Sister Noon (29 page)

“
Please
come in,” Lizzie said again.

Across the way she could see her neighbor’s boy in the window, watching. He had his jaw tied up for toothache, and a cat like a shawl on his shoulders.

Again Viola refused. Her voice was thready, her color poor. “Do you see that she could have been killed?”

Lizzie did not. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Jenny’s so happy at the Brown Ark. Happy and safe.”

“Happy?” A bead of spit appeared on Viola’s lip; she wiped at it with the fingers of her cotton glove. Her dark hair was twisted into her hat, which was of a simple black felt that any shopgirl could have bettered. “How should she be happy? It would be one thing, if she’d never known anything but poverty. But to be petted one minute and cast aside the next. Don’t you think that’s the cruelest thing can be done to a child?”

It was possible, of course, that Jenny had talked to Viola about her past, but then Jenny didn’t talk to anyone about anything. “What do you know about Jenny?” Lizzie asked.

“I know she’s not
happy
. I went to the Brown Ark for our lesson. I was told she’d been put to bed and the doctor sent for. I asked the matron for your address and came here. I want you to know I hold you responsible. If she’d died you’d be responsible for that, too.” Viola’s voice had started low and gotten angrier without getting louder. Her fist gripped the handle of her crutch so tightly that it shook.

“Why am I responsible?” Lizzie asked. She had her own ideas, of course, but she didn’t see how Viola could share them. Lizzie had calmed considerably since the day before; another sleepless night avoiding thoughts of her father had spent her. But now Viola was upsetting her again. Lizzie wished Viola would come inside, was afraid the neighbors would see, was afraid she would fall.

Viola tossed her head. The sunlight hit her brooch, making it sparkle threateningly. “Mr. Finney asked me to remind you about his money, if I ever had the chance. We’re to be married.” She said these last words as if she was aware she shouldn’t be saying them but unable to deny herself the pleasure of it.

Now Lizzie wished there were only Jenny to worry about. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” she said automatically, and then,“I’m afraid he’s a dangerous man. I’m sorry, I must say it. You’re so very young.”

Viola’s brooch was a twinkling rose at her throat; her eyes were bright as glass. “I know he’s not been a good man,” she said. “We tell each other everything. He repents it all.”

“You read the Bible together,” Lizzie suggested. Your love will save him. She could imagine the potency of that, Mr. Finney, so handsome, so sincere.
Save me.
If he’d
offered that aspect to Lizzie, she doubted that even she, twice Viola’s age, would have successfully resisted. She had never understood Jane Austen’s Fanny Price. “I’ve seen a different side of him.”

It was the wrong thing to say, only confirmed Viola’s special intimacy. “I’m sure you have,” she said proudly.

Lizzie felt the press of dead air she associated with Baby Edward. The silver color in the corner of her eye, the taste in her mouth, the sickening spin of Viola’s brooch. “It was you, then, told Mr. Finney about my father.”

“Yes.”

“What else did Mrs. Pleasant say about him?” Lizzie closed her eyes and there were tiny fairy lights on the inside of her lids. She pushed the headache firmly away. She couldn’t have one now, not with Viola’s heart open before her and matters of such delicacy still to be discussed. The usual terror approached, but Lizzie refused it.

“Mrs. Pleasant said nothing. She has a book with names in it, dates, and such like. I saw it last week, just for a moment. I can’t show you, but I don’t lie. I want the money for Mr. Finney because he has debts to settle before we can marry, but I didn’t do it for that. I did it for Jenny. Someone has to watch over her.”

Viola’s voice had quickened, while Lizzie’s mind had slowed. “I believe you,” Lizzie said, her words unintelligible. She made a greater effort, achieved a moment’s normalcy. Then it was gone again, bees buzzing, lights popping, the silver stain spreading over the world.

But no headache sent by anyone for any reason would stop Lizzie. She was speaking without thinking of it; the pain would come, no doubt, but she’d have what she wanted
when it did. “I need to know what else Mrs. Pleasant has in her book about my father.” The silver film soaked into Viola’s eyes, her hair. Lizzie’s hands were made of snow. “Things from long ago. I’ll pay you to look again.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

Viola was trembling. She was angry or ill or tired from standing for so long. Lizzie felt the power leaking from her own legs. She couldn’t do anything more. She pulled the door shut without waiting for an answer, so that Viola wouldn’t see her when the pain hit.

Doggedly her imagination fetched up images of Malina Paillet, but all in silver now. Drops of silver blood fell on silver silk. The sharp slice of a silver moon. Her head falling away from her neck. Silver roses wilting on her wrist. “You have only the beauty of youth,” her angry suitor told her. He caught her by the hair.

Lizzie was lying on the marble of the entryway with no recollection of how she’d gotten there. She wondered whether Viola was still waiting outside, but she couldn’t lift herself up to go see.

L
ater Lizzie managed to reach the sofa in the dayroom, where she spent the rest of the night. She threw up twice, but by morning her headache had receded and she felt it only when she turned her head or sat or stood quickly. She would have liked to stay in bed for the day. But sometime during the ebbing, Viola’s initial words had finally penetrated. Little Jenny had spent the night on the cupola ledge in her nightdress, and she might have been killed.

Lizzie washed her face with the coldest water she could stand. She dressed and caught the streetcar on Van Ness and walked the rest of the way to the Ark. The leaves of the silver-dollar eucalyptus were green on one side, silver on the other, so that a breeze made the stands of trees shimmer like water.

Lizzie knew the name of this tree because her father had taught it to her. He’d liked taking her for walks. “You don’t complain about the hills,” he said approvingly. “You don’t chatter on about nothing.”

He didn’t always talk himself, but she liked it when he did. He was less guarded in what he said than her mother was, not so determined to make a lesson out of everything. Here in San Francisco, where the money grows on trees, he would start off, so that once as a girl she’d asked him which trees the money grew on, and the silver-dollars were the ones he’d named. He’d also said he could remember a time when there were no trees in San Francisco at all, but never, ever a time when there was no money.

He’d liked to tell stories that illustrated the lunacy of the madly rich. He was appalled by them, but proud as well—only in San Francisco.

Mr. Crocker’s spite fence.

Layman’s medieval castle.

Stanford’s mechanical birds.

How many of these men had been at Mrs. Pleasant’s parties with him? How many had pretended later not to know her, or one another, either?

Her father had also told her of Dr. Toland, a man who kept his dead wife in a glass-topped coffin in his office. What kind of a story was that to tell a child? Her mother was horrified when she heard. You’ll give the child nightmares, she cried, so frightened of Lizzie’s unruly imagination. You always underestimate her, Lizzie’s father had replied. Lizzie had been so proud to hear him say that.

The story hadn’t bothered her a bit. Lizzie asked to be
kept under glass herself, which amused her father. But it struck her as a sensible precaution, just in case she wasn’t dead after all, to leave a window through which she could get someone’s attention.

The dead woman under glass put her in mind of the women on Morton Street. Against all her best efforts, she saw her father waiting in line there, making a selection, the woman like a puppet in his arms. Her mother at home, telling Effie to tie Lizzie’s hands at night.

At the Ark, she found Nell in the parlor laying newly crocheted doilies over the backs of the threadbare chairs. The older girls must have been learning to tat. The doilies were round with scalloped edges and in no way improved the appearance of the room. Dubious finery piled on faded finery.

“Still abed,” Nell said, without Lizzie’s even asking. “You just missed Dr. Kearney coming by for a second check. He says she’s fine. But not talking, not our Jenny. We ask her, Just what were you playing at out on that ledge in the dark, and she won’t say a word.”

The line of Nell’s mouth changed from tight to soft; her cheeks sagged into pockets. “The lamb,” she added. “Poor Maudie hasn’t left her side since we found her. I thought my heart would stop when I first saw her, her nightdress flying in the wind like a kite, holding on to the window with those tiny fingers. Her hands were so cold I thought they’d crack when we opened them. We were in a state, all right.”

Since Jenny wouldn’t talk, Ti Wong had taken it upon himself to investigate, Nell added. Nell herself guessed it was simple high jinks of some kind, a game gone wrong.
But Ti Wong had been carefully through the tower room, and in his opinion, the door was jiggered. He’d also found a hidden pessary. That had taken some quick talking on Nell’s part; she wished Lizzie had been there to see that!

The embroidered wisdom on the wall behind Nell had been changed again. Now it read:

A square of light fell from the one small window at the end of the room onto the floor. There was a row of empty beds and then one with Jenny in it, awake and sitting up. On the bed past Jenny, Maud lay asleep, facedown across the blankets, her golden curls spilling off the side of the mattress. What a vigil for a young friend to keep! There must be
something
about Jenny to inspire such devotion. Lizzie was determined to find it.

She spoke in a whisper so as not to wake Maud. “Are you all right now, little Jenny?”

“Yes,” Jenny said. Her eyelids were swollen as if she’d been crying. Her hair was a tangle that would have to be painfully addressed when she was feeling better.

“I’m glad.” Lizzie tried to think what to say next. She had so few ideas she settled on what she was really thinking. “Does it seem to you that we’re anything alike?”

Apparently the question was too ridiculous to be worth answering. Jenny looked at her briefly, then looked away.

Lizzie sat on the side of her bed. The headache stabbed once, then stopped. “I like ducks and you like ducks.” Lizzie counted on her fingers. “That’s one. I used to play the piano when I was a little girl. That’s two.”

“You’re not a little girl.” Jenny lay back on her pillow. Now Lizzie saw a bruise on her neck, up by her ear, a scratch on her arm. Her fingernails were torn and must have hurt.

“Not anymore. But I was once. I like stories. Do you like stories?”

“Tell one,” Jenny said. She turned her huge dark eyes to Lizzie. She was missing a tooth, right in the front of her mouth. Lizzie saw the gap when Jenny spoke. She would have the smile of a jack-o’-lantern if she ever smiled at all.

Telling a story was the perfect way to have a conversation with someone who refused to talk.

Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, and they had a daughter. They’d wanted a child for many years, and when the baby came she was the answer to their prayers. Her skin was snowy white with just a hint of apples. Her lips were red; her eyes were blue, and bright as stars. She was the most beautiful baby anyone could remember ever seeing.

But one night while the king and queen slept, an ogre took the child from her cradle and replaced her with a child of its own. In the morning the child in the cradle was wrinkled as a walnut, had eyes that crossed, and little pointed teeth. “This is not my child,” the queen said, but
the king was not so sure. Perhaps the child had fallen ill during the night. He sent for the finest doctors in the kingdom, yet no one could restore the child’s beauty.

The ogre child grew every day. It was wicked as well as ugly. When the mother fed it, it bit her and then drank the blood instead of the milk. “This is not my child,” the queen said, and when the king again refused to listen, she crept out into the night to find her daughter.

She walked for many days. Her shoes were soft and wore through at the soles. Her feet were soft and began to bleed. She came to a forest and in the forest was a stream and into this stream she put her bloody feet.

She was used to being served and cared for, not fending for herself. She hadn’t eaten in quite some time.

So the queen was hungry as well as footsore, and there, beside her toes, trapped in a small pool, was a large silver fish. She picked up a stone to kill the fish, but before she could the fish spoke. “Put me back in the stream,” it said, “and if I can ever do you a kindness, I will.”

“How can a fish do me a kindness?” the queen asked, but she put it into the stream.