Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  Now Blanche feels at least a little cooler, and P’tit must too, though he still seems as hot as a baked potato to her touch.

  He stares in the vague direction of her bare body. Michetons pay well for such a view, she’d like to tell him, petulant. Her swan-white flesh is no comfort to this child, no home. He doesn’t know her from Eve.

  “What shall we do now?” Blanche asks aloud.

  No response except a shattering cough.

  “Can you even hear me?” It strikes her that P’tit could be deaf and dumb, some kind of cretin for all she knows. Blank-eyed, barely alive. Why did she ever let her body make such a mistake? There are always ways—

  Blanche shudders. That’s a notion that shouldn’t occur to a mother. Much too late to wish this small life undone. And yet she does wish it, every time her eyes approach him.

  Not his fault. Her fault. For everything Blanche did before he was born, and everything she’s failed to do since.

  Damn Jenny Bonnet and her questions. And me for listening to them.

  She tries to concentrate on practical matters. She rather regrets having thrown the foul little shirt in the stove, because she hasn’t got anything else to put him in. It’ll be all ash-caked now. Could she bear to poke the thing out and scrub it in what’s left of the water? No, she’ll leave P’tit nude for the moment, because the air might do his scabby skin a little good. But of course, he’ll be pissing himself again soon if she doesn’t find something …

  Blanche looks through the mound of clothes on her chair until she finds an old petticoat. She rips it into three pieces. Forms one of them into a diaper, a crude loincloth, really; it gives P’tit the air of some small saint in his final sufferings. The cloth keeps coming loose on the left. He scratches at his hairline as if something invisible is biting him.

  If she could just run out to get the things she needs—but she can’t leave him here. Perhaps he does know how to roll, he’s just too scared to do it while this strange woman’s watching. Babies left alone wind up dead; Blanche has read about such cases. She’ll have to haul him with her and manage somehow … but no, she can’t carry a stark-naked infant around town. She’s washed them both, Blanche reminds herself pathetically. She’s done that much.

  With nothing on but a chemise and a petticoat, she carries the baby from room to room to pass the time. She tries to keep her eyes off from the strangest parts of him: ankles, wrists, that sinister breastbone. At least he smells less disgusting now. “This is where Papa and I sleep,” she says. “There’s your caca on the bedspread that I’ll have to wash before your father’s very fine nose gets a whiff of it. And this room is where Ernest—your uncle Ernest,” she improvises, though the phrase doesn’t sound quite right, “he sleeps here when he’s not at Madeleine’s—that’s his lady friend—and this is where we make our coffee and heat up dishes from restaurants …”

  The knock at the door makes Blanche spin around so fast she almost drops the baby. “Arthur!” She says it in relief but it comes out accusatory somehow.

  P’tit bursts into tears. Coughs. Cries on.

  “Chut,” she says urgently, rocking him too hard. “Shush now for Papa.” Crucial for him not to make a bad first impression.

  It’s not Arthur at all, it’s some skinny gamin. Blanche wasn’t thinking straight; why would Arthur need to knock? She realizes she’s not even dressed, and she presses the baby to her chemise to cover herself up. The child gawks at her, handing over a note in familiar copperplate on pearly paper headed with the address of the House of Mirrors.

  My dear,

  I understand from Frau Hoffman that you’ve withdrawn your little one from her establishment. If I can be of service in helping you make new arrangements, do let me know. Otherwise I will expect you for your regular performance on Wednesday.

  Blanche tears the note down the middle. New arrangements indeed. That treacherous salope can find herself another star dancer and see how her customers like it. “There’s my answer,” she says, handing the boy the scraps.

  He’s whistling as he trots down the stairs—not merrily, more as if he needs the rhythm to keep his feet moving.

  A sense of anticlimax settles over her as soon as he’s gone: a cloak of lead on Blanche’s shoulders. P’tit has pissed right through his diaper and her fresh petticoat.

  Twenty minutes later Arthur finally turns up. Without Ernest, for once, thank God. And it’s all going to be fine, because he’s utterly charming. He kisses Blanche as if he hasn’t had the chance to do it in weeks and points his pencil-slim cane at the wizened new arrival like a magician flourishing his wand. “I didn’t know we were to be honored with a visit, monsieur. How you’ve grown! Viens ici, mon gars.” Arthur blows on him and makes comical noises.

  P’tit keeps up his frozen stare.

  “What’s this nasty thing?” Arthur tugs at the slick doorknob, but P’tit holds it tight.

  Blanche cries out, “Don’t.”

  He tilts those slim eyebrows that he gave his son.

  It all spills out of her then, the whole sordid story of the Hoffman place, the weeklies, the paid-ups …

  Arthur murmurs in outrage but interrupts before she’s even finished. “You didn’t know what it was like,” he soothes her.

  You, he says, not we. And certainly not I. As if it weren’t Arthur who’d made the deal with Madame Johanna when Blanche was out of her mind with fever last September. Eight dollars a week: the price of three good blankets, say, or a best-quality corset. It sounds too little for proper care, now that Blanche is letting herself—making herself—think about it. No, probably not even eight dollars, it occurs to her; Madame, she knows, would skim off a percentage.

  “Whatever made the Bonnet girl start asking about the baby in the first place?” mutters Arthur. P’tit, slumped in his lap, is gnawing on the doorknob.

  Blanche hesitates. “It was—she happened to see his picture on my bedside table.” That’s not an answer. The irritation just below the surface of Arthur’s voice is exactly what she’s been feeling herself, but now she’s compelled to justify their new acquaintance. “They were just the sort of questions that anyone would have …” She trails off. Questions that Blanche and Arthur should have been asking all year instead of busying themselves with their own pleasures.

  His tenderest smile. “You’re looking utterly exhausted, chérie.”

  Blanche appreciates the sympathy, but it stings too. He and Ernest were eager enough to fuck her this morning; how can she be so transformed already?

  “Gulli gulli!” Arthur tickles P’tit under the chin but gets no response. Takes both the tiny hands in one of his, lifts the limp arms. “Blanche. What’s this?”

  His tone makes her hurry over and peer at the rash of red spots in both the tiny armpits. “Putain de merde!” she curses. It couldn’t be. Could it?

  “Probably just a rash. Don’t you think?”

  Blanche can’t speak, she’s so scared.

  “A summer rash, where the sweat’s built up,” says Arthur more firmly, lowering P’tit’s hands. “If it was—”

  “Face, hands, and feet,” interrupts Blanche. She’s read in the papers, that’s how it starts. She’s read other things too, such as the fact that it kills every third person who catches it.

  “His face is fine,” says Arthur.

  She examines P’tit close up: scaly red patches, especially under his chin where the drool collects, but there’s no rash, strictly speaking, either there or on his minute palms and soles.

  “Well,” says Arthur, rising to his feet and handing P’tit back to her, “I should start looking for a new place for him. Something much more wholesome, farther out of the City …”

  Blanche shakes her head.

  Arthur’s adjusting his waistcoat in front of the mirror, smoothing the curve of his fob and its dangling trinkets: the lucky crystal pig Blanche got him back in Paris, a coral hand holding a tiny dagger …

  How to explain that the location isn�
�t what makes a hell? “You didn’t see it.”

  “So we’ll choose the next place carefully, together. A real farm—”

  “No.” Blanche almost shouts it. “We—I was an idiot,” she says carefully, “to think eight bucks a week could buy the kind of looking-after he needs.”

  “So we’ll pay twelve.” Grandly: “Fifteen if we have to.”

  “These places …” She swallows her sob as if it’s a hard crust. “The whole trade’s a swindle.” She tightens her grip on P’tit, and he starts to squirm. “We’re keeping our baby right here.”

  A gentlemanly sigh. “We’ll get someone in, then.”

  “Yes,” says Blanche, letting out her breath. Someone to help, that’s all she needs. It was on the tip of her tongue to suggest, out of long habit, that he ask Madame; she almost laughs. “The sooner the better.”

  “Perhaps, for now, Gudrun?”

  “Nowhere to be found,” laments Blanche.

  “Oh, but I passed her on the stairs,” says Arthur, making for the door.

  A couple of minutes later he’s back with the young seamstress.

  Under her gleaming straw-colored braids, Gudrun’s wearing a wary look. “I know nothing,” she says, hands up like a shield. “I was youngest in my family.”

  “So was I. We just need a little assistance,” says Blanche soothingly. She looks around for Arthur, but he’s disappeared into their bedroom. “Only until we find a nurse.”

  The Swede shakes her head, eyes on P’tit as if he might explode. “What he got?”

  Blanche is at a loss.

  “Is it disease?”

  She clears her throat, outraged to hear her own fears stated so bluntly. “He’s perfectly well, thank you!”

  Both women watch the baby, who slobbers on his doorknob and lets out a low wail.

  “He’s hungry, that’s all,” Blanche insists. “Will you run down to the store for some milk and a bottle with a teat to put it in? Or hold him while I—”

  “I run down,” says Gudrun, fast.

  The girl clearly doesn’t want to touch him.

  Clamping her teeth together, Blanche fetches some coins from her pocketbook.

  Arthur emerges and pours himself some wine to sip while changing his dusty boots.

  “Well, she’s not going to be much use,” Blanche tells him, listening to the ugly sound of Gudrun’s low heels clumping down the stairs.

  “I’ll pop out this minute and start asking around.”

  Blanche hunches her shoulders to ease them. “Mon amour—what if she’s right about the baby, though?”

  He hoists his eyebrows as he adjusts the line of his striped pantaloons. “As she was the first to admit, she doesn’t know anything.”

  Blanche glances down at P’tit in her lap. “His forehead—his chest—he bulges where he shouldn’t. Look at his wrists and ankles.” She whispers it, as if no one but the two responsible parties must hear. “He won’t meet my eye. He doesn’t even know how to smile—”

  As if wounded by this list of his flaws, P’tit starts to cry, which makes him cough again. Blanche joggles him, clicking her tongue the way she would to calm a horse, which he doesn’t enjoy at all.

  “Pauv’ bébé. Should I get the poor lad something while I’m out?” murmurs Arthur, fishing in the green chamber pot for banknotes.

  “What kind of something?” asks Blanche.

  A shrug as he straightens his cuff links. “A syrup or such. You know. For quieting.”

  Fury behind the hard plate of her forehead. “He’s been quieted enough. I bet that doctress had them dosed to the gills.”

  “Still, of course,” muses Arthur, “it’s what he’ll be used to. Seems cruel to cut him off all at once, especially if he’s not quite well, with that nasty rash under his arms.”

  Blanche’s eyes narrow, because all at once she can see right through this man. Arthur doesn’t want his son here, making noise, making demands. He doesn’t want to be put to the least trouble in the world.

  On the fifteenth of September, Blanche is groggy from panic and lack of sleep. Bolted into the tiny lavatory of the train from San Miguel Station, she drags her hair into an approximation of a high chignon. She arranges a few ringlets over her forehead, then re-pins the flat straw hat as far forward as it’ll go. She paints with speed and something near accuracy, bracing herself against the mirror as she applies a steady line of red to her upper lip. It’s melting already, so she scours it off with a handkerchief and starts again, ignoring the knocking at the lavatory door. She rubs at the little scab on her cheek where the glass grazed her last night—Jenny! Christ, those skewed limbs, the puddle of blood—and it starts to run red again. Blanche presses on layers of powder till the mark is fainter, at least.

  She finally returns to her seat, leans back on the knot of her bustle, and tries to take a full breath.

  Someone at the end of the carriage is warbling what Blanche recognizes as a Stephen Foster tune; there’s nowhere you can go to get out of earshot of his jingles. What an incongruously pretty day: the low peachy hills, the pale green sea in the distance. Sparse farms, and their owners heading with heavy carts toward the markets downtown because the train must be too expensive for them. Here comes the Industrial School on its arid plateau. A U.S. flag hanging limp above three long floors of cells. It’s not a school at all, but a reformatory. A scattering of boys outside, pecking desultorily at the dust with hoes. A few straighten up to watch the train rocket by, as if it’s their day’s sole entertainment. Whenever Jenny came this way, she filled her pockets with candy to toss over the fence for the inmates, Blanche remembers. What a child that woman was still, at twenty-seven.

  “Weren’t that a female I saw over by the washing line?” a passenger remarks loudly behind Blanche as he gets up to use the spittoon.

  “No, they send the girls to the Sisters now,” the wife informs him. “Ever since the supervisor got fired—for taking liberties, don’t you know.” The euphemism in a carrying whisper.

  The Industrial School boys have been swallowed up in the dust already. Blanche stares out the other window, at a field of lettuce.

  Chimneys growing in the distance. The train speeds up as they head down the long grade toward the passenger depot at Third and Townsend. The City’s coming at Blanche like a bullet to the head.

  At the terminus, it suddenly strikes her that Arthur could be waiting on the platform, scanning the crowds for her familiar face. Blanche reckons the chances that Detective Bohen has arrested him already are slim to none. But where else can she go today? Should she pick a random town to hide in? If she doesn’t show up at tomorrow’s inquest here in the City, the detectives might put a warrant out for her.

  When Blanche gets to her feet, everything goes black for a moment. Now that she thinks about it, she realizes she’s had only a sip of water today.

  Her step slows as she moves down the platform toward the gate. Men are stacking a whole freight car full of ice, as neat as masonry, with chaff and sawdust for mortar. She scans the milling crowd for men with bird’s-wing mustaches. She dreads the sight of that lovely sallow face she’s woken up beside every morning since she was fifteen.

  And yet … she’s almost disappointed that Arthur’s not here. It feels like a long time since they had their last battle, at the gaming saloon, just a week ago. Blanche shouldn’t have allowed herself the satisfaction of sparring with him that night, she sees that now. Should have fallen to her knees in the pose of some penitent Magdalene and begged him to tell her what he’d done with their son.

  So many ways to dispose of a baby. Hand over mouth and nose. A cushion, a blanket. A cord; a ribbon, even. A quick shake or a blow. A fall. A drain, a culvert … Or don’t give him his bottle; that would do it, after a day or two, in this thirsty weather. Just go out, shut the door, and leave him to cry his way to silence. So many quick and simple means to finish off a small life that should probably never have started.

  Blanche won’t let the t
ears come, not in front of this pair of patrolmen displaying their seven-pointed stars for authority as they peer suspiciously into every face for pustules. The smallpox has been spreading through San Francisco since May, so what good do they think it’ll do to examine arriving passengers now?

  Outside on Third Street, the sun is dizzying. The push and clamor of the crowds overwhelm Blanche after three days of the silence of San Miguel Station. She finds a pump and bends to drink from it. Only a dribble; the pressure’s low. She thinks of that reservoir she and Jenny saw being gouged out of the hill, up at the back of Sweeney Ridge. It won’t be ready for a while yet. What’ll happen if the City runs dry?

  Her throat floods with acid, and she swallows it down. Her arm aches already from keeping the delicate green parasol between her face and the hammering sun. There’s a Mexican slumped against a wall, wrapped in his serape. Funny to think his lot once owned this whole part of the world. A Prussian-looking busker pumping an accordion tiredly.

  Blanche wishes she could afford a cab. She has to get hold of some cash today. Instead, she squeezes onto a horsecar going north.

  “Terrible hot, ain’t it?” a fellow remarks. “Ninety-five in the shade, they’re saying.”

  Blanche tugs down her short lace veil and pretends she hasn’t heard. A little conversation, a little flirtation … so many men think they can get a bit of her for free.

  On Market, a Chinese man with a huge bundle of clean laundry tries to get on. But several passengers protest that the linens might be riddled with invisible germs, so the driver moves off without him. This is what plague has brought San Franciscans to, Blanche thinks: flinching from every smell, scrutinizing every face for danger, balking at sharing the same air.