges. It was barely as nice as the Goodhouses' parlor, and Famke and this skinny brown fellow seemed to be the first customers of the day. The time was a second past three.

But there was a table for drinks, and there was a piano at which the big-browed Professor sat down and began to pound. Music came pouring forth, and with it about a half-dozen girls in gaudy dresses streamed in from a hallway. They toyed with colored ribbons and false curls, and though their giggles began to sound forced within a very few seconds, at least they made an effort at welcome.

All females. No Albert.

The girls sidled over, batting their eyes like wind-up dolls. They brought with them whiffs of stale cologne, alcohol, and smoke, and they gave the two customers their names:

“I'm called Bett.”

“Spanish Sadie.”

“Big Kitty,” declared a tall bundle of curves, “two hundred and five pounds of lovely!” She tossed her light brown mane and set her impressive flesh to billowing.

The other girls ignored her.

“I'm Jo, and this is sweet Giulietta.”

“Golden Lallie.”

“Duchess Irene.”

Famke was overwhelmed, confused, and powerless. Somehow she found herself seated with the other customer on a smoke-yellowed sofa, clutching a watered-down whiskey in one hand. She kept the other hand on her head, still holding the cloth hat down. Lallie, a dirty blonde, perched on the arm at the thin man's side, and Big Kitty nearly unbalanced the couch at Famke's.
All the girls giggled and purred; Jo and Giulietta stroked each other's hair with gestures obviously calculated to please the viewer.

And then the madam swept in, Mrs. Oggle herself. Her hair so white it was nearly blue, she was wearing a dress of emerald green silk dark at the armpits. She looked sharply at Famke.

“What'll it be,” she said, “boys?”

Famke felt Amy's black eyes poking at her. “I am seeking—,” she began. When the girls looked at her sharply, too, she remembered to pitch her voice lower and said, “That is, I—” She couldn't finish.

Mrs. Oggle pulled out a newfangled brown cigarette and lit it, peering steadily through the smoke. “Not from around here, are you? What did you do, strike a mother lode?”

The other man snorted, claiming his share of the women's attention. “Money ain't in the digging these days.”

“You said it, honey.” Amy looked around the room at her pathetically bright girls and sighed.

“I have money,” Famke blurted out, and she felt the prick of Amy's gaze again.

The piano music got stronger; someone had given the Professor a drink.

“You may have the bones, young fellow, but we'll take care of your friend first,” said the madam, not allowing Famke or the other man a moment to protest that they weren't friends. “Which of these lovelies will you have, good sir? Cash up front and in my hand, given the times you've fallen on.”

Famke watched the man make the difficult choice. Jo was striking, with her dark hair and good skin, but there was something fascinating about the size of Big Kitty, and Giulietta had a nice pink smile. In the end Lallie's breasts were nearest, and as they pressed in closer to him he took the easiest decision.

“Ten dollars,” Amy said.

Famke was surprised; the man in the street had offered her far less, and she'd dressed herself for a fraction of Lallie's fee. Women must be more highly valued here than she thought.

The door banged shut under a legend that read, S
ATISFACTION
C
HEERFULLY
G
UARANTEED
.

Once he was gone, the atmosphere in the room shifted. The other girls pulled out cigarettes, too, and they turned away from Famke. One or two of
them wandered off to sit with the now-idle Professor and plink halfheartedly at the keys.

“You may as well go,” said Amy. “We don't serve women in here.”

Famke wasn't too surprised; in the gaslight, she'd already felt exposed. Anyway, she didn't see how her disguise would help her now. So she dropped all further pretense and said, “I am not here for a girl. I am looking for Albert Castle.”

The girls' heads whipped around, and Famke felt the hearts about her beating fast. Clearly this was a name they knew.

“Is he here?” she asked.

Amy exhaled a long gray breath. “Albert Castle,” she said. She bent in closer, pulled off Famke's hat, and unpinned her hair familiarly. “And who are you to him, if I might ask?”

“Please, if you know where he is, tell me,” Famke said, as the hot waves of hair settled over her shoulders. She felt tears in her eyes, and she brushed stray locks away impatiently. “Is he in Denver? Is he—here now?”

Amy shook her snow-white head. “No, hon. He left a couple days ago.”

“He painted all of us,” Big Kitty interjected. “It's going to be in the newspaper.”

“Has been,” said Bett. “Days 'n days ago.”

Famke felt her eyes welling up, and one traitorous tear slithered away. She couldn't speak.

“Would you like to see the picture?” Amy asked, offering her a cigarette at the same time.

Famke shook her head at the cigarette, but she managed to squeeze out, “Yes.”

Jo grabbed Famke's hands and pulled her upright. “Turn around,” she said.

The painting hung above the very sofa on which Famke had been sitting. She'd been too overwhelmed to notice it when she entered, and truth to tell it was not a very remarkable work; but now she studied it hard. The composition featured nine women—all these girls, plus Amy and another—arranged singly and in groups of three around an olive grove and mostly naked, with assorted props placed so as to accentuate their charms and hide the problematic hair Down There while at the same time suggesting it was present in abundance. Famke recognized a scroll, a flute, and a pair of large
masks: one frowning, one grinning lewdly. Without these familiar props, she would hardly have recognized the canvas as Albert's. The details were imprecise, the lines hurried—and then, too, it was a
finished
painting.

Amy told her, in a puff of smoke, “The boy said he's traveling around the West, earning his way with these pictures.”

“You asked him to paint this?” Famke asked, feeling a telltale tickle in the lungs. “It was a job”—she'd learned that word from the men of Prophet—“not a work he chose for himself?”

“He came calling, and I said yes. Most houses like something to show off their girls, but your average picture's only a photograph. I say a painting's got more tone, especially when it's Greek like this one.” She shook her head, obviously delighted. “I think it turned out, wouldn't you say?”

Famke couldn't answer at first, for she had to give in to the tickle. While she coughed, brown-haired Irene touched the canvas and set the whole picture slightly off balance. She seemed to speak of Albert with a special eagerness. “There's his mark. He makes ‘AC' look like a castle . . .” She glanced down at her fingertip, now faintly green with paint, then rubbed it with her thumb until both were deeply stained.

Mrs. Oggle reproved her, “I told you not to touch that thing. He said the quality stuff would take a while to dry, so don't chafe it all away.” She combed through Famke's hair with her fingers and said, “Jo, get this girl another drink. Get her some of your laudanum.”

Jo vanished under the Satisfaction sign.

Fragile Bett, who looked hardly older than Sariah's eldest boy, gave Famke her handkerchief. “He was very nice,” she said. “I hope you find him.”

Famke was afraid of just how nice Albert had been to all of them, and she could have wept from the unfairness—the paint was still wet but Albert already gone, without even applying a layer of varnish that would preserve the image. Yet she held her breath, swallowed the draught that Jo brought, and kept studying that canvas.

Nine girls in the painting, eight in the house, if you included Amy herself. That left one extra. As Famke looked at that one, a shadowy, nearly faceless figure alone in the background, her stomach fluttered. All of the women at Mrs. Oggle's were blonde or brunette, but that one figure wore a wreath of rosebuds and butterflies atop flaming red hair. And it seemed to
be her lips that voiced the words painted around the frame:
Nine Muses · Inspiring Pleasant Thoughts · in a Grove · “Had We But World Enough
.”