LAST WEEK: Mike was turned into a vampire. He killed his wife and children and moved to San Francisco, where he was made proprietor of a pawn shop by Thanatos, god of death, and Ploutos, god of wealth. A young woman was killed and San Francisco went into lockdown.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here.
Chapter 112
Pamela
San Francisco 1906 – 1919
Love and Death
Disaster’s brought out the best in Teresa. Ryo watches her work ceaselessly to help raise tents, care for the wounded, and feed the hungry. She becomes affectionately known as “Madam Bountiful.” When, after a few months of ferocious energy, she saves enough money to open a new house, none oppose her.
Why, Ryo wonders, does disaster ennoble some? And why doesn’t the sentiment last?
Teresa’s house is three stories of, gilt, girls, and liquor. Mirrors veined with gold reflect and multiply the fifteen waiting buxom blondes. Here, beneath a needlepoint that reads, “If every man was as true to his country as he is to his wife—God help the USA,” Teresa greets her gentleman callers.
On the second-floor ballroom, crystal chandeliers swing over a polished wood floor, smooth as a frozen pond. Around the ceiling, cupids frolic in the soft, warm glow of candlelight. Portraits of Napoleon, whom Teresa finds devastatingly sexy, hang on every non-mirrored surface. Busts of the tiny emperor glower in corners and glare out of alcoves.
From the ballroom, a hallway, secret as a rabbit warren, leads to twelve small bedrooms. Footfalls are silenced by plush burgundy carpet.
The third floor is a simple private apartment where Pamela is once again ensconced with Sarah and Margareta.
Pamela lusts after Margareta’s uniform, black, with a frilly white apron and hat. The uniform, so unambiguous, seems a symbol of constancy. When Margareta is not working, and if Pamela has been very, very good, Sarah lets her model the lacey cap. When Pam puts on the cap, she becomes an enchanted princess. The dirty pigeons that clutter the ledges of the city are snow white doves that come at her call and do her bidding. She leans out her window, arms spread wide, embracing her kingdom… until Sarah catches her and pulls her inside.
“Don’t you go doing that now, Miss Pamela. You know Madam Wall hates for you to be seen.”
It’s true. Pamela is the secret in the attic, the child no one wants. No one except for Sarah.
Teresa had a body for love, a head for business, and a taste for publicity. Saturdays she’d parade her girls down Market Street, dressed in the latest fashions. Other madams followed suit. Processions of fashion-whores, competing carnal currents, in a torrent of lust, gushed through the streets.
Teresa’s clients rarely spent the night. But if a gentleman stayed, he was greeted with freshly pressed clothes and a full breakfast. Little touches count.
Now, established, and revered, Teresa begins to drink in earnest. In fact, she begins challenging patrons to drinking contests. She has a match with John L. Sullivan, last of the bare-knuckle boxers. He is known for marathon matches that could last for hours, sometimes running as many as seventy-five rounds. But, after twenty-one glasses of champagne, he sinks onto the floor gracefully as a two-hundred and twelve pound feather. Theresa blinks glassily and pours herself another flute.
While clients decide between blondes, they feed coins into the automatic music box, a newfangled miracle that is Teresa’s pride and joy.
One night, a short, stout man visits the house. He has a patrician nose, deep-set, gray eyes, and thin brown hair. He is Frank Daroux, a gambler and a Republican politico. Frank’s father was a minister. His mother was a saint. He loves drinking and gambling in illicit places; it makes him feel free. It makes the world seem unrestricted.
Frank invites Teresa to dinner. She downs twenty bottles of champagne and never leaves the table. Filled with awe, Frank is drowned by desire. Teresa’s also adrift in a bubbly sea of love. Frank is a dead ringer for Napoleon.
Teresa doesn’t charge, not even the first time. They are caught up in a mad tangle of passion. Frank proposes. They marry.
But though Teresa tells Frank of her fiery first marriage and her lost Joseph, she never mentions Pamela. And Frank, ever the politician, keeps Teresa as secret as Teresa keeps Pam.
Teresa wants to go out on the town. She wants to attend Frank’s political shindigs.
“I will be the shining, voluptuous, ornament on your arm,” she whispers.
“My love, that cannot be,” Frank says. “You won’t decorate my career, you’ll destroy it. The party would never support…” his voice trails off.
“Would never support what?” she shrieks, “A man who won’t acknowledge his wife?”
When a Republican mayor comes to power, bent on stamping out gambling and prostitution, Frank buys Teresa a home in Marin, but she refuses to leave the city.
“I’d rather be an electric light pole on Powell Street than a queen in the sticks,” she screams, tossing a half-full bottle of bourbon at the gold-streaked mirror. It shatters, cracking the glass. Yellow drops drip down the fissures like urine.
Frank longs for sweetness, not spectacle.
At a political ball, he meets Mary Lind McGuire. She’s a big, placid blonde, as mild as milk. She never drinks. She hardly talks. She’s an antidote to drama, a balm to madness.
Frank files for divorce.
Teresa, drinking almost continually now, spends every night tracking Frank and Mary through the city. She progresses from champagne to gin. She buys a small pearl-handled revolver.
When Teresa gets home, she tumbles into bed, passing into dreams, falling into nightmares. Frank is in bed. With him, beneath him, Mary Lind twists and groans. When she turns her head, Teresa sees Pamela’s child face on Mary’s over-ripe body. Her hatred for the child grows.
She locks the door to the third-floor apartments, forbidding Pamela to exit. Margareta and Sarah become Pamela’s sole connection to the outside world. Sometimes, when she is sure that Teresa is asleep, or drunk, Sarah sneaks Pamela into the glass-smooth ballroom. There she, and occasionally Margareta, waltz the child silently around and around. On new moon nights, they snuff the candles and Sarah lets Pamela lean way out the window and, hidden by darkness, watch the elegant gentleman arrive.
One night as Frank and Mary wander home, Frank grabs Mary’s arm and draws her into a doorway. His lips meet hers, opening like a butterfly’s wings in sun. Teresa, watching from the shadows, feels the caress sharp and deadly as a knife. She remembers Frank’s arms pulling her into similar doorways, opening her lips and her heart with a parallel touch. Pulling out her gun, she shoots Frank three times in quick succession. Blinded by love, liquor, and fury, she misses his vital organs. She shaves a millimeter off his bicep and elbow, tears holes in coat, vest, and shirt. But she gets his dignity right through the heart.
Teresa is booked on attempted murder and held without bail for three months. She keeps herself well lubricated. Guards are promised future favors for immediate alcohol. Her cell is furnished with pillows, comforters of velvet and silk, a gilt mirror, and pots of cosmetics.
Each day, Teresa carefully applies rouge to her lips and cheeks. She lines her eyes with kohl and dabs a beauty mark just above the curve of her left lip.
“Such a beautiful gal… How could her man have left her?… My Frank, my Napoleon…” Her kohl tears stain her dress and face.
Maggie, a big-boned, younger version of Teresa, takes control of the house. She unlocks the door to the third-floor apartments. For the first time in two years, Pamela roams freely through the vast ballroom and lavish dining room. It is wonderful. But as always, freedom is illusory.
Teresa arrives home, eyes glazed. She has difficulty ascending the stairway. In three months, she’s become an old woman. She is twenty-eight years old.
In the ballroom, a lithe figure is spinning round and round, pale arms glittering under the chandeliers, twinkling like a music box ballerina. It is Pamela. But Teresa sees Mary Lind dancing in her ballroom. Teresa charges like a wounded bear.
Pamela races up the stairs. Teresa staggers after her, tripping on the hem of her dress, toppling into a bust of Napoleon. Madam and Emperor fall to the ground, and Napoleon shatters into thousands of shards. Plaster coats Teresa’s hair. It dusts her face. It mingles with her kohl black tears, turning them gray.
Teresa is put to bed.
The scandal destroys Frank’s dreams of a political future. He decides to marry Mary Lind and move east.
The day before the wedding dawns bright and clear. Breezes stretch airy fingers through bright new green leaves. Wisteria dangles from the eves of Mary Lind’s house, smelling of tranquility and hope. Arm in arm, Frank and Mary stroll to the end of the Hyde & Beach, toward a prenuptial breakfast.
Teresa follows a shadow of grief, an avenging angel. Frank and Mary Lind enter the Buena Vista Restaurant. As if to aid Teresa’s vengeance, they take a table at the window overlooking the Bay.
Teresa takes careful aim. But, as she pulls the trigger, she sees Joseph and Pamela, sitting at t table, their baby heads on grown up bodies. Her shot goes wide. The only things she destroys are the window, two water glasses, and her final fragment of self-respect. Two large blue uniformed police arrive and lead her away. She doesn’t try to resist.
She doesn’t bother to make her cell comfortable with satins and silks. She sits on the bare hard bed staring into the middle distance. Her only companions are bottles of gin smuggled in by guards, ever hopeful of future favors.
Mary Lind and Frank are married on a day so foggy they cannot even see their hands join, so misty the future seemed nonexistent. They board a night train to New York and vanish into the future.
When Teresa is let out, she returns home, grabs a hammer, and smashes all the busts of Napoleon. On the street in front of her home, she piles canvases of the tiny emperor, douses them with gin, and lights a bonfire. The fumes are venomous. Residue from the oils bleeds into the grout between the cobblestones, permanently staining it the dark red of dried blood. For months, the lane smells of burnt hope and singed expectations.
The police are called. Maggie takes control once more, placating them with promises of liquor and love.
Teresa crawls into bed where she remains for two weeks, slugging gin, sucking hard sugared candies, and weeping. The spaces where portraits of Napoleon had hung are lighter than the rest of the walls and seem like squares into infinity. In every corner, remnants of the tiny emperor’s crumbled statues dust the heavy fringes of the rugs and tapestries like dandruff.
On the morning of April 28, 1932, Teresa is awakened by a throbbing in her lower jaw.
Doctor Stevens arrives. His neat mustache covers his upper lip like a fuzzy tea cozy. His emotions are buttoned tightly behind his herringbone vest. He is the repository of many secrets, but no confidences. Respected by many, loved by none.
From the doorway of Teresa’s boudoir, stronger and more pervasive than the eau de toilette with which Teresa doused her pillows, dresses, and person, wafts the sweet scent of rot. Beneath her left molar, armies of bacteria are rallying. Despite himself, the doctor’s mustache twitches. He has only smelled an odor this powerful once before.
It had been long ago, when he was just a boy. He and a friend, whose name has long ago faded into the sands of his memory, were exploring the rocky beaches of Marin. They had stumbled across a dead seal. Upon a dare, he’d poked it with a stick, puncturing the flesh. The recollection rises, viscous and real as pain. Enduring as death. Permanent as loss.
The remains of crust-less butter and cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea flow from beneath the good doctor’s mustache onto the red carpet like a rising sea. Fragments of Napoleon’s dust edges the vomit like sea foam. Dr. Stevens is ushered into a toilet and offered linens. He emerges red faced and shaking, covering his nose with a handkerchief soaked in eau de menthe. Even so, he can barely enter Teresa’s boudoir. His inspection is cursory, but he doesn’t need any knowledge to pinpoint the putrefaction, nor much training to extract the tooth. Its roots had decayed long ago. Once the thin porcelain veneer is removed, the bacteria explodes out of the cavity like a sulfurous geyser. Dr. Stevens staggers, gagging, from the room.
He presses a roll of gauze and a flask of oil of clove into Margareta’s hand.
“Press this on her gums twice a day,” he mutters. “Ought to be fine in no time… be back tomorrow.” He lurches downstairs, clutching his kerchief to his nose, never to return.
***
Nona sighs as she finishes the cloth. As Morta cuts the threads, they unravel, dye leaking out of frayed ends, staining the floor red.
***
Teresa died later that day, just before her twenty-ninth birthday. Her casket was closed.
Two days after Teresa’s death, Margareta packs her bags. She departs with no good-bye, leaving in the dark of night with one of the house’s frequent customers. Pamela and Sarah are alone.
After the funeral and auction, the house is still. Many of the girls have gone. Those who remain stay in their rooms. When they emerge for meals, they wear black and speak in hushed voices. When they go out, they hide their pretty, painted faces behind dark lace veils. The house is empty of callers, sound, and laughter.
Teresa’s gilt furnishings and personal belongings are sold at auction. Thousands of people flock into the house to marvel over the extravagance, but bidding is low. The scent of loss and sorrow is embedded in the folds of the thick, red, velvet curtain. No matter how hard Sarah scrubs, rubbing with a metal brush until her hands are raw, Dr. Stevens’ bile soils the carpet like a bitter omen. Some stains just can’t be removed.
Teresa’s jewelry box contains only a few paste gemstones. A small box of pawn tickets lay where her famous jewels had been.
Her pride and joy, the gold Napoleon bed, which Daroux had bought for one-thousand dollars, is sold to Sacramento County Sheriff Ellis Jones for one hundred dollars.
Pamela wanders downstairs to the bedroom, now bare of furniture, where Teresa died. She holds her breath, fearing and hoping to sense her mother’s ghost, to see her shadow, or hear her voice. She wants to feel the tickle of an intangible kiss. She longs for the spectral love she never possessed.
But the chamber is empty, haunted as only a completely vacant room can be, wiped clean of memory, love, and heartache. Teresa is gone.
Maggie buys the house for less than the cost of its contents. Teresa had become careless in her last years. Her friends and admirers are long gone. Maggie knows how to flash a fetching smile, and more, at the lawyers and bankers who control Teresa’s papers and property.
Pamela and Sarah are given eighty dollars. They move to a small apartment in the mission district. For two years, they eke out a living taking in laundry and sewing. Sarah washes and stitches. Pamela delivers the clothes. It is a quiet, dull life, but to Pamela it seems like heaven. She exalts in her liberty. Days she works with Sarah, nights she sneaks out and roams dark alleys. Spreading arms like wings, she dances down cobblestone streets. She counts stars when it’s clear and revels in the cool mist when fog shrouds the city.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: The loom never stops. Usually, the pattern it is weaving when the sun goes down is still weaving when the sun rises, but sometimes it changes in the night. A baptismal gown stretches into a ghostly hood. A wedding dress becomes a shroud. Morning metamorphoses into mourning. The fabric of the universe is unknown, even to the weavers.
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.