“An actor?”
Rose let it pass. She banged her teacup to signal that time was short, her patience even shorter, and, anyway, tea was not what she drank. She had already made peace with the notion that I should never be hers. She had as much use for a baby as a lion has for fins.
“I should think you’d want to meet her.” Rose called to the footman to bring me in from the coach.
Elsa sighed. There was no avoiding it. She stood as Sugar led me by the hand inside.
“Oh my,” Elsa exclaimed, “she’s… quite dark, isn’t she?”
Rose squinted at the map of capillaries covering the widow’s nose and cheeks—the distinct markings of a tippler. “I see all the shadings when I look at a face. I make it my business to do so,” she said. “How ’bout you?”
“Yah, yah,” Elsa agreed. “Only, should folks ask why she is so different from me and my girl, I would have to tink on what to say.”
“Oh, you’ll tink,” Rose assured her. “That, or me and the girl will move on.”
It was Rose’s observation that folks who begin the dance with a string of noes often prove the most malleable. Still, she didn’t have all day and this pride-bound Swede would require a bit of the lash now and again.
“Va’ fan,” the widow mumbled.
“What does that mean?”
Elsa wasn’t about to say. Rose would learn soon enough that fan was devil. Va’ fan? What the hell. Hora was what Elsa called Rose—in private.
“Our city neighbors,” Elsa said. “They will just have to tink my Lars was—”
“Dark,” Rose offered. “Mysterious.”
Now that I was in the house, the pace of the negotiation quickened: hereafter I would call the widow what Pie called her—Morie, mor, Swedish for mother. Rose would build us a house in a flat section of the city; Morie didn’t want to be climbing hills. It wouldn’t be the best, not even the second-best, part of town, but maybe that was right too. Close to the piers.
“Good—far from the Jews,” Morie said. Rose sighed at Morie’s bigotry. The Jews lived in the finest houses in Pacific Heights. Where Rose also lived.
Rose arranged for her Chinese cook, his surname was Tan, to spend one day a week provisioning the larder and otherwise keeping tabs. Money for our food, necessities, school fees, and incidentals would arrive on the first of the month, regular as the Pacific railroad.
As Morie listened to all the bounty coming toward her, she held still, lest it pass her by. It was more than she dared hope for. She touched her heart, that organ that shut the day they put Lars in the ground—and felt it quicken. She touched her chest to be sure.
“The city,” she said, blushing. “Lars always dreamed of going there. Won’t he be proud.”
“Chrissakes, let’s not burden the dead with pride.” Rose decided it was caraway, yes, caraway, the scent that pervaded the room. “I should have liked a bit of your akvavit,” she said.
When she was frightened, Morie’s pupils all but disappeared in a sky of bleached blue. “I don’t expect you to be a churchgoer, but I won’t have you ridicule. The doctor, he prescribes a tonic for my nerves.”
“Does he now?”
Rose had planned to suggest a visit one evening each month. But hearing the widow connive—in Swedish singsong—she cut the visits to six times a year. Then, as Rose observed the low-slung cottage with the ceiling pocked where the rains seeped through, and the frayed rug, and the stale spritz cookies, she cut that number again. She would see me three times a year.
“And now I’d like to meet your daughter,” she said.
Pie had been playing quietly in her room. Five years old, with blond ringlets and a sweet laugh, she ran into the room, took me from Sugar, and hugged me close. Morie had promised Pie she was getting a sister as a present.
“Vera is a funny name for a baby,” Pie said.
“It means truth. Let’s hope she grows into it,” Rose replied. “Now, Piper, why don’t you take Vera to your room and shut the door. I bet she’d like to play with your doll.”
The part no one told me, what I must imagine, is what happened after I discovered they’d gone—Sugar, Rose gone.
Once Rose decided something, she never looked back. In San Francisco she had thirty girls to flick with her switch. The men who paid for those girls paid for me.
So, you see, I was a special bastard, a not-quite-orphan, a madam’s mistake, a tippler’s charge—provided for but never loved by either mother. And though that fact pained me in my early youth, I came to see my place as unique. I was never trapped by pretty frocks and expectations of home and hearth that plagued the other girls I knew; I was a secret, bound by a secret, and if all that binding kept me apart, it also allowed me a certain freedom. My mind was my sole company, and when the old world ended and the new world began, my mind would have to see us through.
But, oh, what a challenge I was for Morie. She played it corked and tight on that first visit with Rose. But with us, with Pie and me, Morie showed she had many sides. When sober, Morie could be funny, or salty as the pickled herring she forced us to eat. The stern side saw that I was scrubbed proper and that I knew where to put my fork and napkin. At dinner Morie talked of people and things. A girl was pretty or fair, a woman cultured or not-from-our-side-of-the-street, which is laughable, except in her mouth it was a serious charge; a man had means or he was nothing. She believed in keeping up with the news, and by news, I mean gossip. Thankfully, the San Francisco papers supplied an amplitude of celebrity and scandal. I taught myself to read early, and in the evenings I read the
