Frog Music (29 page)

“A girl has to live,” she says uncertainly.

“Perhaps Madame and I could come to some arrangement. Yes.” He’s looking startled now, exhilarated at his own daring. “If you could be a very discreet companion—perhaps we could settle on something private, exclusive—”

As Blanche told Madame this morning, she never wanted a keeper. But that was when she thought she had other resources: legal title to a six-story building on Sacramento Street, for one thing. Now Blanche has nothing. The notion of not having to find herself lodgings, clients … The temptation of letting somebody take charge … If any man can keep her safe from now on, surely Lamantia can?

A pulse bounds in her throat. Should she trust him with the whole story at once? The fact of the baby, and of his having been spirited away by his father, and of Ernest blackmailing her to lie to the coroner tomorrow if she ever wants to see P’tit again?

No. A superstitious conviction seizes Blanche that if she pronounces P’tit’s name, that’ll be the last time she ever hears of her son.

Besides, Lamantia might well be put right off her by these entanglements. Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.

So Blanche plays for time. “I’m afraid I ain’t Madame’s to dispose of,” she murmurs. “She and I … we’ve come to a parting of the ways. In fact, tomorrow night will be my final appearance at the House of Mirrors.”

“All the better,” cries Lamantia. “You’re too good for that mob. That settles it. Let me look after you as you deserve.”

“I’m overwhelmed,” she says, honestly enough. “I’ll have to give the matter the most serious thought …”

“You could have been killed last night,” he lectures her, gigantic finger wagging in her face.

And Blanche gets a glimpse of how tedious it might be to be this man’s mistress.

“You should take it as a sign to give up your disreputable associates, all that scum that floats around town,” he says. “I’m offering you a fresh start.”

But he hasn’t specified dollars per month. The two of them have never mentioned figures, in the elegant game they’ve played. If Blanche were to put herself entirely into the hands of this man, she’d need to know the numbers first.

She blinks, clouds her gaze, as if desire has distracted her again. “Will you be there in the audience tomorrow night?” she murmurs, reaching out to put her small hand in his hot grip.

Early morning on Monday, the eleventh of September, and Blanche is lying awake in a cheap, odorous hotel on Commercial Street where she’s spent the last three nights. Well, not so much a hotel as a house of assignation; girls thump up the stairs with their customers at every hour, breaking up Blanche’s sleep. She’s brooding on P’tit, wondering whether anyone is picking him up when he cries. Has he been doped with something “quieting”?

She hasn’t dared go back to 815 Sacramento Street since the terrible scene in the faro saloon.
You’re a no-account son of a bitch, and I would beg on the streets before I’d live with you again
, she told Arthur, and how fine the words rang out. But Blanche should have made sure she held better cards before indulging herself in grand declarations. Should have gotten firm possession of her apartment, her clothes, and her money before provoking the
macs
. (Why didn’t she think to grab at least the nest egg from her old boot, at least, before she rushed out with Jenny to look for the men last Friday?) Above all, Blanche should have kept her mind fixed on P’tit. Couldn’t she have managed to stay polite, even humble, until Arthur revealed what
steps
he’d taken for the care of the baby? What the hell did she think she was doing throwing down the gauntlet when the men still had P’tit?

This is why women don’t start wars
, she thinks with a flash of contempt for her whole sex. It’s the blasted babies.

Blanche tries to make impossible calculations. Knowing Arthur as she does … but does she really know him at all, this enraged, scar-faced man? What’s the best—or the least stupid—way to proceed? At night he and Ernest will be drunk. In the morning they’ll be asleep. In the afternoon, the worse for wear. How long should Blanche wait for their wrath to calm down? Approach too soon and they’ll scorn her, just like they did in the faro saloon. Delay too long and—could there be any truth at all to Arthur’s boast that he’s going back to France to get himself a
real woman
? Every day she waits is full of gnawing uncertainty about P’tit, his whereabouts, and his welfare, and Blanche is not sure she can bear many more of these days.

If she tracks the men down in a bar or at the gaming table again, knowing they have an audience will harden their arrogance. But if she goes to the apartment—steps into a room with them once more—then all the power is theirs. The last time she was there, after all, Arthur proposed to the American that they hold her down and take her three ways. No, Blanche decides, she has to speak to Arthur one to one, but in a public place.

A few hours later she’s standing on Sacramento Street, watching the second-floor windows. This is her own building, she reminds herself with a sense of dull resentment, so why is she skulking outside it like a burglar?

Because she needs to know who’s there. She’s waiting to glimpse Arthur on his own, without his malign companion at his side to egg him on. Surely if Blanche catches Arthur coming out of the front door of number 815 or approaching it from the street, she can run up and throw herself beautifully, pathetically on his mercy? Appeal to his vanity, his boredom with this elaborate bluff, his wish to be master. It doesn’t matter what cruel things he says to her, so long as he tells her where in this whole sweltering city she can find their son. She’ll take P’tit off his hands, gratefully, and the two of them will be no further trouble to Arthur, ever.

Beside her, Jenny tilts her cap and squints up. Does a little shuffle. Jenny can’t stand still; Blanche registers that only now, because it’s the first time they’ve ever had to wait in one spot.

The half-moon, up in broad day, looks like some cheap bit of stage scenery.

Blanche returns her gaze to the second floor of the building.

“Seen that?” Jenny asks.

“What?” she says, jumping.

Jenny’s jerking her thumb not at the building but at a broadside pasted crooked on the wall behind them.
Evangeline: A Burlesque
. “I dozed off in the middle,” she remarks, “but the spouting whale was first-rate.”

Blanche tilts her parasol and blinks up at the glittering windows. P’tit. P’tit. His name a hiccupping heartbeat.

Jenny flicks her cap up into the air and catches it on her elbow. The second time, she spins it way above her and crooks her neck so it lands neatly on her coal-black hair.

On the corner of Dupont a thick knot of workmen has formed around a fellow talking himself hoarse on a box. Blanche catches only a few phrases:
evil empire
and—
noisome vermicelli
, could she have heard that right?

“Just the anti-coolies,” says Jenny, following her gaze.

The man’s voice rises to a rusty whoop. “Let the capitalists quake, because their reign is over.”

A single clap from someone beside him.

“They have opened the gates of this city to Oriental labor, whose octopus of disease now extends its fell tentacles into every quarter. Soon workingmen will rise up and deluge it in blood and fire!”

The applause is limp. As if San Franciscans have the energy to so much as pick their noses in this heat, Blanche thinks, let alone set a fire!

Arthur, Arthur
, she calls in her head, watching the second-story windows. Does he still love her, a little, in some poisoned way? Is he keeping P’tit as bait to lure her back? But he must realize that after the things they’ve said and done, the two of them can’t take up their old dance again. And why would he even want Blanche back if she’s the nasty piece of shoddy he thinks her?

“‘Mardi i’ r’viendra m’ voire.’”
Jenny sings the old ballad under her breath, as if reading Blanche’s mind.
“‘O gai! vive la rose.’”

He’ll come back to see me on Tuesday; hey, long live the rose. Of course Blanche knows the carefree lyrics of the old song, but she’s not in the mood.

Mais je n’en voudrai pas
,

Vive la rose et le lilas!

Jenny lilts as sweet as some bird on a branch relishing the sun on its feathers.

Can she be taken at her word, Blanche wonders, the girl in the song? Is it true she won’t open her arms to her man if he does crawl back to her? Or is that just something girls insist when their men dump them? She turns to look at Jenny. “Ever had your heart broken?” she demands.

Jenny only grins and cracks her knuckles, a sound that Blanche hates.

“Well, aren’t you a slippery fish.”

“Hope so,” says Jenny. “It’s the other kind that end up in the pot.”

Blanche lets out a long, blistering breath. It’s clear they’re only going to annoy each other today. If this is friendship, no wonder she’s never had much truck with it. “Don’t you have any place you need to be?” She waits. “No frogs that need catching?”

“Delivered a couple sackfuls yesterday,” Jenny assures her.

“This is my business.” Blanche eyes the windows, the door, waiting for the slightest glimpse of Arthur. She realizes that she doesn’t want Jenny to witness her abasing herself, offering anything at all just so long as he’ll give P’tit back. “You ain’t obliged to get tangled up in it.”

“That reminds me,” says Jenny, ignoring Blanche’s comment, “you ever hear about the frog who got acquainted with a mouse?”

“I have the feeling I’m about to.”

“‘Hey,’ says Froggie, ‘what say we declare our friendship by tying one of your feet to one of mine?’”

Despite herself, Blanche half laughs.

“Mousie’s persuadable,” says Jenny. “So the two hop along together to the meadow for their dinner. Then Froggie goes, ‘What say we stand at the edge of the pond and admire ourselves?’”

“Oh no.”

Jenny mimes the yoked animals leaning out dangerously over the water. “Froggie falls in—or jumps, some say, but there’s no proof, and afterward Froggie can’t say, for obvious—”

“Get on with it!”

A slow smile. “‘Help, help,’ cries Mousie, ‘I can’t swim.’ And Froggie answers, ‘How do you know until you try?’” Jenny’s voice has a hectic cheer. “So Froggie swims around croaking merrily while Mousie’s swallowing a bellyful of water. But then Hawk sees them and dives.” She mimes the ruthless swoop of the bird. “Lifts Mousie into the sky for a snack, see, while Froggie’s dangling below from one little toe. ‘Help, help,’ cries Froggie, ‘I can’t fly!’ And Hawk says—”

“‘How do you know until you try?’” supplies Blanche. Then, after a moment: “That’s a terrible story.”

“The best ones generally are.”

They lapse into silence.

Blanche returns her gaze to the apartment windows. In her imagining of it, Arthur’s going to step out of the building any minute now with P’tit on his hip. The man will look hollow-eyed, harried; the child radiant with relief at the sight of his mother. In the daydream, Blanche runs up, as graceful as a prima ballerina, and Arthur lets out a single sigh of capitulation and puts P’tit in her arms …

“Now, in the song, they get married, if you prefer that,” says Jenny.

“What?” she asks distractedly.

“‘Frog and Mouse.’ ‘A Frog he would a wooing go,’” she croons, grunting very low in her throat and keeping time with her boot on the sidewalk,

Heigh ho, said Rowly
,

A Frog he would a wooing go
,

Whether his mother would let him or no—

“Something tells me this is going to be a long courtship,” Blanche mutters, her eyes still fixed on the bland panes.

“I’ll skip to the wedding, if you like,” offers Jenny. “It was some party, let me tell you.” She starts singing and tapping her sole again.

Pray, Mr. Frog, will you give us a song
,

Heigh ho, said Rowly
,

Let the subject be something that’s not very long …

“Jenny—” Blanche interrupts hoarsely.

But Jenny keeps on as if she’s getting paid for it.

Blanche is chewing her lip raw. What possessed her, the other night at the faro saloon, to hint that P’tit wasn’t Arthur’s? Of all the lies she might have invented in a spirit of malice, none could have put the baby in more danger. Is Blanche some kind of idiot or just too addicted to the pleasure of the moment to think about anybody but herself?

Jenny sings on relentlessly:

As they were in glee and a merry making
,

Heigh ho, said Rowly …

Now she slips her arm through Blanche’s and tries to swing her.

Blanche shakes her off harder than she needs to. “Is it possible for you to shut your trap for one almighty minute?”

“Girard, right?”

Blanche doesn’t know what to make of that till she follows Jenny’s gaze across the street and flinches. Ernest, hovering on the curb, staring in her direction: Could he have emerged from the building while she was looking away for a second? A horsecar clanks between them, cutting off her view.

“Ready,” announces Jenny, rubbing her hands.

This was a bad idea. Blanche hurries away down the street.

Jenny gallops after her. “What are you doing?”

“We shouldn’t be here.” Glancing over her shoulder, Blanche can’t see Ernest in the crowd.

“Hey,” Jenny objects, “we’ve been waiting half the day.”

“Waiting for Arthur, not Ernest.”

“Don’t back down now.”

“I’ve seen what happens when you won’t back down. You’re a born fight-picker,” Blanche cries. Where’s Ernest gone? Not on the opposite curb now. Is it possible he didn’t catch sight of the women after all?