The Last Woman Standing (7 page)

A growing feeling emerged, unbidden, from the swirling emotions of excitement and fear the spectacle inspired. Right there I became infatuated with Wyatt in the way I might fall for the handsome actor in emerald tights playing Romeo, or the tenor in
Aida
—all from the distant balcony. And so I watched this lone gunman stand strong against the crowd. I recognized greatness in Wyatt. I perceived the trust he placed in his conscience. His inner strength was as much a weapon as his shotgun. He’d put his life on the line to uphold the law, even if it meant sacrificing himself to protect a lesser man.

I feared for Wyatt’s safety. I wanted to be beside him in my infatuated state. I wanted his protection and his respect; I yearned to protect him in whatever way I could. I looked down, wishing for him to see me there on the balcony—more than a face in the crowd—believing in him. Naturally, he did not see me. His gaze focused on the mine owner, Dick Gird. The middle-aged man pointed his rifle at the dirt. He employed most of the miners surrounding him, and drank with them, too; he beat them at cards when they weren’t beating him. He was well liked. He and Wyatt were friends, for that matter—when they weren’t squared off on opposite sides of a shotgun. And when there weren’t folks in the back forcing the issue, crying: “Cut Earp down! Turn loose on him! You’ll get him!”

“Stop where you are, Dick,” Wyatt said. “Sure, you can get me. I’ll take eight or ten of you along. There’s eighteen buckshot in this gun, and the wads are slit. One step more and it’s Boot Hill for some of you.”

The men in the rear pitched forward, pushing Gird and his mining associates within twenty feet of Wyatt. The deputy US Marshal stared the mine owner down and said in a voice so conversational they could have been sitting across a poker felt with fair-to-middling cards, “Nice mob you’ve got, Dick. You’re first. Three or four will go down with you, Bob here and Jack. Your friends may get me, but there’ll be my brothers. It’ll cost good men to lynch that tinhorn, and number one will be Dick Gird.”

There was a long pause. Those in the rear still pushed forward, but Gird and his friends faded back. The stamping stopped. The war cries fizzled. Only the dogs barked down the lane. A rooster crowed. And then Gird turned his back on Wyatt and threaded through the crowd. Gird’s friends followed behind him, taking the local miners with them. The Charleston miners followed in their black armbands.

After the front line crumbled, the Tombstone thrill seekers retreated to the far sidewalk with the old-timer in his stovepipe hat. That left about fifty furious cowboys. The men had ridden down from Charleston agitating for a fight—gentlemanly John Ringo, ranchers Ike Clanton and his brother, Finn, with roots in Tennessee, and an assortment of armed men in bright bibbed shirts and silver-buttoned jackets. They were mostly Texans and transplanted Southerners, Democrats, and Confederate sympathizers who resented the Republican law-and-order Earps and the business interests they defended. Many had come west to Arizona to escape Northern domination.

Wyatt returned his shotgun to the crook of his arm. Still facing out to the street, he said, “Jim, have Charlie Smith drive his wagon up here. I’m taking the prisoner to Tucson.”

The double doors opened behind Wyatt. His brothers Morgan and Virgil flanked Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce. The slight prisoner blinked in the sunlight, looking impossibly young. He was shorter than average, with a dandy’s slim mustache; strong, dark eyebrows; and black hair pushed back from his fair forehead. He seemed spent, what with shooting a man in the morning and nearly being hung in the afternoon before his twentieth birthday, but he was making an effort to hold himself together under the glare of John Ringo and his crew.

With a sense of relief, I looked down Allen Street. There was Johnny. My heart skipped a beat as it always did when I first saw him in those early months. Here was my man, the brave Arizonan who had wooed and won me, so handsome under his silver Stetson. He rolled toward Vogan’s with a take-charge walk. Beside him marched Ben Sippy, who’d beaten Virgil in the race for city marshal two months prior. The pair climbed the curb in tandem with their hands on their pistols. They locked in behind Morgan and Virgil to form a wall around the prisoner.

Right then I saw Wyatt’s friend, Doc Holliday, who was standing half-hidden behind the prisoner, guarding his back. I watched how the slivery Georgian sneered as Johnny assumed a spot beside him. Doc hissed at Johnny under his breath. I picked at my lip, wondering what Holliday had said with such vitriol, which led me to ponder where Johnny had been all this time while Wyatt faced down the crowd. Johnny was deputy sheriff now. It was his turn to show Tombstone why he was the best man for the job, why he deserved the badge. But while Wyatt confronted the rabble, where had Johnny been?

A tug at my hem distracted me from concerns about Johnny-come-lately. Delia said, “If you don’t want Behan to see you and the boy, you’d best withdraw.”

I gazed down for one last glimpse of Wyatt and Johnny, but they were already gone, having vacated Vogan’s front walk to escort the prisoner to the waiting wagon. They swept the bystanders along with them, leaving behind a street littered with shell casings. Albert and I retreated on our knees like children in a parlor game. Back in Delia’s boudoir surrounded by yellow roses, she helped me up, her eyes dilated and distracted. She took my hand and led me out the thick mahogany door and down the carpeted stairs, our feet hardly making a sound. I hastened to leave the house, but as we reached the bottom step, the pocket doors slid open on well-oiled tracks.

April stood primly beside the portal to the parlor like a maid taking her mark in a play, her face red from scrubbing and wearing white gloves and a starched apron. She smiled shyly, and I noticed for the first time her exaggerated buck teeth. She said, as if she was running lines, “The madam requests your company for tea in the parlor.”

“I have to get Albert home,” I insisted.

“Albert,” said April, “would you like cocoa and cake with me in the kitchen?”

Before I could stop the boy, Albert was heading down the narrow hall with April toward the cinnamony smell of baked goods. The pair resembled Hansel and Gretel as they receded. April reached for Albert’s hand; to my surprise, he gave it willingly.

Delia stepped back. She faded against the canary-striped wallpaper in her yellow silk dress, as if she were a chameleon in an interior jungle. Alone at the threshold to the parlor, I felt myself in intimate and unknown peril.

CHAPTER 8

“
Entrez
, Josephine,” came a seductive voice from beyond the pocket doors. I shuffled across the threshold, pausing in a seemingly empty room. Then I saw the diminutive madam, propped up on a rich, red Renaissance Revival sofa, a cello leaning against its arm. She was doll-size, with a pompadour of crimped purplish-brown hair. Her pale-gray eyes were hooded by dusky half-moons covered in powder (thwarting efforts to guess her age). A Japanese kimono the color of cherry blossoms draped low, revealing a stemlike neck, bare shoulders, and deep cleavage. Her near-nakedness shamed me. I felt tainted just by sharing the same room, breathing the same rose-scented air. Gazing down, I noticed the woman’s slim calves beneath rolled silk stockings; the robe’s train had been swung carefully forward so it swirled at her feet, where white cranes flew among silver peonies. The birds’ red-dot eyes shocked like tiny bloodstains.

For all this, her mustache was the tiny woman’s most unsettling and obscene feature. The auburn bit of fuzz, pomaded and twisted left and right under her pointed nose, didn’t make her appear manlier—oddly, the unusual facial hair heightened her femininity. She introduced herself as Eleanor Dumont, but I’d already heard of her. She was Madame Mustache, Tombstone’s infamous French bawd.

Miss Dumont smiled, her pointed teeth tinted green from the liquor she drank. She motioned me to a moss-velvet chair. Dispensing with small talk, the madam asked, “Having a little look around our establishment? There’s another big bedroom in back if you’re interested.”

“I have a place to stay, thank you,” I said, horrified at the thought. “I’m with Mr. and Mrs. Jones until I wed Johnny Behan. Do you know Johnny?”

“We all know Johnny.” She raised her glass, sipped, licked the green from her lips with her pointy tongue. “Do you know
our
Mr. Behan?”

“What a silly question. I wouldn’t be foolish enough to travel all the way from San Francisco without knowing my fiancé.”

“I retract my question, Miss Marcus.” A sugar cube–size emerald flashed from her ringed fingers as she shifted her kimono to reveal even more skin and reached out to ensure that her cello was at hand. “But he is a man.”

“That’s for sure.” I straightened my spine and preened, displaying my engagement ring with its comparatively small diamond.

“But what kind of man is he?” A memory appeared to slide across her hooded eyes, perhaps a recollection of men she’d known, or men she wished she hadn’t. Perhaps it was a memory of Johnny. The madam blinked. She sipped. She licked. She said, “I think, Josephine, you do not entirely understand your predicament.”

“What predicament?”

“You are in a precarious position.” She retrieved an ivory-inlaid box, withdrawing a black-papered cigarette with a gold filter; she extended the box toward me, presumably aware that I would reject the offer and her generosity would cost nothing.

“It’s not the least bit precarious, as if it is any of your business,” I protested, my voice rising. “We’re engaged. Johnny and I will soon be married. He is the deputy sheriff, you know.”

“Pardon me if I don’t salute. My experience with men has left me skeptical. And, trust me, my little bunny, my experience has been substantial. So let me ask: Are you married today? Certainly there’s a justice of the peace to be found, and you have that itsy-bitsy ring on your finger that you repeatedly attempt to flash in my direction, if only it had power to shine. So, Miss Marcus, why not today? We can decorate the parlor for you right now. We can assemble roses for your bouquet. Cook makes a wicked angel food cake so light it flies into your mouth on wings of sugar. Poof! Heavenly! If that seems a bit of a rush on a day that has already had so much excitement—compliments of that rascal Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce—and you don’t want the blessed event upstaged by murder and mayhem, why not tomorrow? Or a week from Tuesday. What’s the delay? Will Johnny love you more in a week?” she asked, leaning forward and staring directly into my eyes. “Will you love him more?”

I flinched as this freakish foreigner pressed my most vulnerable spot. I craved a witty retort but couldn’t manufacture an answer. An awkward silence ensued. I felt like we were playing cards and I’d lazily discarded the knave of clubs my opponent desired. I knew this woman was an adversary, not the ally she presented herself to be.

I loved Johnny. I did. But doubts plagued me despite my belief that I’d kept my misgivings hidden. If I were so madly in love, and Johnny was the only man for me, how had these sudden flushes of infatuation for Wyatt emerged when I watched him confront the lynch mob? I could deny that the feelings were mutual, but not their intensity, and not on my side. Actions are true, and desires are fickle, but more than once my thoughts, unguarded, had wandered back to our cozy time in Kitty’s kitchen on that rainy November afternoon. We had an ease even in silence that I lacked with Johnny. Wyatt radiated a sense of security, and although he was a few years younger than Johnny, he seemed older, more grounded, more patient. But anything between Wyatt and me was a fantasy on my part. I knew that. Somewhere down Fremont Street, he had a wife who ironed his white shirts and brushed his black coats with such devotion that even the desert dust hesitated to soil them.

And I had Johnny.

Wyatt wasn’t responsible for my insomnia. Late at night, alone on a cot on Safford Street, I worried. I overheard Kitty and Harry bicker and whisper conspiratorially in the next room, Kitty sobbing and sighing. While the couple did not epitomize love eternal, it irked me that Johnny and I had not yet wed and moved in together as man and wife. I’d done my part. I’d cut my bonds with my family and traveled to Tombstone. But he dragged his feet despite the engagement ring that he insisted demonstrated his honorable intentions.

I attempted to deny the precariousness of my situation, but the green-fanged lady sitting opposite saw through me. Facing the madam, I tried to rally. I romanticized my plight, imagining it to mirror that of the character of Josephine in
Pinafore
. She loved one man, yet her father promised her to another. I followed my heart and disobeyed my mother’s wishes. Yet my guilt was only compounded by the possibility that my situation in Tombstone might result in abandonment rather than a loving and secure union.

Looking into Dumont’s chilly eyes, I summoned my strength. I was no quitter. I had no reason to suspect Johnny. I recalled him astride his stallion beside the stage when I arrived in Tombstone, carrying a bouquet of yellow roses (even that raised muted alarm now, awash in those flowers as this awful place was). And then his hands encircled my waist as he swung me into his arms and the crush of his embrace. I loved the surprising little sweet kisses he gave me, like a boy in the schoolyard, when I least expected them.

I shut my eyes and imagined Johnny’s arms around me, then opened them and looked straight at the madam. “I love him now,” I said, “and I will love him more.” Even as I said it, my thoughts betrayed me. I beheld an image of Wyatt standing tall in front of the mob, defending that boyish captive—sitting close in Kitty’s kitchen with a charisma that drew me toward him despite Johnny’s imminent arrival. But I sublimated those visions and continued, “Johnny loves me now, and every day he tells me he loves me more. I have this ring on my finger, and he says I have a silver rope around his heart.”

“Oh, that is pretty talk.” Miss Dumont paused to sip and savor while letting her words hang in the scented air. “Ask Johnny: What’s the difference between a silver rope and a silver noose? And if you pull too hard on your silver rope and ask him to marry you tomorrow, what will happen? What will he say? Where is his last wife, and how could she have let this most amazing catch escape? Oh, little bunny, all this talk of true loves, of rings and silver ropes, is way too fancy for a poor, petite French girl like me, raised on goat milk and rancid cheese.”

Miss Dumont looked flirtatiously at me in the moss-green chair from her lurid sofa, her eyes now alight and mirthful. She wiggle-waggled her shoulders, and her breasts shimmied from side to side, breaking against each other like waves. She feasted on my discomfort. “You’re a pretty little thing,” the Frenchwoman said, apparently changing the subject. “The creamy skin, dark curls, dark eyes, those endless lashes. That is all good, if you lean toward the naturalism of a prize mare—and I know some men that do.”

The madam reached forward for another sip. “The brows could use a mow, the cheeks, rouge—and you must spend more time on the hair. You are no longer a schoolgirl memorizing your multiplication tables; if you do not know nine times nine by now, you never will.”

“Eighty-one,” I said. I had recently tested Albert on that one.

“Oh, goodie, goodie,” Miss Dumont snapped. “But you can’t eat numbers from the air. You’re not nearly as calculating as a frontier boomtown requires. One always needs an alternate plan, a back door, a saddled pony waiting in the alley for a quick escape, perhaps a friend to hold it, perhaps not.”

The madam continued: “A ripe beauty needs to be a step ahead of all those men with their smoking six-shooters before she is not so ripe. It’s true, you have natural advantages. I can hardly see your shoulders or your arms in that nun’s habit you insist on wearing, much less your legs to see how you’re put together. But you have a full bosom and the benefit of youth without the weight of disappointment, and fresh flesh not yet fallen or dimpled or scarred by childbirth or the pox. A pretty little thing, it’s true, like a German porcelain doll still on the shelf, not yet played with or chipped. The men aren’t lying when they tell me that Josephine Marcus is the prettiest girl to see Tombstone since Ed Schieffelin found silver at the Lucky Cuss. Find silver, and pretty girls will follow; find gold, and you can’t keep them out of your pockets.”

April tiptoed in and settled a fresh liqueur glass in the sticky circle left by the previous one. She discarded her employer’s ashes in a tray and retreated, eyes downcast so that I could not catch her gaze and ask after Albert. By the Ansonia mantel clock, it was past four. Should Johnny come straight home from sending the prisoner off to Tucson, he might well wonder what crack had swallowed us up.

The heavy, sweet scent of Miss Dumont’s tobacco, so different from what men smoked, made me light-headed. Smoke formed swirling clouds around the madam’s pompadour. “Miss Josephine, I am surprised that the men haven’t revealed your greatest asset, probably because they’re not an objective judge of female flesh like I am. Your gift is not your lips or your eyes or your cheeks, but your vivacity, the way your spirit lights up your skin right through the pores, lifts you up so you’re almost not walking on the same boardwalk as we poor mortals. Your optimism sends your hips floating as you trod the street, expecting the best, protected from the worst. You have dancing hips, little bunny, and there is nothing practiced or put-on about your gait; it is who you are for now. Keep that, and your health, and you’ll have more than a few years on you.”

I was at a loss for words, unsettled as much as pleased by Madame Mustache’s flattery and the notion that men discussed me in town. The woman lit another cigarette. Where was Madame Mustache going with this puffery? She continued with a grand arm motion, as if to a crowd of avid listeners. “All right,” she said, “you’ve convinced me, Lady Josephine. I am overcome with remorse for bringing wrinkles to your brow, wrinkles that will immediately fade, unlike my hard-won creases.”

Madame Mustache reclined against her pillows and puffed thoughtfully for a moment, leaving the mantel clock to tick the time. “I surrender to your optimism. You know the world better than I, I’m sure. I see you and your faithful, love-besotted Johnny together in a little cottage, picket fence, villains in jail, a bun in the oven, an orange cat on the hearth with mice in her tummy, and a sudden bonanza in the silver mine. Your husband purchases you an even bigger ring and bangles and baubles and a three-story brick house with an even taller fence. But please, just hear a foolish, frightened old
Française
out. What if something happens?”

Miss Dumont dropped a long ash, then raised her eyes to the ceiling in thought. “Suppose Johnny rides off on a posse and catches a stray bullet or a rattler’s naughty fang, or his breast stops the shrewdly placed arrow shot from a distant cliff by one of those rude Apaches?” As she spoke, she’d reached over to her cello and now twanged the strings to mimic the bow’s lethal sound. “What then, little bunny? What will happen then?”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said, my voice tight in my throat and unfamiliar. “Why should you think the worst?”

“Expect the best, prepare for the worst: isn’t that the English expression? Always so practical and dull, like my mother’s second husband! I could never love a man who smells like cabbage. But you distract me. God forbid, something happens to your man. Big tears. There is an outpouring of sympathy; the church league brings you casseroles for a week. Oh, maybe not. You’re Jewish, no? All right, Miss Kitty and her friends supply the succor. The fireman’s league helps out as well with blankets and coffee. Other men step up and offer their protection, but they smell wrong and you are heartbroken.
Très désolée
. The only man in the world for you has been taken away. You are true to the one, the only, the Johnny. You are desolate, inconsolable, and in two weeks’ time, broke, down to your last petticoat.”

Beginning to sweat, I said, “I think I’ll have one of those green drinks.”

“That’s a girl,” Miss Dumont replied, ringing a little bell. April entered, carrying the second drink, which she placed at my knees on the marble-top table, and vanished. “You, Josephine, must learn to live in the moment and plan for the future. Where was I? Oh, yes, you were desolate, crushed, and I wondered: What shall we do, we who care so much for your welfare? Will we put you on the next stage home to your joyous parents, happy to receive their favorite daughter like a Union soldier back from Chickamauga? But isn’t that really just running back to Mummy and Daddy? I can’t imagine that would be your first thought, otherwise you wouldn’t have traveled all this way over thistles and thorns.” Miss Dumont took a long drag on her cigarette. “And then there’s the question: Will they have you? You have to admit, you are no longer the little girl in pigtails who skipped off into the wild. Will they look at you the same, now that you’ve run off with a man? Will they introduce you to potential suitors, their unmarried daughter, as only slightly used goods available at a discount? Think about it, Josephine. Can you return to your little bed by the dark stairs, taking up your old ragged dollies and teddy bears after you’ve seen the moonrise over Tombstone?”