The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “We shall see after you get a load of my stable,” she says. “Just between you and me, do not gamble at the Mansion. The games are rigged.”

  He laughs. “Thank you for the tip.”

  “You miss your mama, don’t you?” she asks, half hoping to cut him down a notch or two.

  “She was a lady.” He shrugs. His eyes glint for a moment, then die out. “I am famished, Miss Malone. Will you dine with me?” He turns away, crestfallen. “Oh, pardon me, I haven’t got a red cent.”

  Tomorrow we die. “Meet me downstairs in half an hour. I’ll stand you for dinner at the Poodle Dog.”

  “You’re very gracious.”

  “Gracious, pah. I shall add the expense to your bill when you scare up the scratch to pay me.”

  “Gracious and fair.”

  She fairly flies up the stairs like a spring chicken. Dinner with a handsome young foreign-looking gentleman at the Poodle Dog, where all them Snob Hill gentlemen go to dine on some of the finest French food in town. How tongues will wag when she strolls in with Mr. Watkins. She yells for Mariah, who has mounted her watch on the rooftop again.

  Mariah wearily climbs in the window, softly cursing. Sure and Jessie knows them Snob Hill gentlemen. When they get a gander of her with the likes of Mr. Watkins, they’ll be panting at her door to see what new tricks she’s learned. If she’s going to stand the pup for dinner, she may as well reap whatever harvest she can from his company. The biz is the biz.

  “It’s advertising,” she tells Mariah, who helps her shimmy off the pink silk frock. “It’s the American way.”

  “I’d watch out for that young gentleman, if I was you.”

  “Sure and I’m watchin’ him,” Jessie says gleefully. The ladies in France are tightening the goddamn waist? “Relace my corset, Mariah.”

  “Please, Miss Malone. Madame De Cassin has pleaded with you to go see the doctor about that pain.”

  “Relace the corset. Tighter. Tighter!”

  Mariah does and when Jessie cries out, Mariah feeds her another dose of Scotch Oats Essence. Then they pour her into the mauve damask evening dress with lace festoons, garlands of pearls, and crystal pendants on the bust. Jessie finds her blue diamond earrings and filigree necklace, pulls on opera-length mauve satin gloves. She fills her handbag with two hundred dollars in gold coins. When the Queen of the Underworld goes out of the town, she goes with plenty of gold. Then she saunters downstairs to Mr. Watkins.

  He’s waiting in the foyer, spruced up and spiffy in a black wool Prince Albert suit, an ivory silk shirt with a thin red pinstripe, a red silk vest, a red silk French necktie, and black leather boots. He’s slicked down his thick brown curls so they fall behind his ears almost to his shoulders and donned a black silk top hat.

  “You’re a daisy, darlin’,” Jessie says.

  “You’re a picture yourself, my Queen,” he says and offers his elbow.

  They stroll out the door of 263 Dupont Street into the dust and clouds of gunpowder, the stench of spilled rotgut. The frenzied celebration of the Fourth of July carries on well into the deepening dusk. Drunken brawls ring out from every corner. Squealing horses rear and bolt. Wives scream and cry and plead with their husbands to come home. Men lie passed out pie-eyed on the street or stagger in chortling packs, arms entwined over each other’s shoulders. The street hookers flirt, poxy and crude. Jessie sniffs with disdain. Them chits are as many classes down from Jessie as Jessie is from a Snob Hill lady. Maybe more.

  She hails a hack just as Mr. Jackson’s elegant hansom is trotting up Dupont Street. Abundant silver trim gleams on the fine mahogany leather. Jessie hesitates, her idle flirtation with Mr. Watkins forgotten. Mr. Jackson is a good john, regular and always very flush. An aging Silver King, he was once a rival of one of Jessie’s beaux. Now he patronizes Jessie’s parlor as much as he patronizes the girls on Sutter Street, if only for petty revenge. Is Mr. Jackson headed her way? She cranes her neck.

  Then suddenly a black brougham careens through the intersection, slamming broadside into Mr. Jackson’s hansom. Horses shriek and kick. The drivers leap down from their seats and seize the horses’ bridles, trying to calm the beasts. Mr. Jackson dismounts from the hansom, seizes his driver’s horsewhip, and confronts the offending brougham and its occupants.

  They spill out, three tong men dressed all in black, their queues coiled at the napes of their necks. They wear black slouch hats and black slippers. A wiry, tattooed fellow with a knife tucked in his belt begins to berate Mr. Jackson in a high, excited gibber. A fat man with diamond rings scornfully surveys the gathering crowd. And a third man, tall and gaunt, a black eyepatch over his left socket, barks orders at his driver.

  Them’s the hatchet men Jessie saw in the park! And there, crawling out of the brougham, is the tall, thin lady in gray silk they accosted, towing the squalling Chinese wretch by her elbow. Mr. Jackson’s driver and the driver of the brougham shout at each other, curse and argue. The brougham driver swings his fist at Mr. Jackson’s driver, and Mr. Jackson shouts at the hatchet men, cracking the horsewhip.

  Jessie rushes over, her earlier outrage kicking up like a mule. A lady, a proper citizen accosted by tong men! What’s the city coming to? What’s next?

  Jessie runs to the lady and takes her arm, and the lady throws back her veil. In the dusk, Jessie stares, disbelieving. The lady has pale golden skin, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, the most amazing eyes Jessie has ever seen, the irises the gleaming green color of shamrocks. A Chinese woman? In a proper lady’s outing togs?

  “They’ve been driving and driving, going all over town,” the lady says, breathing heavily. “I can’t think what they’re doing, except looking for a place where they can imprison us.” She looks at Jessie, beseeching. “They seem to think they own her, but they certainly don’t own me.”

  Sure and the lady speaks perfect, educated-sounding English. And then Jessie hears a tiny voice tingling in the air over the lady’s head. Like a spirit! Lordy, there’s something extraordinary about this lady!

  Without thinking twice—a bad habit of hers—Jessie strides up to the eyepatch.

  “How much for her?” she shouts at him, pointing at the lady.

  The eyepatch turns, surprised. He knows Jessie, sure and everyone in town knows the Queen of the Underworld. His eye narrows. “How much?”

  “Yeah, how much?” she snaps. “Be quick about it.”

  The eyepatch spits words at the wiry fellow and the fat man, who withdraw from the confrontation with Mr. Jackson and his driver. The eyepatch points at the wretch. “That one, she ours.”

  “Hmph! I don’t want no Chinee chit.” She spills out a hundred dollars in double eagles, which is probably way too much for the lady if she’s consumptive or poxy. Still, Jessie is determined to get the lady out of this predicament. She’s got a feeling. What do you call it? A premonition. “The one in the gray dress, you dunce.”

  The eyepatch grins and seizes the gold. “She yours.”

  Jessie takes the lady’s arm. “Come along. We should vamoose.”

  “Jade Eyes!” cries the wretch as the fat man wrestles her back into the brougham. “Do not leave me, Jade Eyes!”

  “I can’t leave that girl with those men!” the lady says angrily. The tiny voice chimes again over her head. Like a spirit. Just like a sweet spirit.

  Jessie pulls her away, out of the street. “Miss, please. There’s nothing you can do for that chit.” Jessie pats the lady’s hard, thin arm, well pleased with herself. “As for you, now you belong to me.”

  October 12, 1895

  Columbus Day

  4

  Up and Down Dupont Street

  This is the United States of America, 1895. President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation thirty-two years ago. Casualties of the War Between the States have lain in their graves longer than Zhu Wong has been alive in the future. Slavery has been abolished in America. Everyone here is free.

  And I’m not, Zhu thinks as she si
ts at the breakfast table.

  “What I need is red wine and plenty of it,” Jessie Malone proclaims, tossing her blond curls. Dissatisfied with her natural endowments, Jessie pins hair switches from the Montgomery Ward catalog here and there in her tremendous coiffure. “Go fetch me red wine, missy, and be quick about it.”

  “For breakfast, Miss Malone?”

  “Lordy, no, for the Mansion. For the gentlemen tonight. It’s Columbus Day! Don’t you know anything?”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Malone,” she says deferentially, as is fitting for an indentured servant. She mutters to Muse, “Columbus Day? I can’t keep these American holidays straight.”

  “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” Muse whispers in her ear, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

  Excellent, Zhu mutters under her breath. Now Muse is spouting doggerel.

  Jessie looks at her askance. What must she look like, forever muttering to herself and rolling her eyes to the side to view whatever Muse has posted in her peripheral vision?

  Muse has turned out to be a serious problem. Her one tenuous, desperate link to her Now, she can’t rely on. Very excellent.

  Zhu hasn’t known what to expect of Muse since the first day of the Gilded Age Project when the monitor spontaneously communicated in projection mode and advised her not to fight the hatchet men, to let them abduct the girl and carry her off. Now how can she secure a position at the Presbyterian mission when Jessie Malone holds a two-and-a-half year contract for Zhu’s services and the madam fully intends to enforce the bond? The girl she was supposed to rescue has been abducted, the aurelia never showed up at all, and Zhu is taking orders from the Queen of the Underworld over breakfast.

  The Gilded Age Project has turned out to be a disaster. Nothing like what the Archivists planned.

  Zhu has no idea how to make things right and Muse is no help at all.

  She dallies at the breakfast table, overcome with a peculiar lethargy. Things always change from moment to moment, don’t they? At the most basic quantum level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling. Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. Yet in cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity. Isn’t that what Chiron said? Reality is a set of probabilities constantly collapsing into the timeline. Multiple universes coexist like motes of dust swirling in a sunbeam.

  Quantum physics has long supported these contradictions. Zhu chuckles to herself. Quantum physics, hah. Oh, it ought to be quite painless. You won’t know the difference. You awaken transformed, once a Self contemplated yesterday, now a Self scarcely anticipated tomorrow.

  But what about today?

  She yawns and blinks, drowsy, and doesn’t know herself. She breathes the scent of red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and butter. Who is this slender woman who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen of the Underworld, conversing with gentlemen boarders, sipping coffee with cream and sugar?

  Is it really her, Zhu Wong?

  Or some other woman, altogether?

  Only three months ago, she stood accused of attempted murder. In a T-shirt, jeans, and worn sneakers, she’d trudged through mud, a Daughter of Compassion, a handgun strapped beneath her right arm, a black patch behind her left knee. She’d been a comrade, a devotee of Kuan Yin. She’d been an abandoned skipchild, a Generation-Skipping radical working hard for the only sustainable future the world could hope for.

  Three months ago. Six centuries in the future.

  She tilts her head toward strains of music drifting from the saloon across the street, where they’ve got a string quarter for the early-morning drinkers. A lilting waltz, romantic and dizzying. She plays with her sleeve, the silk a luminous blue, the buttons on her cuff nubs of mother-of-pearl.

  Only three months ago, she’d breathed the stink of petroleum fumes from the antiquated ground traffic of Changchi. She’d breathed the stink of fumes from fourth-hand recyclers beneath the shabby dome over the compound where the Daughters of Compassion lived. She’d breathed the stink of compost, disinfectant, too many human beings living too closely together.

  Now the perfume of red roses sends a shiver of pleasure through her.

  The Night of Broken Blossoms is a distant nightmare, no longer looming over her every anxious waking moment. In three months, the Gilded Age Project has taken on the quality of a dream.

  Who is she?

  She is Zhu Wong, of course, a modern Chinese woman. She’s tough, morphed for telelink, Blocked for UV radiation, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Her fingernails were always caked with grit, soil and oil, and bits of plastic.

  Yet she is Zhu Wong, the runaway mistress of a British gentleman, fleeing to America by way of Hong Kong and Seattle, with nothing but a feedbag purse and traveling togs in tasteful pearl gray silk. The LISA techs gave her manicure right before she stepped over the bridge.

  Who is to say she is not that lady? Who is to say who she really is?

  “Jar me, missy, you’re a dreamy chit,” Jessie says. “I said, it’s Columbus Day. The day that dago discovered America.” Jessie polishes off her customary breakfast of five roasted quail stuffed with oysters sautéed in butter washed down by three bottles of champagne. The madam drinks champagne from morning till morning. Her endurance is staggering, her contempt for sleep awesome. “Pay attention. Ten cases of Chianti should do.”

  Zhu reaches for the green leather account book lying at her elbow on the dining table. Every morning she goes over the books with Jessie, setting out debits, credits, and cash flow for the Parisian Mansion, the Morton Alley cribs, and the boardinghouse. She actually doesn’t mind, finding the work oddly satisfying. She doesn’t even use Muse’s calculator. She likes to figure the numbers by hand, checks her calculations three times.

  “Presently we’ve got fifty cases of liquor at the Mansion,” Zhu says, flipping through the account book. “Ten cases each of whiskey, rum, and gin, and two of champagne. Do we really need red wine, too?”

  “Of course we do!” Jessie declares with the expansive joy that always overcomes her after her first champagne for the day. She turns an empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, and Mariah whisks bottle and bucket away. “I love them dagos, don’t you? I told Chong he’s got to cook a special dago spread tonight. Minestrone, melon and prosciutto, yellow squash fried in butter. Veal parmigiana.” Jessie’s lips are still buttery from her breakfast, but her eyes shine with gluttonous anticipation. She knows of more different kinds of dishes than Zhu has ever eaten in her whole life. “Tortellini with pine nuts and heavy cream. Rigatoni in marinara sauce with shredded beef. Macaroni casserole with fontina cheese. That dago bread they bake in North Beach dipped in olive oil. Macaroons and nougat, spumoni with candied cherries. And red wine, missy! We must have plenty of red wine with a spread like that. Make that twelve cases, will you?”

  Jessie pops the cork on another champagne bottle. My fog-cutter, she calls her breakfast libation. When she comes to the table particularly haggard and groaning, she tartly informs Zhu that a lady never feels good in the morning. Mr. Ned Greenway, tastemaker for the Smart Set, said so himself. Zhu asked Muse to search the Archives for the quotation. It turns out Ned Greenway said that a gentleman never feels good in the morning. Mr. Greenway does not approve of champagne for ladies. Jessie loves to twist the truth to suit herself.

  Jessie splashes champagne into her goblet and tops off Daniel’s. Daniel usually starts his day with half a pound of grilled bacon, an oyster omelette from the secret recipe Mariah pilfered from the chef at the Palace Hotel, and coffee heavily laced with French brandy. Today, however, Daniel and another boarder, one Mr. Schultz, a gentleman who books arrivals and departures for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s China Line, have joined Jessie in quail and champagne.

  Zhu studies them as they tuck into their rich food, feeling queasy just watching them. The only nourishment Zhu takes before noon besides black coffee is a glass of orange juice that she or Mariah squ
eeze fresh every morning. “No wonder you’re skinny as a flea knuckle,” Jessie complained, offended that Zhu wouldn’t try the quail.

  “Go see Mr. Parducci on Union Street,” Jessie tells her now. “And chisel him down, he charges too much.” She drains her goblet with alarming speed. “Then go check up on the Mansion for me, missy. I’ve got errands to run before I make my appearance today.”

  “I hear the two-year-olds are running at Ingleside,” Mr. Schultz says, grinning.

  “You hush,” Jessie says, but Zhu has already figured that Jessie is off to gamble on the horses at the brand-new Ingleside Racetrack out beyond the Western Addition. Jessie is crazy for the colts and shrewd at betting.

  The front bell rings, and Mariah goes to answer the door. From her place at the table, Zhu glimpses a sweaty boy in an American Messenger Service uniform, handing over a letter. Mariah brings the letter in to Daniel. He takes it with a contemptuous glance, quickly slips it in his vest pocket.

  He catches Zhu’s furtive observation as he reaches for his champagne. She can feel her face burn, a pulse beat in her throat. Daniel Watkins is arrogant, rude, condescending, and bold. He acts as if he’s entitled to whatever he wants. He’s completely unlike any man she’s ever met. He smiles mockingly at her discomfort, and she casts her eyes down. She can just about hear Sally Chou’s sardonic laugh. “Think with your brain, kiddo, not with some other part of your anatomy.” She abruptly turns away and studies the abundant table to conceal her embarrassment.

  The table—beautifully set with china and crystal, linen and flowers—is totally foreign to her. A relic out of some museum. And the way Jessie and the others linger over their plates, discuss dishes, extol the virtues of taste and texture? Surely such behavior is odd, quaint, and self-indulgent. Before the Gilded Age Project, Zhu well remembers how often she ignored the aching hollow in her stomach on many a long night, ignored the gritty water, the nutribeads like chalk between her teeth, the nutribars resembling the packaging they came wrapped in—which in fact was edible after you steamed off the germs and the grime. It’s immoral to dwell on food beyond one’s nutritional requirements, uneconomical, and incorrect. The closest the Daughters of Compassion ever came to feasting like this was when there was the occasional surfeit of millet gruel which they scooped out of Styrofoam cups while squatting around a trash fire.