Frog Music: A Novel by Emma Donoghue

Author:Emma Donoghue [Donoghue, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime, Family Life, General, Historical, Literary
ISBN: 9780316324687
Google: cfLiAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 031632468X
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

If you’ll only get a mustache …

“You reckon I pine for what you fellows have?” asks Jenny.

He sings on, getting shriller.

You will suit all the girls to a hair,

If you’ve only got a mustache.

“Oh, trust me, I could glue one on if I thought it was worth a dead rat,” says Jenny, stepping up and bending one wing of his waxed mustache.

Arthur’s fist comes up fast, but Jenny’s already ducked. She dances out of range, her eyes exuberant, and then the bouncers are herding the two women toward the door.

One week later, on the fifteenth of September. Blanche is scuttling away from the building that used to belong to her. Slow down, she tells herself. It seems that no one’s planning to shoot you today. Arthur’s gone, she doesn’t know where, but he’s abandoned the City, that’s what Ernest said just now, in a tone too wounded for him to be lying.

She passes a whole gang of pigtailed workmen carrying planks and ropes. Low Long’s bunks, she realizes, as she turns her head and sees the carpenters filing through the door of number 815. Their denim overalls remind her of Jenny.

Old lodgers gone, Low Long told her a quarter of an hour ago, new lodgers coming. She wonders where the old lodgers scattered to when Low Long evicted them without notice, the Corfu men and the Irish and Chinese, the two Scotswomen and Gudrun; have they somewhere to lay their heads tonight? And Blanche, their stylish, top-of-the-bill landlady, is no different from them.

P’tit. His the one face that she can hold on to. Jenny’s dead but P’tit’s only lost. Ernest spoke—in the apartment just now—as if P’tit was alive, as if that went without saying. Blanche has no reason to trust him, but her years of familiarity with his every tone tell her to believe him. So she might get her baby back if she can somehow fix what she so clumsily broke this morning by blabbing about Arthur’s guilt. All Ernest seems to require of her is that she walk into that inquest tomorrow and untell her story—whitewash Arthur’s name, persuade the jury that everything she told Detective Bohen about vengeful macs was just the improvisation of a hysterical female. Easy! Blanche la Danseuse has never been afraid of an audience.

The heat’s taken on the solid quality of a sponge. Thunder faintly rolls, and she keeps thinking she feels a drop, but it’s only sweat squeezing out of her skin. Surely the weather must break soon and grant San Francisco the mercy of a storm? The cool mists for which Fog City is nicknamed must be hovering out there in the Bay, waiting to reclaim their peaks. So close, so close, like ecstasy just out of reach when you’re riding the wrong man …

Where is Blanche to go? This toast of the town lacks the cash even to rent a room. Jenny would laugh. (So many things made Jenny laugh.) Blanche is the vagabond now. No home, not a

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