The Gilded Age Part 38

"Missy mean a squarer?"

"I do, indeed. A squarer, please."

"For sick gentleman friend?"

She looks at him, surprised. "He looks that bad, does he?"

The cook gives her a look of deep sympathy. "I make good squarer for him." He rewards her with that smile. "And for you, too, missy."

The cook seizes a loaf of fresh milk bread, slashes the loaf in half with a huge steel knife, presses out a hollow, and slathers top and bottom with sweet b.u.t.ter. He pops the bread into a little wood-burning oven to toast. Next he tosses a bowl of fresh bay oysters into a shiny copper saute pan with a huge scoop of b.u.t.ter, pinches coa.r.s.e salt, black pepper, and garlic shavings onto the sh.e.l.lfish, and sets everything sizzling on the stovetop above the oven. Then he takes the toasted bread sh.e.l.l from the oven, spoons the oysters in the bottom, clamps the lid on top, and divides the gigantic sandwich into quarters. He wraps the fragrant concoction in crisp white paper.

"Squarer for you, missy," says the cook. "Is my San Francisco special."

"Thank you, sir. I will always remember your culinary skill."

Zhu hurries back to Daniel. He sits slumped and shivering, his face fallen, his arms folded across his chest like the limbs of a puppet.

"Muse?" she says, panicked.

"Give him a neurobic," Muse advises. "Two, if you've got enough left."

The LISA techs supplied her with nine months' worth of neurobics and no more. She's taken care to ration them out. She finds the last half a dozen in her feedbag purse, takes out two without a second thought. She breaks open a capsule under Daniel's nose, and his eyes flicker, a little color filters into his cheeks as he breathes the healing fumes. She breaks open another. Now he smiles wanly.

"What have you got there, my angel? It smells wonderful."

She leads him to the picnic tables set beneath a whispering willow tree. They sit and munch on the squarer. After two enthusiastic bites, Daniel pauses, becoming pensive again. "I wasn't the first," he says heavily, "to make pictures move."

"You don't have to be the first. This is only the start of the moving picture business. What's needed is a creative mind like yours to choose which pictures will move. To choose which stories to tell with those pictures. And to pioneer more technological innovations. Believe me, a whole new world is opening up for you."

If she was hoping to rouse him with her encouragement, she's disappointed now.

"By G.o.d, I'd like champagne with my oysters."

"If your mother fed you whiskey and morphine to keep a little boy quiet, you're going to have to fight every day of your life for sobriety, Daniel. Trust me, it will be worth it."

"But why?" He throws down his food. "Oysters taste so much better with champagne. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. We do die tomorrow, don't we? As life follows birth, so death follows life. That's the way the world works, is it not?"

Zhu sighs. She too wishes she had a gla.s.s of champagne to wash down her oysters. And she wonders. If she dies in the past-which seems inevitable, now-then her birth and her life are to follow her death. How many times has she made this loop? How many times has she thought these thoughts? Though, at the moment, her thoughts feel fresh and new. Eat, drink, and be merry? Why not? Why not? How will she bear the rest of her life?

"You know, I can't see the stars dance anymore," Daniel mutters.

"The stars dance?"

"Yes, in the sky over marvelous Californ'. There was a time when I could look up and see the stars dance. Not anymore."

"Muse?" Zhu whispers. "Help me."

That scratchy feeling irritates her left eye as Muse downloads data through her optic nerve and projects a holoid field. A translucent wall of blue light hovers over the gra.s.s in front of the willow tree.

Daniel gasps, leaps to his feet, circles the translucent wall. He thrusts his hands into the field, marveling at the lack of resistance. Well, of course, his expression tells her, this how the future would do it. He guffaws with delight, and his cheeks bloom with color. He glances at her, jubilant, expectant. "Go on, go on! What's next?"

She blinks, and Muse's holoid of Woodward's dancing bears pops up amid the swaying leaves of the willow tree. There they are, the bears in their silly hats and costumes, yelping for apple chunks. The holoid is nothing special to Zhu, just a digital recapitulation of a previously recorded reality. But Daniel drops to his knees, ruining his trousers with gra.s.s stains as he crawls all around the holoid, studying the three-dimensional images from every angle.

To Zhu's surprise, Muse goes on, showing holoids of megalopolises, the Mars terraformation, the EM-Trans, the huge infrastructure of s.p.a.ce stations...o...b..ting the Earth. Then holocausts, conquests, visions of apocalypse. The brown ages that last for terrible centuries. And restoration of the Earth, the New Renaissance. A stampede of virtual gazelles leaps over a blind where a man and woman lie hidden together.

Daniel watches, transfixed. "Will I be able to do this?"

"Not all of it, not yet," Zhu says, smiling. "Three-d, let alone holoids, are a long way away from this day. But look, Daniel. Look and learn. Perhaps with your moving pictures you'll tell the story of a young man from Saint Louis who went to San Francisco."

As the afternoon slips into an evening promising more rain, Zhu hails a cab back to their south o' the slot hidey-hole. The cab driver patiently cajoles his young bay gelding that rolls his eyes at every drunken whoop and bellow. The first celebrants of Saint Patrick's Day have staggered off to their favorite brothels or cribs, pa.s.sed out in the back rooms of saloons, or lurched home to their scornful wives. Now another crowd of celebrants streams into the streets and saloons, workers done with the dayshift at factories, warehouses, and sweatshops.

"Did ye see the rainbow this afternoon, miss?" the vegetable vendor cries out as she and Daniel jostle through the crowd on their way back to the boardinghouse. "Ah, ye should've seen it. Them rowdies from Sausalito were hangin' around here, and they saw it." He adds with a significant wink, "Guess they didn't see you and the mister go out earlier."

A sharp foreboding pierces her, and Zhu pulls Daniel to a stop. "Let's circle around the block."

"I cannot around circle the block. I just can't, my angel. So tired. . . ."

Boom boom boom! Fiery debris sprays from their room on the second floor. People scream, jump back, scramble away from the blast. A knot of five men stand impa.s.sively on the corner, watching. One boldly dangles a can of kerosene in his hand.

"Stay here," Zhu commands, helping Daniel lean up against a lamppost. Cupping her hand beneath her belly, she runs toward the boardinghouse. I'm going to get you. That's all she can think. She's had the place where she sleeps sabotaged before. I'm going to freakin' get you!

A small dark man with a mane of greasy black hair loiters at the corner. Harvey-who else? He laughs, holding a match to his cigar. Before he and his thugs even notice her, Zhu thrusts the side of her hand in his kidneys, in his neck. He turns, startled, in pain, and brandishes his fists, but he can't bring himself to slug a pregnant woman. Too bad. She hoists up her skirts and lets him have it with a kick to his kneecap, the pointy toe of her b.u.t.ton boot connecting with a satisfying thwack against his cartilage. Harvey crumbles to the sidewalk, and his thugs gather around him in confusion.

Men run toward Zhu from all directions--the local bulls and the local guys, the bartender at the Devil's Acre, the landlady's son, Old Father Elphich's cadre of newsboys.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Zhu yells, kicking Harvey in his ribs, on his back. "You leave me and the father of my baby alone!" She nearly retches from the stink of whiskey on him.

The local guys seize Harvey's thugs, including the one with the can of kerosene. The landlady's son pulls out a pistol and trains it on them. "Don't you move or I'll blow your friggin' heads off!" he warns. The newsboys pile on Harvey and gleefully pummel him with their fists till the bulls pull them off and handcuff the lot. A paddy wagon gallops up to the scene and hauls them off to the cooler.

"We don't have to hide anymore?" Daniel says, leaning heavily on her shoulder.

Firemen dash in and out of the boardinghouse, tamping out the blaze with admirable efficiency, saving the place from the certain annihilation most blazes of this nature inflict on the ill-starred buildings of this day. Zhu breathes a huge sigh of relief. She likes the landlady and her son, who have both been kind to her and Daniel in spite of the cloud of disrepute they've brought with them.

"Muse, is there anyone else Daniel must hide from?" Zhu whispers.

Muse posts a string of statistics in her peripheral vision. "Negative. My a.n.a.lysis indicates that Daniel's opponents will go to prison for fifteen years."

"We don't have to hide anymore," she tells him.

"The luck of the Irish has smiled on us today!" Daniel crows. "I'm going to book us a room at Lucky Baldwin's Hotel straightaway. We shall eat, drink, and. . . . Well, we shall eat and be merry, by G.o.d. I cannot think of anyone else I should want to be merry with besides you."

She smiles, her heart bursting with joy, hoping this h.e.l.l is over and all she has to do is live out the rest of her life. Whatever that amounts to. If she's trapped in a Closed Time Loop, if she has to live and die, live and die, over and over, then so be it. She accepts that.

Daniel hails a cab. A smart black brougham halts for them, and they board and collapse, laughing, on the plush leather seat.

"My angel," he says, cradling her in her arms.

"I'm not an angel, Daniel."

"Oh, yes! Yes, you are."

"No! I'm not an angel and I'm not a wh.o.r.e. I have intelligence and pa.s.sion, strength and perseverance. I am capable of abstract thought, intellectual accomplishment, and artistic expression. Just like you, sir."

He ponders that as the brougham trots up Fifth Street to Market. "What shall I call you, then?"

Zhu smiles. "You may call me a Woman."

14.

High Tea with Miss Anthony When Zhu and Daniel step down from the brougham at Market and Powell and stroll to the entrance of the magnificent Baldwin Hotel, Zhu sees Jessie Malone walking into the lobby. Actually, Jessie isn't walking. She is being alternately led, pushed, pulled, and yanked by Madame De Ca.s.sin and a smiling Mariah. Mariah, smiling? Zhu can't remember the last time she saw Mariah smile. Or if she's ever seen Mariah smile.

"Jar me," Jessie complains to her bullying companions. "If women go into politics, they'll wind up as jacka.s.sed as men."

"You don't like some man telling you how to run your business, now do you, Miss Malone?" Madame De Ca.s.sin says. As always, the spiritualist wears her dashing black riding habit and boots.

"So why do you tolerate some man deciding the laws governing your life?" Mariah says. She looks like a totally different person. Zhu blinks, wary, fearful for a moment she'll suddenly see all reality change and Mariah will be unsmiling and stern in her customary maid's uniform. When Zhu looks again, though, Mariah is still smiling and still wearing a blue French-cut jacket with burgundy silk braid and fancy geegaws like military decorations, matching blue b.u.t.ton boots, a blue Caroline hat, and a sweeping burgundy skirt.

"We'll all wind up in Napa Asylum," Jessie declares. "We'll all start a-smokin' them vile cigars and a-growin' them billy goat beards."

"Well, h.e.l.lo, Miss Wong," Mariah calls out. "And Mr. Watkins, good to see you up and about. We have all been quite worried about you."

"You have?" Daniel says incredulously.

Zhu smiles. She's overhead his little altercations with Mariah many, many times.

"We're delighted that you're coming to the meeting," Madame De Ca.s.sin says. "We welcome gentlemen, of course, but you'll have to keep your trap shut."

"Meeting?" Daniel says, glancing at Zhu, his eyebrows raised. "Trap shut?"

"The meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation," Mariah says proudly. "I have been attending the meetings of our local chapter for some years now."

"And I'm the one who first persuaded Mariah to attend," Madame De Ca.s.sin says. "We spiritualist brothers and sisters support woman suffrage, along with equal opportunities for all of our American brothers and sisters. And we despise cruelty to the humble beasts among us."

"You do?" Daniel says, and Zhu returns his look of amazement. She never knew that nineteenth century spiritualists were in the forefront of the equal opportunity movement and the hue and cry against cruelty to animals. She knows now.

"Most certainly," Madame De Ca.s.sin says. "Our souls are all equal in the Summerland."

Jessie turns to the spiritualist, her eyebrows arched in surprise. "Is that so?"

"Yes, indeed," Madame De Ca.s.sin says.

"So that's where our Mariah was always sneaking off to," Daniel whispers to Zhu.

"Miss Anthony herself has honored our town with a visit to raise support for the state referendum," Madame De Ca.s.sin adds.

"What referendum is that?" Zhu says.

"The one that shall pa.s.s a const.i.tutional amendment giving women the vote in California," Mariah says, beaming with excitement.

"Indeed, the measure will be on the ballot this November," Madame De Ca.s.sin says. "You must persuade your gentlemen friends to vote for it, Mr. Watkins."

"Perhaps I will," he replies with a diplomatic diffidence that suggests to Zhu he has no intention of doing any such thing. Or maybe not. Maybe she's misjudging him again.

"And who is this Miss Anthony?" Zhu says, aware of the spiritualist's tone of awe when she speaks her name.

"Why, Susan B. Anthony, Miss Wong," Mariah says. "President of our a.s.sociation."

"Mother of G.o.d," Jessie moans, "we'll all start lyin' and cheatin' and stealin' just like men. We'll all start dishonorin' the precious sanct.i.ty of the family."

"Miss Malone," Madame De Ca.s.sin says, "you do all of that now."

Jessie is indignant. "I do not lie, cheat, or steal!"

Zhu and Daniel join the throng of women sweeping into a downstairs salon, which is set with dining tables and chairs. The sideboard offers hot tea, cream, sugar, scones, bread pudding, candied violets, and a large Lady Baltimore cake shaped like a shamrock and iced with green b.u.t.ter frosting.

"What, no champagne?" Jessie complains.

"Cake and no champagne," Daniel whispers to Zhu. "Positively barbaric."

"The temperance movement supports woman suffrage, too, doesn't it?" Zhu says, recalling the signs and demonstrations she's witnessed all over San Francisco. She tries a candied violet. The vile thing tastes just exactly like purple sugar. "They wouldn't approve of champagne or sherry at this high tea, would they?"

"Quite right," Madame De Ca.s.sin says, helping herself to tea and a scone. She licks her lips. Zhu gets the impression that the spiritualist wouldn't mind a nip of sherry with her tea, herself. "However! Miss Anthony has asked the WCTU and other temperance interests not to meet in California this year as they'd planned. The liquor interests are keen on defeating the woman suffrage referendum. They've invested a bundle of money into the campaign against it."

"The liquor interests," says Mariah scornfully, "exploit the friendship between temperance and woman suffrage every chance they get. What drinking man who beats his wife and whose wife hates his habit wants to let her have a say-so in the government? Let alone a vote to go dry?"

She aims an evil look at Daniel, who fusses with the lace on Zhu's cuff. Hmm. How will he vote? Zhu wonders.

She finds a table for her and Daniel, helps him sit. He's still so frail and weak. She hurries to the sideboard and fixes up a tray of tea and scones and bread pudding. Jessie, Madame De Ca.s.sin, and Mariah join them.

Now a plump young blond woman plunks her tea things on the table and sits next to her.

Zhu stares, disbelieving. What wonderful new reality has she found herself in, now that she didn't die on the Chinese New Year? Maybe living in a Closed Time Loop won't be so bad, after all.

"Li'l Lucy? Is that really you?"

"Just Lucy is fine, Miss Zhu." Lucy looks radiant and fresh, with neatly combed yellow hair, a scrubbed face, and a high-collared gray cotton dress. "I met this wonderful fellow, a business man in shipping, not a sailor. He loved me at first sight--though what a dreadful sight I was! He helped me kick the booze and the dope. I do declare, Miss Wong, I shall never go back to the sportin' life." She giggles, and it's the same old giggle, only the girlishness is real. She touches Zhu's arm. "We got married last week--can you imagine?-and bought a house in the Western Addition. Oh, it's a very small house and the neighborhood is still so rough. But I do believe Randolph and I will make a go of it." She glances enviously at Zhu's belly. "With luck, I'll look just like you come autumn."

As Zhu exclaims over Lucy's good fortune and congratulates her, a tiny, tightly corseted and veiled lady sits tentatively beside Mariah. f.a.n.n.y Spiggot smiles nervously at the a.s.sembled company, avoiding Daniel's eyes.