by Lisa Mason
Daniel crosses the street to the Hopkins mansion. They say old man Hopkins never lived here at all, though he poured a fortune into the monstrous construction. Part cathedral, part Mansard, part Gothic, a dark moodiness like a German castle, a hint of Queen Anne with all the excesses and none of the frivolity. The place is atrocious, in Daniel’s opinion. After the old man died, the widow moved East and took up with her interior decorator. Daniel has heard the rumors along the Cocktail Route. Young spunk. Knew which side his bread was buttered on. The widow died a couple of years ago, and the interior decorator inherited everything. He built another bigger, gaudier house over in Massachusetts, felt no need to hang onto this one. He donated the whole kit and caboodle to the San Francisco Art Association, which took up residence in a gleeful flash.
Hence the shindig, quite a show-off for the bohemian crowd. There’s Ned Greenway, he of the rumored twenty bottles of champagne a day, dressed like Puck, a wreath of laurel leaves crowning his sweaty pate, a tremendous white toga billowing around his girth. As if one should aspire to drink twenty bottles of champagne a day. Daniel sniffs disdainfully. A good snort of the Incan gift might do the tastemaker a world of good.
He, Jessie, and Zhu sweep into the foyer beneath candelabra all ablaze. Forests of asparagus fern sprout in every corner, smilax drapes the walls. Fresh flowers everywhere, from banks of orchids surrounding the polished dance floor to rose petals floating in the champagne cocktails. The baroque ballroom is sheer chaos as the orchestra strikes up a mazurka. Filters rotate over the gaslights, sending a kaleidoscope of colors over the dancers. Jewels wink in abundance, masks bob with ostrich feathers, pale curves of flesh abandon modesty. Sideboards groan with punch bowls and platters of food rivaling the offerings along the Cocktail Route. Daniel smells terrapin in sweet cream. Huge parlors converted into galleries are hung with a profusion of oil paintings, landscapes, still life, some sculpture. All rather dull to Daniel’s eye but with the exciting scent of fresh oil paint, chalk, newly cut stone. Revelers throng around the exhibitions, offering shrill critiques and chattering like monkeys.
A nabob costumed as Louis XIV strolls in, leading a donkey dyed green upon whose back perches the nabob’s mistress. She is costumed, so to speak, as Lady Godiva. By God, she’s naked as a jaybird, for all Daniel can see, but for a pair of lady’s riding boots fitted with green spurs. The mistress’s own ample golden locks, generously supplemented with fake curls, conceal her, more or less. She does not look very happy about her charade, as her wrists are bound and lashed to the donkey’s cinch. His face livid with drink, the nabob announces, “It is she who spurs Green Jealousy. Feast your eyes. The other gentleman surely did.”
Zhu clucks her tongue and shakes her head, and ladies of the Smart Set avert their eyes. “Really, Duncan,” exclaims a leading social maven, “we shall not be a party to this disgraceful spectacle. And poor Bernice”—Daniel is guessing that’s the nabob’s wife—“in the very next room.” She gathers up her chums and steers them away.
“Ah, but that’s why everyone comes to the Artists’ Ball,” Daniel says, laughing. “To witness disgraceful spectacles.”
“In my Now,” Zhu says, “she’d sue his ass for all he’s worth.”
“My diamonds is bigger,” Jessie murmurs, watching the maven sail off with her ladies.
Fortunately, no one pays Zhu any attention. But Jessie turns plenty of heads, as much for her bejeweled bosom as for her reputation, and Zhu hovers behind her like a shadow, her face drawn and dark. Suddenly Daniel feels frazzled and claustrophobic in the crowd. Panic gathers in his throat like too much rotgut.
“Miss Malone.” He takes her aside, and Zhu huddles with them. “I was supposed to receive a letter of introduction to a gentleman who’s attending the ball tonight. He’s a gentleman I need to meet.”
“Yeah?” Jessie says, grinning with delight as she blows kisses at her best clients, their scandalized wives by their sides, and waves excitedly to other wealthy madams who shamelessly promenade around the ballroom. “Who’s the gentleman?”
“Why do you need to meet him?” Zhu quizzes him.
“His name is Jeremiah Duff,” Daniel says, ignoring his mistress. Her concern is touching, yes, and also quite tiresome.
“Jar me,” Jessie says, paying attention at last. “You want to speak with Jeremiah Duff? You’d best gather your wits about you, Mr. Watkins. That dope fiend is no gentleman.”
He gestures her to keep the bray of her voice down. “He is prominent in Society, is he not?”
“Prominent, hell,” Jessie declares. “Jeremiah Duff made a killing in the silver mines. Never touched a pick or a shovel in his whole lousy life. Oh no, he shipped booze up into them hills for them poor sufferin’ miners, that’s what Mr. Duff did. Married himself to Elaine Hennessy, heiress to the dry goods fortune. A proper lady if I ever did see one, with her white cotton gloves and black cotton stockings. If she was more of a slut and less of a shrew, her husband wouldn’t come to me.”
“Then you would recognize him if you saw him?” Daniel says, greatly encouraged.
“Dope fiend?” Zhu says, her voice rising, too. “What does she mean, Daniel, dope fiend?”
Fortunately, so many other revelers are shouting and laughing and drinking that no one pays them any attention. The orchestra strikes up a rousing waltz, and the pharaoh and his queen wheel onto the dance floor.
“Recognize him?” Jessie says. “Darlin’, Jeremiah Duff visits the Parisian Mansion every Thursday evening at seven. Used to ask for Li’l Lucy. Left that girl black and blue. Maybe he’s the one who left her with the pox, too. He likes my new redhead well enough. At least she listens to me about douching. The biz is the biz.”
Hope soars in Daniel’s heart, which is beating a trifle too rapidly. “Could you introduce me? Please?”
“Oh hell, why not?” Jessie says. “Then you shall owe me a favor, Mr. Watkins.”
The madam strides off, Daniel following, Zhu dogging his heels, protesting and nagging him. Jessie moves fast for a woman of her size, positively sprightly in spite of the wasp waist imposed by her corset. She sashays, bold as you please, up to a tall, gaunt man in an immaculate black tuxedo, a simple black satin mask tied over his eyes. Daniel feels like a fool. He should have had the sense to do the same. By God, a silly pirate. He must remember that the next time he attends the Artists’ Ball. If there is a next time, sneers a voice in his head. Before he knows it, he is being presented to Jeremiah Duff. Jessie knows how to be gracious.
Duff looks him critically up and down. Good thing Daniel has lost the paunch. Duff has the stringent look of a man who disapproves of the plump Ned Greenway type. They exchange gentlemanly salutations and retire to a secluded corner buffered by three marble monoliths. There’s an air of conspiracy about Mr. Duff. Splendid.
Zhu sidles up next to them. There’s no graceful way to get rid of her. “My manservant,” Daniel says. “At my beck and call.”
“Useful,” says Duff and whips off the mask. He looks Zhu up and down, too, with the same blunt appraisal. He apparently doesn’t mind her looks, either, in the disguise. “Speakee English, boy?”
“Yessir,” she mumbles in a low voice and averts her face.
Daniel heaves a sigh of relief. He must remember to behave nicely to her later tonight.
“Indeed, very useful,” Duff says. “A faithful Chink can pick up the goods for you in Tangrenbu. I may want use of him, myself.” Duff is a skeletal man with a receding hairline over a high bulging forehead, a complexion like white wax, and pale brutal eyes. The kind of mouth that never smiles, the mustache drooping regretfully down the long, stern face. Did his mother ever love him? Daniel sincerely doubts it. “Been taking Dr. Mortimer’s cure, have you?”
“Religiously. sir. Puts me off the drink well enough, but I’m at my wit’s end about the nerves. Plus, the ticker goes too fast at times. Gives me a bit of a pain through the chest.”
“Don’t sleep much, either, eh?” Duf
f scrutinizes him. Brutal eyes, yes, but thorough. Daniel appreciates the stringency, the conspiratorial huddle. “What did you say your age is, sir?”
“I’m nearly twenty-two.” Daniel catches a glass of champagne and a clever little pastry from a tray sailing by on the shoulder of a harried waiter.
“Twenty-two,” Duff says, ignoring the tray. “When I was twenty-two, sir, I trucked goods into the mountains. Even higher than the Gold Country, that’s where the Comstock Lode lay. Even higher, even harder, even crueler than the hills. I wore a burlap shirt, sir, and denim like your coolie here, and padded cotton crawling with lice.” He casts a baleful glance at Daniel’s silk and satin pirate’s costume, the spit-and-polished black leather boots. “We climbed rocks, sir. We ate stone soup when winter came to the mountains.” Another baleful glance at the champagne and pastry in Daniel’s hands. Daniel hastily sets both delicacies down on a side table. “We ate squirrels when we could catch ‘em. With no campfire, we ate them raw. Have you ever tasted raw squirrel? Tasted raw squirrel’s brains, raw squirrel’s intestines?”
“No, Mr. Duff, I have not had that privilege.” Daniel swallows hard.
“You young men with your petty troubles, your women, your drink, and your drugs.” Duff surveys the whirling party, contempt pulling at his features. “One day I fell, sir. A slip on the ice. Oh, I had slipped many times before. But that slip did me in. I fell down that cliff like a son of a bitch and shattered my goddamn leg forever.”
Duff raises his right leg, showing Daniel his boot with the heel built up three inches high and a brace that disappears into the leg of his trousers. “That’s when I started on the medicine, sir. I had to. Pain all the time.”
Daniel murmurs, “I am truly sorry.”
Zhu is watching and listening, her slanted green eyes wide behind the tinted spectacles.
“I took whiskey to the miners,” Duff says. “God knows they needed it. I make no apology for it. My wife and her people”—he spits this out—“enjoy chastising me for the source of my wealth. Take pleasure in suggesting my injury was God’s punishment for bringing them whiskey. Well, sir, there are punishments and punishments.”
“Real estate is hardly a better enterprise,” Daniel says, cringing when Duff’s frown deepens. A shiver of panic runs through him. Is he, in his bourgeois pirate’s costume, losing his friendly connection to the inestimable Duff?
“I took them whiskey,” Duff says, ignoring him. “I took them good whiskey, but I never touched a drop of it myself. No, sir, those were our goods. When we needed the fire of alcohol of warm us in the cold, we drank puma piss. Not a drink a fine young gentleman like yourself would know a thing about.”
“Ah, puma piss,” Daniel says. “Terrific rotgut. Homebrew, tobacco juice, and a dose of strychnine. Gave me astonishing visions.”
Duff finally cracks a small smile, and Daniel knows he’s in. “Let us find the gentlemen’s facilities, Mr. Watkins.”
Duff leads the way, Daniel follows, and Zhu dogs his heels again. He turns and whispers, “You cannot come in with us.”
“I follow master,” she protests in a low voice.
By God, he could throttle her!
Duff turns in midstride. “Oh, your manservant may attend us. Indeed, he should learn how this is done, Mr. Watkins. Like I said, he may prove very useful to you. And to me.”
They find the gentlemen’s urinal on the far side of the ballroom. Not too many fellows in here yet. The serious drinking has only just begun. They tour the gilt and scarlet antechamber set with spotless mirrors, marble tables, and upholstered chairs, porcelain sinks and pitchers of water, trays with brushes and combs designed for a gentleman’s special needs, freshly laundered towels, smelling salts, pots of mustache wax and hair tonics, tapers burning in candelabra, and colognes in cut-crystal flasks.
Negro attendants in scarlet uniforms swarm around them, politely offering various hygienic services. Duff dismisses them, takes a pitcher of water, and finds a table and a mirror on the far side of the chamber. “Now look here, Mr. Watkins.” He takes out a leather case from a pocket inside his tuxedo jacket, unsnaps the top. Inside nestle several vials of powders, a large steel spoon, a thick white rubber thong rather like an oversized rubber band, and a hypodermic needle.
Zhu expels a soft breath. Daniel knows that breath. The sound of her perpetual exasperation.
“Your manservant is impressed, eh?” Duff says, casting a keen look at his mistress who, despite her attempt at this manservant’s masquerade, cannot completely conceal her delicate feminine charms.
But if Duff is distressed by her charade, he gives no indication and promptly sets about tapping a quantity of powder into the spoon. He carefully pours drops of water from the pitcher and stirs the concoction with a silver toothpick over the hot tongue of a burning candle. Like an alchemist he sits, intently stirring, and says at last, “It is done. Take off your coat, Mr. Watkins and roll up your sleeve. Lay your arm down on the table, like this.” He proceeds to roll the thong up Daniel’s arm. “You must cook the medicine as a chef cooks a fine sauce. Like a fine sauce, it requires the right ingredients and attentive care.” Duff draws the liquid in the spoon into the hypodermic needle in one neat suction.
Daniel watches, enthralled. “This will help me sleep without the drink?”
“Has the drink ever helped you sleep?”
“Not really, now that you mention it, Mr. Duff.” He asks again, his hope soaring higher. “And this will calm my nerves from the dipsomaniac cure?” So tired, so overwrought, what he would give for relief! “I will rest?’
“You will rest,” Duff says and, tapping the inner aspect of Daniel’s elbow, promptly jabs the needle into his arm and pushes in the plunger.
Pain! But not so much, Daniel can take a bit of pain, and then—
—then he’s torn from his body, this pale wriggling worm, flung like a stone into the sea, waves of pleasure, sheer pleasure, pressing his very soul into oblivion. Flat as death, dying without dying. A rush—by God!—the most incredible… .pleasure, pressure, pain so vast he is transformed into… .sensation itself, mindless, nerveless pleasure like the moment of sexual release but wrought a hundredfold, a thousandfold, tongues of pleasure caressing him all over his body, and his brain, his poor sleepless harried haggard brain—
Rest, my son, says a voice in his head, and a chorus of voices sing, discordant yet beautiful, the way the sea smashing into rocks on the shore is beautiful.
Like in a dream, a distant dream, hazy and meaningless, he hears his lunatic mistress shouting at Duff, “What did you just shoot him up with, you bastard?”
“Ah, I’m a bastard now,” Duff murmurs. “You will be very, very useful to him. And to me.”
“I asked you what?”
“I hope you followed how to do the procedure. What, you ask? Only one of the most beneficent medicines God has ever granted to us poor mortals exceeding, in my estimation, the gift of the Incas.”
“What is it?”
“Calm down, boy, or whatever you are, and hold your tongue,” Duff commands. He packs up his leather bag and strides out of the gentlemen’s facilities, heading out to the Artists’ Ball. “I merely graced Mr. Watkins with God’s great gift of morphine.”
*
Daniel is sick, then, of course. Somehow that seems inevitable. The price of admission. He retches, clutching his gut, retches over and over till there’s nothing left inside, nothing but his gut. And it feels as if the gut itself will come up, too.
His face is filmed with tears and sweat and bile. By God, he looks like hell in the spotless mirror confronting him. “My poor mistress,” he says as she leans over him with a basin, a washcloth, a pitcher of water, ice cubes. The sound of her breath, quick and close, thunders in his ears. She does not weep, but he can see the sorrow molding her face like the carved grief of an icon. “What I make you endure.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you, Daniel,” she says over and over. A catechism of
despair. “I’m not supposed to. I’m not allowed to. I can’t save you.”
Bloody sleeve, bloody face—his nose is going out on him, again. “Save me? You silly goose. Save me from what? You’re not responsible for me.”
“No, I’m not,” she says miserably.
“I mean, you’re not my mother,” he clarifies, and as soon as he says that word—mother—a cold draft blows over him like an exhalation of the dead. Shivering, teeth chattering.
Zhu summons an attendant, a handsome black fellow, all high cheekbones and dark glancing eyes, who sets down a pot of steaming hot tea.
“She had a lover,” Daniel says.
“Who?” Zhu says and directs the attendant to wrap a blanket over his shoulders. The attendant pours out tea. Daniel can smell the bitter steam, waves the cup away.
“I know that now, though I didn’t understand it at the time. I cast the memory from my mind. I was a boy of seven. I didn’t understand that the lovely proper lady, my mother, had taken a lover.”
The incipient summer, the heat fecund and poisonous, winding like a serpent through the blackness of his heart. The river black beneath the bending hickory trees, the cypress sighing, and the beautiful girl with deep sea eyes who had married a cold, scowling man found herself in love with a man who conducted a gambling business up and down the river. A quadroon. Daniel saw him perhaps once or twice. One of those quick-eyed men with charm, even little Daniel could see his charm. Mama crying, always crying, slap of flesh on flesh. That would be Daniel’s father. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give up her quadroon, her quick-eyed man with his high cheeks and crinkled hair, his laugh like the crack of a branch breaking. Like a woman’s heart breaking.
Her quadroon left her. Montgomery Ward iron tonic after that. And then Daniel watched his slender mother grow fat and luminous as the moon waxing full.