Sister Noon (12 page)

Lizzie’s eyesight had normalized, but her breathing had not. Her voice was oddly tilted. “She came to the Brown Ark on business,” she told Mrs. Putnam. “I don’t expect her back, but I can’t promise not to see her on business. I have to do whatever’s best for the children.” She touched her hands together to reassure herself that they were both warm. She pressed her fingers to her forehead.

“Her business is just what I want you kept out of,” Mrs. Putnam said.

Lizzie lowered her hands and saw Mrs. Mullin patting Mrs. Putnam’s knee. “Lizzie’s not her usual type,” Mrs. Mullin said. Mrs. Pleasant’s usual type was a fragile beauty like Mrs. Bell.

“Lizzie is being very obstinate,” Mrs. Putnam complained.

“Lizzie looks very handsome this evening,” Mr. Putnam observed without looking at her. “I have spent the evening with three very handsome ladies.”

“Are you getting one of your headaches, dear?” Mrs. Putnam asked.

“No,” Lizzie said cautiously. It appeared not. She began to feel the charged, sweet heat of relief rising inside her.

“She was the most wonderful cook,” Mr. Putnam said. All three women turned to look at him. He raised his hands in protest. “I was never at her table, myself. But everyone says. Cajun crab cakes and candied figs. Wine jellies. Caraway cheese. Dishes from the South.”

And then Roscoe stopped, because Lizzie was home. She looked through the rain to her dark, cold house. A woman who had just released a quantity of dead people, including her own angry mother, into the city should probably not sleep alone. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s
The Hidden Hand
lay on her bedstead, a popular, feverish book, and she was just up to the chapter where robbers hid themselves under little Capitola’s bed.

Mr. Putnam prepared to help her down. Outside the carriage she heard Roscoe shake himself. She did the mental equivalent. Nonsense, she told herself firmly.

There was no room under her bed for a pack of robbers.

The green people were a fraud and an illusion.

And anyway, her mother’s spirit, if it was loose at all, was at the Palace Hotel and surely happy. The Palace would be her mother’s idea of heaven, especially if there was also a king dying there.

W
hatever complaints Lizzie may have had concerning her mother were slight compared with Teresa Bell’s complaints regarding hers. Teresa Bell was obsessed. She referred to her mother often in conversation and, late in her life, wrote two similar accounts of their relationship. One of these she sent to the physician who attended her in her final years. The other formed the heart of her Last Will and Testament. Teresa Bell died in 1923.

Her maternal grandfather was one Colonel Nathaniel Tibbals. Colonel Tibbals distinguished himself during the Revolutionary War and was given, for his services, a parcel of land in Auburn, New York. He married Sarah Lydia Ward, one of a family of celebrated Kentucky beauties, and together they raised four healthy children.

The youngest was the youngest by far, and her father, rather an elderly man by the time she was born, doted most upon her. She had her own harp, her own pony, and she knew her own mind. Her name was Elmina Caroline, and her father would hear nothing against her. He died when she was only eleven.

Some years later Elmina married Wessel Harris. She brought six hundred acres of farmland to the marriage, as well as her own considerable beauty; he thought himself the luckiest man in the world. He kissed his bride and commenced his living happily ever after.

But in the next years he faced the inexplicable loss of his first two children. Both of them boys, they were full-weight, pink-cheeked, active babies. Labor and births unremarkable. Yet neither lived to see four months. When a third child was born, a pretty girl who favored her mother, with eyes like cornflowers and hair like cornsilk, Elmina refused even to hold her. Before the child was three months old, her father came home to find her stripped to the skin and set outside on a windowsill, sobbing her heart out in the soaking rain.

Wessel wrapped the baby warmly in an old, soft undershirt, tucked her inside his coat, and walked off in the storm. Five miles away lived the family of a bricklayer named John Clingan. The Clingans had recently lost their middle daughter, Matilda. Wessel Harris gave his baby to the Clingan family, and she remained with them for many years.

She was visited often by her grandmother Tibbals, her father, and even occasionally by her mother. One day her mother arrived alone. She took the child to play in a creek that ran through the Clingans’ lot. The girl made a pile of wet silvery rocks. Elmina removed her own shoes and
stockings and tucked up her skirt. She knelt and splashed her face with water while her hair tumbled down. She looked like a wild creature, a doe, a naiad.

“Come here,” she told her daughter. “Come see the crawdad hiding in this pool here.”

“I hear voices in the wind,” the little girl confessed. She went to meet her mother’s outstretched hand.

“What do the voices tell you?” Elmina asked.

The little girl didn’t like to say, since the voices were telling her to run away. She felt her mother’s damp fingers moving down her cheek to her shoulder. “Just my name,” the little girl said. She really did hear her name.

“Kneel down here so you can look.” Her mother’s hand moved from her shoulder to the back of her neck. “Lean forward.”

The little girl knelt with her face nearly touching the water. She saw how the surface twitched with waterbugs, how big and shivery the rocks looked. She thought she saw the crawdad’s claws under one of those rocks. “Run while you can,” the wind whispered. “Run away, Teresa. Teresa.”

“Teresa! There you are!” her grandmother Tibbals said. She was out of breath and gulping like a fish. She came down the bank, sliding in her haste, losing her footing. “You’re wanted back at the house.” She pulled the child from Elmina’s hands.

“Yes,” Elmina said. She gathered her dripping hair together, twisted it so the water streamed down her arms. “You run along now, dear, since Mrs. Clingan needs you so immediately.”

The Clingans may have been a hasty choice. Mrs. Clingan was a drunken, abusive mother. Mr. Clingan was a
cardplayer who lost more than he won. There were two daughters in the family already—Mary Jane, who was six years older than Teresa, and Kate, who was four years older. “I know why you live with us,” Kate said one day when Teresa was seven years old. Kate had light brown hair and a fat face.

“She’s not to say.” Mary Jane shook her head. “You’re not to say,” she told Kate.

“I didn’t say I’d tell. I just said I know.” Kate leaned toward Teresa, her lips pinched together so the words wouldn’t pop out inadvertently.

Mary Jane dropped a hint. “It’s the same reason your mother can’t visit you alone.”

“It’s because she wants to kill you,” Kate said. “Just like she killed your brothers.”

This was instantly plausible. Wasn’t Mrs. Clingan always saying, I’ll kill you if you can’t be quiet? I’ll kill you if those dishes aren’t washed when I get home? “Just like
your
mother,” Teresa said, understanding, and the two girls looked at her with suddenly angry mouths and waspish little eyes.

“No,” they told her.

“It’s not anything at all like,” said Kate.

In Teresa’s will she refers to the Clingans as a bogus crew who may try to claim a blood relationship to her. She singles out Kate in particular as one of the vilest characters on earth, who once “even tried to claim that my father Wessel Harris begot me with the aid of her mother. Wessel was my father and her mother was my mother, so she said.”

“Well, someone needs to tell you,” Kate finished. “Because now your mother’s run off and no one knows where she is or what she’s up to. I’d be plenty scared if I was you.”

The wind told Teresa to leave the horrible Clingans, to run away to the creek, but now she could hear that it spoke in her mother’s voice, and she was too frightened to obey it ever again. She didn’t leave the house for several days, and she didn’t see Elmina for many years.

Mr. Clingan died. A neighbor turned the family in to the county and they were all shipped off to the county farm. Teresa went, too, her father and grandmother apparently unable or unwilling to intervene. From the farm the children were fostered out to separate homes. Teresa was now twelve.

“That I live is a wonder,” Teresa wrote later in a letter to her doctor. “But that my soul lives is a still greater wonder.” Describing herself at age twelve, she says she was “proud, sensitive, and refined clear beyond her years,” with a delicacy of perception and a purity of soul. These things she attributed entirely to her father, Wessel Harris. Blood will tell, she often liked to say. We cannot know which of these qualities—the delicacy or the purity—first attracted the attention of a young man like James Percy.

Mr. Percy came calling when she was seventeen. He sat with Teresa in the parlor of a shabby boardinghouse that catered mostly to immigrants. The most intimate business could be conducted in that parlor, and if the conversation was in English, one’s privacy was complete. James Percy’s business with Teresa was of the most intimate sort. “I want to tell you everything I see in your eyes,” he was saying. “I can read your fortune in them if you’ll only look at me.”

And then he suddenly stood. Teresa turned to see why, and there was Elmina, faintly reflected in the cracked
glass of the parlor doors, in an expensive lilac dress. She didn’t seem to have aged a minute, but then the parlor was a dim room, no good for sewing or reading whatever the time of day. Elmina entered and sat on a dirty chair, her skirt billowing in a lilac froth about her legs. “Aren’t you pretty?” she said to Teresa. “Could I have just a moment alone with you, dear? If the gentleman will kindly excuse us?”

Teresa caught James’s hand. “Don’t go,” she said, and he sat again.

“Which of us is the prettier, do you think?” Elmina asked him. She was flirting, in her costly dress, with her hair coiled about her head like a snake. Teresa might have been in rags by comparison.

“I couldn’t possibly choose,” James said, “when faced with two such beautiful women.”

“Now you’re teasing me. Though there are those think I’ve held up rather well for such an old lady, I won’t deny it. But beauty can’t last forever. That’s why a woman wants children. So her beauty will survive her. It pleases a beautiful woman to have a beautiful daughter.”

“You must be very pleased.”

“Teresa is my only living child,” Elmina said. “Naturally I’m proud of her.”

It wasn’t until Elmina left that Teresa realized she was still allowing James to hold her hand. He tried to kiss her then, because that was the idea her fingers had given him. That night Teresa blocked her door with a chair and kept her window closed.

The next day Kate Clingan drove by. She was a swollen tick of a woman but, even so, already married, and really her name now was Kate Gray. “Your father has died,” she
said. She didn’t even get out of the wagon to say this. “He left six hundred acres of land and he left it to you instead of your mother. It only goes to Elmina if you die before she does. I thought you should know. I thought you should know she was there when they read the will and she said it was her land from her father, not your land from yours.”

Teresa left New York hastily at the age of seventeen and in the company of James Percy. She arrived in San Francisco when she was twenty-three. She was calling herself Mrs. Percy in 1870 when Mary Ellen Pleasant first met her, although James was by then in San Quentin. He’d been caught robbing drunken farmboys in the bars of the Barbary Coast.

Teresa had asked the Bank of California for a loan to see her past this drop in income. On the application was a space for her maiden name, in which she wrote “Clingan,” and a space for her mother’s name, in which she wrote simply the word “mother.”

Mary Ellen Pleasant thought her very lovely and very sad. “I own six hundred acres in New York,” Teresa told her coolly. She was wearing a patched dress, a glass brooch, and shoes that didn’t quite fit.

It must be noted that extensive rebuttal for all the above was supplied over the years in which Teresa Bell’s estate was contested. Both Mary Jane and Kate testified that Teresa was their sister, the youngest daughter of John and Bridget Clingan. Their contention was supported by baptismal records.