The Gilded Age

5

Strolling Along the Cocktail Route

“You going to get up, Mr. Watkins?’ Mariah says, her dark eyes glowering. “Or you going to lie about all the day like a sick puppy?”

Daniel lounges in a morning jacket on the satin settee in the smoking parlor. He lets loose a forlorn doggy howl for Mariah’s benefit, but he can’t persuade the auntie to crack a smile. Has he ever seen her teeth? He grins fetchingly, hoping to win her over, but she continues to glare, tapping her toe, holding the tray he ordered in arms that look as if they can lift a twenty-pound sack of potatoes.

“Dunno,” he concedes.

Will this feeling of oppression ever lift itself from his soul? He feels limp, every shred of ambition he may have ever possessed drained from his blood by this vampirish mood. A listlessness that refuses to sharpen into something more despotic against which he could rebel. The crudely scrawled letter delivered by the messenger at breakfast lies half-crumpled at his feet. He belches, queasy from the quail and sautéed oysters. No wonder Jessie Malone is so well endowed. And that was only her breakfast. He should have had his usual omelette. Ah, but perhaps that’s the cure? Something drenched in butter, would that settle his gut? The champagne giddiness, the jolt of brandy, all the comfort of his morning libations has worn away. A drowsy ache settles behind his eyes, and a peculiar anxiety thumps in his heart like a moth dashing itself against the glass of a lighted window. He needs a cure for that, too—his heart.

He may be baffled by his soul’s disturbance, but at least he knows the source of his heart’s perturbation—that accursed Chinese servant girl, Zhu Wong. She’s quite unlike any other woman he’s ever known. But in what way?

He ponders his understanding of the female sex. Women want to suffer pain, that’s what Krafft-Ebing writes in his scholarly treatise, Psychopathia Sexualis. Sacher-Masoch’s novels—not to mention those of the great Zola, the great Tolstoy—amply bear out these assertions. Women by nature want to suffer and, hardly knowing their own minds, thus are instinctively subordinate to men. Authorities like Lombroso, Ferrero, Schopenhauer, Michelet, Comte, Spencer—dare he go on?—have scientifically proven the feeblemindedness and masochism of women. Craniologists, too, the eminent Carl Vogt. A woman’s skull is so different from a man’s that she might as well belong to another species. Smaller skulls, smaller brains.

Mama crying, always crying, muffled sobs in the night. He shivers. In the end, all he remembers of her is her pain. How her pain grieved him, Father’s only child, a boy with the mother’s beauty, her cheekbones, her lips. Her weakness, too? A boy whose beauty his father observed with a scowl and a wary look in his eyes.

Yet pain was his mother’s natural province. He must remind himself of that. Krafft-Ebing is quite explicit.

Daniel rubs his eyes. He dwells too much on himself these days. Dwells too much on the past, which is dead and gone, never to be repeated, never to be remade. Too many memories haunt him now that he’s away from the scowling father, separated forever from the mother begging for his loyalty with her last breath. Wasn’t I good, Danny? Wasn’t I good to you?

Women want to be taken, to be subjected to force. Schopenhauer has written extensively on the subject.

She—Zhu Wong—is not a whore, but she is, by her own claim, the former mistress of a gentleman, perhaps a man like himself. And therefore tainted, not truly a lady. It follows, then, that she led him to desire her. As much as she hated it, she wanted it and knew exactly how to get it. With every glance of her strange green eyes, every languorous gesture, she spurred him on these three months. What else could one expect in such close quarters?

Inevitable, what happened this morning. Though he’s still not sure what, exactly, happened. Had he subdued her or she seduced him?

She hadn’t wept. So what he did had to be all right, then, hadn’t it? Authorities on the topic say so. Does she really hate what gives him such pleasure? Her hands unbuttoning his shirt. That’s the man’s duty, to unbutton his shirt. Quite unlike any other woman he’s ever known, indeed. Perhaps she’s something other than a woman. A sylph. A witch. A demon.

Listlessness closes over his soul like a velvet fist. Krafft-Ebing warns gentlemen against the spillage of bodily fluids. A gentleman must always protect his vitality.

“Over there,” Daniel says.

Mariah bangs the tray down on the side table. He’s glad to see that she’s brought him a cup of black coffee and the last of the brandy in a smeary decanter. Plus Miss Malone’s bottle of Scotch Oats Essence and a spoon. The auntie stands, awaiting his command. As is only proper for a servant.

For the balance of the morning after breakfast, Daniel studied “The Lady of the Tides,” the painting of the mermaid he gave to Miss Malone in trade for two months’ rent. As for the rest of Mama’s junk, he’d taken everything to Gump’s, as Jessie advised. The Gump brothers were savvy importers and formidable purveyors of art and costly trinkets to San Francisco’s rich. What a gorgeous shop they had! Gilt and crystal, jade and ivory gleamed beneath the gaslights and reflected off ample mirrors. The Gump brothers themselves, clad in immaculate black gabardine, discreetly scented with patchouli, the very picture of gentility.

Daniel had been deeply impressed. And envious. This charming enterprise survived the depression of ‘93. A worthy pursuit for a gentleman, in other words. But would Father ever entertain such a notion? No, Father had the aesthetic sensitivity of a toad. Daniel sold Mama’s junk for forty dollars. Nothing she’d collected was noteworthy, well, he expected as much. During the transaction, he described the mermaid painting to the younger Mr. Gump, who removed and carefully wiped his spectacles. The poor fellow must have been nearly blind, the lenses of his spectacles as thick as the bottom of a brandy bottle. “I’d have to see the painting myself, of course,” Mr. Gump remarked, “but I’d say, offhand, it could be worth perhaps seven thousand dollars.”

Seven thousand dollars! When Daniel informed Miss Malone of the potential value of her new acquisition, she tossed her curls scornfully. “Sure and then make it four months’ rent. And not a day more, sir.” She grinned like a minx. The biz was the biz. He had traded her fair and square.

Brilliant sun streams through the scarlet fringe edging the curtains, creating patterns of shadow and light. He spoons Scotch Oats Essence onto his tongue, savoring the medicinal bitterness. A breeze through the open window sends shadows and light shifting across the dizzying arabesques and medallions of the Persian carpets, inducing an intriguing sense of depth. An illusion of reality, like the persistence of vision creates the illusion of continuous motion.

Space and time. How the devil does one harness it?

He picks up the Zoetrope and whirls it, contemplating the persistence of vision, studying the shifting patterns. Nice effect. Kinetic, that’s the word, from the dear old Greek, kinesis--to move. He really ought to brush up on the dear old Greek. Many a gentleman drinking along the Cocktail Route is a scholar. A hotbed of cultural discourse, is the Cocktail Route.

But how could one reproduce kinetic effect in an artwork? And not some trifle like the Zoetrope. How could one produce depth and motion in, say, the mermaid? Have the tart stretch and wink and loll about, her fishtail flopping? Right up there on the wall? Such a kinetic work ought to reproduce color, as well, glorious color the way a painting does.

Daniel knows very well that the best minds in Europe have for decades pondered this very question. Monsieur Roget advanced his theory of the persistence of vision way back in 1824—that the brain retains a visual image perceived by the eye for a fraction longer than the perception itself. Thus we gaze, oblivious to the hundreds of times we blink in the course of a day. And thus we perceive space and time as a smooth continuous flow.

Then Sir John Herschel inflamed everyone when he spun a shilling, showing its head and its tail at the same time. All manner of clever devices utilized the spinning coin trick--Dr. Paris’s Thaumatrope, Plateau’s Phenakistiscope, Horner’s Zoetrope, Beale’s Choreutoscope. Toys fit for the junk heap or the gypsy trade by now. Every fancy brothel in Paris sported some flimsy imitation of Rudge’s magic lantern show. What things one could suggest in a mere seven phases of action. In the meantime, Eddie Muybridge in jolly old Californ’ proved with a rigged row of cameras that, at the height of a horse’s gallop, all four of the beast’s hooves leave the ground. Photographic proof that the horse catapults into space. Muybridge won a $25,000 wager with old man Stanford. A sturdy steed, sir, defies gravity. Defies God Himself.

But none of it, Daniel thinks, is good enough. None of it captures the mermaid, her slick skin, her chatoyant scales, her coy eyes. Nothing induces her to rise, to turn and smile. To splash across the wall and seduce another young man. By God, he wants to see it!

Scotch Oats Essence warms his head. He lights a ciggie, picks up the Zoetrope again. When you whirl the toy too fast, the images blur. Yet the trick must be to speed up the sequence, expand it somehow, make the flow continuous without sacrificing clarity. “So much to do and so little time, eh, Mariah?”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“In a hurry, are you, Mariah?”

“A young gentleman like yourself shouldn’t lie about all the day.” For a person with no discernible mind of her own, she’s awfully pesky. “Mr. Watkins, you ought to be ashamed.”

“I am ashamed, Mariah.” He grins. “Truly, you have no notion how ashamed I am.”

“Thought you got important business in town. Your daddy’s business.”

“Ah, dear old Father and his dear old business.”

Daniel had dutifully sent the eminent Jonathan D. Watkins a telegram once he’d settled in at 263 Dupont Street.

FATHER STOP ARRIVED STOP YOUR DUTIFUL SON DANIEL

Then, just to get the old man’s goat--

LOVELY LADIES STOP

Lovely ladies, indeed. This town has cast an evil spell over the ladies. Just look at ‘em. Fanny Spiggot, a pickpocket. Li’l Lucy, a sporting gal losing her charm at age nineteen. Jessie Malone, Queen of the Underworld. Even Donaldina Cameron, the elegant lady who snubbed him on the train, a Holy Roller, which may be worse than all of the above. And what about the ladies dressed in little girls’ sailor outfits or fanciful dresses who aren’t women at all? What about Zhu Wong taunting him, leading him into sin?

Mariah waits silently as Daniel stubs the ciggie out. “And what is Father’s dear old business? Real estate. Have you any notion what a lousy racket real estate is, Mariah?”

“I should think that a young gentleman like yourself should be grateful to have the means to enrich himself handed over to him by his family,” Mariah says. “No matter what he may think of his daddy.”

He glances up at the auntie, astonished by this speech. As usual Mariah glares at him with the face of a wooden Indian. “Damnable plague, that’s what real estate is. Interest rates and down payments, defaults and bankruptcies. Bankruptcy, Mariah, is a sin. Or it ought to be.” He plucks the crumpled note from the floor and examines it one more time.

Der Sir:

Konserning yer rekwest I tern over key to bording haus at 567 Stockton I say damm you sir is mine an I ain’t giving up nothing. Tis my haus & my borders. Yull git yer pownd of flesh when you get it. Sinseerly, Mr Ekberg

“Speaking of grateful, Mariah, Mr. Ekberg has enjoyed a year’s respite from all mortgage payments, and yet he sends me an ungrateful note like this.”

Daniel does not look forward to rousting Mr. Ekberg out of the Stockton Street boardinghouse. The crumbling Stick is a dreadful piece of work, in dire need of a new roof and a paint job. Mr. Ekberg is a Forty-niner whose modest bonanza enabled him to purchase the house in the sixties when Stockton Street was white and Portsmouth Square was a gambling haven and a dining resort. Now that Stockton Street is smack-dab in the middle of Chinatown, Mr. Ekberg’s rents from his Chinese tenants packed in like tinned fish have plummeted. Which is why he mortgaged the place in 1890 to Jonathan D. Watkins & Son. Daniel does not want to manage the place himself. Collect coins from coolies every month? No, thank you.

He crushes Mr. Ekberg’s note into a ball and flings it across the room, taking a swig of Scotch Oats Essence. Remarkable medication. He should purchase his own bottle. “Perhaps Jack London is right. Perhaps private property is no damn good.”

“Mr. Watkins,” Mariah says, “the War Between the States was fought so that my people would not remain someone else’s property. So that my people could own property of their own. Perhaps a privileged young gentleman like yourself should not be so quick to dismiss that which others have fought and died for. That which this great country of America was founded upon. Freedom, the pursuit of a free life, and owning one’s own house.”

By God, where does the auntie get her ideas? “Excellent speech, Mariah. But the numbers. In real estate, I mean. The numbers make my head ache.” At least Mr. Ekberg replied to Daniel’s notice to quit. Mr. Harvey, the other debtor who has defaulted on the shack in Sausalito, has had neither the manners nor the intelligence to reply at all. “Mortgages. Did you know that ‘mortgage’ means ‘death pledge’? It’s a deadly business, all right. Deadly boring.”

“And just how do you intend to pay Miss Malone for the rent?” Mariah asks pointedly. “Lying about all the day?”

Thank goodness he has to pay Miss Malone and not Mariah. “Do not worry your little head about that. That lady up there”—he points to the mermaid—“has paid my way around here for a while longer. Besides, that’s enough of your scolding.” He’s suddenly impatient with Mariah’s interrogation. She’s just the Negro maid. What she may think—or for that matter, what any woman, a carriage horse, or a dog may think—is not the proper subject of speculation for an educated gentleman. “My mother is in her grave. I don’t need or want another.”

Mariah stares at him. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Watkins, I forgot. You’re a-grieving.”

Daniel laughs sharply and empties the rest of the brandy bottle into his coffee. “I really should abstain from champagne at breakfast. Knocks me flat on my prat all morning. I don’t know how Miss Malone carries on so.”

“Miss Malone has got practice.”

“Thank you, Mariah. You may go.”

She turns on her heel and goes without another word. He hears her clattering across the hall to the suite she shares with Zhu Wong, riffling around in there. Is there a chance she could discover what went on in the second bedroom this morning? But no, she strides briskly out, clatters down the stairs, and bangs the front door so loudly the mirrors rattle in the smoking parlor.

Now and then he’s heard Mariah mention something about “going to a meeting” to Zhu or Jessie. He has no idea what sort of meeting a Negro maid would go to. A church meeting? Or perhaps a temperance meeting? Mariah is so sober, it makes his teeth ache. Or is there a union for house servants? Could be. There seems to be a union for nearly every occupation, avocation, and hobby. Is there a union for drunks?

Hah! There’s the ticket. He’ll start a union for drunks. The mustachioed senator and the great burly fellow who owns the bank on California Street and all the other fine gentlemen who stroll along the Cocktail Route will have themselves quite a laugh. They’ll march in the Fourth of July parade with a cask of whiskey set in a surrey. They’ll march in every damn parade the citizens of San Francisco marshal every month of the year.

He pulls himself to his feet, glances at the grandfather clock ticking in a corner of the parlor. Four o’clock in the afternoon. High time to stroll along the Cocktail Route.

He starts up the stairs to his suite when his sinuses suddenly loosen. He pulls out a handkerchief and touches it to his nostril, soiling the pristine cotton with a blotch of blood. What a puzzle. He hasn’t had a nosebleed since he was a kid in short pants.

Still, he’s feeling much better. Buzzing like a bee! In his suite, he peels off the morning jacket. Where is his shirt, his collar, his vest, his cutaway, his bowler, his boots, his tie? Where in hell is a pack of ciggies? He’s gone through the first pack today. He spills a handful of silver bits in his vest pocket, thrusts his derringer in the back of his belt, along with his Congress knife. He plucks a red carnation from the bouquet Miss Malone leaves outside his door every morning. What a pill she is. It’s quite remarkable, how she manages her sordid little empire. She told him she enjoyed Mr. Wells’s Time Machine, but the character of Little Weena reminded her too much of Li’l Lucy. A chit too trusting of strange men. Which is preposterous. Li’l Lucy is a whore, whereas Weena is a woman of the future. He tucks the red carnation in his lapel. Jessie says that a red carnation signifies, “Alas, my poor heart.”

And he’s off. He’s stepping out the door of 263 Dupont Street when a coolie barges in.

“Say, you there!” He catches the scoundrel by the wrist, reels him in. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

The coolie mumbles something and struggles to get away, but the struggle knocks his fedora halfway off his head, exposing his face.

“By God.” Daniel stares. “Miss Wong? Zhu? My angel?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Watkins,” says she—truly it is she—and moves around him, dashing for the stairwell.

He chases after, seizing her wrist again. Staring again.

Shock ripples through him like the time when he was ten and a horse threw him off. His nerves clang, his head spins. It cannot be true! He’s only just won her. Only just gained mastery over her. He sinks into a chair in the foyer. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Whatever is wrong, Mr. Watkins?” She’s smiling. Smiling!

He points at her clothes, speechless. The coolie’s costume is cut so loosely, he cannot glimpse the curve of her waist, the swell of her breasts and hips. Yet the certainty that her body lurks beneath the ample rags nearly makes him ill. Is she wearing proper undergarments?

She laughs. Laughs! “You like my new togs?” She twirls before him like a mad child. “Actually, you know, they’re quite modern. More like what I used to wear every day in my Now. Maybe I’ll start a fashion trend.” She claps her hand to her mouth. “Oops. I’m not supposed to say that. Anyway, what do you think?”

He hasn’t the slightest notion what she is raving about. “It’s illegal,” he says, scandalized.

“Illegal?”

“You’re impersonating a man.”

“I’m comfortable for the first time in months.”

“You could get arrested. No, don’t laugh, I really mean it. The police arrested one Miss Constance Malloy just last week for appearing in public wearing a suit jacket and trousers. And you’ve become degenerate.”

“How do you mean, ‘degenerate’?”

“Max Nordau’s treatise is quite explicit. You threaten all of human evolution with this bawdy display.”

“Bawdy display?” She stretches out her arms, glances down at herself. The blue denim hangs like a bag over her. “You see more of my bosom—what there is of it—in those dresses.”

“Nordau and the great Lombroso are both very clear. If humanity has struggled out of primal indeterminacy into true manhood, then woman must become ever more feminine, finding her refuge and her destiny within the family home. For you to dress like a coolie, for you to take on masculine qualities is to sink back into primal indeterminacy. In a word, devolution.”

“Why don’t you think for yourself instead of quoting harebrained philosophers? Surely you don’t really believe any of that drivel?”

“Belief has nothing to do with it. What’s true is true.” He smacks his brow with the palm of his hand. “Is it something I did, miss? Did I damage you so terribly this morning?”

She studies him with a bright, curious look like a bird cocking its eye at what the rain has brought up out of the muck. “Not half so much as you damage yourself, Daniel.”

Her look and her words and the throb in her voice disturb him. His hands tremble. By God, he needs a good stiff drink. Whiskey straight up. He doffs the bowler. “Don’t go temperance on me, miss. Go upstairs at once and change your clothes. I never want to see you pull this stunt again. Do you understand me? Now I’m off.”

He turns on his heel and strides out the door. But she follows him onto the street like a spaniel, dogging his heels. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got business to attend to. Not,” he says, “that it’s any of your business.”

“You’re going to the Cocktail Route, aren’t you? Haven’t you had enough to drink today?”

He stops in his tracks. “I beg your pardon, but the president of the Bank of California will probably take his usual at the Reception. He may be useful to me, and I would do well to hobnob with him. I may need financing.” As he lectures her, his nosebleed starts up again.

“Oh, Daniel!” She pulls out a handkerchief of her own and takes the liberty of blotting his nostril, seizing his chin, studying his face more boldly than any other woman has ever dared look at him, even his mother. “I’m coming with you.”

“I should say not!”

“Try and stop me.”

“Only whores frequent saloons. And you are not a whore, are you, miss?”

She thinks that over. “I’ll come like this.” She plucks at the ridiculous denim tunic. “I’ll come as your manservant.” She grins wickedly. “As your coolie.”

“By God, no! That is absurd, that is. . . .”

Then suddenly the idea tickles him. Wouldn’t Father be outraged by such a ploy? A young woman masquerading as a manservant, accompanying him on the municipal custom for drumming up business?

Yes. Father would be outraged.

“All right,” he says. “But you cannot drink.”

“You know I don’t.”

“And you’ll not be served the free lunch. Not as a coolie.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You must keep your head down and your mouth shut.”

“Suits me. I’m supposed to be only an observer in your spacetime, anyway, except for the object of my project. The more invisible I am in your Now, the better.”

“Hm!” Spacetime? What the devil kind of a word is that? And there she goes again, raving about her Now and his Now. It’s really quite perplexing, and she has never once offered an explanation. “Very well. But I want you to know, I do not approve of this stunt at all.”

“Duly noted, Mr. Watkins. And I want you to know, I do not require your approval to do whatever I want to do.” She giggles. Quite disconcerting.

“And don’t go temperance on me.”

“That I can’t promise. But,” she adds with a grave look, “I don’t think preaching will make much of a dent in your thick skull, so I won’t.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. I can assure you, preaching doesn’t make a dent at all.”

And they set off together, he striding down the street, the handsome young gentleman, she trotting behind him, his coolie in disguise.

Yes. Father would be outraged.

But is he?

He most certainly is. Outraged and amazed by Zhu Wong, by her easy banter now that he’s had his way with her. No simpering or blushes or batted eyelashes. Not like any other woman he’s ever known.

* * *

Ah, strolling along the Cocktail Route! What a splendid tradition the gentlemen of San Francisco enjoy, hatching business schemes and enjoying a healthful constitutional as they promenade from saloon to saloon. The Route proceeds along Market Street, zigzags up Montgomery to Sutter, then down to Market again along Kearny or Stockton. And all along the Route, first-class establishments sparkle like stars in the sky. Each place, Daniel fervently believes, deserving of his respectful visit.

Gambling resorts, sporting houses, and steam baths also offer their delights. During the stroll, which the city’s most important gentlemen engage in as a nightly ritual, one may encounter friends and potential friends, acquaintances and associates, competitors and enemies, newcomers and ladies of a certain charm. Milton and Shakespeare are quoted, Latin and Greek flow like wine. The latest political gambit, gossip, and rumors are mulled over, interpreted, and adjudged. Business deals are discussed, negotiated, and consummated. No one cusses, guffaws, or tells lewd stories. Not along the Cocktail Route, sir.

Daniel notices a flit of shadows behind them, and Zhu whirls around, anxiety stitching her brow beneath the brim of her fedora.

“Boo how doy?” she whispers.

He surveys the street. A couple of thugs are roaming about, nobody he knows. No hatchet men, either.

“By God, why are you so skittish? What business have you with hatchet men?”

“None,” she says, but continues to glance about anxiously.

“If you say so.” He heartily disapproves of her propensity to dissemble. “We’ll start at the Reception. Always good for the first visit.”

Daniel eagerly sweeps through the grand mahogany doors of the Reception Saloon. The dark, high-ceilinged burrow is splendidly lit by gaslights in crystal candelabra. Liquor bottles banked before vast mirrors behind the bar glow like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and topaz. Fastidious bartenders in white jackets attend to one’s every need. They’ll hold a gentleman’s gold and other valuables behind the bar for the evening, ensuring he won’t lose his kit and caboodle to the pickpockets who roam these streets, the thugs, or a light-fingered sporting gal. The black-and white-marble floor gleams like a giant checkerboard. Polished brass spittoons stand between each brass and leather bar stool. Daniel sniffs. The air is thick and rich with cooking smells. Among the delightful odors wafts the delicate fragrance of the Reception’s specialty, Maryland terrapin.

The bartender raises on eyebrow at Zhu, and Daniel says, “He’s my manservant.” He orders a Sazarac—rye whiskey, a dash of bitters, and a dash of absinthe shaken with ice and served in a glass rubbed with anisette. Father would die at the expense of four bits, but Daniel adores Sazaracs. “My just reward,” he tells Zhu. “I’m celebrating the entertainment of a creative thought I had this morning.”

“What creative thought is that?” Zhu says in a lowered voice, hunching her shoulders, and concealing her delicate woman’s hands in her long sleeves. Very good. She’s quite a clever creature, he must admit.

“There’s a scientific theory called the persistence of vision.”

“Oh, right. The principle behind how our perceptual apparatus works. Led to the technology of movies.”

“Movies?” What an odd word!

“Yep. But of course, insects and other creatures have evolved other perceptual means. Just goes to show you, that old cosmicist homily is so true. ‘What you see is what you are.’”

“What on earth are you jabbering about?” he demands.

“Never mind. Sorry, Daniel, I interrupted you. What was your creative thought?”

The director of the Pacific Title Insurance Company huddles over bourbon with the president of Bankers Investment Company. Daniel should join them. New financing is just what he needs to refurbish that blight of a boardinghouse, perhaps develop those weeds in the Western Addition, too. He can practically hear Father’s stern scolding voice. “Go on, Daniel. He who hesitates is lost, sir.”

But Daniel does hesitate. Why can’t he linger with his new mistress discussing the persistence of vision? Movies? What does she mean? Why can’t he ever do what he wants to do?

The bartender brings his Sazarac, and he knocks it back. Ah, finally a sharp feeling against which he can rebel—shirking family duties, carousing with a degenerate woman, guilt. Better and better. To hell with new financing. He’ll see about new financing some other day.

“I dreamed up a device,” he says, “a machine, a gadget. I envisioned how the seven phases of action of magic lantern shows and Herschel’s spinning coin and the painted parrot flapping in a Zoetrope could be made into something brand-new. A device that could make the mermaid in the painting swim across a whole wall as if she were reality itself!”

“I’m quite sure it’s possible,” Zhu says seriously. Not laughing at him.

“You are?” At her vigorous nod, “I’m sure, too. The trick is to keep the sequence continuous with a mechanical device. Perhaps a miniature steam engine?”

“A steam engine?” Now she laughs.

“Why not?”

She shrugs. “Invent this device, then.”

“I intend to!” He raises his empty glass. “To my moving picture machine! I want some lunch. Come help me with my plates.”

Zhu dutifully follows him to the tremendous buffet. The Reception offers free lunch every day, any time of day, to anyone who buys a drink. Daniel surveys the platters crowding the sideboard. There’s a Virginia ham baked in champagne. A whole goose ringed by roast quail. A cheddar cheese the size of a wagon wheel. Grilled bear steaks, a side of venison, broiled rattlesnake, stewed rabbit, porcupine cutlets. Plates of salami and sausages, sardines and salmon. Prawns the size of a man’s thumb. Sweet and sour pickles, celery and gherkins, radishes and water chestnuts, onions and tomatoes, artichoke hearts. Loaves of rye and pumpernickel. Pots of mustards, mayonnaises, ketchups, and clarified butter. More cheese—rounds of brie, gorgonzola, mascarpone. Molded domes of liverwurst, pates and puddings. And of course, in silver chafing dishes, the famed Maryland terrapin.

Daniel heaps two plates with delicacies, hands them to Zhu, then loads up two more for him to carry, balancing a dish of terrapin between his thumbs.

“This is obscene, Daniel,” she says, surveying the feast on their table.

“What is obscene?” He feels so refreshed after the Sazarac, he starts to take her hand, then forcibly stops himself. What if someone important saw him holding a coolie’s hand?

“Well!” She waves her hand at the magnificence before them. “You people treat eating and drinking like a hobby.”

“And a very fine hobby it is, too.”

“What about people who don’t have enough to eat?”

“What people?” he says, dipping a prawn in clarified butter.

More men stream into the Reception. Next to the director of the title company and the investment banker crowd politicians, financiers, newspaper men, merchants. Corpulent men in striped trousers and fine silk cravats, top hats or brushed bowlers, gaily colored vests, brocaded waistcoats, sable collars on cashmere topcoats. Chunks of gold glint at cuffs, on cravats, on fingers and wrists. Abundant beards and mustaches fur plump-cheeked faces. Though Daniel proudly boasts a thirty-two inch waist, he would not be unhappy sporting a girth like the ironworks heir, whose waistcoat is fashioned entirely of silver sealskin.

“The men of Chinatown, for instance,” she persists, bending near so he can hear her over the rising din. “Surely you know that peasants are tricked or kidnapped, forced aboard clipper ships, and sold into slavery in this very city. Slavery as pernicious as the servitude of black people over which American people were willing to die.”

“Not the war again. Mariah was raving about the war today, too.”

“And what about the women of Chinatown? Surely you also know that Chinese girls, some as young as five years old, are sold into slavery, then prostitution. They’re beaten, stripped of their property, starved, and imprisoned.”

Daniel notices some fellows barging through the Reception’s mahogany doors and casually turns to look at them. It’s those thugs again, in shabby workingmen’s togs. Not the sort of swells who are welcome on the Cocktail Route, but there’s no law against them coming in for a drink. The poor devils can eat like kings for the price of a beer.

He doesn’t want to hear this kind of talk from his mistress. It sounds too familiar, like the dreadful lady on the train, Donaldina Cameron.

“My dear miss,” he says curtly, “that is their lot in life.”

“They’re people, Daniel!”

“There’s nothing you or I can do about them, even if we wanted to.”

She glowers at him. “There is something I can do for one girl in this Now. And there’s plenty you could do for a lot of them.”

“Oh, damn it, Zhu. The coolies and the slave girls, you and Mariah. All women, really, and the inferior races. You are what you are and where you are due to the forces of evolution.”

“Oh, yeah. Muse warned me about that, too. You’re a social Darwinist. Like being born in a time of war or drought or pestilence or of a certain gender is the same thing as why some species have bifocal vision or red feathers on their asses.”

He starts at her loose language, shakes his finger at her. “Mr. Darwin’s theory explains much about society, too.”

“I see. And I suppose it’s your lot in life to wallow in self-pity over the ruin of your father’s business and punish yourself over your mother’s death. I suppose it’s your lot in life to smoke and drink and gorge yourself to death.”

He orders another Sazarac, just to spite her. “I do not wallow, miss. It is my lot in life to rehabilitate my father’s errors in business. And I shall do so.”

“You don’t seem to care very much about rehabilitating his business.”

“Of course I do. I care very much about securing my prosperity in the future.”

“Ah!” She leans forward, face flushed, green eyes glittering. “Then you do acknowledge there’s a future?”

“Naturally.”

“If you care at all about the future, then you must care about the people who don’t have enough to eat today. Don’t you see? You must care about them because they’re a part of the future, too.”

“Not my future.”

“Yes, your future. Everyone’s future. Everything you do now affects everything else. It’s all connected. That’s the principle behind cosmicism—that humanity cocreates reality with the Universal Intelligence. With the Cosmic Mind.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a communist.”

“No, no. I said cosmicism.” She flicks her eyes to the side in the peculiar way she does and mumbles to herself, “All right, all right, Muse. The Tenets. I know.” To him, “Daniel, the future can only survive because people care. Live responsibly or die.”

“How tiresome.” He gulps his second Sazarac. “Pardon me, but you’ve got it all wrong. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we surely do die.”

* * *

The golden late afternoon deepens into a shadowy dusk and gentlemen throng the sidewalks, jostling into saloons, tossing coins to beggars beseeching from the gutters, negotiating with painted ladies clustering at every street corner.

Usually Daniel loves the hustle-bustle, but now his nerves grow frazzled. Zhu’s skittishness is contagious. She walks slightly behind him, as is proper for a manservant, but he’s well aware how wary and somber she is. He glances over his shoulder, notices those thugs again. They duck around the corner at Post when he looks. A moment later, when he looks again, there they are.

He seizes her elbow and hustles her down the street, quickening their pace, which seems to please her. She moves like a man in her crude sandals, keeping pace with him. That’s good. Daniel likes speed. Speed is the key to the persistence of vision, the telegraph, the train, the transoceanic steamships. Modern life is speed. He hurries to each pleasure along the Cocktail Route as though this may be the last time he will ever savor pleasure again.

At Haquette’s Palace of Art on Post near Kearny, Daniel samples the aged Kentucky bourbon, thick and rich and fragrant, and gazes at the art---paintings of nudes, nudes, nudes, and more nudes. He’s starving again by the time they stroll into Flood and O’Brien’s, must sample the corned beef and cabbage plate washed down with Black Velvets, champagne with a mug of stout. He orders a crisp gin cocktail at the Peerless, a Pisco Punch at the Bank Exchange.

“You must try this,” he says, offering Pisco Punch to Zhu. “Go on, no one will notice.”

“I don’t drink, Daniel.”

“You’ve never tasted anything like it,” he insists. Pisco Punch is concocted of a mysterious fiery Peruvian brandy that one else in the world has been able to procure save for the proprietor of the Bank Exchange. “Do try it, my angel,” he says, pressing the glass to her lips. “Smooth as silk, hot as fire, long as love. Down the hatch.”

She is as tight-lipped as a temperance worker. Oh, fine. Daniel finishes the Pisco Punch himself. He samples the crab stew at the Occidental, devours roast turkey at Lucky Baldwin’s. Beneath the jeweled cornucopia chandeliers, his strange little mistress rails on about the evils of greed.

“My dear,” he says, throwing an arm around her shoulders. To hell what the other fellows think. “All this talk of the lower classes, of women and slaves. Of the future and my responsibility for the suffering of others. All right, I grant you it’s a shame and a sorrow. But I say, forget all sorrow. That is our highest duty in life—to live. And to forget.”

“I believe our highest duty is to live and to remember.”

“By God, I remember too much. And, somehow, not enough.”

She rests her hand on his beneath the table. “What don’t you want to remember, Daniel? Tell me.”

Remember. His heart tumbles, spinning him around and around. He doesn’t want to remember, but he does. Bits and pieces. He does.

“It was 1881,” he says, leaning close, his lips nearly touching her cheek.

Saint Louis languished beneath incipient summer, the fecund heat ripe with fruit and disease. Daniel, a lazy boy of seven, sucked on sugar cubes Mama heaped in silver bowls. He remembered the heat, the smell of mold, of corn whiskey. The heat squeezed sweat off everyone’s brow, filmed skin beneath cotton and silk. That smell of mold, mud, mint, Southern Comfort, overripe peaches, and sickness--it nauseated him just to remember it.

Cholera was everywhere. Father conferred with the priest, city councilmen, merchants, the great landowners, shippers who worked the river. They knew the infection had to do with the heat, with moisture, rot, and perhaps insects, vermin in the water. But his father and those men were powerless before the slippery devilish disease that wrung life so painfully from a person’s gut. Even lazy little Daniel could sense their defeat.

“Yet it seemed as if she was sick ever since I was born,” Daniel tells Zhu, sipping a Bonanza. “That’s what she would tell me. ‘Danny, since the day you were born, I have been sick.’”

“How did that make you feel?”

“Guilty, of course.” He glares at her. What kind of damn fool question is that? He doesn’t want to think about his feelings. He wants to forget about his feelings. But she only smiles at him in the smoky darkness of the bar. “But that summer she was worse. Much worse. I remember her crying. Crying in the night.”

“She contracted cholera?”

“Well, that cannot be, can it? She would have died, like poor old Tchaikovsky. No, no, she lingered on for years.”

“Then dysentery, maybe?”

“You know, I. . . .I’m not sure. She would have died of that, too, wouldn’t she? Oh, but her pain! Our doctor put her on the Montgomery Ward iron tonic. A jigger every two hours. Vile stuff. I tasted it, of course. A concoction of finely ground beef and grains of citrate of iron dissolved in pure sherry wine.”

“Your doctor prescribed booze to a chronically ill woman?”

“Now, now, my angel, it was a tonic, not booze. The tonic calmed her, soothed her. Father saw an immediate improvement, and so did I. She stopped crying. She was so ugly when she cried. I wanted her to look beautiful. We all did.”

He lights his fifteenth ciggie for the evening and draws the smoke down hard. He welcomes the twitch of pain deep in his lungs. Lets him know he’s alive.

She seizes the ciggie from his fingers, holds it like a piece of offal. “Why are you so hell-bent on self-destruction?”

He seizes the ciggie back. “I am not self-destructing, I am smoking. I love to smoke. When I haven’t eaten, smoking settles my stomach. And when I’ve eaten too much, smoking settles my stomach then, too. And one cannot possibly drink properly without a smoke. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, for starters, smoking’s going to kill you. Rot your mouth, your throat, your lungs, induce other cancers.

“Rot. I do apologize about my story. I’ve talked too much about rot, and now you’ve got rot on your mind.”

“You people know about lung cancer in this Now.”

“And when will this horror overtake me?”

“One day. Someday. Someday comes sooner than you think.”

“Always one day, someday. I cannot think about someday, I tell you. It’s a struggle for me to negotiate this moment right now.”

She rises angrily and strides out of Lucky Baldwin’s.

He dashes after her. “Zhu! Zhu!” Gentlemen turn and stare.

He catches up with her, seizes her arm. “Zhu, please. You must behave yourself. You promised you would. This is all quite improper.”

“I won’t be your mistress if you don’t respect yourself and your future.”

“Very well. Very well!” The sudden exertion makes him dizzy. Perhaps he’s reached his limit. “Let’s walk. Let’s talk about the future.”

But anxiety twists and sharpens in him as they stroll along the Cocktail Route, past Montgomery, past Kearny, past Dupont. He starts every time they encounter a gang of ragged fellows. His heart pounds as they turn every ill-lit corner. Beneath the tobacco smoke and booze and rich food, he can suddenly smell his own fear.

“Daniel, what is it?” Zhu whispers as they reach the Dunne Brothers at Eddy and Market.

“Someone is following us,” he whispers back. “I’m sure it’s the same fellows I’ve seen all evening.”

“I’ve seen them, too.”

“You have?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Listen, my dear, I may have enemies.”

“What enemies?” She stops and gazes up at him, her strange eyes bright behind her tinted spectacles. In his bleary gaze, she is sympathy incarnate. An angel, a lady, a woman—what? Something turns in him like a knife.

“A fellow defaulted on a boardinghouse Father financed. The note at breakfast, that was from him. Most impolite. Perhaps he’s sent some thugs.” Though Daniel doesn’t really think that’s likely. Dotty old Mr. Ekberg? Still, this is San Francisco.

“Perhaps,” she says, “I’ve got enemies, too.”

“You?”

“Yeah. I went to see a girl today, the girl I’m supposed to rescue.” At his bewildered expression, “The girl who was with me when Jessie bought me from Chee Song Tong. The hatchet men took her away, remember?”

He isn’t sure at first, then he does remember the day he arrived at 263 Dupont Street. He nods. “Why are you supposed to rescue her?” As if any of this makes any sense.

“She was sold to a brothel. Damn it, she’s just a kid. There are other reasons, too, that I can’t explain. Anyway, I’ve got to get her out of there.”

“And does the tong know you intend to rescue her?”

“No, actually they don’t. Not yet. But one of the tong men told me today he was interested in me.”

“May I remind you, you’re indentured to Jessie Malone.”

“You think Chee Song Tong gives a damn about that?”

“I get your drift.”

They duck into the Dunne Brothers Saloon. The air is so thick with tobacco smoke, he can barely see three feet in front of him.

“Just a quick nightcap,” he says, “and then we’ll go home. I promise.”

“I can’t take any more smoke,” she says. “I’ll wait for you by the door. Don’t be long, please.”

Daniel greets his fellow tipplers, says hello to dapper Frank Norris, who is drinking deeply at the bar. He pays for his nightcap and knocks it back, then cuts through the convivial crowd. But Zhu is not waiting by the door.

He senses her distress even before he hears her cry, filtering catlike from the alley next to the Dunne Brothers. He pulls the Remington derringer from the back of his belt and dashes into the alley.

Not one man, but three circle around her. The scrappy thugs he’s seen all night. They’ve got her between them, lunging at her as she whirls like a dervish, keeping them at bay.

“She’s just a girl,” he shouts. “Leave her alone!”

The first thug turns from Zhu, lurches at Daniel. Before Daniel can jump back, the thug swiftly kicks, kicks high, his boot toe connecting with Daniel’s wrist. The derringer flies from his hand.

“That’s a message from Mr. Harvey,” the first thug says.

“Who? What?”

“Mr. Harvey says you friggin’ leave his poolroom alone.”

Mr. Harvey? Then the name swims up in Daniel’s memory like a big ugly catfish, pale whiskers streaming. The shack in Sausalito? Got to be.

“This isn’t worth it, man!” Daniel cries. “It’s not worth thrashing us!”

He backs away, and the second thug pounces, punching and thrusting hard fists into his back, his gut, his poor old kidneys.

“So you say!” The first thug seizes him, and knuckledusters pop against his mouth, shooting white-hot sparks through his jaw.

But through his pain and dizziness, Daniel glimpses an amazing sight—Zhu whirling through the alley in some strange purposeful dance. She flies around the third thug, who gapes her, openmouthed.

She assails the second thug beating Daniel. He hears the sickening slap of flesh on flesh, masculine grunts of pain and surprise. She worries him away, keeping the third thug at bay, but the first thug strikes Daniel across the back of his head with the knuckledusters.

The world spins and shatters.

“My dear Zhu!” he shouts. A gay tune pounded out on a piano roars in his ears, filling his head with chaos.