Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

11.

MARRIAGE, n. – The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

Aboard the ferry across the Bay, and on the train to St. Helena, Bierce and I discussed the murders.

“Senator Jennings murdered Mrs. Hamon in order to rid himself of a threat of exposure and disposed of her after the manner of the Morton Street murders,” Bierce said. “I believe Captain Pusey knows it, knows more than we do in fact, but he has his own springs of action.”

“His spring of action is how to get a hook into someone with money to fork over,” I said.

“I believe Pusey’s game has less light than shadow.”

I started at the word “shadow.” What did Amelia mean by her “shadow”? Surely she could have no connection with Morton Street. Her father had been on the Comstock, and the connection of his name with a conspiracy called “the English shuffle” fretted me like a pebble in my shoe. The idea of a “shadow” caused chills of anxiety to wash over me. But she wouldn’t have written of it so lightly if it had been serious.

“It is the shame of the Nation that we do not have a Chief of Detectives we can trust,” Bierce said in a bitter voice. “A mayor we can trust. A governor. A president! If our lives must be led in distrust and contempt of all who govern us, it would be well to accept the fact. It is my burden that I cannot. It is an affliction to me that a moth-eaten old malefactor such as Collis B. Huntington keeps a hand in my pocket, and another on my reins. It is unbearable!”

The Bierce two-story cottage faced south among pine trees that had dropped a brown carpet of needles. On a veranda were bicycles, a porch swing and a litter of baseball bats and mitts. Two boys of ten and twelve, in short pants and striped baseball shirts ran out to dance around Bierce, followed by a red-haired child in a blue jumper, who flung herself into her father’s arms. She was received with the first real enthusiasm I had seen Bierce evince toward another person. There was no question from their reddish fair hair and neat countenances that Day and Leigh were his sons, little Helen his daughter.

Mrs. Bierce came out on the veranda, wiping her hands in a frilly apron. She was a dark-haired, smiling woman considerably younger than Bierce, with a classic straight nose, a long face and intense bars of eyebrows. She and Bierce greeted each other coolly. I liked Mollie Bierce immediately, maybe because of Bierce’s cynicism about marriage and women. The older boy, Day, followed Bierce to the veranda with a perfect mimicry of his father’s stiff-backed military gait.

Mollie Bierce’s mother, Mrs. Day, was inches shorter than her daughter, with graying hair and Mollie’s straight nose turned into an aggressive beak, a ram of a chin, and an upper lip wrinkled like pie crimping. She had a way of moving toward a quarry splay-footed, as though in preparation for combat, halting too close for comfort and extending chin and nose like a challenge.

If Bierce and his wife tolerated each other, Bierce and his mother-in-law did not. Mrs. Day demanded to know why Bierce had not brought Mollie down to the City for Senator Sharon’s reception. She complained that Mollie had no piano on which to practice.

This conversation took place on the veranda, Mollie Bierce rolling her eyes apologetically at me. The three of them moved inside the house, where the clamor of Mrs. Day’s accusations continued. I set my bag down, took off my jacket and invited the boys to a game of catch.

We spread out into a broad triangle on the pine needles and flung the ball into each other’s mitts. Leigh was not as strong as his older brother, who powered the ball with a nice acceleration of his wrist. Helen watched from the veranda, seated in the swing which she pushed with her feet against the rail, her red hair a bright stain on green canvas.

At the supper table, with Bierce at the head, Mollie at the foot, her mother beside her and the children and me distributed, Mrs. Day said, “Will you say grace, Mr. Bierce?”

“A toast!” Bierce said, rising. He held out his iced-tea glass down-table toward his wife:

“They stood before the altar and supplied the very fires in which their fat was fried!”

He was quoting himself.

His wife flushed, as though he had paid her a compliment.

“I suppose that is all the attention the Good Lord will receive at this table,” Mrs. Day said. “But you will come to church with us tomorrow, will you not, Mr. Bierce?”

“No, madam, I will not.”

“We will attend,” Mrs. Day said, trap-mouthed. “Your wife, and Day, Leigh and Helen. But you will not accompany your family?”

“I am the sworn enemy of organized piffle, madam,” Bierce said. “Including Sunday-scholiasts and Saturday pietaries.” He served up meat patties and gravy, potatoes and peas, and distributed the plates.

“And you, Mr. Redmond, are you also an enemy of religion?”

“I am Roman Catholic,” I said. My response was as unsatisfactory as Bierce’s. Mrs. Day appeared to be girding for sectarian battle.

“Momma,” Mollie Bierce said.

“Is Roman Catholic like Mikey Hennesey?” Day wanted to know.

“Yes, dear.”

“It is as honest a collection-extraction system as any protestant Bible-thumping,” Bierce said.

“Dr. Grove is a fine man!” Mollie Bierce said gently.

“I’m sure he is, my dear,” Bierce said. “And well deserving of your tiresome panegyrics.”

“Dr. Grove has a red nose!” Helen chirped.

“Helen!”

Bierce gazed at his wife with eyes in which I could discern no affection.

“And you are a journalist also, Mr. Redmond?” Mollie Bierce said. Her darkly pretty face regarded me with her gentle smile. I thought of the constant diplomacy that must be called for, with her mother and her husband. There was a brother, I knew; the third of what Bierce termed the “Holy Trinity.” I thought of my father and my brother Michael and the bitterness of interfamilial contentions, more intense and thus more savage than those with no blood connection; like the ferocity of Federals and Confederates murdering each other on the Southern killing fields.

I said I was an apprentice journalist, learning what I could from The Hornet’s Editor-in-chief and Tattler. I was always uneasy praising Bierce, for I knew he was absolutely aware of flattery.

Mollie asked what I was writing now.

I thought it best not to mention the Morton Street murders. “I have been inquiring into the Mussel Slough Tragedy,” I said. “There is some historical evidence that needs to be reconsidered.”

“Those farmers were no better than Communists,” Mrs. Day proclaimed, ramming her jaw out at me. “When this nation no longer respects property rights we are on the road to perdition.”

Bierce regarded her calmly and held his peace, comfortable with his conviction of the Railroad’s pervasive villainy. Now we knew that an enforcer from Virginia City, a connection of Nat McNair’s named Klosters, had been one of the sheriff’s deputies acting for the SP at Mussel Slough, and that the trials of the settlers in Circuit Court had been decided by Judge Aaron Jennings in every instance in favor of the Railroad.

We managed to finish supper without more hostilities. I had time alone with Mollie Bierce when she was showing me to the spare bedroom, arms filled with pillows and a quilt.

“I wish Mr. Bierce could relax more when he is here,” she said. “He is so busy in the City. When he comes home he brings his busyness with him, and by the time he can relax it is time to go back to that teeming life again. It can’t be good for him, Mr. Redmond.”

She bent to place the pillows and the folded quilt on the bed, and plump the pillows, bending to her work and pushing strands of dark hair back from her face.

“He is busy in many good causes, Mrs. Bierce,” I said.

“I know that, Mr. Redmond.”

After breakfast Day and Leigh badgered me to play ball again. This time I set up double-play practice. I lofted the ball or bowled grounders, to Leigh, who pegged to Day at second base, who hurled the ball to me at first, whereupon I tossed to Leigh again. The boys yelled with excitement as we pitched the ball around with increasing velocity.

Bierce watched from the veranda. I thought he wished he were a father who could play ball with his growing sons, but he was not. He was a closed-in man with an affliction of hating oppression, fraud and sham, and a talent for expressing his indignation in print. He would never be a good father, nor even a decent husband, whether or not he was able to relax from the demands of the teeming City.

Little Helen came outside and leaned against his leg, and he went back into the house with her. When Mollie Bierce called to the boys to dress for church, there was a good deal of complaint.

Mollie Bierce, Mrs. Day and the children trooped off to their Sunday duties, and Bierce and I went for a walk on the road that looped up the hillside above the town. I was in my shirtsleeves from playing ball with the boys, and Bierce left his jacket off as well, his concession to country relaxation. He carried a stick and batted at the weeds along the margins of the road, which narrowed and steepened as we mounted. It was a bright day with puffs of cloud drifting in from the coast.

“This is Larkmead,” Bierce said, flourishing the stick ahead. “Lillie Coit’s estate.”

Every San Francisco fireman knew of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, although her years as a fire-belle were before I had come to San Francisco. She loved firemen, had proved it as Lillie Hitchcock and continued to prove it after she had married Howard Coit. The grateful fellows of Knickerbocker #5 had awarded her one of their pins.

I couldn’t fault her for wanting to wear a fireman’s helmet. I remembered once as a child so loving a pair of copper-toed boots my father bought me at Gus Levenson’s Store in Sacramento that I took them to bed with me. Maybe it was something of the way that Lillie Coit loved the firemen of San Francisco’s Engine Companies.

It occurred to me that Bierce had been looking for her when he led me up this trail into Larkmead, and there she was, in a clearing with a horse trough, standing beside a splendid bay with his muzzle in the trough. She wore a yellow-brown dress of many layers and flounces, and a broad hat heaped with feathers. She was a rather stout little woman of about Bierce’s age, with a round, friendly brown face which lighted up as she swung toward us, waving her riding crop.

“Halloo Brosey!” she called to Bierce.

They embraced. I was introduced. The coldness that had hardened Bierce’s features within the bosom of his family had melted in Lillie Coit’s company. The two of them sat on a downed log, gossiping and laughing, while I paced the clearing gazing out over the treetops into blue distance. I was not included in their conversation, and I felt ill at ease as I patted the horse and paced some more and seated myself and looked down at my shoes.

Bierce waved me over to them.

“Listen to this,” he said to me. “About Beau McNair,” he said to Lillie Coit.

“He isn’t Nat’s son,” she said. She had a lisping way of talking, with an earnest set to her round face. “I was a sweet young thing myself at the time and didn’t pay much attention. I’m sure Carrie was carrying child when she married Nat. He adopted Beau.”

“If he was not the father, who was?” I asked. Jimmy Fairleigh had told me this, and I did not see what it could have to do with the Morton Street slashings.

She shrugged. “Old mysteries!”

“So she bore Beau in the City?” Bierce said.

“Mammy Pleasant would know.”

“Mammy Pleasant!”

“I think that woman had to do with just about every birth on Rincon Hill or South Park at that time,” Lillie Coit said. “I’d bet a dollar she midwifed Carrie.”

Mammy Pleasant was a quadroon woman, very light complected, who had worked for many of the “instant aristocrats” of the City, recruiting colored servants for them, who, it was rumored, then became her informants in a blackmail scheme. She had been a procuress and the proprietor of notorious houses of assignation. She was also rumored to deal with unwanted children, and to supply children to couples who were barren. Mammy Pleasant was often to be seen about the City, a tall, upright figure in black with gold hoop earrings and a big bonnet or a black straw hat tied on her head with a scarf. She was reputed to be rich.

I had the sense of the Morton Street murders swelling and expanding to involve the whole City of San Francisco.

Bierce and Lillie Coit discussed when Bierce would next visit St. Helena, and I moved out of hearing range again. Then Bierce was assisting Lillie onto her horse. She bade him farewell and walked the bay over toward me, bending down.

“Brosey says you were a firefighter.”

“Up until last year,” I said.

“What company?”

I told her.

“A fine outfit! I’d be pleased if you’d come visit me at Larkmead.” It was an invitation. She raised her eyebrows interrogatively.

“Well, I—” I was shocked to the core. I focused on the Knickerbocker #5 pin on her bosom.

Lillie Coit laughed, waved her riding crop at Bierce, and the bay trotted out of the glade.

Bierce and I walked back down the trail together.

“Did she invite you to Larkmead?” he asked.

I nodded.

“She takes what she likes from life,” he said. “I admire that woman.”

“I saw that you do.”

“When falling into a woman’s arms be sure not to fall into her hands,” he said.

I was still shocked at the frankness of Lillie Coit’s invitation.

“She is a true aristocrat from an old Southern family, not one of our instant dukes or duchesses,” he went on. “Nor is she one of the female slaves who enslave their masters. She is one of the few women I know who transcends her gender.”

Descending the trail to the house it was as though, stride by stride, Bierce’s face returned to its usual coldness, the failings and demands of the female gender the subject. He indicated the steeple of the church, visible through the treetops, with his stick.

“The femininnies will bore themselves to insensibility every Sunday morning on the chance of getting into the ‘Upper House’ for eternity,” he said.

“My mother likes the sociability,” I said. “She sees her friends and has a chat with the priest.”

“The church is the warden of the institution of marriage, in which the monogamous female seeks to imprison the polygamous male,” Bierce went on, pompously.

I was afraid he was going to confide in me the unhappiness of his own marriage, but he was no more able to reveal his personal problems than he was to play catch with his sons.

“Throughout her marriage the bride continues to demand of her captive husband the same ardor he was able to summon up during the days of their courtship,” he said, slashing his stick at the weeds along the path. “She will insist on the childish inanities that were the language of their betrothal. But her lover died on the wedding night.”

Bierce was lecturing on the defects of marriage and the female nature at a moment when I considered Amelia Brittain the brightest star of her sex, and her gender itself the glory of creation.

The churchgoers were already at home, and dinner was presently served. Today the argument was over the Elite Directory of San Francisco, a social listing in which the names of Mr. and Mrs. Bierce appeared. Bierce was contemptuous of such a list, but Mrs. Day insisted that he and Mollie Bierce take advantage of their social prominence.

Bierce had more to say on the subject of gender and institutions on the train and ferry back to San Francisco.

And he said, “I know I am a bitter man, Tom. And I know I shock you. What is there to blame? The fact that I saw too much of the nature of man in a war that had no meaning, only a resolution, and men I helped to slaughter were as good and as bad as men who were slaughtered at my side? It has affected my nature, I know. I will never be a happy man. I can only hope to be an effective one.”

“You know you are that,” I said.

“That remains to be seen,” Bierce said.