Sister Noon (11 page)

“Lizzie?” A tiny, sleepy, faraway voice came from behind. “Is it Lizzie?”

“Speak up, dear.” Mrs. Mullin squeezed Lizzie’s hand. “Your mother is asking for you.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Lizzie. Mrs. Mullin’s nails dug into her skin. “I’m sitting right here.”

“Oh, Lizzie. Your father says to tell you we miss you. And our darling Edward. He loves you very much.”

“I love you, too.”

“We’re all watching over you now!”

Lizzie had never doubted it. “Thank you, Mother.” She thought to provide a distraction. “Mrs. Mullin is here.”

“But Lizzie, you have us so anxious.”

“And the Putnams. Your dear, dear friends.”

“Why do you put us through this worry? You were always so dependable. What’s come over you?” The voice was beginning to sound like her mother’s, after all. It had her mother’s disappointed, unsurprised tone. It came closer, spoke in her ear. Lizzie thought she could have touched it,
if Mrs. Mullin and Miss Rolphe weren’t holding her hands so resolutely. Everything Miss Rolphe did was resolutely done. There was no reason for Lizzie to find this irritating. Miss Rolphe was a thoroughly admirable young woman.

Lizzie’s corset was cutting off her air. Mrs. Mullin’s grip was cutting off her circulation. Lizzie’s fingertips began to throb. “Mother, I’m the treasurer for a charitable home. I’m quite good at it. I have sixty-two wards at present.” The wind whined outside. Something scraped against the window.

“You’re our only living child. We should be at peace. You never used to behave this way.”

“What way? What have I done?” This was rash, and Lizzie immediately wished she could retract it. She was letting the mere semblance of her mother get to her, and in front of everyone, too. But even as she told herself to calm down, she felt her agitation growing.

“Stay away from Mammy Pleasant.”

Lizzie shook abruptly free of Myrtle. “Don’t tell me what to do, Mother!” she said. Her voice was loud and angry and unlike her voice.

Never before had she spoken that way to her mother in public. There was a stunned pause and then a shaft of light, as if someone had opened the door into the corridor. A gust hit the window like an explosion. The glass of the cabinet shivered and cracked into a spider web of fissures. Through the glass, a multitude of green hands and staring faces could be seen. They seemed to slide through the cracks, evaporating immediately, flattened and bleached, into the material world.

I
t took an entire glass of sour wine to calm Lizzie down. Everyone was looking at her, and she hated this above all things. Her corset was sawing her in half. She had the ghosts of ghosts burning in orange afterimages under her eyelids, which could easily bring on a headache, and she would blame Dr. Ellinwood if she got one, for all the good that would do.

Dr. Ellinwood hovered, rubbing his wrists where the bonds had been, to emphasize their tightness. “Obviously I unleashed something I couldn’t control,” he told the group. “I blame myself. Calling the dead is not a party game.” He apologized to them all, just as if he hadn’t orchestrated the entire catastrophe.

Which, of course, he had. From the other side of the
wine, Lizzie could see that her mother had not come back, certainly not. Was Lizzie the only one who’d read that Margaret Fox, the most famous of the American table-rappers, had admitted to fraud? Lizzie didn’t know how Dr. Ellinwood performed his illusions, but that was no reason to credit them. Surely the dead led lives of more dignity than this feeble, grasping, greenish manifesting.

Mrs. Mullin raised her voice. “Dr. Ellinwood? Do you think the dead can still tell lies?”

“They can indeed,” he assured her. “But they have no reason to.” Which was, Lizzie thought, practically an admission of guilt.

She herself regretted nothing. She wished only that she’d been louder and ruder. In the category of small mercies, at least there’d been no ectoplasm.

Half an hour later Lizzie was safely back in the carriage and clattering out of the Palace courtyard. The rain was falling harder and colder. The streetlamps shone in the damp, soft and rainbowed like bubbles. On Mrs. Putnam’s instructions, the driver was urging the horses to hurry—at Roscoe’s age! with the road so wet!—and Lizzie couldn’t help feeling guilty about this. Roscoe himself could scarcely believe it. He would take a quick pace or two, then slow until whipped, then take another quick pace, then slow again. His obstinacy was affecting the other horse. The carriage rocked like a train, bumped like a boat.

Rain was too ordinary in San Francisco to spoil a Saturday night. The streets were brightly lit. Sheltered under canopies and alcoves, bands played bravely along their
route—ecstatic polkas and somber Salvation Army hymns. The carriage passed phrenologists and shooting galleries and the Snake Drugstore, with rattlers coiled in its windows. Revolutionaries shouted from the steps of jewelry stores, salesmen offered the afflicted the revivifying powers of aconite, tiger fat, and belts stuffed with cayenne pepper. The
nymphes du pavé
beckoned from beneath umbrellas, their smiles wet, scarlet, and practiced.

Mrs. Putnam was not speaking to her. Lizzie was clearly meant to feel guilty about this as well, but the impact was lessened by Mr. Putnam’s need to fill any silence with labored gallantries. He was a naturally garrulous man; now he also appeared to be drunk. Mr. Putnam noted that Mrs. Mullin’s shawl was as good as Italian, that Lizzie’s color was attractively up. He observed his own good fortune in being the only man among three such elegant ladies. He informed them that the king of Hawaii, Kalakaua, was staying at the Palace. The livery boy had said so when he brought the carriage around. “They say he is very ill.” Mr. Putnam’s voice was serious and subdued. “Might die.” Rain plonked on the fabric roof of the carriage, slid down the glass windows.

“Surely not,” Lizzie answered politely, although how did she know? She imagined the stretched green dead people dispersing throughout the Palace, inhaled out of one room and exhaled into another through the pneumatic tubes. She couldn’t imagine this would improve the king’s chances.

“Death comes to king and commoner alike,” Mr. Putnam intoned. He shook his head sadly.

And what if it didn’t? People always said things like
that as if it were such a shame, but how much more of a shame would it be if death were selective? A brougham crossed them on the left. The driver sat, hunched in a thick wool coat, rain dripping from the brim of his hat onto his hands. A gray horse shook rainwater from its mane. The brougham’s windows were draped, but twitched briefly as they passed. Lizzie had a quick glimpse of a woman’s eyes in a veiled face.

“In Hawaii, they admire a dark skin,” Mrs. Mullin said. “They see it as a mark of royal blood. The king is very dark.”

“In Hawaii they admire a stout figure,” Mr. Putnam said. “Not merely stout. Actually fat.” Mr. Putnam was himself a remarkably thin man.

“I just this moment remembered.” Mrs. Mullin was seated next to Lizzie, opposite Mrs. Putnam. She leaned forward as the carriage wheel hit a hole, and the broody, headless wings on her hat jumped in an unpleasant parody of flight. “You were there at the ball the night Mammy Pleasant turned colored.”

Mrs. Putnam nodded once, a sharp, brief nod. Her face was turned away toward the street. The hair around her ears bobbed gently; the feather in her hat shook. In fact, she was atremble from head to toe. It was the carriage making her so. That, and the angry stiffness of her spine, a forced rigidity adding much to her bouncing.

The real cause, of course, was Lizzie’s insulting behavior. Mrs. Putnam believed that mothers and the dead should be treated with the utmost deference. Rudeness to one’s mother when she was also dead was beyond the beyond.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Putnam. “Yes, indeed. Everyone was there. Mr. Ralston. Senator Sharon. Mr. Bell. Of course, they were young men, they were no one important yet. They were just like us. And all of them lining up to dance with her. She was a looker. No one called her Mammy that night.”

“And her not nearly as young as everyone thought, neither,” Mrs. Mullin noted.

Mrs. Putnam directed herself strictly to Mrs. Mullin; Lizzie was still only getting the profile. “And out of the blue, she just says it. I’m a colored woman, she says. I thought it was a joke, when I first heard about it. More and more people from the South were arriving then, with the war coming, so she must have known she’d be exposed. People from the South, they know what to look for.”

“Once you were told, it was obvious,” said Mr. Putnam. “She was dark. We all knew she was Spanish or something. But Ralston, Sharon, Bell, and her, they were great friends even after. They all got rich together.”

“Nothing more needs be said on the subject.” Mrs. Putnam shook her head, then continued. “There were so few respectable women in the city back then. No one maintaining standards. Vigilantes and hoodlums roaming the streets, vying with each other to see who could make the most misery for the most people. But those days are past and in the past may stay.”

Roscoe had settled back into his usual pace with his usual roll. The ride had smoothed accordingly. The sounds of the rain on the fabric roof, of hooves and wheels on pavement, the warmth of the Putnams’ lap robes, the smell of perfume and horsehair, and the wine she had
taken medicinally combined to make Lizzie sleepy. She closed her eyes and let the conversation float over her. She’d heard about rough San Francisco all her life; she even remembered a bit of it. This and the sleepiness made her feel young as a girl.

“And then there was that business with Mrs. Bell,” said Mrs. Putnam. Lizzie opened her eyes. “People have all but forgot about that. He’s living on Bush Street, like a bachelor. She’s over on Sutter with two of his children and calling herself Mrs. Percy. One minute the papers say they’re married, the next, not. She vanishes for months, and Mrs. Pleasant hires the Pinks to track her down. And then Mrs. Pleasant up and invites everyone to a wedding party as if all is right as rain. With Thomas Bell still denying he’s a married man.”

“Were you invited to that as well?” asked Mrs. Mullin.

“I wouldn’t have gone,” said Mrs. Putnam, and no doubt she wouldn’t have, though this clearly meant no.

The carriage swung slightly, following the curve of Mission Street. They were leaving the lamps of the downtown, heading into darkness. Lizzie covered a yawn with her hand. “What happened to the Palace’s Negro waiters?” she asked.

“Fired,” Mrs. Mullin told her. “Just this week. One of them was caught filching food from the kitchen, so Morgan fired the lot of them. You see how old and toothless Mrs. Pleasant has become since the Sharon business. No one would have dared do that to the colored when she was younger. She’s always been a great one for the courts.”

“Oh, Lizzie.” Mrs. Putnam turned and seized Lizzie’s hands, shaking her fully awake. Her face shone in the
carriage, dim and yellowed by the black hat and deeply creased, pocked as the moon. She was a decade younger than Mrs. Pleasant, but she looked a decade older. “I have nothing against the hardworking colored. You know I believe in judging people by their hearts. But you don’t know how treacherous she can be. Will you promise me not to see her? For your dear, dear mother’s sake?”

When Lizzie was fifty instead of forty, she would still be a child to the Putnams. She didn’t mind; it was one of the things she loved about them. Nobody else could make her feel young now that she so definitely wasn’t.

One afternoon when Lizzie was twelve, and Erma seven, they’d begged to eat their supper on the Putnams’ back lawn. They were playing castaways, they were playing Robinson Crusoe—Lizzie’s idea, of course; this was a book she’d been allowed to read early, all except for the chapter with the pirates. “You’ll break a dish,” Mrs. Putnam protested, and they promised to be ever so careful.

“We’ll make maps,” Lizzie said, getting overexcited as usual, and then, racing into the house for pencils, she stepped on the pink rosebuds of her dirty plate, heard it crack, and ran home without another word to anyone, before Erma even knew. An hour or so later, Mrs. Putnam appeared in her room. “I hope the day never comes when I care more for a dish than for a little girl,” Mrs. Putnam said. She didn’t even tell Lizzie’s mother. How could Lizzie ever bear to refuse her anything?

She opened her mouth to accede. In that moment she saw, through her left eye, the tiny disturbance in the air, the silver flash that presaged a headache. The emerald wings on Mrs. Mullin’s hat hung like a hawk. There was a
gummy silence within the carriage; without it, the mounting drumbeat of rain and hooves. She closed her mouth in a panic. Her vision improved immediately.

“Do you know what voodoo is?” Mrs. Mullin swayed in the carriage and her voice became a whisper. “What it
really
is? Black arts aimed at the destruction of the white race.”

“You don’t believe in magic, do you, Mrs. Mullin? Hocus-pocus? Habeas corpus?” Mr. Putnam shifted in his seat so as to engage Lizzie’s eyes, involve her in the joke.

“I believe in malice. As if you or I or poor, fanciful, inconsequential little Lizzie could ever do Mammy Pleasant a speck of harm.”