Prospects of a Woman
Page 27
She sat on a porch outside the newly built Methodist church, mustering up the courage to go inside. She hadn’t sat in a church since living back in Lowell listening to the Reverend Spillwell spouting off sermons about how a good woman should comport herself. She hadn’t gleaned much out of his preaching back then, and in the years since, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” proved much more useful than the Good Book. Now humbled by all that’d come before with Henry and her mother, and Nate and Nemacio, and the tumbling, Elisabeth had lost faith in Emerson too. Yet for some reason she still carried that damn letter from Nemacio in the pocket of her skirt. She couldn’t say why, as she never took it out, having memorized the lyrics to “Malagueña” as his sorry excuse for leaving.
Perhaps circling back around to God now might ease her soul, give her a slice of absolution for all she’d done. Watching folks trickle into the church, dressed fine and otherwise, she willed her legs to stand up and go inside. By eleven, the Old Ship Saloon across the street had more folks, and she felt sorry the church attracted such a paltry congregation in comparison.
“No shame is too much,” said a preacher standing over her, blocking out the morning sun.
“Even God has limits, surely,” she said, looking up.
The preacher looked down with prideful eyes and scratched at his bald head.
“Any woman’s soul can be rectified,” he said.
Maybe this preacher knew the secret to forgiveness. Knew the secret of how a woman might set her soul right enough to find a good life worth living.
“Tell me the secret,” she said.
“You must follow the narrow path of righteousness, with a good husband guiding you.”
She paused for only a moment before realizing he was serious. She rolled her eyes.
“Tell me now, preacher,” she said. “What’s a woman to do if her man doesn’t follow the narrow path of righteousness?”
“The Bible says a silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord.”
She understood then, the church simply stood as yet another instrument of control to keep a woman down.
“You’re quite a relic. You have no idea, do you? Women don’t work that way out here in California,” she said, standing to leave.
The preacher gripped her arm and raised his voice, angry.
“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjugation! I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” he said.
“I’m not interested. I’d rather find my salvation out in nature. But I thank you just the same,” she said, shaking out of his grip.
Elisabeth strode forceful across the street over to the Old Ship Saloon, sitting down out front. When the preacher shook his finger in recrimination, she smiled wide and waved back, taunting. Although she wouldn’t go inside the saloon for a drink. She intended to keep her promise to God and herself, staying off the whiskey. She hadn’t turned religious, just fancied herself a woman who kept her promises. Besides, the drink no longer lured or tempted. She’d lost the taste for it, knowing from experience it didn’t help much and contributed to a downfall she’d rather avoid from here on out. The Old Ship Saloon simply had a nice shady spot to sit.
In truth, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself for a whole day off. Sitting idle with nothing to do felt strange. Lazy. Peaceful. Thankfully, she wasn’t the novelty she’d been three years ago down on the American River. No one sat at her feet flipping coins into her cup now, as lots of women came to San Francisco on ships every day, hoping on a better life than the one they’d left. The cheeky saloon was the novelty now, a tall ship trapped on all sides by sand pushed down from the surrounding hilltops to fill in the bay for more land, stuck landlocked, still trimmed full up with rigging. On the top two decks, men leaned on the rails, drinking and laughing loud, while three women hung off windlass ropes on the bow, calling to folks passing by in the street below. A fiddler squeaked out an off-pitch tune impossible to dance along with, but people danced anyway, reveling raucous atop that strange, landlocked boat saloon, enjoying themselves. Elisabeth marveled at the delight of it all, and on a Sunday no less. As the saloon doors swung open and closed, with folks coming and going, men tipped hats and women smiled at her. No one judged. The folks seemed to hold a thick tolerance for living in fallibility, with an understanding that greater delights are only reached by first stumbling messy through a thick fog of mistakes.
She pulled paper out of her valise and began a letter to Nate. She wrote that she’d taken work at the Pacific Print Shop, explaining that she didn’t yet command the wages of a comfortable woman and wanted him to send quarterly profits of her shares in the Goodwin Claim to her. She also penned a letter to Samuel, sending no money this time for his schooling, explaining a fire destroyed the Split Rock Books and Prints Shop in Manzanita City. Careful with her words, she said she’d moved on to San Francisco to expand her prospects, saying Nate stayed behind on the Goodwin Claim. She promised herself not to lie, but telling Samuel the whole truth was out of the question. Best to reveal bits and glimmers in each letter, letting shades of truth fall over him slow, so as not to offend his New England sensibilities all at once.
After dropping the letters at the post office, she walked toward the hubbub of the port. Summer in San Francisco froze her through, with a foggy wind blowing in fierce through the Golden Gate like winter back east. No trees graced the sand-swept city. No New England maples or elms. And no cottonwoods or green pines of the American River. Just blank, windswept sand. Turning a corner along the boardwalk, she saw a royal-blue tent with a crowd milling out front. A showman wearing a red silk suit and top hat called out to a crowd gathering ’round, telling of a mysterious woman inside.
“She speaks to the dead. Tells the future,” he bellowed.
Elisabeth didn’t actually think anyone could talk to her mother or Lucy, but she was curious and joined the crowd anyhow, paying a quarter to enter the tent. Inside, soft candlelight illuminated silver paper stars hanging from the ceiling. She took a seat in the back and waited for the show to begin. When a girl no more than thirteen stepped out from behind a curtain, the crowd hushed. Perfect brown ringlets fell around her face, innocent and sweet, and she wore a garish orange velvet dress revealing a pale cleavage and a large silver cross dangling down from around her neck. The blend of innocence and allure was jarring. The girl seated herself facing the audience on a long velvet settee and spoke in a tiny whisper. Elisabeth strained to hear, wishing she’d sat closer up front.
“My name is Sara L. V. Hatch, and I will now enter into a trance.”
The girl raised her eyes to the tent ceiling with a fixed expression. Unblinking and intense, yet confident with invocation. Rapt entrancement overcame the young girl’s soft face. Suddenly, the girl stood and recited an eloquent prayer to the Heavenly Divine Father. A man in the front row interrupted the girl, pressing a subject clearly beyond her expertise.
“Is the soul of a man part of the Deity?”
To Elisabeth’s surprise, the little girl medium set forth on the subject at length. Mesmerized, she watched from the back row, thinking it some sort of trick. When a woman on the side asked about metaphysical abstraction, the girl launched into the subject in great detail for a whole fifteen minutes with startling confidence.
“It’s quite remarkable, don’t you agree?”
Mr. John Langley slid over on the bench beside Elisabeth. Seeing a familiar face at such an eerie event was reassuring.
“So very peculiar,” she whispered to him.
John Langley leaned over too close, smelling of his usual stale cheese, with a hint of wine.
“I hear the dead send messages to the present through her.”
“Impossible!”
“Perhaps you could reach your father,” he said.
A chill ran up her spine, and her faced burned hot in the crowded tent.
“I’m a believer in letting the dead lie in peace, Mr. Langley,” she said.
“It’s all right. She’s just a girl,” said Mr. Langley.
In the dark recesses of the conjurer’s tent, he cradled her hand in his lap with affection. After a time, she nearly forgot about Mr. Langley altogether, lost in watching the little girl communing with the beyond for an old man who’d dropped to his knees on stage pleading for the girl to relay a message to his dead wife. The spectacle stunned her into thinking the girl a near miracle. When Mr. Langley slid her hand over the middle of his lap, she didn’t pull away. She wasn’t yet uncomfortable, just assumed he’d taken too much drink. When his pants bulged up, she grew amused at his bold move, and couldn’t help the thin smile spreading across her lips. She was pleased as still being able to move a man to pleasure, and wondered if maybe this sort of power might get him to give up some information about her mining shares. Mr. Langley didn’t turn toward her, just kept his eyes locked toward the stage, and she had a mind to start rubbing him through his pants right then and there in the tent, in front of all those people, just to see if she might turn the tables. Get him to moaning under her control.
But the little girl abruptly stopped talking, stood up, and walked off the stage, and Elisabeth lost interest in Mr. Langley. When the crowd clapped raucous with enthusiasm, she pulled her hand away from his lap, and he stood, holding out his arm to escort her out of the tent like he hadn’t just been lewd with her hand. Fed up with the man’s silly overtures, she declined his arm and left the conjurer’s tent, alone. She hustled off to the Pacific Print Shop. Being a Sunday, the curtains were drawn, so she knocked.
“It’s Elisabeth,” she whispered.
Jacob opened the door, ushering her inside.
“We must print an article about her,” she said.
Pacing the shop with excitement, she told Jacob and Ethel about the little conjurer. Trying to convince them. Jacob wasn’t so sure.
“We can’t compete with the Daily Alta. Robert Semple has a powerful steam press over there, with a dozen workers to help get his paper out,” said Jacob.
“But, they aren’t open today, with the Sunday closing laws. We are! We can get to work on an issue now. And they’ve no artist like Ethel to recreate a likeness of the girl.”
“We can’t risk being fined for not abiding the Sunday closing laws,” said Jacob.
“Plenty of saloons are open today, flaunting the law,” she argued.
“They’re not run by Jews,” he said.
“If the police come, we’ll say we began work Monday morning, early. No one can prove otherwise,” she said.
Jacob twirled one end of his mustache with his fingers, looking at Ethel.
“She’s right, Jacob. This is our opportunity,” said Ethel.
They began immediately. Elisabeth described the medium show in great detail while Jacob asked questions and took notes. She described Miss Sara L. V. Hatch to Ethel, who sketched her likeness. A young girl. Petite. Diminutive but suggestive. Too mature for her age. Her nose is too short. Broader shoulders. Longer ringlets.
Ethel captured an approximate picture of the girl and quickly etched the drawing into a copper plate for printing while Elisabeth read over Jacob’s article about the event, suggesting changes to make the article more enticing.
“Perhaps we should include the details of how the girl looked up at the ceiling when she was in a trance. Her voice got deeper when she went on about metaphysical abstraction,” she said.
Jacob took her suggestions, setting the type on his press. Ethel suggested a different format.
“Let’s go bigger. Like a magazine. We can fold the paper in half and include one of my drawings of the west on the other side. It will distinguish us,” she said.
“We need a title,” said Elisabeth.
“How about California Illustrated?” said Ethel, who’d already begun sketching a unique design for the new title.
“Brilliant!” said Jacob.
By midnight they began the assembly, with Ethel inking the plates, Jacob pulling the press, and Elisabeth hanging the wet sheets. As the paper dried, they took a resting on stools, grinning at each other. Flora, Ethel’s mother, came down from the apartment above with warm chicken soup.
At first light, Jacob hired men to sell the first edition of California Illustrated at the Port, Front Street, Market, and Montgomery too. That morning, five hundred copies sold out in thirty minutes, at fifty cents apiece. No one asked if it was printed on Sunday.
That day, Jacob rewarded her with a weekly raise of five dollars, for a total salary of forty dollars a week. It was much less than she’d earned sewing a day down in the diggings, and a measly amount compared to the gold she’d dug out of the river, but she didn’t care. Engraving and writing challenged her mind, made her feel as if she added something valuable to society. She wanted to spend all her time roaming around San Francisco searching for interesting stories to report about, but after the tumbling, she still questioned her own judgment. Besides, she’d never written anything other than letters. She hesitated, thinking it seemed too easy for a woman to simply lean in, grab a piece of any conceivable scheme in California, no matter how bizarre or impossible. It required a woman with a healthy dose of confidence and courage to take the opportunity, to be sure. She had nothing to lose by asking.
“You’ll need a reporter,” she said to Jacob.
“I suppose I do,” he said, looking up from his lettering case over at Ethel. “Do you know of anyone?”
He was forcing her to ask. Step up. Grab the opportunity. He wasn’t just going to hand it over.
“I can do both, engraving and writing.”
“Makes sense to me,” he said. “Ethel?”
Ethel nodded, and Elisabeth clapped her hands together fast.
“Yes. Yes. I’ll do it,” she said.
So, Elisabeth Parker became the first reporter for California Illustrated. For the second issue, she collected information about the harbor happenings, asking the city manager, port organizers, sailors, and even the saloon owners about the harbor getting smaller with infill. Everyone offered up an opinion, and she brought her notes to Jacob, who helped her write up the article. In the months that followed, she wrote the articles by herself, with Jacob only giving them a once-over for grammar accuracy. All her years of reading novels had made her a solid writer. Jacob helped her with the grammar particulars, but she knew how to hook in readers with a good lead. Fill in stories with just the most important and interesting facts. She wrote about a group of women who opened a new school for children, the bifurcated skirt, the Ladies Temperance Society, traveling minstrels, bicycles, and Maguire’s Opera House. Consumed with working as a reporter, she rarely ever thought about Nemacio anymore. She no longer fretted over why he’d left, closing the lid tight on that jar of sadness. She only occasionally remembered his body moving over hers. Loving her with a devastating passion and tenderness. His fiery touches and soul-sucking kisses. She sometimes imagined him living on his family rancho somewhere and wondered if he was happy without her.
She decided to overlook Mr. Langley’s indiscretion in the darkness of the conjurer’s tent, knowing she needed him as her banker. Besides, he never mentioned the incident and made a special point of always treating her as a respectable lady. She continued stopping by the Pioneer Bank every other week, depositing her earnings, collecting interest payments, and asking about her mining shares. Mr. Langley still advised her to hold off in selling, saying it was better to wait until solid information about the mine yields drove share prices higher. Trusting his advice, she saw no reason to do otherwise. He didn’t stop flirting with her, expressing admiration, saying he read every article she wrote. But as promised, he never asked her to join him for dinner again. She missed thei
r little game of him asking and her saying no. It had been a comfortable ritual that flattered her sensibilities.
After a year, living at the Sully House dulled, tarnished by the unsavory newcomers crowding in, looking to get rich quick. Her single room cramped dark and too spare, making her want for a single window and her own bath. Tom Sully grew weary of the crowds, too, taking to seasoning the bland food with too much salt and changing the bed linens only when someone complained of the stanky stains. He lost his temper at two young sisters from North Carolina, accusing them of prostituting, saying he’d seen them out dining alone the previous Saturday at a questionable saloon, trolling for men. She understood Mr. Sully’s concern about keeping his boarding house respectable but felt uncomfortable with his accusations, as she hadn’t seen those women take in any men. Not even once. Besides, a woman’s got a right to enjoy a meal without a man, prostitute or not. But Mr. Sully kicked the girls out with no notice anyhow, and they cried and hollered rude obscenities when he threw their trunks in the street. She followed the girls down the steps, slipping them each five dollars to find another place to sleep.
When the Rosenblatts’ new steam printer arrived from Germany, print production in California Illustrated increased, and so did the profits. Soon, the Rosenblatt family moved over to Hawthorne Street, into a proper two-story Victorian, built from milled redwood trees with curved windows sticking out beyond the house frame, and garish gables and rounded turrets at the top. Panels of showy fish scale shingles on the front screamed out in bright colors of yellow, brown, and red. Much too showy for Elisabeth’s liking. Within a week of moving into their new home, the Rosenblatts insisted she move out of the Sully house into the apartment above their shop, rent-free.
“I don’t deserve it,” she said, hugging Ethel with a squeeze. “But yes!”