And where was Molly at this same time? Young Molly, having been released by her friend Carrie with strong words to the effect that she must go home and rest, was now in that very place and doing that very thing.
As it so happened, several other characters in our story found themselves, by either coincidence or design, in a different place still: the Fatted Pig Public House.
Here sate Jane Higgins and the man who sought that very after noon to win her favour, and decisively so: the outwardly charming and prepossessing Mr. Tom Catts, who was funny, and demonstrably endearing, and eager to see their two bumpers of old Madeira refilled until Jane’s head was a-swim in a swirling pool of compliments and blandishments the likes of which she’d never heard in all her three-and-twenty years upon this earth. Close by and watching the two with the studied intensity of a drowsy infant was Jane’s brother, a warm pint of porter clapped between two moist palms. As the room had become mist and haze for the increasingly alcohol-fuddled Jane, it was all that, as well, for Lyle Higgins, although, having grown used to living with his senses dulled and degraded, he had a stronger impression than did his sister of what was up and what was down, and what was up was this and no mistake: his sister Jane was become recipient of the most concerted form of love-making by a man who, unbeknownst to Jane, oozed dishonour and ill purpose from every pore.
And whatever was Higgins to do about it? Catts had been the first man ever to pay Jane more than casual notice. And were not disreputable overtures better than no overtures at all? It was a puzzlement, and he would sit with his porter and puzzle it out even after the two left the pub, directed for someplace he knew not.
Lyle Higgins would sit for upwards of a full minute. And then…
“Begging your pardon, lads,” said Higgins, after decamping from his chair and tottering with tangled steps to the table next to that previously occupied by his sister and her spurious admirer. “Did you happen to overhear any of what was said by the two what was just here?”
“Aye,” said the older and slightly more sober of the two young men. “What is it you’d be wanting to know?”
“Whither he was taking her. That’s the thing.”
“And why, pray, would you be wanting to know such a thing as that? Have you a claim upon the girl?”
“It depends on how you mean the question. She’s my sister.”
“Ah. Now that is a horse of a very different colour,” said the older man. “So I’ll tell ye. There was mention of the emporium. Would you know the place?”
“Indeed I would.”
“Is the man up to no good?”
“I don’t know it for a fact. I only know that I’ve crossed paths with his like afore.”
“Then join us for one last pint as be a send-off to rescue your sister from a fate unknown.”
Higgins bethought himself of the merits of the proposition and concluded that one drink more—strictly for the purpose of lubricating his steps in service to his mission of potential rescue—could do little harm, and perhaps very much good.
Jane Higgins and Tom Catts walked in the High Road with slow, careful steps to mask their having just spent the last two hours drinking intoxicating beverages at a public house (though Jane’s incapacitation was far greater than her companion’s). “You say you have a brother?” asked Catts, as Jane placed her hand upon his arm to steady herself.
“I have a brother, yes.”
“And he lives with you in the back of the family shop?”
Jane nodded.
“Yet you know with certainty he won’t be there at this hour.”
“With certainty I know this.”
“And how is it, Miss Higgins, that you are so confident in this belief?”
Jane stopped in her place. She looked at Catts with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Because that was him sitting at the table by the old clock—the one drinking alone and slipping into his wonted state of daily hibernation. He’ll not show up until all the chickens have gone to roost, he being the one confused cockerel that sometimes forgets where it even lives.”
Catts laughed hardily. “Miss Higgins, you are perhaps the most delightfully clever young woman I have ever met.”
“And is cleverness my only attribute?”
“Not by any measure, my dear woman. Allow me to enumerate your other fine traits when we are finally alone.”
The two went along thusly. But unbeknownst to Jane, they did not go along unobserved. For Jane was, in fact, being most closely watched by her friend Ruth through the window of a mutton pie shop. Only moments before, Ruth had slipped guiltily inside that establishment after bidding adieu to her friend Pardlow following their after noon tea. Though she had imbibed three cups of the tasty beverage, yet it was a most gastronomically unsatisfying hour and a quarter, for there was naught to be had of a victual nature—not even a fragment of a caraway-seed biscuit or a crumble of an old gooseberry scone. Thus a much-famished Ruth now stood alone in a dark corner of the shop gobbling a crusty meat pie with ravenous shame, and being glad the proprietor was nearly blind and did not identify her, until such point as that familiar gait, that instantaneously recognisable tall and gangly presence abroad, caught her eye.
Ruth betook herself to the window to get a better look, and there-through saw the thing for what it was: her friend Jane being led away by one who appeared to revel in her lurching debility. In that frightful moment Ruth knew there could be nothing propitious to be gleaned from their companioned procession in the lane. On the contrary, Ruth believed Jane to be careening down the path to dire consequence.
The well-being of her friend being more important to Ruth than the last three or four bites of mutton pie, she fled the shop with all due haste and bent her hurried steps to the doctor’s infirmary to enrol Carrie in her mission of rescue (for any confrontation effected by Ruth singly would be misinterpreted by its recipient as officious intrusion in the customary Ruth Thrasher manner).
There was one other familiar to the reader who was at the Fatted Pig. This one sate drinking grog and a great deal of it, which was not a good thing, since the man of reference was one who had pledged himself to absolute temperance: Molly’s father, Michael Osborne. Osborne was drinking to steal himself away from thoughts of Sylvia Hale and from his ineffective attempts to minister to her in the wake of the tragedy of her house catching fire from a toppled candelabra. It was right in his mind that he should do so, for not only did he know the good woman and felt her to be his friend, he also considered himself to be a legitimate member of the healing profession. Yet when he attempted to offer assistance to her through the herbs and other unconventional treatments he had learnt during his years of itinerate practise, he was insolently driven from the premises by the town doctor and made to feel small and unworthy in his adopted line of work.
And as Osborne took stock of his life and tallied the reputable paths he might have taken, which had eluded him, and faced the sad verity that he was in fine neither healer nor the best provider for a wife and child who had died in his deficient custody, and was not by any means the best claimant upon the heart of anyone, let alone the woman he now wished to marry, and was not nearly the prosperous and sober-headed father he should have been for his daughter Molly, he sank into a pit of despair and self-doubt, and then, by and by, into a state of wretched self-loathing, which caused him to drink ever the more and to lose all sense of himself.
In her dream Molly found herself in the middle of a field of daisies, or was it pennywinkles or marigolds or sunflowers? Yes, it was great sunflowers, bent like genuflecting Mussulmans from the weight of their Brobdingnagian seeds. She wandered amongst the flowers and did not know if she should be happy in their crowding presence or affrighted, for there were a good many of them and they choked her path and rose up to her own height. And there seemed traces of something lurking behind them—creatures of some mysterious sort. Lurking, Molly wondered, or merely abiding? Was there a human form to the creatures? If so, were they known to her?
Dreams are never unambiguously revelatory, and sometimes they are not revelatory at all. So Molly was happy to have done with this one when into the field intruded the sound of a hand rapping upon a door. There being no doors in the out-of-doors, Molly found in this incongruity reason to waken herself. Once she had come fully to herself and realised the knocking had not suspended, it became incumbent upon her to rise and discover the identity of the visitor to the rooms she shared with her father over the stationer’s and prints-seller’s shop (for there was no maid or footman to do it, and of her father’s whereabouts at the moment she had not the faintest idea).
With no need to dress, for she had lain down upon her bed without bothering to take anything off or to put anything on which was more appropriate for retirement, Molly plodded sleepy-eyed to the door that communicated with the public corridor and found, when she opened it, the young man who had touched her heart as no man had ever done before.
The two fell into one another’s arms without the exchange of a single word. The door was shut, and all the world that had no place or claim on this moment was shut out with it.
Chapter Seventeen
San Francisco, April 1906
The waiter swept his arm before him—silent indication that Cain and Ruth had their pick of all the tables in the empty tearoom.
“That sunny spot over there,” suggested Ruth, “right next to the door to the balcony.”
The waiter nodded and led the couple to the table Ruth had selected. But Ruth didn’t sit down. Instead, she stepped through the open door. The balcony commanded a generous view of Dupont Street all the way down to Bush. Cain joined her.
“How did you find this place?” Ruth asked, her gaze drawn to a fish stand and the two men haggling stridently in front of it. This being a Saturday afternoon, Chinatown’s main thoroughfare was bustling with boisterous, clamorous activity.
“I come here now and then. It’s popular with some friends of mine.”
“The men with whom you work at the advertising agency, or a different set?”
“A very different set. The proprietor of this place is happy to entertain the patronage of Occidentals for whatever their purpose might be. The Plague’s been over for some time now, but non-Asians—as a rule—still can’t find the nerve to venture back into this part of town.”
Ruth stepped back into the room and sat down. Her eyes wandered about the room. She counted herself among those who seldom came to Chinatown, though she’d heard that it had many interesting restaurants and tasty noodle shops. The room was gaudily ornamented in the Oriental style. The walls were painted bright blue and adorned with vertical Cantonese legends in silver and red. The tables were partitioned off from each other by large screens of elaborately gilded ebony, a material echoed in the tables and stools themselves, each stool inlaid with a slab of speckled marble. The gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room was strung with tinsel, which glittered even in the suffused light of its subdued gas jets.
“It seems to me,” said Ruth, running her palm along the contour of the smoothly polished table, “that this is one of those places where San Franciscans come who want very much to be left alone.”
The waiter handed Cain a menu and took a few steps back. “And you’d be totally correct in that assumption,” said Cain, his eyes now lowered upon the menu.
“What happens in those curtained-off rooms over there?” asked Ruth with casual curiosity.
Cain glanced up. “Opium smoking, for the most part, but other things take place there too—human activities that aren’t much spoken about in polite company. Do you mind if I order for the both of us?”
“Not at all.”
Cain signed to the waiter that he was ready to place his order. “A pot of Black Dragon, if you please. And we’ll have a platter of the pickled watermelon rinds and candied quince.” Turning to Ruth: “Do you like dried almonds?”
“More than pickled watermelon rinds, I think.”
Cain laughed. “Today you are being adventurous, whether you like it or not.” To the waiter: “And the dried almonds. Thank you very much.”
As the waiter receded from the room, two young Occidental men retreated on his heel. They had just emerged from one of the curtained rooms. Both were dressed in bright and unconventional colors, the more pavonine of the two fumbling with the tying off of a large purple cravat, which had apparently been removed and was now being restored to his ensemble.
Ruth arched an eyebrow. “Do you come here often?”
“Not as often as some.”
“Well, Mr. Pardlow, your secret is safe with me, as is anything else you may wish to tell me this afternoon—including whatever it is that has necessitated our coming to your hideaway in the first place.”
Cain, who had been distracted by the sudden emergence of the two young men, now purposefully returned his gaze to the woman seated across from him. “I’ve made a decision, Miss Thrasher—one which obviates the need for the two of us to do or pretend to do anything.”
“Have you arranged with a few of your Barbary Coast associates to have certain individuals we know shanghaied? I hear there’s a lot of that going on these days, and it could prove very advantageous in our present situation.”
Cain hooted with laughter. “Now just what do you know about shanghaiing?”
“I read, Mr. Pardlow.”
“That, Miss Thrasher, is undeniable fact.” Cain settled back in his chair and laced his fingers. “My decision has to do with me, Miss Thrasher. I’m leaving San Francisco—moving to New York. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s only been my fondness for Pat Harrison that’s kept me here for so long. But it’s sheer lunacy for me to continue to maintain a professional and fraternal association with three men who utterly repel me, all for the, the, the tenuous privilege of sustaining a friendship with Mr. Harrison that is—if I may be honest—one-sided and totally unfulfilling. So I will fly, Miss Thrasher, and I will start my life anew. And you’ll be happy to know that I require nothing from you but your valedictory good wishes.”
“Which I’m most happy to give you. But what about Will Holborne’s threats to expose you if you don’t play out that diabolical game of theirs?”
“If he should follow up with those threats out of some diseased form of vindictiveness—if he, to be more specific, intends to divulge certain of my proclivities to my father’s opponents in his race for state senate—then so be it. Dad’s given me nothing in all these years that I couldn’t have just as easily received in one of the city’s most miserly orphanages. ‘Everyone by his own bootstraps!’ That’s been the precept his four children were expected to live by. So what I now do with my own bootstraps should be of no relevance to him whatsoever. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to come to such a simple conclusion.”
“So just as we’re becoming good friends, you take yourself three thousand miles away.” Ruth made a comical moue with her mouth. “What arrant inconstancy!”
“Then come with me.”
Ruth’s eyes grew big.
“You want to write,” he elaborated. “I want to write. So let’s the two of us move to New York City and see if we can make a go of it.”
Ruth didn’t respond. She was thinking the proposition over. She was, in fact, giving it very serious thought while trying with all her might to tame the feeling of sudden, bursting euphoria that accompanied it.
She was thinking of it still when, after saying good-bye to Cain and upon her walk home, she spied her friend Jane and the advertising man named Katz headed in the direction of Higgins’ Emporium. Both seemed drunk, and Ruth didn’t like at all the way he was touching her in the bright light of day. Not wishing to face the situation by herself, Ruth quickly turned herself around and headed in the opposite direction—hurrying in a near trot to nearby St. Francis Hospital, where Carrie could be found attending her mother.
“Now this place is the real goods!” pronounced Tom as he followed Jane into the Higgins’
back parlor. “Homey, but with a personal stamp. Say, nice touch: that floor vase with the what’s-it grass and the gilded cattails.”
“It’s pampas grass. Thank you. My mother was very fond of cattails.”
Tom resumed his impromptu appraisal of the room: “The only thing missing is a wheezy old parlor organ and a lumpy old easy chair for Papa Bear to smoke his pipe and browse the Examiner.”
“We had an easy chair—Dad’s easy chair, but we decided to sell it after he died.” Jane trailed her finger through the layer of dust that had collected on the surface of a side table. “Lyle and I don’t come into this room very often. There are just too many memories of him in here.”
Tom, ignoring the opening Jane had created for him to say something appositely consolatory about her late father, threw himself with bodily irreverence upon the plush rose-colored upholstery of the sofa that was Jane and her brother’s pride—a Victorian construction of beautiful, unblemished mahogany, marked by delicately carved swirls and scrolls. The sofa easily dominated the cramped little room. If Tom had shown even a passing nod of respect for it, Jane would have shared that it had also been her father’s pride; indeed, he had bought it at an estate sale and could have slapped a high price tag on it, but preferred, instead, to keep it in the family parlor and out of the showroom altogether.
Tom stretched out his arms expansively to each side and began to trace the carved curls with lazy fingertips. Then his fingers flexed themselves into an unambiguous “come hither” gesture. Though she felt flattered to be so keenly beckoned, Jane didn’t budge from her spot. Because this was the most advantageous place from which to fully absorb the picture put before her: the handsome Tom Katz, guest in her very own home, laughing and lounging in complacent manhood, his expression of desire for her careless and unambiguous, his legs spread ridiculously apart as men are prone to do when they wish to make statements about themselves which cannot be said aloud.