Breath and Bones (33 page)

Famke's eyes and throat ached. Dimly she became aware that someone was speaking to her.

“. . . interested in our painting,” Cracklin' Mag was saying. “It has a name—
Evening of the Ladies, Whispering in the Breath of a Nymph Called Time
. And see the wee castle in the ice—”

Famke pulled her arm away from Mag and wrapped it around herself. She needed to concentrate on what she was seeing. Other girls within her own breath . . . She compared the
Ludere
on the couch to the ones on the canvas—Yes, each painted face was reproduced in a face of flesh below.

Albert had painted whores into
Nimue
. He had made Nimue herself a madam.

“. . . I'm at the very top, left-hand side, with that little harp thing,” finished Mag, then she seemed to pause expectantly. “My head's the biggest.”

Famke could only stare at the canvas. Mag's head was indeed the largest; but more than that, Famke noticed now that Nimue had grown considerably fleshier, and her hair was a loud shade of light orange. Really she looked very little like Famke at all . . . Famke struggled to swallow the lump in her throat.

There was a breeze as Mag stood on tiptoe again and peered into her face. Famke smelled the dizzying odor of her armpits. “You all right, lover? Need to sit down?”

The other girls slid down the couch at once. A blonde thumped a cushion invitingly, raising a cloud of dust that shimmered in the bright light.

Famke would not speak, lest she begin to cough. She didn't intend to sit or lie down, either. She swayed on her feet, and as she suppressed her cough she felt her face turning blue.

Mag planted her hand on one hip and studied Famke. “You want dosing, maybe some mercury—why, my sister had that very look when—”

“Enough from you, Mag.” A tall woman dressed in peacock blue taffeta came forward through the motto-less inner door, and Mag flung herself down on the sofa, lower lip pouting, bosom heaving. This was obviously Opal Cinque. And she was a stout woman who dyed her hair orange.

Famke did not look at the painting again. Instead she watched Opal Cinque screw a cheroot into an ebony holder with a deliberate motion of wrist and elbow. The cold electrical lights made everything look strange and ugly: They faded the madam's hair to a peculiar pale shade and showed up the wrinkles around her mouth, the dirt on the skirting boards, the worn places on the furniture. They showed the difference between the Nimue found here and the one Famke knew so well.

Mrs. Cinque asked for a lucifer, and for the first time Famke noticed that there were other customers, sturdy men in warm suits looking at the shabby boy she made and laughing at him. She noticed, also, piano music playing smartly. It was a tune Albert had sung her once, about a girl who wandered around crying about cockles and muscles or some such things.

Famke was suddenly tired. She dropped down next to Mag, conjuring her own cloud of dust. Her throat felt terribly sore, and she had to dig her heels into the carpet to keep from sliding down the slippery pinkness. There seemed to be too much to remember.

Standing on the ladder before
Nimue
, Albert just below her, pushing her to paint the ice, pulling her down to their bed . . . Famke was not glad to look up and see, reflected in the enormous glowing mirror, an image of herself crowded together with Mag and the three blondes, beneath
another
image of herself—or someone who had long ago been herself—coughing out a pantheon's worth of whorish Muses. If this was the kind of narrative Albert was painting these days, how far apart the two of them had really drifted.

“Albert Castle,” she said hoarsely. “I am looking for him.”

“Are you.” Opal Cinque took a long drag on her cheroot, the very picture of calm. She offered no information.

“Where is he?”

Mrs. Cinque shrugged her shoulders, exaggerated in their blue taffeta and their wreath of smoke. “Your guess good as mine. What's your interest—are you an inkslinger?”

Famke swallowed hard again. “The paper said he finished this afternoon—”

“Papers lie,” said Mrs. Cinque. “You must be a pretty poor correspondent, or you'd know that. Clio, give the boy your handkerchief.”

Famke took it without thinking and let it ball in her fist. “I am an artist,” she said, blinking rapidly. The electricity had power to addle the brains; it was as if the currents in the walls and floors were making her limbs tremble. She felt all the customers and all the girls were staring at her. “Do you wish any change to that painting?”

“Change the painting?” Mrs. Cinque flicked ash into the cuspidor. A wrinkle formed between her eyes as she looked hard at Famke. “Why?”

“I
love
that painting!” Mag declared passionately. The blondes murmured agreement. “I wouldn't touch a line!”

“What is it you want here, my boy?” asked Mrs. Cinque.

“Yes,” Mag said more softly, “what do you want?”

Tingling, with a buzz in her head, Famke turned to Mag. She did not know what to do next. Blue eyes looked into brown; uncertainly, Mag smiled. Famke's ears roared, and there was a lump in her throat so large she could not speak.

She thought of something: She took Mag's face in her hands and kissed her. She made it a deep and hungry kiss, the kind the girls of the Immaculate Heart of Mary had given each other, and she tried to spin one of the old stories in her head:
The cottager comes home and finds his house has been burgled
. . . She pushed her tongue into Mag's mouth, probing it, trying to find what Albert had left there—for she was certain in that moment that Albert had kissed Mag, had perhaps even made love to her. So Famke explored the corners of Mag's mouth, looking for traces of Albert, perhaps even traces of herself. Of this new Nimue.

When the kiss was finished, Mag swayed backward and studied Famke even more dubiously. “You sure do that funny.”

At that, Famke opened her mouth again—but not to kiss or speak. She opened her mouth because her throat felt hot and full, and because she
needed to breathe and couldn't. She exhaled, and a flood of heat came pouring over her lips.

“Christ and the devil!” Mag tumbled off the sofa. “That's blood!”

The roar in Famke's head grew deafening. It was much easier to slip into unconsciousness than to reply. She slid down the pink satin slope and landed in a heap at Opal Cinque's feet.

The city [Santa Fé] is free from malaria and excessive heat and cold, and from wind and sand storms. It is supplied with pure water and pure air from the mountains surrounding; it has delightful scenery beneath bright sunshine with glorious sunsets; and besides possessing wonderful health-giving properties, it is one of the most comfortable residence cities in the world. This fact is rapidly becoming known and appreciated
.

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

For long timeless hours, Famke lay pitching and rolling, throwing sweat-soaked covers off her body one moment and burrowing into them the next, after shadowy hands restored them gently to her. She was aware that she was ill and that her throat ached. Sometimes a basin was held under her mouth or her bottom, and at those moments she was very ill indeed; sometimes a spoon forced her teeth to unclench and dribbled a foul, burning liquid—much worse than Piso's or Deseret's or even Lydia E. Pinkham's cure—down her throat. Almost always, she coughed, and the bed rocked like a ship.

Despite this discomfort, there were moments of beauty. Colors pulsed around her—blue, red, orange, rose, dripping from the ceiling and over the sheets, over her body. She was delighted to discover those colors were there even when she closed her eyes; they were stars that burst and spread across her eyelids, butterflies that flew slowly by, trailing clouds of tiny bright feathers. Waves of luscious-hued feeling washed through her, until she could feel her heart beat in every place she could name.

Opal Cinque visited, and the blonde girls, and Mag. Sometimes they brought curiosities: a dwarf dressed in a tiny replica of Opal's blue gown; or a tall girl who had a beautiful face but no arms, and only one leg to hop about on; or a midnight-dark woman who sponged her gently all over, with special care for her underarms and the furrows between her legs.

Sometimes Mag stayed, and the kisses she gave Famke were deep and refreshing and delicious. They lingered on her lips and suckled there, as Albert had once done, before moving down to pepper Famke's neck, her bosom, the ticklish line below her ribs, the wing of her hipbone, and then—

Famke groaned and pushed the covers away. The dark hands replaced them. An angel with fiery wings lay against her, rubbing her body on Famke's, her wing between Famke's legs. Famke realized they were both naked. A line of print unfurled before her eyes, at the same time read aloud in what she was surprised to recognize as Myrtice's voice: “
When a painting of the nude by its spirit and surroundings directs the mind away from the element of artistic beauty, it becomes vulgar.”
How funny to find Myrtice here. She would have to tell Heber when she joined him at the doctor's office—if only he would keep his nasty worms from gnawing away at Nimue . . .

“
Fanden
,” she whispered.

“Who are you, really?” the angel whispered back, holding her tighter and tighter, till it seemed Famke's ribs must break and her heart pop through her lips.

When he'd written to Birgit, Viggo had felt no need to mention the painting he had seen in New York. He had been even gladder of his decision once he reached Denver and saw the first of what, even then, he suspected would be a long trail of pictures featuring the face that had finally grown so familiar as he gazed into the handbill, now printed on expensive yellow paper. He fancied that if she knew her pet's likeness was found in places the like of which Birgit could scarcely have heard, that news would have the power to strike the nun down, to bring her to bed of chagrin, even to kill her. Women were so delicate. Viggo was grateful to have the means of protecting both of those he knew best; all he had to do was hold his tongue.

Contrary to what he might have expected if he'd thought it all out, Viggo found his love for Famke undiminished by the images he now found up and down Denver's Holladay Street and, as he traveled onward, in the bagnios of the smaller towns. They were all enchanting—the Muses, the Valkyries, the nymphs in their caves. Even the pictures' lesser satellites, those bordello
denizens, glowed with the reflected light of Famke's unearthly beauty. Viggo could and did find reason to gaze on the images for hours.

“Are you an artist yourself?” asked Mrs. Maud Dempster, spare-boned proprietress of a house in Frisco, Colorado. Her ochre-tinted
Twilight of the Muses
was the talk of the town.

“No,” he replied truthfully, “but I do paint people.”

As it happened, Mrs. Dempster's back room held a flower fading fast. The madam was relieved to assure herself of Viggo's services and save the expense of sending to Leadville for a more expensive mortician; and so the contents of the carpetbag came in useful at last. He stayed on a day and a half, waiting for the big girl known as Wobbles to expire of what Maud called fever 'n ague but a more practiced doctor might have named malaria—rare but not unheard of in late autumn. When she was finished, he prepared her for her final party.

“May I place the painting in the room where I work?” he asked, with the scrupulous politeness that was endearing him to the prostitute nation. “I can make Miss Wobbles appear as she was painted.”

The result, Mrs. Dempster's girls agreed, was better than life, even better than the painting; and Viggo's future was made. All across the mountains he loved, he might earn room, board, and rail passage by restoring a temporary bloom to the fair but frail women who'd fallen prey to a diphtheria epidemic, laudanum overdose, or the violence of the Dynamite Gang. Bungled abortions did him a brisk trade, thanks to rusty wires and a rumor that a baby would leave a mother quietly if she ate fifty or sixty phosphorous matchheads. Without a mortician's system of tubes and pumps with which to drain the bodies, he could not give a complete embalming; but with the camphor and arsenic he carried, he could do enough to make a corpse look appealing for the duration of a dinner and a wake and the flash of a camera, if there was one in town.

The madams who were willing to pay him for the preservation of these girls—their own favorites, surrogate daughters and sisters—were touched that in his zeal for realism and authenticity he wished to follow these artistic models so closely. Some of them already had photographs they tried to foist on him instead, but he always asked for and eventually received private access to the paintings.