Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  The Blind Boss turned his face away with a pinched expression, as though I had created a bad smell. I gathered that I was excused. So I left the Alhambra Saloon gathering of the party chiefs of the San Francisco Democracy.

  EPILOGUE

  FUTURE, n. – That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Senator Jennings was found guilty of the murder of Mrs. Hamon but appealed. He was dying from stomach cancer, however, and during the second trial was brought to the courtroom in a wheelchair. He did not receive much sympathy. He was represented by Bosworth Curtis.

  The Morton Street Slasher murders joined the list of San Francisco’s unsolved murders. The theory that the Slasher fled to London, where he resurfaced as Jack the Ripper, gained considerable credence.

  Lady Caroline Stearns and her son also returned to London. Her daughter was married to the son of the duke of Beltravers at Beltravers late in August. The wedding was an immense affair, with its shocking costs published in the London Times.

  Amelia Brittain and Marshall Sloat were married in September, in Trinity Episcopalian. I rented fancy duds to attend. It may not have been as grand an affair as the Beltravers wedding, but it was too grand for me. The fanciest turnouts with the fanciest horseflesh clogged Post and Powell, and uniformed servants and footmen hung around them during the ceremony. I’d never been in an Episcopalian church before. It was pallid Roman Catholic. Amelia and her banker were very small up toward the altar. He was bald-headed, with ginger tufts of hair peaking over his ears like a wildcat. Ramparts of flowers surrounded them. Ranked in pews were the instant aristocrats of the Elite Directory of San Francisco. I didn’t enter in the hymns or the prayers. I felt heavy and loutish, as I had when I’d knocked down Beau McNair and received a bloody nose in return. There were fat gents in full regalia and various arrays of chin whiskers looking mighty comfortable with themselves, there were old women with embonpoints like kitchen ranges, there were young men and women admiring each other. I didn’t attend the reception.

  When I quit The Hornet I got a job at the Chronicle, for a slight increase in wages over what Mr. Macgowan had paid me. The Chronicle was as anti-Chinese as The Hornet, but they did publish my piece on the slave girls, which I quote because it was to become important to my career as a journalist:

  Chinese slave girls can be found in San Francisco in parlor-houses or cribs, the parlorhouses with all the Chinese trappings expected by tourists, musk, sandalwood, teak, silk wall hangings, comical ceramic gods, and scrolls. These houses are in Grant Avenue, Waverly Place and Ross Alley. There are only a few of them. There are cribs without number. They line Jackson and Washington Streets, and Bartlett, China and Church Alleys.

  In 1869 the Chronicle reported a cargo of nine- and ten-year-old Chinese girls as though they were any commodity arrived from the Orient. “The particularly fine portions of the cargo, the fresh and pretty females who come from the interior, are used to fill special orders from wealthy merchants and prosperous tradesmen. Less fine portions of the cargo would be ‘boat-girls,’ from the seaboard towns, where contact with sailors would have reduced their value.”

  That item was published six years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  The girls are sold at about the age of five by their parents. Syndicates farm as many as eight hundred girls, bringing them along to an acceptable age, at which time their prices might be seventy-five or eighty dollars in China. In California they are worth from two hundred to a thousand, depending upon their degree of attractiveness. Pay for their services ranges from fifteen cents to a dollar.

  The crib girls on Jackson and Washington Streets, and in the alleys, are exposed like chickens in cages. The cribs are ten or twelve feet wide, containing a front room and back, divided by a curtain. Reformers claim that up to 90 percent of the girls are sick. Their indentured prostitute contracts, which are usually for eight years, add on two weeks for every sick day. If they try to escape their indenture is changed to life. If they are too sick to work they are transported to a “hospital,” which they do not depart alive.

  I played baseball with Elmer Nix once more, at the new baseball diamond at the Central Park at 8th and Market, both of us playing for teams to which we no longer rightfully belonged, for Nix had quit the police to become a dispatcher for the San Francisco Stock Brewery. I had the pleasure of throwing him out at second base in a double play.

  The Girtcrest Corridor Bill passed in early 1886.

  Captain Isaiah Pusey became San Francisco chief of police in 1891.

  I continued to write occasional pieces for the Chronicle, on events, scandals; profiles and expositions for tourists and newcomers to the City; on Emperor Norton, on Sarah Althea Hill, Judge Terry and Senator Sharon, on King Kalakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, Lucky Baldwin, William Ralston, the Big Four, Boss Buckley and Boss Ruef. My extended piece on the Chinese slave girls was published by Bret Harte in the Atlantic Monthly. It caused a stir, and my journalistic fortunes were much enhanced.

  I published some work that gave pain to the Democratic bosses of the City, the Republican bosses of the state, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. If I was by no means as brilliant as Bierce, I was not as cynical either. Later I published several books and collections on San Francisco history.

  I think my father eventually became as proud of me as if I had been a fire chief. He continued to distribute boodle in the legislature on behalf of Railroad issues. We met for supper about once a month at one of the better San Francisco restaurants, the Gent paying for the repast even after I became well able to do so. The Former-Spade messages to Bierce were never mentioned, my father’s single act of disloyalty to his employers.

  Some years after her marriage, I met Mrs. Sloat on Geary Street. Amelia was with another handsome young lady, both of them dressed to the nines with elegant hats and tight bodices with low necklines that revealed flesh as smooth as chamois, both of them laden with packages of purchases. They were up from Woodside for the day.

  The friend went to the City of Paris while Amelia and I had tea. Her gloved hands fluttered. Once she touched my hand. She smiled and laughed like the Amelia I remembered. She seemed happy. Her husband was a dear man, she said. She loved him very much. She called him “Marshy.”

  “I think I have made my husband happy,” she said.

  “How could you not?” I said.

  She gazed at me with her eyebrows rising up her forehead and her brown eyes filling with tears.

  Looking down, she said, “Marshy is ill. It is doubtful that he can live for two more years, Doctor Byng tells me. He is very brave. I will be a very wealthy woman, Tom.”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “Have you read any good books lately?” she asked, changing the subject.

  I said I had not had much time to read, lately.

  “I have been rereading Jane Austen. She is very fine.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I thought about the social elite at Amelia’s wedding. I said I didn’t much like Jane Austen.

  “All the characters think about is money,” I said.

  Amelia looked as though I had slapped her. She rose, daubing at her eyes. “You have not yet learned irony,” she said. She gathered up her packages, awkward in her haste.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Please forgive me!” But I didn’t know if she had heard me, for she was gone with a swish of her brown velvet skirt past the table.

  I sat alone with my eyes stinging as though they had been dipped in acid.

  I remembered Bierce saying that perseverance in one’s principles might be praiseworthy, but obduracy in perseverance was stupidity.

  I called on Senator Jennings in his room at the Grand Hotel during a court recess. An Irish maid with a face like a side of bacon let me in and went to see if the senator was sleeping. She ushered me into sickroom stink, Jennings braced sitting in a big bed with a half do
zen medicine bottles on the table beside the bed. His face was gray as blotting paper.

  “I remember you, you’re Bierce’s boy Friday,” he said. He did not sound hostile. “I know your daddy. Is Clete still working for the SP?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Working for the Railroad,” he almost sang, as though he could make a song of it. “The Railroad dollar did exasperate those that wasn’t getting it. What’s that nasty son-of-a-bitch Bierce doing now?”

  “He’s living in Sunol, writing ghost stories about the War.”

  “Tell him I don’t hold no grudges,” he said. “We’re going to beat it this time. Bos’s just that much smarter than they are.

  “I’ll live to see it,” he went on. His lips fluttered when he spoke, as though there were no muscles in them. “Sworn I’d live to see it. We’ll beat that one, but there’s another I’m not going to beat.”

  I said I was sorry to see him laid up.

  “See that glass of water there? Would you measure exactly twelve drops from the brown bottle into it? Otherwise I’m going to be yowling like a catamount with a cactus up his ass in about two minutes.”

  I measured in the laudanum, and he swigged the water down with an explosive “Ahhhh!”

  “Tell Bierce it was McNair that had Gorton cold-cocked,” he went on. “Al was one cadging, complaining, nasty piece of work. It was Nat McNair.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said and asked if he minded talking about George Payne.

  “Don’t mind talking about it if you ain’t going to print it.”

  “I won’t print anything you don’t want me to.”

  “Promises made,” he explained. “Guess who’s paying Bos Curtis.”

  I said I expected it was Lady Caroline Stearns.

  He nodded once, grinning, and wiped his damp lips with the sleeve of his nightshirt.

  “The woman you hate.”

  “Son,” he said, “when the crabs are chewing on your innards, and old man Death is standing by with his scythe pointed at you, you don’t have time for hating. I am pleased to say I am over it. It is like shedding off your shoulder a hundred-pound sack of shit. Anyway I’d be hanged by the neck by now if it wasn’t for Bos Curtis and that lady paying him. Elza’s still sticking by his guns; that was her agreement with Bierce. But Bos is a kind of favor a man don’t have any right to expect.”

  I said Bierce had figured that Mrs. Hamon had made the mistake of telling him, Senator Jennings, that she was going to see Bierce with certain information, and he had met her to dissuade her from it, which encounter had ended in Morton Street.

  Jennings didn’t want to talk about that.

  “That is all I hear about in the courtroom, son. George Payne now, that is interesting.”

  He closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering like moths. His lips twitched. “You know, I took that German fella’s painting of High-grade Carrie out of my office in Sacramento and I had it brought down to that saloon me and another chap had on Battery Street. This young fella’d come and sit at the bar half a day staring at it.

  “I don’t know when I figured out he was Carrie’s son, my son. I still don’t know how it works about twins. It was maybe my jism and the Englishman’s swapping around inside her, and the fancy twin was his and the crazy one mine.

  “He knew that painting was his mother, too. He’d bartend for me Saturday nights. It was a queer sort of coincidence. He was kind of gentle, you’d never consider he was thinking about cutting doves’ guts out. There was something wrong with his peter, I guess. So whores’d made fun of him, that he didn’t forget.”

  “Morton Street whores,” I said.

  “I told him about the Society of Spades, and how Eddie Macomber and me’d been choused by his mother and McNair, and Al Gorton. I was still hot under the collar‌—‌I don’t deny that. But I never told him he was my son.

  “Bierce was wrong about me pushing him to slash those whores, and going after Carrie. But there was maybe somebody else pushing on him, maybe the Missus Payne he’d been farmed out to, who was some kind of invalid. He knew plenty about Carrie and his brother and things in London. Isaiah Pusey’d told me about his brother in some whore-muckery over there.

  “It was crazy. He loved that painting, couldn’t stop looking at it, but he hated the lady, his mother. Hated, like Bierce said.

  “Hated his brother too. That had everything he’d had took from him.

  “He was fixated on that mansion of Nat’s. He’d found a way to break in and he’d pretend it was his, pretend he was one of the aristocrats from up there. Steal flowers out of the vases and bring them to the saloon. I didn’t realize he was even crazier than I was about getting shat on by those people.”

  “You and Captain Pusey were old friends,” I said.

  “You could call it that,” Jennings said, with the floppy grin.

  “I didn’t think much about the boy’s brother coming back and all that, but he was stone-set loony on his dispossession,” he went on. “I never thought of him being after Carrie‌—‌to kill her. I didn’t think about him being the Morton Street Slasher until the second one, and by that time I had some concern of my own in the matter. And he went after that skinny daughter of Jim Brittain’s, I understand.”

  I said that was true, although it had been kept out of the papers.

  Senator Jennings shook his head in dismay.

  “I guess the Morton Street slashings will never be solved,” I said.

  “Won’t be solved because of me, I can promise you. What about Bierce? “

  “He made a promise to Lady Caroline.”

  “She is good at that,” he said, eyes still closed. “Well, I fucked her before she got to be a grand lady; got her in a family way, she told me. That was something! She wasn’t so much of a fuck, but by God she was surely be-you-tee-full!”

  He lay with his eyes closed, cheeks puffed out as he breathed. “The best,” he said, “was a little Chinee girl, couldn’t’ve been twelve years old.” He held up the first joints of his index and second fingers pressed together in a tight crack. “Like that,” he said. “Just like that! Wonder where that little nonpareil is now?”

  “Probably dead,” I said. “When they come down sick they put them away.”

  He puffed out his cheeks some more and asked me to prepare another glass of laudanum in water. When he had drunk it, he sat there with his head sunk on his chest and his eyes closed.

  “Nobody ever figured out your Daddy was Eddie Macomber,” he said softly.

  “No, they didn’t,” I said.

  He snored.

  The nurse came in to tell me it was time for his nap.

  I called on Senator Jennings twice more, to find him lower each time. I tried to find Mrs. Payne, George Payne’s adopted mother. I had no help from Mammy Pleasant, who had nothing to gain from me. I made inquiries around Battery Street, I asked so many people if they knew of her that I got tired of hearing my voice speak her name. I never found her.

  Senator Jennings died before there was a judgment in the second trial.

  A couple of years later Amelia Sloat telephoned me at the Chronicle. She sounded breathless. I sat in the dusty, noisy cubicle where the telephone was, the earpiece jammed up against one ear and my mouth close to the mechanism’s mouthpiece. I closed my eyes to savor her voice in my ear.

  “Will you do me a favor, Tom?”

  “Anything.”

  “This is very difficult for me,” she rushed on. “Tom, you must understand, I love Marshy very much. And he loves me very much. But I want to have a baby, and he wants me to, but he had an illness when he was a young man that left him unable to‌—‌to father a child. But because he loves me he has given me permission to have a child that will be someone else’s child but that we will raise as our own. Do you understand, Tom?”

  I was being summoned instead of Mammy Pleasant.

  I didn’t mention old ironies.

  We made arrangements to meet in one of the pr
ivate dining rooms upstairs at the Old Poodle Dog. That was of course an evening I will not forget, no more than Jimmy Fairleigh had been able to forget Caroline LaPlante‌—‌filled with wine and laughter, but more tears than laughter, and seriousness of purpose. Arrangements were made for a second meeting a month hence, if it should be necessary.

  It was not necessary, and in January of the following year I received an announcement of the birth of Arthur Brittain Sloat. On it was written in a familiar bold hand, “Thank you,” without a signature.

  I saw the notice of Sloat’s death two years later in the obituaries of the Chronicle. He was survived by his widow, the former Amelia Brittain, and his son, Arthur Brittain Sloat. Mr. Brittain died about a month later and I figured that Amelia might have moved to town to be with her mother.

  I walked down the steep block of Taylor Street from California Street past 913 three different times before I caught a glimpse of the boy. He was playing on the porch where once the Slasher had attacked his mother, a tow-headed child in a black and white sailor jumper running and banging things together, that I finally saw were pots and their lids. He ran and banged, and was silent and invisible behind the railing for periods, until a nurse in a blue uniform with a white doily on her head came out to bring him back inside the house. I didn’t catch sight of Amelia.

  By then I was married myself.

  So is time the lock and occasion the key that does not always fit.

  In the society columns it was noted when Amelia Brittain Sloat left for New York with her son.

  Belinda Barnacle was married in her eighteenth year, but not on her eighteenth birthday, to a young fellow named Haskell Green, who was a boarder at the Barnacles’ establishment. Green had a job as a coal salesman for the Cedar River Coal Company. He was “a real go-getter,” Mr. Barnacle assured me. I sent leather-bound, gilt-edged fine editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as a wedding present.