Love and Other Consolation Prizes

by Jamie Ford

  Juju kept talking. “And, now that I think about it, Mae West practically made her name playing the types of characters you grew up with.”

  Ernest said, “Mae West isn’t helping your argument.”

  “Why’s that?” Juju asked as she helped Gracie fix the buttons on her coat.

  “Because I remember going to the AYP and watching a dashing musician named Guido Deiro,” Ernest said. “He went on to be the secret love of Mae West—a scandal that haunted both of their careers.”

  “It was a different time then.” Gracie shrugged. “People move on. Speaking of, we should too. It’s starting to rain.”

  Ernest looked at his wife, his mouth open. It seemed as if she was really following the conversation. “I’ll go get the car,” he said.

  “I’d like to walk,” Gracie interrupted.

  Ernest looked at his daughter, and Juju’s expression seemed to say, Why not?

  Despite the cloudy sky, it was a pleasant summer evening. The avenue was clear and the streetlights were flickering to life, reflecting gasoline halos in the wet pavement that surrounded them. Neon shimmered on the damp sidewalks, and gulls bobbed happily, picking out scraps among the litter. As they walked across the street, Gracie slowed and then stopped in the middle. She looked around, her face suddenly flushed with confusion. She pulled the scarf from her head and dropped it to the ground. Ernest felt a jolt of déjà vu as Gracie froze, a statue staring up into the sky as rain began to fall.

  “Ma, what’s wrong?” Juju asked.

  Cars rounded the corner, slowed down, honked, and then swerved around them, bathing the street with their headlights. Ernest dropped the bag of takeout and caught Gracie, as her legs buckled and she collapsed in his arms.

  CLOUDY DAYS

  (1910)

  Ernest was bringing in large tins of coal oil on a rainy Tuesday night when he heard a racket from the third floor. At first he presumed that the banging, door slamming, and caterwauling was Madam Flora having another one of her bad moments. But as he set the tins down and ascended the grand staircase, followed by Fahn and Professor True, Ernest heard a heated argument that included a man’s voice. And when Ernest reached the landing, he saw Miss Amber down the long hallway, a baseball bat in hand. In her largest, reddest wig, she towered over one of the Tenderloin’s new customers, yelling at the man, who stood in a doorway. A gaggle of the upstairs girls still in various states of undress joined in on the shouting match like a chorus of hectoring, henpecking furies. Their voices echoed off the wallpaper that had been painted with doves.

  Outnumbered, the man’s barks turned to yips as he muttered, “You’re all just a bunch of two-bit harlots anyway.” He hastily collected his hat and necktie and stormed away. Some of the girls threw shoes and hairbrushes after him, and the objects bounced off the walls, the man’s head, or both.

  Miss Amber cursed and hollered back, “I don’t ever want to see your face again. The last man who caused a stir under my roof ended up in jail. Try explaining that to your boss. Or your wife!”

  Ernest and Fahn found Maisie in the hallway; her cheeks were flushed with emotion. “What happened?” they asked her.

  “That jerk got jealous. He wanted Jewel to be his steady.” Maisie shook her head and stared daggers in the man’s direction as Professor True followed him downstairs to make sure he found his way out. “And when Jewel laughed and said no thank you, he slapped her around, started yelling, calling her names. He shoved her head into a wall. Luckily Miss Amber keeps a close eye on all the new gents these days.”

  Ernest could barely remember the man’s face, let alone his name. Since Madam Flora’s health had been failing, business had been slowing as well. Her presence as hostess, emcee, and ringmaster for each evening’s entertainments was a crucial ingredient of the Tenderloin’s magic. Without her showmanship, a haunting sadness had settled over the place, and customers seemed to sense it. They were staying away. Plus her numerous treatments and clinic visits had been costing a small fortune, even though they’d done little to ease her slide into madness.

  In response, Miss Amber had been forced to open the Tenderloin’s opulent bedroom doors to strangers. Before that, new customers had been allowed only in the company of a trusted regular, someone vetted and vouched for. Now Professor True, sometimes with Ernest’s help, had to toss out a belligerent drunk at least once a week. Ernest felt he’d aged years in the past few months. He was no longer a simple houseboy but seemed to have inherited a man’s responsibilities, always on guard, protecting members of their odd little family.

  “That fella got lucky,” Maisie said. “Miss Amber only brought her bat. One of these days she just might shoot a man, or cut him where it counts. A creep like that could end up singing castrato at Squire’s Opera House.”

  “It’ll get better,” Fahn said. “Madam Flora’s bound to come back to her senses.”

  Ernest hoped for the best, but he wasn’t so sure. Their matron had been having more bad days than good. And even her good days were not the same. She’d occasionally dress up and preside over a Friday evening gala, or introduce a guest poet, or a famous cellist who was in town to play with the symphony. But her time in the spotlight was always tenuous, and her smile barely masked the disquiet that lurked underneath.

  As Ernest scratched his head and looked up and down the crowded hallway—at the working girls coming and going in their elegant dresses and silk changing gowns—he couldn’t help but wonder. Perhaps the right patron could actually change things. Perhaps that person was Louis Turnbull after all. Surely he wasn’t the only one who had imagined Flora’s old paramour might be the answer to the complicated riddle the Tenderloin had become. But no one mentioned the man’s name—at least not in the presence of Miss Amber. Though his gifts kept arriving—cases of Bordeaux from Château Latour, a floor-length coat of Russian sable, an oxblood vase from China, a painting by someone named Sargent.

  Does Louis Turnbull even know about Madam Flora’s fits of madness? He must—surely—gossip travels fast. Maybe Turnbull thought he could rescue his lost love from the ghost of a woman that Madam was becoming. Or perhaps he thought her condition was exaggerated in rumors spread by jealous rivals for her affection.

  “Okay, get back to work, ladies. I’ll take care of everything here,” Miss Amber said as she clapped her hands. “You too, young man.”

  Ernest nodded and slipped by Miss Amber toward the servants’ stairs and past the open door to Jewel’s bedroom. He peeked inside and saw that Madam Flora was already there, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the girl, dabbing at her black eye and bruised cheek with a hand towel from the washbasin.

  Ernest stepped aside as Maisie slipped into the room and sat next to her mother, who was still in her sleeping gown, with curlers in her hair. Madam Flora put her other arm around Maisie, gently kissing her forehead.

  “My ladies are my world,” Madam Flora said as she held both girls and gently rocked back and forth. “No one will ever hurt you again. I promise.”

  SUNNY DAYS

  (1910)

  Madam Flora was true to her word. The Tenderloin went back to its regulars-only policy, despite dwindling business. And there were no more incidents. Now the only disturbance was the occasional evening when the house was too quiet—just the ironic sound of Professor True playing “Everybody’s Doing It Now.”

  But at least spring had arrived. The morning fog had become a memory, and the rain took a brief, unexpected vacation, leaving sunshine to look over Seattle in its absence. As Ernest walked outside, he marveled at the smell: thousands of sakura florets had filled the air, swirling on the breeze like pink snowflakes. The flowering buds came once a year, and for only a week or so, but they meant rebirth, another beginning. Just like the new hotel that had opened on the corner of Sixth and Main—where Fahn, Maisie, and Ernest were heading.

  “Follow me, I have a little surprise for the both of you,” Fahn had said, as she led Ernest and Maisie through Chinatown, pa
st apple carts and fishmongers, to the thriving Japanese neighborhood to the north. There they wended their way through the flowering cherry trees. Ernest loved the trees’ cycles of beauty and then repose, unlike evergreens, which stood constant and dull by comparison.

  He remembered reading about cherry saplings that had arrived in Washington, D.C., gifts from Japan to President Taft’s wife—two thousand trees in all. Most had been blighted with some type of disease, the damage had spread, and now all the young trees had been dug up and destroyed before they took root.

  Pity, Ernest thought. The young trees in Seattle were marvelous to behold, finally coming into their own, a season away from bearing fruit. They reached toward the sun, potential waiting to be fulfilled.

  “What’s the surprise? That you’re going to try to be the next Gibson girl?” Maisie asked. “You told bigmouthed Rose, so now everyone knows your plan. Word’s probably spread all through the neighborhood, all the way to Aberdeen by now.”

  It was only a matter of time, Ernest thought, frowning.

  Fahn had been practicing her Japanese tea routine for months. And she always managed to work, clean, and polish the silver within close proximity of the upstairs girls, hoping to improve her already formidable social skills. Fahn had taught herself to charm and flirt, following Jewel around and borrowing her books, like The Evolution of Modesty by Henry Havelock Ellis.

  “Tut, tut.” Fahn brushed away the comment, parroting Madam Flora. “A lady does not confirm or deny idle gossip; doing so is like wrestling with a pig: you both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it.” Then she revealed an apple she’d stolen from the cart down the street and took a nonchalant bite. She offered the purloined fruit to Ernest and Maisie, who both declined, frowning. They waited for a convoy of Sternberg trucks to pass, then a trolley, and then they crossed the street.

  “No matter,” Fahn said. “We’re almost there.”

  As they trundled up the sidewalk, Ernest felt bad for stepping on so many delicate buds that dotted the pavement. But he quickly forgot his worry when they rounded the corner and saw the shining brickwork and polished windows of the hotel that had been named after America’s latest international adventure—the Panama Canal. Workers from Seattle—and everywhere for that matter—had been shipped out to carve a channel from the Pacific to the Atlantic, battling malaria and jungle rot the whole time. Ernest had read in the newspaper that many scientists were worried that the balance of life in each ocean would be forever disrupted when the two systems met. The idea seemed familiar to Ernest, a mixed-breed boy in China, a half-breed in Seattle. He wondered if Fahn ever felt the same way. If so, she never showed it. He also wondered if Maisie felt out of place in this part of town, which Fahn called Nihonmachi.

  “Here we are,” Fahn said, out of breath from marching up the steep hill of Sixth Avenue. “Welcome to the Panama Hotel.”

  “And…what exactly are we doing here?” Maisie asked, slightly winded.

  “Don’t be such a Friday face, I didn’t bring you all the way up here just to show you the hotel. I brought you here to show you what lurks beneath—the Hashidate-Yu, the finest Japanese bathhouse in Seattle.” Fahn made a grand flourish with her hands, like a magician revealing a stage-crafted mystery, then pointed to a set of steps that led below the street.

  Ernest had walked past the steam baths in Pioneer Square that the Scandinavian sailors from Ballard all favored, as well as the other Japanese baths whenever he’d run errands to this part of town—the Shimoju, the Naruto, the Hinode. But he’d never dared enter—he wasn’t even sure what a public bathhouse was, or how it worked.

  “Goodie for you, Fahn, but what are we doing here?” Maisie asked, her expression a mixture of displeasure and wariness. “Are we even allowed?”

  “That’s the beauty of the sento,” Fahn said. “Everyone’s allowed—men and women, the rich and the poor. Follow me. I came here when the hotel first opened last month. I wanted to share it with you; it’s lovely and feels wonderful. I used to go to an onsen bath each week when I was a little girl in Japan—this is almost as good.”

  Ernest followed the two girls down the stairs and through the double doors. He felt a rush of steam and humidity hit his face, making his shirt feel damp and heavy. He inhaled the scent of soap and fresh laundry as he paid twenty cents to get in and took the bath towel and washcloth he was given. He removed his footwear at the behest of a sign. There were a handful of Japanese patrons milling about.

  “You’re sure about this?” Maisie asked.

  “Maybe you two should go without me…” Ernest mumbled.

  “Relax. There are separate tubs for men and women, boys and girls,” Fahn said. “Just do what everyone else does, wash first, then soak in the giant pool. If you sit near the wall, we’ll be right on the other side, okay?”

  “Got it,” Ernest said, but his heart beat warily. From when he was a toddler, he remembered people from Jiangsu frequenting the public bath, but he and his mother had never been allowed. They were too poor. Like most in their village, they bathed in the same cold, muddy river where they washed their clothes, upstream from where people poured their buckets of night soil.

  Ernest reluctantly followed an older Japanese man through a curtain into the male side of the bathhouse, to a row of wooden lockers. A half dozen elderly patrons were in various stages of undress, some toweling off, some soaking, one sitting on a stool scrubbing himself with a wooden brush. Another sat in the corner near a laundry window, wearing a towel around his waist, drinking a Rainier beer and wiping his brow with the cool bottle. Ernest felt self-conscious about his relative youth as he watched the elderly men move slowly, taking careful steps on the wet, tiled floor.

  Through the wall he could hear Fahn explaining the rules of the bathhouse to Maisie, and the chatter of older women talking, laughing.

  Having watched the other men do the same, Ernest took a tin pan and scooped out hot water from the large bath, then sat on a stool and lathered up with a bar of soap, scrubbed with the washcloth. Afterward, he scooped up another pan of hot water to rinse, again and again until he was clean, his olive skin steaming. Then he stood on the marble riser that surrounded the enormous pool. He slipped over the edge into the water, inch by inch, until he was all the way in and found a seat next to the wall. The clear water, which seemed hot enough to boil an egg, leveled off just below his chin. The heat was incredibly soothing, relaxing, and there was something about the purity of the bath, something magical about soaking in such a finely appointed tub. It made him feel less self-conscious about the shriveled old men who sat across from him, eyes closed, as though sleeping or meditating, or sobering up from a long night of drinking.

  Ernest felt the water moving, like the rocking of a cradle. He noticed that through a small rectangular opening in the wall, no larger than a shoe box, water could pass freely between the men’s and women’s soaking tubs.

  That’s where he heard Fahn’s voice.

  “Are you in yet?” she asked him.

  “I’m in. Does it have to be so hot?”

  “It’s just the time of day. The water is at its hottest in the morning. That’s when all the old people come to the sento. Then after school, mothers bring their children, and then men show up in the evening, after work, and before going out on the town. Late at night, people come here to freshen up before bed. The water gets cooler as the day stretches into night. So what do you think?”

  “It’s okay,” Ernest said. “I guess.”

  “I haven’t bathed with other girls since I was a toddler” came Maisie’s voice.

  “Try to relax,” Fahn said. “Clear your mind.”

  Ernest closed his eyes. The water felt soothing. He heard light splashing as the other men left the pool, dried off, and began to get dressed. Soon he found himself alone in the large room. Then he heard whispering, the sound barely audible over the dripping tub and the gurgling drain.

  “Fine,” Maisie said to Fahn, in response to something. “
Close your eyes, Ernest.”

  “They are closed.”

  “And you keep them closed,” Fahn added.

  He did as they instructed, even as he heard the swish of metal rings on a curtain rod and the faint padding of bare feet on wet tile. Then he felt the hot water rise and ripple against his chin and heard light splashing.

  He squinted and saw the two girls climbing in, covering themselves with hands and forearms and their tiny cotton washcloths, their bare skin pink from the hot water.

  “Hey! No peeking,” Maisie said.

  He covered his face with his wet hands and smiled as he felt them swimming, splashing, then sitting next to him, Maisie on one side, Fahn on the other.

  “Surprise,” Fahn whispered, and Maisie giggled.

  He opened his eyes as they sat hip to hip with him, water to their chins. He tried to stare directly ahead at the wall, but his eyes wandered through clouds of steam and he couldn’t help but notice their long hair floating like lotus leaves on the surface of the bath, their bare legs extended, suspended in the water. Fahn folded her washcloth into a neat square and then rested the small towel on her head. Maisie splashed hot water on her face and let it trickle down past her ears. Then they each held on to one of Ernest’s hands to keep from floating away into separate, steamy corners of the deep tub.

  “Is this allowed?” Ernest asked, blushing, though he didn’t really care. His face was already flushed from the heat, masked by clouds of steam. “I don’t want us to get kicked out of here or anything…”

  “You worry too much, Ernest,” Fahn said. She sank lower in the tub and her toes surfaced through the clear water, wiggling. “This is normal where we come from—and I don’t mean the Tenderloin. Besides, this is the quiet time. All the old people go home, but school isn’t out yet. This is our time.”