The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

  She waited for him to tap or speak or do something, but he didn’t. Finally he looked up at her, and Lily took a short breath. The face Martin had lifted to hers looked waxy. His lips were red, too red, and it took her a moment before she understood that he was wearing makeup, not the drugstore variety, but stage makeup—a light-colored, heavy pancake—and that his mouth was touched with lipstick. She stared at him, and taking her pad from her pocket, she asked him what he wanted.

  Martin did not tap. He did not stutter, and there was no music in his voice. “I want what I always want, Lily.”

  The ease of Martin’s speech alarmed her, and she thought, Something’s terribly wrong.

  In the kitchen, Lily said to Vince, “Martin Petersen’s wearing makeup.”

  Vince peeked over the kitchen doors and said, “Well, I guess he’s come out of the closet. I knew there was something of the fruitcake about that guy.”

  “That not it,” Lily said. “He’s not stuttering either.”

  Vince shrugged. “Well, there’s no law against weirdos, Lil’. This is America. We grow ’em fast and furious.”

  Lily nodded. Ed’s gone, she said to herself. And then she felt it, the grief she hadn’t felt last night. She had a sudden urge to run to the bathroom and start bawling in there, but she stopped herself and walked out of the kitchen.

  The truth was that Martin had attracted very little attention in the cafe. If Mike Fox, Harold Lundgren or the others had noticed Martin’s peculiar face, they weren’t showing any signs of curiosity, and Lily thought this was a good sign. She served Martin his poached eggs, refilled his coffee and waited on Mr. Berman, who was in early with his Minneapolis Tribune and what looked like a sheaf of order slips. Mr. Berman was the only one who bothered to give Martin a second glance. He raised his eyebrows to register mild surprise for Lily’s benefit, but then he settled into his reading material and didn’t look up.

  Lily cleared Martin’s plate. He had eaten all his food. There were lines of smeared egg yolk on the plate, but that was all. She spoke to him in a whisper, the plate shaking in her hand. “It isn’t true, is it, Martin, that you locked me up? It’s just a story, right? Please tell me.”

  He looked at her but didn’t speak.

  “I want you to understand,” she continued, still in a whisper, “I want you to leave me alone from now on.”

  “I know what I know,” Martin said. His voice had no stutter and no inflection to it. When she walked off with Martin’s plate to the kitchen, she noticed Harold Lundgren watching her for a couple of seconds before he brought his coffee cup to his lips. On her way back from the kitchen, she breathed in Mike Fox’s eighth Kent as she passed the counter and saw that Martin had the paper bag on his lap and was unrolling the top. By the time she reached the end of the counter, he had his arm inside the bag and was pulling out what looked like a ratty pink towel. Lily stopped and said, “Martin.” She didn’t say it loudly, and she said it more to herself than to him.

  But Martin had carefully set down the paper bag and was now engrossed in unrolling the towel. Lily watched him work with both hands. His bandaged left hand didn’t hamper his movements. Lily started walking toward him. When she reached his booth, she gasped, and the cafe went dead quiet.

  Martin had unrolled a gun, an enormous gun she guessed was a forty-five, bigger than the ones at the police station and heavier. It lay on the towel for only seconds before Martin took it in both hands. Lily started speaking silently to herself, stating facts as if what she was seeing had to be affirmed. It’s a gun, but it can’t be loaded. Why does he have a gun? “It’s not loaded?” she said to Martin aloud. Behind her, she heard shouts. Vince was yelling, “Lily! Move! Get down!” But Lily thought, I’m too close to it. I can’t. I can’t move.

  Martin was pointing the gun at the ceiling now. His white face had no expression at all, and behind Lily Mr. Berman was saying, “Put it down, Martin. You don’t want to hurt anybody.” And then Lily thought she heard Boomer crying, but it might have been somebody else. Martin moved the gun down and turned it on Lily. He blinked, and she saw his head wobble for an instant. I’m going to die right now, she thought. He’s going to kill me in the Ideal Cafe. Right now, these are my last seconds. Lily felt her face convulse. The glare of hazy sunlight from the window hurt her eyes. This is my death, she said to herself, and looking into Martin’s placid face, she started to sob, “No! No!” but he held the gun on her, and she choked and cried and listened to the screaming behind her and the sound of someone dialing a phone. Urine ran down her leg inside her jeans. She hadn’t felt her bladder give way. She felt only the warm stream that seemed to run on and on. “No!” Lily yelled through the blur of her tears. “Please!”

  Martin did not speak, but she saw him look around the cafe for several seconds, and then he turned the revolver toward himself and pushed the barrel into his mouth. Lily watched him. She saw his red lips stretch over the steel and saw his pale blue eyes looking at her. She noticed the awkward position of his hands and elbows as he held the gun. She saw the dirt in the creases of his knuckles, and she heard the blast. Lily saw Martin lose his face, saw skin and bone and blood fly. She saw his ruined head thrown back against the sunlit window. She saw his body stop moving, and she saw the blood continue to run. There’s so much blood, she said to herself. Then the nausea came and Lily grabbed her stomach. I’m dizzy, she thought. I’m so dizzy.

  * * *

  It was Vince who carried Lily upstairs to Mabel’s apartment, but by the time she regained consciousness, he had gone back downstairs. She saw Mabel, and for a moment didn’t remember what had happened in the cafe, but when she looked down at herself, she saw that her chest was covered with blood and began pulling off her T-shirt. She examined her bra and noticed that a spot of blood had seeped through the shirt, so she yanked off her bra, too. Lily took off all her clothes. Without saying a word, Mabel stuffed every garment into a plastic bag, tied it, and put it into her garbage can. Then Lily took a long shower and scrubbed herself with a cloth. Standing under the water, she rubbed every part of herself methodically, looking closely at her skin as she moved the washcloth over it. Twice she thought she saw blood on her feet, but the stains turned out to be shadows. Then she dressed herself in clean clothes that belonged to Mabel and noticed how pretty the blouse was, but when she emerged from the bathroom, Lily discovered she didn’t want the garbage bag in the same room with her and insisted on carrying it down to the bins in the alley. “Let someone else do it, Lily,” Mabel said. “I would, but my ankle.”

  Lily did it herself. When she passed the back door of the cafe, she saw that it was open and heard voices, one of them Lewis Van Son’s, but she did not look in. Every sensual detail of the walk outside into the alley—the light, the warm air, the shine of the silver garbage cans, the muscles in her arms straining as she pushed the bag firmly into the bin—was oddly distinct and measured. Then she turned and walked back up to Mabel’s. The sight of her legs on the stairs moving through space, the pain in her elbows and knees, the stiffness in her neck when she turned her head were present to her, but also absent. She felt her body, saw it, but didn’t believe in it.

  She telephoned her parents in Florida from Mabel’s apartment. She heard her voice telling them what had happened, heard her mother gasp, heard her father’s horrified exclamation in the background. She did not tell them Martin had held the gun on her. She said she wanted them to hear it from her before anybody else. “I’m not hurt. Nothing happened to me.” Her mother said they would fly back to be with her, but Lily said no.

  Lily and Mabel didn’t talk much after the call, except about what to eat. They listened to the hubbub downstairs, to the police cars coming and going and the noise of other cars, to official voices that barked orders and the exclamations of people who had stumbled onto the aftermath of a spectacular suicide and were getting the dope.

  Lily knew what she had seen. She knew that Martin Petersen had shot himself to death while she loo
ked on. This was a fact. She remembered the pink towel, the gun aimed at her and then at himself. She remembered his lips around it, but after the gun went off, she found no image of him in her mind. She couldn’t see Martin dead. She knew there had been a lot of blood, because she remembered telling herself about the blood, and she had seen it on her clothes. Now that she had rid herself of the clothes, only the words remained. The picture had disappeared. Other than that, there was nothing in her. She didn’t feel sorry or sad or even shocked. She did know she didn’t want to say anything to anybody, and Mabel didn’t demand conversation, so Lily kept silent. She sat on Mabel’s sofa and looked at her legs and wiggled her toes. She watched herself move. There was an urgency about this that captivated her full attention. At about five o’clock she suddenly asked Mabel what day it was.

  “Thursday, June twentieth.” Mabel was reading with her glasses on, and she pulled them down to look at Lily.

  “It’s dress rehearsal!” Lily said. “I’ve got to get ready.”

  “No, Lily. You’re in no shape to go.”

  It was Mabel’s tone that decided for Lily. It was incontrovertible. Lily was silent.

  Mabel phoned Mrs. Wright and kept her voice very low throughout the conversation.

  After dinner they heard the band at Rick’s, not the music so much as the bass, a steady pounding beat that went on and on. Motorcycles roared on Division Street, and Lily remembered the Hell’s Angels. It thundered, and then it rained.

  At about nine o’clock, Hank knocked at Mabel’s door.

  Lily was sitting on the sofa looking at her knees under Mabel’s pajama pants. Hank sat down beside her. She looked up but Hank didn’t speak. A piece of hair had fallen across his moist forehead and stuck to his skin. It thundered again. She had nothing to tell him. Yesterday she had wanted to explain to Hank about the doll, but now she didn’t.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” he said.

  “Is he at Swensen’s?” Lily said. “Martin, is he at Swensen’s?”

  Lily saw Hank glance at Mabel. “Yes. The funeral’s Saturday.”

  “The funeral,” Lily repeated. She had forgotten about a funeral. Of course, there would be a funeral.

  Hank hugged her, but Lily didn’t hug him back. She stiffened at his touch and turned her head away. He was trying to be nice, but she didn’t care.

  That night, the next night, and for many nights after that, Lily slept with Mabel in the woman’s big bed, surrounded by bookcases on all sides.

  * * *

  Mickey Berner played Cobweb. He wore the clean and pressed costume Mrs. Baker found hanging in the wardrobe room Wednesday night. Mickey was bad, but then nobody expected him to be good. Martin Petersen had been the best fairy in the play, and everybody knew it. Lily was surprised when Mabel asked her if she wanted to go on after what had happened. Of course she did. She rode her bicycle to the Arts Guild and pretended nobody was staring at her when she walked through the doors. She had expected the cast to be upset, to be amazed by Martin’s death, and they were. But more than that, the suicide seemed to have enlivened the cast like a stimulant. Oren pledged his performance to Martin. Gordon declared loudly that the play would “keep Martin’s memory alive,” and Denise cried in the dressing room. Lily didn’t cry. She had been too close, and her closeness to Martin’s death made the others circumspect and distant. Mrs. Wright had told her how sorry she was, but the awkward expression on her face looked a lot like shame to Lily. Only Mrs. Baker hugged her, and when the woman’s arms came around her, Lily felt a quaking inside her and the threat of real sobs, but she did not give in to them and couldn’t return the embrace. “I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

  When Lily put on her costume Friday night for the first performance and looked in the mirror, she lost Hermia and forgot her lines. She had often dreamed of such a moment, going onstage without a word in her head. But it didn’t last. When she heard her cues, the lines came back to her and so did Hermia, who seemed to have changed again, to have become a little fiercer and more passionate, and when she fought Helena, the audience was very, very quiet. Mabel sat in the front row, and once when Lily looked down at her while she was speaking, she saw the old woman’s lips moving without sound. And after that first performance was over, and Lily was cheered and congratulated, she kept Hermia inside her a little longer, and she and Jim held hands offstage.

  * * *

  Saturday, the weather was perfect. Winds from the Dakotas swept in a cloudless sky and low humidity, and walking up the church steps Lily thought to herself that her father would have seen it coming if he had been there. The church wasn’t full, but it was almost full. Lily seated herself beside Mabel in a pew toward the back and noticed several people turning their heads to get a glimpse of the waitress who had served Martin Petersen his last meal. Ida came wearing a silver bow in her high hairdo. Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Wright came with their husbands. Jim, Denise, Oren and Gordon arrived together. Bert brought Boomer, but Vince stayed home. Lily recognized Martin’s sister, Eileen, and his older brother, whose name she couldn’t remember. Lily waited for them, but Frank and Dick never shuffled into the church. Dolores came. She wore a blue suit that hugged her figure and had put her hair up. The effect tamed her, Lily thought.

  Pastor Carlsen avoided the word “suicide.” She guessed she would have heard if he had said it, but the truth was that Lily didn’t listen very closely. Martin’s coffin was standing in the front of the church, and she looked at it very hard to focus herself. She imagined Martin inside the coffin, and then she tried to remember the doll. She had been worrying about that doll. She didn’t want anyone to find it and recognize her in its face and body. Martin could have left it anywhere, and as she thought about the doll, she tugged repeatedly at the material of the black blouse she was wearing, the one Mabel had given her. She did this without thinking and didn’t stop until she felt Mabel’s hand close over hers. She lowered her hand and looked at Mabel’s cane. It had a taupe rubber grip. If someone finds it, they’ll know it’s me, she said to herself.

  Martin’s sister was talking, and Lily tried to find Martin’s face in hers, but she couldn’t. Eileen had just finished saying, “My brother was a kind person,” when she looked up, opened her mouth wide and emitted an odd, little noise. It wasn’t loud, but it expressed amazement, and the congregation turned as one to look toward the back of the church and saw Tex charging down the aisle dressed like an outlaw from the old West, complete with black hat, six-shooters at his hips and spurs that jingled as he flew past Lily and Mabel’s pew toward the coffin. Had it not been church, Lily knew that several people would have leapt to their feet immediately, but it was church and for a couple of seconds a horrified pause fell over the sanctuary. Then from the back a child started crying, and Lily saw Martin’s brother leap to his feet and saw Pastor Carlsen with his hands raised and his mouth open. He was speaking, but Lily heard nothing through the din that had now broken out among the people in the pews.

  Lily didn’t move. Tex had mounted the coffin and was straddling it awkwardly. Big as he was, the coffin was too wide for playing horse, and the next thing she knew Tex was pounding on the lid, yelling, “Marty! Marty!” Four or five men near the pulpit, including Pastor Carlsen, threw themselves at Tex and dragged him off the coffin, but the huge man turned and heaved himself back toward the box, and for a second or so, no more, Lily thought she saw the lid of the coffin opening. Her face vibrated with what felt like electricity. She shut her eyes and imagined Martin sitting up in his coffin and climbing out. In her mind, he was wearing his costume but then she wondered how they had dressed him. In Webster, every male corpse she had ever seen had worn a navy blue suit—her grandfather, her uncle, Mr. Deerhoeven. When she opened her eyes, she saw Pastor Carlsen untangling his vestments from Tex’s spurs. The coffin was closed.

  After Lewis Van Son and Dick Shockley hauled off Howard Gubber to jail, everybody stayed for the end of the service. Lily could feel the collective det
ermination in the room to finish what they had started. Eileen was shaking, but she continued her speech. She said Martin loved carpentry and books and animals. Lily didn’t know about the animals, but she took his sister’s word for it. It’s all true, she thought, and it’s all a lie. Eileen wanted to remember him, to say what was right, but Lily had a feeling you could dig and dig and talk and talk until doomsday and no “real” Martin would be found, that whatever had been there, you couldn’t say it. When the pallbearers carried the hidden body out of the church, Lily fumbled for Mabel’s hand without looking at her, and she held on to it through the benediction: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and give thee peace.”

  * * *

  The Ideal Cafe reopened the following Monday, and Lily started working her usual shift. For about a week the only people who sat at the booth by the window were from out of town. After that, nobody seemed to care where they sat, but Martin’s death remained a hot topic. People were less interested in why Martin had killed himself than Lily would have thought. They said he was crazy or in despair, but that’s all. As far as she could tell, they took it, as her aunt Irma used to say, “philosophically.” It interested her, too, that Martin’s pointing the gun at Lily wasn’t included in the story. People in the cafe that day must have seen it, Lily thought, but nobody talked about it. Nevertheless, Lily sensed that there was talk about her and Martin, and that even if nobody blamed her for Martin’s death, they knew she had been somehow involved in it. When people stared and whispered, she felt as if she had become an object to point at and say, “She was right there when he did it—only inches away. There was blood all over her.”

  For several days Boomer Wee gave tours of the “suicide booth,” mostly to boys under twelve. Then Vince got wind of it and told him to stop. But while it lasted, Boomer charged a quarter for the “reenactment”: “Had the weapon in a bag. Big sucker. Stuck it ’tween his teeth.” That was Boomer’s cue to bite down on his finger and throw himself backward toward the window while he continued his description, which came straight from the pages of a comic book: “Pow! Bang! Blew his head off!” Boomer had been in the kitchen when Martin shot himself. He had seen him die through the door. Apparently only seconds after the shot, Mike Fox had come barreling into the kitchen, and Boomer had thrown up all over both of them. Something about Boomer’s performance fascinated Lily. She didn’t mind seeing it, just as she didn’t mind the abbreviated version of the story that was told again and again. “Martin Petersen walked into the Ideal Cafe and ordered his breakfast as usual. He ate it, every last bite, and then he took out a gun and blew his brains out.” Neither Boomer’s theatrics nor the little story misrepresented what had happened, and yet when Lily watched Boomer gyrating in the booth or listened to someone telling about the suicide, she experienced the gestures and words as evasions. She had forgotten Martin’s corpse, but somehow that blank spot in her mind where his body should have been came closer to the truth than anything anyone could do or say.