Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  We walked down the muddy hill, his arm around my shoulder. “You’re trembling,” he said.

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  “Arabella, I have just read a letter from Agnes,” he said, and though I had been as sure, as sure as that I was standing on a wet hill among a crowd of men sporadically putting their hands to their hats, that he had read the letter, to hear him say it made my knees buckle, and though it was in my interest to seem indifferent to the news, I could not. I would have fallen in the mud if he hadn’t caught me. “Are you all right?” he said, and we walked again, facing in the same direction, toward a little rise of mud and sand and rocks that hid the bay from view just then. “This isn’t her first letter,” he said. “You’ve read her earlier letters. You read them and you destroy them. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, Jeptha.”

  There was silence as, perhaps, he waited for me to speak. It was a hopeful silence. It was an invitation for me to explain it all away. I had thought a thousand times of what I would say, worked out half a dozen speeches, and I saw now that none of them were any good.

  “When, Arabella?”

  “In Rio. That was the first letter. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “What else would I mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The bumpy street of mud and pebbles and scrub began to rise. At the top of it the bay came into view, the geometrical lines of the wharves, the tidal stretch of mud flats which grew and shrank daily, the crescent-shaped little city of wooden ships, the watery expanse gleaming and shadowy, here blue, there silver, in constant watchful motion.

  “Arabella,” he said.

  I turned and looked up at him. He was troubled, but he wasn’t cold. I had hope.

  I said, “You’ve read it; it’s the fifth one. I know most of what’s in it—she adds something new to each one and repeats the old accusations. She seems to know I’m intercepting them, and she keeps on, knowing one is bound to get through finally, and now one has. I know what you’ll say, that you know she is a liar, that I should have trusted you not to believe her, but—” He began to speak; I put my hand over his mouth. I was inspired, I felt as if I were telling the truth; I was telling the inner truth. “I couldn’t bear it. Do you understand? I couldn’t bear to let her put those pictures in your mind. To be thinking those things when you looked at me. She scours the mire of the streets, she is willing to abase herself and pick up the dung of the streets to fling at me. She wants to poison our marriage. And now she has.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” he said.

  I shook my head. “You will never be able to forget.”

  We walked, bending our heads down against the wind, to the foot of Clay Street, where several rowboats labeled “Flavius” waited in the mud. Jeptha rowed us to the Flavius, which rocked, straining against its tether, amid the musical knocking and drumming of moored boats on restless water. “Give it to me,” I said, when the hull of the ship rose before us. He handed me the letter. I opened it. I read just enough to see that she said I was Frank’s mother and had lived as a prostitute and a madam under the name Harriet Knowles; and then, partly because it was difficult to read it under Jeptha’s gaze, and partly because I thought the upright woman I pretended to be would have found these disgusting lies unbearable, I crumpled it up hastily into a ball and threw it into the bay.

  The ball of paper rose on the wavelets and fell and rose again, while slowly opening like an ugly white flower. Jeptha took an oar and reached with it until he nearly fell out of the boat, so he could catch the pages, which separated from each other in contact with the flaring end of the oar. Carefully, as though performing a delicate operation that would save our lives, as if ultimately everything, including guilt and innocence and suspicion and trust, were a technical matter calling in the main for dexterity and finesse, he coaxed the paper nearer to the boat, pulled the oar in slowly so as not to send the sheets swimming away from the rowboat, and reached out slowly for them. Like a killer drowning a man by holding his head beneath the water, he submerged them. When they were wet enough, he picked them out dripping and shredded them in his glistening, dripping hands. “We don’t want to send it out like a message in a bottle,” he explained. “We want it to end here.”

  I reached out to stroke his cheek. He leaned his face into my caress. “You won’t think,” I began.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “You won’t look at me, thinking of what she said.”

  “I promise,” he said, stroking my hair, kissing my cheek.

  “I wish I could tear it out of your mind.”

  “I understand. I don’t blame you for keeping it to yourself—I can see why you would try to—but it would have been better, don’t you see, for us to have discussed it earlier.”

  “Yes, Jeptha.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have had to bear it alone.”

  “Yes.”

  What could he do? Agnes was telling the truth. On the other hand, this truth was highly improbable, and she had been proved a liar, and he didn’t want to believe her. His faith in God was shaken, and his faith in himself. How could he bear to lose his faith in me at the very same time?

  “She must be crazy,” he said.

  We took our other letters to our cabin. We embraced, inhaling each other’s smell, which was like a drug to us; both feeling that we had had a near escape, we were hungry for each other, but Mrs. Austin was calling my name. I did not tell him about my pregnancy until we were together again that night. He kissed me, said it was wonderful, and, like any good man in such circumstances, he began to worry about money.

  I felt immensely relieved, but later, recalling that celebratory moment, it made my heart sink to realize how pallid it had really been. There had been nothing like the joy we would both have experienced if this good news had not had to creep into the world under the memory of the boy who had fallen from the mast, and in the shadow of Agnes’s words, which rang true because they were true. I could not make myself believe that I had escaped detection forever. With my head on my sleeping husband’s chest that night, I told myself that at least I had postponed it, perhaps for years, and I could enjoy those years.

  For a week or two, he was often testy and irritable. He complained about the rain, the mud, and the soulless dollar-worship of the men around us. He seized eagerly upon any little mistake he made—a shirt or a belt that eluded him until it turned up in some place he had already looked—to accuse himself of being a fool. In all this I recognized anger directed away from its proper target.

  JEPTHA HAD MADE ELEVEN CONVERTS during the journey from New York to San Francisco. Four of them left for the gold regions as a group, pledging to keep each other Christian, after bidding us a solemn farewell, and a few others went by themselves, also shaking my husband’s hand and thanking him for bringing them to Jesus, and promising to keep the Ten Commandments in the mining camps. A few decided to stay in town until the end of the rainy season, but whether seeing him made them sad or they realized that seeing them made him sad, in any event they stopped visiting. He preferred the company of Herbert Owen, who now had a law office in one room of an old adobe-brick cottage on the wharf. When I was alone with Owen, he told me that Marie Toissante had been spotted dealing cards in the Bella Union. The Juniper was anchored within sight of the Flavius. Stormfield wanted the government to turn it into a hospital.

  A letter came from Edward. It was four months old and written on a letter sheet that had been printed a ten-minute walk from where we stood. On one side, a series of humorous verses about the miner’s life were arranged in a ring around a picture of San Francisco Bay. On the other, blank side, my brother Edward had written in tiny print:

  Dear Arabella and Jeptha,

  If you’re reading this, you are in California. Guess what, so are we! Both well, after ups & downs. Albert Mitchell, one of Lewis’s Pearson Academy friends, got the cholera on the way to Independence; die
d. Lots of hard luck with wagons, oxen, ponies. The funniest part of the trip is a desert you get to near the end where you pass all the family heirlooms, sideboards & chests of drawers stuck in the sand.

  Our camp is in Tuolumne County. We eat well thanks to hunting & the friendship of a clever Frenchman who keeps a garden. Had a misunderstanding with some Sonorans thanks to Stephen McPhereson, another one of Lewis’s Pearson Academy friends. We wrote his family, saying how we’d miss him, but just between us their dear Stephen spent everything he made on vice & dissipation & then he nearly got us all killed, but never mind RIP.

  We met an interesting man named Billy Mulligan, who Lewis likes better than I do. Mr. Mulligan runs boxing matches in the mining towns. Lewis fought for him, acquiring more specie in this way than all us together have gotten with pick and shovel, but he hurt his hand, which is why it is I who mar this helpless fair page with my scribbling & not he. Write to us c/o the Imperial Hotel in Mariposa. Lewis sends his love & will write himself when able.

  Affectionately,

  Edward Godwin

  Two inches were left blank at the foot of the sheet, ample room to tell us what made Billy Mulligan interesting, what fate befell Stephen McPhereson, and other questions that naturally came to mind.

  In the same post, we received a letter from Agnes. With matches we had brought along for the purpose, we burned it, unopened, within twenty yards of the post office. A man with a dusty black frock coat, muddy pants, and a chin-muffler beard stopped to watch us. Soon afterward, there came a man in a boater and a butternut shirt and striped pants. A third spectator arrived, wearing a flat cap and smoking a clay pipe, and finally a gentleman with a round hat and a cigar. They accumulated like birds on a ledge and stared as if they had each paid us a dollar for the privilege. It seemed that the one with the pipe wanted to ask us the meaning of our little auto-da-fé, but a look from Jeptha changed his mind.

  I was not ready to relax. I knew he had not forgotten anything.

  Breakfast each morning on the Flavius was at a long table under a canopy where the mainmast had been. Like most meals in San Francisco, it was conducted as a race, which I began by hitting a small brass gong with a hammer. As many men as there were seats would fall with frightful efficiency—with a simultaneous working of jaws and elbows and darting arms—upon the highly miscellaneous and occasionally surprising comestibles I kept rushing to the table. Anyone who lingered over ten minutes would be asked to hurry by others waiting for seats, and usually, by tacit consensus, the eaters rose all at once to make way for the next shift. A day or two after we burned Agnes’s letter, a short but sturdy-looking fellow in his early twenties took a seat among the others, and Mrs. Austin told the company, “This is Justin Nugent, our new boarder.”

  The blue flannel shirt was new. The red kerchief and the stained brown hat he doffed politely had been through a lot. He was bronzed and bearded, and would have been handsome had he not been cross-eyed, a doll with a fixed expression of bemusement. Where had I seen those eyes?

  There was a flurry of handshakes. I decided not to wait for Jeptha to introduce me; the whole company had noticed that Nugent was staring at me. But I was too slow. “Harriet! Harriet Knowles from New York,” he said, as if pouncing on the correct answer in an oral examination. Instantly I remembered him—clean-shaven, with white gloves, silk hat, cape.

  Jeptha was a few places away at the table, behind me. I dared not turn and look at him. For what it was worth, I was going to tell Justin that he was mistaken, but I heard Jeptha say in a stranger’s voice, “So you know Harriet. You know her from her establishment on Mercer Street, I suppose?”

  “That’s right,” said Justin. His eyes, in perpetual conference with each other, made his expression hard to read. I do not think he wanted to harm me. I think his main emotion was nostalgia: after many strange experiences, a hard voyage here, hard living in the mountains, it was delicious to remember New York City. Possibly it had slipped his mind that some people come west to leave behind a bad name, that a woman who condescended to be a waitress in California might not wish it to be known that she had run a parlor house back in the States. Having drowned his pancakes in molasses, he sliced them all into small squares with a series of efficient strokes. “Do you remember a girl named Monique? And what was her name, Alexandra, who never talked, but Miss Knowles here said she was the daughter of a ruined Polish aristocrat?”

  Jeptha stood up, and everyone was looking at us, and if they were too stupid to guess what sort of establishment was being discussed, they could read the dismay on my face as Jeptha rose and took me by the wrist and out to the deck and into our cabin.

  I sat on our bed, rocking, my face in my hands, while he paced the tiny cabin, his hands squeezing and wringing each other. “Tell me now,” he said. “Tell me all.”

  He waited.

  “You know what happened to me in Livy.”

  I reminded him that he had abandoned me, believing Agnes’s lies. He mustn’t think that the bad things I had done since then made those lies true.

  As I spoke, he moved restlessly about the cabin, sometimes stopping by the window as I spoke. All the light in the room came from that one window. Whenever he was facing me, I tried to catch his gaze, to guess his emotions and adjust my tale accordingly, and also to seek the balm of his sympathy, but there wasn’t any. I knew that he would not be satisfied with a confession of sins already proved or be distracted by a reminder of someone else’s misdeeds; and that probably nothing I said could help.

  I told him most of it. I left out the parts about Eric Gordon and Jack Cutter, except in the most general way, saying that, as a young girl without guidance in a sordid world, I had done many things I wished I could undo. Abandoned, misused, I had lost my self-respect. I had suffered blows worse than any that Agnes had ever endured. I had been tried in a way she had never been tried. For that matter, I had been tried as Jeptha had not been tried—not even, in my expert opinion, after the death of Philippe. “You think you know what remorse is, but you don’t—oh, my darling, not yet, I hope not ever. I don’t hear you sobbing in your sleep as I did, night after night. You don’t know what it is to be kept alive only by the fear of death. You don’t know what it is to feel your heart grow cold, and your spirit die, and wish that it would happen faster.”

  I told him about Jocelyn and Mrs. Bower, and how I had learned too late that my grandfather was alive and arranged for Lewis to return to him. I told him about Cora. I said that Frank was the child of a gambler who had treated me with great kindness, and I had thought it better that my son grow up with Anne than with me.

  He was quiet, and whenever I stopped we heard water splashing on the beams of the Flavius, footfalls making its boards creak, distant shouts and nearer conversations. The whole cabin went dim for a while—out there some clouds must have gone before the sun—and presently it brightened again. “Through all of it, I was true to you in my heart; I loved you only, though I thought you had treated me cruelly. I thought that you had read my letters, which Jefferds kept from you. I thought that you knew about Matthew; I thought you were heartless; and still I loved you. And the instant I knew that your wife was dead, I turned myself inside out and my world upside down and gave up … many things to get you back.”

  As I spoke, I began to think I might keep him after all. Surely he was still enough of a Christian to believe in forgiveness. I was carrying his baby. There was some justice on my side. I grabbed the sleeve of his frock coat as his steps took him near the bed. I took his wrist and made him face me. I looked up at him. “All these months, I’ve been in terror that you would find out; that you would throw me aside in disgust, as any ordinary man would—as anyone out there would think you had a right to do. Now my time of reckoning has come. All I can cling to is the hope that you will show yourself different from other men, better than other men, as I have always believed you are.”

  He looked down at me as if attempting to recall whether we had ever met.

>   “Help me—there are some things I don’t fully understand,” he said.

  “What, my darling?”

  “You said that you—put yourself into the employ of this woman, Mrs. Bower, in order to pay a bribe and thereby, if I have this right, keep your brother out of prison.”

  “Yes, Jeptha.”

  “And then you had to go on because you owed her money for the fine dresses that she had bought for you to make you more attractive.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But this went on for years. It went on after you had found that your grandfather was alive. He would certainly have paid whatever was needed to free you from this woman. You went away with a gambler and had his child. He did not want to marry you, so he gave you a large sum of money. With his help, you started an establishment of your own, in which you employed other young women. You left the child with Anne.”

  “I had lost you. I was without guidance. I was weak.”

  “You don’t seem to have been weak. You seem to have been very capable.”

  “I meant the weakness to want money. I was confused. I was in a wilderness. You can’t know. You can’t understand. I was lost. I was among other lost people. None of us knew right from wrong.”

  “Put aside the question of what was right. If you found that life unpleasant, and had a way to leave it, why didn’t you? If it was money you wanted, you could have gotten more than you had as Harriet Knowles, by hiding your past and marrying.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Don’t you think so, a lovely, well-spoken woman like you?”

  “It was too late!” I expostulated, really thinking out loud—understanding it myself for the first time. “The damage was done. I could never go back to being like another girl when I had crossed all the lines they say you can never cross without being destroyed, but I had crossed them, and here I was, alive and strong. And then comes this chance, the world saying: Here is the life we stole from you to see if you would crawl, and look at you, you did crawl. Isn’t that funny? Well, here it is back again.” I stopped for a moment. “Well, in that case, keep it, I thought. I don’t want it anymore, keep it. What, I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life in a parlor, sewing, while my husband goes around town free? Do that now, when I know how these good men live away from their dutiful wives? Restrict my society to the company of these smug, stupid women who would shun me if they knew what I’d done? Why should I, to what purpose, when I’m free, with money of my own, and I’m an aristocrat among my kind, and a newspaper editor does my bidding, and I don’t care that much”—I snapped my fingers—“for anyone’s opinion and could tell anybody to go to hell? And if I did, there would always be the chance that someone like that cross-eyed miner would come along and recognize me from my old life. There had to be a reason, Jeptha. And there could only be one reason. I was ready to do all of that the moment there was the slightest possibility of having you. You see that, don’t you, Jeptha?” I asked, walking to him, reaching my hand out toward his face, but not quite daring to touch him.