The Abandoned Heart

by Laura Benedict

  “Stop crying.” Madame Jewel had spoken quietly so that Randolph, sitting at the other end of the room, wouldn’t hear. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Kiku had been at Madame Jewel’s for almost six months—long enough to understand that not so many of the men asked for her the way they asked for the other girls. Ruby, whose real name was Edith, and who had never really warmed to Kiku, had told her that Madame Jewel had been about to put her out on the street with the older whores.

  “You don’t try. You think you’re better than the rest of us girls, when you’re only just different.”

  There were men who wanted her, though. Three months earlier, Randolph Bliss had come to the house in the company of one such man, especially to see her.

  The other man, who called himself Mister Jackson, always talked about money when he took her into the opulent Red Room, which Madame Jewel had decorated with some silk hangings and pillows and two bowls she said were Oriental. The figures on them were unfamiliar to Kiku, and she guessed that they might be Chinese or Korean. But she wasn’t sure. She had never learned even to recognize more than a few Japanese characters. There had been no money for school when she was a little girl in her village.

  Mister Jackson—who cried out the names of currencies: pounds sterling and dollars and drachmas and dinars and francs and lire, as he stabbed into her with his small, frantic penis—had introduced Randolph to her in Madame Jewel’s parlor, as though they were at a party, and Kiku had bowed, knowing a lot of the men thought it charming. It had charmed Randolph Bliss. After another week, Mister Jackson had stopped asking for her, and soon Randolph Bliss requested that Kiku be reserved for him, and him alone, telling Madame Jewel that the money involved didn’t matter.

  Madame Jewel had cheated him, making Kiku lie, and had let other men have her. But now Kiku was on the train, and Randolph had told her that they were going to Virginia, where—the other girls had told her—there were still secret slaves and everyone was poor. Randolph Bliss wasn’t poor, though, and because he had bought her, she believed them about the slaves.

  “Does the boy speak English so you can understand him?”

  Kiku took the heavy food hamper from the porter, who addressed Randolph as though Kiku weren’t standing right in front of him. At Madame Jewel’s there had been a pair of sculleries who brought the food to and from the table in the basement kitchen where the girls ate, but Kiku at least knew enough to lay everything out on the train car’s small dining table. Outside, the Philadelphia siding where the car waited to be picked up by a southbound train was bleak and dusty. She would have liked to have seen Philadelphia, or any city besides New York, which had stunned her with its noise and grit and horses and stench. People had stared at her the way the porter had stared at her, as though she were the captive golden eagle in the park’s menagerie.

  I am more like a swallow than an eagle. What harm can I do, what prey can I take?

  “What time in the morning will the company hook up the car? It took them far too long to detach us when we got in today.” Randolph had no patience. Everyone was beneath him, as though he considered himself a lord and the rest of the world his vassals.

  “Six forty-five A.M., Mister Bliss.”

  As Kiku unpacked the hamper, she felt the porter’s eyes on her. Could he see that she was not really a boy? She wished she had her hat on again. Madame Jewel had warned that there might be questions if Randolph was found traveling with a young, foreign-looking girl who was obviously not his daughter. The shirt she wore was big, and Madame Jewel had tied Kiku’s corset so that it was tighter at the top, though her breasts were small, especially compared to those of the other girls at the house. While she was used to stares, the porter was not the kind of man who would have been welcome at Madame Jewel’s. He was more like one of the Portuguese sailors on the boats that had brought her from Japan to New York. When he’d given her the hamper, his breath had smelled familiarly of gin. She narrowed her eyes at him the slightest bit and he gave a little start.

  Randolph gave him several coins.

  “I won’t be needing anything else tonight.”

  The porter touched his cap. “Yes, sir.” He backed out of the door, then stopped.

  “Be sure to have your boy pull the shades down for you when it gets dark, sir, if you’ll be burning the lamps. There will be two other cars on the sidings and there are trains all night. You won’t want to be disturbed.”

  Randolph had already turned away, but Kiku saw the corners of the porter’s mouth turn up in a sly smile.

  They dined early, before it was time to light the lamps. The carriage smelled of sausage and strong cheese and smoked fish and cider and wine. During the months she had traveled on the ocean, Kiku’s teeth had suffered, and while she had lost only one, far back in her mouth, her mouth remained tender so that she had to soak her bread in wine or water and stay away from overcooked meat. There were pickles, too, and slices of pale green sugar melon and grapes. The fresh fruit was a miracle to her, and she ate the grapes and melon as quickly as she dared while trying to remain ladylike, as Madame Jewel had taught her.

  “You may be a heathen, Jade, but there’s no reason why a man can’t expect you to eat like a Christian girl.” The lessons had intensified after Randolph had requested to see her exclusively, and Madame Jewel began to suspect he would take her away. “You might become a great lady down there in Virginia. He may even want you to serve at table.” The other girls had snickered, and Kiku had colored with embarrassment. She would not miss any of them. But she did understand that Madame Jewel was wrong about what Randolph Bliss wanted from her. She would not be a favored courtesan, but only a concubine to satisfy him when he was away from his wife, who lived on Long Island. Randolph Bliss had been the least handsome of the men who had come to her at Madame Jewel’s, and the things he did to her, and had her do for him, were often ugly.

  Randolph ate quickly and fully, as though he had better things to do. And she was quickly learning that when he was done, she was done.

  “Enough food. Bring me my humidor.”

  Kiku brought him the carved wooden box containing the odious cigars and, when he was ready, lit one of the safety matches he kept in another small box.

  She had laughed a rare, natural laugh the first time he had shown her how to strike a match on the box, and he had smiled, surprised. She would have liked to sit down with the entire box, lighting match after match, watching them burn down until just before they reached her fingertips. At fifteen years old (though Madame Jewel had told everyone, Randolph Bliss included, that she was only thirteen), she was still like a child in many ways, particularly when she was alone.

  After she cleaned up the hamper and pulled down the car’s many window shades, he excused her to the tiny servant’s room behind the car’s kitchen and water closet.

  The porter in New York had carried in the pair of dull gray canvas portmanteaux that Madame Jewel had purchased for her with Randolph Bliss’s money. She had followed, giving a little gasp when she saw that the room would belong to her and her alone. The porter had turned around to look at her strangely, and she’d caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the small, rimmed shelf on the other side of the bed. She looked like an excited young girl, and she was supposed to be a servant boy. Composing herself, she had coughed into her hand.

  For two days she would have a room of her own.

  Kiku sat on the cot, listening to the rumble and clanging of the trainyard around them, wishing that they had gone to a hotel for the night as Madame Jewel had said they surely would. She was alone. At Madame Jewel’s she had never even been alone to bathe, which they were required to do once a week. On the ships—both the one from her home in Japan to Hawaii, and from Hawaii to New York—she had been hidden in the second mate’s cabin with the English girl, Christiana. And at home? She had had to leave the house to be by herself. At night she slept on the tatami mat in the corner she shared with her sister Hanako, th
eir bodies often warm against each other. Her grandmother and her other younger sister and brother slept nearby. Her mother and father slept on the other side of the room, and sometimes she lay awake and listened to them make the sounds of love, and wondered what it would be like when she was married and her husband made those sounds over her. Would she lie quietly, like her mother? She had wanted to ask her mother what it was like, but she never had the nerve.

  Did her mother know that she had been kidnapped from their village and hadn’t run away? Kiku tried to imagine her mother’s face if she told her that she had had many husbands of her own now. That the first had been the second mate on the steamer to Hawaii, while the other girl, Christiana, lay humming to herself on the floor. Another girl who hadn’t run quickly enough.

  No. She didn’t want to imagine her mother’s face.

  Now she was going to a place called Virginia, and she had a room of her own, if only for a few hours.

  She slowly took off the tight, stiff collar that made it hurt when she swallowed, and the shirt, and the itchy wool pants, as well as her undergarments. Folding them neatly and laying them on the dresser that, like the bed, was bolted to the floor, she was hopeful that she might be allowed to sleep on the bed at least for a while. It had a pillow in a crisp white cover at its head, and the coverlet was deep blue, with the railroad’s insignia stitched across the middle. How she longed to fold back the snowy white edge of the sheet peeking from beneath the pillow, and slip into the perfect whiteness and sleep. A long sigh escaped her lips. She was naked because he didn’t like her to wear clothes, or even pretty nightdresses, like some of the other girls at Madame Jewel’s wore. Her eyes lingered on the perfection of the bed for a moment. What were her sisters doing now? They would never see a bed such as this. Were they on the other side of the world, sleeping in each other’s arms?

  “Kiku.”

  She quickly fitted one of the several sponges that Madame Jewel had given her far up inside her body, careful to make sure the thin bit of yellow ribbon she had sewn on wouldn’t be felt by him. She hadn’t had her monthly in several months, but she didn’t want to think about that now.

  Entering the car’s state bedroom, she found Randolph, also naked, waiting at the end of the bed. He had turned down the lamp, so that he sat in shadow. His shallow breath emerged with a faint wheeze, and it was the first of many times she imagined him ill or dying.

  His chest was almost three times the breadth of her own, and though he was not as tall as the skinny second mate had been, she felt herself disappear when he wrapped his arms around her. There was no sense of shelter or safety. It was like disappearing into a cave where a capricious tiger lived. Sometimes she would emerge broken and shaking, sometimes certain that he would never be cruel again.

  The plane of his forehead was broad and unlined, and his cheeks were like high ledges on either side of his broad, strong nose. She had heard Madame Jewel flatter him about his handsomeness, but Kiku saw nothing handsome in him. Even though he might smile, she never saw pleasure in his eyes unless he was hurting her, and she had only seen that pleasure by chance, once, when she had dared to open her eyes and look at him. She had no guess as to how old he might be, but she didn’t think he was more than forty. So many of the men she had been with after she arrived in New York had been as old as fathers or grandfathers.

  He beckoned her over with a benign smile.

  Tonight he held out a hairbrush that she had never seen before. The ivory handle and back were of a single piece and carved to look like a plaited rope. She thought of the elephant named Cuyo that a rich country cousin of her father’s had imported for farm work. The cousin had planned to work Cuyo until he died, then make his fortune selling his tusks. But Cuyo arrived with only small stubs where the tusks were supposed to be. Kiku had been glad when, after a year of the cousin’s harsh treatment, someone had unchained the elephant, and it ran away. His body had never been found, and she imagined that he had walked into the ocean and died peacefully in the waves.

  “Take it.”

  Outside the car, the brakes of an approaching train squealed like a dying animal.

  “Come now. Take it,” he repeated, just as calmly.

  She walked over to him, trying to smile as Madame Jewel had constantly reminded her.

  “Smile, but don’t show your teeth, Kiku. You’re much prettier when you don’t show your teeth. Always let him know how glad you are to be with him.”

  The bedroom’s carpet was soft beneath her bare feet. How much happier she would have been if she could simply have lain down on it and felt the vibration of the railyard pass through her body. The motion might carry her away from this place. Not to unknown Virginia, but somewhere else. Somewhere safe.

  She took the hairbrush from him. When he touched his own hair, she understood that he wanted her to brush it.

  He was vain about his hair. In the time since she had met him, he had let it grow longer, past his high, stiff collars. It was thick and wavy, and if he had not kept it lightly oiled, it would have been as hard to brush as Emerald’s stubborn, knotted red hair, or the thick hair of the pretty Negro girl, Jet, who had slept in the bedroom with her at Madame Jewel’s.

  Kiku knelt on the bed behind Randolph to reach his head better, and, as tenderly as she knew how (she hated for someone else to brush her hair), she ran the bristles through the soft, twisted strands. They smelled of lemons and bergamot, like the tea that Madame Jewel was fond of. There was none of the hideous smell of animal fat of the inexpensive pomades that Madame Jewel gave to Jet and some of the other girls. Though Kiku had often shared the little presents of perfume that Randolph gave her with Jet because Jet couldn’t stomach meat or see harm to come to any animal, and it made her cry to smell of it.

  As she brushed, Randolph reached behind and touched her knee, her thigh. His hand slipped to the inside of her thigh and upward. She made herself relax as he began to touch her in the hidden place, and adjusted her body so he could reach her more easily. His breath quickened as she stroked him with the brush, and she knew she wouldn’t be brushing his hair for very much longer.

  There was a movement at the window, but Randolph didn’t notice. She suspected that his eyes were closed. The shade was pulled down, but perhaps there was an inch revealed. How much could someone see with the lamp burning low?

  She was certain it was the porter, standing on some steps or a tall box, come back to spy on them. For a moment she was angry, thinking of his sly, ugly smile, thinking he knew what she was.

  But what did it matter to him, or even to her, what she was? The time for shame had passed a long time ago. She felt old, like the peddler woman who came to the kitchen door of Madame Jewel’s with her boxes of fancy buttons and trims. Sapphire had told her that the woman bought her wares from the undertaker, who snipped them from the clothes of dead before they were buried.

  “Don’t stop.” Randolph’s voice was strangled in his throat, and his hand was busy in her hidden place.

  She had been distracted, imagining she could feel the porter’s breath on the window.

  Leaning forward, she flicked her tongue like a butterfly’s wing on the edge of Randolph’s ear, and he moaned. Let the porter see what he had come to see. She only wished that she were truly a boy, because wouldn’t that have scandalized the nasty little man!

  Randolph took his hand away and quickly rose to stand over her, surprising her (and no doubt the man at the window, as well). Despite the dim light, she saw that there was no pleasure in his eyes. Only blind lust. It was a look that all the men wore, and Madame Jewel had explained many times that the girls were lucky because they were so desired, that it was a calling that not every woman could answer.

  Kiku did not believe her. The other girls did not believe her. Kiku was certain that Madame Jewel didn’t believe it, either, that it was perhaps a story that she had once told herself, before she had turned wrinkled and ugly and had to dye her hair a beastly orange to hide the streaks o
f gray.

  Randolph roughly pushed her farther up onto the bed, so that her head was against, but not resting on, the pile of snowy white pillows. She smiled her pleasure smile, the one that said, Oh, what fun we’ll have now, and languidly turned her head to look at the window. A light had come on somewhere nearby, outlining the porter’s now-hatless head. It was perfectly still.

  When she turned back to Randolph and saw that he still had the beautiful hairbrush in his hand, she knew what sort of tiger dwelled in the cave of his arms tonight.

  The porter would get all he had hoped to see.

  Chapter 5

  KIKU

  August 1878

  It was dusk the next evening when the train, to which their car had been noisily joined that morning, stopped at an unlighted station, and a porter and conductor came to help them with their luggage. Kiku kept her hat on and her face down, as Randolph had instructed her, but she stole a glance at the tiny station that was no more than a leaning wooden booth with a sagging lintel and broken window, set on a long wooden platform. A porter—not the one from the day before—set her bags down a few feet away from the booth and gave her a curt, disinterested nod before retrieving Randolph’s bags.

  Randolph had awakened her only fifteen minutes earlier, and despite the cool of the evening, she wanted to sink onto her bags and go back to sleep. There was enough light that she could see the outlines of a few buildings well beyond the station, but when the train pulled away again, she looked across the tracks into an impenetrable mass of trees, whose jagged tops stood in relief against the gloomy sky.

  Randolph stood a few feet away, his own bags at his feet, peering at his vest watch, which he had checked ten times since awakening her.