Sister Noon (5 page)

Still, many of their most generous donors would no doubt feel differently. The Ladies’ Relief Home had no savings, no margin for error. Even a small drop in donations could mean ruin. Wasn’t Lizzie’s first obligation to protect the wards already there? Could she set them all at risk for the sake of one child?

The next book was a
Robinson Crusoe
someone had evidently dropped in the bathtub. Lizzie picked it up and tried to flatten the crusty cover with her hand. What she admired most about Crusoe was his calm sequentiality. He found himself in an overwhelming situation and survived simply by dealing with each task in its turn. The mere sight of the book was clarifying.

These are the things Lizzie thought, and in this order:

Today’s task was to take care of Jenny. Possible repercussions were not today’s task.

Besides, she had often noticed that charity made misers of donor and recipient both. She had always sworn that it wouldn’t work this way on her.

Plus, she genuinely thought it likely Jenny had a wealthy father. What might such a man not do in gratitude for the preservation of his daughter? Lizzie was in charge of the Ladies’ Relief Home finances, and in her professional opinion the financial risk was easily outweighed by the possible benefit.

And then Mrs. Pleasant was no one to trifle with.
Lizzie would do nothing wrong to please her, but if she did the right thing and it pleased Mrs. Pleasant as well, wasn’t that a bit of luck?

And who would not be moved by little Jenny’s situation?

“You’re not to say this to anyone else,” Lizzie told Nell. “Once you’ve said it, it won’t be unsaid, no matter how untrue. And it is untrue. Mrs. Pleasant cares about money. She doesn’t care about the colored. You mark me, she’ll be back within the month with a wealthy father in tow.” Her voice began friendly, but sharpened as she spoke.

“What kind of a name is Ijub?” Nell Harris asked, and since Lizzie didn’t know the answer, she said nothing, but she said it to good effect. It shut Nell up entirely.

Two weeks later a box arrived for Jenny. Lizzie Hayes was there to open it. It contained a doll, wrapped in tissue, and a note. “I have noticed that many young girls are more interested in their needlework if they have a friend to sew for,” Mrs. Pleasant wrote. “This is a doll that needs just such a friend.” Her penmanship was as twisty as wrought iron. The note was signed “Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant.”

Lizzie unwrapped the doll. Her head was made of china, her hair was paint. She had a sweet, pouting face. She wore a necklace with a tiny coin, and a work apron over her dress. She fell out of Lizzie’s hand and her head broke into several curved pieces. On one piece Lizzie could see a little heart-shaped mouth.

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a voodoo queen and Lizzie
Hayes was an Episcopalian. They had had a very cordial exchange. There was no reason for Mrs. Pleasant to be angry. Except that Lizzie hadn’t removed her work apron. Such a small thing, a careless thing, an oversight, honestly, when the big thing, Jenny’s care, had all gone exactly as Mrs. Pleasant wished. Lizzie told herself that Mrs. Pleasant would not send a doll to curse her, and reminded herself that she couldn’t be cursed by a doll even if Mrs. Pleasant had.

In fact, Lizzie had parts of this right. Mrs. Pleasant was angry about the apron, but the doll was just a bit of a joke, a bit of misdirection. There was no need to curse Lizzie with a doll. Not when she’d been given Jenny Ijub.

No one ever mentioned the doll to Jenny. It would have been pointlessly cruel, since she was already broken.

T
he Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home occupied a lot on the corner of Geary and Franklin. There wasn’t a tree on the property, just scrub and sand, so storms hit hard. The Home was familiarly called the Brown Ark. Though blocks from the ocean, it had a shipwrecked, random air, like something the tides had left. In this respect, it matched the fortunes of most of its residents. During the year of 1890, the Ark housed a total of two hundred thirty-nine women and children, many only on a temporary, emergency basis.

The motif of randomness was carried up from the basement, with its kitchen, laundry, and schoolrooms, all the way to the bell-tower cupola. The furnishings had been donated, and represented the worst taste of several decades.
The parlor, into which Mrs. Pleasant had not been asked, contained a clock face painted with clouds and trapped under a bell jar, a handmade mantelpiece decoration of gangrenous velvet, pinned into tufts with brass studs, and an old set of stuffed chairs that crouched before the fireplace like large, balding cats. The effect was little offset by the posting of embroidered quotations intended to uplift and edify. “He who loves a friend is too rich to know what poverty and misery are.” And “Some flowers give out no odor until crushed.” And “The true perfection of mankind lies not in what man has, but in what man is.”

The last had been gleaned from the deplorable Oscar Wilde. In 1882, Wilde made a visit to the city and was absolutely undone by the vulgarity of it. He said so in public lectures addressed to the badly dressed perpetrators themselves. “Too, too utter,” he said, though they all felt this described him far better than them. His observation on the parlor wall of the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home was unattributed.

The Bell place was only a few blocks away, on the corner of Octavia and Bush. It was known throughout San Francisco as the House of Mystery, although there was a second House of Mystery, out on the beach at Land’s End, owned by the Alexander Russells. Mrs. Russell, despite her increasingly vehement denials, was widely believed to be the center of an Oriental cult whose disciples all called her Mother. Soon there would be a third House of Mystery, the Winchester house, but that would be down by San Jose.

The Bell House of Mystery was the occasional home of Thomas Bell, his reclusive wife, Teresa, an indeterminate but large number of children, servants, and Mrs.
Mary Ellen Pleasant. Mrs. Pleasant was the housekeeper, although everyone knew she was too rich and too old and too famous to be a servant. This was part of the mystery. In the 1890 census she listed her occupation as “capitalist.”

Mr. Bell had another house on Bush Street where he sometimes stayed. Mrs. Bell had a house in Oakland. Mrs. Pleasant had a house called Geneva Cottage on the San Jose Road, and properties on Washington Street and in Berkeley and Oakland. She was currently thinking of buying a large country ranch in the Valley of the Moon.

The Octavia place was a thirty-room mansion shadowed by blue gum trees. It had a red mansard roof, a southern mood. The interior was stuffed with hidden passageways, spiral staircases, statuary, and gold-veined mirrors. Rock-crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceilings. Every Saturday, even in winter, cut roses were arranged in vases with ferns and peacock feathers. The rooms smelled faintly of old bouquets. Mrs. Pleasant had chosen the decorations, many of which were imported from Italy. She had a fondness for vaulted ceilings and also for the gilt cupids that were so liked by everyone.

Lizzie Hayes was seriously considering walking from the Brown Ark to the House of Mystery. The distance between the two was not best measured in blocks; the Bell home was simply not a place one visited. Lizzie had never even passed by it. But she’d recently suffered a series of devastating headaches. Though she’d had headaches before, had them all her life, these were particularly rough going. The night after she dropped Jenny’s doll, she’d had a vivid dream in which both her hands were encased in a block of ice. She tried to free herself by raising the ice and
dashing it against a stone. Her hands broke off at the wrists instead. She could see them dimly through the scarred surface, floating, with the fingers widely separated and streaming off like jellyfish tentacles. She woke terrified, and although the feeling subsided, it did not disappear. The next day, the headaches began in earnest.

It occurred to her that nothing would be more natural than to go to Mrs. Pleasant and offer a report on Jenny’s settling in. Dress with care and behave with the same. It would be a courteous attention and would show Mrs. Pleasant that Lizzie was a good-hearted, respectable woman.

Part of her recoiled from her own plan. She did not believe in voodoo and would not be governed by superstition. Good-hearted, respectable women did not visit Teresa Bell in the House of Mystery, much less Mrs. Pleasant. “How does Jenny like her doll?” Mrs. Pleasant was bound to ask, and then what would Lizzie say? Plus there was the matter of Lizzie’s card. This wouldn’t be a social call, but it would take place in Mrs. Pleasant’s home. Would Mrs. Pleasant expect her to leave her card? If she did, would Mrs. Pleasant feel compelled to return the visit? If she didn’t, mightn’t this merely compound the original rudeness?

Besides, Lizzie didn’t really know how Jenny was settling in. With sixty-two children now in residence, she could scarcely be expected to keep track of them all.

She rang the bell for Nell Harris. Nell took some time arriving and appeared impatient when she did so. “Yes?” she said.

“Little Jenny. Jenny Ijub. How does she get on?”

“Well enough.”

“Has she settled? Does she eat heartily?”

“She’s not much of an eater, I’m afraid. I believe I told you as much the first day.”

“Does she get on with the other children?”

“She’s not entirely truthful. The other children naturally resent it. And the dress she came in. It was turned. I don’t think she’s as wealthy as you hoped.”

“Has she said anything about her home and family?”

“Not a whisper. She claims to remember nothing about it. But then, she’s not a truthful child.”

“But she seems content?”

“She thrashes at night. Her bedclothes are a rat’s nest by morning. Miss Hayes, I’m dishing supper. If there’s nothing further…”

Lizzie had a sudden memory of her own dining room table many years before. Her mother at one end. Her father at the other. And she between them, balanced unsteadily on two cushions, her legs dangling. No one was allowed to speak at meals, so she could hear her father swallowing his soup, her mother rustling a napkin under the table, out of sight.

It must have been a special occasion—she was never permitted to eat with her parents. It might have been her birthday. Lemon ices were to be served. But then Effie had been summoned to carry her off. “I simply cannot have you thrashing about,” her mother told her. Lizzie could still feel the bewildered humiliation of it. She would have said she was sitting still as stone.

“Thank you,” said Lizzie to Nell.

It was not the report she had wanted. But was it, after all, such a bad one? An imaginative little sprite, Lizzie could still say to Mrs. Pleasant. She so entertains the other children with her fanciful tales. An active, spirited girl.

B
efore she’d made up her mind about the visit, something occurred to necessitate it. Jenny was taken with several of the other children to Layman’s German castle on Telegraph Hill, as a treat for learning her Bible verses. The middle school children were reading
Ivanhoe,
and there was to be a special exhibition of armor and swordfighting. Mrs. Lake, a postman’s widow who taught the middles, had been assured that the thrusts and parries would be accurately medieval. There were rumors of actual tilting, and she assumed this meant horses. Tilting afoot would be a sad spectacle even for orphans.

The children were sorted into pairs, an older child with each younger. Jenny Ijub was partnered with Minna Graham, a pretty ten-year-old with fat black braids, and
front teeth that folded toward each other like an opened book. The two girls held hands on the cable car. Mrs. Lake was getting a cold, and she sneezed until her nose swelled.

A large crowd had gathered at the castle, whose Gothic turrets and parapets had been decked from top to bottom with banners. At noon the copper time-ball fell through its glass shaft. A group of strolling musicians sang madrigals. Minna Graham was not musical, but she was entranced by the women’s costumes. She wished that she, too, wore dunce caps with feathers and veils, velvet bodices with brocade inserts, high waistlines and yards of skirt. She followed the singers a few steps only, fell behind the other children. When the first combat began, people pressed forward to see it.

Mrs. Lake complained to Lizzie later that little chivalry was shown to her and her pupils. There were several moments of confusion in the crush. But they all heard Jenny scream.

By the time Mrs. Lake got there, Jenny was being held and petted by a fat, handsome man in a yellow waistcoat. He said that Jenny had been frightened by the appearance of the black knight. The black knight wore a facemask that looked like the back of a shovel, with a row of stiff bristles over the top of his head. The bristles appeared to Mrs. Lake to be cut by machine and therefore not something that would have been available to Ivanhoe, although the metal part might well have been old enough.

In any case, Jenny denied being frightened of the knight. She said instead that a man had tried to snatch her, a man in green trousers. It was the only description they were able to get. He had clutched her by the neck, one hand over her mouth. She bit him and screamed as he
dropped her. Then he’d disappeared into the crowd. Mrs. Lake could find no one who had seen any of this.