Breath and Bones (55 page)

Famke thought that if this were what it meant to be a woman artist, she was just as glad that she had failed. She gazed at Albert's tiny Rapunzel, imagining her with red hair, as Miss Dart's voice faded in and out of her awareness.

At last she heard the Englishwoman's fruity voice saying, “. . . looking for a model, and if you are accustomed to posing, you would be—”

“I do not pose for painters,” Famke interrupted. “Except Albert. Can you tell me where to find him?”

At that, Miss Dart looked crestfallen, and she stood to reach for her cold teacup. “I do not know,” she said, and in those four syllables Famke detected a longing akin to her own. “I believe he is still in the city.”

Miss Dart sipped her tea and then, politely but firmly, asked for the return of Albert's signature.

For the first time since her master had taken to his bed, Frøken Grubbe ascended the stairs with reluctance. “Asking for you, he is, and he don't look pleased,” the housemaid, Vida, had reported with obvious glee. Frøken Grubbe reflected with something as close to sadness as she allowed herself to feel, that although she took no real pains to be liked among the staff, neither did it gratify her to be so disliked. And now it appeared that the man she had saved from the flames, whom she had nursed back to a semblance of health and the first pink patches of new skin—this man was displeased with her.

“You sent for me?” she asked, standing at the bedside and reminding herself to relax her spine so that she might look the image of the loving care she did in fact personify. The smell of burnt flesh was gone, replaced with the bracing scents of alcohol and liniment.

“Grubbe,” he barked, with his old failure to observe any sort of social grace, “I want to know why that nun has not come round. Mother Birgit. She did me one favor, and I need another.”

Frøken Grubbe bowed her head. “If there is some service you need performed, I will be happy to do it.” She, who had done everything for him—
from bandages to chamberpot, reading aloud to transcribing accounts, had thought his manner was warmer to her of late.

“I want Birgit,” the man in the bed said stubbornly. “I hear you've kept her from coming back.”

“It is said,” Frøken Grubbe ventured slowly—for by whom were these things said other than herself?—“that, as Mother Superior, Birgit allowed improper behavior among the orphans and novices . . .” She coughed delicately, hoping to convey much through the small explosive sound; but the man who collected Japanese prints found nothing shocking in her insinuation.

“That doesn't affect me,” he said brusquely. “You send for her directly.”

She thought out her next words carefully. “Mother Birgit is no longer in this life,” she said.

At those words, Herr Skatkammer seemed to shrink, nearly vanishing among the snowy sheets. It was a long moment before he said, “Send up that fat housemaid, then.”

So here was a clue and a kind of proof, a kind of hope, at last: Albert
was
in San Francisco. Famke reasoned that if he was not generally to be found among the city's artists, there was a natural next place to look. The time had clearly come to discover the bagnios and boardinghouses of San Francisco, to seek for Albert's art in the types of places that had most recently been known to sponsor it. She had seen nothing in the galleries here that impressed her, anyway; perhaps true art lay in the whorehouses these days.

Famke made new inquiries at the Old Court House, and she learned that there were something like three hundred known establishments of carnal business within the city. It was a crippling discovery, for even the lowest bagnio in the fearsome Barbary Coast district cost money, and if she were to be safe there she would require masculine clothes. But her money was gone. With so many trained painters about, there was no market for the refurbishments that had carried her through Colorado; and after the humiliation of
Hygeia
(now in the Greek pawnshop window, with a swathe of whitewash slapped over the ruddy triangle Down There), she knew she
would get no commissions as a painter. It was out of the question to work as a maid, as she needed more money than a servant could command, and her days must be free for the search. To work for other artists seemed a betrayal of everything she'd had with Albert and, more importantly, of her long journey toward him. And yet this was all she knew how to do well: to stand still, to impersonate a figure from the world of the imagination.

And thus, she resigned herself to the one path open to her.

Gorgeous decoration is characteristic of San Francisco; the people pay high prices for the necessities of life, so velvet and gilt work is thrown into the bargain
.

F
RANK
M
ARRYAT
,
M
OUNTAINS AND
M
OLEHILLS
;
O
R
, R
ECOLLECTIONS OF A
B
URNT
J
OURNAL

Paris is really as near San Francisco as New York [ . . . ] Perhaps in no other American city would the ladies invoice so high per head as in San Francisco, when they go out to the opera, or to party, or ball. Their point lace is deeper, their moire antique stiffer, their skirts a trifle longer, their corsage an inch lower, their diamonds more brilliant,—and more of them,—than the cosmopolite is like to find elsewhere
.

S
AMUEL
B
OWLES
,
O
UR
N
EW
W
EST

Mid-May 1886 was a mad season for San Francisco, with a play or a concert on each corner. Virtually every gentleman, and some few ladies, who lived in or visited the city during that month eventually came to the Thalia Festival House on Bush Street, in the heart of a labyrinth of hills and avenues and warehouses. Streetlamps glowed over walls blanketed in red poster bills; there were no illustrations, but yellow letters masquerading as gold leapt off the page and burrowed into minds and hearts of even the most rushed passersby, awaking a passion for art.

Professor Charles Martin du Garde
presents
A Night of
Tableaux Vivants
,
or, The Living Waxworks
featuring ARTISTIC enactments from renowned works
of painting and sculpture
among them, Rubens, Renoir, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
~and the breathtaking Winged Victory~
8:00 of the evening
~two dollars~

And so, urgent as their business in town was, Viggo and Myrtice paused before the red walls and glass doors and considered.

“Two dollars,” Myrtice said. “That's forty miles' train fare each.”

“But we are not taking a train,” said Viggo. “We are in San Francisco, waiting for Edouard Versailles.” He took four silver dollars from his pocket, and he and Myrtice looked at them: Liberty's face on one side and the eagle on the other.

Both Viggo and Myrtice felt the time was ripe to glean some enjoyment from life. Upon arriving in Hygiene, they had been dismayed to learn that they'd missed Edouard Versailles by a mere four hours—this despite having hired a private carriage at Harmsway and scaled impatiently over the wall of Versailles's estate. The foreign maid with the sad round mouth regarded them suspiciously and pressed her lips together, but they agreed her words had the ring of truth: Famke had disappeared, and Versailles was not home.

Myrtice fell to the ground in a fit of tears—which in the end had saved the day, for the mournful maid had taken pity on her and told her where to find the master.

“Hotel called Palace,” she said, “five floor. Fireproof.”

And so Viggo and Myrtice had come to San Francisco and camped in the marble lobby of the Palace Hotel for as long as they could, while men in frock coats and top hats made frequent and enthusiastic use of shiny brass spittoons nearby. It was said there were a thousand rooms in the Palace, and Myrtice and Viggo scrutinized every person who might be going into or coming out of one. When the staff finally shooed them into the street, they left their names and swore to come back the next day. When they did, they missed Versailles by only ten minutes, or so a disdainful clerk explained. They were not allowed to sit in the lobby again, and both were burned standing outside in a day of unusual sunshine.

Now here was the Thalia in its crimson glory, seducing them with the promise of a deeper glimpse of the world in which Viggo, at least, had been
seeing Famke during the long months of the search. Art in Mæka, in the city that the Celestials called Golden Mountain.

“What is a tableaux vivants?” asked Myrtice, conscious of mispronouncing the words.

“It is artistic,” Viggo said firmly, though he was no more certain of the meaning than she was; the word highlighted in majuscule letters reassured him. “There will be a place to sit. Shall we go in?”

Myrtice thought yet again that Viggo was the nicest, most considerate man, certainly not what she'd expect Ursula's brother to be like. Tableaux vivants must be something educational. And Myrtice's skin was now beautifully clear, so really she should not feel at all self-conscious as she stepped into first a foyer and then a concert hall full of handsome men and women, all of them (so it seemed) in silk, with opera glasses and gloves. Walking in there was like walking into fairyland. Everyone was covered in jewels, and the gaslight glittered off their diamonds and threw patterns of illumination on faces and walls, dancing like fairy lights through the smoke from their cigars. The odors of their various perfumes were a blessed relief after the rotten reek of a city in early summer.

Myrtice and Viggo took seats toward the back, perhaps fifty feet from the red-curtained stage, at the top of the room where the heat of gaslight and excited art lovers' bodies was strongest. She reminded him to remove his hat, and he reminded her to hold on to her purse. She was doing that anyway, but she liked that he thought enough of her to pay these little attentions. Indeed, she fancied that, away from Utah, he had begun seeing her in a different light: if not as desirable, at least as a woman. The rest would surely follow.

Shortly after they settled themselves, she saw a man, even more resplendent than the others, strolling onto the stage. His hair was dark and well oiled, gleaming in the light, and countless diamond stickpins studded the lapels on his simple black suit.

“Ladees and gentlemen,” he boomed, in a voice calculated to quiet every one of them. “I am your host, Charles Martin du Garde, and eet is my fondest pleasure to welcome you to the most unforgettable night of your lives. I bring you ze art treasures of Europe, displayed here in unique fashion, as you have never seen them before or since . . .”

His voice droned on until Myrtice found herself blinking sleepily. She scarcely noticed when the glittering man finished talking and left the stage,
but she snapped to attention when the red curtains peeled apart. For there, directly in front of her, stood a naked woman.

Charles Martin du Garde's voice came from backstage. “
The Little Fur
, by Peter Paul Rubens,” he said.

Out in the audience, heads began to nod as if in recognition. The diamonds' light played over the woman's arms and stomach and legs, over her pale brown hair, over the fur she had draped from one shoulder to swoop behind her back and settle around her hips, just above the place a woman grew fur of her own. Myrtice blushed at the very thought of such things, but she was too awake now to look away. She certainly would not look at Viggo.

Du Garde went on explaining the beauties of the painting and its significance in the history of art, but it was clear no one heard what he was saying. Every ounce of energy in the room was fixed on that shameless pink flesh, flesh that didn't even move to cover itself. Perhaps, thought Myrtice, she is not alive at all—but then a breeze whispered through the hall, and the woman's hair stirred. The hairs on her fur stirred, too, and they released a sudden flurry of white moths—an unexpected event that provoked laughter throughout the room. The girl in the fur sneezed.