The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 39
I returned to my dressing room and changed, a cold iron taste in my mouth.
There are things a woman must do, my sister used to say.
A woman owns nothing in this world, Ursula used to say.
Roar, the mountain lion used to say.
Brand was waiting outside, beneath my name on the theater marquee, near a large touring automobile. He held the door, I climbed in, and he drove us all of three blocks. The auto was the point, obviously, for it was an unseasonably warm night and we could have walked as easily. “That’s quite a machine,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, as if he’d invented it.
It was a fine restaurant with stucco walls and white tablecloths. The dinner service was ending and chairs were being put up for the evening. I followed Brand through the main dining hall to a small private room with formal settings for two. All around were marbled pillars and red curtains.
Waiting for us in the room was a side of security beef who introduced himself as Willard. He was holding a folder.
“Willard’s a retired Pinkerton,” said Brand, “and the head of my security. I told him you were the kind of woman who would want documentation, so he prepared this dossier.”
Willard wouldn’t meet my eyes and, with a nod, backed out of the room.
“I was hoping we could eat first,” Brand said. “I have just come from a meeting about some pending labor trouble that upset my stomach, and if you don’t mind, I should at least like to pretend that you are eager to dine with me.”
“Oh, but I am,” I said, and sat next to him, the two of us on one side of a long table, like a king and queen receiving official visitors.
For the next hour, waiters swarmed us. We were served a French red wine, a fine local beefsteak, scallops from Seattle, and gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel. Brand told me about the theater scene in Spokane, about the battles he was having with a union organizing the men he would prefer remain unorganized, about the ministers who wanted to tame the city he would prefer stay untamed, and about a spineless mayor who seemed to think a modern city could be constructed only of parks and churches.
He was surprisingly good company, and I told him so, though not the surprising bit. I said how nice it was to be in a city that employed actual chefs and not the blind syphilitic camp cooks who had tried to poison me in Montana.
Our plates were being taken away when Lem Brand asked the headwaiter to hold our desserts a moment. “You’ve been kind,” he said to me, “and you have waited long enough.” Then he reached over and opened the file on First Ursula.
Her real name was Edith Hardisson, he said. She was forty-six years old. She was not the youngest child of an East Coast stage family but the oldest of six, daughter of a clerk and his wife from Independence, Missouri. Her parents were members in frightful good standing of a devout chapter of Reorganized Latter Day Saints, and they betrothed her at fifteen to a widower and pig farmer from their church, but Edith ran away before the wedding.
Mr. Willard could find no trace of her for the next six years, until a twenty-two-year-old Edie Hart was arrested at a labor camp brothel in Minnesota. There were also arrest records in Virginia City, and Cripple Creek, Colorado, which was where she met Joe Considine, who first put her onstage as a saloon singer and, later, turned her into Ursula the Great.
“She told me she was from Philadelphia,” I said, “that her father was an acrobat who cracked his skull falling off a tightrope.”
He smiled. “She told me that her father was a cowboy in Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling Wild West show and that he impregnated her French mother, and when she turned sixteen, she came to America to find him.”
I could see on his lumpish face that he was as disappointed in this banal report as I was, and I reminded myself that even if he had been shabby in not returning her telegrams, Ursula had once thought enough of the man to share his bed.
I paged through the report myself: After she left Reno, First Ursula took the train to Denver, where she apparently went to the offices of one “Putnam and Gold Traveling Circus.” The circus was performing that week in Iowa, so she inquired of the circus booking agent about purchasing an animal she’d once worked with, a performing bear named Boryenka. The booking agent explained that Boryenka had been dead for a year, put down by his trainer when he began to go blind. The booking agent didn’t recall Ursula being overly upset by the news of Boryenka’s demise, but they spent some time reminiscing about the bear and agreed that he was a rare talent, the booking agent saying the animal had grown so adept at the banjo in his last years that his facility rivaled that of a human player.
Edith spent another week in Denver, Willard wrote, eating and drinking until her money ran out.
I kept flipping pages, Brand narrating as I read.
“Finally, when she had nowhere else to go, she went back to Independence,” he said. “It was not a pleasant homecoming, and she stayed only two days. Her father is deceased, and her mother and sisters rejected her. Now she is in Des Moines, Iowa, at an SRO hotel, working as a waitress and”—here Brand cleared his throat—“augmenting her income in ways I asked Willard not to include in this report.”
The report fell to my lap. How far you have fallen. Your ruin. For