Frog Music (12 page)

Meaning to America, but to the House of Mirrors too. Arthur brought her, watched, clapped the loudest. After a few weeks, it hadn’t seemed to Blanche so very much of a step to go from dancing to sitting in the laps of the richer customers, and from that to letting one take her to a hotel for five times what she earned from a leg show. Arthur had been so encouraging. Blanche was pregnant and in what he teasingly called an overheated state. The
michetons
didn’t object as her belly rounded; quite the contrary. It seemed to give some of them a perverse thrill.

“A stinking ship brought you here too,” murmurs Madame,” but you managed to walk away from that promptly. Strange how girls of other nationalities don’t seem to need these hangers-on. If they have pimps, the fellows take managerial roles, at least, whereas these French
macs
are the feeblest parasites.”

Blanche only smiles. Parasite? For almost a decade, Arthur’s been the soil she’s rooted in, the rock she grips, the water that revives her. What would this widow know about men and women in the real world, outside her little puppet theater of performers and watchers?

There’s no information to be had about the late Mr. Werner, so the parlor girls who live upstairs speculate that Madame Johanna poisoned him. She’s never been seen with anyone who could plausibly be a lover, so they joke that her
chatte
must have sealed up by now, the way an old wound scars over.

“Why keep one sponger, my dear,” Madame presses on, “when so many men pant at the prospect of keeping you? L’amant de Blanche, to name but one …”

Lamantia is the man’s real name, and his punning pseudonym for himself—L’amant de Blanche, “the lover of Blanche”—sets her teeth on edge. The Sicilian businessman, partner in a large concern on Market Street, insists on using the assumed name when he hires Blanche—as if spending a night with a showgirl is a cloak-and-dagger business! “For the last time,” Blanche snaps, “I don’t want a keeper.”

“But you have so very many friends to choose from, you could follow your whim …”

She can’t stand that euphemism for
michetons
either—friends, as if what she exchanges with these various merchants, railroad magnates, and other plutocrats bears any resemblance to friendship. “My whim has always been Arthur.”

“Well.” Madame throws up her bony hands. “You must be making a comfortable living from your rents in addition to what you earn here, if you can afford to keep such a pet.”

Blanche smooths her scarlet skirt instead of answering. She wishes she’d never boasted to Madame about buying number 815 in the first place. The woman makes a habit of knowing too much and using it.

“Two pets, rather, if we count Ernest Girard—a matched pair of pugs,” says Madame amusedly. “I imagine they take a great deal of feeding and grooming …”

This reminds Blanche, uncomfortably, of P’tit and of her new acquaintance’s digging for information about him last night. To get Madame off the subject of keepers, she says, “By the way, these Hoffmans who’re minding our P’tit Arthur …” Then she realizes she doesn’t know how to phrase the question. “Is it far enough outside the City to be safe, would you say? Is the air”—Blanche strains for the word—“salubrious?” It occurs to her only now that while she, Arthur, and Ernest all got their scratches the last time the smallpox hit Paris, the same isn’t true of P’tit. “No doubt they’ve vaccinated the babies.”

“No doubt.”

Blanche tries again. “Have the Hoffmans quite a few little ones in their care?”

The Prussian is looking into her cash box now; she licks a finger to count a stack of notes. “Children have such a relish for company, don’t they?”

Was that an answer? “Perhaps I should pay him a visit there,” Blanche says tentatively.

The widow purses her pale lips.

“I know it’s not our usual procedure, but these aren’t ordinary times.”

Madame Johanna shakes her head. “Frau Hoffman finds that parents disrupt the routines.”

Blanche bristles.
Routines
—that makes the place sound more like a school or a hospital than a home for babies. How many infants could there be, lodging with one family of farmers? Blanche supposes she should have looked into these details before, but at the end of each visit, she’s always been grateful to wave good-bye as the nurse totes her small burden away in his basket.

One of these days, of course, P’tit will be grown enough that everything will be different. He’ll sit up, or stand, finally stretch out his arms to Maman, ready to be carried back to Sacramento Street to see his Papa, and perhaps even to stay, when the time is right. “I’m just a touch anxious, because of the heat and the epidemic,” she tells Madame now.

“Naturally. But your little one’s very well.”

“How do you—”

“Frau Hoffman would have informed me if the case were otherwise.”

This is where Blanche should accept her hundred in worn notes, pull on her lace gloves, pick up her parasol, and say her
merci
. But there’s something veiled in the madam’s tone … “Where do they live, exactly?” asks Blanche.

A hiss of breath. “If you’re irrational enough to insist on putting the child at greater risk in order to set your mind at rest, I’ll have him brought here this very afternoon.”

“I just find it a little odd that you don’t seem to want me to see this farm.”

An elegant shrug of the silk-covered shoulders. “You’re a free woman. But I find it equally odd,” adds Madame with an implacable smile, “that you’re suddenly so curious after almost a year.”

Blanche is on her feet, knuckles on the carved bureau. “What’s the damn address?”

Madame Johanna seems to be weighing something. “Folsom,” she says at last.

Blanche has never heard of a village by that name. She stares. “Folsom
Street?
” That’s right downtown, in the Mission. She’s probably gone past the door a hundred times.

“I wonder how you picked up the impression it was outside the City?”

“You’ve always called it a farm. Whereabouts on Folsom?” demands Blanche.

“Sit down.” Madame sighs. “You’ve proved your point: underneath that famously snowy décolletage beats a mother’s heart. I’ll send for him this minute, if you like.”

Blanche sees red. “What number on Folsom?”

“Fourteen twenty-two.”

Blanche strides toward the door, then turns back to snatch her parasol and gloves.

“I always thought we understood each other,” murmurs Madame.

That August afternoon the air’s unbearable, chalky with dust. The harpist is still on his stool outside the House of Mirrors but struggling with a tune from some Verdi opera now. Squinting out from under the pinked edge of her ivory parasol, Blanche waits impatiently for a horsecar—but when it comes, there’s a boy hanging off the back whose pocks look moist. What’s he doing out of bed? Blanche shudders and turns away, looking for a cab instead. Realizing, only now, that she dashed off without getting her wages from Madame, as impulsive as some green girl.

The cabbie spots her wave and brakes at the last moment, so the sweating horse almost tramples her. The man doesn’t bother getting down. “Fourteen twenty-two Folsom,” Blanche calls up to him, climbing into the little carriage. She slams the door shut herself.

They pass a crumpled brown shape in the street being winched into a cart: the third dead horse Blanche has seen this week. In the endless heat, the hills of the City are breaking the poor hacks; no circus pony she had the handling of ever endured so much. Blanche wishes this driver would slow down before his own wild-eyed bay drops in the traces. A knot of Specials at one corner are jawing and smoking pipes rather than engaging in any law enforcement. The streets are emptier than usual, she notices, but the vast white pavilion built for the Industrial Exhibition in this national centennial year is still pulling in the crowds. Maybe folks just want to be out of the sun, even if it means they risk rubbing up against the sick.

The cab turns down Tenth Street, into the Mission, and the variety of pale faces strikes her: Italians, Irish, Prussians, all living cheek by jowl. Blanche rather dreads reaching her destination. Under what conditions has her son been living? If these Hoffmans aren’t farmers, what are they?

She spots a swarm of kids kneeling around an ice block that’s fallen from a cart, still bristling with straw. They’re all licking it. Children are said to be the most susceptible to infection. How could this neighborhood be any healthier for babies than Chinatown? Blanche was misled from the start. Goddamn Madame Johanna and her Prussian friends.

Number 1422 turns out to be next door to a Chinese laundry that sends coils of smoke in all directions. It’s a wary adolescent who answers the door, not the uniformed nurse who brings P’tit to the House of Mirrors for his visits. “Doctress has just stepped out,” she mutters.

Blanche is hit by the eye-watering reek of shit. “Who’s this doctress?”

“Doctress Hoffman, she just stepped out. Wish to leave a message? What name?”

Blanche has been steeling her nerves, half expecting bedlam—babies shrieking—but this silence is worse. “Where do you keep the infants?”

The nursemaid’s eyes flicker. “Doctress is—”

“Just stepped out, yes, but what I want to know is, where’s my son?”

“What name?”

“Beunon. I mean, Deneve.” Blanche pushes past the rigid girl and tries the first door on the right. It opens.

“Not—that’s for appointments,” says the girl. She yanks the knob and shuts the door again, but not before Blanche catches a glimpse of a narrow bed, a sink, and a rack of instruments and realizes what
appointments
must mean.

The girl has more grit than one would expect; she takes her stand between Blanche and the second door, her arms out. “They’re having their nap.”

Blanche’s pulse is hammering in her throat. “I pay eight dollars a week for his care and lodging, and I believe I have the right to see—”

While the nursemaid’s still blinking at her, Blanche shoves past her and opens the door.

So dark—that’s what strikes her first, even more than the hot distillation of the stink. Her eyes fight to make sense of the shapes. Crib after metal crib, littered with small limbs … “Christ, open the shutters.”

“That’ll only let more heat in,” the girl protests.

Blanche fumbles her way to the window, forces her skirt between two cribs.

“Which is yours?”

Instead of answering, Blanche grabs a handle and winches till light slants across the room. Weak goatish cries go up. Two small ones in one crib, three in the next … Tear-shaped glass bottles in mouths, or gone crusty on chests, or lost in corners with their black rubber teats dribbling onto the sheets. Every baby is tangled in the same size garment, once white. Eyes closed, or blinking wetly, or open and vacant. All, big and small, strangely inanimate; with a sensation like a blow to her chest, Blanche finally recognizes the tribe her son belongs to.

One black face, one or two infants who could be Indians, but most of them pallid. Pinching her nose to shut out the smell, her eyes sliding from crib to crib. She can’t see P’tit anywhere.

The foot of a facedown sleeper flickers and curls, and with a pounding relief Blanche spots the soft sole and seizes it, then scoops up her son. He seems so much bigger since she saw him last, and she presses kisses all over his howling face …

“I said, that one’s a girl.”

Blanche is scarlet. Deposits the stranger child back in her crib, wipes the foreign tears off her own mouth.

“Upset her, so you did, picking her up that way,” complains the nursemaid.

“Are you telling me they lie here all day in their own dirt with nobody picking them up?” roars Blanche, her eyes scanning the shadowy corners of the room.

“I do what I can.”

But Blanche’s not listening because she’s recognized P’tit at last, in the end crib. She approaches cautiously, in case he turns into another changeling. But no, that’s him, lying on his side, gigantic eyes sunken above patches of hot red skin. Watching her through the bars, as if she’s a wild beast. A bulging forehead, but Arthur’s pencil-thin eyebrows arching across it: How could Blanche not have known her baby?

He’s chewing on something mushroom-shaped. Blanche holds out her hands to him with an attempt at a smile, but he doesn’t stir.

She lifts P’tit carefully. His small garment is limp with sweat. He lets out a sob. Then a convulsive cough, and Blanche feels such pity that she presses him to her. Registers a surge of warmth against her bodice.
Love
, she thinks in shock, love flaring up between herself and this sobbing baby, love so hot she can feel it on her skin. Then the heat dies away and she realizes what it is: he’s pissed on her.

The girl’s moving from crib to crib slotting bottles back into mouths.

Blanche can’t bear this room a minute longer. She’s tempted to set down the wailing, sopping bundle that is P’tit exactly where she found him. But of course she won’t; she can’t; she could never do that, now she knows what it’s like here, and look herself in the face. So she pulls him onto her hip and makes for the passage.

“The shirt, if you please.” The girl’s too close to her.

“What are you talking about?” shouts Blanche over the baby’s cries.

“I need the nightshirt back.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Any parent that—‘own clothing to be provided on departure,’ see,” says the girl, with the rapid delivery of a memorized lesson, “because it’s the doctress’s property, she’s particular about it.”

For a moment Blanche is tempted to pull the sodden rag over P’tit’s head and throw it in the girl’s face. Instead, she steps away.

But the girl clings to P’tit’s hem. “The shirt or its value,” she pleads, “or the doctress’ll dock me.”

“Here’s its value.” Blanche spits on the floor.

The girl’s grip has shifted to P’tit’s tiny foot.

“Take your hands off my son.” Blanche yanks him away. P’tit is still weeping as his reddened mouth fastens onto the black thing in his fist, and he twists away from Blanche as best he can.

A mutter: “Reckon he knows my hands better than yours.”