Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  At Morton Street, a couple of worn crib girls squeeze in. Blanche wonders if there’s any truth to the rumor that each one, in her narrow stall, services up to a hundred customers a night. With a small shudder, she looks away.

  All along Kearny, folks are cringing away from the glare, crowding to the shady side of the street. Every dive and barrelhouse is spilling over. Temperance Lemon Cocktails, offers one awning, but the drinkers loitering under it look half soused to Blanche.

  The coupled hacks slow as they haul the horsecar up the slope on its smooth tracks, and the passengers brace themselves. Of all the unworkable spots to build a city, thinks Blanche with exasperation. If you get tired in San Francisco, you can always lean on it, she remembers Jenny quipping.

  Chinatown smells like a urinal, which Blanche notices only because she’s been out of town. The health inspectors have nailed disinfectant sheets over many more doors, and yellow flags hang like bunting for some canceled New Year. A Nordic-looking man plods up and down with a sign in the form of a gigantic arrow—FREE VACCINATION NO MONEY FREE TODAY—but he’s not getting many takers, because the Chinese bachelors with braided pigtails down to their hips are lined up outside the herbal shops instead.

  Recognizing the square tower of St. Mary’s, Blanche jolts upright. She was heading home without thinking, but 815 Sacramento Street is the last building in the world she should approach today. Her brain’s all rusted up this morning.

  As the horsecar creaks past Sacramento, she catches a glimpse of the blue-and-white mansion: the House of Mirrors. Yes, that’s where Blanche needs to go, she decides—for proof of her hunch that Madame Johanna told Arthur where the two women had fled to on Tuesday. How else can Blanche convince the detectives that it’s Arthur who shot Jenny—by mistake, because he was aiming at Blanche, but that’s still murder, no? “Driver,” she shouts, pushing her way down the car, her orange carpetbag snagging on hips and bustles.

  She stands at the corner, her head aching and her mouth so dry that she’s not sure she’s capable of speech. A constant stream of Chinese bachelors parts around her, not an empty hand among them. Every man seems to be hauling a bale of shoes, a laundry bag, or a wet basket of sea life writhing on a bed of kelp; Blanche recognizes shrimp, squid, and those snails that always remind her of severed ears. Some of the men are toting their baskets on long sticks over their shoulders—in defiance of the City’s new bylaw criminalizing that tradition, or has nobody told them it’s a crime yet?

  Gray’s Undertakers is just a block away, at Dupont. Perhaps Blanche should head straight there, to make sure the—what are they called?—dieners aren’t prettifying Jenny with their little pots of paint. But she finds she can’t bear to, not yet. Her stomach is a tangled knot. She hasn’t eaten anything at all since dinner yesterday evening. (Splendid stew, if I may say, Mrs. Mac, Jenny assured Ellen McNamara, though it wasn’t.)

  So Blanche turns north, going past a runny-nosed Irish fiddler who can’t be more than ten. Chez Durand, just for half an hour, to gather her strength? It can’t be safe to go where the French go—where a Frenchman might guess he’d find a particular Frenchwoman—but then, Arthur’s hardly going to gun her down in a public place, is he? Even in his current crazed state, the man’s intelligent, and he can’t mean to end up on a gibbet in the yard of the Broadway Jail.

  Under the striped awning, the brasserie’s crammed with drinkers. Safety in numbers, Blanche reassures herself, stepping inside. The print of the Champs-Elysées is back up by the door, minus its glass. That’s the only sign that Jenny was ever there.

  “If we don’t keep our liquids up,” a female voice is remarking, “we’ll like to expire by lunchtime.”

  Blanche hovers at the bar, trying to catch the eye of the owner. It occurs to her that Durand won’t know the news, because it can’t have hit the papers yet; Cartwright must be still working up his story for the Chronicle’s afternoon edition.

  “Mademoiselle,” says Durand with a nod of acknowledgment, shoving a young man off a stool so Blanche can sit down. “Qu’est-ce que ce sera?” His mustache so thickly lank it hides his mouth.

  Blanche shouldn’t have come here, not today. She can’t be the one to tell him. She orders a plate of vinegary choucroute—the first thing she can think of—and a beer.

  At the piano in the corner, a ginger-haired man is thumping an accompaniment for a plump blonde with a Languedoc accent who giggles when she fails to hit the aria’s top notes. Blanche wants to slap her. She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.

  When Durand comes over with her order, she looks at it queasily and takes a sip of her beer.

  “If you see Jenny, tell her j’en ai marre. Enough!” he barks. “Since Wednesday I’ve been waiting. The season’s nearly over, I tell them, it’s halfway through September, time to eat leeks and apples, but they’re still craving their cuisses de grenouille …”

  Blanche’s mind fixes on the frogs she released by the pond this morning. The small McNamaras licking their singed fingers by the bonfire.

  “I’ll get my supply from someone else next spring, if I can’t count on—”

  She makes herself break in. “Jenny’s dead. Last night,” she gasps, “down at San Miguel Station. We were—somebody shot her through the window.”

  “Bordel de merde!”

  Blanche slides off the stool, needing to get out of this place.

  Durand shouts in the direction of the kitchen. “Portal!”

  A muffled roar comes back.

  “Get out here!” he roars. “He won’t believe it from me,” Durand tells Blanche, taking her elbow and pushing her down on the stool again.

  The smell of her pickled cabbage turns her stomach.

  The long-faced cook comes out, his apron spattered red and brown.

  “Tell him,” the patron insists.

  Blanche repeats her news, leaden.

  Portal doesn’t curse or interrogate her about how it happened. Instead, he caves in like a man made of paper. He staggers, he writhes in his employer’s arms, tears flooding down his scarlet face.

  Durand keeps kissing the side of his head.

  Blanche’s cheeks burn. She pushes her way toward the door, almost reaching it before she remembers her carpetbag and has to turn back to grab it, her eyes low. Portal is still weeping on the bar. These foutu Frenchmen!

  In Madame Johanna’s parlor at the House of Mirrors a quarter of an hour later, Blanche smooths her blue plaid flounces and tries not to count the minutes. Keeping Blanche waiting is just the widow’s little game, nothing worth losing one’s temper over.

  Her stomach growls. She should have eaten that choucroute. There’s a fly buzzing intermittently against the window. Blanche arches a little, to ease the strain in her back. Funny how it never ached when she was performing on horseback twice a day or, more recently, doing leg shows in the Grand Salon upstairs.

  What was the last one? Almost a month ago now; the Saturday night Jenny rode into her on Kearny Street. After Blanche went to Folsom Street and realized what kind of place Madame had consigned Blanche’s baby to—after she sent back Madame’s note, ripped up—she would have liked to maintain a stony silence and never lay eyes on Madame again, even if it meant forfeiting her pay for her last two performances. But three days ago, when Blanche had to flee town for fear of the macs and was desperate for cash, she swallowed her pride and came here for her hundred dollars—and the Prussian had the almighty gall to claim that the debt was the other way around. So Blanche wouldn’t be back here today for any reason less serious than this: she must find evidence that Arthur knew she was going to San Miguel Station. Only when he and Ernest are in jail will she be able to take a breath without terror.

  How much longer is the woman going to make her wait?

  You came within an inch of death last night, Blanche scolds herself. Surely she can manage to sit for a quarter of an hour in a quiet room where the thick drapes keep out t
he worst of the heat and where she knows that she’s not going to be shot at.

  The door opens noiselessly. Blanche’s head jerks up.

  Madame Johanna, in pearl-gray silk. “Ah, my dear.”

  Blanche steels herself.

  “You are not looking your best, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Do take some water.” Pouring two small glasses from the carafe. “I trust you’ve come with glad tidings about your little one?”

  Blanche is rigid, eyes on the carpet. On Tuesday, why did she let herself complain to Madame about Arthur taking P’tit away? She’s not going to say a word about it today. She can’t trust herself not to burst into tears.

  “Well,” sighs Madame. “If the baby’s lost for good, I do hope you feel the whole drama of snatching him away from Folsom Street was worth the candle.”

  “I trusted you,” Blanche roars before she can stop herself.

  “Indeed you did, to relieve you of a burden so that you could continue to work, more and more profitably, may I add, and live as freely as before.”

  “I didn’t know what kind of rat hole you’d stashed—”

  “Please don’t waste your time and mine by playing the innocent,” Madame cuts in.

  Blanche clears her throat but still her voice comes out as a caw. “I only came here today because of my friend Jenny.”

  Madame puts her head to one side. “Jenny. Do I know a Jenny?”

  Blanche bets she does: Madame knows everybody, from gentlemen high up in the state government to the least shivering nine-year-old smuggled into the House of Mirrors. “Jenny Bonnet.”

  “Ah, the girl with a taste for making a spook of herself in pants?”

  Blanche forces herself to ignore that. “She got blown to pieces beside me last night. It was—it has to have been Arthur.”

  The pale mouth forms a little O of shock.

  As fake as some old diva at the opera, Blanche thinks. How could she have borne this woman for more than a year of her life?

  “Did a bullet do this?” asks Madame Johanna, leaning over to explore Blanche’s cheek with one cool fingertip.

  She pulls away and raps the accusation out. “What I find curious is that you’re the only person who knew I was going to San Miguel Station.”

  “Did I know that?”

  “Do you have the gall to deny it?”

  “You may very well have mentioned it last time we met.” The Prussian turns the gold ring on her finger. “Goods, clients, petty bureaucrats … you can’t imagine how much business I have to attend to in a single day.”

  “But who else—how else could Arthur have found out where I was?”

  Madame half smiles. “I’ve had no dealings with your bel ami in some months.”

  “What about his friend Ernest?”

  “If I haven’t seen one Siamese twin, I could hardly have seen the other.”

  Madame’s a liar par excellence, but why would she need to lie in this case? Why would she even bother? It strikes Blanche with an awful clarity that Arthur wouldn’t have gone to the House of Mirrors for news of Blanche, since—much to his fury—she’d broken with Madame more than three weeks before, the moment she reclaimed P’tit from Folsom Street.

  She ransacks her memories of last Tuesday, when she set off for San Miguel Station in that buggy she hired from Marshall’s. Blanche could swear she didn’t tell anyone but Madame her destination. But of course—her stomach sinks—Jenny could have mentioned it to any number of people. Those unknown friends whose sofas she used to nap on. Jenny knew the strangest assortment of folks.

  But Blanche presses on: “The detectives won’t believe Arthur’s involved, not unless I can show he knew where Jenny and I were last night.”

  “Ah,” says Madame, letting the syllable out with a soft hiss. “Now I understand the purpose of this unexpected visit. You’re asking me to swear that your discarded mac burst in here yesterday waving a gun, mustache dripping with foam, and that I, out of pique because you’d disrupted my schedule of performances, sent him off hotfoot to shoot up San Miguel Station?”

  Blanche chews her lip. Put that way, it sounds like a third-rate melodrama.

  “It’s not that I have any objection in principle to misleading the authorities—especially these days,” adds Madame, “since the board of supervisors seems to have embarked on the doomed venture of trying to whitewash a city that’s been a byword for liberty. No, the problem is that my involving myself would draw the attention of the police to my business. And incidentally, the fable you propose would leave me open to an accusation of abetting—even inciting—a murder.” She winds up with a little nunnish smile.

  Salope: the word is salty as blood in Blanche’s mouth, and it would be some relief to say it.

  “As it happens,” says Madame, “the only man who’s been here inquiring after you is Signor Lamantia. He’s sent to me twice in recent weeks, offering considerable sums just to know where you might be.”

  Blanche rolls her eyes. L’amant de Blanche; her Sicilian regular is just a buzzing fly.

  “You really mustn’t hide away,” murmurs Madame. “The City’s memory is so short. Unless you’re planning to live on your rents, without dancing or michetons?”

  It’s living through the next few days that worries Blanche. “Just pay me my hundred dollars and I won’t trouble you any further.”

  “Ah, still you misunderstand. Let me show you the figures, to make the matter crystal clear.” Madame opens her ledger and slides it over. “Two show fees of fifty dollars each in the left-hand column. And on the right, your outstanding debits: costumes, musical accompaniment, refreshments, dressing, rehearsal and stage facilities furnished, advertisements circulated …”

  “Hogwash,” Blanche cries. “You can’t work these madam’s cheats on me. You take your finder’s fee whenever you arrange a rendezvous, and it’s never been part of our bargain that I pay for costumes or music. I ain’t one of your stable. I’m an independent artiste, and the most popular ever seen at your house.”

  “Nor has it ever been part of our bargain that you can quit on me with no notice, leaving me with no explanation to offer your many admirers,” says Madame coolly.

  “What refreshments,” Blanche demands, “the odd glass of brandy?”

  “Everything costs, my dear. Since you decided to forgo my protection so abruptly last month—”

  Protection? A muscle in Blanche’s cheek twitches as she reckons the fortune this woman must have made off her hide.

  “—well, I must recoup some of my losses by charging for what it’s cost me to turn you into Blanche la Danseuse.”

  “To turn me into—” says Blanche, bewildered.

  “You were a pregnant bareback rider,” says Madame, “with very little to make you stand out from the tide of female flesh that washes into this City. You were raw material, from which, I congratulate myself, I constructed a figure of considerable mystique.”

  Blanche is speechless.

  “Three hundred seventeen dollars, all told,” Madame adds more briskly, pointing to the figure on the right, “which, reduced by your earnings of one hundred, comes to two seventeen. Will you be paying in notes or coin?”

  Blanche grabs the ledger and pokes the column on the left. “What about adding this: ‘Payment to Blanche Beunon in consideration of her not telling the police about the goddamn dying babies’?”

  Madame looks as if Blanche has soiled her chair. And then her face changes—lights up. “Despite all the abuse you’re heaping on my head in your pardonable state of distress after the shock of your friend’s death, I would like to help you, for old times’ sake. May I suggest you let me announce one final Saturday appearance of the Lively Flea, tomorrow night?”

  Blanche almost laughs. This woman is made of India rubber. “You must be joking.”

  “For an unprecedented fee—say, five, no, ten times your usual. Five hundred dollars,” Madame almost sings, marveling at her own kindness. “Which would clear what you owe
me and leave you with almost three hundred to be getting on with.”

  Blanche swallows hard.

  The Prussian’s fiddling with her wedding ring, not just waiting for an answer but enjoying seeing Blanche squirm. Letting them both hear the silence that implies consent. “Until tomorrow, then?”

  Almost three hundred dollars. Blanche doesn’t open her mouth in case what comes out is You cold bitch, I’ll never work for you again. She has so little cash in hand, she can’t afford to give an unequivocal no. So she says nothing at all, just grabs her bag and makes for the door.

  Almost cantering away from the House of Mirrors in her little mules, sweat breaking out on her forehead and under her arms. Forget the money for now. Blanche has to get off Sacramento Street before she walks right into Arthur or Ernest or one of their set. She ducks down the next passage, skirts a spill of cabbage leaves, and almost trips over an elderly man in the shadows. Only one sleeve on his shirt. An R burned on his dark gray cheek. He’s singing nasally:

  Here in this country so dark and dreary,

  I long have wandered forlorn and weary.

  His cap’s on the ground in front of him, but there’s nothing in it. His eyes are squeezed tight shut. Perhaps there were coins but some gamin snatched them already? There’s someone like this every five paces in the City, metropolis of bums of all shades. Blanche supposes San Francisco is where they wind up because of the mild winters; they figure at least they won’t freeze solid overnight. Jenny would have stopped and given him fifty cents for a bunk. Jenny would have learned the rest of his song, his story. I just like stories, she said, that first night at Durand’s. Blanche can’t afford to throw anything in his cap, she decides, and it’d only get stolen anyway.

  “‘Do not detain me,’” he drones on sorrowfully,

  For I am going

  To where the fountains are ever flowing.

  There’s the city to which I journey,

  My redeemer, my redeemer is its light!

  There’s the city. Oh; heaven is what he means, not San Francisco. Blanche speeds past the busker, away down the alley.