Sister Noon (32 page)

There was a silence. The shards of light, spinning like tops. Lizzie’s breath coming through her mouth, thin as thread.

Then, “You astonish me,” Mrs. Pleasant said. Her face was shadowed. Lizzie was glad not to see her eyes.
He was frightened of those eyes,
she’d once said, although Lizzie couldn’t remember about whom. “I thought you a lady and a friend.”

“I meant no harm to you. I certainly meant no harm to
Viola. I just got it in my head that my father killed Malina Paillet. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt I had to know.”

“Who’s Malina Paillet?”

Lizzie told herself there was no way to offend Mrs. Pleasant more than she’d already done. No way back, in any case, only forward. “Mrs. Bell told me about Malina. The beautiful young girl in a yellow silk dress. Killed by a white man at one of your parties. Her throat cut.”

“There’s a Victoria Paillet has a place around the corner from us. Malina, I never heard of.”

“But Mrs. Bell said.”

Mrs. Pleasant turned. Her face was every bit as angry as Lizzie expected, deserved. The southern vowels hardened and shortened in her mouth. “Mrs. Bell says that she can fly. She floats over the bay to the Oakland estuary. The wind tells her stories. I love her dearly, but I don’t credit everything she says.”

“Oh,” said Lizzie.

“Are you much of a reader, Miss Hayes?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Now, I’ve left books alone and studied people. You don’t have time for both. A woman like you will always go with the person who tells a story. You should watch out for that.”

This was so obviously true. “I’ll be more careful,” Lizzie said, more and more ashamed. And still she couldn’t stop. “Where is Jenny Ijub’s mother?”

“Buried in the sea. You society women. You always think everything’s about you. You think everyone else is only here to cook your meals or sew your clothes or be grateful for your charity or forgive you.”

Lizzie’s father had once said that very thing to Lizzie’s mother. “You think the poor are only here to provide you with a reason to be charitable,” he’d said. “So why
are
the poor here?” her mother had answered.

Had Lizzie’s moral position not been so compromised, she might have argued. If it’s not all about me, she might have said, why does everyone watch everything I do? Lucky she didn’t. Who would complain of this to Mrs. Pleasant, about whom the whispers never hushed? Mary E. Pleasant, who had only to touch a thing to turn it notorious. Mary E. Pleasant, Queen of the Galloping Tongues.

Lizzie tried to believe that Jenny’s mother was buried at sea. She owed Mrs. Pleasant at least this much, so she tried her best. Unlikely as it was.

“It does tire me sometimes,” Mrs. Pleasant finished, and Lizzie could see why: Lizzie was tired of Lizzie, too.

“I’m going to be different,” Lizzie offered, and she meant it; she was determined to be so, but Mrs. Pleasant walked away while she was speaking. Lizzie trailed behind, though there were no more gestures inviting her to do so.

“I have never been given to explaining away lies,” Mrs. Pleasant said. “And you can’t explain away the truth.”

Her voice was tight with hurt. Even so, Lizzie couldn’t escape the brief suspicion that everything she’d ever done had been entirely as Mrs. Pleasant wished. Hadn’t she produced all those signs out of her very own hallway, forced a magical juncture on Lizzie merely by asserting that she faced one?

An invisible bird sang in the blackberries, a fluttering, descending whistle, which stopped as they approached. They arrived at a large stone. Mrs. Pleasant pointed to the
name—James Sullivan. And a prayer with an odd mixture of sentiments:

Lizzie read the epitaph aloud. “‘Who died by the hands of the Vigilance Committee.’”

“That was never proved,” Mrs. Pleasant said.

The strings of her purple bonnet had come loose. She retied them briskly. Her fingers were long and thin, her creased face set. She did not look saddened or surprised or angry or vengeful. She did not look hurt so much as she looked like a person who could be hurt. She looked old.

“Now our acquaintance is at an end,” she said. “Be so good as to leave me here with my friends.”

O
n the seventh of April, Maud Curry’s mother attended one of Mrs. Woodworth’s revival meetings and was instantly cured of her tuberculosis. She came at once to the Brown Ark for Maud, who left in a daze of happiness, hardly able to believe she’d been collected at last.

April 14 approached. Without crediting the prophecy, without mentioning it, possibly without even thinking about it, the Putnams joined a number of residents about the bay who had decided to spend Easter week taking the waters in Napa or Middletown or Calistoga. Some went to confession. Some wrote letters that apologized for old faults, revealed secret loves, and otherwise settled accounts.

Most paid no attention to the Doom Sealers. The press, long bored with it all, gave the story less space than the Sharon trial had routinely taken.

Lizzie dressed in her corset and her apricot silk and went to see her solicitor, Mr. Griswold. It was raining just slightly. Wherever the ground was unpaved it had softened, but not all the way to mud. The air had a lovely laundered smell. Lizzie shook her umbrella off and left it with the doorman.

“I need some money,” she told Mr. Griswold. “I was thinking maybe fifty dollars, but I’m not really sure what would be right. I have to pay off a blackmailer.” This wasn’t quite true, but avoided a longer explanation.

“How that takes me back!” Mr. Griswold said. “How often your father came to me with those very words!”

Mr. Griswold agreed that fifty was a standard payoff. Low for a man, but very standard for a woman. He thought he could advance Lizzie that much so long as it didn’t become a habit. He supposed she’d require cash.

She was planning to give the money to Viola at Jenny’s next piano lesson, assuming Viola was still Jenny’s piano teacher. Otherwise, Sam would have to tell her where and how to find the Boones. It didn’t make up for the trouble Lizzie had caused, of course; she wouldn’t pretend that it did.

By the time Lizzie had finished her business, she’d taken up Mr. Griswold’s lunchtime. The downtown streets were filled with women at this hour, the men all working in their offices, except for those in the bars. There was a matinee of
Rip Van Winkle
at the Tivoli. Lizzie saw groups of women going inside with their children, their skirts
brushing together, the children’s voices high and piping like birds’. Edward Bryan would be singing the lead, and his smoldering overacting was very much to Lizzie’s taste. What a treat this would be for the wards. Lizzie determined to suggest it to Mrs. Lake.

A hack stopped beside her and Mr. Finney looked down from it. “May I offer you a lift?” he asked. “Nasty weather to be walking in.”

It was nothing of the sort, a softer rain couldn’t be imagined. “I like it.” Lizzie went on without stopping.

He jumped down, tied the horses. When Lizzie looked back, he was running after her. He walked a moment by her side, catching his breath, a little water dripping from the brim of his hat. “I hope you’ve forgiven the messenger, Miss Hayes,” he said finally. “I’d be sorry to think I’d lost you as a friend.”

“Your interest in me was never social.”

“Your interest in
me
was never social,” he replied. “You know nothing about my interest in you.”

“So you’re not here to ask for money? I’ve quite mistaken things?”

Mr. Finney gave an awkward laugh, made an awkward gesture with his hand. Of course he wished there was nothing financial between them, that they were only a couple of old friends out for a stroll. He hoped someday that would be the case. Nothing would please him more. As to now, he only wanted what was fair. He entirely understood Miss Hayes’s reluctance to pay anything before his information had been confirmed. She was a lady with delicate feelings. The things he’d told her were, no doubt, shocking to hear.

But now he had it on good authority that she knew
them to be true. Now was the time to determine a fair price for a secret delivered and a secret kept.

Lizzie hauled up her skirts to cross the street. There was a carriage coming, black with glass windows. The driver wore full purple livery except for a large white cowboy hat. Only in San Francisco, her father would have remarked, had he been there to see it. Heaven must be wonderful indeed to make up for all the things you missed by being dead. “You can say whatever you like about my father.” Lizzie stepped up onto the far curb. “My father was a good man, and when he was alive he wouldn’t have spared a thought for a sharper like you. I don’t imagine he cares more now.”

Mr. Finney tipped his hat and clucked his tongue in admiration. “I do admire the way you speak your mind. I never met a society lady like you. No pretense, what you think is what you say.”

“Only to you.” Lizzie was surprised to realize this was true. It made her suddenly, unexpectedly fond of Mr. Finney, in spite of his being such a loathsome man. Hadn’t she always stood her ground with him? You couldn’t say Lizzie was nobody’s fool, but she wasn’t Mr. Finney’s.

She turned, stopping, and raised her umbrella so that he could slip beneath it, too. He took off his glasses to wipe them dry, and his eyes were that mottled, pebbled blue.

“What about the child?” he said. “There are details, things once said that can’t be unsaid.” But Lizzie had already reached into her pocket and drawn out the money, and this had nothing at all to do with Jenny. Lizzie was trusting her instincts. She put the fifty dollars into Mr. Finney’s hand.

“Here’s what I’m buying,” she was already saying. “It occurs to me that Miss Viola Bell held an interest for you that Miss Viola Smith might not. For fifty dollars, you look into your heart. If you’ll be a good husband to her, then marry her. If you won’t be a good husband, then let her alone. The decision is yours. You’ve come to a magical juncture here, Mr. Finney, but you’re a man who takes the long view. I trust you absolutely to do what’s right.”

He was staring at her, his face close to hers under the single umbrella, the light, intimate tune of the rain hitting the taut cloth and the stone street. The passing horses were polished and the air fragrant. It was a perfect day, one she would often remember. She’d just cursed Mr. Finney with his very own magical juncture. “The person I’m saving here is you,” she said.

Then he went forward into his magical juncture and she went backward into hers. She returned to Mr. Griswold for another fifty dollars. He was far less agreeable this time. What an amateur she was at this! If she went on letting just anyone on the street blackmail her this way, her father’s estate would be gone before she knew it.

When the morning of the fourteenth arrived, it came wrapped in a blue sky and a bright sun. Lizzie woke early and drove to the Brown Ark. “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” people asked her as they passed on the street. All over the city people were saying the same thing to one another. “Beautiful day, isn’t it? Did you ever see such a beautiful day?”

It was the day after the end of everything. Lizzie had chosen it deliberately as the day on which she would become someone new. She was a notorious woman now; there was no point in continuing to pretend otherwise.

She sent a letter of resignation to Mrs. Hallis. Included in it was her Atlantis-coin necklace and her written decision to remove the offending child from the Brown Ark. On April 14 she took custody of Jenny Ijub.

And then, because she still wasn’t sure she liked Jenny all that much, she sweetened the deal by taking Ti Wong, too. Jenny was an obligation of blood, but she and God had a covenant for Ti Wong.

She’d met many times with Mr. Griswold, to discuss her finances. Luckily she had her experience as Ark treasurer to draw on. She knew more about money than some women of her class. Lizzie was going to court to challenge her father’s will. It was a frighteningly public thing to do. A lady appears in the papers only twice—on the day she weds and the day she dies, Mrs. Putnam reminded her. The Putnams were, of course, most disapproving. She is
not
your sister, they insisted with some cause, and Lizzie couldn’t make them understand that this had simply ceased to matter.

Lizzie hoped for a quick and quiet decision in her favor. She was not, after all, getting married, as her father had absolutely forbidden her to do. If she now had a family to support, there was no one to blame for this but him. She was prepared to say so in open court if it should come to that. She only hoped there’d be no further claimants on the estate, no additional children she knew nothing about.

In any case, it would all take time. Meanwhile she’d packed Baby Edward’s picture into a trunk along with many other mementos and removed him to the attic. He protested this. She was burying him all over again. But it was nothing personal, just part of her plan to let her home to a quiet family of four and move with Jenny and Ti Wong down to the Big Trees house for the summer. This was an economy, but would, she hoped, also be a pleasure. Lizzie had every expectation Baby Edward would find a way to come along.