Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

script proceeding unbroken from the last line of one notebook to the first line of the next.

      The transcribed manuscript was read by Doctor Buddell, who corrected my errors of reference or sequence and gave valuable advice on selecting excerpts from the letters which amplify and complete Mei-li’s story. Doctor Buddell also suggested the title, in which the term “confessions” is used in its traditional denotation of a spiritual autobiography.

      Dorothy Bryant

      Berkeley

      1986

      THE CONFESSIONS

      1875–1906

      My father’s full name was Parker Stanton Murrow. He was born in New York in 1850 to a family I know nothing about. The only communication from them came through lawyers in the form of a small monthly check. Attempts to get more money or to contact the family would, the lawyers said, cut off all payment. My father neither mentioned his family nor endangered his income by trying to contact them.

      I learned what little I know about his family from news articles written in the 1920s, attempts to discredit me by identifying me as the “illegitimate daughter of the black sheep of a prominent New York family.” These articles mentioned my father’s expulsion from Harvard, a brush with French police investigating the smuggling of national art treasures, and hints of scandal involving the daughter of a New York state legislator. At twenty-five he became what the English call a “remittance man,” paid to keep away from the family that had given up on him.

      My father once said that he ended up in San Francisco while trying the new transcontinental railroad, riding on to the end of the line, never intending to stay. If what he said can be believed (and often it could), he was well received by rich San Franciscans when he came west in 1875. They all knew his name; his reputation had not yet caught up with him. He must have been very handsome and charming. Even during my childhood, when he was already middle-aged, women’s eyes followed him. He had good looks, good manners, and some erudition. Despite his early expulsion from college, he could recite passages of Homer in Greek and knew the best literature in English.

      Four years after his arrival he was on the brink of marrying a young heiress when she learned he was living with a Russian woman who had already borne him two daughters, my half-sisters Erika and Sophie. The engagement was broken, and the doors of San Francisco society were, as the saying goes, closed to him forever.

      He could have done worse. He could have married the heiress if he had been more clever in hiding his mistress Tatania and his daughters. Other men did so. But he was carelessly proud of his little girls, especially the older one, Erika, and let himself be seen with them. The trouble with my father was that he took the virtue of living moment by moment—an admirable and difficult virtue—and turned it into a vice, never anticipating the collision of contradictory acts, never taking responsibility for consequences.

      It is not even true that he never took responsibility. He supported Tatania and their two daughters with whatever was left from his gambling. He rented a three-story house for them in the flush of early winnings. Sophie insisted she remembered its glittering chandeliers, though she was hardly more than an infant when his winning streak ended and they were forced to leave its splendor.

      It was Tatania who knew Hunters Point, that peninsula of a peninsula jutting from the southeast bay shore of the City into the Bay, where houses were cheap and food almost free. She was the widow of a Russian fisherman who had left her in a rented shack near the drydock while he steamed up the coast to Alaska, returning every six months, until the time he failed to return—lost, boat and all. Tatania made my father sell the jewels, the horse and carriage, and other trappings of their briefly opulent life. She bought a small woodframe house at the southern tip of the Point. Sophie’s early memories there, she once told me, were only of the bitter quarrels between her mother and father. A year after they moved into that house, Tatania disappeared. No one ever heard from her again. But there is evidence that she did not desert her family lightly. Before leaving she had the house put in her daughters’ names so that their father could never again gamble away their shelter.

      So in 1884, at the age of thirty-four, my father was left with two girls, ages seven and six, in a weatherbeaten cabin by the Bay, forty minutes by cable car or horse-drawn wagon from downtown San Francisco. It was a year that both Erika and Sophie remembered well. My father decided to devote himself to his daughters. He resolved to teach them Greek and Latin in addition to what they learned in the schoolhouse a mile away. Erika learned quickly, already showing the talent of the brilliant woman she became. But Sophie could not grasp a scrap of what he force-fed her. He lost patience, shouted, Sophie wept. Whether from natural ineptitude or from the shock of this early forcing, Sophie remained barely literate even in English throughout her life.

      Of course, Father’s resolution was, like the rest of his life, inconsistent and erratic. When the girls came home from school, he was just rising. If his hangover was bad, they might be sent out to play and to figure out what to do about dinner. After a meal of sorts—on the best days assembled from the vegetable garden of the Portuguese or Greek or Italian family down the road—he and Erika read Greek or did algebra. By nine the girls were in bed and Father was on his way out, seldom returning before dawn. Sometimes days passed before he came back. Near the end of that year, he hired a woman to care for the girls. She lasted only a couple of weeks, infuriated by their disobedience and his absence, especially on the day he was supposed to pay her.

      In early 1886 he brought my mother home. I heard the story from him so many times after her death that I can describe the event as if I had witnessed it.

      On a cold, rainy night in January he left the Palace Theater at midnight; then stopped at a nearby saloon where the men were talking about the latest riots against the Chinese, erupting again only that afternoon. The general mood was convivial approval of any means to “drive out the dirty little heathens who take work away from honest American labor.” According to my father, he left in disgust (he always felt superior to the men he drank with), walking down Market Street, turning at Third Street, hurrying to catch the last car home.

      At this time of night on this street he usually walked near the curb, away from the doorways where a drunken derelict or sick prostitute might shelter, or quite possibly a desperate thief. But this time, because of the rain, he walked closer to the sheltering buildings. Something made him turn toward a doorway—a movement, a rustling, a light moan. He saw what looked like a mound of discarded clothing, a shimmer of silk. Then he heard another moan.

      He meant to go right on but took another glance and after that glance took a step closer. Such a small mound, a child perhaps. He bent over the body, then gasped in recognition. It was Dilly, one of the girls from the Jade Palace, a place he frequented in Chinatown. The Jade Palace catered to white men, offering drinking, gambling, and girls. Dilly was unconscious, her clothes torn, the side of her head bloody.

      He knew at once what had happened. The mob that had swept through Chinatown had probably destroyed the boot factory above which the Jade Palace operated. The next morning’s newspapers confirmed his guess. The whole building had burned to the ground, killing three unnamed Chinese men. How Dilly had made her escape remained a mystery. According to my father, she always insisted she remembered nothing after the first shouts of the mob.

      He hesitated, but only for a moment. He could not leave her there. If a drunken, roving gang of white men found her, they might kill her, after making her wish she was dead. If the police found her, they might treat her just as roughly before throwing her in jail. He reached down and picked her up. At first she struggled, eyes closed, like a sleeping child in a nightmare. “It’s me, Dilly, it’s Mr. Murrow. You know me, Dilly. Parker Murrow.” She opened her eyes, stared, and was quiet.

      He carried her for half a block. Then she signed to him that she could walk. It had stopped raining. He stood her up. She brushed her skirt with her hand. Then he offered his arm, “and we walked, like any lady and gentleman on Saturday promenade, to the cable car on Mission. And I brought her home.”

      That was how my mother came to keep house for my father and his two daughters. I know almost nothing about the first