Marissa put Carter’s left hand at the top of her stocking; Lupe did the same for his right. He could barely breathe.
“Maybe you should join us upstairs,” Lupe said, and then each of them took a stride backward, almost in unison, like it was a new dance step, and Carter’s hands held only the air.
Carter found his voice. “Yes,” he said.
The girls, holding hands, raced out of the room in excitement, and a second later, he could hear them trot up the stairs. He righted himself on the couch. He wasn’t sure he could stand.
Then, in excitement, he found his legs and bolted out of the room. He was at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, when he heard a deep sigh from back in the living room. Ginger was stretching on the carpet. She waved a paw toward him.
He hesitated.
He went back to the couch and sat down, not entirely sure what he was doing. He watched the staircase as if it might roll up at any minute. Ginger jumped up onto the couch. She put her chin on his knee. He was getting hair on his trousers. The shirt he could have pressed. The shoes he could have shined. They thought of everything here. He remembered how, after his father had taken overnight business trips to Oakland, his mother had always gravely examined his shirts and his shoes. He lay back on the couch, next to Ginger, and tried to imagine sprinting up the stairs. He could hold on to the railing, taking the steps two at a time. He thought of what their room must look like, the fresh pastel stalk in a porcelain vase, erotic etchings from Paris in tasteful frames, a bed, brass, no, four-poster and of oak. They would be waiting for him in the bed, or perhaps there would be a game, an ambush as he went in. Before he went up, he had to remember the sensations, the fingers against pliant skin. Lupe, the younger sister, stepping back, saying, “Maybe you should join us upstairs?” Something was familiar about that, it had a hollow ring to it, and then he remembered, yes, it made perfect sense, it was the same intonation, exactly, as “Will you have her as your bride?” An act. Everything here, in this house, even sincerity, was an act, and sweetly performed.
He fell asleep there, on the couch. His dreams were unfocused and pleasant. Relief. Someone was playing Franz Liszt’s gentle Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. It was the type of aching solo piano music that spoke of sitting by the edge of a lake in summer at night, looking for comets.
When he opened his eyes, he was still on the couch and Ginger was gone. Across the room, Annabelle Bernhardt was playing the Liszt harmonies on Jessie Hayman’s grand piano. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted.
When waking to something unlikely, the mind usually tries to make excuses—that it’s just a dream. But Carter knew, even as he was still half asleep, that this was real. Annabelle sat near him, in this parlor, and she could play the piano beautifully. It was quiet music that built to great passion slowly, then faded back to reflective states, then charged again into full tempests and whirlpools. The Bénédiction was a long piece, with many asides along the way, and when Carter closed his eyes, he had dreamy, pleasant thoughts, and when he opened them, he saw Annabelle, dressed in a man’s work shirt, Levi’s dungarees, and her tall harness boots.
He had no idea she could play the piano, or when she rehearsed. He knew nothing about her offstage life. For example: what exactly was she doing at 44 Mason?
Annabelle breezed through a difficult stretch, but on the diminuendo, missed a chord change. She tensed, let out a deep sigh, then flipped the keyboard shut.
She looked over her shoulder at Carter.
Carter said, “That was beautiful.”
“It stunk. Shut up.”
Carter walked over and sat next to her on the bench. She shifted, putting more distance between them. Carter looked toward the window. The sky was purple. It was almost dawn.
“I was thinking about it,” she said carefully, looking at her hands, “and I realized you’re the only man on the program I haven’t had to punch in the mouth.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “So you’re here to finish the job?”
She shook her head. She seemed sad.
“You know, you play the piano very well.”
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t even start with that. I was icing my hand after I decked Mysterioso, and I just started thinking.”
She didn’t say what she was thinking about. Carter said, “If you have talent that involves your hands, you shouldn’t risk it by punching people. You saw how Houdini and I didn’t touch you when you were beating Mysterioso.”
“Yeah. You guys are pansies.”
“We are not—” Carter stopped. He folded his arms, and realized he was smiling.
She picked at a chipped nail. “I was at the Ferry building, and I couldn’t sleep. Everyone was talking about you taking over the act and I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.”
“No?”
“You’ve gotta take over an act tomorrow morning. How the hell you gonna do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, anyway, I was thinking of quitting.”
Carter shook his head. “I won’t allow it.”
“Yeah, right. So, I heard you were here, and I thought, Just what I need, another whoring, leering kind of boss, and so I came over and I sat in a tree right out there . . .” She pointed out the bay window, to the yard Carter could now just faintly see. “And I watched you . . . for hours!” She looked mad when she said this. “I kept thinking, any minute now, Charlie Carter’s gonna prove himself a chicken chaser, but no.” She glared at him.
He said, “They’re very accommodating here—they would have brought you a pillow.”
“If you had gone upstairs with those two little girls . . .” Annabelle said, and Carter wondered what the threat would be. Finally, she murmured, “But you didn’t. So I can’t quit right now, and so I thought I’d come in. Plus I was getting cramps in my legs.”
Carter went to the window, looked out into the yard. There was the tree, a magnolia whose leaves were becoming distinct as the night sky around it was, by the minute, fading into blue. “Why did you play the piano just now? It seemed to mean something to you.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I play the piano.”
“But not usually.”
“How the hell do you know?”
He crossed to the window that faced the street, and he pulled back the draperies, which were damask, and smelled of burnt wood. Outside, it was silent and the rarest of San Francisco dawns: no fog. He could see, between the rooftops, just one spire of St. Boniface’s Cathedral. It was lovely. He and Annabelle were alone together. It was 5:30 in the morning. “Would you take a walk with me?” he asked.
“What’d you have in mind?” she responded quickly.
“A walk. Nothing that would rate a punch in the nose.”
CHAPTER 15
It was warm. They didn’t even need overcoats. They didn’t pass a single person on Mason, and when they hit Market, Carter realized he wanted to take Annabelle to the foot of Powell. “Listen,” he said. The trolley cars weren’t running yet, but there was the whine of a turbine under the red bricks of the street. “They put all the cable cars in a barn for the night, but the system runs anyway. See all the metal plates? There’s a cable underneath them, and it goes for miles, over the hill there, and it moves all night long in a tremendous loop.”
She told him she was from Lawrenceville, Kansas, which was flat, so she was unimpressed with all the uphill hiking required in San Francisco. As they went up Columbus, he pointed out the new buildings, and the gaping, vacant lots awaiting new structures. He described all the beautiful things now gone: parks, monuments, ramshackle houses, playgrounds, amusement parks, all destroyed five years ago. But Carter remembered them. “When I was ten and eleven, I often couldn’t sleep. I would wake at four in the morning and I’d be so excited I had to go for a walk. So I left the house and walked miles and miles in a straight line, down Washington Street, right to the Barbary Coast.”
Annabelle groaned.
“That wasn’t smart.”
“I wasn’t smart, just restless. Boys like me were usually kidnapped and sold to seamen at Shanghai Kelly’s. I don’t know how I managed, but I did, back home before sunrise, maybe twice a week, and no one ever bothered me.”
“What did your folks think?”
“They never knew. They were asleep. I used to tell my brother, James, about it, but he didn’t understand what I was getting into any better than I did. I always wished I had a friend I could take with me.”
“You could have taken James.”
“He was always sleeping.” To their left was the Winged Victory statue, to the right, a vacant lot that had once been a row of houses. “Did you have brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“I wish I’d known you.”
Annabelle snorted, shook her head. “No you don’t.”
Columbus led to Filbert Street, and Carter indicated that they would have to walk up a hill, in fact, the steepest hill in the world. All the way up, Annabelle moaned that all this walking uphill was no good for people from Kansas. When they got to the top, they were in a small park. Carter pointed toward the bay, where there were ships at anchor: schooners, ferries, square-riggers, Chinese junks heading back, already, from that morning’s shrimping.
“Once, I stood here just before dawn, and there was a huge ship at that dock, that one there, and she was listing to her side. Not listing, nearly capsized—all of her masts were tied to the dock, and there were dozens of men on a raft, with lanterns, and her hull was exposed down to her keel. I’d never seen all the parts of a ship that are usually underwater. They were just recoppering her, but I thought I’d stumbled onto a terrific secret. I ran most of the way home, looking at everything. I was sure I’d see all kinds of things in the middle of the night that adults were hiding.”
“And that’s when you decided to become a magician.”
“Oh, no,” Carter said. “That started when the world’s tallest man stole my lucky nickel.” And he told her the whole story. She laughed throughout. He liked many small things about her, even the things that anyone would do, like how she shielded her face as the sun was coming up. There were times that he completely forgot what he was saying, and she had to prompt him.
They bought biscuits and honey and milk, and walked to the top of Telegraph Hill (Annabelle called it Telegraph Mountain). On the way up the spiraling path, which took them through overgrowth heavy with dew, he told her about the eccentrics of San Francisco. He told her about Lillian Hitchcock, who as a little girl had been rescued from a burning house by firemen, and who grew up obsessed with the Knickerbocker Number Five fire company. Because she was wild, her parents sent her away to France, where she attended an imperial ball dressed as a fireman. She sang songs about firemen, in French, to Napoleon III, which horrified her parents, who summoned her home. They were determined to marry her off, and over the next year, fifteen men claimed to be her fiancé, but she never married any of them.
“I like her,” Annabelle said.
Carter told her how Lillian came into her trust when she was twenty-one, built a mansion in Pacific Heights, and threw parties for everyone in society. Carter’s parents had attended one at which Lillian had put down canvas and roped off the parlor and, all evening long, staged boxing matches between professional fighters.
“Did she ever marry?”
“No.”
“Someone that good shouldn’t be alone,” Annabelle said.
“She had a companion. A very lovely woman named Irene. They said she was a Russian countess.”
They were passing a vegetable garden where tomatoes, still green, hung wet in the sun. Annabelle made no further comments about the story of Lillian Hitchcock. Carter was disappointed. He had hoped the story would invite some kind of confession. But they came to the top of Telegraph Hill. The park here was vaguely municipal, in that there were benches for admiring the view, but there were also herb gardens and goat pens belonging to local families, and, at the distant end, patches of dense overgrown weeds surrounding an illegal quarrying operation where bruisers from the Barbary Coast slept the night off.
Carter and Annabelle sat on a bench nearest the bay, and here they finished their biscuits. The waters were green in some patches, or grey, or blue, but calm everywhere.
Carter told her more stories of things once here now vanished: an old castle, a trolley car line, terrific and wonderful houses the size of cathedrals. When he asked her questions directly, she found ways not to answer them.
He asked, “How long did you train before you went onstage?”
She shrugged.
“Have you thought of playing piano onstage?”
“That’s a bad idea. I like fighting.”
“I mean, in addition to fighting.”
Annabelle said nothing. She was looking at her hands.
“You have an evocative style of playing,” Carter said.
“What?” Annabelle looked like he’d stabbed her.
“I mean it as a compliment.”
“Carter, you dope, be quiet.” Annabelle stepped away from the bench. She stood with her back to him. Annabelle, with all of the colors of San Francisco Bay behind her. Finally, she groaned, “Aw, nuts,” deflating like some army inside her had raised a white flag. She sat back down on their bench. “What a revolting development this is.” And quiet again. Then, “Before I say anything else, I gotta let you know one thing. I hate you.” She looked at the bench, then back at Carter. “No, two things. You have beautiful eyes. And I hate you.” They looked at each other for a long time, until she finally said, “What?”
“Are you about to hit me?”
“No.” When she spoke again, her voice slowed, as if she weren’t sure she could finish her sentences. “I was a prodigy. When I was four or five years old, you could play anything for me, once, and I could play it back, only better.”
“That’s incredible.”
“It’s terrible. It was the only thing I knew how to do. And when I was twelve . . . I am not gonna cry.” She looked at the bay for a moment and, true to her word, she didn’t cry. “It was like fog rolling in. One day I had it, the next day, I didn’t. People thought I sounded good, but I knew. I lost it.”
“You sounded excellent tonight—”
“Can you imagine being the best in the world, you feel music like it’s another one of your senses, and one day, you wake up, and you’re only excellent?”
Carter shook his head.
“You’re supposed to get better. And I didn’t. When I found you tonight, I was . . .” She swallowed. “Oh, I was proud of you. You did good tonight, with the Blackmail bit, and Mysterioso, and Houdini, and the girls, and everything. You’re just a real straight-up guy. I thought maybe I could show you something without getting screwed, and there was the piano, so.” Her voice, which was still woolly, rose and fell almost musically, Carter realized. From calm to passionate, and now, slumped over, elbows on her knees, she went full bore again. “Why did I follow you? I am such an idiot.” She put her head in her hands. “I am stuck on you, Charlie. I can’t stand it.”
“You like me?”
“God! I can’t even be mad at anyone right now. Do you know what that’s like for me?” She kicked the ground, hard. “God!”
Carter watched everything: her limp red hair hanging around her face, the anguish she wore, her insistence that there had to be something in the bay worth looking at, the fists she had pressed into her knees. And the dew on their bench, the grass beside them, the smells of rosemary and basil and sage in the Italian gardens all around.
She would not meet his eye. “It is torture to be with you. You’ve been teasing me all night long.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “really.” And he was overwhelmed. “I didn’t know you liked me. I thought the only joy you took in men was violent.”
And then she looked at him. The backs of her hands were swollen and knotted, her palms rough like burl, and he too
k her head in his hands, and her lips touched his, chapped, but sweet. They kissed long enough for Carter to feel all the tender possibilities of contact: kissing! touching! feeling! and then, with a flood of happiness, he realized he was kissing Annabelle Bernhardt, and she was exactly the right person to kiss.
“I could look at you all day, I think,” Carter said. He shook his head, smiling. Around them was the city and the world and the universe in all its known and as-yet-unexplored parts, and with them, the future.
. . .
Astonishingly, the meeting with the performers would start in just half an hour; Carter and Annabelle had to rush. He took her down side streets and through alleys, until they found a cable car. Inside, crushed together in the crowd, they had trouble taking their eyes off of each other.
He was a headliner, he had stood side by side with Houdini, who had named him Carter the Great, and he was holding hands with a woman who thrilled him.
Annabelle said, “Is your name really Carter?”
“Yes.” They pushed together as the car lurched to a stop.
“Charles Carter is your real name?” They had to draw even closer together, the workaday crowd pushing in on either side of them, as the trolley resumed up the hill.
“Charles Carter the Fourth. Who would make up such a dull name?”
“Well, my last boss’s name was Mysterioso, and you were just talking to Houdini tonight, and that’s not his real name—”
“True.”
“And Minnie Palmer changed her last name from Marx so she wouldn’t seem related to her act, and I bet those parlor girls all have different real names, so it’s just in the air.”
“No, my name is just Charles Carter. Is your name Annabelle Bernhardt?” The trolley jerked to a stop, then picked up again. The cab man rang the trolley’s bells in double time.
“No.”
Carter said, “No?”
She shook her head. Her red hair rustled, flowed, calmed down again. “Well, Bernhardt is. Annabelle’s my middle name. But I could never perform under my first name, because it’s the name of someone famous, and I might get sued.”
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