Vera Carol Edgarian (great novels of all time txt) 📖

gave a great Sugarman sigh. “As to Rose, I should think we’ll know anytime.”

She faded in and out—two more days. I stayed with her, rubbing witch hazel into her hands and feet. She woke briefly, rolled her battered face in my direction, and said, “Hurry.” Before I could answer, she drifted away.

Pie shook me as I dozed in the chair. “V, Bobby’s waiting.”

“How do you know his name?”

“They’ve been by, Bobby and Monster, every day. Sometimes twice a day,” she said. “You have to give him an answer.”

“Tell him I don’t care.”

“I can’t tell him that.” Pie twisted her hands nervously. She couldn’t hide the hint of a smile.

“What, he’s your friend now?”

“I think we ought to let him stay,” she said with emphasis. “Tan agrees.”

“Does he, now?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve changed your mind.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “now that I’ve seen him a bit.”

“All right,” I said.

“That’s it: All right?” Pie sighed with relief. “Good. I’ll tell him.” Pie paused before adding, “V? When was the last time you put a comb to your hair? You look a fright.” She didn’t mean it unkindly. “I could sit awhile,” she went on. “I’d wake you the minute—”

“Go on, Pie. Tell your boyfriend he can sleep with the horse.”

That night—always nighttime for the madam—when she woke, I managed to dribble half a cup of soup into her. When it was obvious that she was in pain, I gave her some spoonfuls of morphine.

“What happened,” she asked.

I told her about the quake and the fire. Then I told her about Morie and the house on Francisco Street, and Tan with his curbside kitchen, and the city, all but disappeared. Speaking it, it seemed impossible that so much had transpired on the first day of the quake, and all the days since.

Her one good eye remained closed; the other, of course, was bandaged. She was so still, I was certain she’d fallen asleep.

“What happened,” she said.

I thought: Ah, she wants to hear what happened to her. So, I told her of The Rose and how I’d found her in the tent of the dying.

“Vera,” she said, “is that you?”

Those next few days, I stayed with her. The morphine, it turned out, loosened Rose’s tongue. And if I gave her a little extra, so that she’d answer some of my questions, well, so be it. My hunger was vast.

For hours, she rambled, saying things she would never say—things no virgin should hear. Things like: the duke came down, they all came down—a woman’s privates she called turkey wattles; penises were sticks or things.

Despite her delirium, Rose remained duty-bound, a working girl checking her lists. She sighed and fussed over the pending orders of crab and beef and shrimp—who would receive them? And the weekly deliveries of liquor; the silk stockings and robes, potions and creams, the mountain of laundered sheets and towels. There were the sheepskin condoms to order, the diaphragms made of vulcanized rubber; the house-made douche they called salad dressing, a mixture of lemon, lavender, and white vinegar.

Rose talked of her clients, their names, their predilections, their wives. But always she circled back to the duke and money, her two great loves.

It was my job to follow her through the bramble, and if every so often she winced, I gave her another spoonful of the morphine, chased by a dribble of tea.

From what I could stitch together, Rose and the duke had started sleeping together as a professional arrangement in their youth. When they were no longer young, they became lovers, confidants, investors, friends. Rose had seen the duke through four wives and seven children, five of whom survived. It seemed the duke had a baby in every port. Early on, she’d taught him to apply powder to his face to hide the pocks, and she’d seen to the deflowering of the young duke, the older duke’s son. That the duke loved both men and women didn’t seem to bother Rose; up, down, in/out, sex was sex that Rose provided.

The duke had a particular yen for sailors and rough boys who worked in the stockyards. Across the years, it seemed, Rose had made a handsome profit catering to her friend’s appetites.

But what of my mother’s heart? I wondered. What of her heart?

That night of Caruso, she and the duke left the opera and rode through the streets, the city as shiny and great as it had ever been. When they arrived at The Rose, the duke made a strange and rare request: he wondered if he might see some of the back rooms where the girls lived in their off-hours. Experiences, that was the key, my madam mother always said: you give the client what they cannot get elsewhere, and you have them in your pocket. Well, what the duke was asking for, Rose didn’t want to give, any more than a magician wants to show the shitty cage where the rabbit-in-the-hat sleeps. She never allowed clients to see where they kept the makeup and menstrual rags; the toothbrushes and hair crimps.

But the duke was special and it had been a grand night.

She showed him the pink-tiled bath, its rows of tubs and toilets, its cubbies—one per worker, where they stored their towels, potions, and pumice stones. Overhead, the laundry lines were festooned with the whores’ just-washed stockings and bloomers.

The duke ran his hands along the women’s drying underthings, their filmy flags of nirvana.

“Rosie, Rosie,” he said, titillated, as she knew he would be.

Two flights up, they made their way to her private rooms. There the duke asked his old friend if, on this most celebratory night, she’d permit him. For old times, eh, Rosie?

Pshaw. She confessed that she hadn’t allowed a man in years. Even so, it was a special night.

Afterward they dined on what was known, in the parlance of The Rose, as the Full-Barrel: courses of beef, fish, poussin, and potato caviar, champagne and strawberry roulade.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when the duke suggested that they continue on to