I do remember one detail from those drunken days that drove me mad: in every bar, every deadfall tavern, I saw advertisements for Klondike suppliers for the new gold rush: Cooper & Levy. Levy, Levy—that name, blazing at me nightly. I took it as an emblem of my own insanity, a concoction of the chemicals of my brain. How maddening: I could not forget her, still, even here!
One night, Hughie’s college friends (who thought I was his uncle) took us to an actual brothel. I cannot remember what the outside looked like; they were all the same. You rang the bell and
some sweet Negro woman answered and led you into a parlor which opened wide onto your left and there—it was always the same—the room was decorated so richly and gaudily you would think you were among the wealthy on Nob Hill who, by coincidence of their taste and budget, bought at the same furniture shops as the madams of Pacific Street. There in that parlor the lady of the house would greet you. They were always lovely in the way women used to be—not slender and breakable, Sammy, as you seem to admire—and always blond.
“Gentlemen, what would your pleasure be this evening?” she asked. She was in a long yellow gown covered in a fine black netting on which were sewn, as if plastered there during a storm, large silhouetted leaves. A thistle pendant lay between her quivering breasts. She was as stout as a bottle but had a pleasant lightness in her movements, especially the way her hand kept brushing at her cheek at if performing some private spell under her ear. Her eyes picked every one of our pockets and I seemed to sense a relief in her; here were a few boys who would be easy to please.
“Perhaps a virgin?” she offered slyly. “We have a sweet girl staying with us, she’s in the bath now, so it will be a moment. She is of course much more …”
“No thank you,” Hughie said sharply. We had all heard this ruse before.
She blinked and smiled; his whipcrack of defiance seemed to amuse her. No, that’s wrong; it touched her; it softened her. She gave us a new, lower voice with the boozy grin: “Then, boys, maybe you’d like a better deal. I’ve got viewing holes in her room. A country gentleman has just joined her, he’s quite excited and may not last long, so I’ll give you a very good deal.”
Hughie’s good friend Oscar, a tall dragoon of a fellow, thanked her and declined for us all, though Hughie seemed nervously intrigued. The woman tried to interest us in bottle beer and half pints of liquor at bad prices, and then showed us the intriguing
automatic harp on the sideboard, which took only pennies and nickels. This was another way to lose money in a brothel and we had enough only for one thing. Hughie said what one always said in these places: “May we see our choices?”
To which the woman—Madame Dupont was her name—turned and shouted out what madams have shouted in San Francisco for all time:
“Company, girls!”
The other boys had their heads bent back to watch the girls descending the rainbow of the stairs, but I was oddly captivated by Madame Dupont. As she looked up at her harlots, pleased by her collection of youth, the shadow they cast on her thinned her face, darkened her salon-treated hair, and in an instant I recognized her. The thistle pendant. I must have made a noise; she turned towards me, her face warped by time as through a quizzing glass, and I nearly laughed aloud to think who this proud and powdered woman used to be.
“So, Max, you’ve been in love!” Mary remarked, for surely you’ve guessed it was my old gossiping maid, who, accent shifted slightly south to French, hair bleached “back to its natural color” as she said, now went by the name Madame Dupont.
“I what?”
The boys were already upstairs, having taken their time in choosing among the girls who—in this particular house—all wore satin negligees to just below the hip and little stocking caps as if awakened from their sultry beds. I waited for the last ring of the register before revealing myself to my old servant. Her maquillage crumbled for an instant and the old Irish servant rose like a Gaelic witch from a lake, but soon Madame returned and took my face in her hands, kissing me in leopard spots across my forehead. I was given
a free bottle of champagne (quite an honor; these were her most lucrative goods) and she informed me I had been in love.
“How old are you now, Max?”
“I’m twenty.”
“Twenty, God, you still look …I mean, it’s something. If I didn’t know I’d think you were a man my own age.” She blushed, a finger to her nose, “Which ain’t much more than twenty, a course.” There was the old accent, springing up like wild thistle.
“No, I’m really twenty.”
She lifted her neck and my old maid was gone; she was once again a woman with an unbreakable heart. Her pearls dropped into the rolls of her neck, those signs of beauty that we used to call rings of Venus. “Should I envy you, Max?”
“What?”
“You should have been a woman,” she said, looking at me intently as I imagine she must have examined every one of the girls upstairs, the girls who, like her, had fled from bad domestic jobs, or men, or families. “I know, I can tell you. A woman, all she has is her youth, and if she’s smart she invests in it, gets all the jewels it can earn her. I have a sapphire from a prince, Max, and I got it when I was twenty-six. That’s right, when I was working for your family. When your parents went to the Del Monte hotel for the weekend, I used to have men up to my room to make a little money. Don’t be shocked. Every girl does it, even maids in good families.”
I tried to turn the conversation my way. “When did you stop being a maid, Mary?”
“A maid, what a question! Ha! Oh, you mean a servant. After your grandmother threw me out.”
“But I saw you at Meigg’s Wharf.”
She cocked her head. “Was I wearing a servant’s dress?”
“You don’t remember? I was with my father, and you had an iris—”
“That’s an old trick, Max. I earned a lot more pretending to be
a servant girl than I ever did being one. Rich men, they liked to pick me up. That was a little gig I did for a while before I got in a house. And then I got this one when Madame Dupont died. But we were talking about you.”
“You’ve had a hard life, Mary?”
She slapped me down with a stare. “You don’t get to talk about my life. Whatever it is, it’s all I could make of what your family left me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Your grandmother’s dead?”
I nodded and told her my father was gone as well, that Mother and I lived in changed fortunes in the old South Park house. “I guess you wouldn’t know. We live in different worlds …”
“We don’t. You’re in this parlor, I’m in this parlor. That seems like the same world to me.”
“I …well …”
And then she changed again. “More champagne, dear?” she asked, smiling. It was like this the whole time, with old gay Mary coming into view and fading like the streetlights we had seen along Pacific that very evening, glowing and dispersing in the gusts of fog. Perhaps this was what she had become: a trick portrait flickering among the women she might have been. “I was saying you’d have been better as a woman. You’d have been ugly when you were young.”
“I was ugly.”
“You’re still young, too, but for a girl it’d be lucky. I wish I’d been ugly. Ugly girls never have to worry about marriage or children, not unless they get desperate. And you wouldn’t get desperate, Max, because you’d know your best beauty was before you. That you’d be lovely when you’re old and wise. To be beautiful and happy at the same time.”
“I’m not either one.”
“Way of the world, boy. Should I envy you?”
Her stare, sharpened by the scattered light of her pendant diamonds, was broken by the arrival of a strange character in the parlor. At first it appeared to be a stooped-over old cleaning woman, but I quickly realized it was a man in a plaid woman’s dress, scarf, apron, and cap, entering the room with a feather duster and an ashcan. Madame Dupont rose, unsurprised, and kissed the man on both cheeks, then began to give explicit instructions on which rooms needed the most attention. She treated him like a beloved servant, and the creature, who seemed as bland and mustachioed as any man on Market Street, nodded faithfully as she talked. When she was done, he handed her a gold coin and left the room. The coin barely caught the light; she slipped it into her pocket with the swiftness of a stage magician. Then she returned to me, smiling but businesslike.
“Yes, Max, now people pay me to be my maid. Things change, boy.” She did not sit down with me again. She just gathered our empty glasses and said: “Don’t ever come back here.”
She was tidying her parlor without a glance to me. The awful baubles and whatnots of her professional life were being put back in their sad places; the automatic harp was relieved of a fingerprint on its gilt back. And within Madame Dupont, the bars were going back on the windows, prepared for the next ringing bell, the next entrance of the Negro maid and some covey of snickering men. She spoke and she arranged the room: “A woman like me enjoys believing she was always the way she is. And when I’m legitimate, I’ll believe I was always that. Don’t come back here.”
I wordlessly took my hat from the post. I fit it onto my old man’s head and—I can’t explain it to you—I began to cry. Monsters will do this. Mary softened at once.
“I’m too rough,” she said, frowning, touching my arm. “It’s because of how you look, like a policeman trying to strike a deal. Oh, don’t take it that hard. Look how unhappy you are. Did she love you back? Of course she didn’t. Not you, not any of us, they
never do. Oh all right, I’ll get you a girl, not that it ever helps, Max. And next time you pay like everybody else.” She was true to her word, of course; I paid each one of the many times I visited her house over the years.
Within a moment I was at the stairs, being directed towards the landing where a young woman waited with a smile and jaguar eyes. I don’t recall her very specifically; she held a long feather and kept waving it lazily through the air; her hand appeared and she crooked a finger towards me. I do remember I was magically drawn to her, for I was still young and sad and eager for comfort. “Max,” I heard behind me, and I looked back down at Mary. Curiously sad, the old blond gal, and who knows why? Perhaps it was the wasted opportunity of my condition, the poverty of advancing age, or maybe just the sad gold-dusted air around her.
“You know I’m glad you came,” my old maid said at last, chin lifted in the gaslight. “All my life I thought time was not on anybody’s side.”
My writing has been interrupted by fortune, and I must write it down. Sammy, it’s wonderful news: I may soon be your brother.
Mrs. Ramsey, the lovely lady, has said nothing yet, but during one of my long sleepless nights (old age does not reward all the frankfurters I am fed) I decided to rifle through her desk. Don’t think this was the first time it occurred to me—I long ago became a juvenile delinquent—but I only recently discovered where she keeps her key. Have you found it yet, Sammy? Or are you one of those boys, those happy boys, who are incurious to all the secrets hidden around them? If so, it explains how I have managed to keep this journal for so long. In any case, you may find the key in the linen drawer beneath the Christmas cloths. That is where I found
it last night, with Buster as my companion, and he dutifully padded downstairs beside me to the study.
There, in her desk, I found something astonishing: a set of adoption papers. She had filled them in only as far as printing my name in her formal Victorian hand. I believe my date of birth must have stumped her; there is only a scratch of ink as if she were thinking and let the pen’s weight fall onto the page. I will try to let my birthday slip—I am supposedly thirteen in September. I held the pages to Buster’s nose and he sniffed them with admiration in the moonlight. “It’s going to happen, Buster,” I whispered to him, rubbing between his eyes so that he closed them in delight. “I’m going to be with my son.” A little groan of pleasure from the dog.
Brothers! Would you like that, Sammy? Sharing your knee pants? Breaking your sled? Doing your homework for you on the brisk walk through the February slush? There is no use asking you, even in the privacy of our room, even as we lie submarined in the zebra-striped midnight. You are the kind of boy—you are, Sammy, you are—the kind who will break any heart he’s handed.
So tonight, I celebrated a little; a mistake. Having cased this house thoroughly in my midnight tours, I knew the hiding place of the bootleg gin and mixed myself a tiny little Martinez (their proper name in San Francisco, where they were originally made with maraschino, an ingredient that seems to have been lost along with the z). I sipped it out of a juice glass while Mother prepared dinner. Now why did I do such a thing, I who had not had a drop of booze in some time? I don’t know, my nagging Reader. Perhaps the old man was weary.
The liquor made me warm and kind. All through dinner, I silently smiled and found myself staring too deeply into my future mother’s eyes. I kept thinking of those papers, the possibility of a family, a home. Mrs. Ramsey squinted, concerned, and smiled back. When you started telling jokes, Sammy, I laughed with your mother, but for some reason both of you looked at me strangely.
I discovered myself to be sitting with my feet on the table, juice glass raised high, giggling as hysterically as a harlot in a pub. Reader, I was blotto. I quieted, pulled myself into a more sober position, but I was disturbed. Clearly this new body of mine had never heard of a Martinez.