by Lyndsay Faye
“Does he now?” the matron drawls. The woman owns about as much gravitas as a mountain, and is roughly the same shape.
“Yes. I think his friends should watch out for that tendency in his character. Now, are you going to toss me street side, or patch the old girl up? When he said I was dying, I’m . . . pretty sure he had the right idea.”
This evaluation is made through the last of my exhausted tears.
Dr. Pendleton whisks his glasses off. “Oh, I was always going to patch you up. It doesn’t matter whether I like a patient or not, or what race they are—I’ve taken a sacred oath. Which is lucky for you, since I don’t like you being here at all.”
“Um . . . thank you?”
He produces a vial and pours a smidge of liquid into a kerchief.
“Miss James, I aim to close these apertures. Your blood has been severely poisoned, but you are not yet fully in the grip of sepsis. It’s my belief that you cannot stay still for such a painful procedure. If I give you this chloroform, I admit there is a minor chance you may not wake up—but if you do not allow me to treat you, you certainly will not survive. It would be unethical for me not to mention it.”
My lips part as I absorb this.
But there’s only the ceiling above me and a chandelier to address. I’d say goodbye to the hotel room, but it’s unfamiliar. I’d say goodbye to Max, but he’s done enough already, so much that it lodges in my throat like a sweet thorn.
I’d say goodbye to myself, but we lost touch a very long time ago.
“When you put it like that,” I reply, and reach up to pull his handkerchief down to my nose.
* * *
—
At first, there is only afternoon light gilding my blond lashes.
It’s pleasant. I take care not to stir.
Calm. Stay calm.
Something chemical is happening, something familiar. It’s not laudanum, I’m fairly certain. If it were heroin, I wouldn’t recognize it. The hurt radiating from my side feels like it’s locked in a display case. Not gone, not even hidden, just trapped. Therefore, probably morphine.
Same as the other time I was shot.
I keep very still. The cotton clouds in my ears slowly dissolve.
“. . . gone more days than he’s here, but he ought to have considerably more sense in that head, you ask me. Or maybe all those miles of tracks shake the sense clean out of Max soon as he gathers any.”
It’s the matron speaking, tense as a high-wire act. A cool compress replaces the skin-warm one I hadn’t realized was on my brow and I can smell her, a welcoming orange oil aroma harking of cleaning products rather than vanity.
They’re keeping vigil.
Which means I’m still dying.
“Why, Mavereen, you’d not ask a cow to lay an egg, surely, no matter how fast friends you were or how many favors the cow owed you,” says a new voice. “Whatever makes it reasonable to expect Maximilian to have any sense?”
This woman’s voice is altogether remarkable. Medium high, breathy as a debutante’s. The accent is indeterminate enough to mean touring company decisively. You hear the same glib, almost self-conscious pitch in song-and-dance girls from Santa Fe to Atlantic City. The flat-morning-champagne and washed-off-glitter sound of viciously quashed twangs. Ruthlessly annihilated lisps. The midtown clubs I frequented had those girls going for ten a penny, ready to hop in a cab with the first swain who lit their cigarette.
But I check myself. Not so with this woman—hoofer, chanteuse, or comedienne, she’s performed in more cabarets, slapped more suitors, and then calmly reached for her brandy and soda. My best friend, Sadie, and I would have adopted her for the evening, floating her tab solely to hear her commentary on the menfolk. She’s not just an artist.
She’s a critic, and an awfully good one.
“Blossom, you’re always after excusing that boy,” the one called Mavereen chides.
“Max isn’t a boy any more than I’m a strawberry farmer, honey. He’s thirty-one.”
“Thirty-one and too purblind foolish to let white people take care of white people! And it’s half for this little lost mouse’s sake I say that too. Do you pretend her own folks would approve?”
“Well, several points to make now.” Blossom’s tone is dry as a Bowery martini. “First, we both got her into that nightdress, and she isn’t a mouse. She’s been shot before, unless you think that scar on her arm means she walked into a hot steel poker, which I don’t.”
If it weren’t for the morphine, I’d be crawling out of my skin.
They know you aren’t who you’re pretending, and it’s been all of eight hours, maybe. Grand. Suppose you send an at-home card pinpointing the Paragon Hotel back to Nicolo Benenati, tell him you prefer Tuesdays to have your heart cut out and left in your mouth, remember—wasn’t that a sight, his eyes still open and his jaw forced cavernously wide and the scarlet lump of muscle not beating inside it?
And then to finish bringing trouble to these perfectly decent people, why not send a slug through your skull without paying your room bill.
“Next,” Blossom continues, “Max having full-white half sisters and all, it’s hardly the shock of the season he helped someone desperate who probably reminded him of a sibling.”
Oh.
“And lastly,” she concludes as a cool, vanilla-perfumed hand tucks a piece of my hair back, “she made it from New York to Portland in this state. Alone. I’d bet you my pearl choker you like so well that this one doesn’t have her own folks to disapprove of anything.”
“Fine, Blossom, there’s no denying a word of that logic, so you’ve got me pinned up against a wall as usual—”
“Honey, you know I never try to show anyone up, I’m just observing a few facts.”
“Your facts are all well and good, right till the time when either someone comes looking for this stray, or this town finds out we have us a white lodger!” Mavereen hisses. “We ain’t running a charity hospital. Think of the risk, for once in your life.”
“I do, Mavereen,” Blossom rebukes coldly, outrage coloring her tone. “I think about risk constantly. I think about it more than I think about money, and I am forced to think about money a great deal. Anyway, if I didn’t take precautions, I imagine you’d call down lightning and zap me to cinders.”
“Lord have mercy. Blossom, why do you always have to rile me up so? It ain’t hardly decent.” Mavereen slides the window open and lights a cigarette. The rain must have stopped, the breeze curling into the crannies of my bedsheets like a teasing lover.
“Why, I could give out that the devil put me up to it, but it’s entirely for my own pleasure.” Worriedly, Blossom adds, “You’re distraught over more than our signing up for the Samaritan act. Anything . . . untoward today?”
“Depends on what you call untoward. Seen the newspaper I left out in the meeting room this morning? Had a wire from my cousin to go with it. They strung up another Georgia Negro back home, left him for the crows and the ants. Wasn’t much skin left on his back in the first place, seemed like, and the critters made plenty quick work with the rest. He was a local shopkeeper’s boy. Eighteen.”
“Oh, Mavereen, honey.” Blossom sounds aghast. “But surely we read that sort of thing more often than we read, ‘and the black fellow cast his vote entirely without incident and went home to a hot roast.’ What happened here, and I ask again—was it untoward?”
Mavereen sucks in an angry mouthful of smoke. “If cats die natural from slitting their own throats and curling up in hotel doorways with their guts spilled, then no.”
“Oh, Mav,” Blossom gasps. “Well, no, I don’t suppose I’ve ever heard of a cat in such a depressed state. Did Rooster find it?”
“No, Wednesday Joe did, when he arrived for his shift. Poor sweet angel, you know how he loves anything with fur. Cried and cried before I managed to wrestle hi
m into uniform. Brought tears to my own eyes.”
“Did . . .” She pauses. “Did Davy see?”
“No. But it’s sheer luck and God’s grace that he didn’t. Whatever nasty piece of trash did this wanted it public, didn’t want us to have time to notice they’d defiled our home again. I tell you, I can’t hardly think on it. Recollecting an honest-to-God exodus, sugar, the wilderness I traveled to be someplace better, and for what? So I could scrape cat guts off our . . .”
Blossom seems to traverse the room and I hear a muffled sniffle followed by a soothing hum.
“Mavereen, if you had these cowards in front of you, why, they’d piss themselves over the licking they were in for.”
“Blossom, language, I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“Have you any idea how difficult it is to forget words once you know them?” her friend teases.
“Gracious, what am I doing? Blubbering over some cast-off white girl’s sickbed when there must be a dozen or more rooms to check, and my maids running wild. Don’t tell anyone you saw your Mavereen in this state.”
“Oh, death first,” Blossom vows.
“Stay with her until Dr. Pendleton gets back? I’m tired witless, and I just know the linens for the dinner service need ironing. The new downstairs girl has been plenty distracted over . . . well. All this nonsense.”
“Don’t say another word. I’m not due at the club till eight tonight, and the getup is as easy as rolling over in bed. Go on—I can handle the likes of Miss James.”
You really can’t, I think, though the brag endears her to me.
The door shutting behind Mavereen provides me with the perfect opportunity to awaken. Twitching, I fuss with the coverlet, set free a tiny moan.
Because I want to see what Blossom is like about as much as I want to see what she makes of Nobody.
The Nobody I am around Blossom will be a slightly jaded version of the sweet flapper Max knows. More like the desperate woman Mavereen and Dr. Pendleton met last night. Doesn’t do dope but doesn’t mind when someone else does, may have been kept as a banker’s baby doll but thought she was in love, cut her bare foot on broken glass in the street once when her dancing shoes had pinched her. Never pays for her own cigarettes. That sort.
“Miss James? Are you all right?”
The curtain rises.
Whatever I expected Blossom to look like, I’ve fallen short.
She smiles. She’s dark, dark as any African. These things matter in places where we’ve dumped pink, white, yellow, red, black people into the same paint can. Her skin is burnished, as if she’s aglow. Blossom’s lips and eyes are delicate, pretty watercolor strokes of peach and umber. But her cheekbones and her brow prove positively architectural. If you left a Grecian temple alone for around thirty-five years, a bit older than they’d mentioned Max was, and then you lacquered it, that would be Blossom. She wears artful cosmetics and loose fabrics in dragonfly hues, a gold-threaded scarf draped at her neck.
I cough. “If there’s water, please . . .”
Blossom sweeps away and returns with the substance, which never tasted quite so much like pure, icy gin. A side effect of either the morphine or the pine forests hereabouts, doubtless. She resettles herself in the bedside chair.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Oh heavens, that sounded so coarse. I mean, thank you. I’m all in shreds.”
“You certainly are, honey.” Blossom tilts her stone-carved chin, evaluating. “Now, let me see. Some might say that I ought to send you straight back to dreamland, and some might say I should ask you every little thing about yourself. But I think presently—your being in God’s lap and all, and thinking terribly lengthy thoughts—you must want to ask me a few things. Well, I am always disposed to talk to interesting people, and you, Miss James, interest me unnaturally. Who am I, you inquired? My name is Miss Blossom Fontaine, I live down the hall, and I am a cabaret singer. Next?”
My answering smile gushes like a spill of blood. Oh, I know how one gets into the knack of reading people well. A few hard years, some harder knocks, and human beings come into clearer focus. And Blossom just read me like a front-page headline.
“I was always dreadfully fond of the W questions,” I rasp.
She laughs, a musical sound. “Yes, because how can be too complex to even contemplate. As to when, you are Tuesday, April the nineteenth, of nineteen twenty-one.”
A quick calculation tells me that means I’ve spent seven days shooting myself cross-country like a rocket with a pair of festering bullet wounds in my side. No wonder Max was forced to hoist sleeve and mop me up.
“What happened to me after Dr. Pendleton knocked me for six?”
“Nothing you could call very active on your part, honey. Dr. Pendleton worked his medical magic, how I am not aware, but he’s terribly thorough. Cranky as an elderly weasel, but never mind that. Then we found this nightdress for you and changed your bandaging once. That shaft someone drilled through your person already looks much better. You continued to do very little, which brings us to the present. You’re overwhelming me with liveliness. Please reduce the throttle a bit.”
I’d gladly laugh—it’s the fastest-drying glue for friendships, and for some uncanny reason I instantly want to exchange intimacies with this person—but I haven’t the strength.
“Whose nightdress is this?”
“Gracious, what a cordial and unexpected W that was. Mine. It’s only cotton, and I lost the ribbon for the eyelets, I’m tragically careless, but there was no way of knowing whether you’d bleed all over it, you understand. You can see it when I allow you mirrors, which is not today.” One side of her mouth slides up, and the opposite side of her granite brow swoops down, and I know she has as many comedic patter songs in her repertoire as lost love ballads. “And I’m ever so much taller than you, Miss James, so don’t take any constitutionals, or you’ll be flat on your ass.”
“Duly noted. Um, regarding one that particularly concerns me . . . where am I?”
“You’re at the Paragon Hotel,” she declares, the tightness from earlier returning to her voice.
“If you’d care to continue?”
“Oh, gladly. But let us make this a bedtime story, for I’m marvelous at those and you look worn threadbare, all right? Let me see, the Paragon opened in nineteen-oh-six, and is full to bursting of decent citizens and lunatic nomads. I admit to being of the latter variety. It is one of the busiest hotels in the city of Portland, and profoundly well-appointed. We’ve six or seven business ventures in the building, so practically anything you like, just ask me to fetch it for you, and you shall have it in a trice.”
“Truly?”
“Of course, honey. And I’ll take you for a tour once you’ve resumed your normal complexion. A complexion which, I must add with regret, is a cause of some concern for us, as the Paragon is simply the only Portland hotel where both the most aristocratic and most hardworking of Negroes are all invited to rest their weary heads. Oh you’re smiling—I mean the only Portland hotel, quite literally,” Blossom adds with a hard glint in her eye. “When it comes to segregation, you may consider yourself free to whistle ‘Dixie’ where the great state of Oregon is concerned. So you present a moral enigma to the establishment, you see, and I always adore those. Better than fresh coffee.”
“Oh.” I meditate on this. “What a shame. You’ll have to chuck me out, and I like it here ever so much.”
The naked truth in my words is audible.
“Gracious, but you are from Harlem, aren’t you? Max was right, the dear lunk of a man. You could be from literally nowhere else in America! How marvelous. Are there any other questions you’d care to pose before you rest?”
Don’t think of it, Nobody.
I disobey myself. I do think of it, and though I’m too dry souled to weep by now, it must show in my face, for Blossom swiftly shifts closer.
> “Why did this happen to me?” I ask in a cracked whisper.
“Oh, honey.” She brushes the backs of her fingers over my cheek. “I haven’t the slightest idea. I never do, you know. Not about that.”
◆ Three ◆
THEN
Only on feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on its holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the up-town streets, it is hard to imagine.
—JACOB A. RIIS, The Battle with the Slum, 1902
So. Where to begin?
I’ll start from the start, I suppose, that being the traditional technique: I was born on March 23rd of 1896, on the day the Raines law was passed. And thus for the first ten years of my life, I was raised in a so-called Raines law hotel, one called the Step Right Inn.
That still dings my pride. If only the owner had prognosticated all the days when he might be tempted to make a joke, and stayed in bed accordingly.
The Raines law was a liquor tax then, in the same way that Prohibition agents are defenders of justice now. Itchy to curb drinking among the huddled masses and clever enough to notice that the immigrants were only let out of harness on Sundays, the law stated that no one save hotels could serve the giggle juice on the Lord’s day of rest.
Everyone thought that was dreadfully cute.
Sometimes the way to solve a thorny problem is to whack straight through. The saloonkeepers—who were plenty often landlords—bought some used furniture, swept the back staircase, and demanded their hotel licenses. Dandy! The stevedores and carpenters and bricklayers could continue spending their Sundays getting soused while the dearly beloved polished the children and scrubbed the lampshades as ever.
A collective sigh of relief was heard as far off as Florida.
The snag to this seemingly crackerjack idea was that now the saloonkeepers had rooms but no kitchens. The second part of this thorny dilemma was solved quicker than a New York springtime: serve pretzels. As the French would parley it, voilà. Now, I don’t mean to imply that only pretzels were served. Sometimes pickles or peanuts or in the awfully tongue-in-cheek Irish establishment operating eight blocks from where I grew up, the cabbage leaves that were too brown to go in the stew pot. If there are browner cabbage leaves than ones the Irish won’t touch, may God have mercy on those who eat them.