Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  “Come if you’re coming,” she snaps.

  The Durand boy, perched astride the great spokes of the bicycle’s front wheel, is taking in the whole scene as comfy as if he’s in the stalls at the Bella Union Theater. Jenny flicks him a small coin and leads the machine off by the handlebars down Kearny Street.

  She suddenly cuts sideways, nearly knocking Blanche down again, and rattles her machine across the cobbles. She halts below a window from which a song is drifting in a scratchy voice.

  ’Tis you who makes my friends my foes,

  ’Tis you who makes me wear old clothes.

  Jenny leans against the wall, her face alight as she listens to the unseen man.

  He sings, “‘Here you are so near my nose—’”

  “‘Tip her up,’” Jenny carols in an oddly sweet soprano, “‘and down she goes.’”

  From inside the building, laughter, and several voices roar the chorus back at her.

  Ha, ha, ha, you and me,

  “Little brown jug,” don’t I love thee!

  Ha, ha, ha …

  Blanche turns away with a sudden yawn. She crosses at the flagstone strip on the corner.

  “‘The rose is red,’” Jenny belts out, gliding after her, standing straight-legged on the mounting peg of her machine.

  My nose is, too,

  The violet’s blue, and so are you;

  And yet I guess before I stop,

  We’d better take another drop.

  Blanche leads the way west on Clay into Chinatown proper, where the streets are sinking into the patchy blackness of their accustomed night. The moon’s waning C has got caught in one of those alleys so skinny that the overhanging balconies almost touch. When Blanche and Arthur came to the City, they naturally washed up in Chinatown, where the rents were low and patrolmen hardly ever penetrated the warren of passageways. Few of the businesses here can afford to hire Specials to guard the streets, so folks live more or less as they like. Passing her favorite noodle house now, Blanche breathes in hot oil, ginger, and sesame. Then rotten vegetables, from the next alley. This quarter’s always filthy—mostly because the City supervisors won’t fix its sewers or pay for garbage collection. Arthur relishes it, claiming that skirting piles of fishtails makes him feel like a true bohemian. The newsmen call Chinatown a laboratory of infection; if even half what they say were true, Blanche thinks irreverently, she and Arthur and all its other residents would be dead by now.

  Dupont Street is littered with yellow flags that shopkeepers must have ripped off their doors so they could get back to business. “I hope you’ve had your scratch?” she asks Jenny, suddenly wary.

  Jenny slaps her sleeve above the elbow. “Stood in line for a day, eight years back, when it hit the City last.”

  “I thought perhaps you’d take your chances,” Blanche teases, “being so devil-may-care.”

  Jenny grins back. “Devil-may-care’s not the same as dumb as an ox.”

  In the middle of the street, a spectral man in silk pants and bonnet is stooping to collect the little flags. Chinatown’s a soup of these pigtailed bachelors—more and more of them stirred into the mix every month. Low Long, Blanche’s lodger, tells her that’s because no one will rent to Orientals elsewhere in the City.

  “What do you want with those?” Jenny calls out to the man.

  He blinks, doesn’t have enough English to answer her.

  Blanche laughs under her breath. “Word’s going round this week that the flags aren’t the mark of the disease, but the opposite—they scare it away.”

  Jenny shakes her head in wonder. “Like some old girls I met in jail, quite convinced by the scaremongers that vaccinations give you syph!”

  Looking into an alley, Blanche glimpses knots of people bedding down on skinny balconies, flat roofs, even stoops—anywhere that might offer a breath of air in the suffocating night. At the corner of Sacramento Street, she and Jenny pass a metal drum full of smoldering blankets and rugs. A rubber-masked man is hammering a wet sheet over the door of a building that has steam pouring out all its windows. Another white official is herding a dozen Chinese men with waist-length braided pigtails into a wagon stenciled Board of Health.

  Blanche and Jenny step off the sidewalk but both catch pungent facefuls of sulfur and start coughing.

  “Jenny!”

  Merde. It’s that one-eyed wreck of a Frenchwoman whom Blanche tried to avoid earlier. She’s hovering over the paraphernalia she hawks from her suitcase.

  “Maria, chérie, ça va?” Jenny calls back, rattling her machine across the cobbles to reach the old witch and then kissing her on both cheeks.

  Perhaps a cancer, or is it leprosy, eating the woman down to the bone? Blanche wonders with a shudder. She can’t bring herself to look at the melted face. The rouge only makes it worse, and so does the kohl ringing the remaining eye. Breasts hanging in this Maria’s bodice like thirsty tongues; she still dresses like what she must have been, though who’d pay for a piece of that? Still, no accounting for men’s tastes.

  “You ride this thing?” Maria’s asking Jenny in a gravelly voice.

  “I fly it,” Jenny corrects her.

  “Till you land and smash your face.” She puts one yellowed nail to Jenny’s swollen cheekbone.

  “Nah, that was in a little scrap,” says Jenny with a hint of pride. “You know my friend?” she asks, gesturing to Blanche.

  Who’s already shaking her head.

  But Maria makes a ghastly curtsy. “Blanche Beunon, Blanche la Danseuse, top of the bill at the House of Mirrors!” Jerking her head down the block toward the brothel. “I haven’t had the honor.”

  “Blanche la Danseuse,” repeats Jenny with a grin, “the famous dancer, that’s right.”

  To avoid looking at the woman’s missing eye, Blanche examines the litter laid out around the valise as if there’s something she might possibly want: a set of brass weights, a stained cravat …

  “Is that your mac I’ve seen with you, that long string of misery, Ernest something?” Maria steps so close, Blanche gets a reek of spirits off her.

  “No,” she says, edging away.

  “Ah, his ami intime, then? Albert, Arnaud?”

  Blanche fights the impulse to tell the hag it’s none of her business. “Arthur Deneve,” she corrects her coldly.

  But Maria’s already turned to Jenny. “You should put some meat on that to draw out the bad blood.”

  “What claptrap. Blood’s just blood,” says Jenny.

  Blanche takes her by the patched elbow of her gray jacket and hurries her west on Sacramento, the high-wheeler clattering along beside them. “Are you mad, kissing that creature?” she hisses when they’re out of earshot. “These things can be catching.”

  Jenny giggles. “Acid, catching?”

  Blanche is taken aback.

  “One splash of vitriol, that’s all it took to wipe out half Maria’s face,” says Jenny. “They didn’t do things by halves back in the Rush. She was the first French dove here, or so she claims …”

  Blanche shudders. The Gold Rush was almost three decades ago; could the one-eyed hag really have lasted that long? “I say it again: you like everything disgusting.”

  “You mean Maria?”

  She does, but that sounds harsh. “I mean her story.”

  “I just like stories,” says Jenny with a shrug.

  Blanche insists they stop at Hop Yik and Company for some meat. Mei’s face is glassy with sweat as he serves his countrymen unrecognizable things in bamboo boxes and twists of paper. He charges Blanche only two bits for a steak, though she suspects that’s because it won’t last another day. It has that tinge of gray, but it’s cold, at least.

  She badgers Jenny into holding it to her swollen eye, and she wheels the machine for her across the busy intersection with Dupont Street to Blanche’s building, number 815. This block of Sacramento’s so steep, the sidewalk slashes diagonally in front of the first floor, where Low Long has his living quarters, workshop
, and shoe store. With one of the keys on the ring hanging from her waist, Blanche lets them into the pitch-black stairwell.

  “‘Au clair de la lune,’” she sings softly, “‘on n’y voit qu’un peu.’” By moonlight, you can’t see much.

  “Can’t see a thing, in fact,” says Jenny. “What a deep voice you have for such a slip of a girl. Did Maman teach you that one, back in Paris?”

  Blanche snorts. “She smacked me if she heard me singing.”

  “Quelle salope!”

  “She said it would attract lightning,” says Blanche, a little defensive. “Did you never hear that one—that a song can turn the weather?”

  Jenny laughs.

  “More pure dumb superstition, I suppose.”

  “Some folks just like to hit kids,” remarks Jenny, “the way others like a drink.”

  “Oh, Maman liked that too,” says Blanche under her breath as she heads up the stairs. She thinks of her bedbound grandmother who shared Blanche’s mattress and taught her all the old songs sotto voce, mouth to ear. “You can leave your darling machine down here,” she throws over her shoulder.

  “Won’t the landlord object?”

  “That would be me,” says Blanche, smiling in the dark.

  “Huh,” says Jenny behind her.

  It still sounds incongruous to Blanche. She never aspired to own property until a few months back, when one of their fellow lodgers mentioned that the building’s Swiss owner was desperate for cash to pay some fine. It gives her a twinge of amusement to remember bargaining him down to fifteen hundred dollars. All that legwork at the House of Mirrors, all those bouts in hotel rooms, converted by alchemy into bricks and mortar …

  “Don’t much care for buying things, myself,” remarks Jenny.

  Blanche bristles a little. Remembering Arthur’s laugh, the day she produced the deed with a ta-da. How he told her she’d make a good little bourgeoise. Not that he objects to the cash she collects every week from Low Long and their nine other lodgers of all trades and tints. “What about that revolver you were brandishing at Durand’s?” she counters.

  “Ah, my equalizer,” says Jenny fondly. “Won that off a California infantryman in a poker game.”

  “Why’s it called an equalizer?”

  “Because anyone can load and fire it, easy.”

  “I bet it’d be easy to shoot yourself in the leg if you keep bicycling around with that thing in your pocket,” Blanche tells her. “Yourself or the next innocent party you crash into, of course …”

  “It can’t go off if I haven’t cocked it,” says Jenny, laughing.

  “Hey, if you don’t much care for buying things, where did you get your precious high-wheeler? I can’t imagine what such a fancy contraption costs.”

  “Me neither,” Jenny assures her. “I found it last week on Market Street.”

  “Found?” repeats Blanche, dubiously.

  “Saw the wheelman come a cropper and get toted off on a stretcher,” explains Jenny. “That little back wheel’s treacherous—one rut and it flips you over the handlebars.”

  “So you stole a valuable machine from a wounded man!” They’re on the second-floor landing now. The scent of oregano wafting down from the fourth story tells Blanche that the pickle-factory men from Corfu are cooking on their tiny stove.

  “Well, I sure wasn’t going to just leave it lying there for the next passerby to grab.”

  “The next thief, you mean,” retorts Blanche as she lets them in her front door.

  “Well, a toff that can afford such a toy, I figure he can afford to lose it too,” says Jenny.

  Blanche finds the matchbox and strikes a light.

  When they first came to number 815, Blanche and Arthur lodged in a nasty chamber on the fifth floor—and then, once she’d been dancing for a month or two, they moved down to a better set of rooms on the third. After Blanche bought the building, she let the little room on the fifth to a pair of Irish hat trimmers and the one beside it to a Chinese vegetable-seller; two Scots, widow and daughter, lodge and run their photography studio on the third floor. Which means Blanche and Arthur have this roomy apartment that takes up the second story and gives them the fewest stairs to climb (which helps, when his back is bad). Air and light and space. No kitchen, but really, in San Francisco, why bother cooking if you can afford to eat out?

  Jenny stands just inside the door, steak still pressed to one eye, gazing around with a child’s frank curiosity.

  When Blanche has lit a few hanging lamps she can see that Gudrun’s at least cleared away the detritus of lunch, though the long deal table’s still speckled with crumbs. (Their help is a Swedish seamstress who lodges in the attic in exchange for light house-cleaning. Blanche and Arthur prefer this arrangement to having some live-in on top of them; Gudrun flits in and out, morning and evening, as if nervous about lingering long in such a ménage.)

  Trying to see through the stranger’s eyes, Blanche registers the bare windows, the motley furnishings: a fine Turkish shawl draped over the balding back of the sofa. Not so much la vie de bohème, it occurs to her, as life in a dump. But why should Blanche give a rat’s ass what this visitor thinks? Jenny Bonnet’s a vagrant just out of lockup. An admitted thief, too, whom Blanche has invited into her home for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to her.

  Jenny’s over by the window now, apparently relishing the view of Sacramento Street.

  While the woman’s back is turned, Blanche undoes the top buttons of her greasy silk bodice and tugs out half the cash she earned in the International Hotel this evening. She tucks the notes into the emerald chamber pot that sits cheekily in the fireplace. (It was Arthur’s brain wave, one drunken night, to stash their money where burglars were unlikely to look.) The pot’s not as full of notes as it was, Blanche notices before she sets the lid back on; Arthur must have taken a big handful as his night’s gambling stake.

  Looking in the huge mirror, she considers her hair, a cloud of maddened bees. In lieu of an hour with hot irons and pins, she catches one honey-brown curl and thrusts it back into the hive.

  Ah, there’s yesterday’s Courrier de San Francisco over the back of a rush chair; Blanche flattens it on the sofa. “Take the weight off your feet,” she orders, “but keep that steak on.”

  Jenny stretches herself out in a gingerly way. Shifts, then pulls her revolver out of her pocket and slides it under the sofa. The meat juice trickles down her face onto the newspaper, and her hat tips sideways, letting out her shock of black hair.

  Blanche sinks into an old lion’s-claw-footed armchair. She should boil up some coffee on the spirit lamp, change her butter-stained bodice. But she’s spent, all of a sudden. The unending August heat, the collision with the bicycle, strong wine, that connard hurling her against the wall outside the brasserie … She lays her head back, just for a minute.

  In the saloon of the Eight Mile House at San Miguel Station, on the fourteenth of September, Blanche huddles on one of the barrels that serve for stools. Dead. Dead, she repeats in her head, trying to grasp it. Jenny’s dead on the floor in there. In our—the McNamaras’ front room.

  Behind the bar, John McNamara fumbles open the case of the clock. What’s he doing? He clutches the pendulum, stills its tick: 8:49, Blanche sees, squinting at the clock hands. The time. He’s stopping the time.

  “The boy,” Ellen McNamara howls suddenly from the back room. She appears in the doorway, crazy-eyed. “Where’s the boy?”

  Her husband only blinks at her.

  Blanche’s mind is moving as slowly as syrup. That wasn’t thunder she heard, a matter of minutes ago, but bullets shattering the window. A hard hail that just missed Blanche where she was sitting, on the edge of the bed. Bullets winging over her head as she bent down to undo her right gaiter.

  She presses her teeth together so as not to say his name: the man whose bullets have ripped her friend to pieces. She thinks she may puke.

  Jenny! All that light snuffed in a single second.

&nbs
p; The door bursts open and Blanche almost screams.

  But it’s not him. Only little Phil Jordan from the grogshop next door, eyes wide, dancing from foot to foot like a featherweight. With the twelve-year-old hunched behind him. “Did you hear that?” demands Jordan.

  Then his eyes take in Blanche, the butcher-shop state of her.

  “Hear it?” wails Ellen McNamara. “Wasn’t there gunfire punching through the wall within an inch of my head?” She glimpses her son behind Jordan and runs over to enfold him in her arms. “John Jr., are you shot?”

  The boy only yelps in her grip.

  “This young fellow was sitting in the outhouse doing his business,” says Jordan, patting him awkwardly on the head. “The noise put him into such a fright, he leaped up and gave his arm an awful thump on the door.”

  “Jenny’s—” McNamara, sunken-faced, tilts his head toward the bedroom.

  “Ah no,” cries Jordan. “Not Jenny.” Dead? He mouths it as if it’s an obscenity.

  McNamara nods.

  Blanche notices, for the first time, spatters on the floor by the bedroom door.

  “To think of you stumbling around in the middle of murderers,” Ellen keens over her boy.

  “Don’t upset yourself,” her husband soothes her.

  “Upset myself, is it? Hoodlums roaming the countryside, or them slit-eyed gurriers from Chinatown for all we know, and I amn’t supposed to turn a hair?”

  “Did you see anything, son?” asks McNamara.

  John Jr. shakes his head, eyes huge.

  “Would you not have thought to throw something over the looking glass?” Ellen rebukes her husband, slopping whiskey as she pours herself a measure.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything, Mother of God, what does it matter?”

  “Never mind the mirror,” Jordan butts in. “John, shouldn’t you and me—I reckon—” He casts a nervous look over his shoulder, toward the front door.

  Suddenly stern, McNamara collects a scarred billy club from behind the bar.

  “You aren’t going to leave women and childer alone while there’s some class of slaughterer roaming?” protests Ellen.

  “Just a wee look around,” John promises her, shouldering his weapon and handing Jordan a lamp to carry.