Sister Noon (15 page)

Lizzie hoped that Mrs. Bell was merely shy. She wished to demand to be taken to Jenny at once, but saw how rude this would be. She removed her gloves, accepted a cordial. It was far too early for one, really—and wine just yesterday!—but she’d had such a fright. She took a seat on the sofa. Mrs. Bell sat next to her.

There was a long and uncomfortable silence. The cordial was in a tulip glass and tasted of fermented raspberries. The fog pressed against the windows to Lizzie’s right, where she could see, dimly, the reflection of her own face. She watched a drop of water fatten until it was too heavy and then stretch thin as it fell. Just for fun, she repositioned her face until a teary trail ran down her reflected cheek. She glanced at a clock on the wall. It had stopped at three forty-three. There was no evidence of a servant anywhere. But surely Mrs. Bell’s hair was too elaborate for her to have done it herself.

“Such a quiet house,” Lizzie said, trying to make it sound a compliment. She set down her glass. “Your servants…”

“All of them drunk,” Mrs. Bell said. “Or I miss my guess.” Lizzie made a noise she intended as sympathetic but feared came out startled. She reminded herself that it was a scandalous household and Mrs. Bell a scandalous woman. Lizzie had not minded the last time she was here. She’d rather enjoyed it. She tried to find the mood of her last
visit, the sense of waking up, the hope of her life taking a magical turn. What was missing now was the tea, the sun, and Mary Ellen Pleasant. “I’m sorry not to see Mrs. Pleasant,” she offered. “She’s in the country, you said?”

“Well, one never knows.” Mrs. Bell’s voice dropped confidingly. “But I’ve searched the house.”

She put her cordial aside, the red liquid shivering in the glass, and reached for Lizzie’s hands. Her own were as cold and soft as Lizzie recollected; the fingernails so icy they made the back of Lizzie’s neck twitch, tightened the skin over her skull. Mrs. Bell continued to stroke Lizzie’s hands, and Lizzie forced herself not to withdraw. She touched Lizzie’s wrists, rubbed them with her thumbs. She seemed to be warming her hands on Lizzie like a cat. It occurred to Lizzie that Mrs. Bell might be drunk herself. Or drugged. Hadn’t Mrs. Pleasant’s tea come from Chinatown?

Lizzie wondered exactly how old Mrs. Bell was. Her skin was so translucent the shadows under her eyes were blue. Her gold-brown hair caught the lamplight and glowed like amber. When she smiled, tiny wrinkles opened like fans at the edges of her mouth and eyes. If she didn’t smile, there were no lines in her face at all. Her shoulder touched Lizzie’s, and Lizzie smelled milkweed powder.

“You should stay away from Mrs. Pleasant,” Mrs. Bell whispered. “She don’t like fine white women.” She nodded for emphasis, then straightened. “She wasn’t always that way. She was good to me at first, she introduced me to Mr. Bell. We married in this very house.”

“Weddings are such lovely occasions,” Lizzie said. Actually she thought they lacked spontaneity, but as an unmarried woman she could hardly say so. In books they were
interrupted, protested, prevented. They were the scenes of great drama. Jane Eyre’s wedding, for example, the one that had not taken place—you couldn’t call it a lovely occasion, but so much passion! As a young lady, whenever Lizzie had imagined her own wedding, she’d imagined it not taking place the way Jane Eyre’s had not taken place. (And not ever the way it had actually not taken place.)

“Ours was private. I left next day on my wedding trip. Mr. Bell stayed back.”

This was interesting, and Lizzie would have liked to know more about it. “How sad for you both,” she said encouragingly.

But Mrs. Bell waved the point past. “He’s a businessman. Business prevented him.”

O
n her return from her wedding trip, Mrs. Bell told Lizzie, Mrs. Pleasant felt there had been insufficient ceremony to mark the occasion. She insisted on a party. It was winter. Mrs. Bell wore a gown of green
crêpe de Chine
shot with silver thread, and her wedding gift from Mrs. Pleasant, a diamond choker. The mansion was strung with lamps, filled with flowers, and the food was extraordinary. Seven courses were served, smoked and fresh meats, out-of-season vegetables, pâtés and wines from France, fruits glazed with liqueurs; there were jewelry boxes containing teas from China for the guests to take home. “Mrs. Pleasant puffs herself a bit on her table,” said Mrs. Bell. “She used to cook for Governor Booth when he came to town.”

Mrs. Bell was not a good storyteller. Her affect was too
even, her chronology unusual, her vocabulary common. But Lizzie loved stories with
crêpe de Chine
and strings of lamps and out-of-season vegetables. She was a passionate reader. She was more than able to supply whatever details Mrs. Bell omitted.

Only the men had attended. One by one they arrived, without their wives. They made unconvincing, embarrassed excuses, agues and toothaches and unexpected family obligations; a few of one, a few of the other, as if it had been orchestrated. That’s what angered Mrs. Pleasant most, the sense of collusion. She insisted on seating the men at the tables as set, with every other chair left empty. The men began to drink and, when drunk, to make discourteous comments. Teresa Bell was admired, but in an intimate, insulting way, not befitting a married woman. Ribald toasts were made to Mrs. Pleasant as well. Eventually Mrs. Pleasant told Mrs. Bell to leave, and she did so, fleeing up the stairs.

“Wasn’t the insult to me?” Mrs. Bell asked Lizzie. Her voice was plaintive. “I was the bride.” But Mrs. Pleasant insisted on appropriating it. Years before Mrs. Bell had even arrived in San Francisco, Mrs. Pleasant had tried to host a dinner for society’s finest. The result had been the same. The result would always be the same.

Although at the time of their marriage she lived with Mr. and Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Pleasant still owned Geneva Cottage on the San Jose Road. She began to redecorate it. She put in oriel windows, reddened the wood floors with stains, bought gold-veined mirrors, marble basins, and fountains. She hung curtains of lace patterned with orchids. The
gardens were replanted to make a large, lush greensward surrounded by groves and private trysting grottoes. There were cool shaded places where ferns and violets could grow, patches of sunny grass perfumed by hidden herbs. When she was finished, she sent out invitations again.

This time she invited only men, some of the most powerful in the city and all of them married to the women who had snubbed her. The invitations were delivered in secret by Negro messengers. Two of the men were bankers; there were a railroad millionaire, three mine owners, and a newspaper baron. There were a blind ward boss and a judge from the state supreme court.

“She never told me the guest list,” said Mrs. Bell. “She does keep her secrets. But anyone could guess that much.”

Mrs. Pleasant promised the men a special evening in the country without their wives. The invitations were written on heavy red paper; the ink was silver. Only one man declined.

The story moved briefly south. When Mrs. Pleasant had left New Orleans, under the name of Madame Christophe, she was only a step ahead of the hangman. She had been stealing slaves, connecting them with the Underground Railroad, and the plantation owners were closing in. She escaped through the help and intervention of Marie LaVeau.

“You’ve heard of LaVeau?” Mrs. Bell asked.

Lizzie hadn’t, but Mrs. Bell did not elaborate further except to say that Mrs. LaVeau had taught Mrs. Pleasant many things and that one of them was how to give a party.

There was little to eat and much to drink. They called the drink champagne, but it was really something far more lethal. Mrs. Pleasant had put it down herself from strawberries she’d grown in special barrels. “The entertainment
tonight is voodoo,” she told the men. There were ten beautiful young women, dressed like princesses, but with the skin of slaves, to sit with the men while they smoked and to dance the calinda with them after. There were drums. There were ritual incantations. The ballroom grew hot from the dancing and the liquor; the drumming quickened.

One of the women was a sixteen-year-old named Malina Paillet. She wore yellow roses on her wrist and yellow silk on her shoulders. She caught the attention of one of the men, perhaps a banker, perhaps a mine owner. What appealed to him most was her shyness. She couldn’t answer his questions, couldn’t smile at his jokes. Her movements during the dance were slight, but this, he thought, made them even more suggestive. He drank and she didn’t. When he put his hand on her skirt, groped through the petticoat to squeeze the leg beneath, she froze suddenly, awkwardly, and asked another of the women to change places with her. There was a silence in the room. When the dancing began again, the man had a different partner.

Mrs. Pleasant could see that he was angry and very drunk. She took Malina aside and told her she was a fool to be rude to a rich man. Mrs. Pleasant wanted the men entangled, wanted the women installed as mistresses, draining whatever time and money they could from the men’s wives.

But this was not New Orleans. Malina refused to listen. “I hate him,” she said, and it was loud enough to be heard throughout the room. She was sobbing, salty tears that would ruin the yellow silk, an expensive dress that belonged, Mrs. Bell noted, to Mrs. Pleasant and not to Malina.

Lizzie had begun to wonder whether this was a story she should be hearing. Mrs. Bell’s manner was so tranquil
there was no anticipating the things that came from her mouth. And yet Lizzie was far too engrossed to stop her. It was like a story by Conan Doyle, but with voodoo instead of Mormons. The Palace Hotel hired pretty young mulatto girls as maids. Lizzie could easily picture one of them in a floating silk, tears falling like diamonds from her eyes.

Malina ran from the room and the man went after her. She ran through the pink-and-white parlor, into the courtyard, and into the trees. The man followed. There was silence, and then a single scream. It might have been the peacocks Mrs. Pleasant had purchased to patrol the grounds.

When Mrs. Pleasant and the others reached the yard, Malina was returning. Her hair was loose about her face and she was not wearing her roses or her shoes. She stumbled between the two fountains with their statues—“statues of women,” said Mrs. Bell, in a tone that Lizzie understood immediately to mean they had no clothes on—her head at a strange angle. She fell in the courtyard. Her throat had been cut.

“I’ll take care of this,” Mrs. Pleasant told the men. The other women had fled. “You can rely on my discretion.” She removed her housekeeping apron and covered Malina’s face. “No one will ever know you were here tonight. Your wives need never know.”

Teresa Bell’s hands reached for Lizzie’s neck. Lizzie gasped and pulled away, but Mrs. Bell had caught hold of the chain of her necklace and held her fast. “Such a strange coin.” Her face was very close to Lizzie’s. Lizzie could feel the heat of her breath, could see the raspberry stain like blood on her tongue, the pores of her skin clotted with powder. “Is it very old? I never saw its like,” she said.

“I really must be going.” Lizzie opened Mrs. Bell’s icy fingers by force and stood. Won’t you promise to stay away from Mrs. Pleasant, Mrs. Putnam had begged her, and if the question were put to her again, put to her just now, she would return quite a different answer. Despite every effort, her words came out with a tremble. “I must get back. Everyone is so worried about little Jenny. Please take me to her at once.”

“Did I scare you? I apologize.”

“Not at all.” Lizzie managed to govern her voice, though not her legs. They shook and she sat again. “Why do you keep her on?”

“Keep her on?” Mrs. Bell smiled so her teeth showed. They were small and perfectly graduated, like strung pearls. “You don’t understand a thing, do you? Old Mrs. Pleasant does what she likes. And Mr. Bell, if he has a fault, it’s loyalty. He’d never turn on her.”

“Who was the murderer?”

“She never said. Mr. Bell knows, of course, seeing as he was there.”

“Why have you told me this?” Lizzie asked.

“Because you’re a white woman. And so am I.”

“Then why won’t you take me to Jenny?”

“I will, of course. Are you worried about her? She’s just upstairs, asleep.”

Lizzie felt her heart rattling against the cage of her ribs. Mrs. Bell’s face was too composed; her tone of voice too even. It had all been a performance, and Lizzie had been taken in. “You’re lying, then. She’s frightened to sleep by herself. What have you done with her?” She remembered Mrs. Bell’s face the first time they had met, her
courteous, placid voice. My mother set me out on the windowsill in a thunderstorm, she’d said.

Now Mrs. Bell’s face showed annoyance, perhaps—surprise, at least. Something swam through the bright glass surface of her eyes. She picked up the painted canary, wound its key. “We played with this music box here until she dozed off. I lugged her upstairs. I see my word isn’t enough. I’m happy to show you.”

There was a sequence of tinny chirping, then a strangled cry. The automaton froze into place, its beak open in silent alarm.