“Where did they get those bumps?” Rose demanded.
“Why, how would I know? They’re always mucking about, playing in the creek and bushes.”
“Oh yeah?” Rose said. “Then why is her bruise in the shape of your thumb? And, look here, this welt is shaped like your hand.”
The widow stared at the young thing with marks on her legs and arms. When she turned back, Rose was already climbing into the coach.
Back in San Francisco, at Rose’s brothel, the whores passed me around. One would keep watch in the early hours and another would feed me breakfast and another lunch and yet another would walk me up and down the halls while I dozed. Late at night, when the customers came around, I slept in Rose’s office. An elderly harlot by the name of Sugar took care of me.
Some nights—many, I like to think—Rose took me home to her newly built house. Of course, I don’t remember those nights, but the women have assured me this was so. I remember my mother’s hands—quick, sure. And I remember her smell.
When I was nearly two, I opened my bird mouth and asked Rose why. Why this, why that.
Rose instructed her lawyer in Sacramento to find a person of refinement, with perhaps just one child. Elsa Johnson’s husband had been a professor in Stockholm. He died in the flu pandemic of 1890, leaving her with a child and no means of support. This was a time in our collective history when folks simply fell off the shelf. The tenements seethed with sad stories, deaths from measles, influenza, meningitis, tuberculosis, whooping cough, or the slow creep of malnutrition, ringworm, polio, cancer. Of widows and babies starving. With few options, Elsa considered the one occupation available to a woman with a pretty face.
She wrote a letter and addressed it to a post box in Sacramento. Rose’s lawyer responded with a different kind of proposal: Would she be willing to relocate to San Francisco and raise a second daughter? For her trouble, every convenience would be provided: a house, clothes, food, a weekly maid.
Soon there came the day when the women had to meet—if only to make the exchange. It was a Sunday. Elsa and her daughter attended church, where I expect they prayed for their souls ahead of meeting the madam and her bastard. The cottage in Auburn was only slightly better than a shack. Rose pulled up in a fancy rig accompanied by two footmen.
She left me in the carriage with Sugar and went into the house, instructing one of the footmen to wait for her outside the door.
Rose turned her wide, bronzed face to the widow and nodded. Elsa was struck by Rose’s crude beauty, a beauty so unlike hers in its too-muchness: the brows and eyes lined with kohl, the lips red with pigment, her city dress requiring some thirty-six yards of satin, lace, and flouncing.
What is she? Elsa wondered. Whatever mix went into making Rose, she had long since dropped her given names in the dirt. “I am everything,” she said. She was Rose, irrefutable, fierce.
When I was very small I imagined she had gold flecks inside her, for they were sprinkled in her green, sardonic eyes. The freckles that covered her cheeks and her flat, straight nose were golden too. I always thought that those freckles were there to remind me that even Rose had once been a girl. She parted her black hair in the middle, her bun held in place by jeweled combs, their tips sharp as knives.
“So,” Rose said, sitting wearily, “let’s get to it, shall we?”
Elsa Johnson shivered despite the midday heat. “My daughter will need city clothes appropriate to her new station in society.”
“Not so fast,” warned Rose. “First, we deal with mine.”
The widow nodded agreeably. She recognized a fellow survivor and the fact that she had little to bargain with. As the daughter of a Swedish Baptist minister, Elsa had been raised to believe in church four days a week, grape juice as Jesus’s blood, and whenever her father drank, which was most nights, the rod applied liberally. She recognized that this madam slept in a big city bed, under covers of sable, while she perspired in the infernal Auburn heat.
“Yah, I expect the girl will need everything.”
“Indeed,” agreed Rose. “Everything.”
Like seasoned traders, they talked of me, as the afternoon sun cast golden shadows on the faded carpet.
Elsa negotiated with the urgency of a woman with just two dollars in her purse, and the rent due, and her daughter, Piper, having a hole in her one pair of boots. That and a chorus of women from church assuring her she was bound for hell. The chorus couldn’t decide which was more scandalous: serving tea to a madam or taking in the madam’s bastard child. That and the fact of a trick heart, which she now mentioned.
“How bad is your heart?” Rose peered into Elsa’s soul, arithmetizing on her internal abacus where the widow would prove weak or problematic. Anticipating, that was my Rose’s genius.
“On the boat across, I took scarlet fever,” Elsa admitted. “The doctor tells me I’m fine… a bit of hearing loss is all.” She tipped her head and pointed to her right ear. “Then he died on me.”
“Your husband? That was hardly his fault.”
“Yet it’s put me and my girl to shame.”
“Shame you can survive,” Rose declared. “Of that I’m certain.”
She was seeing the broader picture now, of a Swedish professor falling for a bit of beauty. The desires of men being Rose’s chief preoccupation. She considered that Lars Johnson might have been one of her customers: a man who wished for a little stroking of the box, be it the box on his shoulders or in his chest or in his trousers. Thinking of desires reminded Rose that she was far removed from the din of the whorehouse. This little cottage in hicksville made her eager to move on.
“And the child’s father?” Elsa asked. “Will he be—”
“Not a
