“It was crazy. He loved that painting, couldn’t stop looking at it, but he hated the lady, his mother. Hated, like Bierce said.
“Hated his brother too. That had everything he’d had took from him.
“He was fixated on that mansion of Nat’s. He’d found a way to break in and he’d pretend it was his, pretend he was one of the aristocrats from up there. Steal flowers out of the vases and bring them to the saloon. I didn’t realize he was even crazier than I was about getting shat on by those people.”
“You and Captain Pusey were old friends,” I said.
“You could call it that,” Jennings said, with the floppy grin.
“I didn’t think much about the boy’s brother coming back and all that, but he was stone-set loony on his dispossession,” he went on. “I never thought of him being after Carrie—to kill her. I didn’t think about him being the Morton Street Slasher until the second one, and by that time I had some concern of my own in the matter. And he went after that skinny daughter of Jim Brittain’s, I understand.”
I said that was true, although it had been kept out of the papers.
Senator Jennings shook his head in dismay.
“I guess the Morton Street slashings will never be solved,” I said.
“Won’t be solved because of me, I can promise you. What about Bierce? “
“He made a promise to Lady Caroline.”
“She is good at that,” he said, eyes still closed. “Well, I fucked her before she got to be a grand lady; got her in a family way, she told me. That was something! She wasn’t so much of a fuck, but by God she was surely be-you-tee-full!”
He lay with his eyes closed, cheeks puffed out as he breathed. “The best,” he said, “was a little Chinee girl, couldn’t’ve been twelve years old.” He held up the first joints of his index and second fingers pressed together in a tight crack. “Like that,” he said. “Just like that! Wonder where that little nonpareil is now?”
“Probably dead,” I said. “When they come down sick they put them away.”
He puffed out his cheeks some more and asked me to prepare another glass of laudanum in water. When he had drunk it, he sat there with his head sunk on his chest and his eyes closed.
“Nobody ever figured out your Daddy was Eddie Macomber,” he said softly.
“No, they didn’t,” I said.
He snored.
The nurse came in to tell me it was time for his nap.
I called on Senator Jennings twice more, to find him lower each time. I tried to find Mrs. Payne, George Payne’s adopted mother. I had no help from Mammy Pleasant, who had nothing to gain from me. I made inquiries around Battery Street, I asked so many people if they knew of her that I got tired of hearing my voice speak her name. I never found her.
Senator Jennings died before there was a judgment in the second trial.
A couple of years later Amelia Sloat telephoned me at the Chronicle. She sounded breathless. I sat in the dusty, noisy cubicle where the telephone was, the earpiece jammed up against one ear and my mouth close to the mechanism’s mouthpiece. I closed my eyes to savor her voice in my ear.
“Will you do me a favor, Tom?”
“Anything.”
“This is very difficult for me,” she rushed on. “Tom, you must understand, I love Marshy very much. And he loves me very much. But I want to have a baby, and he wants me to, but he had an illness when he was a young man that left him unable to—to father a child. But because he loves me he has given me permission to have a child that will be someone else’s child but that we will raise as our own. Do you understand, Tom?”
I was being summoned instead of Mammy Pleasant.
I didn’t mention old ironies.
We made arrangements to meet in one of the private dining rooms upstairs at the Old Poodle Dog. That was of course an evening I will not forget, no more than Jimmy Fairleigh had been able to forget Caroline LaPlante—filled with wine and laughter, but more tears than laughter, and seriousness of purpose. Arrangements were made for a second meeting a month hence, if it should be necessary.
It was not necessary, and in January of the following year I received an announcement of the birth of Arthur Brittain Sloat. On it was written in a familiar bold hand, “Thank you,” without a signature.
I saw the notice of Sloat’s death two years later in the obituaries of the Chronicle. He was survived by his widow, the former Amelia Brittain, and his son, Arthur Brittain Sloat. Mr. Brittain died about a month later and I figured that Amelia might have moved to town to be with her mother.
I walked down the steep block of Taylor Street from California Street past 913 three different times before I caught a glimpse of the boy. He was playing on the porch where once the Slasher had attacked his mother, a tow-headed child in a black and white sailor jumper running and banging things together, that I finally saw were pots and their lids. He ran and banged, and was silent and invisible behind the railing for periods, until a nurse in a blue uniform with a white doily on her head came out to bring him back inside the house. I didn’t catch sight of Amelia.
By then I was married myself.
So is time the lock and occasion the key that does not always fit.
In the society columns it was noted when Amelia Brittain Sloat left for New York with her son.
Belinda Barnacle was married in her eighteenth year, but not on her eighteenth birthday, to a young fellow named Haskell Green, who was a boarder at the Barnacles’ establishment. Green had a job as a coal salesman for the Cedar River Coal Company. He was “a real go-getter,” Mr. Barnacle assured me. I sent leather-bound, gilt-edged fine editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as a wedding present.
Senator Sharon died before Sharon v. Sharon came to its conclusion. Knowing he was dying, he vowed that his estate would expend every penny he owned fighting Miss Hill’s outrageous fabrications. “Why, she would be the highest paid whore in history,” he was reported to have said. “The grandes horizon tales of Paris are cheapskates compared to her. I hear they charge a thousand francs a night. If Allie wins out, she’ll be netting about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per.”
On hearing of Sharon’s death, Bierce wrote in his column in the Examiner: “Death is not the end; there remains the litigation over the Estate.”
The State Superior Court ruled in Sarah Althea Hill’s favor. Mrs. Sharon was awarded $2,500 per month as alimony, and $55,000 for counsel’s fees. Mrs. Sharon promptly went on a shopping spree. Unfortunately the Federal Circuit Court was still to be heard from. There would be no more shopping sprees for Miss Hill.
I knew that Bierce had been moving from place to place. He spent some time at Larkmead with Lillie Coit. He lived briefly at the Putnam House in Auburn, and in a boardinghouse in Sunol. My wife and I called on him in Oakland, where he had taken an apartment. She was intimidated about meeting the man about whom she had heard so much, but Bierce was in a fine mood. He had a new job.
We sat on a sofa in the small, hot room, while he brought us tea and ranged before us, gesturing as he told the story of his employment, the same Ambrose Bierce, with his fair mustache like a pair of sparrow’s wings, and his curly, silvering hair, and his cold eyes beneath shaggy brows. He wore a checked suit and a high collar and tie.