The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “So what if another hundred thousand illegal babies are born?” someone heckled from the back. “Why do you care?”

  “Because with exponential growth,” Sally Chou said, “another hundred thousand illegal babies means another million six people before we’ve reached our own middle age. Can our fields feed another million six people when we don’t have enough to eat right now? Can our factories employ another million six people when we’ve got thirty percent unemployment?”

  “Can our future sustain another three million people in the next generation after that?” Zhu called out.

  Sally Chou was sweating and exhausted by the end of this rally. Zhu didn’t remember what happened to the heckler in the back.

  New campaigns were announced each spring over bowls of millet gruel at the long plywood tables.

  “Women must be the first to understand that having children—skip or natch—is a privilege, not a right,” Sally Chou said. “Women must sacrifice that privilege for the children. Everyone’s children. For the future! As the cosmicists say, ‘To give is best.’”

  “Are you a cosmicist, Sally?” Zhu asked.

  “We can learn from the cosmicists,” Sally said, a little evasively. “We must all learn that a sustainable future depends on the sacrifices we make now. Let us make those sacrifices gladly! Make them out of compassion! We must win the hearts and minds of our women. All the world watches mother China. Our China must not fail!”

  Our mother China. We, the women. Zhu eagerly embraced these words and ideas. If all the world watched mother China, then all the world watched her, too. Zhu, the abandoned skipchild, now a Daughter of Compassion.

  The compound was comprised of a scrawny vegetable garden, a fishpond, a small ugly office high-rise, a mediocre medical clinic, a depressing dining hall, an uninspiring recreation room, and a dormitory and communal baths. Zhu thought the compound was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen. Especially the shrine to Kuan Yin.

  Kuan Yin was the patroness of the Daughters of Compassion. A five-thousand-year-old goddess, a mystic presence, an intellectual principle, a metaphor, a heroine of fables, a source of aphorisms, a philosophical statement.

  “Who is Kuan Yin?” Zhu asked as she sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor. She gazed at three statuettes on the altar—a seated woman of celadon, a standing woman with a baby on her hip, and a crouching woman in golden armor, her arms raised for battle. She wasn’t sure which aspect of Kuan Yin she preferred—the priestess, the mother, or the warrior.

  “She is the bodhisattva of compassion,” Sally Chou said. “She who hears all pleas.”

  In one fable, Kuan Yin was a hunter, like the Greek goddess Artemis, who offered women the spiritual life as an alternative to marriage. In another fable, she was an innocent girl whose parents abused her, then sentenced her to death. Each time the executioner took pity on her, and she survived. Then, when the parents fell ill, Kuan Yin carved strips of flesh from her arms and made them meat soup, which nourished the parents and saved their lives.

  Zhu was enraged by this story, but Sally Chou whispered, “The Daughters of Compassion are strips of flesh. We are the sacrifice.”

  Zhu nodded and embraced the Cause. She threw herself into the life of abstinence and discipline. And she never ate meat after that. Meat of any sort—red flesh, fish, or fowl—tasted too much like a sacrifice.

  *

  Zhu gains the crest of Montgomery Street, troubled by Muse and perplexed by the cigar wagon. She gasps for breath. The Archivists insisted she wear a corset for authenticity. A corset gives the female figure a distinctive curvy look, even a woman as thin as Zhu. At her most anorexic, her waist measured twenty-one inches. Wearing the corset, she’s managed to squeeze her waist down to eighteen inches. Hah. Maybe she hasn’t pulled the laces tight enough. The advertisements promise a reduction of five inches.

  She runs her hand down her side. She remembers Daniel circling his hands around her corseted waist, delighting in the bound portion of her body.

  A very troubled young man. And very much a man of his times.

  Should she begrudge him that? Or try to save him from his ignorance?

  Oh, man. There she goes again, trying to save the world and everyone in it.

  Not only does a corset restrict a woman’s breathing, but the undergarment compromises her digestive tract, her bowels, her uterus, her liver, her kidneys, her bladder. The exoskeletal construction weakens a woman’s midriff muscles to the point that some long-term corset wearers can’t sit up or stand without the support of their whalebone stays.

  “Braced for the day,” Jessie cheerfully says.

  Zhu sneezes at the corner of Montgomery and Broadway where street sweepers bend to their task. A man in a sombrero leads the way, driving a one-horse Studebaker wagon. Bolted to the wagon bed is a huge oak cask from which black cast-iron Niagara sprinkling heads protrude. The driver sprinkles water onto the dusty street, but without rain for three months, his efforts don’t help much. Another Studebaker wagon follows, a huge cylindrical brush sweeping the dampened grime into the gutter. Still another wagon follows that, accompanied by a hunchback on foot. The hunchback shovels horse manure, dust, and refuse, and deposits his burden into the back of the wagon. The wagon buzzes with flies. Dust not captured by the sprinkling water rises over the street in a filthy brown haze.

  Zhu sneezes again, pulling an antihistamine out of her feedbag purse, as well as a freshly laundered handkerchief. Tears spurt from her eyes and nose. Muse has managed to identify the source of her allergenic reaction—powdered horse manure mingled with fly refuse. The fine particulate matter hovers in the city’s air everywhere. Sometimes luckless horses drop dead on the street and are abandoned. Along with the feral dogs, the flies quickly descend there, too. It’s the fly refuse that really gets to Zhu.

  She smelled plenty of compost in Changchi. She breathed carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. But fly shit? Not till 1895.

  Now the blare of a brass band fills her ears as a Columbus Day parade wends its way up Columbus Avenue. Leading the way on a prancing black stallion rides the grand marshal, resplendent in a scarlet top hat and cutaway coat, a scarlet sash and a blooming rosette, white breeches, and high black boots. Zhu claps her hands and shouts, enchanted by the sight. Fancy carriages follow with black leather hides and silver chasing, their convertible roofs folded down. Wealthy Italian families ride inside, decked out in bright silks and black gabardine, red, white and green sashes slung over the ladies’ ample breasts. They wave to the crowd, as regal as royalty, and Zhu waves back, happy as a child. Now nuns in crow-black robes trudge solemnly past, called out into the festivities on this honored day to look after their obedient charges who march along next—little girls in white veils, each with prayer books embossed with purple crosses, and little boys in black suits and green and red ties. The children sing, their birdlike voices lost in the air. Orphans, Zhu thinks with a sudden pang. Then jugglers follow, flinging silver balls, painted wood pins, flaming torches. Lovely! Zhu has only seen live jugglers on holoids. Juggling is a lost art in her Day. Now clowns costumed like the great Joey Grimaldi caper and prance, and the goggle-eyed children lining the street curbs scream with laughter. An emaciated brown bear with a muzzled snout snuffles and sways miserably. The clubs and special interest groups from the Italian community bring up the rear, each with its own spangled banner, caps and jackets, and high-stepping drummers beating time to a measured strut.

  Zhu follows the parade up Columbus to Union Street and turns the corner there, leaving the parade to promenade north to the waterfront. She sneezes once, twice, three times. Her feedbag purse slides off her shoulder, and her button boot slips on something slick.

  Not spillage from the street cleaner’s drudge, thankfully. No, the macadam is slick with squashed grapes, grape pulp, and dark mottled juice. Could this be the wine merchant’s address? Well, yeah. Zhu steps inside.

  The place is in a frenzy. The front counterto
ps have been rolled back, revealing a warehouse of surprising size. Huge wooden presses are busily employed by boisterous young men. Young women, their hair caught back in red and black bandanas, fill and cork green bottles as fast as the raw wine can run out of the spigots. Racks of new wine bottled at the start of the season are stacked on the rolled-back counters, ready for a fast sale. Other women fill great wooden casks with the rest of the runoff for proper aging. Bins bulge with purple grapes the wine merchant had carted down from Napa vineyards.

  “Ciao, bella,” says the jovial wine merchant, doused with grape juice and sweat. “You take a taste?”

  New red wine will surely taste dreadful. Zhu doesn’t drink, and anyway, what does she know about wine? “No, thank you, Mr. Parducci,” she says. “How much for twelve cases of well-aged Chianti for the Parisian Mansion? We’re celebrating Columbus Day tonight.”

  “Twelve cases? Eh, fifteen cents a bottle.”

  “Dear sir, since Miss Malone is your steady customer, I think that is way too much. Ten cents.”

  He’s drunk. He’s also staring at her. “Yeah, okay. Avanti. Ten cents. Is done deal.”

  Ah. Each bottle of Chianti from Mr. Parducci, then, costs ten cents. Each drink from that bottle, poured by Jessie’s girls into tiny thimbles, will cost the gentlemen two bits. After two drinks of the stuff, most won’t notice the expense. And Jessie’s girls will make sure they imbibe at least two drinks.

  Why should Zhu be surprised? San Francisco, 1895, is capitalism at its finest hour. Yet she has to laugh. Food and water rationing in her Now—corrupt officials, markups through the roof—isn’t so very different from capitalism at its finest hour.

  Not so very different. Does this mean people haven’t changed so much in six centuries?

  But surely men and women and their relationships with each other have changed. Haven’t they?

  Surely women like Zhu have changed. Perhaps Daniel can change, too?

  “You work at Miss Malone’s, eh bella?” the wine merchant asks, handing her a receipt. He’s a handsome graying man, though he’s eaten a bit too well over the years and is probably due for his coronary arrest anytime soon. Well, maybe not. They’ve actually proven in Zhu’s Now that consumption of wine, especially red wine, is good for the circulation. “You too nice to work at that place.” He surreptitiously hands her a coin as his dark, round wife watches them suspiciously. “Nice girl, you go find work in a nice house up on Snob Hill. You good washee washee girl, no?”

  “Actually, no, Mr. Parducci,” Zhu says. “I am Miss Malone’s bookkeeper and administrative assistant. Sometime I negotiate contracts on her behalf, as well.” She lets the wine merchant puzzle over that. “I am no one’s washerwoman, Mr. Parducci.”

  She cannot hide her smile—yes, of pride and triumph—as the wine merchant’s jaw drops. He could not be more surprised at her reprise of her job description if she were a talking dog.

  “Happy Columbus Day,” she says, oddly cheered by the man’s discomfort, and signs the wine merchant’s receipt. “Ciao.”

  Zhu supervises the wine merchant’s driver as he loads the cases onto the wagon and climbs up next to him on the driver’s seat. The ride is welcome. The afternoon has warmed beneath this beneficent sun. It’s hot and that dreadful dust billows. Zhu holds her handkerchief over her face.

  The wagon clatters up to the Parisian Mansion. A conservative brass plaque simply announces the moniker of the place between two simpering but decently clad cupids. Nice. Such plaques have been the subject of much civic dispute. Lucy Mellon, also known as Miss Luce, caused a quite a stir by mounting a brass plaque above her Sacramento Street house announcing, “Ye Olde Whore Shoppe.” The bulls made her take it down.

  Zhu sniffs. And a good thing, too. How crude.

  The Parisian Mansion’s plaque is the most conservative item of its exterior. Cast plaster cupids smile from every newel, post, archway, portico, and window hood. Jessie calls the paint job Pompeiian red. The elaborate gingerbread is detailed in ivory, eggplant purple, and a startling pale teal. The place is positively hallucinogenic. Zhu can’t quite decide if it’s dreadful or magnificent. Daniel only remarked, “How else does one paint a maison du joi?”

  Zhu steps down from the wagon, carelessly swishing her skirts, revealing a flash of her calf, the lace hem of her slip. Although she is swathed in traveling togs, her collar buttoned up tight against her sweaty throat, the driver—a dashing dark-eyed swain with olive skin and masses of black hair—stares, openmouthed. She wears stockings of a pale pink silk. She gets them from Jessie. They’re far more comfortable than the heavy black cotton stockings proper ladies are supposed to wear.

  That snippet of pink silk, however, is an unmistakable sign to the driver—homewrecker. A sporting lady, a moll, an owl, a fallen angel, a hooker. A whore.

  Suddenly she is fair game.

  “Well, well, miss. How much for a whistle?” And he’d been such respectful boy just a moment ago, chatting about the drought.

  Zhu ignores his rude question, points to the trademen’s entrance around the side of the Mansion down a well-swept narrow alley. “You may take the cases there.”

  “I got time.” He fishes a coin from his shirt pocket. “And I got jack.”

  “I don’t have time. Please hurry up.”

  He steps in her path, slaps his fist in the palm of his hand. “Who do you think you are, chit? I said I got jack.”

  She waves the receipt at him, stamps her foot. “Take the cases in there or I’ll speak to Mr. Parducci about you.” She looks around. “And I’ll call the cops.”

  “Cops ain’t gonna help you none.” He spits. But he shoulders a case and follows her down the alley. He deposits her purchases on the floor of the hall, one by one, sweat and anger rolling off his skin.

  She watches him, tapping her toe. She reaches into her feedbag purse for the mollie knife, closes her fingers over the smooth little shaft. The mollie knife is mostly intended for mending and healing, but she can hurt him with it if she has to. Hurt him bad. She can also aim the side of her hand against his windpipe and really hurt him bad. And to think she was going to tip him. She says instead, “Get out.”

  All over the glimpse of her pink silk stocking.

  *

  Zhu steps into the kitchen of the Parisian Mansion.

  “How you, miss?” Chong, Jessie’s chef at the Mansion, abandons his huge cast-iron pot boiling with wide flat ribbons of lasagne noodles and comes to inspect her delivery. A wiry, shrunken fellow with a graying queue that reaches to the backs of his knees when he unwinds it from around his head, Chong’s usual expression is dour. Now he positively scowls. “Miss Malone want me cook Eye-talian. I no cook Eye-talian. French my special!”

  “I know, Chong. But you know Miss Malone. Once she gets something in her head.”

  Chong’s scowl deepens. Even Zhu, Miss Malone’s right-hand girl, can’t save him. He scurries back to his pot, cursing softly. Chong is one of the finest French chefs in San Francisco, hired away from Marchand’s. Jessie covers her overhead at the Mansion with the girls, but she makes her real profit from the food and drink. The Mansion has a culinary reputation, along with its other reputation. Chong’s specialty is terrapin in heavy cream, sweet butter, and sherry cooked in its own shell with a certain spice Chong will not reveal. Jessie traditionally serves Chong’s terrapin at 4:00 A.M., along with sentimental songs on the calliope, after the gentlemen are well soused and sexed.

  “Five dollars for a tiny dish of turtle meat?” Zhu asked, scandalized when she first observed this ritual. “Never mind that this species of turtle will be endangered in less than a century and will never be seen on menus again.”

  “In danger,” Jessie said. “In danger of what?”

  “That must be a thousand percent markup.”

  “Jar me, missy,” Jessie said, furrowing her brow. “We gotta make a profit.”

  Now Zhu inspects the large immaculate kitchen. Chong’s sideboard is stacke
d with zucchini and yellow squash, Roma tomatoes, sacks of every kind of dried noodle known to North Beach, casks of olive oil, salmon and crabs dripping with bay water, a saddle of veal, a side of beef, fat garlic bulbs, bunches of scallions, bouquets of oregano and basil fresh from the farms in Cow Hollow, wheels of Parmesan cheese. Chong can cook anything, French or otherwise. He’d be a celebrity chef in Zhu’s Now.

  She goes to the parlor, dreading what she’ll see. She hears tinny chords from the calliope, but everything else is still and deserted. Not much business this time of day. Stale tobacco smoke clogs the room. She wrinkles her nose at the stink of spilled booze mingled with the animal scent of sweat and semen. The spittoons are spattered and slick, the ashtrays overflowing.

  Another busy night, apparently, and no one has freshened the place up. This is definitely not acceptable. Zhu storms down the hall to the bedroom where the parlor maid sleeps. The biz is the biz, as Jessie says. Zhu raps sharply on the door. “Myrtle.” Silence. “Myrtle?”

  She tries the door, swings it open. A rustle of bedclothes, soft laughter. Myrtle is a black woman who trained for service at the Palace Hotel, but she’s much younger and wilder than Mariah. Zhu peers in. Myrtle is trying to hide another body on the bed beside her. Zhu doesn’t want to know and doesn’t much care.

  “You’d better attend to the parlor before Miss Malone shows up,” Zhu says. “She’ll tan your hide.”

  She doesn’t wait for Myrtle’s answer and returns to the parlor, fuming. Red velvet curtains are drawn over the windows, shielding all but a sliver of sunshine. The lamp with the scarlet shade is turned down low. The city has forbidden red lights over the doors of sporting houses, so Jessie—and every other madam in town—has resorted to placing the table lamp with its scarlet shade by the window and tossing lacy undergarments over the telegraph wires outside. The parlor has a tired, overused air, but at night it transforms itself into an opulent, dark scarlet cave. Gaslight is so much more flattering than sunshine or electricity.

  “Hey, Miss Zhu,” says Li’l Lucy. She hunches at the calliope, staring at the keys as they automatically depress and spring back. Her fingers curl around jigger of whiskey. She raises the glass to her lips. “Drink?”