Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  “Do you visit much?” asks Jenny, putting on her waistcoat.

  What a talent this one has for putting her nose in other people’s business. And her finger on sore points. “A nurse from the farm brings him,” says Blanche, as if answering the question.

  Not to 815 Sacramento Street; P’tit hasn’t been back here since Arthur took him away to Madame. The nurse totes him in a basket to meet Blanche at the House of Mirrors. In the early months it was every week, without fail, even before Blanche had her health back. Of course she missed her little one; what kind of unnatural mother would she have been if she hadn’t missed him? Arthur came with her; two or three times, anyway. These days, the visits have slid to once a month, more or less, without Blanche recalling who set that schedule. They bore her and leave her vaguely uneasy. Blanche smiles and nods at her son’s slightly misshapen face for a quarter of an hour, privately wondering why he’s got a faint reek about him despite being trussed up in layers of starched linen. She once asked the taciturn, uniformed nurse, who looked offended and told her that was how they smelled, infants. Blanche doesn’t make the mistake of trying to pick P’tit up anymore; some babies just won’t stand for being fussed over, according to the nurse, who should know, Blanche supposes. She always brings him a molasses stick to suck, at least.

  If she weren’t so busy all the time … It’ll be different when P’tit is old enough to respond more to her company, or at least recognize her. She’s just waiting till he’s got some spark in him, till he could be said to be thriving. Till he’s grown into the makings of a son worthy of the name of P’tit Arthur Deneve.

  “What kind of farm,” Jenny wonders aloud as she buttons her jacket, “dairy, poultry, tillage?”

  “Why do you ask?” says Blanche, nettled, instead of admitting she doesn’t know. Really, why should she allow herself to be interrogated about the finer points of the arrangement? It hardly matters whether the Hoffmans keep cows or chickens; P’tit’s too young to notice. He won’t remember, any more than Blanche recalls her first years. Dairy or goddamn tillage! She hasn’t been out to the farm yet, as it happens. Madame vouches for the place and seems happy to arrange P’tit’s visits to the House of Mirrors, so much more convenient than Blanche going out to the Hoffmans’. It all works perfectly well, so who does this stranger think she is, with her prodding and probing?

  The front door; that must be Ernest with the bread. “A table, messieurs-dames,” calls Arthur, and they go in for breakfast.

  At San Miguel Station, the fifteenth of September stops and starts, stops and starts. Only when Blanche notices she’s twisting her neck to get her face out of a puddle of light does she realize that it’s day. And then the terror seizes her again as she remembers: Arthur tried to kill her last night. It was only the wildest stroke of luck that shielded her, a one-in-a-million chance. There’s not a mark on Blanche except a tiny graze on her cheek from flying glass. It should have been me, not poor Jenny.

  “Care for a wash, Miss Blanche?” offers Mary Jane McNamara.

  She looks down at her ghastly browned clothes. “Have the police—”

  “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of them yet,” says Mary Jane. “Dadda had to send another telegram in case the first one went astray, and Mrs. Holt wanted to know if he was doubting her competence.” Her tone bubbles. This murder is clearly the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened in the girl’s vicinity.

  Blanche remembers being fifteen: the dull, shackled sensation that life is something that happens to other people. And then one day, with no warning, it begins.

  He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease,

  A daring young man on the flying trapeze.

  Blanche went to see the circus, that’s all she did, a harmless way to spend a winter afternoon. And found herself gawking up at a beautiful olive-skinned man flying like a knife across the gilded ceiling. The crowd sang along to that year’s hit waltz:

  He’d smile from the bar on the people below,

  And one night he smiled on my love.

  She winked back at him and she shouted, “Bravo!”

  As he hung by his nose up above.

  Blanche hung around the stage door for hours, not caring that she was cold or that she was missing her supper, at least, or earning herself a beating. At last he came out, in street clothes and half drunk already, the lovely man; his greasepaint was meticulously wiped off but his face still held the eye. One arm slung around a lanky boy with the beginnings of a mustache. (That was Ernest; Blanche didn’t pay him much attention at first. Didn’t know how many years ago Arthur had taken this orphan on as his protégé, his circus brother.) She hung around, chattering and flirting as hard as she could, till night fell.

  She came back the next day. He was a thrilling exotic to her: Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve. Twenty-two, and a man of the world; he’d read things, been places, tried everything. He boasted of being a bohemian, and Blanche didn’t even know the word, but she swore she was one too. She was fifteen, and barely had a bosom yet, but it was just as well, because circus girls needed to be as light as air, and soon Arthur was persuading his Monsieur Loyal to try her out on the Shetland pony …

  But what does all that matter now? What does it prove? That Arthur was a fine piece of manhood until this summer? Until circumstances conspired to—no, let’s be honest. Until Blanche broke him. Broke his heart, his spirit. Broke the charming man Arthur seemed to be, cracked that shell and let the devil seep out. Maybe it just proves she was an idiot to fall in love with him nine years ago.

  Her brain’s still moving at half-pace. It must be tiredness. And shock. If Arthur wanted me dead last night, he wants me dead today. She’d better run for her life. But not in these clothes, Blanche decides, staring down at herself.

  Like some automaton, she follows Mary Jane out of the Eight Mile House. On the threshold between the saloon and the rickety porch, her feet lock, refusing to carry her into the hard brightness. She straightens her aching shoulders and makes herself step forward, steeling herself against imagined gunfire. (As if muscles could repel buckshot!) The air’s heating up already, dusty; better than the stink of blood and whiskey, at least. Blanche puts up one hand to shield her face. Where’s her straw hat? Even under these circumstances, she finds—even today—she’s not willing to get a freckle. Her translucent pallor is one of the things Blanche is known for, the promise in her name. Otherwise she’d just be plain Adèle Beunon again.

  Blanche scans the ragged settlement of San Miguel Station for any sign of danger. There’s Jordan’s poor excuse for a country store, just across the baked yard to her left; his low frame building and McNamara’s squat by the County Road like a pair of robbers planning to waylay travelers. Right now the road’s a powdering line with not a vehicle, not a person on it as far as the eye can see. A stone’s throw to the northeast stands the flat brown railroad depot, ruled by Mrs. Holt. In the distance to the southwest, the log cabin where that pair of Canadians scratch out a living—Louis, the man goes by, Blanche remembers, but whether first name or surname, she doesn’t know. Farther out, a scattering of shacks; what laborers or squatters subsist there? Then nothing but sandlots, ruled by rats and fleas.

  “This way,” calls Mary Jane impatiently, beckoning her round the back of the Eight Mile House.

  Blanche holds her breath as she follows the girl past the tiny, fetid box with a crescent cut into the door: the toilet where the twelve-year-old took fright at the sound of the shots. “How’s your brother?”

  “Wee Jeremiah? Sick with nightmares half the night.”

  “No, John Jr. His arm.”

  “I couldn’t tell you.” Mary Jane tosses her head. “That fella’s always mooching off on his own.”

  Who’d be an eldest girl if she had a choice, really? Blanche wonders. All the mopping and potato-peeling and minding the little ones …

  An old sheet held up with sticks passes for a screen, a pail of pond water behind it. With clumsy hands Blanche pi
cks at her encrusted buttons. How muddy blood turns as it hardens. Now she’s got the shakes, like some drunk shuddering outside a barrelhouse before dawn. “Mary Jane?” she calls hoarsely.

  No answer.

  She clears her throat and tries again. “Mary Jane? If you could—”

  But when Blanche puts her head around the sheet, there’s no one there. Only her own large carpetbag, incongruously festive with its orange arabesques. A stain on the top that’s been wiped off, not carefully enough.

  Well. These people met her only Tuesday. To the McNamaras, Blanche is just some stranger left behind like storm debris on their doorstep. They may even have guessed by now that it’s she who brought this horror to San Miguel Station.

  They’re trash themselves, she reminds herself. Down on your knees, you should be, Miss Blanche, Ellen McNamara had the gall to tell her last night. The grandiose slattern clearly thinks herself a cut above Blanche. But didn’t they all leave that kind of humbug back in the Old World? You Frog whore, that’s what Ellen would like to call Blanche, no doubt, except that the woman probably can’t bring herself to say such a word because the Irish are the prudes of Europe. (Always have more children than they can feed, then go round crossing themselves as if they don’t know what fucking is.)

  Blanche stares at her hands, willing them to be steady. Surely she can do this much, get her own stinking clothes off. First she tackles her right boot, finally undoing that wretched gaiter. Then the blood-spotted mauve skirt, the bodice, the sleeves so narrow she can barely wrench them over her knuckles, the stiffened corset, sweaty chemise, petticoats, and knickers—she drops them all on the sandy ground.

  Blanche avoids looking down at herself. Nothing glamorous about her in this brutal light: raw, peeled, hideously bare, with the reek of death about her. Scooping the water over her shoulder fast, she scrubs herself with the rag. For all the heat of the morning she shudders as if she’s scraping off her own skin. She takes the nailbrush to her long fingernails so hard that her fingertips are soon sore.

  Small mercies: Blanche has an extra corset in her bag to cinch her into some simulacrum of her usual self. She rotates her bustle, checking the cotton sheath of every metal band. One brown stain, the size of a penny … but that can’t be helped, and Blanche doesn’t mean to trail around as flat-skirted as some hick, not today of all days. She tightens the tapes as if girding on armor.

  The bag holds no garment quite right for the morning after a murder. She finds herself dithering between a skirt with orange and white stripes and a blue plaid one with deep matching flounces. Hurry, hurry. But telling herself that doesn’t make it any easier to choose. This is absurd. A prickling burr of a tune dances in the back of her mind: “Then I was gayest of the gay …”

  After yanking on the blue skirt, Blanche adds a yellow jacket-bodice, yellow striped stockings, and a pair of white mules with little heels. Pulls out her second-best parasol. That’s all she’s got, all she thought to stuff in her carpetbag before she marched away from number 815 Sacramento Street exactly a week ago. Everything else Blanche owns in the world is still there. Her apartment, her whole goddamn building; it’s her name on the deed. But she can’t go home, can she? Home is the last place in the world she should go if she means to stay alive another day.

  She checks the bottom of the bag. Her fingers meet a bottle. A diaper. A beloved black doorknob.

  Blanche stares at them with prickling eyes. She was forgetting P’tit. How—

  Because I’ve been shot at, she wants to scream. Because I’ve been caked with my friend’s blood. Of course Blanche has never really forgotten her son. All week, since she found the macs gone from the apartment, and P’tit with them, she’s been looking for the baby, fretting over him, waiting for the moment she’ll get him back safe. Right now she’s just preoccupied with staying alive.

  The word, like a fist in the face. Alive.

  Blanche crouches on the dusty ground. Not sorrow, exactly, more like a weight, a cartwheel rolling across her chest and coming to a stop. A sense of her own stupidity so overwhelming that she can’t draw a breath. Because what reason has she to believe that Arthur hasn’t done away with the baby too?

  Think it through, she orders herself. With a crazy sort of logic, like Arthur’s. Say that he somehow discovered where Blanche was hiding. He bought or borrowed a shotgun and set out for San Miguel Station yesterday evening. What would he have done with the baby? Left him with Ernest? No; Ernest can’t stand P’tit’s caterwauling. Would Arthur have hired some neighbor or one of their old lodgers to keep an eye on P’tit while Papa was off murdering Maman?

  Blanche would like to believe that. She really would. Even if she never sees P’tit again, if she could believe him alive and well …

  But P’tit’s his own son!

  He’s always been Arthur’s, Blanche reminds herself, but that hasn’t meant Arthur’s been particularly interested in the baby’s welfare, or even his existence. After having P’tit on his hands for a whole week, Arthur could well have worked up a wave of bitterness big enough to extinguish any last trace of parental feeling. After all, if Arthur’s capable of firing through a window at the women he’s claimed to love for nine years, then he must be equally capable of ridding himself of the inconvenient burden of P’tit. It would be so much easier than killing a woman. A one-year-old who can barely sit, who hasn’t yet figured out how to crawl, let alone walk or run … it wouldn’t even take a bullet.

  No. Stop it. You don’t know. So don’t speculate.

  She presses her last few bits of clean linen into the bag to block P’tit’s things from her view. Her face is slick with sweat. This weather must be about to break; how much heat and humidity can the air hold? “Then I was gayest of the gay—” Curse it, how does it go?

  Jenny would know. Would have known, Blanche corrects herself. Hundreds of songs cached in that narrow head; thousands, maybe.

  A quick squint at her face in her tiny mirror tells Blanche that she can’t do much except rub Jenny’s blood off it with the smeary rag. Don’t dwell on it. Blood’s just blood, isn’t that what Jenny told old Maria? The tiny cut on Blanche’s right cheek from the window glass has formed a little scab already; how fast the living body tidies itself up. She pulls her lank brown hair into a knot, nets it, and stabs it with half a dozen pins.

  Snap goes the clasp of her carpetbag. Blanche gathers her stained clothes into a bundle with shaking fingers.

  The tune finally comes to her in a rush: one of Jenny’s. Delivered with a stage frown, but a smirk behind it, and a few syncopated steps.

  Life was a rosy dream I vow,

  It seems a horrid nightmare now!

  Then I was gayest of the gay,

  But I have got the blues today.

  Blanche puts up her parasol with a click of steel. The green silk blocks the worst of the light. Emerging from behind the hanging sheet with the rank bundle of clothes gripped and held at arm’s length, she stares around for anywhere to dispose of it.

  Near the pond, a tiny bonfire sends up its smoky flag. A small child beside it. As Blanche gets closer, she sees it’s John Jr. With dry eyes he blinks up at her from where he squats. One hand is tucked into his belt, the hurt shoulder held high.

  Paper flares and blackens: an old volume that says Ragged Dick, something about A Bad Boy … John Jr. leans in to stir up the fire with a long stick. Blanche recognizes the green and gold binding of Around the World in Eighty Days. “What are you burning her books for?” she demands.

  “She gave them to me,” he sobs.

  Well, it’s as good a way of grieving as any, Blanche supposes, even if there is something heathen about it. Jenny would have done the same. If things had gone the other way last night—if it were Blanche who’d met Arthur’s bullets with her body—then Jenny would probably be chucking not just Blanche’s clothes but every trace of her on a bonfire this morning.

  “May I—” She gestures with the bundle instead of speaking the words.
>
  His face turns puce. One of these boys caught in the quicksand of puberty who’re mortified by everything to do with the opposite sex, Blanche decides. Ignorant about the whole business, trapped here with no girls to ogle except his big sister; the less he knows, the more his imagination bulges. A handshake from a farmer’s wife could probably make this lad hard, let alone the sight of the underclothes of a genuine Parisian burlesque dancer. Not that he’s likely to be aware of exactly how Miss Blanche earns her daily bread, but instinct always trumps knowledge.

  There’s a mongrel beside her, sniffing at the bloodstained folds excitedly. She kicks at it.

  John Jr. leaps up so fast Blanche is startled into taking a step backward. But the boy’s seizing the clothes with one arm, pressing the whole foul mass of them to his chest. Blanche is ludicrously embarrassed that a stripling of twelve is handling her petticoats.

  He tosses the lot onto the fire. Foul smoke billows and for a moment she thinks the clothes have suffocated the flames. Then John Jr. pokes the fire with his stick and it begins to lick busily again.

  Blanche stands as stiff as a fashion plate and keeps her eyes north on the distant hills that cut San Miguel Station off from the City proper. She’s gripping the wooden handle of her parasol, she finds, as if its spindly frame and thin dome of silk might somehow lift her out of here. “Thank you,” she says, so hoarsely that she’s not sure the boy can even hear her over the crackle of the flames.

  With no warning, he flings himself against Blanche, his head on her chest, so hard she can feel a button dig into her sternum, and his good arm pulls her tight. For all the clumsiness of his embrace, John Jr. is the only one in this derelict hamlet who seems to give a rat’s ass about Blanche. So she hugs him back.

  His words are muffled.

  “What?” she says, pulling away.

  “It’s all right, Miss Blanche.” The boy’s slate eyes are raging with misery. “Going to be all right now.”

  An odd phrase; a remark some lost-for-words adult would make. “Oh, I doubt that,” murmurs Blanche, and staggers away toward the Eight Mile House.