Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  Beside her, Jenny tilts her cap and squints up. Does a little shuffle. Jenny can’t stand still; Blanche registers that only now, because it’s the first time they’ve ever had to wait in one spot.

  The half-moon, up in broad day, looks like some cheap bit of stage scenery.

  Blanche returns her gaze to the second floor of the building.

  “Seen that?” Jenny asks.

  “What?” she says, jumping.

  Jenny’s jerking her thumb not at the building but at a broadside pasted crooked on the wall behind them. Evangeline: A Burlesque. “I dozed off in the middle,” she remarks, “but the spouting whale was first-rate.”

  Blanche tilts her parasol and blinks up at the glittering windows. P’tit. P’tit. His name a hiccupping heartbeat.

  Jenny flicks her cap up into the air and catches it on her elbow. The second time, she spins it way above her and crooks her neck so it lands neatly on her coal-black hair.

  On the corner of Dupont a thick knot of workmen has formed around a fellow talking himself hoarse on a box. Blanche catches only a few phrases: evil empire and—noisome vermicelli, could she have heard that right?

  “Just the anti-coolies,” says Jenny, following her gaze.

  The man’s voice rises to a rusty whoop. “Let the capitalists quake, because their reign is over.”

  A single clap from someone beside him.

  “They have opened the gates of this city to Oriental labor, whose octopus of disease now extends its fell tentacles into every quarter. Soon workingmen will rise up and deluge it in blood and fire!”

  The applause is limp. As if San Franciscans have the energy to so much as pick their noses in this heat, Blanche thinks, let alone set a fire!

  Arthur, Arthur, she calls in her head, watching the second-story windows. Does he still love her, a little, in some poisoned way? Is he keeping P’tit as bait to lure her back? But he must realize that after the things they’ve said and done, the two of them can’t take up their old dance again. And why would he even want Blanche back if she’s the nasty piece of shoddy he thinks her?

  “‘Mardi i’ r’viendra m’ voire.’” Jenny sings the old ballad under her breath, as if reading Blanche’s mind. “‘O gai! vive la rose.’”

  He’ll come back to see me on Tuesday; hey, long live the rose. Of course Blanche knows the carefree lyrics of the old song, but she’s not in the mood.

  Mais je n’en voudrai pas,

  Vive la rose et le lilas!

  Jenny lilts as sweet as some bird on a branch relishing the sun on its feathers.

  Can she be taken at her word, Blanche wonders, the girl in the song? Is it true she won’t open her arms to her man if he does crawl back to her? Or is that just something girls insist when their men dump them? She turns to look at Jenny. “Ever had your heart broken?” she demands.

  Jenny only grins and cracks her knuckles, a sound that Blanche hates.

  “Well, aren’t you a slippery fish.”

  “Hope so,” says Jenny. “It’s the other kind that end up in the pot.”

  Blanche lets out a long, blistering breath. It’s clear they’re only going to annoy each other today. If this is friendship, no wonder she’s never had much truck with it. “Don’t you have any place you need to be?” She waits. “No frogs that need catching?”

  “Delivered a couple sackfuls yesterday,” Jenny assures her.

  “This is my business.” Blanche eyes the windows, the door, waiting for the slightest glimpse of Arthur. She realizes that she doesn’t want Jenny to witness her abasing herself, offering anything at all just so long as he’ll give P’tit back. “You ain’t obliged to get tangled up in it.”

  “That reminds me,” says Jenny, ignoring Blanche’s comment, “you ever hear about the frog who got acquainted with a mouse?”

  “I have the feeling I’m about to.”

  “‘Hey,’ says Froggie, ‘what say we declare our friendship by tying one of your feet to one of mine?’”

  Despite herself, Blanche half laughs.

  “Mousie’s persuadable,” says Jenny. “So the two hop along together to the meadow for their dinner. Then Froggie goes, ‘What say we stand at the edge of the pond and admire ourselves?’”

  “Oh no.”

  Jenny mimes the yoked animals leaning out dangerously over the water. “Froggie falls in—or jumps, some say, but there’s no proof, and afterward Froggie can’t say, for obvious—”

  “Get on with it!”

  A slow smile. “‘Help, help,’ cries Mousie, ‘I can’t swim.’ And Froggie answers, ‘How do you know until you try?’” Jenny’s voice has a hectic cheer. “So Froggie swims around croaking merrily while Mousie’s swallowing a bellyful of water. But then Hawk sees them and dives.” She mimes the ruthless swoop of the bird. “Lifts Mousie into the sky for a snack, see, while Froggie’s dangling below from one little toe. ‘Help, help,’ cries Froggie, ‘I can’t fly!’ And Hawk says—”

  “‘How do you know until you try?’” supplies Blanche. Then, after a moment: “That’s a terrible story.”

  “The best ones generally are.”

  They lapse into silence.

  Blanche returns her gaze to the apartment windows. In her imagining of it, Arthur’s going to step out of the building any minute now with P’tit on his hip. The man will look hollow-eyed, harried; the child radiant with relief at the sight of his mother. In the daydream, Blanche runs up, as graceful as a prima ballerina, and Arthur lets out a single sigh of capitulation and puts P’tit in her arms …

  “Now, in the song, they get married, if you prefer that,” says Jenny.

  “What?” she asks distractedly.

  “‘Frog and Mouse.’ ‘A Frog he would a wooing go,’” she croons, grunting very low in her throat and keeping time with her boot on the sidewalk,

  Heigh ho, said Rowly,

  A Frog he would a wooing go,

  Whether his mother would let him or no—

  “Something tells me this is going to be a long courtship,” Blanche mutters, her eyes still fixed on the bland panes.

  “I’ll skip to the wedding, if you like,” offers Jenny. “It was some party, let me tell you.” She starts singing and tapping her sole again.

  Pray, Mr. Frog, will you give us a song,

  Heigh ho, said Rowly,

  Let the subject be something that’s not very long …

  “Jenny—” Blanche interrupts hoarsely.

  But Jenny keeps on as if she’s getting paid for it.

  Blanche is chewing her lip raw. What possessed her, the other night at the faro saloon, to hint that P’tit wasn’t Arthur’s? Of all the lies she might have invented in a spirit of malice, none could have put the baby in more danger. Is Blanche some kind of idiot or just too addicted to the pleasure of the moment to think about anybody but herself?

  Jenny sings on relentlessly:

  As they were in glee and a merry making,

  Heigh ho, said Rowly …

  Now she slips her arm through Blanche’s and tries to swing her.

  Blanche shakes her off harder than she needs to. “Is it possible for you to shut your trap for one almighty minute?”

  “Girard, right?”

  Blanche doesn’t know what to make of that till she follows Jenny’s gaze across the street and flinches. Ernest, hovering on the curb, staring in her direction: Could he have emerged from the building while she was looking away for a second? A horsecar clanks between them, cutting off her view.

  “Ready,” announces Jenny, rubbing her hands.

  This was a bad idea. Blanche hurries away down the street.

  Jenny gallops after her. “What are you doing?”

  “We shouldn’t be here.” Glancing over her shoulder, Blanche can’t see Ernest in the crowd.

  “Hey,” Jenny objects, “we’ve been waiting half the day.”

  “Waiting for Arthur, not Ernest.”

  “Don’t back down now.”

  “I’ve se
en what happens when you won’t back down. You’re a born fight-picker,” Blanche cries. Where’s Ernest gone? Not on the opposite curb now. Is it possible he didn’t catch sight of the women after all?

  “Some fights are ripe for the picking,” insists Jenny.

  And he’s there, all at once, in front of Blanche, moving with the gait of a long-legged bird, eyes red-rimmed and his face so drawn and clammy that she wonders if he’s ill.

  Ernest seizes her by her elbow and marches her down the nearest alley, holding her close—a parody of a suitor. These Chinatown lanes all close in overhead like pleats in stained cloth. Waverly Place, that’s where they are: Blanche recognizes the barbershop with the Tin How Temple on its top floor. Fifteen-Cent Alley, some call this, for the price of the haircuts.

  “How dare you show your face,” he’s demanding, “you infernal whore.”

  He’s not sick, she realizes, except with rage.

  Jenny’s right behind her but not saying a word. (Small mercies.)

  “Ernest.” As softly as Blanche can. “I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened.” There’s a face watching through a sliding panel in the nearest door: a mui jai. Then a small hand, beckoning. Is the girl offering Blanche a refuge from the furious man, or inviting him in? Two bittee lookee. She forces her eyes back to Ernest. “All I’m asking for is my P’tit.”

  “How do you have the gall to pretend you’re a woman? If you wanted that baby,” says Ernest in a wolfish snarl, “if you’d ever really wanted him, wouldn’t you have held on tight to him when he first dropped out of your hole?”

  She cringes away from the words more than from his spirituous breath.

  “No answer to that one?” He grabs her jaw with one hard hand, squeezes her lips together. “Then why don’t you shut your mouth?”

  “Hey, hey,” says Jenny, pleasantly, at their side.

  He barks over his shoulder. “Stand down, Bonnet, or I’ll see to you.”

  “No, you stand down. You’re hurting the lady.”

  “What lady?” Ernest yelps with a sort of laughter.

  Blanche feels his grip relax a moment, and she shoves with both arms and wrestles her jaw away from him, staggering backward. The pain brings tears to her eyes. The mui jai’s pale face is gone from the door; the panel slides shut.

  Instead of seizing Blanche again, Ernest turns to Jenny. “Settle something for the record, would you? Arthur maintains you’re just an interfering meddler. But my money’s on your being a dirty gouine who wants this muff for herself.”

  He flicks one finger at Blanche, who goes rigid when she understands him.

  “Fact or fiction, chérie?” he asks, stepping close enough to Blanche to make her leap out of range again. “I just hope you charge high, for the dignity of the trade. Don’t tell me you’re doing this piece of filth for free.”

  Jenny cuts in relaxedly before Blanche can answer. “I declare, you fellows are the limpest pair of leeches I’ve ever encountered. You sponge off Blanche for the full of a year, then sulk like cast-off mistresses the minute she decides to go solo. Castor and Pollux!” She lets out a snort of mirth. “I say it’s high time you get out there”—she waves toward Sacramento Street—“and peddle your own handsome asses.”

  Blanche can’t believe Jenny just said that.

  For a moment Ernest only stares, and then he’s clawing at Jenny’s jacket.

  “Oy,” she shouts, “hands off.”

  “That’s my friend’s shirt,” he snarls, “the one that he—gentleman that he is—was kind enough to lend you the night we found you stinking up the sofa, and you never gave it back, you goddamn thief.”

  Jenny’s fighting back in a tangle of arms and kicking legs. The gray jacket’s half open, the pale green shirt loose in the vee of the waistcoat, buttons popping off. “You’ve torn it, you son of a bitch!” She’s half bare, eyes bulging. She wrests herself away, skips to beyond Ernest’s reach, and suddenly the Colt’s out and pointed at him.

  Putain de merde. How did Blanche let it come to this, murder about to be done in a Chinatown alley on a Monday afternoon in September?

  “I give you fair warning—” Jenny speaks levelly, even though she’s out of breath. With the hand not holding the gun, she wraps the ripped shirt around her to cover up her pale ribs, shoves it into her pants.

  “Warning of what?” sneers Ernest, standing tall the way Monsieur Loyal always taught them. “It’s not your clothes I’m going to rip to pieces, Bonnet, it’s you. Whale the tar out of you, fix you for good and all, so you can’t ever lure a woman from her man again.”

  “That’s not what happened,” Blanche protests, “you crack-brained—”

  But the click of Jenny cocking her Colt makes a little pool of silence in Waverly Place. “Fix me?” Jenny says, smiling at Ernest. “You ain’t the only one to try that. But I’ll dance on your grave first.”

  “Jenny!” Blanche shrieks.

  Ernest’s eyes slide to Blanche, then back to Jenny. He jerks his head over his shoulder toward Sacramento. “You really mean to gun me down in broad daylight with witnesses all around?”

  The three of them are standing very still.

  “He’s not worth hanging for,” Blanche roars at her. Blanche could end up in jail for this business, along with her so-called friend.

  Jenny purses her dry lips.

  “I didn’t think so,” says Ernest. “You’ve made your bed. Time to lie in it.” He turns his back on them and starts walking up the alley.

  He strikes a pose at the corner of Sacramento. Peers in both directions, then lets out a piercing whistle through his fingers. “Officers!”

  Is he bluffing? Blanche wonders. Police almost never come into Chinatown.

  “Come on,” she says, dipping to pick up Jenny’s scattered buttons from the dust, out of an obscure instinct to erase all traces of the encounter.

  Jenny’s pocketing her Colt, very cool, and straightening her clothes. Waverly Place opens onto Clay Street at the other end, so they can be out of sight in half a minute.

  But here comes Ernest, marching down the alley with two Specials. How the hell did he rustle them up so fast?

  “Run,” Blanche whispers.

  “Ah, that’d be called resisting arrest,” Jenny murmurs, “and those two know my face.” She sounds faintly proud of the fact. “Afternoon, Officers.” She tips her cap as she strolls to meet them.

  “Well, if it isn’t our old friend the frog-catcher,” says the taller, red-faced one. “Done your time in County already?”

  “Don’t time just fly,” Jenny replies.

  “Been hunting today, I assume, from your costume?”

  “Always on the lookout,” she assures them.

  “Ribbit!” croaks the shorter man.

  “What is this, a strawberry social?” demands Ernest hoarsely. “This female is clearly in male attire. Do your duty and arrest her.”

  “Did this pup just try to tell us our duty?” the taller asks the shorter.

  “As it happens, I’m on my way home to change,” Jenny puts in.

  “Into bonnet and flounces?” asks the shorter one, deadpan.

  “Got a bustle waiting for me the size of a wagon,” Jenny tells him, sketching it comically with her hands. “Now, I wish you both a good day …”

  The taller puts a hand on her torn sleeve as she slides by. “Thirsty weather, this.”

  “Isn’t it, though. Could I wish you well to the tune of two bucks?”

  “I told you, she pulled a gun on me,” protests Ernest.

  “Try ten,” the Special tells Jenny.

  “Fellows! That’s as much as the judge would fine me.”

  He shrugs. “Less fuss for all concerned, though. This way your evening’s your own.” His gesture takes in the whole City, as if he’s offering it to her on a plate.

  “What would you say to five?” Jenny asks.

  “I’d say come down handsome now, Jenny, or you’ll be back in the cells for su
pper.”

  “Five’s pretty handsome,” she argues, still smiling.

  Jenny hasn’t got ten, Blanche realizes, and she starts digging in her carpetbag for her own pocketbook.

  “Take my five and call it quits?” Jenny splays the notes like a hand of cards.

  “She’s a thief too,” Ernest bursts out. “That shirt belongs to Mr. Arthur Deneve—”

  “And another five for your trouble, Officers,” says Blanche, holding out the coins she’s finally added up.

  Jenny throws her an irritated look, as if Blanche has spoiled the game.

  But the faces of the Specials have relaxed. They collect their winnings from the two women.

  “Come on,” says Jenny in Blanche’s ear. She hooks her by the elbow and hurries her up the alley toward Sacramento Street. “It’s all hunky-dory now.”

  “This is … this is corruption of the law to pervert the course of justice,” Ernest roars after the Specials. “What about my friend’s shirt?”

  “Do we look as if we give a rat’s ass about a shirt?” the shorter inquires.

  “Dandy Frogs and their goddamn clothes,” says the taller, rolling his eyes as they turn away.

  VI

  I HARDLY KNEW YE

  On Tuesday, the twelfth of September, Blanche’s mouth still hurts. For a bewildered moment, waking up in the sour-smelling rented room on Commercial Street, she thinks she’s been gnawing at her own lips in her sleep, but then she remembers Waverly Place yesterday, and Ernest’s vicious grip on her face.

  She lies still, feeling it settle on her: ennui. How can she be frightened and bored at the same time? Nothing to do today except wait, worry, wait some more.

  If Arthur were here, at least he’d fuck me. Blanche can’t quite believe she’s thinking that. But it’s true, she could count on him for that much; he was always ready to bend her over something if he had ten minutes free. The man spent most of his life in one of two states: half hard or willing to be hardened. There was a primitive comfort to it, the familiarity of being penetrated, somehow sharp and blunt at the same time. Occasionally Blanche’s mind used to float up to the ceiling and she’d look down and think: How curious, those two, it seems so important to them, that bit of him pushing into that bit of her, in and out again, how repetitious. But it worked. Fucking wasn’t always exquisite but it did make Blanche feel like a woman, like she knew what she was made for. Like something was happening. Five times a day, sometimes; she had to douche so much, her insides stung. So, yes, Arthur’s a son of a bitch, but she misses him.