The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (63 page)

“Women
will get the vote,” Zhu says, and everyone applauds and cheers. She doesn’t want
to say that American women won’t get the vote for another quarter of century.
That the Nineteenth Amendment won’t be passed till 1920, long after Miss
Anthony has gone to her grave. “And women will serve in government. Women will
be elected to every important office, including President of the United
States.” More exclamations and applause. She also doesn’t want to say that the
first woman American President won’t get elected till nearly two centuries
after this time.

“Why,
that’s grand!” Donaldina Cameron exclaims. “If that’s true, then surely women
will vote to outlaw prostitution. We shall drive the Jessie Malones of the
world and her loathsome flesh trade out of business.”

Zhu
also doesn’t want to say that the flesh trade will earn trillions of illegal dollars
for the next six hundred years. It would be too much for them to bear to hear
it. And too much for her to bear to say it.

Jessie
glares. “Sure and we women will look into your private little sweatshop while
we’re a-lookin’ at reforming all that’s bad, Miss Cameron.”

“Sweatshop!”
Cameron says, rising from her chair. “And what, pray tell, are you calling a
sweatshop?”

“Your
mission, that’s what I’m callin’ a sweatshop.” Jessie rises, too, and flings a
candied violet at Cameron. “What kind of wage do you pay your little Chinese
slave girls?”

“Slave
girls! How dare you!” Cameron flings a bit of Lady Baltimore cake at Jessie.

Jessie
hops out of the way, saving her green silk dress from ruin. “Sure and maybe
your so-called rescues is kidnappin’ just like any other kind of kidnappin’,
Miss Holier-Than-Thou.”

Cameron
advances, clenching her fists. “I’ll have you arrested for slander, you sinful
wretch!”

“Look
who’s a-slanderin’ who!”

Zhu
and Mariah leap to their feet, each restraining a combatant.

“Ladies,
ladies,” Susan B. Anthony says with a calm craggy smile. “Our prescient Miss
Wong says we’re going to get the vote. We’re going to hold government office. We’re
going to matter in society. We’re going to make a difference in society. So calm
yourselves, and sit down, and let’s talk about the future.” She raises her cup.
“Come, have some tea with me.”

July
14, 1896

Bastille Day

15

The
View from the Cliff House

“To
a cold bottle and a hot bird,” declares Jessie Malone, raising her glass of
Napa champagne and tucking into her traditional Bastille Day breakfast at the
Cliff House.

Zhu
rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but she has to smile. Jessie isn’t one to
make understatements, and her breakfast offers more than a whole roast turkey. There’s
a saddle of venison, a ham baked in plum preserves, and a second turkey. Jessie
insisted on ordering two hot birds so that she, Zhu, and Daniel won’t quarrel
over who gets the choicest cuts.

“Viva
la Bastille Day!” Jessie says, clinking her glass against Daniel’s, tossing bubbly
down her throat. “Here’s to you, Mr. Watkins, and good luck to you.”

“Good
luck to us all, Jessie,” Daniel says and sips slowly at his first glass of
champagne. He darts a guilty glance at Zhu, sets his glass down.

Excellent.
He’s not only learned to internalize guilt, but learned the pleasures of
moderation. She smiles her encouragement and adds, “And especially good luck to
Hope.”

“To Hope.”
Daniel raises his glass, sets it down again.

Zhu
cradles their newborn daughter in her arms. Hope stirs in her blanket, then
settles down into the dreamless slumber of infancy. Her tiny perfect golden-white
face is peaceful, her black hair escaping from her bonnet in wisps.

Zhu tries
not to judge these people of the past as she gazes out at the view from the
Cliff House. How she wishes Daniel and Jessie would change their self-indulgent
ways. How she’s tried to change them, advise them, threaten them. How she
wishes Daniel would settle down, spend more hours pondering the stories he
wants to tell with moving pictures rather than squandering those hours on
smoking and drinking. How she wishes Jessie would give up the biz for her own
health and safety, and take off her corset for the same reason.

Yet
when Muse downloaded a report, Zhu discovered that the international flesh
trade is alive and profitable in her Now and—to her astonishment--covertly
supported by the World Birth Control Organization. Huh. Okay. There must be
some twisted logic in that alliance from hell.

And
this is the Gilded Age. Of course Jessie and Daniel are going to eat, drink,
and be merry till they die. They’ll never know Prohibition, the regulation of
narcotics, protection against STDs, tests for cholesterol and high blood
pressure. Those things will come long after they’re gone. So why should they
change? Just because Zhu—their little lunatic telling tall tales about the
future—informs them they’ve got high-risk health habits? H. G. Wells entertains
them with tall tales about the future, but he never advises them to give up
their profligate ways. Nor does Mr. Wells ever speculate when the cures for
syphilis and lung cancer will be discovered.

But that
was never the object of her project—to change anyone of the Gilded Age. The
resiliency principle makes sense to her now. Some things never change.

Till
they do.

Oh,
Zhu
has
made some difference. Jessie and Daniel
have
changed for
the better. But this is their Now and their world, not hers. In the days since
giving birth to Hope, Zhu has felt an alienation growing inside her like a dark
flower. A disengagement. A turning away from this world. A turning away from
the Gilded Age.

As
if her project truly is done in this Now. As if her Now is summoning her home.

She
watches the shifting Pacific Ocean unmarred by drilling rigs, hydroplexes,
seaworld domes, megatankers, and the great sea walls erected when the
coastlines flooded during the brown ages, all those artifacts of modern
civilization already timeworn in her day. Now pearl gray in the late morning
light, the virginal sea stretches out to an azure horizon, empty and pure. Just
the sea, gulls wheeling, a colony of sea lions sunbathing on the rocks, and the
good fresh smell of brine unsullied by toxic fumes. The timeless view fills her
with melancholy, a sense of her own transience.

The
Cliff House, newly rebuilt after a catastrophic fire and reopened by Mayor
Sutro in February of this year, boasts an ocean view from all five of its stories.
Tourist concessions selling hot roasted peanuts and trinkets for a penny line
the first story. An art gallery graces the second story. How San Franciscans
love their art galleries, Zhu thinks. The rest of the stories of the Cliff
House are devoted to eating, drinking, and dallying. Plenty of private suites
for amorous affairs. The turreted chateau was to be styled after San Diego’s inestimable
Hotel del Coronado, but the architects, Mr. Lemme and Mr. Colley, have given
the place its very own rococo character. Mr. Ambrose Bierce has pronounced the
new Cliff House a monstrosity, but diners celebrating Bastille Day find the view
and the food and the drink very fine indeed.

Changes.
Things always change from moment to moment. Isn’t that what Zhu has pondered
from the very start of the Gilded Age Project? At the most basic quantum level,
reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling.
Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. In cosmicist theory, reality is One Day,
existing for all eternity. And yet reality is like a beam of light, swirling
with infinite worlds.

It’s
a paradox, inscrutable, Zhu knows that now. If it weren’t for that paradox, she
wouldn’t have been able to t-port to the past. Or return to her future?

Changes.
The first Cliff House burned down to the ground. Where Zhu sits now with her
daughter Hope is its second incarnation. When Muse whispers in her ear that
this Cliff House will also burn to the ground in just a few short years, she
tells the monitor to shut up. She doesn’t want to hear it.

More
changes. Jessie finally went to a doctor who told her what she already knew
from Zhu. That she’s got to cut down on the drinking or her liver will bust.
Jessie proudly proclaims that she’s reduced her intake of champagne from twenty
bottles a day to three, plus a brandy nightcap. Well, two brandy nightcaps. As
a result of this regimen, she’s slimmed down two whole dress sizes in a mere
three months. “Mr. Worth is showing the cinched waist for the fall,” Jessie
says. “Sure and it’s a good thing I dropped some of that lard.”

And
more changes. Daniel has started drinking again, though he says this time he can
control himself. So far, he takes a bottle of wine with his dinner and that’s
all. Still. Zhu shifts Hope to her other arm, displeased with Jessie’s toasts.
Champagne for breakfast. That’s a throwback to Dupont Street. Daniel really
ought to stay sober for breakfast.

But
it
is
Bastille Day, and Daniel is leaving for Paris.

The
dining room is draped with red, white, and blue bunting, sprays of white and
red carnations, bowers of smilax, and hundreds of flags of France, California, and
the United States. On the deck, a string quartet plays the waltz from
Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty.

“The
fall of the Bastille is France’s Independence Day,” Jessie explains to Hope as
if the newborn understands her perfectly. Jessie’s words are slurred; she’s
tying one on already. The baby wakes and squeals, and Jessie says, “Aw, lemme
hold her, missy.”

Zhu
hands the baby over. Hope’s eyes, when she opens them, are green. Though it’s
still hard to tell, not gene-tweaked green. Could Zhu have passed on her
gene-tweak to her child? Yes, but the odds are against it. Gene-tweaks are
resilient in the recipient, but weak in genetic descent. No, Hope’s green eyes
probably come from the deep sea eyes of Daniel’s mother, from some atavistic
gene running through the maternal side of his family. From Hope’s Caucasian
ancestors.

The
ambiguity is not lost on Zhu. Whose green eyes? Hers? Or Daniel’s mother’s?
Under
the resiliency principle, we could become the Cosmic Mind,
Chiron told her.
We could change the details, and it didn’t matter. The outcome we wanted
still happened.

Is
that why Zhu had this baby? The birth was quick and easy, over almost as soon
as her labor began. She’d never planned on having a baby, certainly not during
the Gilded Age Project. Definitely not in her own time. She is a Daughter of
Compassion, a woman not permitted to bear children. A woman who believes that
having a child in her time imposes an untenable burden on the future. That
having a child outside of the law is immoral. She accepted that a long time ago.
The Cause is her purpose in life. Kuan Yin nourishes her devotion.

At
the sight of her baby cradled in Jessie’s arms, a shudder of joy ripples up
Zhu’s spine so intense that it’s painful. But the joy—and the pain—are
distancing, and she feels a peculiar disengagement from the child. Hope isn’t her
baby, not really. Hope doesn’t belong to her, she belongs to destiny. Zhu has
merely been the means through which Hope could come to life. Zhu is an
instrument, a medium. Not the guiding principle of Hope’s life to come.

Daniel
lights a cigarette, stubs it out at Zhu’s sharp glance, and takes his infant
daughter from Jessie’s arms, cradles her. He’s promised to cut down on the
smoking, too. He’s promised they’ll marry when he returns from Paris. “You know
how much I adore you, my angel,” he says. “You saved my life.”

So
she did. But Zhu knows better. They will never marry. That is not Daniel J.
Watkins’s destiny. He wrote to the Lumiere Brothers in Paris, who were
delighted to welcome a young American interested in their moving pictures. One
day he
will
work with Thomas Edison, he
will
go to Los Angeles,
he
will
meet Charlie Chaplin—the actor, not the painter of broken-backed
nymphs. He
will
make the moving pictures he loves.

Muse
doesn’t have to show her the Archives. Zhu has had a premonition.

Daniel
has had a premonition, too. He’s left the Stockton Street boardinghouse in a
trust to be managed by the Bank of California for the benefit of Hope, together
with the proceeds from the foreclosure sale of Harvey’s poolroom. “Just in case
something should happen to me on my journey,” he says. He’s taking with him
only the proceeds from the sale of the undeveloped lots in the Western
Addition. “But never fear, my angel, I shall return within two months,” he
says.

But
he won’t. He doesn’t see it yet, but Zhu does. Daniel J. Watkins has settled
his affairs in San Francisco.

“So
your old man is finally giving you some respect,” Jessie says to Daniel now,
carving meat from the turkey breast and handing him a plate. “Ten thousand dollars
in seed capital?”

“Isn’t
that grand? Father believes the moving picture business has huge potential. Mr.
Edison isn’t quite so sure, but Father is nuts about the notion.” Another
guilty look for Zhu. She’s heard all about his condemnation of his father, all
about his father’s abundant flaws and crimes. Yet the tug of blood is powerful.
Zhu—an abandoned skipchild—has never known that tug herself, though she can see
it plainly in Daniel. The son still craves his father’s respect, welcomes the
old reprobate with open arms if only his father will give him that respect.