Speak Through the Wind (37 page)

Kassandra smiled, pleased at the admiring consent of the other women gathered in the room.

There was a chorus of masculine laughter just outside Jewell’s ornate door. It opened, and a group of men—all in freshly laundered shirts and slicked-back hair—tumbled over the threshold. Once inside, they immediately took off their dust-covered hats and looked almost shyly about the room.

Jewell sidled up to Kassandra and motioned for her to lean down.

“You ready to jump in there?” she whispered into Kassandra’s ear.

“Almost,” Kassandra said, taking a breath so deep it strained against her corset. “Maybe, though, I could get a drink first?”

Her favorite restaurant came tö be a small German eatery tucked away on the eastern edge of Portsmouth Square. The thick noodles and tart cabbage made her think of how her mother would have cared for her if she’d ever had the chance. She liked to go early in the evening, before the streets were full of revelers. On many days she didn’t see first light until well after noon, and the early supper at Klausen Haus was the first food of the day. She always dressed carefully, and today the warm spring sun called for her new lavender silk gown, its neckline low and square.

“Afternoon, Sadie.” He was dressed in a sage green broadcloth suit, a watch chain stretched across his ample stomach. The bright sun glinted off his spectacles when he looked up into Kassandra’s face, but she could well imagine the sprightly squint behind the glare.

“Hello, Jimmy.” She offered the affected smile that brought a pink tinge to his broad, wrinkled neck. “Are you staying out of trouble?”

“At least until later on tonight.” Jimmy made a clicking sound inside his cheek and reached a pudgy arm around to pat the cascade of ruffles at the back of Kassandra’s dress.

“Well, then I guess I’d better go inside and have a good dinner,” she said, maintaining a flirtatious air as she wormed away from his grasp. “Get my strength up.”

The man pulled out an impressive gold timepiece from his strained vest pocket. “Maybe we can make a go of it now. I’ve got a little time—”

“Now, Jimmy, Jimmy.” She patted the top of his balding head. “A girl’s got to get some rest some time. You let me go get my dinner, and I’ll see you later tonight. The bank won’t run itself, you know.”

The smile he gave her made it seem as if a twelve-year-old boy suddenly took possession of his mind as he fumbled putting the watch back into its pocket and pulled out a bulging leather wallet from the lining of his jacket. It was thick with bills, and his stubby fingers worked furiously to pull out an impressive pinch of cash. “Well, at least let me buy you your dinner. It’s the least I can do, knowing you’re fattening up for me.”

She matched him in his laughter and offered a quick kiss to the shiny pate as she took the bills from his hand.

“Thank you, Jimmy. I’ll be thinking of you with every bite.”

He blushed beet red then and seemed suddenly in a rush to get back to his business. Kassandra kept the smile on her face until he had rounded the corner. Once inside, she headed for her favorite table—tucked into the back corner with a clear view of the street through the large plate glass window—nodding a greeting to several of her fellow patrons.

Frederik, the owner, cook, and waiter to the more important clients, was at her table steps before she was, holding her chair out with a flourish and offering a slight bow as she settled in.

“Fraulein Sadie?”

“Hallo, Frederik,”
she replied. Slipping into her native tongue had been awkward at first, after so many years of disuse, but now it came to her naturally, bringing with it an inexplicable sense of comfort. She asked him what was on the menu for the day.

“Wurst-und Gerstensuppe”
he said, indicating a sausage and barley soup that was a favorite of Kassandra’s.

“Das klingt gut”
Kassandra said, offering Frederik the remnant of her earlier smile.

“Und ein Bier?”

“Ja, bitte.”

The second Frederik turned his back, Kassandra let her face relax, only briefly offering up a thankful grin when Fredrik returned with a mug of beer.
“Danke”
she said, sliding her fingers around the cold glass, lifting it to her lips, and taking a long, deep drink.

Frederik brought her a second with her soup.

aintaining employment with Jewell Gunn was tricky at best. Any sign of weakness, illness, or disloyalty, and a woman could find herself kicked to the center of Chatham Square with nothing but whatever clothes she’d arrived in and enough money to buy a week in a wharf-side flophouse.

“You ain’t exactly a guest in my home,” she’d say whenever one of the girls declared she’d rather spend a quiet evening alone in her room rather than entertain the men downstairs.

“I’m not aimin’ to be no matchmaker,” she’d say whenever she caught one of her girls sneaking around the city, offering her services to a favored customer free of charge.

“Does this look like a hospital to you?” she’d ask whenever a lingering cough or unexplained rash overstayed its welcome.

New girls were arriving in the city every day, she warned them. They hopped off the Sacramento stage or hit land from the passenger steamers making more and more regular deposits in the San Francisco Bay.

“Now I’m not sayin’ I’m ready to stock the place with a bunch of Frenchies,” she’d say, rolling one of her cigarettes. “Just mind you don’t think you can’t be replaced.”

Kassandra took her warning to heart. Never again would she allow the course of her life to be determined by her frailty of body or spirit. She would not cower in the corner, waiting for the scraps of acceptance to be tossed her way. Trying to recreate Ben’s easy way with people, she made every man who came into Jewell’s feel like he was a California sultan, greeting him at the door with a smile and cajoling him into buying drink after drink in the parlor before adjourning upstairs. Whenever the men weren’t around, she sharpened her verbal wits sparring with Jewell, swapping stories about the colorful life in the slums of New York for those about the adventure of building an empire on the opposite coast.

She kept her fashionable clothes neat and clean and varied, never allowing any former or would-be customer to see her looking slatternly. She maintained her figure despite all the culinary temptations of the city and, recalling Ben’s accusation that alcohol made her “puffy,” she avowed her limit to be no more than three drinks a day.

If Jewell wanted her girls to be attractive, Kassandra made herself beautiful. If she wanted them to be friendly, Kassandra was effusive. No one had ever asked her to be strong, but if doing so would keep her in Jewell’s good graces, Kassandra was more than prepared to become a woman of power. When a seventeen-year-old chippie from a rival brothel accused Kassandra of stealing her favorite customer—calling her a stinkin’ kraut—Kassandra calmly grabbed the girl by her auburn hair, hauled her into the alley behind Jewell’s house, and hit her exactly once, breaking the girl’s nose.

“Well, well, well,” Jewell said, surveying the scene of the fray with frank admiration, “what brought on this bit of inspiration?”

“Today is my daughter’s first birthday,” Kassandra said, wiping the girl’s blood off the back of her knuckles on a silk handkerchief pulled from her pocket. “I was not in the mood for another insult.”

“A year old? Now that’s some thin’, isn’t it? That merits a drink.”

She held out her silver flask to Kassandra, who took it without question and offered a quick salute before tipping it to her lips.

“Tell you what,” Jewell said, recapping the flask upon its return. “Why don’t you take the night off? Go see a show?”

“I think I will,” Kassandra said, immensely satisfied. God had dropped her off in this place, wobbly and nearly unable to stand, but today she summoned her strength and found her legs. If she couldn’t trust her Lord to lead her, she’d make her life her own.

Unlike many of the young women who spent their time working for Jewell, Kassandra had no desire to find a man and fall in love. She was too engrossed with falling in love with the city. Though theaters and music halls were in abundance back in New York, she had spent her life being either too sheltered or too poor to enjoy them. Not so here. Just as Kassandra was working to create a new identity of confidence and beauty and breeding, so also was the city of San Francisco.

Every day new improvements were made—the streets paved with cobblestones, ground broken to begin the construction of more sophisticated, aesthetically pleasing buildings. She learned there had been a horrific fire just a few years before her arrival, but there was no evidence of any such destruction. It had sprung back to life, resplendent in its resilience, and in that Kassandra felt a kinship and a sense of belonging she never had before.

She went to the theater on the arms of some of the wealthiest men in the city—bankers and merchants, shipping moguls and politicians. Often the show was a comedy burlesque, a broad satire of the plight of the earliest gold-seekers played out in a melodramatic frenzy. Other times, singers would take the stage performing sentimental songs that reduced the room full of men—from the gritty to the groomed—to sniffling into their handkerchiefs. Once she saw a beautiful little girl sing and dance into the hearts of the audience, and Kassandra wondered what songs Reverend Joseph and Mrs. Hartmann would teach her daughter.

By far her favorite evenings were those when a traveling troupe came to town, and she had the chance to see the works of Shakespeare—known to her only as those words studied in her schoolbooks—come to life on the stage.

During the day she delighted in exploring the city on her own. In no time at all it seemed unreal that she had ever found it frightening.

She especially loved poking through the more exotic shops of San Francisco’s Chinese district. There she found many of the different plants and herbs that she had learned about under Imogene’s tutelage. Besides the familiar chamomile and lavender, Kassandra learned—through arduous conversations consisting of shouted short phrases and emphatic gesturing—about new remedies the Chinese proprietors had brought from their native country. Many of these were known to ease the monthly trials of womanhood, and Kassandra brought them back to the skeptical Jewell, who couldn’t imagine anything worthwhile coming from that bunch of pigtailed heathens.

But the other women eagerly embraced such exotic cures for their regular womanly discomforts. Under Kassandra’s careful guidance, they made teas from red sage root that was meant to nourish their blood and encourage mental tranquillity They made tinctures of the herb called
dong guai
, which seemed to put each of them on a more regular, predictable cycle. Even if Jewell never openly endorsed the Chinese invasion under her red roof, she did seem to enjoy running a productive, unruffled establishment, for which she openly credited “Sadie and her potions.”

All of this would seem to solidify Kassandra’s status and position with Jewell, but there was one condition Jewell would not tolerate, and as Kassandra entered her second spring in San Francisco, she knew she was in violation of Jewell’s most emphatic edict.

She was pregnant again.

The idea of a new baby—the feel of it—filled Kassandra so she could hardly bring her mind to focus on anything else. Unlike before, where the earliest months were lost either to innocence or ignorance, she was immediately aware of the changes in her body And, though she knew she had to keep the information to herself, the revelation seemed always to be just a breath away When she first walked downstairs every morning, her stomach churning, she had to stop herself from announcing her news to the still-sleepy women lounging on the sofas. She loved knowing there was a baby under all the layers of silk as she strolled through the city streets.
Be careful with me
, she wanted to say to every gentleman who followed her upstairs from the parlor,
I am carrying a child.
With this baby she felt every bit of the hope and promise she’d carried with Daniel, and a chance to recapture what she’d abandoned with her daughter.