“You need to touch up your hair color, Max,” Hughie mumbled through his new scimitar mustache.
“What?”
“You look like a paperboy. You could be my son.”
“My worst nightmare, Hughie.”
We sat in Hughie’s club, one that I had been invited to join because of my newfound wealth. So once more I found myself alongside Hughie almost every night in a leather chair carbuncled with upholstery tacks, reading a newspaper still warm from the butler’s iron. With Alice gone so often, I was grateful for those evenings with Hughie.
“I like you better rich, Max.”
“You idiot, you used to say you liked me better poor.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
He considered this. “Well, that’s because I was poor. But the least you can do is buy a decent haircut.”
“Hand me my drink.”
“Are you enjoying it, at least? I mean, all this sudden wealth? And Alice? Seems like you’re the luckiest man alive.”
I was. Alice and I, after years in that stuffy apartment, now had a broad-shouldered house on Green with a chilly view of Alcatraz, a modern garage to hold our Oldsmobile, as well as all the new and foolish things that people have when they come back into money, the trinkets and indulgences we missed so much—the clothes and food and miraculous habits—and which are never half as pleasing. Of course, with this new house, I had to find new hiding places for the evidence of my secret, a few letters and the pendant and chain Grandmother made for me. While it had been easy to keep it in its old grave among my shoes, now I was afraid no hiding place would be good enough; servants will go through everything. Eventually, I slipped it with the letters into a locked box in my dresser and told the maid not to dust it.
I didn’t worry about Alice, prying as she was; my wife was hardly ever there. When she did come up to see me, I lavished her as best I could, and she enjoyed it, I think, laughing at the ludicrous jewels I brought to her in little velvet boxes, screaming at the new car when I drove it in front of the house for the first time, but she never wore the jewels and she never drove the car. In fact, with money behind her, she dressed in her same eccentric, inexpensive clothes—and sometimes those pants, underneath, when she could get away with it—and concentrated only on her business plan, on that studio of hers, the one I’d sworn to buy her. I longed to travel back in time and pluck that promise from my lips. But how could I have known? My only hint came too late: on the morning when she stepped from the train, kissed me flutteringly, and, like a magician producing a handkerchief, pulled a piece of paper from her coat: the lease she had just signed. She was so happy; that night she practically melted in my arms. The photography business she had dreamed of. A little studio on an up-and-coming corner. Of course it was in Pasadena.
“She’s got to be near her mother,” I explained to Hughie when he raised an eyebrow. “They’re closer than I realized. Like those fig and cypress trees that grow inside each other in Eastern gardens, it’s unexpected. And her business partner, he’s down there. She apprenticed with him, he was once quite a famous artist and she says, well, she says she’s his muse. He’s got clients and experience.” An old friend of her mother’s, old Victor. I liked to think of him with long white mustaches, brows singed off from flash-powder burns.
“You’re taking this pretty well, Max.”
I said. “It’s what she wants. When you love someone, don’t you want their dreams to come true? If you can help them? And she has to be down there anyway. I see her when I can. That’s enough, isn’t it? When you really love someone.”
“I guess,” he said quietly.
“So things are good, Hughie.”
“Are they?”
“Oh yes.”
He stared at me with those blue eyes, fringed by albino lashes. Then he shook his head and touched my sleeve. “You’ve got to tell her, Max,” he said. “You’ll lose her.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“It’s idiotic,” he hissed. Other men looked and smiled at the noise of our argument. “Dying your hair, and I hear you’ve got a cane now. I’m sure you don’t think she’s stupid. You’ll lose her.”
I looked at him, at his ridiculous mustache, as sober and stupid as a bad disguise. “Shut up, Hughie,” I snapped. “I don’t know why you give advice. Everyone knows you’re no good at love.”
What I meant, I suppose (must we explain what alcohol makes us say?), was that he was no good at marriage. I had gone to his house one afternoon to deliver an invitation and the maid made me wait for Abigail, who arrived in a long brocade gown with a hallucinated look, her blond hair dull as dust. Shouts from her son rang from the upper stories. “He’s not here,” she said, and gave me her old social smile. “He’s attending to our old property, he’s staying there while he makes repairs.”
“What old property?”
She winced. “The Pumpkin.”
My first thought—and hers, I assume—was a mistress housed quite fairy-like in a pumpkin shell. Of course I ran over as soon as I could, only to find nothing more than rooms of Oriental carpets and lamps, bookcases filled with gleaming new books, a new manservant, and Hughie in shirtsleeves. Simple enough: a masculine retreat. Hughie explained quite innocently that he could not get his reading done in the house with his wife’s shouting and her headaches, the child and the numerous cats they had collected. I saw he had covered the walls with army portraits that Abigail would never have allowed, men who were strangers to me, smiling with touched-up faces. Then his man brought in a pipe and—as
in the old days—we smoked hashish until we were giggling on the floor. I remember thinking in my state that the manservant, Teddy, was as young as I looked, with slick black hair and red cheeks, but with an almost frightened look of youth that I could never reproduce. Teddy propped my head on a pillow and lay a blanket over me without a word. “Thank you, Teddy,” I said.
“It’s nothing, sir.”
Hughie sighed and repeated, “Thank you, Teddy,” and fell promptly asleep, snoring, on his sofa. I’d known him with girls, with Alice, in college and in marriage, and here he was, ever the same. Alone again in his bachelor house, with a manservant and mustache, a wife off somewhere putting a child to bed, singing a song he could not hear. No good at love; he knew what I meant.
I have to put down these pages for a moment. The house has been remade for a cocktail party—a quite illegal affair, darling, but I won’t tell—and you are in your bedroom, Alice, shouting for someone to zip up your dress. I’ve got to run. I must get there. before Sammy.
Now let us pick up a dropped detail: the invitation I had brought to Hughie’s house. It was not just to one of our normal club events, the numerous dull evenings that rich men must attend; this was something unexpected. His invitation had come slipped into my own—I guess the hostess only kept track of me—and I delivered it because I needed him to come along. For memory, for history. To a ball, given by none other than my old maid, Mary.
It will not surprise even my youngest reader, I hope, that before the earthquake, every senator and merchant plunked coins in her mechanical jukebox and sat for a bottle of champagne with the woman, and more than a few had peepholes reserved for them within the scented walls of the “Virgin Room.” Madame
Dupont had even opened a male brothel with a secret entrance for female customers, who wore satin masks so they would not be recognized, and a harem of men who supposedly worked as volunteers. All that was over by the teens, of course. Church pressure, legislation, the death of our dearly corrupted government, all brought Madame Dupont to close her houses. She had done well—broker clients had helped her to invest well, and stock tips were easy to hear in her flocked parlors. But it was not the last we heard of her, for she had often told me, a few glasses into the evening, that her dearest dream had never been to be a success. “I want to be a lady,” she’d said, adjusting her blond wig. “Damn it, I deserve it. I’ve worked as hard as any wife for those men. I want to be at a dinner party with a Vanderbilt and have him turn to me and say, ‘Madame, it’s been a pleasure.”’ So that was why, years after her brothel had shut its doors, and long after most had forsworn the vices she represented, after most of us had forgotten her, each important man in San Francisco received an invitation:
Mr. & Mrs.
————
A Spring Ball
March 20, 1914
8 P.M.
at the home of Marie Dupont
You cannot stop a whore from making money, and money would buy anything in our city, so we found ourselves at an elegant white house sitting between the residences of a railroad baron and a Spanish count. Night-blooming jasmine, juniper, columns arcing in a Teddy Roosevelt grin. I imagined Mary had spent every cent on this house, chosen not for the comfort of her later years, but for this very night. The approach of glimmering gaslight—not electric—the noise of an orchestra coming like a distant waterfall from the open door; all planned, or hoped for at least when
she laid down her million. I picture old Mary wandering through the empty rooms, clasping and unclasping her hands, imagining this party when all her sons and fathers and lovers would gather to claim her, this occasion for her best jewels, best jokes, this evening made, like all reunions, of memories best forgotten.
There was an Englishman, and not a Negro maid, to show us inside, but Madame was there all the same, standing at the newel of the stairs and laughing. I could see almost nothing of her except the abnormality of her thinness, her slight hunch that could only be age, and the expensive blond of her wig. The sexes come to resemble each other in childhood and old age, and she stood hands on her hips in the manner of a sergeant. She must have been seventy.
“Mr. Dempsey! I knew you would come,” she said, approaching Hughie with an outstretched hand that shook slightly under the weight of her rings. “And you’re looking so handsome and well.”
“Madame,” he said, kissing those rings. So thin, when did she get so thin?
“No Mrs. Dempsey?” she asked, tensing her port-wine lips.
“I’m sorry, no, we don’t go out together these days.”
She stared hard—the old procuress stare—but it became a sharp dazzle as she looked on me. “But you’ve found a beautiful young man, I’m charmed.” A low laugh of old thrills.
Something of youth comes back with age. Although it was clear at a glance that nothing could restore her body’s beauty, my old Mary, wrapped in her straight black gown, a long egret feather set across and away from her brow, held out her hand and flirted as if love affairs were all before her.
Immediately, though, the hand was withdrawn in a golden jangle. “Well fuck!” she yelled, then a pure yawp of joy. “My God, it’s Max!”
“Now wasn’t there a girl?” she stage-whispered as I helped her into her ballroom. “Some girl you were in love with, poor Max. Have you seen her since you’ve gotten so young?”
“Her name was Alice,” I told her with tenderness. “And Madame, I married her.” I think if she could have cried, she would have. But like a colored gourd, she merely rattled with a sigh, for age and hardness had dried up everything inside her.
“And how’s Hughie?” she asked. Hughie was off at the bar getting a glass of champagne, nodding at the few gathered men. He looked as uncomfortable as any of us among our fellow whoremongers.
“He’s happy, I think.”
“No. His type isn’t ever likely to be happy,” she said, then turned to me and examined me thoroughly with the eye of a slaveholder. “I have to tell you something, Max, you haven’t turned out at all as I expected. When I knew you as a little boy, I mean.”
“No?”
“No, when I first saw you, oh, dear, you were the ugliest thing in the world. What could be sadder than a child in an old man’s skin? I thought, God, here’s something nobody will ever love. That’s the truth. I felt so bad for you, God knows why, the rich little creature. I was so happy to see you’d changed. And you keep changing. I can’t tell you what it’s like to be a woman of my age, and to be so ugly. A gigantic lizard in silk. And now, you see, we’ve switched places. Tonight some man will look at me as he’s drinking my wine and dancing to my band and think, God, here’s something nobody will ever love. Serves me right, doesn’t it? But I’m legitimate at last. I’m a lady, Max. So don’t you tell them I was ever your maid. Don’t you tell them I was ever anything but a lady.”
“You are a lady.”
“You’ve grown handsome, Max. Are you surprised? Try not to get younger. Stay just like this and your wife will love you forever.”
I saw that the old girl was a little drunk. So I told her the simple truth: “I can’t.”
To that, she just laid the back of her hand against my cheek.
It did not take more than half an hour. More men from the club gathered in the ballroom and library, smoking cigars and raising eyebrows meaningfully at one another. I recognized one old fellow as the man who once had paid Mary to be her maid. The orchestra had lit once more into
Blue Danube
in the everhopeful expectation of bandleaders that some couple will be taken by the spirit and start a craze of dancing that will last until the early morning. There were no couples, however. I could hear Madame Dupont in the other room as more guests arrived: