Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  “Yes,” she lies, but a second too late to be convincing.

  Bohen’s mouth purses. “You’d apprised him of the fact that you and Bonnet would be lodging down here?”

  She chews her lip. “He must have found it out somehow. How else could he have tracked us down and shot Jenny?”

  “Why is female reasoning so circular?” Bohen asks of the ceiling.

  Resentment makes Blanche flush. But she’s distracted by a thought: Madame Johanna. The Prussian was the only one who knew where Blanche was going. Could Arthur possibly have browbeaten—no, Madame’s more than a match for him, but could he somehow have charmed her into letting slip where Blanche had gone?

  “Another problem,” says Bohen heavily, not looking up from his notes. “According to Mrs. Holt, the dogs didn’t bark until after the gunshots. Those curs should have gone wild as soon as a stranger came within sniffing distance.”

  That stumps Blanche.

  He lets his notebook drop shut.

  “You don’t mean to do a thing, do you?” asks Blanche. “No surprise! You’re the ones who nicked her over and over for a crime so petty it shouldn’t even be on the books …”

  A small snort. “You’re thinking of patrolmen on the beat,” says Bohen, getting to his feet. “We City detectives are an elite force, with more important things to worry about than what folks wear.”

  Nothing trivial about clothes, isn’t that what Arthur said the night they met Jenny?

  “No known address,” he murmurs. “Where did she keep the rest of her possessions?”

  Blanche is about to mention the missing bicycle, then realizes it might lead to questions about how Jenny acquired it in the first place. If he thinks of Jenny as a thief, will he take even less trouble to solve her murder? “She preferred to travel light” is all she says.

  “The remains are on their way to Gray’s Undertakers, on Dupont,” he says. “Be at the inquest Saturday—that’s tomorrow—ten o’clock. Coroner Swan insists on punctuality.”

  “But Arthur and Ernest, they’re lodging at my house on Sacramento Street,” says Blanche with an urgent gesture northward. “If you hurry—”

  “Your job’s not to tell me mine, Miss Beunon,” says Bohen. “It’s to describe what you know to a jury.”

  After the police go, Blanche finds the McNamaras over at Jordan’s letting the man from the Chronicle stand them to brandies.

  “But I haven’t seen him since yesterday,” John is saying.

  “Louis? He’s away to San Jose,” Ellen reminds him.

  The newsman is taking notes.

  “Then there’s a couple of Prussians in a shack to the west a bit,” says John. “I can never get their names straight …”

  Nobody offers Blanche a drink. Gloom settles on her as she listens. Cartwright does seem industrious, but he’s not going to see justice done by charting every outlying inhabitant of San Miguel Station. Well, if the police won’t listen to her, perhaps the jury at this inquest tomorrow will.

  “I’ll be on my way now,” she interrupts them, with a nod to the group.

  Mrs. McNamara wipes one eye and asks, “What about the room?”

  Blanche frowns, puzzled.

  “Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—that’s three dollars.”

  “Ah, now, Ellen.” Her husband sighs.

  “It’s not as if she can’t afford it …”

  This bitch is trying to shame me. Wrath revives Blanche; her pulse bangs to life. “When you rent me a room in which I can sleep without being shot at, I’ll be delighted to pay. And since we’re on the subject of money, where’s Jenny’s high-wheeler?”

  “What’s that?” asks Cartwright, pencil poised.

  “Her bicycle. It’s worth a fortune, and somebody’s pinched it.” Blanche mentioned it just to put the McNamaras on the back foot, but as she watches them exchange a dull stare, she begins to wonder. Perhaps at some point in the long misery of the night it had occurred to one of the pair that Jenny wouldn’t be needing the machine any longer? Some compensation for their trouble? “She left it behind the bushes, right beside your lousy shack,” Blanche presses on. Had the parents sent Mary Jane out before sunrise to stash the bicycle in some abandoned outhouse? Would they wait a few weeks and then lead it into the City to sell?

  “Nobody’s laid a hand on anything,” protests John McNamara.

  “What call have you to be making accusations when it’s probably the murderer that took it?” Ellen moans. And then, after another sip: “If it’s all that valuable—it might have been for the machine that she was slaughtered, I suppose.”

  Behind those bleary blue eyes, is that a glint? Blanche’s stomach turns. Could Ellen be blaming her own crime on an imaginary stranger? Two hundred dollars would be a fortune indeed for this pitiful family. Could McNamara have crept out on his own porch last night, at his wife’s urging, and shot Jenny through the window for the sake of her high-wheeler?

  Ridiculous.

  But is it? Folks get done to death for money every day of the week.

  No. Quite absurd. If the McNamaras had coveted the high-wheeler, couldn’t they simply have hidden it in a hay bale and claimed to know nothing about it until Jenny got tired of searching? They wouldn’t have needed to bring the City detective force down on their heads by committing a murder. Besides, Blanche doubts this pair would have the intelligence and energy for theft, even. They can barely manage to feed their children.

  No, the real reason it’s absurd to try to pin Jenny’s killing on this potato-faced family is that Blanche knows it was Arthur. Only his rage, only his vindictive malignity, only his need to punish her, could explain the horror of last night.

  “If the yoke does turn up, we’ll send it straight to Sosthenes, of course,” says McNamara.

  “Who’s that?” asks Cartwright.

  “Her father, over in Oakland.”

  Blanche stares. Jenny still had family in this part of the world?

  “Sosthenes Bonnet, this would be?” Cartwright’s gesturing to Phil Jordan to refill the four stubby glasses.

  “He and the missus were bright stars back in the Rush. Comedy, tragedy, opera, the whole shebang.” McNamara sighs into his brandy. “Sosthenes pushes a mop in a barrelhouse now. Jenny takes the ferry across every month or two to slip him some cash—used to,” he corrects himself, fumbling a sign of the cross.

  Jenny’s parents, musical actors? Blanche’s irritation surges. Her friend always implied she had no kin left, or none worth mentioning. Why would she have disowned a pair of former bright stars living close at hand by San Francisco Bay? Sometimes Blanche found Jenny to be a fascinating puzzle—but at other times, just damn mulish. Evading and prevaricating and equivocating just for the fun of it, even when there was nothing to hide.

  Back in the destroyed front bedroom at the Eight Mile House, Blanche finds her straw hat in a drawer. She sets it forward on her head and lowers the limp lace, stares herself down in the mirror. She’s a woman with no man, no friend, no child.

  As she turns to go, her foot catches the edge of something sticking out from under the bed.

  Burlap. Jenny’s frog sack. Full of the creatures she caught up on Sweeney Ridge on Wednesday. Only a day and a half ago, but it feels like a lifetime.

  Does Blanche’s eye detect a small movement? Surely not. How could these tiny hoppers live through what happened in this room last night?

  On an impulse she doesn’t understand, Blanche grabs the sack by the neck; the dampened material is surprisingly heavy. She walks out the front door and around to the back of the Eight Mile House, carpetbag swinging on one elbow, frog sack held away from her skirts.

  The small girl, Kate, is at the pond. Mud-colored hair pulled back in a punitive braid under a straw hat oddly like Blanche’s. What is she, eight? Nine? Waltzing with her one-armed cloth doll and whispering some Irish ballad.

  Blanche struggles with the knotted burlap, abrading a finger on the rough cloth.

  “Wha
t you doing, miss?” asks Kate.

  “Letting some frogs out.”

  “What for?”

  She can’t think of an explanation. “To go back to their people, because I don’t want them.”

  “Frogs ain’t people. Except if you mean Frenchies,” Kate adds confusedly.

  “Clearly I don’t,” snaps Blanche, fighting with the knot. After a minute she adds, “Why do you call us that—Frogs?”

  “Frenchies?” Kate furrows her forehead. “Because you eat frogs, I suppose.”

  “We’re hardly the only ones.”

  “Yeah, but you started it. And horses too,” the girl adds with a frown.

  Blanche considers that. It’s true, in Paris she was raised not to be sentimental about food.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spots the five-year-old, knock-kneed in the bulrushes. How long would it take Jeremiah’s soused parents to notice if he never came home from the pond? It occurs to Blanche that children expire every minute unless someone’s fighting to keep them alive: they sicken, suffocate, or burn. The odds against any one of them making it past a first birthday … “Shouldn’t you pull your little brother out of there before he drowns himself?” asks Blanche, too sharply.

  “He knows all right,” says Kate.

  The boy is squatting in the water now, slapping the green-scummed surface with pleasure.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Jenny’s high-wheeler?” asks Blanche.

  Both children nod.

  She’s excited. “Where?”

  “Here, when she rode it,” says Jeremiah with a jerk of his head.

  “No, I mean today? Have you seen it since she—”

  The boy’s eyes are vacant. The girl shakes her head, and then her doll’s head. But then, thinks Blanche, her father and mother might have prepared Kate for that question; threatened her, to keep her mouth shut …

  Oh, Blanche, let it go. She knows in her gut it wasn’t the McNamaras.

  Blanche’s barely got the bag open before a biggish frog startles her by leaping through. She drops the sack. In ones and twos, the creatures spasm their way out. Some are only the length of her thumb, yet they’ve so much go in them, hurling themselves across the few feet of baked ground toward the water as if they can smell it.

  “Can I’ve a few?” asks Kate with an expression Blanche belatedly recognizes as hungry.

  “Help yourself,” says Blanche.

  The little girl seizes a fat frog and smacks its head on a nearby rock. “Jenny said to bash ’em right away, or a knife to the neck, it’s only fair. Skinning them alive, that’s uncalled-for,” recites Kate. Her pocketknife out already.

  Jeremiah picks up a hinged pair of legs and makes a jiggling puppet of them. “If you salt them, they dance by their selves,” he confides to Blanche.

  She’s heard of that trick but never seen it. If she’s obliged to watch a five-year-old perform it this morning, the top of her head is going to explode.

  Is that Cartwright’s wide sun hat outside the Canadian’s log cabin? This pallid mouse is thorough, Blanche has to grant him that; he clearly means to interrogate every living soul within sight of San Miguel Station. She almost pities the man for his wasted efforts in this heat. Perhaps she should tell him more about Arthur. Convince him to go up to town, to Sacramento Street, and ask around. Bohen wouldn’t listen to Blanche, but can’t an inquisitive newsman dig up evidence of guilt just as well as a so-called detective?

  But here comes a puff of smoke on the railroad in the west. If Blanche stops to talk to Cartwright she’ll miss this train, and what if this is the last one heading into the City today? She mustn’t get stuck here for another night. So Blanche sets off at a run for the depot.

  On the platform Mrs. Holt sits at her stall as if awaiting a horde of customers. Candies twisted into their dusty papers, misshapen apples, one incongruously bright orange … Blanche’s mouth waters and it occurs to her to buy it, but something makes her unwilling to carry away anything from San Miguel Station.

  “Second class,” she says, raising her voice to be heard over the shriek of the incoming train. The engine belches out its bilious gray. She scrabbles for coins in her pocketbook. She can’t quite afford second, but she never travels third. She’ll need to get hold of some real cash soon, but she won’t worry about that now.

  Nobody gets off the train. Blanche heaves her carpetbag ahead of her into the brightly painted carriage. She drops onto a two-person seat, spreads her skirt across the thin cushion to repel any man who might think of sharing it with her. She examines her boots, rubs off the worst of the dust on the aisle carpet. Breathes in the stink of coal, watching the small litter of buildings shrink behind her. Removes a bit of smut from her eye, and San Miguel Station’s gone.

  Back in the middle of August. When Jenny Bonnet heads off across the City in the green shirt Arthur’s lent her that humid Sunday morning, the other three fall into their beds.

  Blanche wakes hours later, twisted in her nightgown with a head that’s pounding worse than her bashed-up leg, sun stabbing her in the eye. (Arthur claims it would be intolerably bourgeois to hang curtains. He and Blanche have squabbled over it just about every morning since the heat wave began.)

  Her dream comes back to her now, an endless loop from last night’s conversation about the photograph. What’s wrong with your baby?

  Nothing.

  What kind of farm?

  It’s for his health.

  What’s wrong with him?

  Beside her lies Arthur, very still, his cheek marble. Tiny black hairs thrusting through perfect pores: a forest sprung up overnight. Blanche should keep gazing at her naked fancy man instead of brooding over some stranger’s nosy questions.

  Will Arthur mind if she wakes him up? Not if she does it right. Not if her hand takes its time snaking through the crumpled sheets.

  Her eye falls on the little carte de visite in its frame. So much of the baby’s swaddled, it’s hard to get a sense of his face from it. Two weeks old, three? She remembers carrying P’tit up a flight of stairs to her Scottish lodgers’ studio. Blanche was feeling almost enthusiastic that day; not yet too exhausted, because P’tit slept a lot. They may not have welcomed the news of a child, she and Arthur, but they had good intentions, didn’t they? They meant to make room for the little stranger in their life somehow, to carry the metamorphosis off with grace. Family life, bohemian-style. But everything changed a little while after that photograph, when P’tit got hungrier and began to gnaw Blanche, and her breast swelled monstrously, the fever making her loco …

  So who was that jailbird to interrogate Blanche about having him nursed out, anyhow? To make her feel negligent for not having inspected the Hoffmans’ farm inch by inch, and obscurely guilty for not keeping P’tit at home in Chinatown!

  On his visits to her, at the House of Mirrors, he’s always so … limp. Blanche has a private uneasiness—so private that she’s never spoken it aloud—that he may have been born a little lacking. That perhaps all those things she did with all those michetons while she was carrying P’tit inside her did some obscure damage. But surely someone would have mentioned it, if so—the midwife, Madame, Arthur, the uniformed nurse who brings him into town once a month; somebody would have told Blanche if he was defective. So, then, the way P’tit is must be the way babies are.

  She shakes her head to banish these gloomy thoughts. And begins to sing, very faintly, to get herself back in a lewd mood, that melody that was on every woman’s lips when Blanche, Arthur, and Ernest left France, and when they stepped off the Utopia on the other side of the ocean. “‘Voici la fin de la semaine—’” It’s the weekend, and the lady’s looking for love wherever she can find it. The lines prowl up and down, feline.

  Qui veut m’aimer?

  Je l’aimerai.

  I’ll love whoever loves me, and why not? Looking down at herself this morning, as she slides closer to her sleeping man, Blanche is grateful for her white sleekness; inside her night
gown, hip and belly and breast are seal-plump and ageless. When her clothes are off, who’d know she’s twenty-four? She murmurs on:

  Qui veut mon âme?

  Elle est à prendre.

  Who wants me should take me, the singer urges.

  Blanche finds Arthur’s sleep-swollen cigare with her hand, then with her lips, casting the lightest of spells. As cocks go, it’s not particularly long, but it’s the thickest she’s ever encountered. She could have him jammed inside her before he even knows it. She did that all the time when she was pregnant—desperate, night, noon, and morning, and Arthur liked her that way. If you have an itch, why not scratch it?

  And surely Blanche has got the right. Doesn’t she treat her mac well, lavish gifts on him, fund every scheme he dreams up? Arthur’s still asleep, but who could object to waking this way, up to the hilt in a woman’s mouth as if some dirty dream has come true? Besides, what better cure for a sore head …

  “Putain,” Arthur swears under his breath, eyes suddenly wide, and he smiles, because what man wouldn’t? And what woman wouldn’t be glad to make him smile that way with every trick her grappling tongue can invent?

  It’s the slight movement of the sticky air that lets her know the door of the bedroom has opened. Blanche is only half surprised when she notices Arthur’s eyes fixed over her shoulder: that luxurious look of watching himself being watched. The expression he used to wear on the platform, standing very erect, waiting to catch the fly bar.

  “Don’t let me interrupt, mon vieux” comes Ernest’s voice, half yawning, from the doorway.

  And from this position Blanche can’t see if Arthur’s beckoned to his young friend or if Ernest has simply walked in or if Blanche could even be said to have invited him, by a wriggle, if ever so slight, or by simply not protesting, because her mouth is full, after all. “You don’t mind, chérie,” Arthur murmurs, his damp hand coiling her hair, not a question but a statement, a reminder, a reassurance, because why would Blanche mind being looked at from any angle? The lovely motion of her hips under white cotton, the dip and duck and bend of her head … Blanche la Danseuse, known for movements so beautifully obscene that customers spill down Sacramento Street boasting of the banknotes they’ve thrown under her smooth heels.