Frog Music (20 page)

“I don’t believe is measles.”

Their eyes lock hard.

“It’s not allowed to hide,” mumbles the Swede.

Is Gudrun threatening to report them to the board of health? Blanche sways closer and speaks softly. “Do you want this whole building quarantined, really? I suppose you imagine they’ll let the rest of you flee before they board us up? Huh! Have you enough food on your shelf for six weeks?”

Tears of terror in the seamstress’s milky-blue eyes. “Monsieur should go hospital.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Nobody’s coming out of hospitals alive.” Blanche loses control of her voice. “They’re slipping in each other’s
merde
or lashed to beds and left screaming for water in the dark.”

Gudrun shakes.

“All I’m asking is for you to keep your mouth shut. And boil laundry for us upstairs, morning and evening,” Blanche adds, pressing her advantage. “I’ll pay you good money. You’ll be perfectly safe if the water’s nearly scalding,” she improvises. A sting of conscience—but Blanche can’t manage without the girl’s help, she reminds herself, and nobody’s safe, anyhow. “Just add a cup of this—” She runs to fetch the enormous bottle of carbolic on the table, and pours a jugful for Gudrun. Then goes to fetch the basket full of stained sheets.

When Gudrun’s gone, Blanche stands frozen, straining to hear voices from the sickroom. P’tit’s fallen into a crumpled doze right on the floor. For a moment there’s nothing for Blanche to do: what an unnerving sensation. Nothing, meaning everything. So much she wants to do for Arthur but she mustn’t. Blanche remembers having him inside her on Thursday before he noticed the marks on his foot, and she shakes with dread. She mustn’t go within arm’s length of him now, because of that ache above her elbow, which means she may not be protected at all, and the same goes for P’tit.
Keep the pair of you away from bad cases
, the doctor said, looking at her as if she were the worst mother in the world, and this much is clear: Arthur’s case is about as bad as it can be.

Food. That’s something to do. What’ll she get? A stew, a hash, a pie? It doesn’t matter. Milk! Milk for P’tit, how could she have forgotten? But she can’t go out till P’tit wakes up, because then she can take him with her so he doesn’t bother the men.

This might be P’tit’s only nap today, so Blanche mustn’t waste this time. What can she do with it?

A creak of the bedroom door. Ernest, emerging with the covered dish he’s using as a bedpan. The hot smell clouds the air. Blanche doesn’t want him to catch her idle, so she busies herself over by the icebox filling another bottle of cold broth to have ready for P’tit. She glances at Ernest sideways to check his color: no sign of fever in the unshaven, concave cheeks. (She made him rush off to get a fresh scratch as soon as she told him the news about Arthur on Thursday.)

When he’s emptied the dish into the covered bucket, he adds carbolic to the water in the basin and rinses the dish, then scours his reddened hands. All this without looking in Blanche’s direction.

“Does Arthur want me?” she asks. Too high, like some vain girl.

“His blisters are swelling up,” he says, not dignifying her question with an answer.

Christ. After a minute, Blanche asks, “Do you need—shall I get more ice? More laudanum?”

“He can’t keep it down,” says Ernest, as if she should have known that. “I’m trying morphine.”

Has this man slept at all? The words burst from Blanche. “You know I’d be helping you nurse him if it weren’t for the baby—”

Like a snake, he turns on her, practically spitting. “The same
foutu
baby you were content to stash out of sight, out of mind, for the past year?”

Blanche bites down on her lip so hard that her eyes water. That’s exactly why she must keep P’tit out of harm’s way now, why she has to go to such cruel lengths to stay out of range of Arthur’s infectious touch and breath. She owes the tiny boy that much, surely. “If I were to catch it, so would P’tit,” she wails.

A snort. “For all we know, it’s him who brought it.”

Blanche’s hands contract into fists. “What bull is this?”

“Do you deny he’s had a fever?”

“Only since his scratch!”

“The creature’s been all coughs, vomits, and itches since you carried him in the door,” snarls Ernest. “Too much of a goddamn coincidence, I say, that Arthur took to his bed not two days later …”

A vast rage fills Blanche. The City’s one great hotbed of contagion, and this
connard
blames P’tit?

Ernest grabs a bottle of wine and some folded cloths from the drawer. Pulls a thin, dripping slab of ice out of the insulated box and wraps it in cheesecloth. “Arthur knows why you won’t go near him. You want to save your own
satané
skin.”

For a second she doesn’t understand.

“Terrified of getting scarred, jeopardizing the porcelain perfection that is Blanche la Danseuse!”

“It’s not about my skin, you son of a bitch.”

Ernest puts his prominent jaw very close to her, now, and she smells his sweat. “Answer me this. Are you his woman or aren’t you?”

I am
, Blanche wants to say.
Always
.

He steps back. “If it’s really the baby you’re so scared for, why not send him away?” he asks with a sneer. “He’d be safer anywhere else.”

“Send him where, back to Folsom Street?”

“Send him to the Dakotas, for all I care.”

“If he—if I dump my son in one of those places again, he won’t make it.”

Hissed through his teeth: “And what makes you so sure his father’s going to make it?”

Arthur’s moaning something in the bedroom.
And
? Could that be what he’s saying?
And
what?

Ernest claps his hands by her ear, making her jump. “He’s calling your name,
putain
.”

Blanche
, that’s the sound.
Blanche
, through lips too lesioned to articulate.

She throws a glance at P’tit, still snuffling in shallow sleep on the floor of the salon. Then hurries as far as the door. If she goes into the bedroom but holds her breath—if she doesn’t touch anything—

Ernest pushes in past her.

Blanche pulls out a handkerchief and presses it over her nose as she follows him, foot by foot, into the stinking room.
“Chéri?”
Muffled by the cloth that she hopes will somehow shield her.

The bare windows let in a merciless light. The man on the bed, wearing nothing but sweat-darkened drawers, is unrecognizable. Hair pushes through the scarlet pustules on his face and neck: a mask of burning wood. Dimpled red pearls, densest on his feet and hands and all across what used to be his lovely face. No, they’re a swarm of bloated ants up his legs and arms, converging on the plains of his chest and belly.

Ernest, his face blank as any stoic’s, starts to cover Arthur with cloths dipped in ice water. He lifts one of his friend’s feet—so the swollen sole won’t chafe against the sheet, she supposes. The muscular legs are bowed froggishly now. Ernest wets a rag with carbolic solution and very slowly wipes the seeping pustules on the foot. Even from the doorway, she can see the opalescent slime. He bunches the rag up, tosses it into a bucket, and begins again.

Blanche is trying not to gag. “I’m here,
mon amour
,” she says. The line sounds stagy. “Right here.” Technically true: about six feet from where Arthur lies.

A strange droning comes from his throat for an answer. It goes higher. Descant variations on a tune of pain.

“Time for another morphine suppository,” Ernest mutters under his breath.

It’s clear to Blanche now that this is not just the camaraderie of two members of an old double act who keep each other company on the streets of San Francisco. Nothing could make someone do what Ernest is doing except love.

“What can I—”

“See to the brat,” barks Ernest.

Only then does she realize that P’tit’s wailing in the other room.

Side to side, forward and back, Blanche shuffles across the apartment on the first day of September, humming in P’tit’s minute ear.

For a week and a half Arthur’s seemed on the verge of death, yet the days stumble on. Blanche still eats, moves, even sleeps on and off, and babies always need looking after, especially this one, whose unfathomable eyes gaze on the world expecting the worst.
You’re here now
, she wants to tell P’tit with a little shake. Here’s Blanche, a woman who’s willing to pick him up when he cries in the middle of the night. His mother. (The word still doesn’t trip off her tongue.) A woman who’s been neglecting her beloved as he lies ill, all for this disconsolate baby’s sake. So why does P’tit still have the air of a parcel forgotten at a train station? She hums on. Scraps of opera, gutter choruses, sea chanteys, rhymes from the crowded little schoolroom on the Ile Saint-Louis that Blanche didn’t know she remembered, any old piety or filth that might distract him: the whole repertoire of her quarter century.

Even hotter today. How can that be? Has the whole climate of the Bay been knocked off balance somehow?

Toward evening, Blanche thinks she hears a roll of thunder, but her ears might be tricking her. Her arm muscles are getting hard from nearly two weeks of carrying P’tit around. At this point she’d hire Satan himself as a nursemaid, but nobody will come near a yellow-flagged building, let alone move into it.

Her lodgers mutter together on the landings. They won’t forgive Blanche for the measles story. She’d better not knock on their doors for their rents tomorrow. Blanche has no idea whether it was Gudrun or someone else who reported Arthur’s case to the board of health; all she knows is that last time she went downstairs to the faucet and stepped out onto Sacramento to take a breath, there was a gaudy yellow flag hanging over the front door. But why haven’t the inspectors turned up at the apartment door with all their fumigation apparatus demanding that Arthur be handed over? Perhaps the hospitals are all full. Blanche doesn’t know because she hasn’t bought a paper in days.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but Arthur and P’tit. Arthur because he’s so ill; P’tit because she mustn’t let him get ill. Her man and her child. How can Blanche weigh them against each other, and why should she have to?

P’tit’s had enough of his bottle now, and he’s slobbering over his doorknob. (She washes it when his grip loosens, in sleep, but she still hates the sight of the thing.) He must be teething, Blanche supposes. But then again, maybe teething’s just what you call it when a child is cantankerous.

Ernest comes out with another bucket of rags to soak. He’s a walking corpse. She tries to remember the last time she saw the young man eat more than a bite of anything. Oddly enough, they’ve never spent such a stretch of time together; they go about their different duties like an old married couple, with Arthur the child they dread to lose. But no, Ernest’s more like the mother who sees to all the dreadful, intimate requirements of the sick. Blanche just goes out to buy whatever he asks or hauls water from the faucet downstairs, afraid to say a word to him.

The silence in the salon jars her nerves. Perhaps she’ll go in and say a word, at least, to Arthur, while Ernest’s busy.

Blanche plants P’tit beside the sofa. He can sit up these days. That’s something, she thinks glumly.

She turns the door handle. Every day she thinks Arthur can’t get any worse. She never knew the body could endure such changes. Today his hands are embroidered with huge rubies each half an inch across, globes so thick on his right lid that he can’t open his eye. Blanche presses her handkerchief over her mouth and nose not because she thinks it’ll keep out the invisible germs but to shut out the sweet, rotten stench. She gags, and it’s not just the smell, it’s the thought of the unbearable pressure Arthur must be suffering as each globe bloats and leaks. Is her lover going to burst apart in the end, dynamited from inside his own skin?

“It’s Blanche,” she says, though it comes out so husky she’s not sure Arthur can hear her. Her eyes prickle with tears. Perhaps he’s past hearing, so far away in his opiate nightmare that nothing reaches him from this shore. Besides, is there any truth left in that claim,
It’s Blanche
? Is this still her, or is it some shoddy copy of the lively
petite amie
who followed him all the way to America? She is different these days, she knows that. Was it meeting Jenny Bonnet that began the metamorphosis? Or taking P’tit away from Folsom Street? Or has this different, older, somehow harder Blanche been hidden inside her all along?

She stands very still, watching for the slight rise and fall of Arthur’s breath.

A hard rat-a-tat: the front door. She bolts out to the salon.

Ernest, tugging an obstinate shard out of the icebox, is ignoring it.

After a moment, Blanche decides he’s right. Too risky to answer the door, especially at this time of the evening.

P’tit has slid to an uncomfortable angle. He’s patting the carved leg of the sofa as if it’s a pet. Blanche plucks him off the floor and walks him up and down, just for something to do, so Ernest can’t accuse her of doing nothing.

“Hou-hou!”
A muffled call through the door.

Blanche unlocks it one-handed to find Jenny, her smile a little softened with drink. Blanche hasn’t seen her for the best part of two weeks. The tanned face looks as if it’s never been battered, and her suit’s even been laundered. She steps in jauntily, not waiting to be asked.

Blanche is suddenly aware of the danger for the visitor. “Didn’t you notice the yellow flag?”

“I tore that down,” mutters Ernest, still wrestling with the icebox.

She expects him to tell Jenny to get the hell out, but he reverts to silence.

“City’s so carpeted with the things, it might be Carnival,” remarks Jenny. “Who’s sick? Not the baby?”

“Arthur,” says Blanche, the name a stone in her throat.

Jenny grimaces and holds up a half-empty bottle. “Anyone fancy some rye?”

Blanche realizes that she does, very much.

Ernest comes over with two glasses to be filled. Then he carries them into the sickroom, shutting the door behind him.