Breath and Bones (53 page)

“I'm not a servant,” Famke said, clutching
Hygeia
tight. “I am here to buy a dress for myself.”

The woman looked close and saw that Famke was in fact not the Celestial that her attire announced her to be. Nonetheless, the combination of blue eyes, gray tunic, and paper-white skin indicated that nothing good might be afoot, and she shooed Famke out of her store.

“But my own clothes were stolen!” Famke protested.

“Try down the street. There's a branch of the Methodist Ladies' Mission eight blocks away.”

“I have money—I need only the proper—”

But she had tried the clerk's patience too far, and the door slammed in her face with a clash of the little brass bell.

It was the same everywhere in that district: No store wanted to assist in transforming a Chinese servant into a white woman of uncertain identity. The city was large and established enough that a number of clerks considered themselves too refined to cater to prostitutes, and that was all they imagined Famke could be. Thus it was not until she wandered into Bush Street, a district with a fair number of theaters and performance halls, that Famke found a shopkeeper willing to help her.

Hearing her story, the woman's well-lined face settled into an expression of willing sympathy, and Famke nearly wept in relief.

“Isn't that just shameful!” her benefactress exclaimed. “Celestials robbing a lady of her clothes! A body reads about such things every day, but without expecting it ever to happen to oneself. Now, how much do you have to spend?”

For three dollars Famke bought a black-and-white plaid skirt, and the rest of her money was good for a pair of simple shoes, a lawn blouse, and the cheapest gloves and stockings and straw hat in that very cheap place. She even bought a set of stays, though Albert did not like them, because she had seen no white woman in the streets going without. She did not have enough to pay for the corset, but the woman was willing to come down in price, and even threw in a ten-cent box of handkerchiefs for free.

“You look like a regular girl now,” she said, pulling a handful of pins from her own topknot and arranging Famke's hair for her. “There's a lovely color to your cheeks. And you'll remember this place—Mrs. Iovino's, near the Thalia Festival House.”

“I will remember,” Famke vowed; she was so grateful that she really thought she might do more business here, as long as she remained in San Francisco.

“I'll even dispose of those nasty old clothes for you,” Mrs. Iovino volunteered, and Famke was glad to leave them to her.

A few hours after Famke left, when the secondhand dealer made his weekly visit, Mrs. Iovino offered him the Celestial costume. He was so impressed with the quality of the materials that it was no trouble to get twice the price of a corset.

Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, eight bits fuckee
. . . Bundle in hand, Ancient Jade tottered into Hygiene, wondering what she would do from now on to support herself. The walk that had taken Famke an hour had required the better part of the morning from her, even though she had traveled not by the road but as the crow might fly, straight through the trees. She was forced to pause frequently to rest her feet. During one of those pauses, Ancient Jade had looked down at the broken, sweaty stumps the Chinese called lotus blossoms, and she wished that if her feet had to be deformed, they might have been made into hooves, like the zebras'—or perhaps like the deer's, for weren't those cloven? These tiny feet had made her valuable to the slave traders who'd bought her from her widowed mother (who had pretended to Ancient Jade and the neighbors that she was traveling to Golden Mountain to be married), but they made real travel impossible. It was small wonder she'd spent six years trapped in that crib, calling,
Two bits lookee, four bits feelee
. . .

Ancient Jade gathered up her determination and looked around for something to do. She saw the sign at the Springs Hotel: N
O
U
NACCOMPANIED
B
LACKS OR
C
ELESTIALS
, and it caused her to shake with another wave of anger. It was perhaps that anger that, all afternoon, made her seem sullen and intractable even to the low rooming houses and laundries that might have been willing to hire a crippled Chinese girl-of-all-work without references; and thus, when the sun went down, Ancient Jade found herself without a roof or a means of employment.

There was a sign posted in the little park as well—N
O
V
AGRANTS
—but Ancient Jade was not sure what that word might mean, and in all that afternoon she had not seen a single man of the law. Perhaps Edouard Versailles had not found time to hire any such men, as the village would not be officially settled until the hospital admitted its first patients. So Ancient Jade sat on that bench, straight-backed and holding her bundle, until the twilight faded and black night swallowed the park. There were globes for gas light, but Versailles had not ordered them lit as yet, either.

She had not come to the park by accident; Ancient Jade allowed as little room for chance in her life as possible. She was here because during her
search that afternoon she had heard, thanks to long habits of invisibility that made men speak freely around her, that this park was actually a den of prostitution.

“The sweetest, whitest flesh you've ever seen, and completely healthy,” one sunken-chested man had whispered to another. “Like a Greek statue she is . . . Twenty dollars to touch, ten to look.”

That was forty times what Ancient Jade used to earn in her crib, and she hadn't been allowed to keep any of that. Reluctant as she was to whore again, this seemed like the best business prospect she would have here. She thought she might earn enough to rent a bed in a house for Chinese cooks and launderers; she could tell them she worked nights at the hospital. This was, of course, if the girls who already worked in the park would let her buy part of their business.

The night stretched longer, and there were no other girls. Just Ancient Jade, sitting on her shadowed bench, so much a part of the shadows herself that when the first customer arrived he almost looked right through her and returned home in disappointment. But, sensing his approach, Ancient Jade turned on her old professional smile, the smile that had been beaten into her; and it lit a path straight to her feet.

“Ten for look, twenty for touch,” she said. She made no other offers, calculating that if this man wanted something more he could damn well ask for it. She was also willing to come down in price, as the schedule she had heard was obviously for a white woman's services.

But this man did not argue; he saved his breath for the difficult business of breathing itself. He simply took out his purse and fished from it two heavy, beautiful golden coins. Ancient Jade smiled again, and this time the smile melted her clothes away. In the moonlight, her flesh was sweet and white, too.

The street floors of the great avenues form one continuous exposition of all that art and science can produce. A pauper could enter these clothing stores and in a moment step out a prince, to the eye at least. [ . . . ] I could never have imagined women in whom beauty and charm are more general than in these
.

G
UILLERMO
P
RIETO
,
A J
OURNEY TO THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

Feeling free of some horrible prison—though her movements were much more restricted in these clothes—Famke set out to find the city's painters. She had
Hygeia
rolled up in one hand, nothing in the other; for she had nothing else in the world. Yet with new clothes had come new hope, and she expected to find Albert momentarily. Perhaps she would turn a corner and run right into him; San Francisco seemed the kind of place where that could happen, and she was just hot and tired and feverish enough to believe that it would.

Then she stopped short, forcing the foot traffic to curl around her with a few curses and jolts of the shoulder. She ran quickly through the checklist of symptoms that Edouard had impressed upon her:
Feverish
. Yes, but anyone who had spent a day and a half locked up in a third-class car would feel feverish. And under those conditions, anyone's lungs would feel raw as well. No, she thought, and began to walk again, she would be better once she had some rest. Hygeia Springs
had
cured her, and she was going to have a long, happy life. With Albert.

She remembered the eleven cents she'd found among the cushions, tucked furtively into her stays at Mrs. Iovino's, and she stopped at a tea house for a glass of fizzy water and some information about art. She sat where the prettiest waitress would serve her and asked, “Have you modeled for the painters?”

The girl blushed as pink as her dainty bodice and, after a little more teasing and prodding, told Famke about the Old Supreme Court House on Montgomery Street. It was full of artists sharing studio space where once lawyers and judges had tried to impose some sense of order. Or, if Famke merely wanted to look at paintings, there were galleries in Woodward Gardens and at the San Francisco Art Association on Pine Street. The waitress also recommended a place called the Bohemian Club, where artists congregated with writers, actors, and their “misses.” It developed that this last category embraced not failed works but the girls most intimate with the artists—girls of whom Famke had read long ago—and thus it was there that she made her first destination. The waitress drew her a map on a teahouse menu.

Famke strode into the Club bravely, with six cents remaining in her pocket and the colors in her skirt already beginning to run together from her body's humidity. She was immediately lost in a forest of plaster castings and gold-painted props, where paintings and drawings were as thick on the walls as scales on a flounder's belly. In the midst of this artistic clutter stood men and women deep in conversation, laughing and gulping at their wine with a determination to be merry, to live artistic lives.

“I am looking for Albert Castle,” she announced.

If she had anticipated an immediate response, she was disappointed; the name appeared to be unfamiliar, or at least to excite no interest. The giddy chatter continued.

Famke felt a rush of weakness and realized she had not had a thing to eat in over two days. “Albert Castle,” she repeated, less loudly, and looked for a chair in which to collapse. Finding nothing, she leaned against the wall and willed her ribs to expand beyond the corset, so the spinning and buzzing in her head would stop.

“Meess?” A voice with a dimly familiar accent hissed somewhere around her collarbone. “You are unwell?”

Famke looked down onto a brown head soaked with macassar oil, the smell of which rolled upward. “It is hot in here,” she said; finding better words, a compelling story, seemed like too much trouble.

“You are perhaps 'ungry?”

“Yes,” she said with relief, hoping this would mean food was about to materialize.

It did not. “You are looking for work?”

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

At last, the man waved at a girl with a plate of tired-looking sandwiches; with a chivalrous gesture, he handed over a nickel and tucked a ham-and-cheese into Famke's hand. She tried not to tear at it too savagely or to think what she might owe this man for his gift. She did not want work; she wanted Albert. For now, she ate, getting crumbs all over her new gloves and wishing her benefactor had thought to buy her something to drink as well.

“I am an arteestic
entrepreneur
,” he said, with that accent that she now identified as something like Edouard's: French, but perhaps from a different part of the country. “I stage a variety of spectacles to please the eye. Arteestic young girls such as yourself—”

“I am not looking for work,” she interrupted. The sandwich now gone, she untied the tress around
Hygeia
and unfurled the canvas. It fell over the length of her and across a few feet of floor; she saw the thickly painted areas had cracked. “I am looking for a man who paints this way. See, there is his signature—the castle in that corner. A. C. Albert Castle. Do you know him?”

The little man studied the long picture carefully, looking from
Hygeia
to Famke and back again, then bending down to peer through his spectacles at Albert's castle. “As a signature,” he pronounced at last, “it is fine. Yet as a painting, I may say—”

“Oh!” Famke began rolling the canvas together. She was not going to listen to another unpleasant word about
Hygeia
. “I did not ask for a review. I asked for the painter.”

Strengthened by the sandwich, she left the little man and dove into the crowd, boldly cutting into one conversation after another, asking after Albert. She met with sketchy success: A few men said his name sounded familiar and had been uttered recently in San Francisco, but no one could recall actually having met him.