Frog Music (47 page)

The hot air’s half water this evening; it’s as if they’re breathing in steam. P’tit’s cheeks trickle with sweat, and Blanche wipes them with a new handkerchief. Less than a hundred dollars of the silver left, because she had to buy so many things this afternoon, with no time for bargaining before the train left. A valise for each of them, bottles and clothes and diapers for him, new dresses for herself—sober by her standards, but chic, and her new bustle’s the
dernier cri
in fashion: high, with ramrod-flat front and sides.

Also, of course, a two-dollar gold ring as evidence of Blanche’s loss in the epidemic. (She’s got her story ready, with its sniffs and sobs.
My late husband was such a good provider
.) By the time she steps down in Sacramento, she means to be every inch the lovely widow. One whose dancing academy will be known from the start for its emphasis on ballroom etiquette. (Well, Blanche might as well make a feature of being a lady, if she’s to steal customers away from all those so-called Professors.) Jenny would approve of this plan, even if she was more grasshopper than ant herself. Would approve of the blood money getting spent this way.

Blanche makes a stack of the coins now and shows P’tit how to knock it over. Here’s where a normal child would laugh, surely? Blanche laughs, to show him how it’s done.

P’tit gives her a look that strikes her as wry.

And it occurs to her that he may be smarter than he’s willing to show, too smart to laugh on cue.

Arthur stole this money and more from her in the first place and shared it with Ernest, who hired Louis with some of it, and Louis took his cut and passed two hundred of it on to John Jr. The look in that boy’s eyes when he held out the bag to her. Think what such a sum could do for the McNamaras, and yet the boy couldn’t bear to keep it.

Is that why Blanche didn’t seek out Cartwright at the
Chronicle
before she left? She told herself that she was too busy getting ready so she could leave San Francisco by nightfall. That the newsman wouldn’t be at his office on a Sunday evening. That Blanche can write to him as soon as she’s settled in Sacramento. But it occurs to her now that she never will.

Because Jenny wouldn’t give two bits for justice. Not that kind of justice. Not a blundering boy, whom she cared for, packed off to that grim so-called school for having let himself be bribed and pushed to the point of doing something so terrible that he’s never going to forgive himself, anyhow. Instead Blanche has paid John Jr. back with the crushing weight of his own future.

Some crimes are better not solved, maybe. Some scars better kept covered up. Blanche lets herself pretend that blurry reflection in the spattered glass is Jenny, pedaling along beside the train.
I don’t forgive him, though
, Blanche tells her.

A shrug.

Don’t expect me to forgive, not one single bullet
.

A grin.

To let John Jr. get away with murder means doing the same for the other two, Ernest and Louis. That’s not fair, but what is? Life brings all manner of punishment and Blanche just hopes those men will get their share. Ernest’s already lost everything he loves best: Arthur and Arthur’s son.

Blanche’s face is turned away from the past, toward the city of Sacramento, where it sounds like citizens rise above grim realities, winching their whole lives into the sky. She’s not going to drift into things anymore, because her life is no longer only her own. She’ll be a boss, but not a tyrant. She’ll rent rooms above her dancing parlor and hire a girl to mind P’tit during classes. He’s light on his feet, so maybe Blanche can teach him to dance.
How do you know until you try?

She drops the coins back into the bag one by one. P’tit makes a thrusting motion that she decides to take as an attempt at doing the same. “That’s right, in the bag,” she says, putting his fist over the opening. “Now let it go. Go on, drop it.”

But P’tit keeps a hard grip on the coin. It must be easier to grab than to let go. She watches him gnaw on it. “Very good,” she says. “Cut some more teeth. You’re going to need them.”

He’s got three already, three sharp little wedges Blanche managed to count on the railroad platform in the City before he had enough and bit her finger. To think that they must have been lying in wait all these months, ready to spring up. Ten days with a murderer and his harlot have done P’tit nothing but good, Blanche has to admit. His features are still melancholic—the heavy forehead, the huge sunken eyes—but at moments he strikes her as somehow beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, of course. That’s Blanche: his beholder.

The bag’s as heavy as a heart. Before this was blood money, it was fuck money. Cash Blanche earned from her dancing or
michetons
and tossed into the green chamber pot in the fireplace or stuffed in her old boot or bought her building with—and then Arthur liquidated that money again when he sold the place to Low Long. (Blanche won’t sneer, anymore, at the folks who keep their heads down and toil, because they’re earning themselves a kind of liberty, a dollar at a time.) Like water, money springs up, trickles down, picks up soil, and sheds it again. Still, the coins shine when she rubs them on her black-and-white skirt. This is hers and P’tit’s, earned over and over, and she’ll spend it on what they need, and what they fancy: train tickets, meals, rent, a bird-shaped musical rattle that P’tit’s going to love more than he ever did that old knob.

She bobs to kiss his humid forehead, one of those automatic gestures to ward off evil. That’s what Blanche is going to do whenever she gets an impulse to shake her son or smack him: kiss him instead. She means to pay P’tit back for all her past crimes, one moment at a time. Her best strength is a terrier one: bite the rope and don’t let go. She’s going to bind P’tit to her with indefatigable love.
One hundred percent enamored
, and more. Each day a cliff she’ll climb again from the base.

Never mind how she and her son got to this point, speeding along toward the city of Sacramento.
Keep him or don’t
, isn’t that what Jenny advised Arthur that night in the apartment?
Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe
. Blanche has lost this child twice, but she’s damned if there’ll be a third time. She and P’tit have wreaked such havoc in each other’s lives, come through so much blood and shit, paid so high for each other—this bargain’s got to hold.

Your Maman’s a flawed jewel
, she could tell him,
and there’s no fixing that
. There’ll be no overnight metamorphosis—but certain things about her are changing already. Perhaps, at twenty-four, she’s growing out of being so stupid. Blanche will always like her drink, but she’ll try to make big decisions in the sober light of day. She’ll probably always require a good deal of fucking, but from now on she’s going to hold on to her independence. She will be fierce in P’tit’s defense. Ambitious for his happiness, and hers.

P’tit’s feet curl in their little boots. He doesn’t like them, but Blanche is going to make sure he’s always got good leather between him and the splinterish world. “‘Who gonna shoe yo’ pretty little feet?’” she croons, clapping her hands softly.

A flash on the horizon. Blanche looks out the window. Could that have been lightning? She listens for a rumble, but all she can hear is the thunder of the wheels. Rain spits at the glass. She almost laughs to think how Maman back in Paris would scold:
Stop singing, you’ll bring on a storm!

P’tit lets out a wail and kicks as if to shake off his stiff boots. He’ll be sturdy on his feet in another few weeks. Running away from Blanche, no doubt. She’ll have to race to keep up.

Water is striping the glass now, turning its glaze of dust to rich mud. “A proper rainstorm,” she marvels to P’tit.

The transparency of his small ear makes her feel like a she-wolf. But it strikes her now that it’s P’tit who’s been protecting Blanche, all this time, sketching a magic circle around her, not the other way around. It was because she was this boy’s mother that Ernest didn’t let himself instruct Louis to kill her too. What a joke! She’s alive today only because hers is the body from which this odd, unwanted, fought-over child sprang.

Rain’s whipping down hard now, hard enough to cut the autumn’s long fever and wash this foul old world clean.

Things ricochet. You can turn the weather with a song.
The knack of riding backward:
now, there’d be a trick to learn. Jenny wouldn’t be dead if she’d never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P’tit wouldn’t exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat’s cocky smile.

She rubs at her cheek, and the tiny scab falls away.

Up ahead of them the engine sends out its long moan. The rain slams sideways against the window.
It’s cheering us on
, she tells herself, like that stone-deaf frog in the story. P’tit’s leaning back, on the verge of sleep. His moist eyelids flicker, fighting it. Nobody wants to give in, be snuffed out, surrender. Nobody wants the day to be over. Blanche holds her son like a sack of gold dust.
It’s all going to be hunky-dory
. Sings in time with the juddering train:
“‘Dors, min p’tit quinquin, dors.’”

AFTERWORD

Almost all the characters in
Frog Music
come from the historical record, and I worked with and around the known facts of their lives:

Jenny (or Jennie/Jeanne/Jeannie) Bonnet (or Bonnett) (ca. 1849–1876); her father, Sosthenes (or Sosthène) Bonnet (1825–?); mother probably named Désirée Leau Bonnet (1818–ca. 1873); and sister, Blanche Bonnet (1856–?);

Adèle Louise “Blanche” Beunon (or Buneau) (1852–1877) and her son, name unknown (1875–?);

Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve (or DeNeve/De Neve) (ca. 1844–?) and his wife from December 1876, Emilie (or Emily) Baugnon (or Baugnan) Deneve (ca.1858–?);

Ernest (or Earnest) Girard (or Gerard) (1856–?) and his wife from 1880, Madeleine (or Madeline/Madelein/Madaline) George Girard (1845–1908);

Adrien (or Jean Pierre-Adrien) Portal (1824 or 1839 or 1843–1904), Charles St. Clair, Coroner Benjamin Swan, Dr. Crook, Julius Funkenstein (1845–?), Doctress Amelia Hoffman (1829–1889), Detective Benjamin F. Bohen (?–1903), and Maria Lafourge (
floruit
1856);

At San Miguel Station, John McNamara Sr. (1830 or 1835–?), Ellen McNamara (1830 or 1835 or 1839–?), and their children Mary Jane McNamara (1860–?), John McNamara Jr. (1863 or 1864–1881?), Kate McNamara (1867 or 1869 or 1870–?), and Jeremiah McNamara (1870–?); their neighbors Philip Jordan, Mrs. Holt, Pierre Louis (or Pierre Logis, or Louis Deframmant/de Frammant/Dufrannon/Dufrannant/Dufranaut/DeFramond) and his wife, Caroline.

Two characters inhabit a gray area. Madame Johanna Werner and her brothel on Sacramento Street are described only in Herbert Asbury’s footnote-free
The Barbary Coast
(1933), and the businessman known to police as L’amant de Blanche, whom I have called Lamantia, is mentioned only in two newspaper articles, years after the murder.

The only characters I have invented are Cartwright the journalist, Durand the restaurateur, Low Long the shoemaker, Mei the grocer, and Gudrun the help.

Although many records were destroyed in San Francisco’s earthquake and fire in 1906, much remains.
Frog Music
draws on roughly sixty newspaper articles (from 1872 to 1902) about Jenny Bonnet, as well as on the annually published
San Francisco Municipal Records
, the U.S. Federal Census (1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910—the 1890 records were badly damaged in a 1921 fire, and almost all of what remained was later destroyed by government order), ships’ passenger lists, and French, Irish, U.S., and Canadian birth/baptism/marriage/death records.

Not that using such invaluable sources is ever simple. Nineteenth-century reporters often made up details to fill in the blanks in their research. Like newspaper articles, legal documents are full of variant spellings and dates. In addition, century-and-a-half-old type or (even worse) handwriting scanned into databases can end up as gibberish. So I had to make many educated guesses, especially when it came to the clashing and at times ludicrous testimonies given at Jenny’s inquest. I have also changed a few facts for the sake of the story, simplifying the sequence of events leading up to the murder and presenting Blanche as just as fluent in English as Arthur when in fact she spoke through an interpreter at the inquest.

There is one myth I would like to put to rest. Jenny Bonnet shows up all over the Internet these days as a proto-trans outlaw: presenting as male, persuading women to give up the sex trade and forming them into a thieves’ gang. Attractive though this image is, it seems to derive from one highly colorful article that was not published until three years after the murder (“Jeanne Bonnett,”
Morning Call
, October 19, 1879) and an equally unsubstantiated popular history from 1933 (Asbury’s
The Barbary Coast
), and I have found no evidence to substantiate it.

Despite the renown of the San Francisco detective force, the investigation of Jenny’s murder was dogged by confusion and delay. Several years on, Detective Bohen and his colleagues would come to the conclusion that Arthur Deneve paid Pierre Louis two thousand dollars to kill Blanche (rather than Jenny) and that Louis bought a farm back in Canada with the money. Louis was arrested there in July 1880, after his battered wife, Caroline, accused him of having shot Jenny (by mistake, instead of Blanche), but he killed himself before the San Francisco detectives could gather enough evidence to extradite him. This police theory—conveniently pinning the blame on a dead foreigner who was said to have earned an extraordinary figure (even by California hired-killer standards) for having shot the wrong woman—seems riddled with holes to me.

Then again, the explanation
Frog Music
offers of this still unsolved murder is only an educated hunch, which is to say, a fiction.