Heavy snow, freezing cold. Arriving Skagway today.
Eight days after disembarking the Seattle waterfront, the Ketchikan reaches Skagway at nine o’clock in the morning, its arrival greeted with a late spring snow that all but obliterates the long view toward White Pass. A din of men’s voices drowns out the sputtering of the vessel. The ship’s long whistle announces their arrival, and an all clear to disembark.
Wharves that jut into the bay are docked full, and the Ketchikan tries to shimmy up as close to shore as possible without running aground. Lighters approach the vessel, some manned by whites, and others, Native. Eliza hears the unfamiliar name Shghagw’ei in the native Tlinget language. Luggage and trunks pass from hand to hand and masses of men lunge their goods overboard. Eliza watches as several trunks tumble and split open on the slimy mud of the tide flat. High women’s voices pierce the lower monotone of men’s. Several children run up and down the deck, like whooping Indians, Eliza thinks, as they wait for their turn to disembark with their harried parents. Eliza rests momentarily by the starboard rail and memorizes the sights and smells.
Shorty comes up behind Eliza with a promise to catch up with her later in the day, “after I do a wee bit of business.” He points Eliza to a Mrs. Brown’s Boarding House on Sixth Avenue.
“Tell Mrs. Brown that I sent you, and she’ll find you a room straight off. And see to it that you pay one Lester Edwards, Esquire . . .”
At this mention Shorty makes a low bow.
“. . . the pleasure of your company, too, Ma’am. He’s the land agent here in town, knows places for rent before renters know they’re out of their digs.”
Shorty pats Eliza’s arm.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be watching out for you, little missy.”
Eliza joins the throng of men who slog across the mud flats toward the shore. Selling her wedding ring in Whatcom had proved costly, swindlers! She received a trifling fifteen dollars for the ring, to add to another five she received for the Peapod. If the forty-five dollars and odd change she has in her change purse cannot start her new career, she knows she’ll be back on a southbound boat in a month, with no prospects ahead.
I don’t have much. No fur hat, no fur muff, no fur coat.
Her meager change purse is now sewn into the lining of Jacob’s coat.
Eliza’s satchel contains the bare necessities of a woman’s toilette and her second woolen skirt, a cream-colored blouse, a spare pair of stockings, and bloomers. Her town boots. Jonathan’s picture safe in its brass frame. The moonstone. A ledger. And of course her precious recipe file, her veritable ticket to gold.
A relentless thirty-foot tide laps in and out of Lynn Canal every day, which makes disembarking the vessel a slippery affair. Jacob’s boots succeed in keeping out the frozen slush as Eliza sloshes through the icy mix of mud and seawater toward the shore. Eliza thinks sardonically that this may be the only positive comment she can utter about Jacob.
His boots hold stay.
The hem of Jacob’s coat crusts with wet mud and hangs low to the ground. By the time Eliza reaches the wharf, Jacob’s boots resemble a logger’s, caked with a half-inch of icy sludge.
Eliza stamps her sopping boots on the wooden wharf, her heels indenting the soft fir. She squints, and gazes the whole length of the long half-mile toward town. False wooden storefronts and the spire of two lone churches form Skagway’s pathetic skyline. Acres of mud, stumps, shacks, and shoddy tents fill in the rest of the scene.
More tents than buildings, she thinks. Tents! In this frigid no man’s land!
A group of young ruffians, not more than ten or eleven years old, clamors for attention at the foot of the wharf. Some hawk newspapers; others jostle to hawk wares. Beneath jaunty hats, the hooligans look thin, and dirty. She will be careful with her purse.
“This here way to Mr. Simpson’s! Boots and the like for fair prices!”
“Read all about it! Avalanche kills miners on Chilkoot Trail! Survivors tell story!”
Eliza stands in the sodden spring of Skagway, snow stinging her brow. Upon disembarking, Eliza Waite is known only to have come from points south, a recent widow without children. She means to open a bakery, her references being a woman. By way of comparison, Skagway already boasts more than forty beer parlors and boarding houses doing a booming business for thousands of men traveling through the portal. And the town is barely a year old.
Eliza maneuvers through the mob of boys and men and walks up the muddied street toward Mrs. Brown’s Boarding House.
“Over here, mister! Only twenty five cents for a shave at Klondike Lil’s!”
“News flash! More gold found in Miner’s Creek. Pokes worth millions!”
The tallest of the boys wears short worsted pants and scuffed brown leather shoes with no socks. His cap hides a mop of curly dark hair. His eyes flash as he darts from passenger to passenger. He pushes a smaller boy toward the offloading passengers. The smaller boy winces. The taller boy stamps his heel on the toes of the smaller boy, and the smaller boy howls. The taller boy moves on to another of his charges, hawking papers high above his head. Several passengers stop to extract a coin for the local rag. Most keep walking. Eliza glances over the tops of the boys’ heads and averts her gaze.
Jonathan would be near their age now.
Blinding snow renders it difficult to find the way as Eliza walks north up Broadway from the wharf. She stops to catch her breath and to wipe her spectacles.
In the near distance she reads: Burkhard House, Pill Box Drug Co., Royal Laundry.
Biting cold burns her lungs, and ice-cased snowflakes freeze her cheeks. She wonders again if this grand adventure is a grand mistake. All around her a tide of men surges into town. She wonders if their thoughts echo her own.
One thing for sure, she thinks, after I find Mrs. Brown’s, I certainly need to purchase a warmer coat.
Up Broadway toward Sixth Avenue, Eliza peeks into storefronts, establishments, and hotels: Getz and Donovon Packers, Joseph B. Meyers Cigars and Tobacco, Hotel Mondamin.
What I would do for a hot meal!
When Eliza turns left from Broadway onto Sixth, away from the wind, she sees with great relief a two-story wooden building on the south side of the muddied side street engraved with large white block letters: Mrs. Brown’s Boarding House.
Eliza stops, catches her breath again. She notices detail of the wooden structure, from its form to its function. Thick green brocade drapes frame the inside of the windows that border each side of the doorway, and refuse a glimpse into its interior. A single step up from the crude wooden boardwalk, Eliza opens the heavy wooden door, its cre-e-eak her entrance.
“Morning,” comes a voice, perhaps from behind an ornate desk by the stairwell. Eliza dusts the snow from her overcoat and smiles.
A real house.
The carpeted parlor dredges long-locked memories, this room the most elegant she’s seen since leaving her aunt’s in St. Charles. A large woodstove stands in the parlor’s rear left corner, and emits a steady blast of warmth, its door slightly ajar. A large green divan sits close to the stove; its carved arms support elaborate woolen throw blankets with sensuous fringes reaching down toward the floor. A smaller green brocaded loveseat is positioned at a right angle to the divan, its back to those who enter the parlor. Rich tapestries overlap on the wooden flooring, and several small tables and armchairs dot the right side of the room. Lace and lamps. Fringe and furs. The soft glow of a single oil lamp on the desk beckons to Eliza, come.
“A Mr. Richardson directed me to you,” Eliza begins, although she doesn’t see anyone to whom to direct her comments.
“Shorty! Seems everyone around these parts knows Shorty!”
A stylish woman of a certain age with the new soft and wavy hairstyle Eliza recently admired appears from behind the oak desk with a duster in her hands.
“Yes, we met on the Ketchikan . . . we’ve just docked, maybe an hour ago.”
“He’s back, is he? Well, well. Won’t be long before he’s at the door. Now what can I do for you? You’ll be needing a room for the night?”
“I’m thinking for a few nights, maybe a few weeks, if you’ve got a room to spare.”
“For a friend of Shorty’s, there’s always room,” the woman says. “My name’s Pearly, Pearly Brown, landlady of this here establishment. And you would be?”
Two small bedrooms occupy the first floor of the boarding house, one sparse room on either side of the parlor. Just behind the parlor, a large claw-foot tub sits surrounded by a heavy green damask curtain.
“Bathtub’s used most nights, sometimes three and four times over,” Pearly says. “We’ve got people coming and going every day. Most of them men. Never seen so many men in one place. Yesterday I turned away five, six men—two in one hour alone—and that hurts the pocketbook. Sent some of ’em over to the Mondamin, and others over to Paradise Alley, I did. I need to build myself a hotel.”
At the top of the stairwell, Pearly motions to the front room to the left of the stairwell. A partially opened door reveals the most opulent bedroom Eliza has ever seen.
“You’ll be my neighbor, here, in the blue room,” Pearly says, opening the door to the rear bedroom. “Fifty cents a night, a quarter more for a bath. Might be willing to dicker on the price if you’re staying longer.”
In addition to a large feather bed flanked on both sides with oak side tables, the room houses a polished maple vanity table and large full length mirror. Cornflower blue paper covers the walls from floor to ceiling, and the rear window’s ivory and blue flowered drapes blanket out the cold. Two carpets overlap at the foot of the full-sized bedstead.
“There’s pitifully few of you traveling women,” Pearly says. “I’m glad for the company. We get some real corkers, let me tell you. Why, just last week we took in the most curious woman—signed the register only as one J.T. Cummins—took a double take, I did, thought she masqueraded as a man. She stayed just one night, and did not bathe. Imagine that. Crazy woman left before I woke and left only two quarters on the nightstand. And that’s the God’s honest truth.”
Pearly turns her attention back over her shoulder and points to the right of the stairwell.
“Those are Rose’s and Cilla’s rooms. They’re what I call enterprising young women. Ladies of the night, some call ’em. Not me. They’re sweet as kittens in the day, but fierce as tigers in the night, if you know what I mean.”
Eliza catches a glimpse of herself in the large ornate gilt mirror at the top of the landing, and blushes.
Am I renting a room in a bordello?
But she is too exhausted and too dirty to care. All she can think of is luxuriating in a hot bath after eight days aboard the Ketchikan.
Pearly reads Eliza’s desperate thoughts like a mystic.
“Now you get out of those filthy rags and get yourself into the bath directly. I’ll fetch you a couple of towels and a robe. You look like you need an hour to yourself to just soak.”
After spending a full hour in the bath, Eliza changes into her woolen skirt and spare blouse. To Eliza’s surprise and delight, Jacob’s boots sit polished outside her bedroom door. Eliza pulls the boots over her thick woolen stockings and gathers her satchel. There is no evidence of Pearly as Eliza descends the stairs and lets herself out the door of the boarding house. She turns to look up to the second story windows. The curtains hang still.
Eliza trudges through frozen mire to find Lester Edwards, Esq. just around the corner of Broadway and Sixth. She walks up to Seventh, and then Eighth. She finds the law office of Lester Edwards, Esq. and lets herself in the modest storefront.
If everyone in Skagway knows Shorty, then perhaps I’m about to meet a valuable friend in this Mr. Edwards. If anyone knows where to rent space for the bakery, Shorty says it’s got to be him.
Later that night, inviting sleep, Eliza hears steady footfalls on the stairwell. In the two weeks she boards at Mrs. Brown’s the footfalls become a regularity, a steady stream of men at all hours of evening and night.
Rose, just over five feet tall, has found herself a comfortable niche at Mrs. Brown’s. Men cannot resist Rose’s ruddy complexion and voluptuous mouth, and her even more voluptuous frame. One can hear Rose at all hours, sometimes her low guttural bellow and at other times a stream of profanities that can be heard from the parlor.
“Quite the mouth on my Rose,” Pearly says. “Would make a preacher blush. She’s what I call seasoned. Maybe twenty-five, if I do my sums right.”
Rose’s whole body shakes when she laughs, and her jet black curls sway in the air as she throws her head back and roars. Rose’s greatest characteristic, Eliza notes, is her complete non-judgment of any man or woman. Rose loves life, and it seems, from the list of clients she keeps in a small leather bound book attached to her waistband, men.
Cilla, on the other hand, a waif of a girl, cannot be more than nineteen as far as Eliza can judge. Cilla bears a continual pout, and stands aside the doorway of the boarding house like a sentinel, smoking thin cigarettes and watching the world stream by. She stands almost as tall as Eliza and levels her gaze at Eliza as well as every other customer entering or leaving the establishment. Cilla looks much like the now famous Gibson Girl, whose lovely face graces the pages of the ladies’ magazines in the front parlor. Eliza much prefers to talk to Rose in passing than Cilla, although Cilla’s constant presence at the doorway encourages Eliza to seek a new look. Eliza knows if she is to open a new establishment herself, she will need to appeal to her mostly male clientele.
Men are fickle, this Eliza knows all too well.
If I lure them in once, they’ll be steady customers.
And Eliza knows once anyone tastes the sweet buns she offers, there will be a line out her door as well, albeit for a much different reason than the men who frequent Pearly’s.
Eliza assesses her situation. She knows she must move quickly with her plans to open the café or she risks the reputation of being associated as one of Mrs. Brown’s “girls.” Of greater import, the forty-five dollars she possessed when she left Seattle has dwindled to sixteen. Her lease on the small café runs four dollars per week, paid in advance, plus another four for rent in eventual lodgings, and she owes Pearly seven. She pays a dollar each morning for egg pie and coffee at The Empire Café, and goes hungry the rest of the day. Eliza traverses the length of Skagway and peers into the storefronts. In addition to The Empire Café, Eliza counts three other bakeries: The Home, The German, and The Denver. Eliza cannot afford to frequent any of the bakeries regularly, except to survey the surroundings and make mental notes.
The Home Bakery caters to a late crowd. The German, well, I can’t understand the proprietor. What’s a Nussecken or a Bratapfel anyway? And the Denver . . . well, their muffins taste like cardboard.
Eliza counts and recounts her mere sixteen dollars, dollar by dollar and coin by coin. With that paltry amount, she needs to buy rudimentary supplies to start up: flour and yeast and coffee. Prices for goods alone skyrocket the further north one travels.
Highway robbery! And I need a sign made. A nice one at that. I can see it now. But what shall I call it? The Moonstone! Yes, The Moon-stone Café.
Eliza borrows cash from Shorty. She marks it on a new page in her ledger, under the initials: MC. Eliza targets the fifteenth of April as her opening day.
But what to wear for the day-in, day-out drudgery of baking? And what to wear when buying goods and tending to other business in this San Francisco of the north? She admires how Pearly, Rose, and Cilla present themselves to the public, despite the fact that the elder of the three is a madam and the younger two are likely prostitutes. Eliza has not paid mind to fashion for so long that she chides herself for vain thoughts.
But I need to join them, in looks anyway.
“COME IN,” PEARLY SAYS. HER BEDROOM DOOR GAPES AJAR. Eliza has been in Skagway for a week now, and she knows from the bottom of her gut there is no going back. She hesitates after she knocks, but pushes through the door to Pearly’s opulent boudoir.
Wide swaths of rich brown brocade fabric circle Pearly’s high four-poster bed. Layers of thick coverlets and gold-fringed pillows invite reclining there. The walls, a lighter cocoa color than the bed curtains, display mirrors of varying shapes and sizes, all framed in ornate gold. A large tufted divan sits positioned in front of the upstairs bay window, the window’s casings also of the brown brocade, and tied back with gold tassels. A thick bear skin rug lounges at the end of the bed. Pearly sits in her nightdress on a plush bench in front of a large dressing table, sweeping her hair up into its elaborate style. Eliza focuses on the bearskin.
“I’ve been wondering if you could help,” Eliza begins.
She pauses before continuing.
“It’s just that I don’t know the first thing about hairstyles. Or fashion.”
Eliza blushes as she admits this self-evident fact.
“Why, of course, my dear! I wondered when you’d ever ask.”
Two hours later, Eliza looks at her reflection and stifles a short cry. Her waist length rust-colored hair, first washed in a basin and then coated with egg yolks before the final rinse and towel dry, lays in wavy pleats on the crown of her head, with the remainder gathered up in a soft chignon at the nape of her neck. Eliza hardly recognizes herself, and squints to see herself even closer.
A long silence ensues as Eliza sits glued to the dressing table bench. Pearly busies herself cleaning up the mess they’ve made, and then pauses before her armoire and selects four day dresses. She spreads the dresses on the coverlets.
“Pick one, my dear. We will see about having another made for you at the end of the week.”
Eliza chooses a pale blue day gown with an empire sash of brown velvet. The square neckline seems risqué, but Eliza does not complain. She slips into the day dress while Pearly gathers the jumble of towels bunched on the floor. The gown, sized for a buxom woman several inches shorter than Eliza, falls lower on Eliza’s chest than she’s ever allowed, and reaches above her ankles. Eliza feels exposed. She returns to the dressing table and lowers herself onto the bench. She cannot help but stare at her reflection.
Pearly laughs. “That, my dear, is what we do.”
“I haven’t worn a gown since I was nineteen,” Eliza says. “And that was near ten years ago.”
She bites her lip; she has resolved not to reveal anything about her past. Of her heritage, hometown, and history, Eliza has decided to wipe the slate clean. Her grand plan relies on this fact. She must reinvent herself to survive in this new world.
“And why ever not, Lizzie?” Pearly asks. “Don’t they wear gowns in San Francisco?”
Eliza scrambles for words. No one has ever called her Lizzie before. And she knows she’s caught in a lie.
“Of course, but as a minister’s wife . . .”
“Ah, now I see. You needn’t say another word.”
Eliza breathes out, and with the breath, her anxiety fades. Pearly bends over and gathers more towels into her arms.
“Did you love him, your husband?” Pearly asks. Her voice sounds muffled; she speaks from behind a mound of still damp towels.
Words catch in Eliza’s throat; she can only dole out the barest details to be true to her promise to herself.
“I suppose not,” Eliza says. “But it’s nothing I’ve ever spoken about. To anyone.”
Pearly tosses the towels into a basket by the dressing table and sits down on the bench next to Eliza.
“I was in love once,” Pearly says. “He was ace-high, would have tied myself to him in an instant. And quite a lover, too.”
Eliza reddens at the mention of a lover.
A lover. What a concept! And quite a lover, too.
“I met him back in ’69, near thirty long years ago. He was a real looker, a Union Pacific man from Chicago. A bit offish. Met him in Nebraska, of all places.
“Funny thing, I never told him that I loved him, and he never told me that he loved me. But if that wasn’t love, I don’t know what love is.”
Eliza has never had such an intimate discussion with any other woman, not even Ida. There were some topics never discussed, even between married women. But why not? Hadn’t she challenged her own father about women having a voice? And didn’t she talk like a man, to herself at least?
“What happened?”
Eliza surprises herself with the asking.
Now Pearly waits before answering.
“We had a falling out, you might say. It was sudden.”
Pearly lapses into the past, her eyes clouded and distant.
“‘A man in a passion rides a mad horse.’ I’ve often wondered what became of him, but it couldn’t have been good. You see, he killed a man, and I was a witness.”
Eliza’s eyes widen at Pearly’s statement. Eliza knows that Pearly has what her aunt would call a “colorful past.” That euphemism dredges up many unladylike qualities, and ones not talked about in polite company.
But murder! That is a topic best left to saloons and newspapers. Then again, Eliza reminds herself, this is Alaska.
She makes another note to herself: Nothing here will surprise me ever again.
“There is another Benjamin Franklin saying, the one about judging others. Oh yes: ‘He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.’”
Pearly does not respond. She continues to stare past Eliza in the mirror. Eliza tries to meet Pearly’s gaze, but is unable to wake Pearly from her reverie.
“Yes,” Pearly says, after what seems to Eliza an eternity.
“I often wonder what became of Steiner.”