Belle Cora: A Novel (3 page)

Harriet gripped Jenny’s hand. We looked around us and at each other. We didn’t know where to go. Then we
did
know—the right place to run was away from the tall, rolling breaker of black soot and smoke rapidly advancing on us. Gerald, after a hesitation for which I could hardly blame him, slung me over his shoulder and ran with me, and now he’s in my will, and so shall that nurse be, if I can discover her name.

He carried me for an astonishing amount of time, two or three roaring city blocks, and at last we were far enough out for it to seem safe to put me down. We were all together—Constance, Harriet, Jennifer, the nurse, Gerald, and I—and they were all panting from the exertion, and I was panting with only the excuse of fear. I thanked Gerald, and then there was another explosion, of which I heard just the beginning, because it temporarily deafened me. Having been hurled to the ground, I rose in a gray mist of dust, through which, when it cleared, I could see just enough of Jenny’s dress to identify her. Her head was under a slab of masonry. Grimacing and straining—and grunting, probably—Gerald and Constance lifted the block, forced themselves to look under it; then they put it down beside her, careful not to look again. We were in a heap of charred bricks and splintered sticks. A limestone fragment said institut, with the final “e” gone, and another said he fine arts.

The nurse stood over Harriet, who lay partly buried under bricks,
coated with white dust, her upper body in an odd, broken-looking posture. Then Harriet spoke, which was startling, like a marble statue coming to life. But I was still deaf, so I couldn’t hear what she said. I felt myself cough—from the dust and smoke. I wondered if my deafness would be permanent, and exactly then all the sounds came back: the crackle of the fire, the roar of wind, distant shouting, motors, bells, Constance and Gerald coughing, and Harriet’s frail voice gasping, “—with Jenny. I had her. Jenny. Oh, my Jenny, my Jenny, Jenny. Tell me, Frances.”

I didn’t say anything. I had never permitted myself to feel anything at all for Jenny, and I had never really liked Harriet, though I felt sorry for her now.

“My foolish baby,” wailed Harriet.

I decided that since she would be dead soon anyway I could lie. “She’s hurt her leg. She’ll have to be carried, but I don’t think it’s serious.”

“You’re a liar. Tell me.”

“But, Harriet, it’s the truth. Ask Constance. Constance?”

“She’s just lamed,” agreed Constance, with enough conviction to inspire belief in someone who wanted to live a little longer in hope.

Harriet wasn’t like that. “I’m dying,” she moaned. “My poor foolish baby is dead, and I’m next. Why? Why me? Why my baby?”

I tried to please her. “We’re in the hands of God, Harriet.” I knew how religious she was. “Whatever happens, it’s God’s will.”

“How can it be God’s will that my baby should be dead and I’m to be dead in a few minutes, good people like us, while you go on gulling the world?”

What did she mean? Did she know who I used to be? No, I decided. She just knew what I was now. She knew I was bad.

I heard Constance intervene, “Don’t talk; don’t tire yourself,” and to me: “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“It’s not so important that I deceive people, Harriet, so long as they act as if they are deceived,” I said thoughtfully as the others picked up the pieces of rubble burying her. “But as to why and who, isn’t that in God’s hands? We are told He has His reasons for sometimes taking the good before the wicked, and that all accounts will be settled in heaven. Then you and your daughter will be among the saints, and where will I be?”

“In a lake of fire,” said Harriet, and I felt as if I knew her for the first time. She was my old enemy, the Good Christian Woman.

“She’s in a delirium,” Constance explained anxiously. “What if you live, Harriet?” she asked, and it was quite revealing. I had not known they were so frightened of me. It was more than I had intended.

I thought: how informative earthquakes are. The locks break, the safes open, people run out of the house in their linen.

Harriet insisted, “I want the Lord to take me.”

Soon enough, she took a last grimacing breath. She exhaled. The breath kept coming out of her like steam heat until it was gone, her pupils grew, she looked smaller, and none of us doubted that she was dead but we were glad to have an expert, a nurse, on hand to make it official; and to tell us that now we could leave her and save our own lives.

What do you want to know now? Did I survive? I’m writing this, aren’t I? We walked to safety. The nurse returned to her job on foot. The rest of us were taken by ferry to a tent camp in Oakland. That evening, when I needed to wash my face, someone brought me a bucket of water and a cake of Pears soap.

BY FRIDAY, MRS. FLYNN HAD MANAGED
to hire a wagon to take all of us—Gerald, Flo, Mrs. Flynn, and me—to a hotel in Sacramento, but first we spent a night in a camp on Lake Merritt, where people who had been destitute before the earthquake mingled indiscriminately with people of means. There were rows of squat canvas tents, long lines of people waiting to be fed, carrying the tin plates they’d been given at the end of another line, men in black coats and fedoras and bowler hats, women in long skirts and shawls, girls in jackets and short skirts, boys in short pants. Some of the children were crying or sulking; others played, as young children will amid awful disasters. We had a large satchel full of bread, jam, ham, goose-liver pâté, mustard, olives, and cheese wedges, all rescued from my larder the day before, and so we were spared the indignity of the tin plate and food line. It was another clear day, but dust was falling on us: residue of the burning city.

In the morning, Mrs. Flynn reported that she had found a driver. I was thanking her when I interrupted myself to ask, “Why is that woman staring at us?”

She was coming away from the breakfast line, tin plate laden with slop, an old woman. Her clothes were no dirtier than ours, but beneath the grime was the drabness of innumerable washdays. She had aged in a
very particular way. The crow’s-feet around her eyes had lengthened until they overtook the rest of her face; every wrinkle was a road to the corner of her left or right eye. Her least appetizing feature was a loose upper plate that she kept moving about in her mouth with noisy clicking and slurping.

“Belle?” she said as she came close enough to be heard without shouting. No one had called me that for many years.

“You’ve made a mistake,” Mrs. Flynn told her.

“Belle Cora?”

She was only a few feet away now.

“Get rid of her,” I commanded Mrs. Flynn, who understood the urgency of this matter immediately. Mrs. Flynn knew me from the old days.

“There’s no one with that name here,” said Mrs. Flynn.

“I know her! Belle, look at me.”

“Get tough with her,” I instructed my housekeeper.

“If you don’t leave us, there’ll be trouble,” said Mrs. Flynn.

“I’m just a poor old woman! What are you afraid of?”

“Mrs. Andersen does not know you. She does not wish to know you. She’s had a very difficult couple of days, and she simply cannot concern herself with your troubles right now. Clearly, you’ve had a hard time, too; we don’t wish you any harm, so, please, don’t persist, don’t make us ask that you be removed from the camp. You don’t want that. We don’t want it, either. Just go. We won’t say another word.” Mrs. Flynn had been reaching into her bag; now she took out a five-dollar bill. “Mrs. Andersen wants you to have this.”

The woman didn’t have a purse or bag; she just stood there, holding the tin plate with one hand and clutching the bill with the other. She looked at it and wept. “I need it, God knows. Yesterday I’d have been too proud.”

Mrs. Flynn put her arm around the woman’s shoulder. “I know. I know …”

The woman said, “Yes, thank you, I’m sorry,” and began to walk off, to my relief, but abruptly she turned and cried out: “I’m Antoinette! Don’t you know me, Belle? It’s Antoinette!” For a second the name meant nothing. Then it all came back. I remembered that face when men wanted to
kiss it, and how the first tentative marks that would become those looping lines would appear around her eyes when she was happy. I remembered that ruined mouth with fine teeth in it and a toothache she’d had and a dentist I had paid to pull the tooth, and I remembered commenting that women of our sort must take care of their teeth, that she should use tooth powder and dentists and eat more white foods. I remembered that she liked sweets, and I remembered that she liked hop.

I looked at her, and I thought, why not? What did it matter really, after all these years, and at my advanced age, and what we’d all just been through? What had I to lose? A great deal, in fact. But I felt for a moment as if it were nothing, for we were in the camp, outside society, in a kind of parenthesis cut off from the regular flow of life.

Those were my thoughts and my reasons for disregarding my policy of over forty years, and revealing myself to someone who remembered me by my old name.

“Antoinette,” I said. “Mrs. Flynn, it’s all right. Leave us alone for a little while.”

I embraced this decrepit old woman with much more emotion than I had known when embracing my neighbors two days earlier. We felt all the losses of the intervening years at once. We wept. I think she wept sincerely, even though less than half an hour later she was trying to blackmail me, as she had probably intended to do from the moment she realized who I was.

We sat on my luggage and shared my picnic food. Chewing gave her such trouble that I supposed she would have been happier with the mush in the tin plate. She told me, first, of her recent adventures—she ran a boarding house on Valencia Street, south of Market, where the earthquake itself pulled down buildings and made the street buckle.

We talked about old times, about other American women with French names, and where they ended up, and how they died. Georgette, who had been thrifty, became a madam in Denver, got rich, made bad investments, took arsenic. Suzette, who would give you her shirt, ended up in a two-bit knocking shop in New York and took some other poison—Antoinette wasn’t sure what exactly, she believed carbolic acid, very painful and bloody—this had happened under highly theatrical circumstances in a miserable dive on Doyers Street, with the owner, a big Irish brute, shouting,
“Not here, you don’t!” and reaching her too late to knock the vial from her grasp. Michelle, after changing her name to “Dr. Winifred Dorcas, Discreet Female Physician,” died at thirty-five, insane from syphilis (so I told Antoinette). Monique perished of a botched abortion, not at the hands of Michelle (again, my information). Francesca, after losing her arm as a consequence of wounds sustained in a knife fight with another girl, continued in the profession until she succumbed to alcoholism at the age of twenty-six. The lovely Angelique, always funny and unpredictable, became wilder and wilder, and went from house to house, and was beaten to death by a customer (or, as we’d have called him in those days, “a gentleman”).

We wept over these women, for we were more sentimental now than when we were hard-hearted enough to live that life, and we said, of the many others whose ultimate fate we didn’t know, that probably they had enjoyed lives of relatively normal length. We said hopefully that perhaps the reason we hadn’t heard about them was that they
had
survived. They had changed their ways, and changed their names, and lived in a manner that permitted them to escape notice.

Then we talked about the men. We clucked over their deaths, too. Jim had been hanged. Bill had been shot. When we knew them, they had been incredibly young. Still, one couldn’t help noticing that on the average even the most violent of the violent, reckless men we knew of had lived longer than most of the light girls. Perhaps there was hidden evidence, but certainly on the evidence known to us it was more hazardous to be a prostitute than a gunslinger. We cried over that.

Enjoying ourselves thoroughly, we reminisced about the parlor houses, saloons, and dance halls—which ones were still open, which had changed their names, which had become Chinese wet-washing factories or been demolished to make way for the houses just reduced to ashes by the fire that had turned us into refugees, and we cried over those places, too, and wondered what had become of the characters who used to frequent them.

Finally, we talked about our lives since then. I told her of my travels and my marriage. There was no way to hide the fact that I was very well-off. When it was her turn, she said she had married a miner and had been a good wife to him, and he’d been pretty reliable, although he had an irritating habit of saying, when drunk, that he didn’t regret marrying
her—no, sir—though all his friends told him he was a fool to do it. He had been dead for twenty years now. They’d had five children, scattered to the winds. She had invested everything in the boarding house. She’d owned the building, not the land; now she had nothing.

“We’ll stay in touch now,” I said, “and I’ll help you.”

“Well, of course you will,
Mrs. Andersen
,” she said, with a hideous grin wide enough to show, more than our previous conversation, how completely she’d ignored my advice about her teeth.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Say it outright.”

“I know who you are, and you will have to make it worth my while not to tell everybody.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said. “Oh, Antoinette. Aren’t you ashamed? Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I take you out of a Stockton Street dance hall, where you were entertaining a dozen men a day in your sad ignorance of your own worth, and give you a home in the best parlor house in the city? Didn’t I loan you money at no interest for your wardrobe?”

“Yes, but never mind.”

“And teach you which fork to use for shrimp? And give you a French name and French lessons to multiply your earning power? Didn’t I get you out of a fix now and then? Never mind all that? Remember a name I used forty-odd years ago, but forget all that?”

“That’s beside the point. I can’t afford to gamble on your charity in my position. Look at you, with three servants, a house on Nob Hill—”