“You shouldn’t have been snooping,” Pie scolded. “James wouldn’t like it. Not one bit.” She lifted her chin, gathering herself. “Oh, drats. We’re late. We’ll miss Eugenie.” Pie started to walk on. “Aren’t you coming?” She squinted, shifting her focus to how she might fix me. “Sun’s out. Put up your umbrella.”
“Pie, Morie didn’t hit me because of my umbrella.”
“No.” Pie hung her head. “Not only that.”
Not only that.
Morie had tried to stop drinking, since the doctor warned her of her heart. But when James O’Neill offered Pie half a cup of nothing, Morie filled her own cup with aquavit. And another and another.
I suppose I gave Morie a hundred reasons to hit me: my skirt was soiled, my tongue was loose. I reminded her of her lost pride. And this: my skin turned copper when I was too stubborn to shield it from the sun. If my skin was dark, while Morie and Pie were fair and pink, the world would know that I wasn’t Morie’s daughter and that our family was a sham.
A “dark affinity” lived inside me that Morie’s boar-bristle brush couldn’t beat out. So Morie’s friends suggested, often to my face, as if there is only one black and one white ink with which to draw the world—one nasty, one good—and that is the dull thing society would make of a girl. Early on, the nuns at school granted Pie beauty and gave me the booby prize of wits. I was fine with wits.
“Same birthday wish?” Pie asked, taking hold of my hand.
“More or less.”
Her face clouded when she heard that. “Why not something new, now that you’re fifteen and a young lady.”
“Oh, hell, Pie, I will never be a young lady.”
I loved Pie; I loved her hard. But I would never believe that a man or a wish could save us. Having come from desire, I knew too much about desire. I knew San Francisco was a whore’s daughter, same as me. If Pie and I were to rise, it would be up to me.
“Pie?”
“Yah?”
“How much is Morie in for to the Haj?”
She was about to tell me when a hired hack charged down the street and captured our attention. Our neighbor Mr. de Bretteville, who spent all day idling in front of his house while his wife gave massages to men inside, leaped from his chair.
“Bet it’s her,” Pie whispered, as the cab halted in the road in front of us.
Mr. de Bretteville’s daughter, Alma, stepped from the hack in the same sparkle gown she’d worn when she left home on the previous night. When I took Rogue out for his evening walk, I saw her.
“Look at her,” Pie hissed, in a rare show of envy. And I did. I looked at Alma de Bretteville, who was famous not just on our street but all over town.
There was a kind of woman bred in San Francisco then—bold, vulgar, and unapologetic—that was Alma. California was a young state, San Francisco was even newer, and Alma was the freshest thing going: twenty-five, buxom, ambitious, a fair Dane with soulful blue eyes. The men of the city were so taken with her, they’d used her face as the model for Victoria, goddess of victory, on the bronze statue that stood atop Union Square.
But that wasn’t what got Alma known. It was the trial. Alma sued a miner who’d promised to marry her. His name was Charlie Anderson and she sued him in court for “personal defloweration.” Alma demanded that Anderson pay her the whopping sum of fifty thousand dollars for what he’d taken, which could not be given back. “Pets, it’s called screwing,” she declared when she took her turn on the witness stand. All of which was covered in the morning and afternoon editions of the papers—and all I eagerly read.
Alma de Bretteville was six feet tall in her stockings, and if that was what shame looked like, I’d have it too.
“Hi, Pa,” she said, sidestepping a pad of horse shit in her too-fancy shoes.
Here, any normal father—and what did I know of normal fathers?—might have had qualms to see his daughter return home from an all-night tryst. Not Mr. de Bretteville, who everyone knew was a fallen aristocrat.
“What news?” he asked, trembling with anticipation. He reminded me of Rogue, wagging at the prospect of a fresh bone.
“Talk inside,” Alma insisted as she dispatched her father to wait for her inside the house.
Only then did Alma show us her dazzling smile. It was the grin of someone who knew you’d been talking behind her back and would give a damn only if you stopped.
“Hello, ducks.”
“Oh, hi,” Pie said weakly, the sight of Alma making her doubly fearful that she’d end up an old maid who’d waited too long for James O’Neill.
Pie and Alma were the acknowledged beauties of our neighborhood. Though Alma was ahead of Pie by any measure of age, height, scandal.
I didn’t speak to Alma, that was my thing. I hid in plain sight.
Alma fixed her gaze on Pie, that way pretty girls have of enjoying the sight of each other, as if standing in front of a mirror.
“Your hat,” Alma said. “It’s dashing. Care to sell it?”
Pie touched the wide brim with two hands, as if a malevolent wind were about to snatch it. The hat was navy silk with bold feathers and at the center a diamond pin. “My hat? No!”
“I’d pay something ridiculous,” Alma assured her. “Even if it is used.”
“You know perfectly well it’s new.” Pie gave Alma the stink eye. In fact, the hat
