Free Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler Page B

name on its guestbook, Charles Crocker the first to enter its dining room.
    Only recently the gaslamps in the restaurant had been replaced with three hundred twenty electric lights. In the suites themselves, major improvements were rumored to have been made in the bathrooms. If a ladylike opportunity presented itself, Lizzie would like to see one of those bathrooms.
    Plus, the Putnams were rich and charitable and would invite more of the same. Contact with the dead would put all present in mind of their immortal souls. It was the best possible setting in which to ask for money. The Brown Arkneeded more beds, the children coats and shoes. In point of fact, Lizzie had a clear duty to attend.

    The evening of inquiry took place on the very next Saturday. Outside, a chilly rain fell, and the Putnams had kindly offered their carriage. Lizzie paused to remove her gloves and pet Roscoe, the closest of the horses. She had driven Roscoe herself as a girl. Blind in one eye, so you had to use a single rein or he wandered to the wrong side of the road, but utterly unprovocable, with a gait like cream. The rain left shiny streaks on his coat. His neck was warm and wet on Lizzie’s hand, and he steamed like a teakettle in the cold.
    She climbed into the carriage and the comfortable heat of Mrs. Putnam. Mrs. Putnam was an ample woman, dressed against the cold in a fashionable sealskin sacque and a new black straw hat. “Erma’s had her fourth. A little boy,” Mrs. Putnam told Lizzie straight off, hugging her so tightly she left the scent of almond soap on her sleeves. Erma was the Putnams’ only child, and everyone imagined Lizzie was fond of her. Certainly they’d played together often as children. But since Erma had married and moved to Sacramento more than fifteen years before, Lizzie had hardly seen her.
    “Six and a half pounds. Little Charlie John. The mother blooming. Father bursting with pride.”
    “Never you mind, now, Lizzie,” Mr. Putnam said, when Lizzie didn’t mind in the least. Any marriage that necessitated a move to Sacramento was nothing to envy.
    Mrs. Mullin was seated opposite Lizzie. She was a gaunt woman with dark, deep-set eyes; it was hard to look at her face without imagining her skull. Her hat was moreopulent but less smart than Mrs. Putnam’s. Emerald wings spread over the crown as if her hair were a nest on which a headless bird brooded. “We’ll see you with your own babies yet,” she told Lizzie.
    “I have sixty-two babies at present.” Lizzie kept her tone light.
    “That’s the way to look at it,” Mr. Putnam said. He turned to his wife. “Our Lizzie has sixty-two babies!”
    Lizzie didn’t often mind not being married. She’d had offers. Few women in San Francisco went entirely uncourted, and none of those had yellow hair and financial prospects. Dr. Beecher, a friend of her father’s, had taken a fancy to her when she was just a girl. Strange how people would think better of her now if she’d only accepted him then, and him a man with a coarse manner, who smelled of brine, but dirty, and who stared at her as though she were something to be killed and eaten. Cats fled when Dr. Beecher entered a room.
    Even now, her father’s fury over her refusal was an awful thing to remember. She’d spent five whole weeks confined to her bedroom under Baby Edward’s reproachful eyes, and she suspected her mother had sent her there for protection as much as punishment. In the ten years between her mother’s death and her father’s, Lizzie learnt what a shield her mother had been.
    But even in the midst of his rage, Lizzie had never reconsidered. And she hadn’t known about copulation then; she’d merely wished to avoid dining at one end of a table with Dr. Beecher at the other. He was still alive, and some girl even younger than Lizzie had married him. She couldn’t bear to think of it.
    When she was in her thirties, Lizzie’s body had developed a pronounced restlessness, a physical ache that