The Gold House
“Put on your new dress, mule,” urged Pie, as she peered through a slit in the parlor drapes to check the road. “Hurry, before Hank gets here.”
It was after midnight and Hank was late. Pie looked gorgeous in her new frock, while I’d thrown on my old blue with its too-short hem.
“What do I care? Rose doesn’t give a fig what I’m wearing.”
“Yes she does,” Pie declared. “Why else would she send these?”
Rose had commissioned the best seamstress at I. Magnin to sew our new dresses, with silks from Paris, lace from Belgium, bone stays made from Pacific whales, and long French ribbons for our hair. The apricot silk with crème lace was meant for Pie and a fine navy satin for Morie, who’d spent the afternoon scandalized at the prospect of appearing in public in anything other than widow’s black.
Even now, with Hank overdue, Morie was upstairs dropping her shoes and cursing, “Skit! Skit!”
Pie checked the road again. “I bet she’s not back from the brothel. Do you ever wonder what goes on at The Rose?”
I shrugged. I wondered all the time, but I wasn’t going to say.
Pie went on. “James heard some fellas talking. The girls, they stand naked, all in a row, like plucked chickens at the market. The men point and say, I’ll have that one. Or that one. And the madam? She takes the money and says, ‘You go with him.’ ” Pie wrinkled her nose.
“James is an idiot,” I snapped. “The Rose is first-class.”
“Oh really? How then? How does it work?”
In all my imaginings of The Rose, I’d considered the frivolity and the money, but till that moment I never thought of the women as anything other than cheerful participants, as actresses in a grand show.
Tan, Rose’s butler and cook, was under strict orders never to speak of the goings-on at The Rose. But if I bribed him on the day every week that he begrudgingly worked at our house—if I promised, say, to unload the buggy for him or shine our three pairs of dusty boots—Tan would sometimes provide curt answers to my questions. “A paradise,” he said, “a hell.” What Tan lacked in articulation he conveyed in feeling, lowering his eyes and faintly shuddering whenever he talked of The Rose.
My mother had some twenty girls working the rooms upstairs, where there were suites with full five-course dining and canopied, gilded beds, and parlors for gentlemen’s games; she had another dozen “hostesses” in the French restaurant-saloon on the ground floor. She had safes stuffed with gold bars.
In his way, Tan held Rose in high esteem—as a sometimes generous, sometimes ruthless boss. If interrupted during a meal, or while she was in the bath enjoying one of her thin cigars, she was liable to turn violent. She’d lash a girl with her tongue, Tan promised, or her whips.
“Of all the places downtown,” I told my sister, “The Rose is the best.”
Pie looked at me curiously. “Does that make you… proud?”
It did. In my mind, The Rose was strictly a high-end joint, where laughter flowed like the limitless quantities of champagne—you know, a warm, cozy sort of place, where all oddities were accepted and even celebrated, where no one was too bookish or stubborn or unsmiling. And, this was essential to me: The Rose was a place where no one was unwanted.
In my story, Rose called her workers girls but she treated them as professionals. She paid them handsomely, saw that they were schooled in the language of pleasing, with a fine appreciation for manners, music, and art, as their rich clients preferred. A doctor attended to them each week and money was sent to their families by courier, and there were even bonuses for the care of faraway children.
Faraway children. That was the part that stuck in my throat. No one had to tell me that Rose was expert at granting or withholding favors. I knew what a real mother’s absence felt like, how it was never to have someone look upon your face with wonder or pleasure. My life was a mess of contradictions, of locked doors and secret assignations, same as at The Rose. Every time I visited my mother, I was sent away.
Overhead Morie’s heels knocked on the floorboards.
“I’m starving,” I said. “I wonder if she’ll serve—”
“V, every day you claim you’re starving,” Pie said.
“And every day it’s true.”
We’d been waiting so long that when at last Rose’s long, garish machine pulled up at the house—silent, like an eel sliding through ink—Morie was so flustered she ran out without her hat and shawl.
Rose had two places: the brothel downtown called The Rose, and her house. The Rose being off-limits to me, our visits took place at Rose’s house, on the highest hill of Pacific Heights. It took a half hour for the motorcar to climb the distance of no more than a mile. Hank, grinding the gears, had to zig and zag to avoid the steepest slopes. Even so, the car huffed, gasped, crawled. When at last we arrived, the house looked shuttered.
“It’s all right,” I told Morie, who hadn’t been allowed near Rose’s place in years. “At night it always looks foreboding.”
“Foreboding!” scoffed Morie, uneasy with things she didn’t understand. “My, isn’t that a fancy word.”
Foreboding it was, at least at night. Rose’s house was a grand Victorian dame, five stories tall—four up, one down—with
