The board of the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society threw a soirée to honor those of its members who’d lived at the Ark and worked so bravely throughout the epidemics. Lizzie’s depression had not lifted, but she could hardly refuse to be fêted. The party was at the home of two delightfully ready patrons, Ethel Crosby and Margaret Cole, whom she wouldn’t insult for the world. She wore her coin necklace and her apricot silk, but under her corset her heart felt pricked with pins.
The Putnams lent her Roscoe so she could drive over and leave early if the evening proved too much. They continued very pleased with her, as if she’d chosen to stay away from everyone they disapproved of for all those weeks instead of having been put under quarantine. Still, Lizzie had had no plans to do otherwise; her conscience was clear.
As she left her house, an evening fog was beginning to swirl into the streets. The city had a magical, underwater feeling. Horses’ hooves echoed in the wet air, and cold currents streamed past her, visible as ghosts.
At Ethel Crosby and Margaret Cole’s she listened to any number of fine speeches. The tracheotomy in which she had assisted was repeatedly detailed; she was honored for her patience with Meredith Penny, for the grisly clothes she’d washed, the hands she’d held, the prayers she’d offered. Lizzie didn’t suppose she’d ever been the object of so much approval. She felt uncomfortably exposed, yet cautiously pleased. She would never like being noticed, but she had done well, so that was the part that pleased her. Everyone had done well.
It was a nasty surprise, then, when she stepped outside for some air, for one moment of privacy, to have Mrs. Hallis follow merely to say something unkind. “I was astonished to learn,” Mrs. Hallis began, “that we’re sheltering a child for Mammy Pleasant. Your decision, I’m told.”
“We had the space,” Lizzie said. “In my opinion. The little girl had nowhere to go. She’s a nice little girl.”
“I’m sure that’s all true. I’m sure you were full of good intent. You always are.” Somehow Mrs. Hallis managed to make this uncomplimentary. “But none of this falls to your area of concern. And now you’ve created a situation. What is Mrs. Pleasant most known for? Baby-farming. What do we deal in? Babies. We can’t for a moment be seen as one of Mrs. Pleasant’s operations. We’d never recover from the scandal. The Ark would close forever.”
Mrs. Hallis was a Methodist with the face of a Botticelli. She believed in culpability, which was not the philosophy of most people with such lips. “When we act,” Mrs. Hallis had asked the ladies during her installation as president, “why should we not hold ourselves responsible for remote consequences as well as immediate?” This was laudable, but hard.
“I wouldn’t have brought it up tonight of all nights,” Mrs. Hallis said. “I did plan to wait. But Miss Cole asked about it. If word is already out to the donors, the circumstances are dire.”
“The circumstances are imaginary!” Lizzie said. “Mrs. Pleasant came to the Ark only the one time when she brought the child. I don’t know her at all, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say so. Of course, I believe you, I know you wouldn’t lie. And yet, Miss Hayes, we run a charity based on public support. We must consider appearances as well as facts. And my cook, Hop Tung, says it’s common knowledge that you run her errands in Chinatown.”
Lizzie was so shocked by this she didn’t immediately respond. The shock was followed by resentment. She was being watched and talked about. Her neck grew hot, and then her cheeks. Her hands were cold. The image of Mrs. Hallis questioning her Chinese cook about Lizzie’s affairs made her first frightened, then humiliated, and then angry. So they’d all only been pretending to admire her all evening, when really she was the object of a campaign of whispers that reached even into their kitchens.
“Am I being dismissed?” she asked. Her voice cracked like ice across the last word.
“Of course not. I only tell you as a friendly warning.”
Lizzie couldn’t manage another sentence. She left the porch and then the party without a word to anyone, even her hostesses. She woke the next morning with a sickening silver headache on which all the tea in China could have no effect. It had been a great mistake to leave her bed, she decided. She wouldn’t make such an error again.
Three days later Mrs. Putnam called. Lizzie roused herself sufficiently to dress, but there was no food in the house, nothing to offer by way of hospitality. The newspapers were piled unread on the parlor settee. There was dust.
Mrs. Putnam took it all in. “How was the party?” she asked. Probably she’d already heard how hastily Lizzie had left. Probably the information was already circulating up in Sacramento through Erma. Soon the governor would know or, at the very least, his Chinese cook.
Lizzie had this bitter succession of thoughts. But Mrs. Putnam’s face was too kind. Lizzie chose to confide. When she got to Hop Tung, Mrs. Putnam shook her head. All was unfolding just as Lizzie’s mother had feared. If her advice at the séance had only been instantly taken! How disheartening it must be to rouse oneself to Contact only to be ignored.
Not that Mrs. Putnam was ever one to lose herself in regrets. “The past is only useful as a guide to the future,” she said briskly. She proposed that Lizzie immediately be seen with respectable people. She proposed the long-promised, long-delayed Saturday-night promenade.
“You can invite that Mrs. Wright you’re so taken with,” she offered, which made it impossible for Lizzie to refuse. Though she’d lost the taste for it herself, it would be such a treat for poor Mrs. Wright. The Putnams would fetch them both.
The usual Saturday-night route was a loop that could be walked in either direction—Market to Kearny to Bush to Powell or Powell to Bush to Kearny to Market. Whatever the weather, the streets were full of people. The Salvation Army band sang at one end of Market Street, while at the other, groups of young men gathered to smoke cigars and watch the wind lift the ladies’ skirts.
You might see anyone in San Francisco on a Saturday night. You could buy stocks or snakes. You could buy a pig or a paste necklace or a paste guaranteed to dissolve warts. The Crockers might be walking in one direction and their servants, off duty, in the other. Fast Irish women passed slow Spanish men. There were sailors from the ships of every country in the world and soldiers from the Presidio. There were sweethearts and zealots and labor agitators and mesmerists; there were black Gilbert Islanders, huge Kanakas, turbaned lascars, tattooed Indians, Chinese with their long hair fiercely loose, Italians in fussy shirts with blue sashes. And the whole scene flooded with so much lamplight it was as if they were all onstage together. The very sidewalks seemed made of light.
Lizzie held Mrs. Wright’s arm and tried to describe it aloud. She recognized Mrs. Hallis out promenading with her husband and two married daughters; they nodded briskly to each other. She saw Myrtle Rolphe freezing out a young man with a fast smile and a gold tooth.
Mrs. Putnam began to talk about the phantom fire engine. The story was getting a good deal of press. A Mr. Tomkinson was suing the fire department for damages sustained on Third and Folsom when a recklessly speeding engine had chased his horses. His driver had lost the reins, smashing his buggy into splinters against a telegraph pole. Mr. Tomkinson was asking for one hundred nine dollars and seventy-five cents in compensation. There were more than a dozen credible witnesses.
Only there’d been no fire on this occasion, and none of the city’s many engines had been at Third and Folsom. After an investigation so exhaustive that Chief Scannell was forced to retire to the country under a doctor’s care, acting Chief Sullivan concluded that Mr. Tomkinson would have to apply for compensation to a supernatural agency. Mrs. Putnam was both pleased and horrified to think there were whole engines of ghosts clattering down the stone pavement on Folsom, carelessly sounding gongs and spooking the horses.
“When you think of all the men who’ve died fighting fires in San Francisco,” Mr. Putnam noted. “Really, the wonder is there aren’t more of these incidents.”
Mrs. Putnam was forced to agree. “But what do you think it means?” she asked. “Is the manifestation a random occurrence or is it a warning we should heed? What a time for omens this has been! Can you ever remember another such, Mrs. Wright?”
Mrs. Wright had been squeezing Lizzie’s arm for the past few moments. She answered loudly and quickly. “Stuff and nonsense. One of the engines was out and everyone is lying about it to avoid payment. These events can always be readily explained if you remember what liars people are. Especially when money is involved.
“These witnesses you refer to—was there anything supernatural in what they observed? The baying of invisible hounds? The scent of unearthly roses?” Her voice was innocent, but Lizzie could tell Mrs. Wright was goading the Putnams.
Lizzie found Mrs. Wright’s rock-solid disbelief extremely comforting. She might shift about from past to present, but Mrs. Wright kept her feet on the ground. It was also slightly rude. Mrs. Wright did not know the Putnams well enough to contradict them so loudly. Nor was her version appealing to them. “That would involve a massive conspiracy to conceal the truth,” Mr. Putnam pointed out. His posture was stiff, his tone formal.
“Someone somewhere would be bound to talk.” Mrs. Putnam turned to Lizzie. “Don’t you think so?”
Lizzie found that she had no opinion on the subject of supernatural fire engines. Naturally, this pleased no one.
The Putnams began to walk faster, and the distance between the two couples increased. This gap was quickly filled with other people. It could not have been the Putnams’ intention to abandon her, but suddenly Lizzie couldn’t see them anywhere.
A group of Italian sailors walking together, arm in arm, created a phalanx against which Lizzie was forced to give way. A gaunt and rheumy-eyed man staggered drunkenly toward her, only to find his path blocked by a bosomy, theatrical woman with a serious overbite. “Even today, the women of ancient Egypt are remembered for their beauty. What did they have that you don’t have?” she asked Lizzie. She extended her hand. In it was a small box, inlaid with an ivory ibis. “Something tiny enough to fit in this box. Would you like to open it?”
Suddenly, inexplicably, the woman and the question filled Lizzie with dread. Why had the woman picked her? Did she look the sort to open a box with no idea as to its contents?
Lizzie tried to walk past without answering, and the woman intercepted her again. “Go ahead. Open it.”
Lizzie began to sweat in the cold night air. She moved to the left, pulling Mrs. Wright along so rapidly she careened into a man with a huge black beard and a white top hat. There was the fleshy sound of collision, the smell of whiskey, a small reproachful noise from Mrs. Wright, a large irritated noise from the man.
“What are you afraid of? Only yourself,” the woman with the box shouted after Lizzie.
Lizzie saw the opening of a narrow alleyway and guided Mrs. Wright into it and out of the crush. Several moments were spent in apology and explanation. Mrs. Wright’s hat had been knocked askew and Lizzie straightened it. They began walking again, forward into the alley. Only then did Lizzie look up. The bright glow of streetlamps was gone, and she found herself in a place she’d never been. She was on Morton Street.
The sounds of the Saturday-night promenade fell away, leaving only their own footsteps. On the left were a dozen small cottages, each with a shallow bay window. In every window a woman sat idly, a smile painted on her lips, and her eyes both staring and unseeing. Instead of dresses, these women wore simple wrappers that would fall away at a touch. Their hair was pinned up in a way that suggested its coming down. The wrappers were in different colors, but otherwise the women looked exactly the same—dark hair, white skin, red mouths.
The dread Lizzie had been feeling doubled, but now she knew what she was afraid of. She feared recognizing a face, some girl they’d sheltered at the Brown Ark. The women were like dolls, waiting for someone to pick them up, move their arms and legs, animate them. She could not take her eyes off them; the women refused to look at her. She thought that what she was seeing was sex, but that it had been made to look like death.
Lines of men drank from flasks and bottles as they waited their turns. In the presence of Lizzie and Mrs. Wright, they fell utterly, eerily silent. A man left one of the cottages, a very young man with barely a beard. When he spotted them he reversed direction and walked ahead so they would see only his back. “Get out of here!” a man who looked to be Lizzie’s age snapped at her. “What can you be thinking?”
This late in her life, it was doubtful Lizzie would ever know what physical passion was. She blamed no one for this; there were things she could have done if she’d chosen to do them. As an adolescent she’d conducted her own solitary investigations until somehow her mother knew. There was a period when Effie had been told to tie her hands together every night, but it lasted only a few weeks, only long enough to make the point. “I know you’re a good girl,” her mother had said, and Lizzie had chosen to be one.
Once, when she was nineteen, Teddy Sprague had pressed against her in the backyard of his house by the large rhododendron. Later she wished she’d pressed back, but at the time she was merely embarrassed. Perhaps if she’d been beautiful, if he’d spoken first, if it had been more like something in a book, she might have behaved differently. Instead she reacted instinctively. It was a revealing instinct, the instinct of no. Lizzie had instantly known that any shared embrace would leave her feeling exposed, observed. The inner woman would not allow the outer woman to look so foolish.
She’d often told herself she didn’t really mind; she could do without. Other women seemed to dislike it often as not. There was plenty of excitement to be found in music and in books, even a bodily excitement. And then there were so many other pleasures to be had—water on her skin and in her throat, the taste of crab legs with melted butter, the smell of lemons and horses and the sea, the touch of velvet and satin, hills of poppies, Beethoven, blackberries and olives, sneezing and stretching in the sun. She would not allow these ecstasies to seem any bit less than they were. She loved them. The pleasures of the flesh were a gift from God.
None of this belonged on Morton Street. Lizzie tried to imagine a looking-glass alley where men sat in windows and waited for women with money. She pretended she was entering a door, making a selection, demanding who and what she wanted. Money on the dressing table. The man like a puppet in her arms.
The fantasy was ludicrous. And upsetting. She didn’t have a word for the combination of horror and thrill and buffoonery and sadness it gave her. What did men feel when they did such things? Whom did they pretend to do them to? Why must they do them at all?
“What’s happening?” Mrs. Wright asked. “Why have you stopped talking? Where are we?”
“Lizzie!” Mr. Putnam’s footsteps sounded behind them. “Where do you think you’re going?” He seized her by the elbow.
“Mrs. Wright was getting knocked about by all the people,” Lizzie said. “I was looking for somewhere less crowded.”
“I’ll take Mrs. Wright’s arm, then,” Mr. Putnam said. “Neither of you should be here.” He led them back to Kearny Street and Mrs. Putnam.
“What were you thinking, Lizzie?” Mrs. Putnam asked.
It wasn’t a question, so Lizzie didn’t answer it. Inwardly she was annoyed at the fuss. Wasn’t she a grown woman, and perfectly able to look at the realities of life? At the same time her hands were shaking and she couldn’t make them stop.
“We were on Morton Street,” Mrs. Wright announced to the whole staff the minute Lizzie returned her to the Ark. “Of course, I didn’t see a thing.”
“How very distressing,” Mrs. Lake said.
“How interesting,” said Miss Stevens.
Nell fetched them all a glass of wine and a piece of cold apple pie to help them recover. No experience could have brought more ready sympathy. These are real women, Lizzie told herself. This is where I live, with God, first of all, and then these real women in this real world.