the very light change. A saloon stands on every street corner, four per intersection, sometimes more if another proprietor has got the story up. Daniel has never seen so many saloons and resorts crowded together in such proximity. Music blares from doorways, inviting him in. Men guffaw and shout. Glasses bang on bars or crash together in toasts. The stink of gunpowder is infused with the powerful smells of whiskey, tobacco, roasting meat, and an odd indefinable sickly sweet scent.
A few women drift in and out of the saloon doors, but mostly linger on street corners. Daniel approaches a young girl who skips gaily down the pavement in a sailor’s costume, a navy and white topcoat over bloomers, striped stockings, and little button boots. A jaunty straw boater is pinned over her yellow curls. She sidles up to him and curtseys charmingly. He gapes at the heavy white powder over her grainy jowls, her thin masculine lips beneath the mouth drawn on her face in red paint. She frowns at his startled look and skips away, tittering.
The porter laughs nervously. “Here’s as far as I go, mister,” He unceremoniously plunks the trunk down and strides off.
Daniel glances around. Something dangles above him, draped over the telegraph wires. Lace and ribbons, straps and stays. A woman’s undergarment? On the telegraph wires? His eyes travel from the garment to a window where a lovely young woman sits. Half-dressed, her hair disheveled, she leans out, seizes a strap of the corset, and reels in the undergarment like a hooked fish. But she does not attend too closely to her task. No, her eyes—are they blue?—are trained on him. He looks over his shoulder, to the right, to the left. She throws back her head and laughs, her bare throat throbbing.
Heat rises in his face, under his collar, beneath his belt.
He drags his trunk a step further. Damn that porter, abandoning him in the middle of nowhere. He finds himself in front of a huge house with square-cut bay windows, angular battens, and geometric decorations. The house is painted a conservative pale gray with bronze green trim, sable brown doors and vestibules. He should think it a perfectly respectable house except for the young woman at the window.
Daniel checks the address. What luck! The porter didn’t abandon him in the middle of nowhere, after all. He climbs the stairs and pulls the door bell of Number 263 Dupont Street. The bell chimes within. The young woman at the window exclaims and scampers down from her perch as he stands at the front door of Miss Malone’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen.
3
Miss Malone’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen
“Jar me, I’ll not have my Fourth of July cooked,” says Jessie Malone to the eager gentleman as he negotiates with her in the downstairs smoking parlor. “And on a Thursday, which, I’ll have you know, is my most magnetic day.”
“Magnetic day?” says the gentleman, feigning surprise. Jessie knows very well that his wife, who also consults with the famed spiritualist Madame De Cassin, surely possesses a most magnetic day herself. You don’t blow it in on a magnetic day. Still, if Mrs. Heald was more of a slut and less of a shrew, Mr. Heald might not be speaking so eagerly with Jessie right now. “What the devil is your ‘magnetic day’?”
“Sure and it’s the day when I speak with the sweet spirits.” The bell chimes. “Ah! There’s someone at the door.”
Mr. Heald twirls the graying tufts of his tremendous mustache and smirks. How transparent men are. Plotting how he can convince her otherwise. He would not dare broach the topic of the increase in the civic contribution he delivers for her to certain persons in the mayor’s office. Not when he wants to dip his wick. The biz is the biz, no less and never more when it comes to Mr. Heald. Sure and Mr. Heald is such a dear friend from the days when she was the toast of the town and the special gal of the Silver Kings.
“Now, Jessie. To hell with the spirits and your magnetic days. To hell with whoever is at the door. To hell with the Fourth of July.”
“Mr. Heald! I thought you were a patriot.”
“You’ve had your breakfast and your outing. Now I want to go upstairs like we agreed. Did we not agree?”
Jessie smooths the feathers of the pressed hummingbirds decorating her Caroline hat. She brushes dust from the pink flounces and bows on her bodice. She spies a clot of horse