Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  What good is a club against a gun? Blanche wonders.

  The men step outside. Their voices, muffled, going round the side of the house.

  Twenty-seven, Blanche thinks; that’s how old Jenny was. Twenty-goddamn-seven years old, cut down halfway through a song.

  In the back room, the smaller boy, Jeremiah, is still sobbing with fright. Kate and Mary Jane’s voices, soothing him. Ellen goes in to them without a word to Blanche, tugging John Jr. behind her.

  Blanche shudders on her stool. Her clothes seem to be tightening. She stares down; Jenny’s blood is stiffening the fabric of her once-white bodice.

  She makes herself picture him out there on the porch: the killer. Stepping soft and sure-footed across the rot-edged planks. Peering around the skewed green blind, through the grimy glass, into the circle of candlelight where Blanche and Jenny were chatting about a lullaby as they got ready for bed.

  Ellen comes back with what looks like a mackintosh and gets up on a stool to drape it awkwardly over the big looking glass. Mumbo jumbo, that’s what Jenny would call all this fussing with clocks and mirrors.

  The Irishwoman gulps her drink and doesn’t offer Blanche one.

  Blanche keeps her eyes down. She can’t let these people guess that it’s she who brought the contagion trailing invisibly behind her from the City. That Blanche knows who’s killed Jenny, and more: that it’s all her fault.

  The men thump back in. “It’s dark as the pit out there,” complains McNamara.

  What about the moon, wasn’t there a trace of moonlight? Blanche wonders. Through the saloon’s caked window, she sees that the sky is wadded with clouds now. Au clair de la lune, on n’y voit qu’un peu.

  “No sign of anything,” adds Jordan.

  Is he gone already, Jenny’s killer? Blanche’s heart sounds in her throat at the thought of his face, the last time she saw it, gaunt with complicated rage.

  Ellen is filling two glasses.

  McNamara downs his in one swallow. “Miss? Miss?”

  Blanche twitches, registering that her host is talking to her.

  “Will you take a nerve-settler?”

  She manages to nod and hold out her hand. The whiskey is harsh in her throat; just right. As the fellow says, quips Jenny in Blanche’s head, sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

  “We’ve been round the building twice, and my grocery as well,” Jordan announces importantly, “and over past the pond to the railroad track. Not a trace.”

  As if these fools would know the trace of a murderer if he left it painted a mile wide!

  Blanche can’t say his name even in the privacy of her mind, in case it shows on her face: her awful knowledge. She knows, which doesn’t mean she understands—not a bit of it. How could he have discovered that she and Jenny were staying in the middle of nowhere, at San Miguel Station, of all places, eight miles south of downtown?

  The two men go into the front bedroom. From what Blanche can hear, they’re heaving what’s left of the guillotine window up and down on its ropes. She hopes they’ve straightened out Jenny’s poor forked body so it looks halfway human. Or thrown a sheet over her, at least, the way you might cover a chair in a vacant house? That’s what Blanche would do if only she could uncurl, make herself stir from the barrel she’s crouched on like some survivor of a shipwreck.

  Ellen’s disappeared, but the two small McNamaras emerge from the back with the fifteen-year-old, Mary Jane. Their bare toes hover at the edge of the browning shadow around the door of the front bedroom. They all stare at what the men are doing, owl-eyed. Blanche wishes somebody would shoo them away from there. She can’t. She can’t so much as stir.

  “Shotgun, must have been,” says Jordan over his shoulder as he steps out, nudging the children aside. “Ten-gauge, would you say, John?”

  The Irishman comes out shaking his shaggy head and holding his hand up to the wall lamp to squint at its sticky contents. “Twelve-gauge, more like, loaded up with buckshot. Six—no, five balls we have now, Phil, with the one you pulled out of the wall, and others stuck in the headboard still. Common number-ones, by the looks of them.”

  “Number-twos, I reckon.”

  Like small boys proud of their harvest of berries. Shaking with such rage, all of sudden, Blanche feels she might slither to the floor. Ten-gauge, twelve-gauge, where would the man have gotten a shotgun, or learned how to use it? None of it makes sense. How many days ago did he decide that the only solution—no, not solution, but the only fit expression of his fury—would be to shoot Jenny dead?

  Blanche thought she knew him. She thought a lot of things that have turned out to be bunkum.

  McNamara drops the bullets on the bar and wipes his hand ineffectively on a rag. He refills his glass and clinks it against his wife’s so hard the liquid slops. “Rest her soul,” he mutters.

  “The dogs,” says Phil Jordan suddenly. “How could some Chinaman have climbed onto your porch with the dogs there?”

  They all stare at him.

  “The smell off him, you mean?” asks McNamara.

  The little man waves that away. “Any stranger from town, hatchet man or hoodlum or the Lord knows what. Wouldn’t the dogs have gone mad barking?”

  But didn’t they? Blanche seems to remember a terrible howling.

  Mary Jane steps out of the dining room with a bucket over one arm and a mop and brush held erect like weapons in the other.

  “Let the girl into the guest chamber there now,” says her mother, “or we’ll be tracking blood and glass round the house all night.”

  The children scatter. But John McNamara holds up his hands. “Ah, we couldn’t take it on ourselves to—’tis the police should survey the scene of the crime first.” McNamara pronounces the word “polis,” with the weight on the first syllable, in his bog-Irish way. And “the scene of the crime”—that’s the jargon of a penny dreadful.

  Blanche could slap this man to the floor for his drunken slur and his saloon full of flies circling every stale drip of liquor. The lousy sheets and slick boards in the front room where something that used to be Jenny lies in the corner like garbage.

  Mary Jane sets down her cleaning things, uncertain.

  “Did you not send for the police yet?” Ellen McNamara barks.

  “What time is it?” asks her husband instead of answering.

  “How should I know?”

  They all stare at the frozen clock, whose hands still stand at death: 8:49.

  “Would you ever nip up to Mrs. Holt with the telegram, Phil?” asks McNamara.

  His neighbor’s neat hands leap, averting the notion. “Ah, now, it’s not my house.”

  “What the hell kind of difference does it make whose—”

  “I’m only saying, I’m glad to lend a hand, neighbor-like, but I don’t want cops in on top of my business.”

  “Isn’t it me sending the yoke, and paying for it too?” roars McNamara.

  “Why can’t you take the message up to the depot yourself?”

  “Because the old harpy has it in for me,” admits McNamara, lifting his glass to his lips. “Called me and mine all manner of filth a fortnight back. If I go banging on her door this late—”

  It can’t be very late yet. Blanche’s eyes slide back to the paralyzed clock.

  “What should I put in this telegram anyway?” John McNamara asks.

  “‘On the fourteenth of September,’” Ellen dictates in a grand tone, “‘at my residence, to wit, the San Miguel Hotel, San Miguel Station—’”

  “Ten words is a dollar, Mammy,” mentions Mary Jane.

  Blanche longs to get out of this room. This is some awful farce, misremembered in a dream.

  “Why would the police need us to tell them today’s bloody date?” objects McNamara. “All we need to say—”

  “‘Jenny Bonnet has been shot by persons unknown at San Miguel Station,’” suggests his daughter.

  “‘Persons unknown,’ well put, girl. Will that do?” McNamara asks.r />
  Nobody answers him.

  “Ah, the City police know her well enough, don’t they? ‘Jenny Bonnet shot by persons unknown at San Miguel Station. Stop.’”

  Blanche is swaying, dizzy.

  “You don’t need to put ‘stop’ unless there’s two lines, Dadda,” says Mary Jane.

  “‘Dead,’” says Phil Jordan. “‘Shot dead,’ you ought to say, or they might think she’s only wounded, like.”

  “‘Jenny Bonnet shot dead by persons unknown at San Miguel Station’? ‘In San Miguel Station’?” McNamara flounders, as if this is a foreign language.

  “How many words is that?” Ellen asks her daughter fretfully.

  “Eleven.”

  Blanche clambers off the barrel like a very old woman. Her bare left foot isn’t cut, she notices dully; a dancer’s soles must be tough enough for broken glass. “It’ll say on the form where the telegram’s coming from,” she points out, hoarse from all the screaming she did earlier. “Put ‘Jenny Bonnet shot dead’ and be done with it.”

  Jordan breaks the silence that follows. “Short and sweet. Shouldn’t cost two bits.”

  Blanche lowers herself to the floor and slumps, her back against the barrel.

  “The pair of us could go up to herself at the depot in a while,” says McNamara softly to his neighbor, as if proposing an excursion.

  “Another nip first, maybe, to steady ourselves,” Jordan suggests, reaching for the bottle.

  McNamara watches the level in his glass rise, then takes a long sip. “Not much the police could do in the pitch-dark, I suppose, anyway.”

  Sliding, sliding. Blanche is stretched on the floor now, her bustle a stone in the small of her back, her splattered bodice as tight as a straitjacket. The voices blur into a cloud. Just to close her eyes for half a minute—

  She jerks to consciousness to find John Jr. taking the weight of her head in his small hands, pushing a folded flour sack underneath her hair. The boy’s angular cheek almost touches hers. “Thanks,” she says, so raw it’s barely audible.

  His sky-blue eyes have the sheen of oily puddles. How’s the boy ever to forget this night? His head turns toward the front room, the speckled shadow of blood.

  “Don’t look,” says Blanche, grabbing him.

  He hisses, his hand flying up to his injured arm.

  “Sorry.”

  Ellen McNamara is suddenly on her feet. She crosses the floor and pulls her son away, making him yip with pain. “Down on your knees, you should be, Miss Blanche, thanking the merciful that you were spared.”

  Spared, repeats Blanche in her head. She’s been learning English since she was fifteen but still sometimes a word turns strange to her, as impenetrable as a pebble.

  “Leave her be, would you,” says McNamara, without lifting his head off the bar.

  “Well, tell me this,” Ellen demands, “how did every godforsaken bullet happen to miss Her Nibs here, but Jenny’s lying in there in flithers?”

  Nobody answers. Blanche can taste the hatred, like vinegar on the air. The funny thing is, these people don’t know that she’s the source of the bloodshed, the cause. But even so, she can tell they all wish it were the other way around, with their old friend Jenny sharing a late-night jar with them, and the other visitor’s body askew in the next room.

  She struggles up until she’s sitting against the barrel, the room spinning around her. It’s a fair question: How did every godforsaken bullet miss Blanche? She bent down, that’s all she can think of to explain it. She leaned down to undo the knot of her gaiter. Mary Jane’s gaiter; Blanche asked for a pair only yesterday to keep the skeeters off. Yesterday? Thursday morning. This morning, because this is Thursday night. Blanche stares at her single small boot with the gaiter taut over it. It feels as if her right foot’s been tied into its borrowed skin for a lifetime. Must ask for a knife, a knife to cut the laces. What a fluke. To owe her life to a borrowed gaiter. Because when Blanche doubled over to pick at the knotted lace, that happened to be the very moment—

  Now her heart hammers with belated panic. What if she’d stayed sitting up straight, singing one more verse—if she’d gotten her laces undone without a struggle—would there be two bodies in the next room right now, a tangle of stiffening limbs in a lake of blood? Was the gun aimed at both of them?

  No. Just at Blanche.

  It’s all a mistake.

  How stupid she’s been this evening, how she’s misunderstood from the moment the shots tore the air. Blanche’s creamy body cut down, that’s what he wanted. That makes a horrible kind of sense. Isn’t it Blanche, not Jenny, he has most reason to resent? Blanche who could be said to owe him something, everything, according to the twisted logic of men? What did Jenny ever do to him except make the error of befriending Blanche?

  A thought occurs to her, like a hand around her throat. Did he stay to look through the shattered window afterward? Does he know what he’s done, and what he’s left undone? Christ! Blanche wants to run straight out the door of the Eight Mile House—except that he might be waiting out there for her, half a mile up the County Road, to finish the botched job. She could let her dancer’s legs carry her far away, if she had any idea where in the world she’d be safe from him. Her pulse sounds so loud, the room seems to shake with it.

  II

  I HAVE GOT THE BLUES

  That Saturday night in the middle of August, Blanche wakes in her armchair. Her leg throbs painfully, reminding her of the collision with the high-wheeler, the thug at Durand’s brasserie, and her new acquaintance Jenny Bonnet, who’s stretched out on the couch, snoozing like some cat.

  What’s roused Blanche is the men coming in. “There’s some ridiculous con on the sofa with meat on his face,” Ernest is remarking to Arthur in the whimsical tone that means he’s soused.

  “Mister, the evening is over,” Arthur murmurs, leaning over the back of the couch in the pose of a spread-winged angel.

  As if Blanche would bring some micheton home. How could Arthur think that? “No, my love, it’s just a girl,” she tells him. (Speaking English, as has been their habit since the three of them stepped off the ship, because it’s the only way to get ahead in this country.) “She needed a rest.”

  “Don’t we all.” Ernest’s long jaw cracks open into a great yawn as he hangs his bowler on an empty bottle.

  “What a heart you have, chérie,” murmurs Arthur, coming over to give Blanche an appreciative kiss.

  Jenny blinks and grins at the company, pulling the steak off her eye.

  “Arthur Deneve—Jenny Bonnet,” says Blanche, waving instead of getting up. She savors her fancy man through the visitor’s eyes: his elegant eyebrows; the slim checked pants that sit just so, even in this heat; his strong hands studded with rings (black intaglio, bloodstone, a signet A); those cuff links, each painted with a tiny horse and rider, she blew so much on for his thirtieth birthday last year … For all Arthur’s love of unconventionality, he’s a scrupulous dandy.

  “Enchanté,” he says with one of his slightly mocking bows.

  “Oh, and Ernest Girard,” she adds with a gesture at the younger man.

  Who only nods. “Now, why don’t you toss her out,” Ernest suggests, “so we’ll have room to sit down?”

  Arthur raps the floor with his crystal-topped cane. “Where’s your sense of hospitality?” he scolds his friend.

  Jenny places the steak on the folded newspaper on the carpet. In the manner of a magician who’s seen better days, she pulls a crumpled handkerchief from her brown-edged cuff and wipes her face.

  Ernest lets out a mocking wolf whistle.

  Rich purple all around her eye, the lid half shut. “Am I going to have a pirate’s patch?” Jenny laughs.

  “I’ll say,” says Arthur.

  “She had a run-in with a brute chez Durand,” Blanche explains, leaving herself out of it. She never lies to Arthur, but she doesn’t need to tell the whole truth. Living together has much in common with horse-handling, it strikes her
now: best to keep the tone soothing, the signals simple.

  “So whose pantalon are you wearing?” Ernest asks the visitor.

  “My own,” says Jenny.

  “She’s just done forty days for those pants,” Blanche puts in, figuring it’s better to introduce the subject of Jenny’s recent jail time in this playful way.

  “Chacun ses goûts,” says Arthur with a tolerant smile, “‘to each his own’ and all that.”

  Ernest is down to shirtsleeves now. The fuzz is shadowing the young man’s jaw and throat already, Blanche notices, though he always shaves before going out in the evening; Arthur sometimes calls him his gorilla. Ernest is wearing exactly the same mustache as his friend this season—a wax-stiff pair of wings—but somehow Ernest’s appears stuck on. How unfair, Blanche thinks, not for the first time, that his strong features, genteel pallor, and impressive height somehow don’t add up. Arthur—a head shorter, with Mediterranean coloring, past thirty—is the peacock everyone wants to stroke.

  “Forty days, for such a triviality?” Ernest exclaims.

  “There’s nothing trivial about clothes,” Arthur reminds him in a scandalized tone, taking off his jacket and folding it carefully over the back of a cane chair. “They maketh the man, and all that.”

  “As the fellow says, there’s never been a naked president,” Jenny points out, which earns her a grin from Arthur.

  “Remember the old joke about Déjazet when she was doing breeches parts?” Ernest asks him. “She complained to a friend, ‘Half Paris thinks I’m a man.’”

  “‘Qu’importe, don’t worry’”—Arthur delivers the punch line with a leer—” ‘the other half knows you ain’t!’”

  Jenny sniggers. “I heard that before—about Adah Menken, I think it was.”

  Jokes must be like songs, Blanche supposes: the words change when they cross an ocean. “It’s funny that travesty’s all the rage onstage,” she says with a little laugh, “but if you step into the street, the same pants will get you locked up.”

  “It’s usually a fine,” Jenny tells her. “The cops been catching me and letting me go every month or two for a couple of years now, all very cat and mouse.”