How could she reckon with this?
In the middle of the room, next to the teetery coffee table, sat two black, silver-latched packing trunks, one very large and one more compact.
“You see, Marion,” he said, arm around her, holding her up. “It’s all taken care of.”
“I don’t see,” she said, clutching fingers to his lapel. “Are we going on a steamer? Are we running to far-flung lands?” And her head twisted loose, and she began giggling and Joe did not like that one bit.
“Marion,” he said, reaching round and grabbing her face in hand. “Marion, you must see what we have done here. You must know what we have done with the girls. Do you see?” Turning her face with one hand, turning it hard, he pointed to the trunks with the other. He pointed to the trunks and Marion would always remember this. His right arm around her neck, hand grooved under her chin like a vise, and left arm pointing, like God himself, down to Earth, down to Adam, down to the black trunks on the unimpeachable floor.
Her girls, her girls. Her girls in those trunks like so much packing. A flash in her head, Louise’s long limbs curled at funny angles, crumpled like a magician’s assistant inside a magic box. And Ginny like some stretched-thin rag doll twisting round itself.
“Oh, Joe,” she said, and she felt her shoulders convulse, but there was nothing in her stomach but gin. “Oh, Joe.”
“Listen, Marion,” he said, voice stern but gentle. “You must pull yourself together here. I need you to help. You can’t fall to pieces on me.”
“No, Joe,” she said, “I won’t.”
“Here,” he said, taking a packet from his pocket. “Take these.”
They were pills and she raised a palm of them to her mouth until he swatted her arm down. “Not all of them, Marion. Not now. One.”
She did as she was told, eyes never leaving the trunks. “Joe,” she said, tongue dusty with the powdery pill. “Joe, how did you get them in there? How did they fit?”
“Worth took care of everything, Marion. Don’t you worry about that. He has,” he said, and there was the sparest of pauses, “operated on Louise and made it all work.”
Marion felt her knees turn to soft dough and she began to drop to the floor.
“What did I say to you, Marion?” Joe said, pulling her back, raising her shoulders high, turning her to face him and then slapping her twice hard across either cheek. Her head rang. “I have done everything, Marion. And now it is your turn.”
HE TOLD HER how it would be. He told her to go home and pack a bag. He told her to telephone the Lightning Delivery Service and have them pick up the trunks and take them to the station and load them on the train and then they would be waiting for her twelve hours later when she arrived in the Southern Pacific Station in downtown Los Angeles. See how he’d rigged it, so she would never even have to touch them? See how he had arranged everything? And she would never have to lay hands on those trunks. Never even have to touch those awful boxes sitting there. Those awful boxes.
“But won’t Mr. Worth…Won’t he…”
“He won’t say a goddamned word, Marion,” Joe said, and it was the first time he had ever cursed before her. “They’re his trunks. He knows I have enough on him to hang him. Horse meat to hospitals. That’s just the start.”
She didn’t know what that might mean and didn’t want to guess. Everything seemed so different with Joe now and yet somehow the same, just with her eyes struck wide, lashed open, there was no hiding. Joe was Joe. And it was a dark thing.
Was this the one who had held her curls between fingers and pressed lips to, tickling stomach, lips on faint down and eyes bewitched?
It was a dark thing.
So she packed her bag and it was all like a dream, fuzzy, ill defined. Later, she recalled running her good hand along the front of her good dress, smoothing its worn cotton.
“WHAT YOU GOT IN HERE, BARBELLS?”
The Lightning Delivery Service men looked at the trunks. One had started raising it onto his dolly and then stopped.
“You joining the circus, angel? Gonna be the Strong Man, or Strong Gal?”
Marion smiled. She surely did. The pills, they were helping. She could feel herself move as if marionette lifted and she recited over and over again Joe’s instructions in her head. He told it to her three times and three times he made her repeat it back to him.
“You sure there’s not hooch in those trunks?” The other man winked. “’Cause we would have to report you for that.”
Marion kept her gentle smile and shook her head, filling out the baggage slips. “Oh no, I’m a Christian, gentlemen.” She did not know where that line had come from, but she was glad for it. It sounded so sincerely meant. Inside, somewhere under the gauze of the pills, there was a whirring terror, but she could barely hear it, a vague purling somewhere far away. And so she returned to Joe’s instructions and recited them with care: “A fellow worker and her friend, well, they packed all their worldly goods in there. They asked me to ship them. They’ve moved west.”
“And left you behind? Damn fools, I’d say.”
“They met some men,” she enunciated, “and went off with them to Los Angeles.”
“Sound like some girls. I’d like to meet those girls.”
“That’s the kind of girls they are,” she said.
“I’ll say. Say, this is going to cost a pretty penny.”
“I have the funds. They left me the funds.” As Joe directed, she showed the men a roll of bills.
“Well, how ’bout that? Those are some girls.”
THINGS BEGAN HAPPENING very fast and all the time was collapsing in on itself, softly falling to the center. It had something to do with her head and something to do with the pills and something to do with everything that mattered being gone.
She did not remember taking the streetcar home, but back at Mrs. Gower’s, she telephoned the clinic and told the weekend receptionist that she was quite sick and expected she would not be at work on Monday.
“Oh, I am sorry, Marion. You do sound rotten. Not yourself at all,” the girl said. “Take care. Hot-water bottle and hot toddy, you know?”
Suddenly, she felt terribly anxious. “I hope Dr. Milroy will not be mad at me for missing work.” As the words came from her mouth they sounded so silly to her, so frivolous she nearly laughed.
“Don’t worry. Everyone likes you, Marion,” the girl said. And Marion replied that she was so glad.
THE PLAN WAS FOR JOE to come to the rooming house at eight o’clock to drive her to the station. She had her head covered with the old cloche hat, as he told her, and she tucked every platinum bit of her hair underneath.
Waiting by the window, she watched her wounded hand and she could smell it and it smelled unclean despite all her ministrations. She took another of Joe’s pills and finally saw his Packard pull up at 8:20, leaving them only ten minutes to get to the station.
“You’re drunk, Joe,” she said as they pulled away from the curb, she with her satchel so heavy and he didn’t help not one bit. He was drunk and she couldn’t believe it.
But he just laughed and steered the wheel. He began instructing her on what to do. What had made sense earlier made no sense now. She said, again, “But, Joe, why don’t we just take the trunks into the desert and bury them? Why don’t we just do that? Why must we send them all the way to California? And why must I go too?”
He waved his hand at her, Masonic ring flashing, and she thought he might strike her again, but he was somehow gay. “I told you, baby doll, I told you. The highway patrol’ll find the trunks before we can blink and it will all come back to you. This way, it’s two girls, two girls notorious for their reckless, aberrant ways, out on a tear to Hollywood for a new life of casual debauch. Who wouldn’t believe that of them?”
She looked down at the ticket in her hand. MRS. H. MACGREW, it said.
“But why must I go too? Why can’t the trunks go without me?”
“You must go to be sure that the trunks a
re safely in the hands of my associate, Mr. Wilson. He will take care of everything there. What’s more, he will bring you to a physician to tend to your wound. It works perfectly, you see, as Los Angeles is a place I have associates and it is a place you have been before. It will swallow this up. Los Angeles is a place that swallows things like this up whole.”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the seat to her. “Take this,” he said, and she smelled the booze coming off him, from his mouth, his suit, his whole body. There was something in his face too. Something closed and done. “Now, what did I tell you, Marion? What are your instructions?”
“Get off the train at Southern Pacific Station and wait for Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson will find me,” she said, “by the pansies on my lapel.” She fingered the cloth pin on her dress. “Look for a thin man with yellow hair and spectacles and a green gabardine suit. It’s just like a motion picture. Like Mata Hari. That’s what you said. You said I was to be Mata Hari.”
“That’s right, darling, Mata Hari. That’s you,” he said, laughing, eyes gaudy with liquor. It was awful, and the look on his face made Marion, even behind the numb the pills cast across her, feel herself die. She died right there. It was all over. It was all over and she knew that once she got on the train, it would be as if all the lights had gone out all over the world.
For twelve hours she sat in her seat on the Golden State Limited and barely lifted her head. The man seated next to her had a large shiny face and big teeth and a pomaded head of hair that shone across the car like a searchlight, and he told her he was going to work in motion pictures and she should too, or did she already, because she looked the spitting image of Constance Talmadge and had anyone ever told her that.
The man talked for a while, and Marion looked out the window, her hand hidden behind her purse, which contained the envelope Joe had given her, and she knew the hand was aching but she couldn’t feel it aching. She looked into the black pane.
“Honey, there ain’t nothing to see,” the man said, and she could feel the wink in his voice. She wondered, suddenly, seeing his grinning reflection in the glass, if this was how Joe Lanigan was, really was at bottom. Was this him?
But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be, and she would make him love her once more.
WHEN SHE FINALLY FELL ASLEEP, that was when she could shut out Louise and Ginny no longer. They were there, they were in the seats across from her, lounging nudely like lovely harem girls with jeweled fingers and toes, and they were chattering away at her, and Marion could feel herself wanting to laugh with them and it was lovely and they were back. They were putting arms around each other and Ginny was singing “Cheerful Little Earful” and Marion wanted to reach over and squeeze her little thrush cheek and as she started to, as her fingertips nearly touched that flushed face, before, before…before the face blew to pieces, to shimmery black powder, to nothing. To nothing.
To pause and think, to think about what had occurred—the savage thing she had, with fumbling hands, wrought—would ruin her. To pause and think of those black boxes jostling in the freight car behind her, to picture the bodies curled round inside—well, one could not allow thoughts to scamper in that direction and yet go on. No. No. She knew in some way it was God’s wrath fallen upon her for her sinful ways and worse still her rapture over the sin, her openmouthed hunger for it.
And yet thoughts of Joe Lanigan still came. They wouldn’t stop, even now. She couldn’t break it. Nothing could break it. She so wanted it broken for good.
IT WAS LIKELY TWELVE HOURS LATER, the spidery hands of the Southern Pacific Station clock told it, but it felt like a minute or a year and she took another pill, noting sadly only eight left and how would she go on without them?
She found a seat under the arrivals-and-departures board, fluffed her crushed pansy pin and awaited the arrival of Mr. Wilson, who would wave a hand and fix everything, Joe Lanigan’s gleaming West Coast proxy and her savior.
AN HOUR AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES had passed when she felt the nerve pulsing in her face. Eyes weary from scanning the crowd, wave after wave of blond men in gabardine, nearly all of whom smiled back at her but none of whom answered to Mr. Wilson, though one said he could be President Hoover if she were so inclined.
Oh, he was not coming. She wondered if Joe Lanigan had deceived her and Mr. Wilson would never arrive—if in fact this Mr. Wilson existed at all. She wondered this, but she could not let herself believe it, not now. She couldn’t slip down into that murky place. It would swallow her whole.
LOOKING IN THE LADIES’ ROOM MIRROR, she felt herself tingling all over. There was a monumentality to the moment. It was so big she was made breathless by it.
Outside, in the bank of telephone booths, she had telephoned Joe Lanigan’s house. “I’m sorry, miss, but he is out on business,” the nurse said. “We don’t expect him until this evening.” Marion could picture her, tray in hand, in that silent house, that dark mahogany corridor, that lonely telephone in that lonely house, the metallic smell of illness choking the air.
She knew of no other way to reach Joe.
Joe had made himself impossible to reach.
For one long minute she was sure that the best, the only, the correct thing to do was to walk back to the tracks and throw herself under the next train like some white-necked heroine from a melodrama. She was certain this was the thing she must do. She was certain of it.
Placing a hand to her face, to her quivering chin and jaw, she asked, Marion, is this the end? Is this the dark pitch at cliff ’s edge?
But it was not. It was not. She would not let it be so. She had found herself in dark corners before, not so dark as this, but dark in other ways—Nights spent lonely as if alone, Dr. Seeley, hollow-eyed and lost, crying to her and skin-popping, and what to prepare her for this, minister’s daughter Dutch Reformed pure and Sunday school in her eyes; this was not for her but it was hers and she had to—she had found her way out before. She would find her way out now. In some ways, she was surprised how fast her blood still ran, how hard her heart still galloped. She was not such a wilting thing. It turned out she was not that thing at all.
Forty dollars remained in the envelope Joe had given her. She had forty dollars with which to save herself.
Her first thought was to abandon the trunks and use her return ticket for the next train home. But the station officials would, of course, find what was inside them and then where would she be, where would she be? It was all too close, it was all right upon her. Those trunks. Those trunks. They were leering, black-hearted things, weren’t they? They were so big, she was sure she could see them through the station walls, through the walls of the claims office and right through into their messy centers.
She felt her throat catch, her eyes turn dun in the mirror. She shook her head, shook her thoughts away, juggled them out of chaos into focus.
Oh, God, one can’t think like this, one cannot, she determined. She just needed time, she needed distance. She needed to figure things out. To slow down her thoughts, to think things through. She tried to concentrate. If only she had time, time to reach Joe, who would have to account for himself, who would have to make things right.
A picture came to her of the Hotel Munn, a shaggy place on Olive Street where she and Dr. Seeley spent six weeks the previous year, awaiting yet another licensing hearing. But the staff might recognize her.
Then she remembered the place on East Fifth Street, above the Blue Bell sandwich stand. The St. Curtis Hotel. She had gone there once, summoned by the manager to retrieve her husband, who had spent four days lounging in the lobby, ascending the stairs on occasion to take his pleasures with bug-eyed hah-peeners in various rooms whenever, as he said, the poppy fleet came in. The St. Curtis, she would go there. It was not a place where anyone was remembered. No one bothered you there. Not even the manager, who’d only wanted his two bits.
“I HAVE COME for those two trunks.”
“Aren’t I the happy fella,” the baggage cl
aims man said, “because don’t they ever weigh a mother-in-law-sized ton and I thought I might have to move ’em to Unclaimed. What you got in them anyway? They sure are stirring up a stink.”
Marion smiled brightly. “Oh, I am sorry.”
“You know,” the man said, eyeing the trunks, “last year, fella up in Montreal, Canada, killed his wife with a claw hammer and shipped her here in a steamer. Ten days en route and stalled in the Plains on account of bad weather. By the time she got here, there wasn’t much left inside but some bones and slime. Only figured her out from her teeth. Her skin had slipped off like a moldy peach peel. Baby, did she stink. I’d’ve taken another shot of the ole mustard they gave me in the Marne over that any day,” the man said, handing her the slips to sign. Looking at her face, he added, quickly, “Aw, I’m sorry. I got a big yap. Are you okay, miss? I made you all green, didn’t I?”
“I’m all right,” she said, fingers delicately to lips. “Just a little travel sick. Will these fit in a taxicab?”
“Between you and me, I think you’re better off hiring a truck. I know a fella runs a hand laundry truck between here and Good Samaritan.”
“Will you phone him for me?” She showed him all her teeth, had not smiled so broadly since playing Little Eva at her grammar school drama pageant.
“Consider him on his way. He ain’t gonna like that smell any more than me, but slap him some extra green and he can hold his nose the whole way.” He paused and looked at the trunks again, and then at Marion. “I am supposed to ask, that wouldn’t be meat in there, would it? ’Cause it sure stenches like meat.”
Marion bit her lip. “I know it’s against the rules, but I promised Mama.” She had no idea where the lie came from, or how she was spinning it with such bright conviction. “It’s just two white-tailed bucks my brother shot up in the mountains. For Mama’s Easter dinner.” Where did such lies come from and from what place did such reserve glide, smooth as churned butter? Was it the pills? Was it Joe Lanigan’s mesmeric speech in her ear? It was as if she had been born to it, and it was so much easier, so much easier to declaim than anything real or true.