Epitaph Read online

  Johnny had been tedious on the subject, and he turned the conversation toward it whenever she tried to find out why on earth he expected her to raise his ex-wife’s child, just because Victoria was getting married again.

  Mr. Bilicke spoke again: “Word is, Holliday hates your . . . husband.”

  Always. That little hesitation. That tiny pause. Angry again, she was tempted to snap, “Well, that makes two of us!” but it would have sounded childish. “Kwand meem!” she said breezily in what she believed to be French. “It’s all the same to me!”

  Mr. Bilicke shrugged and went back to the front desk. Soon he was busy with a guest’s query about telephone service to the silver mines. “Just between the pits and the stamping mills, sir, but more wires are going up, and the Cosmopolitan is on the schedule for early ’81. Shall I arrange for a messenger in the meantime?”

  Their voices faded. Alone, homesick, overwhelmed by the shambles she’d made of her life, she began to cry again.

  “Oh, thank God!” she heard Johnny cry. “There you are!”

  He was standing in the doorway, his beautiful brown eyes moist with freshly relieved anxiety, that handsome open face a complex mixture of concern, dismay, and irritation. Coming close, he gripped her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, taking her in his arms.

  “Josie, honey, you can’t just wander around a town like this on your own. I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I’m s-sorry,” she wept, her head against his chest. “Really, I am. It was all my fault—”

  “Come home,” he murmured into her hair. “I’m sorry, too, Josie. Come home.”

  THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE WERE CROWDED, day and night. A thousand people must have seen them as he walked her back to the house. Soon the story would be all over town—Behan’s little filly got away from him again!—but he tried not to care. With an arm around her shoulders, John Harris Behan made his voice soft and urgent as they approached the door.

  “Just give Albert a chance, all right? Arguments scare him, honey. He’s been hard of hearing since he had the measles, so he can’t always make out the nice things people say to each other. He just hears what they say when they’re angry and upset.” Which meant that Al had heard most of what Johnny Behan and Josie Marcus had said to each other since the boy arrived last night. “Honest, Josie. Al’s a good kid. And none of this is his fault. He’s just a little boy.”

  Finally, she shrugged and looked away. It was assent if not enthusiasm. He was willing to settle for that.

  “I have to get back to town,” he told her. “There’s a meeting at the marshal’s office. But we’ll go someplace special tonight. Would you like that? How about a show? Or dancing, maybe. What d’you say? Let’s go dancing tonight!”

  She smiled, just a little, but when he kissed her, she kissed him back.

  ALBERT WAS WAITING INSIDE, his little face pinched and pale. He must take after his mother, Josie thought, for she saw none of Johnny’s vigor in the child.

  She had hardly closed the door when the boy asked, “Are you going to be my stepmother?” Before she said anything, he told her, “I’ll ruin it.”

  It was more like a prediction than a threat. The boy sounded sad, not belligerent.

  “My real mother doesn’t like me anymore,” Albert confided with the blaring voice that partly deaf people had. “She got fat when she had me, so Dad stopped liking her. She’s getting a new husband, and she says I’d just ruin things again. She sent me to live with Dad so I’ll ruin things for him instead.”

  She stared at him, her mouth open. What kind of mother would say things like that to her own child? No wonder Johnny divorced her! Who’d stay with a woman like that?

  Distracted by a sudden craving for something sweet, she opened a cupboard to see what she had on hand. “Do you like cake, Albert?” She looked over her shoulder. “Of course, you do! Everybody likes cake.”

  He nodded but warily, not sure why she was asking.

  “Let’s bake a cake,” she suggested. “Which do you like better: chocolate or vanilla? Or molasses, maybe, with currants? I know a good recipe for that.”

  They settled on a marble cake and had a good time together. Assembling the ingredients, tasting the batter, managing the woodstove. Later they took turns with the whisk, beating the buttercream frosting until their arms ached.

  They’d each had two big slices when Albert asked, “Can I call you Mamma?” Eyes on hers, waiting for her answer, the little boy licked a finger and pressed it onto the crumbs to carry every last morsel from his plate to his mouth.

  She wanted fame. She wanted to travel the world. She wanted adventure and excitement, not a boring, ordinary life—that’s why she’d run away from home! Then she met Johnny Behan. He was dashing and handsome, important and prosperous. A man who might be governor or even president one day. For a while she was sure she wanted to be his wife, but now . . .

  Albert was still waiting.

  “You have a mother,” she reminded him.

  “I knew you wouldn’t like me,” he said. Stoic. Resigned.

  “Of course I will! I like you already.”

  She didn’t quite mean it. Albert could see that, and his lonely skepticism made her warm to him.

  “All right, listen. You shouldn’t call me Mamma, but . . .” She put her mouth close to his ear so he could hear her speak quietly. “I have a secret name.”

  She reared back to see his reaction, which was wide-eyed.

  “You have to promise not to tell anybody,” she said sternly. “You can only use it when we’re alone together. Promise?” He nodded. Once more she leaned in close to say a single word, then sat back with a conspiratorial smile.

  “Sadie,” he whispered. “I get to call you Sadie.”

  They were children, the two of them, without a tiresome adult to say, “No more sweets! It’ll spoil your supper.” So they celebrated with more cake.

  An hour later, she was emotional again and frighteningly queasy. She’d begun wondering if the butter had gone off and was making her sick when a much worse possibility occurred to her. Unbidden, a dismal future rose up. A squalling baby. A sad little stepson. A thick waist. A husband who liked slender girls. Exactly the kind of dreary, domesticated life she’d fled.

  Face in her hands, she began to cry again.

  A LIFETIME LATER, when she was a stout old woman, all by herself for the first time in nearly fifty years, she would bury her face in one of Wyatt’s shirts and weep hour after hour. For Wyatt. For herself. For their blighted lives.

  It was all gossip and slander and libel—newspapers calling Wyatt a killer, a cheat, a bunco man. And now he was gone, and she was the only one left to defend his good name. If only she could get Mr. Hart to make a movie about Wyatt! William S. Hart was a big star, and he admired Wyatt so. He could set the record straight.

  “My husband was a hero,” she told the nice man who always visited on Sundays. “None of it was his fault.” Or mine either, she thought. “All I did was love him. Never be sorry for loving someone, Albert.”

  “I’m John Flood,” the man reminded her, “not Albert Behan.”

  Wiping her eyes, she snapped, “Of course you’re not Albert. Albert’s only eight. I know that.”

  “I’m sure you do, Mrs. Earp.”

  “Mrs. Earp!” she muttered, staring resentfully at ringless fingers. Then she shrugged. “All the world’s a stage. That’s what dear Mr. Hart would say. You just have to learn your lines. I helped Wyatt learn his after the gunfight.”

  She giggled then—a naughty little girl remembering sailors—and put a flirtatious hand on the nice man’s arm.

  “It’s not lying,” she told Albert, or John, or whoever he was. “It’s just pretending. That’s what Papa said.”

  A THOUSAND SHIPS

  NOW, WHAT YOU GONNA TELL YOUR MUTTI?”

  “I was helping you at the bakery.”

  She was rewarded with fond eyes.

  “That’s my girl!” her
father declared. “I can always count on my Sadie.”

  She wasn’t quite seven when they started sneaking off to the Brooklyn docks together. Her father never explained why Mutti shouldn’t know, except to say, “She got enough worries. Why give her tsuris?”

  For a while, they stood with their backs against a warehouse wall, trying not to get in the way of swearing sailors and sweating stevedores. The docks were scary and exciting. There were rats and stray dogs. Hopeful new immigrants and hopeless old women with painted faces. Casks of stinking whale oil. Huge coils of rope almost as thick as her father’s arms, which were heavy with muscle that came from kneading big batches of dough.

  “Why not?” her father decided. “We go take a look. No harm in that.” He scooped her into his arms, grunting, “Oy, you getting big,” and carried her out to the end of the central pier. There he turned slowly on his heel, Sadie clinging to him like an organ grinder’s monkey.

  They were surrounded by ships tied up at the dock or anchored out in the harbor. More ships than she could count, though she’d recently counted all the way to fifty-three before she got bored and quit.

  “Look at all them masts!” her father cried. “Like a forest, eh, Sadie?”

  “What’s a forest, Papa?” She was a city child, after all.

  “You seen trees, right? Well, you gotta imagine places big as Brooklyn—bigger, even—with nothing but trees and trees and trees.”

  After her father explained it, she could sort of imagine a forest. Except rigging didn’t look a bit like leaves. Rigging looked like scribbles.

  “You want a good heavy ship for passage around the Horn,” he told her as they started back along the pier. “Maybe you don’t want so big like the Roanoke there, but for sure you want bigger than the Germanic. Now, look at this one.” He lifted his chin toward a middle-sized ship. “She’s the Hosea Higgins. Ships is always she, even if they got a man’s name. Ja, for sure . . . The Hosea Higgins. That’s the ship you want for a voyage around the Horn.”

  She thought he meant a horn that you could blow until a few days later, when he took her to a store that sold used books. The owner knew her father and asked, “How are you finding Mr. Darwin’s tale, Mr. Markuse?”

  Her father talked to the shopkeeper awhile. Then he asked to use the store’s globe so he could explain to Sadie about continents and how Cape Horn was a place down at the pointy end of South America.

  “Now, here is Posen, back in Europe. Who knows what country? Sometimes Poland, sometimes Prussia. That’s where your mutti and me was born. And here is Brooklyn in North America, where Nathan and you and Hattie was born.” With his finger, her father traced a line all over half the globe. “This is the voyage of the Beagle.” It sounded important, the way he said it. “But a ship like the Higgins, she ain’t gonna go so far. She gonna go from Brooklyn here . . . south across the equator. Down the coast of Brazil and Argentina . . . around the Horn, then up-up-up past Chile . . . cross the equator again . . . up some more and then you step off in San Francisco. Four months, it takes. Well, six, maybe. If the weather is bad.”

  Twice more that week, they went back to watch the Higgins discharge her California cargo of wine, smoked salmon, and whale oil. When the ship began to take on westbound freight, her father scooped Sadie into his arms again. “Why not?” he said. “We just go introduce ourselves.”

  The ship’s captain was bearded and gruff. “This is no place for a child, sir! State your business!”

  Her father set Sadie down on the Higgins’s deck and approached the captain alone. A few minutes later, he beckoned Sadie to come closer. “Captain,” he said, “I like to introduce you my daughter, Josephine Sarah. Sadie, say hello to the captain.”

  She dropped a little curtsy like a girl she saw in a penny play once. “I am very pleased to meet you, sir.”

  The captain’s eyes widened and warmed. A smile lifted his beard.

  I did that, she thought. I made him nicer.

  The two men moved off a few steps, speaking in low tones again. She craned her neck to watch the sailors up in the rigging and discovered that they were looking down at her, for little girls were rare as rubies in their world and Sadie was an arresting child: small, neat-bodied, with pale white skin and curly black hair and dark brown eyes, her new front teeth coming in nicely. She curtsied to each of the sailors, one after another, turning all around, until she staggered a little, dizzy. And the sailors didn’t just smile. They clapped for her and nudged each other and cheered.

  She was glad when her father took her back to the Higgins the next day.

  “Our secret,” he reminded her. “Mutti don’t gotta know. Just you and your old papa, eh?”

  This time she had to hang on to the hem of his coat. He couldn’t hold her hand because he was carrying big stacked trays loaded with samples. Rye, pumpernickel, and soft white bread. Yeast rolls and three kinds of muffins. Cream puffs. Almond macaroons. Crisp strudel. Seven-layer tortes.

  This bounty was presented to the captain of the Higgins, who shared it with his officers. Grinning, their lips white with powdered sugar, they moaned their admiration for Hyman Markuse’s excellence as a baker. Their eyes ate Sadie up, too.

  When the trays were empty, nested and tucked under one arm, her father took her hand and they walked, bent-kneed, back down the gangplank.

  “Now, what you gonna tell Mutti?” he asked.

  “We took samples to a new customer.” She felt special to be trusted.

  “Good girl. Gotta keep the story straight!” he declared. “Always easier when the story’s true . . .”

  IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME they’d skipped out.

  Silently, Sophie Markuse bundled her three children against the January cold and hustled them down the narrow tenement stairs. Nathan was the oldest and he was used to it, but even little Hattie knew what it meant when their mother woke the children before dawn. You had to be very quiet, so as not to alert the landlord. And it wouldn’t do to wake the Irish boarder, who was sleeping off a drunk on the kitchen floor. He paid for meals in advance and would want his money back.

  Hy already had their bags loaded on a wagon waiting at the end of the block, where the rumble of wooden wheels and the squeal of rusty axles wouldn’t give the family away. It wasn’t until the driver pulled up by the wharves that Sophie realized this was no ordinary flight from overdue rent.

  “Nayn, Chayim! Nayn! Ich vil nit gayen!”

  “English, Sophie! We’re Americans now! Don’t worry, everything gonna be fine,” her husband said, mixing encouragement with urgency as he coaxed her off the wagon. “Don’t make a tzimmes out of it. You gonna upset the children—”

  “I’m gonna upset them? Me? I’m the one who’s dragging them off to the end of the earth? Nayn, Chayim! Nayn!”

  In the end, Hyman Markuse gave up arguing and simply pulled his weeping wife toward the Hosea Higgins. The three children followed like ducklings, their breath forming little white clouds in the first pink light of day.

  A busy crew wasmaking ready to leave port. “Mr. Marcus, take your family to your cabin!” the captain shouted. Pointing at two of the least soused sailors, he ordered, “You and you, stow their bags below!”

  Looking up at his father, Nathan asked, “Mr. Marcus?”

  “I gonna explain later,” Hy promised. “The cabin’s very cozy, Sophie. You gonna see. Everything gonna be all right.”

  Eyes closed, Sophie was shaking her head—no, no, no—but she cried out in fright when a sailor stumbled against her, dropped two valises, and apologized with the glassy-eyed solemnity of a drunk trying very hard to show how sober he is.

  “You promised me, Chayim!” she wailed as her husband guided her into the bowels of the ship. “You promised! I told you I don’t wanna go!”

  Sadie tried to take her little sister’s hand, but Hattie wouldn’t let her.

  “Papa musta lied,” Hattie muttered, eyes on their weeping mother’s back. “Papa always lies.”


  WITH HIS FAMILY ASSEMBLED in their dark little cabin, Hyman Markuse lined the children up in front of the berth they were to share—packed head to toe, like tinned sardines—for the next 158 nights.

  Nathan, eleven, was the reason Hy had offered to marry Sophie. She might have hoped to do better than a Brooklyn baker, but at twenty-seven, her chances were dwindling, and with a baby on the way, Hyman Markuse was better than no husband at all. A miscarriage was next, and a stillbirth followed: tragedy piled on irony. When Sadie finally came along, it seemed a miracle. Doll-like and beautiful, she took Hy’s breath away. “You spoil her, Chayim,” his wife always said, and that was true. He could deny Sadie nothing, for she was lively and demanding, a terror when thwarted and adorable when indulged. Hattie was next. Her mother’s daughter. A dour little soul, wary and mistrustful. Glaring at him now, as if daring her father to speak the truth.

  “Children,” he announced, “today we leave for to seek our fortune in the West! We gonna sail round the Horn to a new home in San Francisco, and our passage is paid, complete, ’cause I gonna be the ship’s cook. From this day, our family name gonna be Marcus. We gonna have a new American home in a new American city, and we gonna have new American names when we get there.”

  Nathan made a noise with his lips and left the cabin.

  “Just like your father!” Sophie called after him. “Leave! That’s the solution to everything!” Red eyes cold with judgment, Sophie declared, “You oughta be ashamed, Chay.”

  “It’s Henry now, and I told you, I gonna pay your brother back.”

  “Teaching your own children to lie!”

  “Whose business is it, we change our name a little bit? You changed your name when you married me. Was that a lie?”

  “It’s not just the name, Chayim! It’s—”