Prospects of a Woman

by Wendy Voorsanger

  “Gone,” said Nate.

  “Because of the divorce?” she asked.

  “What divorce?”

  “Did he leave because I want to divorce?”

  Nate rubbed his eyes, perhaps not fully understanding.

  “Just said he was going home. Something about his ranch and his sister. I tried to talk him into staying, but he was out of his mind. Wouldn’t listen to reason. Forced me to pay out his entire share. Said he wasn’t coming back.”

  “When?” she asked, weak and unbelieving.

  “Two weeks ago.”

  She stumbled backward, grabbing at the wall, and he helped her into the rocking chair.

  “Settle down, now. You’ve been through something awful, running all the way down here in the dark,” he said, wiping the soot off her face with his kerchief.

  “He left?”

  “He said to give you this,” he said, handing her an envelope.

  She took the letter, and a knot fitted itself in her neck, choking her tight. Her hands shook as she read the words, and her feet pushed off the ground nervous over and over, rocking and pitching and nearly plunging her backward. Sideways. Off-kilter, and down. She bit and chewed her nails as her head pounded in panic and fury. Pounded at her foolishness. She was so stupid to believe he loved her. So stupid to believe she could have more. She pounded and reeled, gripped in a stupor of uncertainty.

  “He told me to say . . . he’s sorry,” said Nate.

  PART 3

  “We were new creatures . . . and truly not until this time were we fairly conscious that we were born at all.”

  —JOHN MUIR

  33

  A way to forget

  When Elisabeth threw herself down the hill she wasn’t trying to kill herself like her mother, or the men gone mad in the diggins. She only wanted to rid herself of the baby. With most of her livelihood swallowed up in the fire, she had few prospects. And tumbling down the hill hadn’t been her first consideration.

  At first she didn’t understand, begging Nate to tell where Nemacio had gone, shaking him and shaking him until he slapped her face, and she fell down on the floor realizing the rake had used her, swooped her up in a heap of charm. Used her up for his own pleasure. Devoured her. Stolen her dignity, then lit off like a thief with her soul. What a damn fool she was for believing! Believing he’d wanted her forever. Believing he loved her.

  After the fire in Manzanita, she hadn’t fully understood her compromised condition. She only knew all her money was gone—nearly six thousand dollars burnt up in the fire. In the mad scramble, she’d only managed to grab a measly two hundred dollars and four out of her six mining certificates. She’d grabbed her engraving toolbox, but with all her books and woodblocks lost to the ashes, she hadn’t enough heart or money to stay in Manzanita City and rebuild. Most folks scattered, looking for a new town, a new opportunity. Ginny O’Rourke left for Sacramento, determined to set up a new pie shop. Mr. Lockwood the sawyer moved to Auburn. Millie and Joe Stamps moved over to Grass Valley, hoping to come back soon. Luenza refused to follow her man Stanley on word of a new strike near the South Fork of the American, staying behind in the heap of rubble of Manzanita City with her three sons to rebuild the El Dorado.

  There was no way she’d go back to living down on the Goodwin Claim with Nate and Francis loving all over each other, flaunting what she didn’t have and wanted so. Cashing out what was left of her mining shares at the Langley Bank in San Francisco was her only prospect of keeping on as an independent woman.

  Nate agreed to a divorce on the grounds of her adultery. The Manzanita County Court flung liberal and loose with granting divorce, and the Accolade didn’t at all pass judgment on her, believing that building a better society out west required freeing up the few women available. But the liberal sensibilities of California ended at Nate’s peculiar sort of adultery, and Nate was relieved at her willingness to take the fault. He gave her three hundred more dollars, saying he appreciated her discretion and promising to forward on future profits in the Goodwin Claim once she settled in San Francisco.

  Elisabeth set out of the river basin, walking away from the Goodwin Claim, alone. She stopped in Culoma along the way to find Nandy living a free woman. Gold diggers had run Mr. Sappington out of town the previous summer, angry at the slave-owning pig of a Southerner for using people as property to work an advantage in the diggings. The new golden rule of California was clear: everyone works for himself.

  Nandy had grabbed her freedom and flourished, taking over the Sappington cabin and renaming it the Gootch Bakery. A smart woman, Nandy had worked religiously like a daughter of Zion building the Holy Land of California, mixing flour and pounding out famous bread with butter, saving nearly three-quarters the price needed to buy her son from the slaver in Missouri in under a year. She guarded her famed sourdough starter in a pouch around her neck, as the gold earning her son’s freedom. Billy assisted in the bakery, cutting the wood, stoking the fires, and turning the stoves to please his woman, while digging on the side when he got a chance.

  Nandy welcomed Elisabeth back to Culoma like family, telling her to pitch a tent behind the Gootch cabin. Elisabeth helped out mixing and pounding dough while she got her bearings. Nandy felt a great comfort, like the shadow of a giant redwood on a blistering hot day. But she wasn’t above setting out her opinions plain when Elisabeth threw up in the grass after getting a whiff off the sourdough starter.

  “What’s gone is gone. And done is done. Nothin’ you can do about water slipped through your fingers,” she said.

  Elisabeth cursed, furious that Nemacio’s damn thistle tea didn’t work, sick that all she had left of him was growing inside her, and his damn letter. Nandy looked at her sideways like she was a madwoman, failing to see her condition as a terrible predicament.

  “Aww, git over yourself, woman. A baby doesn’t need a man anyhow,” said Nandy.

  “I don’t want to have a baby alone. How can I get my business going again with a baby?”

  Nandy didn’t soften her view, pointing out being a white woman having a free baby alone wasn’t such a terrible lot.

  “It’s not like anyone gonna be taking that baby away from you, like my little Andrew. It’s time you quit being so selfish and get on with living. Stay on here. Help grow my bakery,” said Nandy.

  Elisabeth was fixed on her own predicament, thinking only of herself and not on Nandy’s long-suffering grief at being separated from her only child. She should’ve been more grateful to Nandy but saw only a bleak future flipping dough down in the river basin with no man and a baby pulling on her apron strings. She’d never be content scraping and scratching and digging out a living again. A greater drive ate at her, gouging an ambitious pit of restlessness into her soul. She wanted to sell books again and engrave wood and ink up prints. She wanted her freedom.

  Sinking low and wretched, she let a man kiss her behind Brook’s Blacksmithy for nearly five whole minutes in exchange for sips off his hip flask. She stuffed down her shame while the man slobbered and sucked on her lips sloppy in between her sipping, until she’d drunk up nearly all the man’s whiskey, desperate to forget Nemacio. His loving. His leaving. And the fate of a baby she didn’t want crying at her neck, holding her down, strangling. As she stumbled back to her tent late, Nandy wasn’t light on the judgment.

  “Drinking that stuff’ll eat up all your money. Make you lazy. Kill all that ambition you got.”

  Fixed with guilt, she left the next day, saying John Langley at the Pioneer Bank and Trust owed her money. Nandy sent her off with three loaves of bread and a smothering of hugs.

  “Next time you come visit I’m hoping Andrew will be here. You’ll meet him.”

  Hearing Nandy going on about her son was like a hammer of guilt hitting Elisabeth. Feeling heartless, she fled to Sacramento and hopped a steamer down the delta to San Francisco, along with every sort of poor soul, emaciated and broken by defeat, returning to homes back East they’d left on a gamble
. Hugging the steamer rail, she breathed in the hot delta air, clinging to the hope of cashing out her mining shares. Fixed on the notion of building up her business again. Ignoring her condition yet knowing she had nowhere to go. Nearly three months had passed since those delicious days held up in her cabin loving with Nemacio, her monthly bleedings replaced by a twitchy flutter growing strong and promising to eviscerate her life without permission.

  She settled in at the Sully Boarding House in San Francisco, which had transformed considerably from when she and Nate had landed upon its shore over two years ago. Whole hilltops now flattened, the sand pushed clear off and down into the bay, engulfing the port to make more streets. Most of the tents and flimsy wooden structures were gone, replaced by impressive buildings of brick and stone that would’ve looked at home on any street in Boston or New York or Philadelphia. She had a hunch San Francisco might become a city of great importance someday. The perfect place to start again.

  She found the Pioneer Bank in an imposing three-story stone building with three steps up to the entrance. Walking up the steps, she wondered why the builders didn’t make two or four; an odd number just seemed like bad luck. Inside, pink velvet wallpaper covered the walls, with oak squares carved ornate with laurel and ivy crawling up toward a tall ceiling. It looked far too garish for a bank but nevertheless lent an air of gravitas befitting an institution aiming to bring stability and security to the untamed city. She waited in the lobby as bankers worked in silence behind a dozen desks blanketing a vast marble floor, until a man came out of a set of tall double doors saying Mr. Langley had gone to Sacramento for the month. Said nobody was buying any mining shares.

  “Everyone is waiting to see how the hard rock mining techniques will play out,” he said, brushing her off. “Come back in a few months.”

  She begged, but the man said she’d need to talk to the bank president directly. She walked down the steps, dejected, wondering how she’d pay for the next month’s rent. Mr. Sully charged a fortune for the single room and board, bleeding her savings out. Without the mining shares she couldn’t care for herself, much less a baby, and she saw no clear way of managing the difficult work of building up a new business with a baby riding on her hip. She considered the possibility of giving it up to the Orphanage Asylum Society in the outskirts of Happy Valley, but seeing those cribs stuffed full of wailing babies and sick children orphaned in the past winter’s cholera epidemic, she decided against it. There was no hope for a child growing up healthy in that dreadful place.

  She wandered the streets of San Francisco considering her choices, drinking whiskey during the day, guzzling greedy from a cheap little tin flask she’d bought off a corn farmer at the boarding house with nearly the last of her savings. Nandy was right, of course. Drinking was futile, a bottomless pit, useless at best. She drank anyway, looking in the saloons and hotels and liveries, asking after a Californio named Nemacio Gabilan. If he knew about the baby, he might return to her. Make things right. But searching for him made her feel desperate again, like a foolish girl waiting on her father.

  One afternoon, she stumbled into a cathouse on Morton Street. To be fair, she didn’t know it was such. With the same name as Luenza’s establishment in Manzanita City—The El Dorado—she got all wistful and weepy at missing her friends and the close sense of family she’d had up on that hill above the river canyon. She opened the doors expecting a good meal and warm cheer, and instead found a surprise of a dozen ladies lapping around lazy with next to nothing on, their breasts pushed over the top of their bodices raunchy. Lounging loose and too loud, the women draped themselves around men, kissing their necks and ears and hairy lips, making for sin. It wasn’t at all enticing like the Spanish couple loving each other in the tent back at the river claim, but soiled and messy. As she turned to go, a lady wearing hot red lip paint suggested she join in the business.

  “Eyes like those, you’d lure ’em in. Make up to three hundred a night,” she said.

  She watched the woman’s lips working up and down haughty, smelling like wild roses, and considered it. Living lying on your back for money couldn’t be all that hard. And three hundred a night was an awful lot. A fortune, each day. In that line of work, she’d make enough to keep the baby and hire an Irishwoman to help like Luenza had in Manzanita City. She kidded herself. She could never stand the mix of smelly men getting up on her like that, no matter how much money she’d earn. Lying with a strange man would never give her the love like Nemacio, and she’d probably just get in the same baby way again. Instead, she paid two bits to the madam for a mixture of cohosh tea, drinking a dozen cups of the nasty stuff, but that didn’t rid the baby out of her, either. She just threw up the brew all night in a piss pot on the second floor of the Sully House.

  With no other prospects, she chose to end it, roaming the streets with Nemacio’s letter burning a hole in her skirt pocket, searching for a suitable hill to throw herself down. She cursed that damn Emerson and his “Self-Reliance.” He was wrong. His words didn’t apply to women. Emerson had written that damn book for men. Women couldn’t follow his advice by relying on a future of their own making, because women couldn’t choose their own fate; it came pre-determined and thrust upon them by a long history of manners and tradition and expectations and their own weaker selves and the weight of small-minded men bearing down on them. Emerson’s words had been laughing at her the whole time and gave her no glimmer of hope to sort out her dreadful predicament.

  She couldn’t see a clear way out. She thought her broken heart was blind, as her father’s words came slamming into her head. There comes a turn far more complicated, requiring more of man than he’s capable. Maybe he was right, after all. This was her turn. It was far more complicated and required more than she was capable.

  She settled on Telegraph Hill, planning to tumble down just long and hard enough to propel that damn thing out, but not too hard to put herself beyond mending. Once making up her mind, she spent the whole day circling around the bottom looking up, getting up courage. Telegraph Hill reached 350 feet high, with a north side much too rocky. The south side, facing away from the bay, offered a long steep slope of sand all the way down, steep enough to shake the baby out but soft enough not to kill her in the tumbling.

  Just before dusk, she crisscrossed back and forth, up through the dirt and sand among the wild clumps of yerba buena smelling minty sweet. When her boots filled with sand, she didn’t dump them out, simply let the sand creep down, scratching and tearing at her stockings, as she sipped from the cheap tin flask, growing braver and braver. Breathing heavy, Elisabeth labored up the steep hill, steeling herself against changing her mind.

  Halfway up, she noticed a murder of ravens circling high overhead. They landed en mass right in front of her and started cawing and hopping around crazy over a nest of snowy plover eggs. As the murder fought among themselves, a falcon swooped down and stole the six eggs, gulping them down without one raven noticing. Elisabeth shooed the black birds out of her path, and they took flight with a clamor of irritation. As she neared the top, she found the summit not at all menacing and quite appropriate for the task at hand. The view toward the south spread out stunning, with the sandy hill leading all he way down to open rolling grasslands with goats and cows and a few adobe houses, and magnificent oak trees stretching regal in the dusking light. The bay filled around behind her and to the left, with the ocean opening up endless and encouraging.

  As the sun dipped behind a blanket of fog on the horizon, the sky lit orange and yellow like a heavenly void glowing beyond the sea itself. A blanket of fluffy fog crept in toward Elisabeth, blowing in on the Pacific wind, shivering her cold and calculating. She’d left her straw hat back at the Sully Boarding House, along with her gloves; she didn’t want to ruin them in the tumbling.

  With her lips chapped by thirst, she lined up with an old adobe rancho at the bottom of the hill, planting her feet firm, knowing she was a savage woman gone wrong. Downing the final drops of whiskey, she
coughed and spit, promising this was her last drink. Hereafter, she’d do better, turn toward temperance and fortitude and hard work requiring a sober mind. No longer feeling cold, she flung the flask into the sand, relishing the fog cloaking in misty whiteness around her face, kissing her cheeks wet. She hoped the fog might cover up her deed.

  By her feet, the sand swarmed with hundreds of tiny ants. A single ant escaped the group and climbed up her boot. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She captured it in her cupped hand, and it tickled her palm. She spoke into her hands as if the ant could understand.

  “Be thankful you’ll never have to rely on just yourself. You’ll always have your little ant family marching alongside you. Looking after you. Helping you out. Lightening your load. I’m all alone, you see. I have no choice. I don’t have a family caring for me,” she said, with tears dripping off her chin.

  Elisabeth placed the ant down with its family, then fell on her knees to pray, calling out to God for forgiveness, her sloppy voice carrying along on the wind.

  “I’ll stop the whiskey. I’ll be a good woman. I promise. Please God, let me start over again.”

  She stood up, pulling Nemacio’s letter out of her skirt pocket, thinking it’d help her. Help rise up her anger. The letter didn’t begin “My Dearest Elisabeth.” Or offer up an apology or explanation. He just wrote down the lyrics to that damn song he’d sung to her, “Malagueña,” written in English. The letter left her wondering all the more why he’d left. What she’d done to deserve it.

  Malagueña

  Fly away! said my carefree heart

  To the place where daydreams start.

  Fly away! said my heart to me

  To the shore of the moonlit sea.

  ’Tis the gypsy code to be fancy-free;

  When I see a road,

  Oh, that’s the road for me!

  My Malagueña, your eyes shamed the purple sky.