Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  “You a Pinkerton?” asked the spotty clerk.

  Viggo did not know what that was. “I believe not,” he said politely, wondering if he should enlighten the poor man about the complectual benefits of a light course of arsenic.

  The clerk evidently decided that Viggo was harmless, for he turned the telegram book around and let him read. The message had gone to a Miss Mudge at the New York Times:

  Seeking information Albert Castle, painter. Recently arrived U.S. Anything would help.

  Viggo concluded that Harry Noble was not Albert’s pseudonym; he was a stranger pursuing at least one of the people in whom Viggo had an interest. So, upon leaving Salt Lake, Viggo went where the clerk told him Noble had gone. Denver first: a dauntingly large city, and dirty beneath its smoke-stained dust of new snow. The people there were not particularly helpful, and an invisible hand cleaned out his pocket the first day—he congratulated himself on consigning his money and Famke’s to his boots, where the calluses it formed reassured him as to the stability of their wealth. However, the packet of letters to Famke was gone, and Viggo would have a hard time forgiving himself for that.

  In a process he was to repeat often over the weeks, he went to every hotel in town to ask about Famke, then Harry, and beg permission to post a handbill. He found Harry’s Denver residence within the first day, but the journalist had already departed and there was no news of Famke anywhere Viggo looked, whether hotel or hospital, restaurant or genteel teahouse. And yet he knew she must have been here; and within two days a Bohemian’s offhand remark led him to Amy Oggle’s place and its spectacular Nine Muses Inspiring Pleasant Thoughts.

  Viggo detected Famke’s eyes and hair in the background of that painting right away, and he leapt to the logical conclusion. With the definite air of a rescuer, which won him no friends among the girls, he pointed to the shadowy Muse and asked to see her.

  “Never worked here,” Amy said, blowing a speck of stray tobacco from her tongue. “Just a figure of the artist’s imagination.”

  “But very pretty and very nice,” the beautiful girl called Jo said eagerly, and Amy sent her off with the first customer who entered.

  Viggo was not equal to deciphering the nuances of American speech yet, so he merely asked where Mr. Castle had gone. He thought they might look for Famke together. Amy gave him the same instructions Famke had received the first time: “Go into the mountains. Fair Play, Leadville, Boulder.”

  As the door shut behind Viggo, she crumpled the handbill he’d given her and said to Big Kitty, who was eating a box of bonbons left by an admirer, “I declare, the next man who comes in here asking about that girl, I’m sending him to Timbuktu.”

  “Is that what Mrs. Silks is calling her place these days?” asked Big Kitty.

  Chapter 30

  And this [Santa Fé] is the historic city! Older than our government, older than the Spanish Conquest, it looks older than the hills surrounding it, and worn-out besides.[ . . . ] Yet, dirty and unkept, swarming with hungry dogs, it has the charm of foreign flavor, and retains some portion of the grace which long lingers about, if indeed it ever forsakes, the spot where Spain has held rule for centuries.

  SUSAN E. WALLACE,

  THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS

  It was not just the graphite goose girl who was fading: Eventually Famke had to face the fact that she had developed an array of troublesome symptoms. Perhaps because of the coughing, her throat was always sore, and she had difficulty speaking; every bone in her body ached from the rigors of travel, and yet she was unable to sleep. Rising from her bed each morning required all the energy she had stored between the overnight fevers and chills. Some days it was all she could do to sit on a plush sofa and gaze, empty eyed, at clusters of canvas warriors and nymphs and hunt for the castle made of the letters A and C.

  “You look peaked, Mr. Dante,” at least one Luder was sure to say at each house she visited. And still she continued her search.

  As she grew sicker, the girl whom the whores thought was a boy brought out the maternal in them. They liked to rub Dante’s shoulders and tell him what they could remember of his brother, without revealing that Albert had never mentioned another Castle. Dante was so slight, so delicate-looking, that the girls saw him more as a pet than a potential customer. They imagined they might take him to their beds and stroke his hair and talk all night, and in the morning be almost ashamed to take his money. But he never went with any of them. Maybe he was too young or too sick to have any interest in that area. Maybe he preferred something else; he was European, after all.

  Dante was such a beautiful, ethereal boy that a fourteen-year-old in Manitou fantasized about painting his face with her rouge; he would look as pretty as she, like a great doll grown up. An older woman in Wild Horse thought she might suckle him and thereby restore vitality to a breast that drooped after maulings by miners and ranch hands. So, even without making the trip down the bagnio hall, Famke found her head pillowed against a series of soft bosoms. She was dosed with soothing laudanum and the alcoholic draughts shunned by Saints: Piso’s Cure and Dr. King’s New Discovery; Bull’s Cough Syrup, Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup, and (furtively) Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, “developed by one woman for the complaints of all women.” She wasted a day bathing in hot springs that promised relief “not only for respiratory complaints but also for rheumatism, skin diseases, derangement of the kidneys and bladder, and especially all venereal diseases.”

  None of it brought any change. Her cough and bone-weariness increased. She had waking dreams about worms and knives and needles, dreams of slapping mud into frames for adobe and of stirring enormous steaming pots that made her arms ache all day. Night after night, she fell into a flop-house bed and wept like a kitten, disguising the sobs as snores until she passed into a kind of sleepless stupor.

  Only the thought of taking Albert into her arms, and of being taken into his, roused her from exhaustion. Once they were together—then Famke would sleep, then she would fatten, and then her lungs and bowels and blood would settle into normalcy. The sooner she found him, the sooner she would enjoy not just the lovely, shimmering feeling of want but also the bliss of painless, feverless sleep and easeful breath. And so she pushed on.

  “If you do not like the way that painting looks now,” she forced herself to say to each madam, “I can adjust it for you.”

  By the time November readied itself for serious snows and wind, Famke was at wits’ end. She spent a long night in Coal Creek, a rough town with a large Indian population, drinking whiskey and thinking she might give up.

  “Looking for my brother,” she mumbled drunkenly as the saloonkeeper sloshed gray water over a basinful of glasses. “Went away and never . . . wrote a poem, ‘Had we but world enough and . . .’” She broke off to cough. “You don’t have any boardinghouses here? Only the streets.”

  “Plenty of strangers come through asking after girls,” said the saloon-keeper, shaking water from a glass he’d decided was clean enough. “The sheriff won’t allow it. He’s got a daughter and a wife in town. Wouldn’t tolerate saloons, either, except he likes his drink.”

  Famke grunted and ran her fingers through her hair. She was mildly surprised to feel that it was dirty and that several strands came away in her fingers. They drifted lazily to the floor.

  Feeling conversational, the saloonkeeper leaned comfortably on his elbows. “There was a fellow here a few days ago. Funny kind of cuss, with round bug eyes and hands colored up like a harlot’s face on Saturday night. Said he was looking for whores, too, as he had a business proposition beyond the ordinary. Well, the sheriff thought he was some kind of procurer come to corrupt the town’s daughters, and he scarce escaped a lynching. I pointed him toward Santa Fé.”

  While Famke tried to clear her head, the man slid an extra fifty cents from the pile before her, as recompense for his time. “There was a lynching over in Crested Butte last week. Folks thought they caught one of the Dynamite Gang and strung him up. Turned ou
t to be some farmer just down from the Dakotas—but the opera house blew up the next morning anyway. The papers said it was definitely the Gang, as they were using dynamite they’d stole the month before . . .”

  Famke could bear no more. “You said Santa Fé?”

  “New Mexico Territory,” the man said. “You’ll need a train and a wagon to get there.”

  The old city rose from the valley floor as if the earth itself had heaved it up—which was in some sense the case, as the larger number of its houses were made of adobe, smooth and untextured and even more unabashedly dirt than the walls of Prophet. They were festooned with red peppers and multicolored maize hung out to dry—food that reminded Famke that one cup of milk in a cantina wasn’t enough to keep a day’s hunger away, especially after a bone-jolting thirty-mile wagon ride. Still, she thought she could not manage a real meal, not after the sun and the dust and the biting odors; her throat was throbbing. She rocked on top of a bale of sheep fleece in the back of a rancher’s wagon and clutched the malodorous wool for an anchor. She concentrated on staving off nausea by reminding herself how the vomit would sting her gorge on the way up.

  At last the rancher set the wheelbrake. They’d reached a wide plaza of patchy naked cottonwood trees and more mud buildings, some of them augmented by wooden balconies and ornamental log pillars. A raven-haired Indian seemed to stand or sit by each one of those pillars, and most looked as tired as she. To think she had once thought them thrillingly dangerous . . .

  Dante Castle jumped down, then held a dollar up for fare.

  “The houses is a couple blocks south and west of the Plaza,” the rancher said, pocketing the coin and jabbing a stubby finger forward. “Marcy Street and thereabouts. I recommend Ethel Comfort’s—she’s cheap but the job is good.”

  Famke thanked him and set off in the direction he’d indicated. When she rounded the corner she saw signs for a dozen businesses—Mrs. Comfort’s, Ramona Peter’s, Esperanza Espinosa’s, and more, stretching into unreadable profusion. Where could she possibly start?

  Defeated, despairing, Famke returned to the Plaza and found a shop marked Tienda where she bought a fresh bottle of Pinkham’s—never mind that the Spanish storekeeper looked at her askance. After a long draught of the liquid said to cure all woes that beset the female body—and which did in fact ease her throat a bit, coating it with a viscous layer—she returned to the store for an evening paper. It seemed the easiest way to start, and she could lean against a gas lamp as she began to read.

  More reports of the Dynamite Gang; runaway Chinese cooks, weary socialites, and predictions of snow. Word that Mrs. Opal Cinque was the latest in a series of Marcy Street businesspeople to install electrical wiring.

  Electric light—like the Carlsberg brewery that had once enchanted Albert; but even such a marvel as that had lost its allure for Famke now. She was about to turn the page when a single word made her read on.

  This correspondent is certain that the new means of illumination will make callers take even greater delight in the parlorhouse’s collection of paintings, which is justly famous among artistic types. How lamentable that few of the fairer sex will ever see the collection, “and they fair but frail”! This correspondent himself has already paid a visit and considers the collection worth a viewing even by gentlemen who have no other reason for calling there.

  They will find in particular one large canvas of note, completed this very afternoon, that features the ladies of the evening. The piece is praiseworthy for its color, composition, and signature: a small castle in which the artist’s identity is ingeniously concealed . . .

  Famke did not have to read further. She ran for Marcy Street.

  Chapter 31

  But all rich people are not shoddies, and all poor people are not socially outcast. [ . . . ] Our rich men are beginning to learn that there are nobler investments than stocks and bonds; that life has something grander and sweeter than the pursuit of sordid gain; that he who would leave an honored name behind him must do something for the future as well as for the past, for the public as well as for self.

  SAMUEL WILLIAMS,

  SCRIBNER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

  By now Famke knew that the girls and drinks a man could buy at a parlorhouse cost twice as much as the boardinghouse varieties; they catered to a different class of customer. She would have liked to dress better for this occasion, especially as it was almost certain to unite her with Albert. But she had only the one—male—suit of clothes, and it would have to do. She wouldn’t be wearing it much longer, anyway.

  As she ran, she combed her hair with her fingers and tried to wipe the dust of the road off her face with her sleeve. Watching her, the loiterers shook their heads, as if they knew nothing good could come of this excitement but couldn’t be bothered to do much about it.

  They were much more interested when a short man in a green suit came along some minutes later, handing out cigars and asking about new arrivals from foreign lands.

  “No sabe,” each man said in turn, before asking the stranger for a match.

  I’m Margaret.” The girl at the door dimpled, looking up at Famke beneath thickly painted brows. She didn’t bat an eye at her customer’s dusty dishevelment but, as if on impulse, hooked her arm through Famke’s and hoisted herself onto tiptoes to add more intimately, “Or Mag, Cracklin’ Mag to some. Welcome to Mrs. Cinque’s house.”

  Mag settled back on her heels, looking as gleeful as all the world. She was dark and plump, if a little flat in the chest, and she used the dimples again to considerable effect. Her ruffly red dress was polka-dotted black as if to draw attention to those pricks in her cheeks.

  “I am glad to be here,” said Famke. She pitched her voice low, though her arm trembled as she drew Mag closer to herself. She felt she needed the physical support from another human being. “I’m looking for—I believe he’s here now—my—”

  Mag didn’t seem to hear. “You may leave your hat.” Fetchingly, she snatched the hat off Famke’s head and tossed it onto a green malachite tabletop. She pulled Famke forward by the hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Fam—Dant—Fanden!” As the parlor door opened, Famke clapped a hand over her eyes. Under electricity, the room was lit up exactly like the brewery, so bright that the inevitable pink brocade appeared washed out and the mirror at the far end of the room shone like a beacon. It was blinding, ten times as strong as even the brightest gaslight or the autumn sun, and the effect made Famke sneeze.

  Mag sighed and handed her a clean handkerchief. “Mrs. Cinque has ordered new light globes, but there’s nothing we can do for now, ’less we go back to kerosene. It takes a mighty lot of getting used to.”

  Famke dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, then coughed for good measure. Intending to ask about Albert at last, she raised her head and opened her eyes and mouth—and left them open. For there her eyes had encountered herself: as Nimue.

  Nimue towered over the rosy satin sofa on which four blondes sat in an inviting row. Or perhaps “towered” was not the word; the nymph had shrunk. Though still relatively large, she was only half her former height, and just the right size to fit between the sofa’s arch and the ceiling’s plane. But as if in compensation for the picture’s loss in height, the cave had unfurled horizontally, stretching into more ice and clouds of mist. Famke recognized that ice—yes, the same swells and points she and Albert had painted in Copenhagen. She could even tell which lump of molten glass had stood in for a given stalactite; Albert hadn’t bothered to design new ice for the extra space but had reproduced the earlier spikes as a series instead. It was quite a lot to have done in the three or four days since he had left Coal Creek; but then, he’d omitted much of the detail for which he’d hoped to become famous. He was painting now like a Frenchman, in broad, fast strokes, and the likenesses were not good. But there was the little AC of which the correspondent had written, swelling the walls of a stalagmite.

  There were other changes. Gone were the flowers inside the
ice, gone also the elaborately painted frame. And inside the clouds of Nimue’s breath, blowing from one end of the cave to the other, was a host of female faces and forms.

  Famke’s eyes and throat ached. Dimly she became aware that someone was speaking to her.

  “. . . interested in our painting,” Cracklin’ Mag was saying. “It has a name—Evening of the Ladies, Whispering in the Breath of a Nymph Called Time. And see the wee castle in the ice—”

  Famke pulled her arm away from Mag and wrapped it around herself. She needed to concentrate on what she was seeing. Other girls within her own breath . . . She compared the Ludere on the couch to the ones on the canvas—Yes, each painted face was reproduced in a face of flesh below.

  Albert had painted whores into Nimue. He had made Nimue herself a madam.

  “. . . I’m at the very top, left-hand side, with that little harp thing,” finished Mag, then she seemed to pause expectantly. “My head’s the biggest.”

  Famke could only stare at the canvas. Mag’s head was indeed the largest; but more than that, Famke noticed now that Nimue had grown considerably fleshier, and her hair was a loud shade of light orange. Really she looked very little like Famke at all . . . Famke struggled to swallow the lump in her throat.

  There was a breeze as Mag stood on tiptoe again and peered into her face. Famke smelled the dizzying odor of her armpits. “You all right, lover? Need to sit down?”

  The other girls slid down the couch at once. A blonde thumped a cushion invitingly, raising a cloud of dust that shimmered in the bright light.

  Famke would not speak, lest she begin to cough. She didn’t intend to sit or lie down, either. She swayed on her feet, and as she suppressed her cough she felt her face turning blue.