ALSO BY MEGAN ABBOTT
Queenpin
The Song Is You
Die a Little
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Megan Abbott
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abbott, Megan E.
Bury me deep / Megan Abbott.
p. cm.
1. Physicians’ spouses—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Phoenix (Ariz.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.B37B87 2009
813'.6—dc22 2008030676
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0105-6
ISBN-10: 1-4391-0105-1
“T.B. Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers and Raymond E. Hall
Copyright © 1931 by Peer International Corporation.
Copyright renewed.
International copyright secured. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Photo on Backmatter courtesy of Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library
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Acknowledgments
A true “without whom” to Denise Roy for her peerless guidance, intelligence and insight, and for her warm generosity. I am also so grateful to Paul Cirone and Molly Friedrich for their support. Warmest thanks, too, to the wonderful Kelly Welsh at Simon & Schuster for all her hard work, as well as Kate Ankofski and Jonathan Evans—and to Sarah Hochman for deeply appreciated help in the homestretch. And with a special debt to the remarkable Dan Conaway, for wisdom and kindness above and beyond.
Immense gratitude to Philip and Patricia Abbott, the two people I admire most in the world, to Josh, Julie & Kevin, Ralph and Janet Nase, Kiki and Brody, the muse-like Alison Quinn, Darcy Lockman, Jeff, Ruth & Steve Nase, the Nichols and the Gaylord family (with an extra nod to Dave for his last-minute assistance).
Finally, a special thanks to Patrick Millikin, Sara Gran and Vicki Hendricks, for a very, very memorable night in Phoenix.
Dedication
For Josh, because words dont ever fit
even what they are trying to say at
Bury Me Deep
Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Author’s Note
Part One
THRILL PARTIES EVERY NIGHT over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why, it’s 600 square feet of percolating, Wurlitzering sin. Those girls with their young skin, tight and glamorous, their rimy lungs and scratchy voices, one cheek flush and c’mon boys and the other, so accommodating, even with lil’ wrists and ankles stripped to pearly bone by sickness. They lay there on their daybed, men all standing over round, fingering pocket chains and hands curled about gin bottle necks. The girls lay there on plump pillows piled high with soft fringes twirling between delicate fingers, their lips wet with syrups, tonics, sticky with balms, their faces freshly powdered, arching up, waiting to be attended to by men, our men, the city’s men. What do you do about girls like that?
OCTOBER 1930
He was a kind husband. You couldn’t say he wasn’t kind.
He found her a rooming house and paid up three months, all he could manage and still make his passage to Mazatlán, where he would take up a steady post, his first in three years, with the Ogden-Nequam Mining Company, for whom he would drain fluid thick, yellow as pale honey from miners’ lungs.
He purchased for her, on credit (who wouldn’t give credit to a doctor, even one in a suit shiny from wear), a tea set and a small Philco radio for her long evenings, sitting in the worn rose chair writing letters to him, missing him so.
He purchased for her a pair of kidskin gloves and tie shoes and a soft cloche hat the deep green of pine needles.
He took her on strolls around the neighborhood so they might look for the one hundred varieties of cactus promised in the pamphlet given to them at the Autopia Motor Court, where they’d spent their first two nights after the long drive from California. He found the cholla and the saguaro and the bisnaga, which had saved the life of many a thirsty traveler who, beaten down by the sun, cut off the spiky top and mashed the pulp within.
He helped her fill out all the papers to begin her new job, which he had found for her. She would start Monday as a filing clerk and stenographer at the Werden Clinic. She passed the typing test and the dictation test and Dr. Milroy, the director, who was very tall and wore tinted spectacles and smelled sweetly of aniseeds, hired her right then and there, taking her small hand between his palms deep as serving dishes, as softly worn as the leather pew Bibles passed through three generations’ hands in the First Methodist Church of Grand Rapids, and said, “My dear Mrs. Seeley, welcome to our little desert hideaway. We are so glad you will be joining us. I have assured your husband you will be happy here. The entire Werden community welcomes you to its bosom.”
On Sunday night, late, he packed his suitcase for his long trip, first to Nogales, then Estación Dimas, then ninety miles on muleback to Tayoltita. The mining company didn’t care about revoked medical licenses. They were eager to have him. But, with her, he had always been clear: where he was going was no place for a woman. He would have to go alone.
When he was finished packing, he sat her down on the bed and spoke softly to her for some time, spoke softly of his grief in leaving her but with solemn, gravely worded promises that he would return in the spring, would return by Easter, arms filled with lilies, and with all past troubles behind them.
And on Monday morning at seven o’clock her husband, having made all these arrangements, walked her to the trolley and kissed her discreetly on the cheek, his chin crushing her new hat, and headed himself to the train depot, one battered suitcase in hand. As she watched him through the trolley window, as she watched him, slope-shouldered in that ancient brown suit, hat too tight, gait slow and lurching, she thought, Who is that poor man, walking so beaten, face gray, eyes struck blank? Who is that sad fellow? My goodness, what a life must he lead to be so broken and alone!
THE DOCTORS AT THE CLINIC were all kind as could be, and all seemed concerned that she felt comfortable and safe in her rooming house. They left a cactus blossom on her desk as a welcome gift and offered her a tour of the State Capitol, pointing proudly to its copper dome, which could be viewed from the clinic’s third-floor windows. Right away, Dr. Milroy and his wife began inviting her to Sunday dinner and she heard again about the one hundred varieties of cactus she might see around town and she heard that no other place in the world is blessed with so many days of sunshine and she heard how, as she must know, the desert is God’s great health-giving laboratory. Then, at the end of the evening, Mrs. Milroy always sent her home with a dish steaming over with creamed corn casserole, a knot of pork, sweet carrots in honey glaze.
“You’re nothing but a whisper of a girl. But you’ll
need something on your bones for when you start your family. When Dr. Seeley comes back, you know he’ll be ready for a son. Am I right?”
She smiled, she always smiled. Dr. Seeley hadn’t talked of sons, of children since before the first monthlong stretch at St. Bartholomew’s narcotics ward. They’d never talked much of babies, even as she was sure when she married three years, seven months back that she’d be near the third time large with child by now, like all the girls she knew.
IT WAS FRIDAY, her fifth day at the clinic, and she had seen Nurse Louise stalking the halls more than once, stalking them, a lioness. A long-limbed girl with a thick brush of dark red hair crowning a pale, pie face, painted-on brows thin as kidsilk and a tilting Scotch nose. When she walked, her hips slung and her chest bobbed up round apples and the men on the ward took notice—my, how could they not? She was not beautiful, but she had a bristling, crackling energy about her and it was like she was always winking at you and nodding her head as if saying, always, even when stacking X-rays, C’mon, sweet face, c’mon.
And now here was Nurse Louise dropping herself, hard, in the chair across from Marion in the luncheon room. She smelled like licorice and talcum powder.
“That’s for beans, kid,” she said, jabbing her thumb dismissively at Marion’s jelly sandwich. “Have a hunk of my brown bread. Ginny—that’s my roommate—swabbed it up good with plum butter. Tell me that ain’t the stuff.”
And Marion took the wedge offered her and it smelled like Mother’s kitchen even if Mother never made any bread but white or sometimes milk-and-water bread. And the plum butter, well, that stung sweet in her mouth since she hadn’t had much but bean soup since Dr. Seeley left her, left her all alone five days past.
“What’s your name, answer me now with your cakehole plug full,” she said, laughing. “I’m Louise Mercer. I’ve been here going on a year now, so I guess there’s not much I don’t know. I’m happy to show you all the dials and knobs and pulleys, if you like. So nothing crashes down on that slippery blond head of yours.”
“Well, I’m Marion. Marion Seeley,” she finally got out, eyeing a dab of butter still smeared on her thumb.
“Go on, Marion.” Louise smiled, nodding toward the pearly butter. “We don’t believe, none of us, in wasting fine things.”
SUDDENLY, she was under Louise’s red-tipped wing and everything became easier. She learned the best place to hang her hat and coat so they didn’t smell of disinfectant, the trolley route that’d get her home seven minutes faster and two blocks closer to boot and that you should punch the clock before you even set your purse down each morning.
Each day, they ate lunch together and Louise gave her the what’s what on everyone at the clinic. The doctors no longer seemed half so frightening once Louise had told her about the one who was always pinching nurses’ behinds, and the one who tipped his bill in his office all day long, the one who never even gave a pretty penny to the St. Ursula’s Annual Blind Children Drive and the one who had ended up here on account of losing his medical license in the state of Missouri for operating a still in his office.
Louise always brought treats—small cakes, a glass canister of baked beans with brown sugar, a sack of jelly nougats, a crimson jar of pickled beets. Wanting to return the favor, Marion brought in her mother’s sturdy currant jelly and, later in the week, steamed bread she had spent all evening making in the kitchen of the rooming house. Neither could eat it. Louise crossed her eyes like Ben Turpin.
“It’s for the birds, kid,” she said. “But a girl as pretty as you, what could it matter?”
Marion was embarrassed, mostly because she thought she was a very good homemaker and Dr. Seeley had dined on her food for years with never a complaint. He always smiled and said, “Very good, Marion. Very fine, indeed.”
“You come by our place,” Louise said. “You should try my creamed onions. You’ll think your tongue ran across a cloud.”
What might a cloud taste like, she wondered. Like Mother’s snow pudding made for birthdays and Sunday summer suppers. No, no, like dew, like rain gathering on the edge of your winter muffler, brushing against your lips.
THAT NIGHT, Marion took the streetcar to Louise’s duplex on Hussel Street, not two miles away. As she approached the house, she could hear female voices pitching delightedly at each other. Swinging open the front door, Louise yanked her inside, the first time Marion had seen her out of her nurse’s starchy whites. The housedress she wore was very plain, but cut tight across her chest, and when she walked it all twisted into glamorous shapes.
The place was as small as her own room at Mrs. Gower’s, only with an accordion wall that separated the living and sleeping quarters and it had a kind of pullman kitchen. There must have been cracked walls and chipped ceiling tiles and water stains, but you didn’t notice these things because there was an abundance of feminine enchantment. Never seen anything like it, except maybe in that Greta Garbo picture Dr. Seeley took me to where Garbo lived in a harem and her bedroom all overhung with filmy scarves of twisting, winding, billowy loveliness through which chimes tinkled, oh, like such bird songs from far-off heavens. Ev’ry time you saw the long, looping chimes the piano player tinkle-tinkled those keys and you felt your heart lift and tickle you under your chin like you’d do a baby in a high chair and laugh giddily at how wonderful it all was.
“Sit and entertain Ginny, Marion, doll,” Louise said, waving a long arm over at a blond thing reclining on the settee with the claw feet. “I already burned the casserole and am out a dollar sixty-five.”
Marion looked across the room at the blond thing called Ginny, wrapped in intermittent muslin.
“Grab a cush, darling,” she rasped, her mouth candied over like she’d just eaten a cherry mash. On her chest rested an India rubber hot-water bottle. Her teensy pink fingers tapped across it in time to the radio.
Seating herself in a wobbly chair beside her, Marion smiled and asked Ginny if she was feeling poorly.
“Comme-ci, comme-ça,” she said. “Don’t you love ole Al Jolson? He makes you laugh and cry at the same time.” Up close, Marion marveled at how tiny the girl was, like a yellow feather.
“Ginny’s a lung-er,” Louise said briskly from the kitchenette, like saying she had blue eyes, which Ginny did, china blue. With the whiteness of her skin and how small she was, a little doll was all you could think of. “Was out of town for two weeks last year, they tried to put her in a Bugville. You know, those camps?”
“I’m sorry,” Marion said to Ginny, who just kept grinning. “My, aren’t I. I’ve had some health troubles too, but nowhere near as bad.”
“You look it a bit,” Ginny said. “I might say, you look a little of the lunger yourself.”
Marion knew she did, knew she had a wisp of that drawn look, that pulled look. As a teenager, they’d drained her lungs and she’d twice stayed a month or more in hospital wards. For these reasons, and others, she could not go with Dr. Seeley to Mexico. He would not permit it. My darling wife, I cannot bear the thought of you, of your dainty ways and your face so like an angel in these dark parts. All those days on muleback, journey by mailboat, bayoneted soldiers. Why, when I think of it! One fellow here, an engineer, brought his wife. A burro ran into her and tore her kneecap off. That is nothing. I do not dare share with you what I see because I would not risk, not for anything, tainting you.
“Good thing Dr. Milroy han’t spotted your Golden Stamp,” Ginny said, and Marion’s hand flew up to her neck, the spot the doctors effused to a gapy pucker a dozen years past. It had not returned. For years, so many years, in moments quiet and nervous, her hand would go there, her fingertips searching for a return, something gathering beneath the skin.
“Tuber-cu-lo-sis, my dear,” Louise said, dropping her voice low—this was her Dr. Milroy imitation and it was a good one, Louise stretching her whole face long and lanternly like Dr. Milroy was right there. “It is a disease of depletion. A disease in which vital energies are continuously exhausted at a rate
no replenishment can match. A vermin eating away at our most vital organs, those which allow us to breathe, to breathe and thus to live.”
“My family,” Ginny threw in, “they got the Christian Science. Who needs them.”
“Do not be afraid, my dear,” Louise went on, winking over at Marion. “Never has a nurse of mine succumbed. As my mentor, the renowned Dr. Harry Ellington Brook, has said, germs are mere scavengers, feeding their gullets on waste, septic matter long dead or dying. Now pick up those sputum cups, pick them all up. They will do you no harm.”
“Before my lungs gave,” Ginny said, craning her neck out toward Marion, who tried to lean forward in the chair beside her, “I had a proper job.” She reached out, her forearm white to almost blue and delicate as a teacup handle, and touched Marion’s wrist, as if to make sure she was playing close attention, as if to make sure Louise’s antics were not drawing Marion away.
“Ginny has had many vocations,” Louise said, shaking out place mats and setting them on a card table that sat just behind Ginny.
“I once taught elocution,” Ginny said, squirming into ramrod-straight posture, “and poise. At the Miss Venable Charm School in St. Louis, Missouri.”
“She was very popular,” Louise asserted.
“I’m sure you were,” Marion said, although she couldn’t picture silky Ginny, her bosom in danger of sliding out from under her inconstant buttons, standing in front of a classroom, ruler in hand.
“Well, the girls enjoyed me on account I was young and I had been on the stage and had traveled beyond the four stoplights of our grand thoroughfare.”
“She was a star of the stage,” Louise assured Marion, straight-faced but a smirk nestling there somewhere.
“I never said I was a star.” Ginny flounced. “I never said that but once to get a job here. And it worked, my lovely Irish rose.” Marion wasn’t sure who was the Irish rose, she or Louise.