The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “Suddenly a strange gentleman with silver hair stood beside me on the riverbank.

  “I was never shy, but as I stood dripping wet in my cotton shift, I could see how his black eyes looked me up and down. I think that must have been the first time I got a notion about the lust of men. I remember how I found my crumpled dress on the riverbank and clutched it to myself. As though a dusty piece of cotton could hide my body from his eyes.

  “But it wasn’t me he wanted most, he wanted Rachael. He made small talk, all polite. ‘Can you swim, too?’ says he. ‘Sure I can,’ says I, all boastful. ‘Like a mermaid.’ I got real mad when I cottoned on that it was Rachael who had grabbed his eye. ‘We grew up at Lily Lake. We swum like mermaids before we could walk.’

  “’Mermaids,’ says he. ‘How charming.’

  “Like a damn fool, I spilled our whole story. ‘Orphans?’ says he. ‘Would you like me to spring you and your sister loose of that orphanage?’ ‘How?’ says I. ‘Come with me,’ says he. ‘I own a circus.’”

  “Oh, my! You joined the circus, Miss Malone?” Lucy exclaims.

  “But that’s wonderful!” Zhu says. After her skipparents abandoned her and she went to live at the barracks, Zhu often fantasized about just such an escape from the cruelties of her young life. Run off and join the circus!

  Jessie smiles wanly. “What seems wonderful ain’t always so wonderful, missy.”

  “Sure and we joined the circus, Rachael and me. Mr. Girabaldi—for he was the silver-haired gent, of course—billed us as ‘The Water Princesses. See the Little Living Mermaids!’ Rachael at nine was not so little, anymore. She shot up taller than me. And at eleven going on twelve, I was not so little, either. After the cheap grease and grits Mr. Girabaldi fed us, I was developin’ my bosom and hips, you bet. Neither of us was such little girls anymore.

  “Oh, but you should have seen our act! Mr. Girabaldi dressed us in daring silver and green sateen bathing suits. He had a glass tank made, it was as big as a whole room. And he filled that tank with water, and tinted the water blue, and in we’d slip, the Living Mermaids. Sure and I could hold my breath underwater, but Rachael was the best. She would spin, she would roll, she would turn loop-the-loops. Oh, was we grand! The audience loved us.”

  “Then you must have made a lot of money,” Miss Anthony says.

  “Hmph! Mr. Girabaldi made a lot of money and kept most of it for himself.”

  “I thought so,” Miss Anthony says.

  Jessie dabs at her eyes with her fingertips, and Miss Anthony hands her a napkin.

  “We traveled all over the West in a horse-and-wagon caravan. Mr. Girabaldi didn’t care about us like our Pater, but he fed us and clothed us and gave us our own little wagon and a big gray gelding. The company was respectful like. I had a sweetheart, the son of an acrobat. Rachael didn’t give a hoot about boys at that time. And then everything changed.

  “We toured through San Francisco, and a lady named Miss Hester saw our act and bribed her way backstage. Sure and wasn’t she agog over us. ‘Mermaids,’ says Miss Hester as she dried Rachael’s hair with a thick cotton towel. ‘So beautiful.’ We both took to her. I suppose we was missing our Mum, all the fussin’ and such. Miss Hester started comin’ to see us every night. She brought us little gifts, chocolate and fancy things to eat. She bought me my first diamond. A silly worthless chip it was, but I thought it was the queen’s own jewel.”

  “And this Miss Hester,” Miss Anthony interrupts, “she was a madam, was she not?”

  “Sure and she owned a parlor on Terrific Street. A class joint,” Jessie says with a toss of her curls. “One night after the show, she asked us out to dinner. No, she didn’t take us to her parlor, not at first. She took us to the Poodle Dog. The Dog was such a naughty place at that time, them Snob Hill ladies wouldn’t be caught dead there, not even on the first floor. Miss Hester took us to a suite on the wicked third floor. I was thirteen by then, Rachael going on twelve, as skinny as a stick but developing her bosom. After the circus, we was not stupid chits. Still, we was pretty young kids, and the circus folk had coddled us. We was the Little Mermaids.

  “We did not expect to find several fine gentlemen waiting for us in that suite on the third floor. Gentlemen who wanted to meet the Little Mermaids. Who wanted to see us perform. In private, you see. One Mr. Heald, a young up-and-comer in town, had taken it upon himself to build a tank. A glass tank like the one we swam in for our act, only not quite so large. He had the water tinted blue and everything. And Miss Hester urged us—no, she insisted—that we perform as true mermaids do. Without our green and silver sateen bathing suits.”

  “So you swam in the nude for those men, you and Rachael?” Miss Anthony asks. “And you went to work for Miss Hester? You were eleven and thirteen?”

  Jessie nods. And Miss Anthony nods as if she’s heard Jessie’s story a thousand times before. “Ah,” Donaldina says softly and aims a look of deep sympathy at Jessie. Everyone at the table does. Zhu doesn’t want to speak up, doesn’t want to say that Jessie’s story, or something like Jessie’s story, will be told in the future by a million children as the centuries pass.

  “Sure and Miss Hester tricked us out,” Jessie says wearily. “She set up a tank in her Terrific Street parlor and dyed the water blue. After our act, we went upstairs with the best gentlemen in town. The toast of San Francisco, we was. Made money for Miss Hester and also for ourselves, so that seemed all right. I learned most of what I know about the biz before I blew out fifteen candles on my birthday cake. I learned the value of money young, so I didn’t blow it in. I started a bank account, bought real estate.”

  “But Rachael is in the Summerland, is she not, Miss Malone?” says Madame De Cassin. “She’s the one you always summon. She’s the one who always comes to you.”

  Jessie dabs at her eyes with the napkin, and Zhu holds her breath.

  “She was so beautiful at fourteen. My sweet innocent Rachael, the highest paid sportin’ gal in town. Sure and she was wicked. She loved to pit her gentlemen one against another. She loved to make them jealous the way she loved to make me worry when she swam at Lily Lake. When I warned her that her games would come to no good, she only laughed and said, ‘Make ‘em pay, darlin’, make ‘em pay.’ She wanted more than gold, she wanted passion. She made a horse race out of it. Who would come a-callin’ on Sunday morning before church. Who would bring her the best diamonds. Who would surprise her with a mare or a sailboat or a dress from Paris.” Jessie frowns, pulls at her flask. “I curse the day that Captain Franklin Morrisey blew into town. He’d served under General Grant when he was but a boy. A fightin’ cock, that one. He’d gambled his way across the West, played poker in Tombstone, killed two men in Cheyenne. Still proud and handsome by the time he got to San Francisco, but getting on in his years. No longer such a young man, and wantin’ a wife equal to his passion.

  “He went sweet for Rachael the moment he laid his eyes on her and demanded her hand, in spite of her reputation. She would have none of it. Wild as a cat she was. What would Rachael do, a married woman? Cook and clean and bear Morrisey’s babies? Nah, she’d acquired a taste for the sportin’ life. One night she consented to dine with him at the Poodle Dog. A third-floor suite, plenty of whiskey and champagne. He must have proposed to her again. Sure and she must have mocked him. Morrisey never did have a sunny temper, but Rachael made a lunatic out of him. They found her in that suite with her neck broke, the rest of her black and blue. And Morrisey never got hanged for it, neither. He blew town, and I never heard one word about him again. And the police? Well, she was just a whore.”

  Zhu and everyone at the table, even Daniel, are struck with silence.

  “Thank you for sharing your story with us, Miss Malone,” says Miss Anthony.

  Jessie sniffs, but her face is as hard as stone. “And that’s how my sweet innocent Rachael crossed over to the Summerland.”

  “No protection for children’s legal rights and property,” muses Miss Anthony, stroki
ng her chin. “No decent child labor laws. No decent wage laws at all. No decent educational opportunities for most women. Few decent employment opportunities for any woman except in a menial job that doesn’t pay a wage that a single person needs to decently live on. Prostitution has everything to do with poverty and lack of opportunity. That is why,” she declares in a ringing voice, “we must have woman suffrage. Because if men do not care to address these issues with their vote, surely women will. Women will.”

  “Miss Wong tells me she knows all about what the future will bring,” Jessie says. “Ain’t that so, missy? Sure and Mr. H. G. Wells don’t say a thing about woman suffrage in his book. Will women get the vote in America? Will women ever go into politics?”

  “Women will get the vote,” Zhu says, and everyone applauds and cheers. She doesn’t want to say that American women won’t get the vote for another quarter of century. That the Nineteenth Amendment won’t be passed till 1920, long after Miss Anthony has gone to her grave. “And women will serve in government. Women will be elected to every important office, including President of the United States.” More exclamations and applause. She also doesn’t want to say that the first woman American President won’t get elected till nearly two centuries after this time.

  “Why, that’s grand!” Donaldina Cameron exclaims. “If that’s true, then surely women will vote to outlaw prostitution. We shall drive the Jessie Malones of the world and her loathsome flesh trade out of business.”

  Zhu also doesn’t want to say that the flesh trade will earn trillions of illegal dollars for the next six hundred years. It would be too much for them to bear to hear it. And too much for her to bear to say it.

  Jessie glares. “Sure and we women will look into your private little sweatshop while we’re a-lookin’ at reforming all that’s bad, Miss Cameron.”

  “Sweatshop!” Cameron says, rising from her chair. “And what, pray tell, are you calling a sweatshop?”

  “Your mission, that’s what I’m callin’ a sweatshop.” Jessie rises, too, and flings a candied violet at Cameron. “What kind of wage do you pay your little Chinese slave girls?”

  “Slave girls! How dare you!” Cameron flings a bit of Lady Baltimore cake at Jessie.

  Jessie hops out of the way, saving her green silk dress from ruin. “Sure and maybe your so-called rescues is kidnappin’ just like any other kind of kidnappin’, Miss Holier-Than-Thou.”

  Cameron advances, clenching her fists. “I’ll have you arrested for slander, you sinful wretch!”

  “Look who’s a-slanderin’ who!”

  Zhu and Mariah leap to their feet, each restraining a combatant.

  “Ladies, ladies,” Susan B. Anthony says with a calm craggy smile. “Our prescient Miss Wong says we’re going to get the vote. We’re going to hold government office. We’re going to matter in society. We’re going to make a difference in society. So calm yourselves, and sit down, and let’s talk about the future.” She raises her cup. “Come, have some tea with me.”

  July 14, 1896

  Bastille Day

  15

  The View from the Cliff House

  “To a cold bottle and a hot bird,” declares Jessie Malone, raising her glass of Napa champagne and tucking into her traditional Bastille Day breakfast at the Cliff House.

  Zhu rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but she has to smile. Jessie isn’t one to make understatements, and her breakfast offers more than a whole roast turkey. There’s a saddle of venison, a ham baked in plum preserves, and a second turkey. Jessie insisted on ordering two hot birds so that she, Zhu, and Daniel won’t quarrel over who gets the choicest cuts.

  “Viva la Bastille Day!” Jessie says, clinking her glass against Daniel’s, tossing bubbly down her throat. “Here’s to you, Mr. Watkins, and good luck to you.”

  “Good luck to us all, Jessie,” Daniel says and sips slowly at his first glass of champagne. He darts a guilty glance at Zhu, sets his glass down.

  Excellent. He’s not only learned to internalize guilt, but learned the pleasures of moderation. She smiles her encouragement and adds, “And especially good luck to Hope.”

  “To Hope.” Daniel raises his glass, sets it down again.

  Zhu cradles their newborn daughter in her arms. Hope stirs in her blanket, then settles down into the dreamless slumber of infancy. Her tiny perfect golden-white face is peaceful, her black hair escaping from her bonnet in wisps.

  Zhu tries not to judge these people of the past as she gazes out at the view from the Cliff House. How she wishes Daniel and Jessie would change their self-indulgent ways. How she’s tried to change them, advise them, threaten them. How she wishes Daniel would settle down, spend more hours pondering the stories he wants to tell with moving pictures rather than squandering those hours on smoking and drinking. How she wishes Jessie would give up the biz for her own health and safety, and take off her corset for the same reason.

  Yet when Muse downloaded a report, Zhu discovered that the international flesh trade is alive and profitable in her Now and—to her astonishment—covertly supported by the World Birth Control Organization. Huh. Okay. There must be some twisted logic in that alliance from hell.

  And this is the Gilded Age. Of course Jessie and Daniel are going to eat, drink, and be merry till they die. They’ll never know Prohibition, the regulation of narcotics, protection against STDs, tests for cholesterol and high blood pressure. Those things will come long after they’re gone. So why should they change? Just because Zhu—their little lunatic telling tall tales about the future—informs them they’ve got high-risk health habits? H. G. Wells entertains them with tall tales about the future, but he never advises them to give up their profligate ways. Nor does Mr. Wells ever speculate when the cures for syphilis and lung cancer will be discovered.

  But that was never the object of her project—to change anyone of the Gilded Age. The resiliency principle makes sense to her now. Some things never change.

  Till they do.

  Oh, Zhu has made some difference. Jessie and Daniel have changed for the better. But this is their Now and their world, not hers. In the days since giving birth to Hope, Zhu has felt an alienation growing inside her like a dark flower. A disengagement. A turning away from this world. A turning away from the Gilded Age.

  As if her project truly is done in this Now. As if her Now is summoning her home.

  She watches the shifting Pacific Ocean unmarred by drilling rigs, hydroplexes, seaworld domes, megatankers, and the great sea walls erected when the coastlines flooded during the brown ages, all those artifacts of modern civilization already timeworn in her day. Now pearl gray in the late morning light, the virginal sea stretches out to an azure horizon, empty and pure. Just the sea, gulls wheeling, a colony of sea lions sunbathing on the rocks, and the good fresh smell of brine unsullied by toxic fumes. The timeless view fills her with melancholy, a sense of her own transience.

  The Cliff House, newly rebuilt after a catastrophic fire and reopened by Mayor Sutro in February of this year, boasts an ocean view from all five of its stories. Tourist concessions selling hot roasted peanuts and trinkets for a penny line the first story. An art gallery graces the second story. How San Franciscans love their art galleries, Zhu thinks. The rest of the stories of the Cliff House are devoted to eating, drinking, and dallying. Plenty of private suites for amorous affairs. The turreted chateau was to be styled after San Diego’s inestimable Hotel del Coronado, but the architects, Mr. Lemme and Mr. Colley, have given the place its very own rococo character. Mr. Ambrose Bierce has pronounced the new Cliff House a monstrosity, but diners celebrating Bastille Day find the view and the food and the drink very fine indeed.

  Changes. Things always change from moment to moment. Isn’t that what Zhu has pondered from the very start of the Gilded Age Project? 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. In cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity.
And yet reality is like a beam of light, swirling with infinite worlds.

  It’s a paradox, inscrutable, Zhu knows that now. If it weren’t for that paradox, she wouldn’t have been able to t-port to the past. Or return to her future?

  Changes. The first Cliff House burned down to the ground. Where Zhu sits now with her daughter Hope is its second incarnation. When Muse whispers in her ear that this Cliff House will also burn to the ground in just a few short years, she tells the monitor to shut up. She doesn’t want to hear it.

  More changes. Jessie finally went to a doctor who told her what she already knew from Zhu. That she’s got to cut down on the drinking or her liver will bust. Jessie proudly proclaims that she’s reduced her intake of champagne from twenty bottles a day to three, plus a brandy nightcap. Well, two brandy nightcaps. As a result of this regimen, she’s slimmed down two whole dress sizes in a mere three months. “Mr. Worth is showing the cinched waist for the fall,” Jessie says. “Sure and it’s a good thing I dropped some of that lard.”

  And more changes. Daniel has started drinking again, though he says this time he can control himself. So far, he takes a bottle of wine with his dinner and that’s all. Still. Zhu shifts Hope to her other arm, displeased with Jessie’s toasts. Champagne for breakfast. That’s a throwback to Dupont Street. Daniel really ought to stay sober for breakfast.

  But it is Bastille Day, and Daniel is leaving for Paris.

  The dining room is draped with red, white, and blue bunting, sprays of white and red carnations, bowers of smilax, and hundreds of flags of France, California, and the United States. On the deck, a string quartet plays the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.

  “The fall of the Bastille is France’s Independence Day,” Jessie explains to Hope as if the newborn understands her perfectly. Jessie’s words are slurred; she’s tying one on already. The baby wakes and squeals, and Jessie says, “Aw, lemme hold her, missy.”