The Half Wives

by Stacia Pelletier

  —And thank goodness for it, Kerr says.—Now: The city cemetery lay in peace almost twenty-five years. It lay in peace, doing what cemeteries do.

  Sears: What do they do?

  —They let the dead sleep. Protected and undisturbed. Everything was fine until some rich folks noticed all those old pioneers, all those Chinamen and seamen and Jews, occupied the best damn property in all of California. And what do those old bones have that we don’t? they started asking. What do the dead have that the living want?

  —Rest, you say.

  —Land, Sears supplies, pallid face brightening.

  —That’s right, son. Kerr nods. He hands the stomach bitters to the sergeant. Sears scrutinizes the bottle. He takes a cautious swig. Then he takes a second.

  —That’s right, Kerr smoothly repeats.—You’re absolutely correct. Go ahead, have another sip, son. You’ve had a long morning. Time to move the dead out; that’s what the neighborhood’s now saying.

  —My landlord’s telling me I have to move too, Sears says and drinks again, helping himself to a liberal swallow. He returns the bottle to the desk and puts his head in his hands.—He’s going to tear the house down and grade the property so it’s level, then build a grand Eastlake. I won’t be able to afford the rent.

  —That’s terrible, Kerr soothes. He tilts his head meaningfully at you, then at the tonic.

  So this is what he wants? So this is his great escape plan? A drinking contest? A trial by jury would be faster.

  You reach for the bottle and help yourself to a small sip. Good Lord, it’s sweet. Good Lord, this whole morning is a nightmare of a headache.

  The people of the Richmond want their cemeteries to disappear. They want to shove them south. The Outside Lands are no longer sufficiently outside.

  The people of this district can see the day when they’ll wake up to find dead paupers across the street from their houses. They do not want the dead to dwell so close. They can’t abide the reminder.

  And as for you: You can see the day when you’ll wake up and across the street will be Lucy’s cottage, having crept inland overnight, having picked itself up and tiptoed in from Sutro’s estate, unable to deny the truth any longer, unwilling to remain exiled on the continent’s edge. The continental ledge. You and Marilyn will stand in the window of your house, and Lucy and Blue will stand in theirs. Lucy will regard your wife, and Marilyn will regard Lucy, through panes of leaded glass. This day is coming too.

  You replant Jack’s garden annually, show up hours early, tools in tow, so Marilyn doesn’t have to admit to herself what’s patently obvious, so she doesn’t have to admit the truth. Nothing in this terrain survives except what’s born here: the natives, spiny growths, abandoned scrubs with their resistance to touch.

  Lucy asked for things to stop. But you carried it out. The head you removed turned out to be your own.

  You hand the bottle back to Sears, who takes it and drinks again. One more swallow, then two.

  —Goes down smooth, he says.

  —You’re right to feel maltreated, son, Kerr soothes.—You’re right to be riled up.

  —Am I?

  —Yes, indeed.

  The more Kerr talks, the more tonic this sergeant drinks.

  —Everyone’s in such a hurry to improve his state of affairs. Look here. You’re a good man, Sarge. A conscientious man. You’re one of the good ones.

  —Fat lot of help it’s been.

  And now it’s another sip, and then Sears offers the bottle to you, his newest friend. He swipes at his eyes. He’s used to spirits. You and Kerr can hold your own right along with him. Among the three of you, there’s well over a hundred years’ solid drinking experience. All that training is coming in handy. All those nights spent filling and refilling your tumbler—they’re paying off at last.

  —So they threw us in here, Kerr continues.—They locked us up for no good reason. Have another sip, son. You understand us.

  —I sure do, Sears slurs.

  —They threw us in jail because we stood up and said, Enough. We stood up for the pioneer bones, for the souls born in foreign lands, for all the people that don’t have a loved one to bury ’em. Because who has the least voice of all in this country? It’s not just the poor man. It’s the dead man. Who will speak for him? That’s what I want to know.

  Sears lifts his eyes.—I thought the city cemetery only held Chinese.

  You shake your head.—You’d be surprised.

  Blue loves the city cemetery. You’ve taken her several times, but never to the mariners. Only near the entrance.

  Living in the Outside Lands has turned your daughter into a naturalist, a botanist, a collector of feathers, bones, shells. A snail rescuer. And if she can’t find any snails to save in the burial grounds, she’ll ask you to take her home, where she’ll pluck them from puddles and deposit them at the front door of the cottage. She relocates them so they don’t drown, she says, so they have a fair chance.

  —A fair chance at what? you asked once.

  To Lucy, Blue is a marvel, a singularity, a star she discovered and named herself. But your daughter feels no need to explain to her parents the inner lives of snails. They live and breathe and have their separate existence, just as you and Lucy live and breathe and have your separate existence; they wander into the mud along Merrie Way, just as her parents appear to have done; and if God did not opt to pluck her ma and pa out of the muck of their own making, at the very least, He can help ensure the snails have a better chance. Her hands on her hips, planted in the open door in the rain, Lucy used to watch Blue’s salvage efforts in action. Mist would dampen her face as she peered down at your daughter, who in turn peered down at the snails. And you would watch Blue as well, on the Wednesdays you visited, hovering, fussing over them both, a series of worries traveling southward, traveling down in size, the larger striving to comprehend the smaller, the known to grasp the unknown. Lucy would look over at you and cover her mouth, try to cover her laugh, her smile, her glee, her spilling over with all that was good and bright and full, for love of you and this child you two had created, this unreasonable sprite. The two of you together could not possibly have made her, Lucy once declared; the two of you together could not possibly have conceived such an absolute original.

  Another letter, penned to her last month:

  I want you to know that you are not, and never were, my mistress. You stormed the bastions of my soul and won me as your lover or, better still, my dearest companion. I sometimes, perhaps too often, pressed to make that impress greater, for which I apologize; I became too eager to advance the idea of how precious this all was. Not a wise plan.

  As much as I am a student of understatement, I find myself sometimes still in the grip of hyperbole. That might well be excused in other circumstances, but at present, in the face of what words cannot express, and commitments that still run deep, quiet gestures speak more.

  So the clock, the pictures, the confounded kitchenware I gave you over the years were really no more than gestures. I hope you will keep them even though I am no longer there. They gesture toward that for which there are no words.

  You’ve received no answer.

  —’Twasn’t fair they clobbered you two for being good citizens, Sears says, raising one hand in a half-cocked salute and then lowering it heavily to the desk.—’Twasn’t fair at all.

  Kerr stands. The stiffness in the old foreman’s knees isn’t an act.

  —I believe we’ve found in you a kindred spirit, Sergeant. You understand what it means to defend one’s home against the incursions of greed and grandiosity. I wonder if you might come to our aid.

  —Grand-osity, the sergeant repeats.

  Move a cemetery; how does anyone move a cemetery?

  Will they scissor the turf away, snip and trim as if shearing a bolt of fabric? Will they cut away parcels of land, tie strips of earth to hot-air balloons, float them overhead? Clods of earth will fall from the sky. Take the bodies to Colma.

&
nbsp; —Son, you look like you need a moment, Kerr says.

  —I do, Sears whispers.—I’m so tired. I believe I’ve never been so tired.

  He might be thirty. He’s got a lot more tired coming.

  You pull off your velveteen getup and drape it over the sergeant’s shoulders. He leans his head on the desk, mumbles:

  —You two shouldn’t be locked up here.

  —Good man, Kerr says.—I am in full agreement. Would you be willing to sign something to that effect?

  A faint, delicate snore issues forth. Sears rouses himself, snorts.

  —’M not allowed.

  —But it’s justice, you say.—It’s a question of justice. And what is the law for if not this?

  Too bad this storage room doesn’t hold a pulpit.

  Sears nods. He’s a convert; he’s weeping again.

  —Do you have a pencil? Kerr asks.

  Inside the desk the sergeant finds one. Kerr produces a sheaf of writing paper. He drafts two release notices for the sergeant’s signature, your ticket out of this station. Tomorrow Sears will have such a headache, he’ll be able to count the blood vessels pounding inside his skull.

  —Now, if you’ll just sign right here approving our release, Plageman and I will be out of your way. Here, I’ll add the date to make it official. What’s today again?

  —May twenty-second, Sears says.

  Like you need a reminder.

  10:30 a.m.

  Lucy

  YOU SHOULD HAVE TAKEN ANOTHER ROUTE. Should have borrowed a bicycle, hired a hack, flown, swum, or floated. You would have reached the hospital faster.

  On its eastbound route, the streetcar hit a rut and swayed so erratically that the trolley pole sprang away from the overhead wire. The conductor climbed down and coaxed the pole back into place. He stopped again a block later, yielding to workers pushing wheelbarrows. He stopped a third time to point out two firemen installing a firebox on the side of a telephone pole.

  This neighborhood builds itself up from the dunes brick by brick and pipe by pipe. You compose two-sentence updates for the Richmond Banner whenever the fire department installs one of those new boxes. Those updates are the only real success you’ve had with that newspaper.

  The French Hospital occupies a full block on Sixth Avenue, between A Street and Point Lobos, close to one of the problem sewers. The Richmond district’s sewage plan generally involves letting rainwater pour into these sewers to flush stalled waste along the pipes. Eventually the mess hits the strait and makes its way to the Pacific Ocean.

  You wrote about that sewage plan in a longer article. The editor rejected your effort, had no interest in publishing it.

  —No one wants to read about a sewer, he said, looking over his reading glasses at your breasts.

  —But it’s about informing the public, you argued.—People don’t know where the sewage winds up. They don’t see it. They need to be told.

  The editor lit his pipe, puffed, and exhaled a gratified plume.

  —To be informed is not why people move to the Richmond, Mrs. Christensen. People move here for the land. For the land and to be left alone.

  He waved you out of the editorial room.

  You sent him another submission a week later. You’ll exhaust the man into accepting your material. You’ll wear him down. Let him leer all he wants, as long as he prints what you’ve written.

  The car clangs to a stop near the hospital. Blue lifts her head from your lap. She coughs and coughs until your own lungs burn. She smells of seawater.

  Henry has no idea she fell into that well. No idea she came within a hairsbreadth of drowning. And today of all days—the news would send him reeling.

  You glance at her. She’s curled up, half buried in your skirt, elfin, her brows and lips precisely sculpted, diminutive versions of what they’ll look like on the woman she’ll become. That pointed chin—it’s strident and vulnerable. That mouth—it’s your mouth on a smaller scale.

  When a man has that mouth, people call him tenacious. Driven. When a woman has that mouth, people call her headstrong.

  Your cousin moved here first, and you followed. Your cousin Dean left Omaha, land of unending horizons, to try his hand at the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada. He discovered no silver, only claustrophobia.

  He wrote to you back in Omaha. I could not abide descending into the earth. He made his way to the Pacific Coast next; he wanted the sea on three sides. He wound up on land belonging to Adolph Sutro. He told the famous tycoon he’d worked the Comstock Lode, didn’t mention he’d worked only twelve hours. Sutro, feeling magnanimous, feeling nostalgic for the mines that had made him his fortune, hired your cousin as a groundskeeper.

  When you turned twenty-one, you boarded the Overland west to find him. Your mother walked behind you the mile-long road to the ticket office, her arms folded across her chest as she muttered to herself in her native Swedish. Dried pie filling crusted the bib of her apron.

  —Our people will never survive California, she warned as you stepped up to the ticket counter.

  —Why not? you threw back.

  —The temperateness. Our blood’s not suited.

  But your toes were tapping, your valise bursting; your train ticket panted to be stamped. For two decades, you and your mother had been a couple, a forlorn twosome. She came close to remarrying one time, a thin-lipped telegraph operator who’d liked your mother all right and you more, but she sent him away after they quarreled over the choice of herbs she used in her meatballs, and he never returned.

  When the Overland pulled into the station, the conductor called all westbound passengers to board. You could not look at your mother to say goodbye. If you looked at her, at this woman who’d borne and fed you, if your eyes found hers, observed her loneliness masquerading as severity, her isolation disguised as self-sufficiency, then you would lose your resolve; you would not be able to set one foot onto that train, would not be able to take a single step forward into your own life.

  —What does that mean, your own life? Henry asked the day you recounted this story; he had drunk one beer too many. You nearly slapped him.

  You boarded that train with eight dollars and a piece of paper with your cousin’s address on it. Dean was as close to a brother as you’d found. You closed your eyes so you would not have to see your mother, unyielding in her disconsolation, arms still crossed over her apron, judging the vanishing train. Eyes open, eyes shut; you saw her anyway. You still see her.

  But you did not see why a woman should not be allowed to try.

  Don’t use the double negative, Henry would tell you.

  Stone helps you down from the car. His grip is firm and warm. The French Hospital lies a long block south. An uneven, rough boardwalk leads there.

  —Watch it, there; watch your step. Just a short ways now. Doc’ll get your kid fixed right up.

  He extracts Blue from your arms. He’s old-fashioned in his way. Protective of her. Blue’s head nestles right back into the crook of his neck. She opens one eye and comfortably gazes at you from the safety of his arms. She’s pleased with this little arrangement.

  Henry couldn’t take his eyes off Blue last night. He spied the two of you at the back of Simon’s Hall.

  What? you wanted to ask, wanted to shout over the heads of the neighborhood men. What are we going to do now? But you kept quiet.

  You should have asked him: How come?

  That’s Blue’s favorite question. It’s so general, it goes with everything. Every occasion suits. How come you’re quiet, Mama? How come you’re still crying? How come you’re sitting out on the front step surrounded by empty bottles of steam beer? How come you cry when I talk about Papa?

  Because where he goes, I go too. I am myself with him.

  You never actually say those words to her. You’re the mother; you’re not allowed to have feelings. And any feelings you do hold are your own fault, your own doing.

  You nearly lost her to that well, to that cistern. Henr
y nearly lost her too.

  The French Hospital is three stories, new brick construction, with high arched windows. It’s the finest facility within blocks of nothing. This Maison de Santé, or house of health, is so grand and opulent that more than one wealthy couple has paid for the privilege of renting a private room, even though neither husband nor wife was ill. There’s no way you can afford to step foot in it.

  Stone, reading your thoughts: I said I’d handle it.

  —That’s not necessary.

  —Didn’t think it was. Doesn’t mean a man can’t still help a woman.

  Henry would have had a field day with his sentences.

  Rain’s threatening again. It’s odd to walk outside with a man without checking to see who might be approaching from the other direction. Without wondering if someone the man knows might see you. People wouldn’t think twice if they saw you with J. B. Stone. Or once.

  Henry’s better off in the dark about her accident. He has enough on his mind today. He can’t shoulder his day and yours too.

  Or maybe he should shoulder it. Maybe it’s time for him to pay attention to the one who’s still living.

  Your cousin Dean helped you find your first official income, your first official employment. Your arrival in the Outside Lands baffled him. He had no idea you’d taken the train to Oakland, no idea you’d crossed the bay by ferry and made your way to Sutro’s, where you searched until you found him.

  Near the estate entrance, sculpted ribbon beds of flowers spelled Welcome All to Sutro Heights. Plaster statues loomed above the seaside rocks and posed throughout the gardens. The statues were copies of copies. No marble for Mr. Sutro, no, indeed. Why buy the real thing when one could imitate it? Why buy a living lion when one could stuff a dead one?

  You found Dean pretending to be at work in a grove of imported eucalyptus. Standing before your cousin, you presented yourself for his approval: twenty-one years old, beaming up at him and clutching your valise; you were practically an urchin, practically a runaway. He blanched, set down his hand pruners.