Sister Noon (2 page)

In the 1850s, most of the people who made up San Francisco’s society had once been or still were distinctly disreputable. In 1855, when Belle Cora, a popular madame, inadvertently caused the murder of a United States marshal simply by assuming she could sit in that part of the theater occupied by respectably married women, it was not always so easy to explain why one person was top-hole and another was not.

But Mrs. Nora Radford’s case was simple. Her husband had died owing everyone money. Her conversation,
she overheard young Mrs. Putnam say, was interesting enough, only there was too much of it. This observation was as hurtful as it was inaccurate. She had always been considered rather witty. Mrs. Putnam and everybody else knew that she was more surprised than anyone by her husband’s debts.

She refused to blame him for any of it. In fact, she was impressed. How clever he must have been to have fooled them all.

And she was touched. How hard he must have worked to give her such a sense of security. Much harder than if he’d actually had money. Forty years of marriage and he’d never once let it slip. She moved into rooms and missed her husband hourly.

Her new home was in the country, overlooking a graveyard. This was not as dismal as it might sound. She had a curtained bed and a carved dressing table. The cemetery was filled with flowers. On a warm day, the scent came in on the sunshine. The boardinghouse was called Geneva Cottage.

Her landlady was a tireless southern woman named Mrs. Ellen Smith. Mrs. Smith took in laundry and worked as housekeeper for Selim Woodworth, a wealthy San Francisco businessman. It was Mr. Woodworth who had suggested the arrangement to Mrs. Radford. Mr. Woodworth was a prominent philanthropist, a kind and thoughtful man whose marked attentions to her after her husband’s death, in contrast to the disregard of others, vouched for his quality. “My Mrs. Smith,” he said warmly. “She works hard and makes canny investments. I don’t know why she continues on as my housekeeper. Perhaps her fortunes
have been so vagarious, she can never be secure. But she is a wonderful woman, as devoted to helping the unfortunate as she is to making a living in the world. That’s where her money goes.” He tipped his hat, continued his way down the little muddy track that was Market Street. Mrs. Radford hoisted her heavy skirts, their hems weighted with bird shot as a precaution against the wind, and picked her way through the mud. She took his advice immediately.

Mrs. Radford’s initial impression of her landlady was that she was about thirty years old. In fact, this fell somewhat short of the mark. But also that she was beautiful, which was accurate. The first time Mrs. Radford saw her, she was sitting in a sunlit pool on the faded brocade of the parlor sofa. In Mrs. Radford’s mind she always retained that golden glow.

“You’ll find me here when the sun is shining,” Mrs. Smith told her. “I never will get used to the cold.”

“It seems to get colder every year,” Mrs. Radford agreed. The words came out too serious, too sad. There was an embarrassing element of self-pity she hadn’t intended.

Mrs. Smith smiled. “I hope we can make you feel at home here.” She looked straight at Mrs. Radford. Her eyes didn’t match. There was a shawl of green and black plaid on the sofa.

Mrs. Radford thought of her friend Mr. Bell. She couldn’t remember the name of his vanished shipmate, but she was sure it wasn’t Ellen Smith. Something foreign, something Latin. Mrs. Smith’s beauty was darkly Mediterranean.

She stood and was surprisingly tall, a whole head above Mrs. Radford. “Take a cup of tea with me.”

The kitchen was an elegant place of astral lamps and oil chandeliers. There were golden cupids in the wallpaper, and a young Negro man who swept the floor and washed the dishes while they talked. Mrs. Smith filled her cup half with cream, heaped it with sugar. She stirred it and stirred it.

“I can’t quite place your accent,” Mrs. Radford said.

“Oh, it’s a mix, all right. I’ve lived a great many places.” Mrs. Smith stared into her clouded tea. She lifted the cup and blew on it.

“I lived on the hill,” Mrs. Radford said, coaxing her into confidences by offering her own. “Until my husband died. I’m quite come down in the world.”

“You’ll rise again. I started with nothing.”

Mrs. Radford had often been embarrassed at how much beauty meant to her. At the age when Mrs. Radford might have been beautiful herself, she suffered badly from acne. It pitted her skin, and her lovely hair was little compensation. At the time, she’d thought her life was over. But then she’d made such a happy marriage and it had hardly seemed to matter. God had granted her a great love. And yet she had never stopped wishing she were beautiful, had apparently learned nothing from her own life. She would have been the first to admit this. It would have hurt her to have had ugly children, and this was a painful thing to know about herself. As it turned out, she had no children at all. “You had beauty,” she said.

Mrs. Smith raised her extraordinary eyes. “I suppose I did.” The day was clouding. The sun went off and on again, like a blink. Mrs. Smith turned her head. “My mother was beautiful. It did her no particular good. I lost
her early. She used to fret so over me—what would happen to me, who would take care of me. She told me to go out to the road and stand where I would be seen. That was the last thing she said to me.”

It had been just a little back lane, without much traffic. The fence was falling into ruins; she stepped over it easily. She could see to the end of the road, shimmering in the distance like a dream. There was an apple tree over her head, blossoming into pink and filled with the sound of bees. She stood and waited all morning, crying from time to time about her mother, until she was sleepy from the sun and the buzzing and the crying, and no one came by.

Finally, in the early afternoon, when the sun had started to slant past her, she heard a horse in the distance. The sound grew louder. She raised her hand to shade her eyes. The horse was black. The man was as old as her grandfather, who was also her father, truth be told.

He almost went by her. He was half asleep on the slow-moving horse, but when she moved, a breath only, he stopped so suddenly that saliva dripped from the silver bit onto the road. He looked her over and removed his hat. “What’s your name?” he asked. She said nothing. He reached out a hand. “Well, I’m not fussy,” he told her. “How would you like to go to New Orleans?” And that was how she moved up in the world, by putting her foot in the stirrup.

“I was ten years old.”

“Oh, my dear.” Mrs. Radford was shocked and distressed.

Mrs. Smith put her hand on Mrs. Radford’s arm. Mrs. Radford had rarely been touched by anyone since her
husband died. Sometimes her skin ached for it, all over her body. Where did an old woman with no children go to be touched? Mrs. Smith’s hand was warm. “It wasn’t the way you’re thinking. He turned out very kind,” she said.

Mrs. Radford adjusted to country living as well as could be expected. The laundry was a busy place. The cemetery was not. She especially enjoyed her evenings. She would join Mrs. Smith. The parlor would be brightened by a lively fire. They would drink a soothing concoction Mrs. Smith called “balm tea.” “Just a splash of rum,” Mrs. Smith assured her, but it went straight to Mrs. Radford’s head. In these convivial surroundings, she told Mrs. Smith how she had planned once to teach.

“I had a train ticket to Minneapolis. I had a job. I’d only known Alexander a week. But he came to the station and asked me to marry him. ‘I want to see the world before I get married,’ I told him. ‘See it after,’ he said. ‘See it with me.’”

“And did you?”

His actual language had been much more passionate—things Mrs. Radford could hardly repeat, but would never forget. His voice remained with her more vividly than his face; over the years it had changed less. It pleased her to speak of him; she was grateful to Mrs. Smith for listening. “I saw my corner of it. It was a very happy corner.”

In her turn, Mrs. Radford heard that Mrs. Smith’s original benefactor, a Mr. Price, had taken her to a convent school in New Orleans. She spent a year there, learning to read and write. Then he sent her to Cincinnati. She
lived with some friends of his named Williams. “I was to go to school for four more years and also to help Mrs. Williams with the children. She made quite a pet of me, at first.

“But then Mr. Price died. I know he’d already paid the Williamses for my schooling, but they pretended he hadn’t. They sent me to Nantucket as a bonded servant.”

The weathered wood and sand of Nantucket was a new landscape for her. Her mistress was the Quaker woman who owned the island’s general store. She came from a line of whalers—very wealthy. She invited Ellen to the Friends meeting house, where they sat in the darkness on hard wooden benches and waited for the Spirit. “It didn’t take with me, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Smith, fingering the locket she wore at her throat. “I’m too fond of nice things. But she was also very kind. I called her Grandma and worked for her until she died, quite suddenly, and then again there were no provisions made for me. By now I was sixteen or so. I sold off some of her stock and got to Boston. Her real granddaughter lived there and I thought she might take me in, but she didn’t.” It was there that Ellen met James Smith, a wealthy and prominent businessman. They were married. He died. “It’s been my pattern,” Mrs. Smith conceded. “Life is loss.”

Mrs. Radford could see that Mrs. Smith had not loved her husband. It was nothing she said; it appeared on her face when she spoke of him.

Mrs. Radford had not decided what to do about Thomas Bell. He’d been back from Mexico for almost a year now. He was an old friend, so she owed him some loyalty, although he hadn’t, in fact, been to see her since his
return. Served him right, really; if he’d come to call, to express his condolences, he might have seen the woman. Virtue provided its rewards.

And what of her loyalty to her new friend? Mr. Bell was not the sort of man who married. There were rumors that he had been seen going into a house of assignation on Washington Street.

Before her husband’s death, Mrs. Radford would only have had to write the invitations and San Francisco’s most eligible men would have gathered. Sometimes she let herself imagine the dinner. Alexander pouring wine. The gold-rimmed china. The sensation of the beautiful Mrs. Smith.

But Mr. Bell had been so desperate. Mrs. Radford was a great believer in love. She longed to do her little bit to help it along. Marriage was the happy ending to Mrs. Smith’s hard and blameless life. The right man had only to see her, and it still might be Thomas Bell, who already had.

The most enjoyable parts of a social occasion are often the solitary pleasures of anticipation and recollection. But it is sadly true that one cannot relish these without having had an invitation to the party itself.

The MacElroys, who were special friends of Thomas Bell’s, had announced the engagement of their middle daughter. There was to be a fabulous ball. Although Mrs. Radford had, with her husband, been a guest at the party celebrating the engagement of their first daughter and also at the marriage of their youngest daughter, there was no certainty that she would be included now.

It was only a party. Only a fabulous ball. She did not
mind for herself, not so much, really, although she had always enjoyed a party. But it would be just the setting for Mrs. Smith. With this in mind, Mrs. Radford finally called on Thomas Bell. He was living in the bachelor club on Grove. He apologized for the cigar smoke, which did not bother her, but not for the fact that he had never come to see her, which did. His blond hair had receded over the years, giving him a high, wide forehead. He had always been a handsome man; now he’d attained a dignity he had lacked before. He looked marriageable. “Did you ever find your lovely shipmate?” she asked him, quite directly, with no cunning preamble.

“Madame Christophe?” he said immediately. “No. I looked everywhere.”

“In the servants’ quarters?”

He responded with some heat. “She was a queen.”

“And if she was not?” Mrs. Radford watched his face closely. She was looking for true love. She thought she saw it.