At that moment, they came out of the brush, urgent as a shot, and the chick had one hand on her skirt, rustling it down, and the other on her face, which was scarlet. Her giggling was not soft and had no rhythm. It trailed, jangling, and was filled with a giddy panic.
His eyes shone. His gait was jaunty and light.
When he got to the car, Joe Lanigan kissed Marion flush on the mouth. She knew why. He kissed her because he was proud.
THEY DROPPED ELSIE OFF at her boardinghouse and the girl shivered up the front steps and Marion could only imagine what thoughts might seize her the night through—she didn’t even need to imagine, she knew. During the ride home, she had seen how Elsie’s right leg could not stop trembling. It rattled so. She knew what the girl’s shaking leg meant, shaking like a pinion and her stocking damp and her face, if you looked closely, it was like there was a gash across it, like a hook caught in her mouth and dragged round. Not a real gash, but a secret mark, a deep score, from five to ten minutes she would never forget.
Joe Lanigan could scarcely wait until he found a secluded street not three blocks away to pull over under a pair of bottle trees and throw Marion’s skirt into the air, and he didn’t bother with himself and instead used his hand on her so fast, his fingers and knuckles, not rough but nearly so. It was so frantic and then he shuddered love thoughts to her and she told herself that what she had done, allowed to be done, helped to make done, might be enough for a long while, might have purchased for her months of love unfettered by deviance. But she knew it wasn’t so. She had only raised the stakes, hadn’t she?
“THESE GIRLS I can balance five to a finger, Marion,” he told her, “because none of them matter, so many cigarettes snuffed out.”
“I can’t fathom that, Joe,” she said, picturing one’s heart rent in so many pieces, diced clean to spread widely. She wanted to leave his car and walk up to her room and sleep for a thousand years.
He became serious and his expression was so solemn. “I am sorry, Marion,” he said, looking down at his hands, “because I know your morality may not be large enough to accommodate my weakness. It is a weakness. It is that.”
He was pale and it was the gravest she had ever seen him. “It’s one thing, Marion. It’s one thing,” he said. “I am more than that.”
It reminded her of something. A moment. Behind the police station in Indianapolis, Dr. Seeley, fingertips still inky and shirt browned and wrinkled, that dark forelock fallen across his brow and his arm too heavy to lift it, to sweep it back.
“One thing, Marion,” Joe was saying now. “One thing isn’t a man.”
She looked at him and said, softly, “Oh, but it is.”
In bed that night, Marion thought about Joe Lanigan and his weakness and then about Dr. Seeley and his. These men and their weaknesses. Could they not restrain them at all?
But then she thought about her own: here a man with a way of smiling so and doffing hat and tilting head just so. These accumulations of gesture and a tender word or two and then she pliant on any bed, seat cushion, what have you? Well, if that wasn’t a weakness, what was?
I am filled with shame. Love me yet, Doctor.
Part Four
Whether I loved you who shall say?
Whether I drifted down your way
In the endless River of Chance and Change,
And you woke the strange
Unknown longings that have no names,
But burn us all in their hidden flames,
Who shall say?
…
But, whether you love me, who shall say,
Or whether you, drifting down my way
In the great sad River of Chance and Change,
With your looks so weary and words so strange,
Lit my soul from some hidden flame
To a passionate longing without a name,
Who shall say?…
—From “The Teak Forest,”
by Laurence Hope,
Pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson (1865–1904)
They had asked her to come and play cards. She didn’t know what Joe Lanigan had given them for the kitty the previous night while she sat on tenterhooks in his automobile with Elsie Nettle, but whether it was pills or money or both, Ginny sounded gay, calling from the neighbors’ telephone, breathless and cheery, and Marion was relieved. All worries seemed to be forgotten in the giddiness that so overswept the girls as they planned their evening.
Hurrying about Mrs. Gower’s kitchen, Marion made bread-and-jelly pudding and wrapped it in a thick kitchen towel. On the streetcar it sat in her lap, hot and sweating, and when she arrived, her dress was wet and the evening air was barely air at all.
Ginny answered the door, a rare thing, especially now that she was so poorly. She had three curlers in her hair and eyes rimmed with kohl and a deep rouge on her lips.
“We decided this is Monte Carlo night, Mims, and you shall be the Duchess Estrella from Hungary and tonight you risk losing the crown jewels and your mountainous duchy on the Rhine—” The cough started then and Marion reached across to hold Ginny’s arms and they were like kindling bits.
“Did you get the money, Louise?” Marion whispered to Louise after helping Ginny to the sofa.
Louise, who did not appear adorned for Monte Carlo night and looked queasy, sticky, jumbled, said, “No, Marion. Can you imagine. Joe Lanigan gave up neither gold nor grain. Only a jug of the slickery white. He is nearly useless as a sugar daddy, wouldn’t you say?”
Her face was pulled and there were heavy things in her eyes and Marion felt those things tugging at her too, and she placed her hand on Louise’s arm and Louise’s eyes filled for a moment and then she turned back to the stove, where a pan with sauerkraut was simmering.
“Marion,” Ginny’s voice creaked from the sofa. “Marion, none of them came by at all this week. None of them. Not Mr. Worth, nor Mr. McNeary, nor Sheriff Healy, nor Mr. Loomis. Not even Floyd of the mine-black hands. And yet we’re still here.” Eyes jumpy and eyebrows doing strange, twittery things, she looked over at Louise. “But they’ll be back next week, don’t doubt it. With the finest corn and an RCA Victor Electrola with swank Oriental trimmings like Mr. Loomis showed us in the catalog. In the meantime, who needs ’em? I’m entertainment to burn.”
“This is a sorrowful world,” Louise said, and she began pouring from the jug of gin. “One needs victuals. That’s what’s needed.”
The sadness of Louise was spurring things in Ginny, disturbances and peculiar energies that were making her manic to amuse, and these energies were making Louise nerved up and drinking more, and finally Marion surrendered to the witchy electricities and took a glass too because it seemed the only way.
“God made man frail as a bubble,” Ginny sang, “God made love, love made trouble.” She pressed one hand to her chest like Sister Aimee. “God made the vine—then is it a sin,” she asked, lifting her glass, “that man made wine to drown trouble in?”
It was a heavy effort on all parts, but within the hour, the mood was lifting, and the close air of the house filled with sweaty laughter and a glistening on Louise’s cheeks from the stovetop, the gin, Marion’s ministrations, twisting her friend’s hair into curls drawn tight with vitamin oil and looking like motion-picture flappers. “Oh, Marion,” Louise said, smiling, “your hands are like butterflies.”
Ginny, trying to help, singing and frolicking, kept having to plunge her face fast into her skittery kerchief with each grinding hack, and Louise kept shushing her away and Ginny would run to the open window and cough out into the night air. Her energy was all wrong and Marion could feel it but didn’t know what to do about it.
On one such circuit, Ginny, now stripped down to bloomers, ran to the bathroom sink and dunked her head under cold water, then circled back, flouncing on the settee, jamming one skinny leg between the girls, seated on the floor beneath her on lumpen pillows, and belted out, “So, tell us about your triple date, toots.”
Marion, so loose a
nd slippery from Louise’s cooing and their shared girl talk, jolted suddenly to alertness. She had known it would come, but like this? She reached for the jug and poured herself a second glass of the tongue-curling stuff.
“Yes, Marion,” Louise said, eyes now on her, saying it in a jolly way, but Marion couldn’t believe in the jollity. She tried to. She took a sip and tried to do that. “Did you have a snapping time?”
“Oh,” Marion said. “I guess I have become the welcome wagon now.”
“Is that what’s happened?” Louise said, and her voice was tighter now.
Retreating from her own question quick as a crab, Ginny reached for her pair of finger cymbals, which she kept tucked under a cushion. “Shall I do my Salome dance?” she asked, clicking them over her head.
“No, you shall not,” Louise said, head whipping round to Ginny. “You be still, bad girl. And stay seated for a piece and a half. You’re on my scolding list.” She turned back to Marion, eyes so black, the pupils dilated so wide she looked like a Katzenjammer kid in the Sunday comics. Oh, she is stewed, thought Marion.
“All day, Marion, before you arrived, I set to scolding her,” Louise said, waving her arm, pointing fingers at Ginny, who had started to giggle. “She’s been blasting herself with secret frolics passed to her by our very own milkman.”
“He likes to help a sister out, that milkman does.” Ginny trilled. “And who knew he had such bonbons and all I had to do was give him a dimple.”
“Those kinds of candy will not help your blown-out lungs one bit,” Louise said, straightening her back to nurse posture.
“They help my lungs on account of my lungs go poof the minute I blow,” Ginny said, tapping her nose with her fingertip. “I can lick anything with this glow I got on.”
“Oh, Ginny—,” Marion started to say, but Louise, head swiveling back round, shot out, “Elsie Nettle, that wood sprite, that mountain apple-knocker. All angel-face, angel-bottom innocent, Joe Lanigan’s favorite variety. Looked to me like you wrapped her up with a fat ribbon for our Gent Joe.”
“Wrapped her up?” Marion said, not liking the look on Louise’s whirring face. A hot, burring energy, a fitful, angry thing. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Was this Louise’s concern, after all? And wasn’t it unkind of her to shine a spotlight on Marion’s private shame?
“Let’s just say it,” Louise said, thumping the sofa’s edge with open palm. Ginny crawled across the sofa, arms out to her. “Let’s not pretend, Marion. I’d love to pretend with you and just play with you like this, as we are, but I look at those bow lips of yours as you lie, lie, lie.”
“Don’t get yourself in a fit again, Lou-Lou. Don’t let’s,” Ginny said. “You told me to calm myself and here you are.”
“We have…It’s not…It’s not…,” Marion stuttered, but she could feel something ruffling in her, something ruffling and setting off hot feelings of her own. “It’s not your affair, Louise. It’s not your business.”
“Don’t you get it, Marion?” Louise snapped, reaching out to grab Marion’s wrist, but not before Marion pulled it away and rose to her feet. “Don’t you get it? Joe Lanigan is all our business.” She paused, then said, razor sharp, “We’re all in the business of Joe Lanigan.”
“Last night, it wasn’t about you,” Marion blurted. All the while thinking, It is I who had to eat my pride up, had to have it forced down my throat. “It’s a separate thing we have, Joe and I. And you can’t know what goes on with Mr. Lanigan and myself. You don’t know anything about what we have shared.” She could feel the junipers tingling under her skin. My, it was fine gin her lover had brought them.
Louise jumped up, shaking off Ginny’s bluing hands.
“Could you really think that? I wonder, could you? Has he gotten so far between your jerking little virgin legs that you’ve gone cross-eyed?”
“Don’t you say such things, Louise,” Marion said, her face hot. She’d never seen Louise so mad, not ever. “I introduced him to Elsie to be nice. That’s all I have done.”
“You’re telling me he doesn’t have plans to spread-eagle her, Marion? Don’t you know his man ways by now? And she, of all girls. She.”
“She? What? What?” Marion asked. “Why are you both against me?”
“Don’t you know what she’s holding tight, that Elsie Nettle,” Ginny said from the sofa, eyes on the reddened edges of her kerchief. “Marion, I hope to goodness you did not know. Because if you knew, if you knew…”
“What? What can you mean?” Marion said.
“I wonder how you’d dare,” Louise hissed, tongue forking. “I wonder how you’d dare fasten him up with a gal sick through like that.”
“Sick?”
“She’s got ole joe,” Ginny said, pounding her fragile boned forearm down on the sofa. “Nursie Nettle’s got the dread syph. Ain’t I finally the lucky one in some comparison?”
“I don’t believe you,” Marion said, Elsie’s fairy-pure face looming before her eyes. It was impossible. “She’s not got that.”
“She’s got it, don’t you doubt it,” Louise said, grabbing again for Marion’s wrist, which Marion wrenched free. “Look what you’ve set us in for.”
Marion backed up three steps, feeling like the waif in some handkerchief-twisting melodrama. What had she done to deserve such wrath and deceit?
Louise couldn’t stop. “First you start up with him and you don’t dally, no, it has to be a love match, a grand passion, Greta Garbo in the drawing room. Ca-mille,” she said, throwing her head back grandly. “But you don’t see that it’s Gent Joe we’re talking about. Gent Joe, who lifts every skirt hem in ten square miles. And so Gent Joe doesn’t come round so much. You decide you like what he gives you and you gotta get it all the time. So what do you do to keep him? Trot in that sickly nymph all loaded up on Neosalvarsan. Even as you must know she’ll empty what’s left of Joe Lanigan’s pockets and run him through the sick. She’s a filthy thing. Myra Jenks told me. She saw her file. Well, you know those mountain rubes and their ways. You brought her in, Marion. You brought her in.”
“It’s not true,” Marion said, with shaking breath. “You haven’t any right, Louise Mercer, to go spreading such lies. Lies no doubt spread by Myra, who’s a horrible gossip and has had her ire on you for months.” She knew it wasn’t true. She knew how the nurses were, with their careless tales. And then it came into her head and before she could think about it, she added, “Just like with the machine. Just like you did with that X-ray machine. I didn’t forget it.”
“Marion!” Ginny started up fast, then her cough disclosed and she could not go on. Her body, though, it was quaking and her eyes pinpointed. She looked ready for something and it was frightening to Marion. Something was not right with her, like Marion’s cousin, six years old, stayed with them while suffering through rabbit fever and thought Marion’s father a demon and screamed all night.
“You so high and mighty,” Louise snarled, face flaming, moving closer toward Marion, finger pointed, the heat coming off her. “Yet when do you turn your hands up at our offers of cakes and candies? You just don’t wish to think about how we come by them. The doctor’s wife can lay in velvet as she chooses, but where is she when the bill comes? And now things aren’t raw enough for us and you bring her in. You bring her in and crowd over the pot. The pot near empty already. That rotting girl.”
“I can’t know what you mean, Louise. I can’t. Elsie’s an everyday girl like we are, I am, I don’t know what you are, I don’t know it now,” Marion said, feeling suddenly dizzy, feeling suddenly the prickly junipers bursting before her eyes, making her head quaky. Who were these women? she wondered. Who were they and what was she?
“How,” Louise began, then her voice shook apart and she had to pull it together again, breathing deeply. “How…How do you think we live, Marion?”
Marion could see something tear loose in Louise, something tear loose, and she was so lost and the thing in Louise that Marion knew so well, the tremen
dous thumping heart and all it held, it was there. It was still there. The rest was panic and noise.
Then something struck Marion urgently, even as she realized she had in some dark, unsaid way known it all along. “Louise,” she said, “did you intend to give me to Mr. Lanigan? Was that your idea, Louise? Was I your gift? Your payment, past due?”
“No!” Louise said, shaking her head, shaking it so vigorously her dark red curls unspooled. “He took you. All I could do was keep it under our roof.”
“I think you set me out for him, Louise,” Marion said, her head reeling. “How is that not what you accuse me of?”
“You don’t see, Marion. How do you suppose we make rent? She…,” Louise said, almost a howl, then, pointing to Ginny, “…has not worked in sixteen months. She has had to go to County three times. We can’t afford a clinic like Werden. We’re still paying bills to the last hospital, so behind they smeared me for delinquency. They tried to pin a fence charge on me too for selling our own things. Gifts that were ours to sell. The only shimmer, Marion, the only shimmer we got is the fairy dust Gent Joe has scattered.”
And with this last sentence her face fell in on itself, and her shoulders fell too, and it reminded Marion of something she couldn’t quite name, something she’d seen on a face once, someone’s face, was it her own face? Her own face in the mirror the night Dr. Seeley first did not make it home and the room he had left her in but half paid and she not even knowing for certain if they were still in Nevada or if they’d crossed the border into California. And she with not twelve cents in her battered handbag.
“Oh, Louise,” Marion said, moving toward her, and Louise came upon her fast and embraced her, clinging tightly to Marion and saying whispered things Marion could not quite hear. Secret words too lovely to say out loud.
It was as though Marion could see Louise’s beating heart laid bare, and she knew then how Louise had taken her as her charge and she herself had treated it too lightly, like a gift easily given when it was not. When it was blood meant. How had she missed that? Had anyone taken such care of her before?