Belle Cora: A Novel (68 page)

On the following day, I left the cabin. I had thrown on a bedraggled dress, and had not washed or combed my hair, but still the men I passed doffed their hats and bowed. A few were bold enough to say that they had heard I was indisposed and hoped I was feeling better. When I said I
had decided to take a walk through town, three men volunteered to row me to shore. I picked a homely-looking young man who was missing so many teeth he must have had to eat only soft food. When we got to the other side, he refused the payment I offered him. I walked to Portsmouth Square and on the streets around it, past lodging houses, cafés, assayers’ tents, and canvas gambling halls. Everywhere, the men showed me elaborate courtesy. When I was about to cross Washington Street, a tall man with a big droopy mustache offered to carry me in his arms. It was a custom that year: women, who were so precious, were carried over the filth of San Francisco’s unpaved streets. Until then I had declined, but this time I accepted. He carried me to the other side, not speaking except to say, in answer to a question, that my weight was not enough for him to notice, and he tipped his hat and did not presume any further upon our acquaintance.

I went to the steamship office and asked the price of a ticket to Rio de Janeiro and to other destinations, but I did not buy one. A carter with a load of lumber gave me a ride to the top of Telegraph Hill. I stood on a cliff, the wind buffeting my face and making false thunder in my ears. As I had many times in the last few days, I pictured Jeptha being shown my broken body and the note in my coat pocket, which I had written not with a fixed intention of destroying myself, but just to be prepared in case I did. It would blight the rest of his life, I was fairly sure, for I had some little experience in this matter. He would suffer then as I was suffering. It would crush him. I wanted that. The trouble was, I wouldn’t be here to enjoy it.

I bought a tamale from a Mexican woman down by the wharf. It made my mouth burn, but I had not eaten in three days, so I finished it quickly while walking, and then turned around, deciding to buy another. Now there was a line, but the man at the front insisted that I go ahead of him, and he insisted on paying for the tamale.

I walked on, and with my emotions dulled by exhaustion, I began to consider my position in practical terms. There were many ways a woman willing to work and, even better, a woman with capital might make money in the boomtown of San Francisco. Women were getting rich just doing laundry that year. They were getting rich running restaurants and boarding houses. I could do that. Or I could invest my money in water lots, which were going cheap just now. Or I could peddle my beauty at the
altar to the richest bachelor in the territory. But there was only one way that was, for me, perfectly reliable—one business I knew inside and out, one way I knew in my bones I could rise to a kind of glory, commanding a host of pretty underlings, in a little kingdom I would rule, while humiliating and shaming the man who had been supposed to save me and instead had damned me. I returned to the
Flavius
and spent another day in bed. In the morning, Mrs. Austin appeared again. “I need you in the galley. Come now, or out on your ass.”

“I’m not ready.”

“Then pack.”

“But I’m busted, Mrs. Austin,” I lied. “How will I live?”

“I guess you know how you’ll do it,” she said, and shut the door.

Presently, there came another knock, and there was big-headed, pop-eyed Captain Austin, in a new shirt, with a tie, and fresh from a bath, smelling of rosewater, his hair slick with grease, the hat in his hands.

“May I sit?” he asked. I nodded. He took a stool. “I heard what happened, and want to say that I think it was raw, it was too rough, I don’t agree with it.”

“And you know—you know what your wife said to me.”

“That was raw, too. I don’t hold with that, either. Cast a woman into the street just after she’s been through an ordeal like that, if you ask me, I can’t see the right of it; it’s heartless, and we have no call to act so high and mighty. Well, I guess you know, just from being on the
Flavius
the time you have, me and Mrs. Austin don’t see eye to eye on much, and I’ve decided …” He looked down at the hat in his right hand and stroked the underside of its brim. “I’ve decided we’re going to divorce.” He looked up, and once again the bulging eyes regarded me. “It’s easy to divorce in California. It’s a territory. The courts here are easygoing. I think it’s safe to say that you and your husband are going to do it. So there you’ll be, without a husband, and me without a wife.”

“Good God in heaven.”

Astonishing myself, I began to laugh.

“Now, hear me out. I’m not offering myself up as a Romeo. I’m rich, and if certain things work out, I’m going to be a whole lot richer. Let’s be hardheaded. Neither of us are fools.”

“And what would happen to your poor wife after that? Would she be thrown out in the street?”

“Well, I don’t know. That would be a little hard.”

“I would insist on it,” I told him.

“Well, then, we could talk about that. Maybe—well, all right.”

I nodded. “That’s good. That shows you’re serious. And it would certainly give me a great deal of satisfaction. But I can’t accept your offer.”

“Don’t answer so quick. Think about it.”

“No, I know now. I won’t. Do you want to know why?”

“Why?”

I gave a shrug. “Because you’re not rich.”

Now, for the first time, his feelings were hurt. “Of course I’m rich. Do you know what I own?”

I nodded. “You own a bunch of land with contested deeds. These water lots are already losing value, because no one can say if the courts will uphold them. They could be worth a fortune one day if the gold holds out, but who knows if it will. Meanwhile, you might lose them. You don’t have enough cash to make land, or build a wharf here, or pay a judge to come down on your side. To get it, you went to a bank, Captain Austin, and if that bank would put on a new shirt and some pomade and propose marriage to me, why, I guess I could learn to love it in time.”

He shot off the stool like a jack-in-the-box, furious now. “She told you all that? Damn her, she did it to poison your mind against me! And I was going to leave her provided for!”

“What? Behind my back?”

“You didn’t say don’t provide for her. You just said throw her out.”

He put his hand on the door; still, he was only a few paces away from any part of the little cabin. “Wait,” I said, because a thought had been germinating quietly in my mind for days—I had glimpsed parts of it in the corners of my eyes, between the tears. I had seen fragments that could not survive by themselves. Now they were assembled, terrible and glorious. I touched his arm. He turned his homely face toward mine, and I think it was the first time he really saw me. “Sit down,” I said. “I have a proposition.”

I would crush him, that pious upright psalm-singer. I would grind his face in the mud. Whore? I would show him a whore.

I gestured toward the stool. After a moment he sat. “Are you a religious man, Captain Austin?”

“Well, not so you’d notice. I’ve got nothing against it.”

“Nor do I. Religion has its place. But I’m glad you’re not too religious, because I don’t want to offend you. You’ve heard of my house on Mercer Street in New York City, and you’re willing to overlook it, which is kind of you, but why overlook it? Why not make the most of it? I know how much the
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brings you now. It could make ten times more as a place of entertainment for men who have been lucky in California. I am not talking of some low bawdy house, but a fine house like the one I had in New York. I would do everything, find the girls, manage them, buy the wine, and arrange for some improvements to make the
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a place of refinement and luxury for the very best people—including, probably, the judges, merchants, and legislators whose favorable decisions could help your affairs prosper. We’ll need fewer, bigger rooms, with better furnishings. I have capital of my own to help pay for that. We’ll need female help of other kinds, and since you are sentimental about her, we might keep the former Mrs. Austin on as a general maid and housekeeper. She would have to know she was subordinate to me, be respectful, and stay up to the mark, but if she did all of that, she’d be welcome to stay on at a good salary. Oh, and she must bathe twice a week.”

And so we made a bargain. I didn’t marry him, nor was I his concubine. It was a business arrangement. Mrs. Austin became a maid of all work. How did she take this treatment? She learned. We must all learn sometime.

A FEW DAYS AFTER CAPTAIN AUSTIN AND I
reached our agreement, one of Mrs. Austin’s boarders handed me a note from Herbert Owen, suggesting a time and place where we might meet to discuss the divorce. The day after that, I took my best dresses out of my trunks and spent a day freshening them and ironing them, with the help of the recently subjugated Mrs. Austin. Tight-laced, in boots, holding my skirts over the mud, I walked carefully to a French café on the south side of Kearny Street, which had an appearance that might generously be called picturesque: narrow, steep, and irregular; its buildings—some of canvas, some of wood—set low or high according to the level of the ground on which they had been erected; signboards and painted cloth banners in Spanish, French, and German; and sidewalks made out of barrel staves and packing cases and upended tin cans.

Inside the café, beneath a tin ceiling stamped in the shapes of flowers and vines, were rectangular tables. The diners, wearing dirty linen shirts and vests and rumpled frock coats, ate with the usual velocity. I spotted Jeptha and Herbert and walked to their table. As I moved, the patrons swung their heads to keep me in their field of vision while shoveling food into their mouths without pause. As an afterthought, just before I sat down, I looked back at one of them for a few seconds. He rose, took off his hat, and bowed; a few more followed his example, and then the rest of them did, all except Jeptha and Herbert Owen.

“Do you know that man?” asked Jeptha.

“Oh, I know all of them,” I said.

Owen put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and said sadly, “Jeptha prefers to keep the occasion of your quarrel a secret from these men, and he supposes you want that as well. So we’ll discuss what needs to be done in general terms, if you’re agreed.”

A greasy blackboard gave the bill of fare in French and English, and a waiter in a dirty shirt and torn trousers added to this the astonishing statement that, with sufficient advance warning and for a small fortune, one could have a grizzly-bear steak brought to the table. I ordered extravagantly: fresh eggs, biscuits, and coffee with cream (five times as costly as black coffee). Herbert Owen had soup and mutton. Jeptha had black coffee.

Even here, said Owen, one party in a divorce must sue the other, with grounds, creating a public record and a blot on the sued party’s reputation. Our choices were: natural impotence, adultery, extreme cruelty, habitual intemperance, desertion, willful neglect.

“You ought to let me be the petitioner, don’t you think?” I said.

Jeptha and Owen looked at each other and back at me. They were inclined to let me have my way: they did not want a court case making Jeptha famous as the Baptist preacher so dumb that he had unknowingly married a parlor-house madam. “All right,” said Owen.

“Recite the grounds again,” I asked, just to be mean. He did. “Desertion,” I said finally.

Owen would prepare the petition. We would appear before a judge in district court, and it should not take long.

Jeptha asked me if I was planning to stay in San Francisco.

“Why? Do you think I should go away? Where should I go?”

“Anywhere, I guess. You’re free.”

“I think I will stay here. There are many opportunities for a woman here. A woman could get rich here just doing men’s laundry.”

“Is that what you plan to do here, laundry?”

“I haven’t decided.”

I planned to run my business under the name of “Mrs. Jeptha Talbot.” Mrs. Talbot’s, they’d say, the best damned house in the whole damned town.

I asked him what his plans were. After a hesitation, as though he hated to say a word to me not spoken in contempt, he said that he and Herbert Owen were going to try their hand at prospecting.

Then he was going to give up preaching. I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot I hated him, forgot I didn’t believe in God, and I wanted to talk him out of it. The moment passed.

“If you like,” he added, and he cleared his throat—I could see this took effort—“if you like, I could ask about Lewis and Edward.”

I thought about this, what he might mean by it. When I tried to find a clue in his tired face, I decided it was his essential decency, and I wanted no part of it. “What a gentleman you are. What a good man. What a knight,” and I watched him react to each of these compliments as though he were a disgraced officer being ceremoniously stripped of various ribbons and chevrons and epaulettes. “Yes, thank you,” I said after a little more time had gone by.

For a moment, nothing was said, and then I took thought. “Not a preacher anymore, really? So quickly?”

He didn’t answer. I took another look at him. He was brushed and neat and shaven—he would never neglect such things. In fact, his neck had been scraped pink by the razor; and his hair, which I had cut two weeks ago with scissors that had been mine when I was Harriet Knowles, was pasted and combed across his brow like the hair of a farmer dressed for church. But otherwise he did not look well: his sunken eyes told me he had not slept; his face looked thin, as though he hadn’t been eating; and he bore as well, I thought, the subtle marks of an inner struggle over God and Tom Paine and Philippe and me. His deterioration bothered me for a moment almost as if he were still my responsibility, but I pushed the
feeling aside. I had to be hard now; I had to show myself stronger than he was.

Of course, if he was not a preacher, perhaps it would hurt him less when I became a madam again—that was too bad, since I wanted so much to hurt him (so I told myself, though at that moment I did not feel it). When we were on Kearny Street again, outside the café, I had another attack of worry for him and said, “But you will go back to it. To preaching.”