My darling, my darling, my sweetheart divine
No feat too daring for my daredevil mine
She dances ’long clifftops and tightropes for show
Wraps legs ’hind her head, can kiss her elbow
It was the thing she must’ve known—he has operated on Louise, he has fixed it so we can take them away—but now seeing it.
Slowly, with such shaping dread even through her medicine fog, she reached for the elbow, the arm and felt the arm rise light, rise, rise, rise, with her own hand. She could lift it as far as the heavens.
So terrible, so terrible, there could be no words.
Oh, Louise, love me yet.
Part Five
…I’m an exile sad, too sad to weep.
My fatherland is dear, but I too left it;
Far am I from the spot where I was born;
Cheerless is life, fierce storms of joy bereft it;
Made me an exile lifelong and forlorn.
—From “La Golondrina,” (The Swallow)
by Narciso Serradel Sevilla,
Trans. Rev. Thos. W. Westrup, 1883
The Golden State Limited pulled into the station just after seven. A scant thirty-six hours had passed, the same bleary-eyed hobo she had noticed the day before still curled in the corner of the platform, leaning against a jutting wall, shielded from wind and the eyes of conductors.
Thirty-six hours, Marion thought, and I have changed forever.
She had done the things and she would not speak of them again. She latched the trunks. She soaked the towels in the borax solution. When she was sure the corridor was empty she tacked the towels to the bottom of the door, closed it and left the St. Curtis Hotel, not bothering to check out.
She left with only her purse.
No one said a word.
It was easy.
How easy it was, it shamed her more.
On the trip home, lulled by the pills and the churn of the train, she slept dreamlessly.
IT WAS NOT SO EARLY, but the streets were echoey and lonesome. The heat had already lowered fierce, settling like an iron pressing to her face and neck.
The streetcar rattled her slowly across town. She put a hand to her jaw, felt the dampness of her dirty hair. Her clothes gave off musky odors and her body too, which was radiating an unclean heat. Her eyes felt to be popping from rusty sockets.
“Lynbrook Street,” the conductor bellowed, and suddenly her heart rose up in her chest.
There it was, his cool, careless fortress, indifferent and immaculate, one stray silver roller skate dangling from its leather strap on the steep slope of the front lawn.
She flitted up the lawn as fast as her shaking legs would take her.
Without stopping, nearly pressing her body against the heavy door, she raised her good hand and clapped the knocker as hard as she could, her whole body swinging into it.
He would answer her. He could speak to his actions.
“Yes?” The door opened and the prim nurse in the white collar and starched apron squinted out at Marion, eyes straining from the sunlight, that house so dark, like a funeral home or a cinema.
“I need to see Mr. Lanigan immediately,” Marion said, trying to stand as upright as possible, as upright as this nurse who looked and smelled as clean as freshly boiled sheets.
“He’s not here, ma’am. Shall I relay a message?” The face, unmarked, empty and serene. Serene as only a young girl’s could be. What was she, twenty? Twenty-one? Marion, ma’am, was once twenty, twenty-one, a million years ago.
“I will see him. I will see him now,” Marion said, voice jangling wildly, a trilling hurdy-gurdy. How dare he hide himself away behind the nurse’s skirts like a little boy. “Please tell him I’m here and he’s to show me his Shanty Irish face.”
“He’s not here, ma’am. But I shall give him any message you would like to—”
Marion felt herself lunging forward. The words tumbled forth, uncontrollably. “Do you mean to tell me he’s not here at this early hour? Why, he is a married man, is he not? A family man with children? And he is not at home at just past dawn? Is that what you mean to say?”
In her head, worse still, voices scurrying, saying, This, a man so degenerate, so dissolute and perverse that he stalks the streets for girls all night like a vampire, like Jack the Ripper.
She could not control herself.
She could not even stop her mouth from gaping and cawing and shrilling like a handsaw. The nurse, standing there so calm, so cool-browed, as if to mock her, to mock her as a hysteric, a madwoman.
“Ma’am, I do not know what you mean,” the nurse said, firm and unflustered, a Sing Sing prison warden in handkerchief cap and bib. “Mr. Lanigan is in the mountains on a hunting party with friends. He returns later in the week.”
Marion could hear a thudding in her head like a wood plank thwacking against a hollow wall.
“Is that what is claimed?” she said, her voice now a wheeze. “Am I to believe that?”
“I have to attend to my duties, ma’am,” the nurse said, trying to close the door. Oh, wasn’t life ever so easy for her? Wasn’t this just another nuisance in a day of nuisances, of filling syringes, pushing pillows about, standing straight in sickrooms, counting clock ticks. What did she know of sorrow, of life?
“You tell your esteemed employer,” Marion said, nearly biting her own tongue, “you tell him that Mrs. Seeley has returned home and he’s to see me and if he declines, he will not like what happens. He will not like it one bit. There’s things I can do. You tell him that. You tell him that.”
MRS. GOWER was not home and the rooming house was hushed as Marion bolted up the stairs to her room, and her head was still doing the thudding and she felt things crawling under her nails, under her skin, and she was not going to take any more pills, and she was going to cover herself in water and never let dirt or ugliness touch her again.
Joe Lanigan, you have broken, burned and beaten me and still I am here. I wear on even as you seek to obliterate and undo me. Even as you have ruined me twice, three times over. Ravishing me, ravaging me and razing me. I stand here still.
The door whinnied open and the familiar smell of old wood and butcher polish, of mothballs and Breath O’ Pine felt like a warm coat and she let it fold over her.
But as she stepped in, eyes adjusting to the light from her window, she saw something moving on the bed, and for one fleeting, appalling moment she was sure it was Louise and Ginny, spread out nude and bloodied like some nightmare come to life. A penny dreadful with bodies under groaning floorboards calling out to guilty souls.
It was only the start of a scream before she shoved her fist to her mouth and slammed the door shut behind her and the thing shifted and her eyes drew together.
“Is that you, Marion?”
And the body—the man—turned and set his feet to floor, and there was Dr. Everett Seeley. There was her husband, or was it? He looked so different. She had not seen that ruddy color on his cheeks in so long, since they married, perhaps, and those knotty cheekbones were draped softly now, his dark hair no longer baby wisping but richly toned, molasses dipped.
He rose and began to walk to her, and then she knew it was him, knew by the familiar slope-shouldered, defeated gait. His eyes, they were soft suddenly, as if with tears.
Before she could take a breath, his hands were gently on her shoulders. He tried to embrace her, but she was still clasping her purse to her chest with both arms, like some rogue-threatened waif.
“Marion, I am a few days early. When I received your last letter about your cough returning, and that you needed money, well, I was concerned. You know how it felt to me to leave you here. I shall never forgive myself for it, even as I saw no other choice. One of the mine captain’s sons was heading up this way and offered me a ride, so I took it.”
He was talking, but Marion could not follow, her eyes growing wider, her fingers digging helplessly.
“But, you see, Marion, I arrived las
t night and found you gone. Were you staying with those girlfriends of yours? Marion, do you intend to speak?”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe she was seeing him. She wasn’t sure he was even there. But his hands, they held her arms so firmly, they spanned her, and his face, she knew it so well, or she did once. Now it was more like a photograph, like the snapshot she kept in her Holy Bible, the one where he stood proudly in front of his brand-new 1927 Model A Ford.
“Marion, you must know there is nothing you cannot say to me. Not after what I have put you through. Marion, believe me, there is nothing—”
Her knees hit the floor and stars were everywhere.
THE AMMONIA SPIRITS tickled her nose and her lashes fluttered fast. On her bed, her legs turned at funny angles, she saw Dr. Seeley, still there, squinting at her, face drawn in concern.
“Marion,” he said. “Marion…”
There could be no dissembling. She could not reckon any more dissembling. She could not teeter one more atrocity upon the towering bank.
“Dr. Seeley,” she whispered.
“Yes, Marion.”
“Dr. Seeley, you must forgive me.”
And she told him.
“MARION,” he said to her, holding her shaking hands in his, having listened for an hour or more to her litany of mortification. The illicit lunches, the parties, the seduction, the descent into sin and, finally, the bloody night and everything thereafter. She told him as best she could.
His mouth remained open, but he could not speak, and his face—everything that had been moving in it stopped moving. It seemed to sink in on itself. It had turned old once more in that hour.
By the time she disclosed the dark day she left town with those trunks and, far worse, the things she had done to the bodies within them, his eyes dimmed and something happened. When his eyes fastened on her once more, it was as though he were looking at a stranger, an alien thing. The beast or witch that had taken possession of his dear blond wife.
Turning from her, he rose and walked to the window. She watched him, watched his stillness. She watched him for what seemed ages and more.
“Murder,” he finally whispered, his hand curling over his mouth, as if to muffle his own voice. “It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t that.”
“No, no,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, a scratchy hiss. Crazily, it reminded her of Ginny’s. “But it feels the same. What have I done, what have I done.” She brought her hands to her face and her body began rocking. It was like a scene from a melodrama. The sinning wife’s mad scene.
But he would not turn to face her. He would not look.
“Marion,” he said, “it is clear to me now, and it should have been when I received your last letters, each more desperate, that you had fallen into such despair that you…you lost all reason. Lost all reason at all.”
“I did,” she rasped. “I did.”
“Things happen, Marion,” he said, finally turning toward her, eyes ringed red and feathered through, “when we fall off the path we’re meant to follow. Because of my weakness, I took you off the path and placed you at peril, and dangers that never should have touched the farmost edges of your life have hit you square in the heart.”
“I didn’t wish to harm her—,” Marion started, feeling her face wrenching as if she might sob. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what has become of me. I don’t know myself.” Her own words frightened her.
But looking, she could see his face softening, his eyes. She thought he must be the kindest man who ever lived.
He sat down beside her. She thought he might touch her, but it seemed he couldn’t. Not yet.
“Marion,” he said, “I understand the…the indignities you’ve suffered on my account. And for my behalf. I never meant for you to have this kind of life. You were not meant to have this kind of life.” He looked across the room and she knew he was looking at their wedding portrait, which sat on the small dresser. “You are a pure and good girl. It has always been as it first was, as the first moment I saw you. Do you recall, Marion? At the hospital, you on the stairwell above, carrying a stack of bedding—brilliant white—and you’d stopped to look out the window on the landing. The sun was coming off the lake and you were struck by it. That’s what I decided. You were struck by the light and you stopped even with arms heavy and you were looking at the light, it broke across your face and it was like some biblical illumination, it was like something you’d see in a very old book with gilded pages. That’s how it was.”
And then this, to bring you to this low state. He didn’t say that, wouldn’t say that. But should have. That’s what she thought. Here she was, a ruined girl, a girl who’d let liquor cover her face, who’d let a man’s hands between her knees, her thighs, who’d set herself before a man, knees on carpet, begging him to drag her down to awful places.
A girl who’d held a gun in tensile fingers and shot the life out of some slip of a thing. Shot the life out of her.
Somehow that last thing mattered less. Somehow that mattered less than that she was the girl who let a man bring his hand, dusted with that tingling white powder, between her legs, and he…and he…how could that have…how could she…
He put a hand to her lips and said, thusly, “Marion, what I see now shakes me to the core. But that is because it is me. Do you see? The shame is mine. The shame is mine. I took you from your father’s parsonage. I took you from the leafy, God-loving groves of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I sunk you in the pits of hell.”
Eyes shining with sudden brightness, he added, “It is my stake to redeem you.”
TAKING HER ARM in one hand and his medical bag in the other, he walked her down the hallway to the bathroom. There, he tended to her wound and redressed it. She did not wince. He watched her a moment, then said, “Marion, did he give you any medicine? Did this man give you any pills or powders?”
She dug in her pocket and held out her sticky palm, showing him the last of the pills Joe Lanigan had given her.
Dr. Seeley put his nose and tongue to one and asked her how she felt after she took them, taking her chin in his hand and lifting it and peering into her eyes. Then he dropped them down the sink drain while Marion watched from the doorway.
“Marion,” he said when he returned, sitting her back down on the bed, “promise me you don’t have any more of those. They will knock your nervous system to a fare-thee-well. You want to get hold of yourself. It’s important, if we’re to get through this, that you get hold of yourself.”
“Yes, Dr. Seeley, yes,” she said. But then she remembered his letters and how he always told her to settle herself, to take things as easy as she could, to come home at five o’clock and rest and eat and sleep in a decent manner. He told her, as lonely and bereft as she might feel, she must use self-control and not indulge in sorrow and malaise. The scolding, like the other one, the other one who said, while feeding her pills, You must pull yourself together here…. You can’t fall to pieces on me. Both of them scolding her, reprimanding her, as if they had no part. As if they had no share in the chaos.
“Dr. Seeley, though, Everett, what do you know of it? What do you know of keeping hold of oneself?” Her voice sounded low and nasty, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“Not a soul knows more than me, Marion,” he said gravely. “Not a soul.”
And she supposed it was true. “You’ve managed, then,” she whispered.
“I’ve been simon-pure for four months, Marion. I haven’t touched the stuff. I haven’t dipped once.”
It was the longest since she knew him, since the Indiana State Hospital when he nearly died.
“What will I do? I wonder what I will do,” she said, her voice low, her face down.
“I will figure things out, Marion. I will.”
And she believed he would. He was not a man who took his responsibilities lightly. He was not a man of fancy, a man of caprice. He was a sober man, a man of purpose. A man on whom whole communities could rely, a family man, a f
amily doctor, a trusted citizen, a pillar.
Were it not for that dark spot on his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.
“The dark spot,” Marion murmured as she sat beside him. “Now it is mine.”
AT FIRST, Dr. Seeley suggested they leave that night, take a train to Eagle Pass, Texas, and then move on to Coahuila.
Not without seeing that Mr. Lanigan, Marion persisted. Not without that. She had to see him for herself. She had to see him and see that it was true, that he had abandoned her to this, and he would have to say it to her face. The look in her eyes startled Dr. Seeley.
“Marion, that would be a mistake.”
Marion raised her fingertips to her temples and tried to stop the shaking in her chest. “But, Everett,” she said, and her voice sounded tinny, like a machine. “I think it best that I go to work tomorrow. Explain that the girls ran off with these men. I don’t think we should raise suspicions.”
“I suppose,” Dr. Seeley said. “Yes. But in the meantime, I will be making inquiries. I will be making inquiries about this Joseph Lanigan.”
“I have told you all I know,” blurted Marion.
“I know you have, dear,” he said, “but you may not know everything.”
WHEN HE SAW HER lying bolt-straight trying to sleep, he took pity and gave her the smallest amount of chloral hydrate. She woke many times in the night and twice saw him sitting by the window, looking out. She wanted to call to him, but she could not make the words come.
She had to speak with Joe Lanigan. She had to.
DR. MILROY summoned her to his office. He told her she looked quite pale and hoped she was well. “I am sorry to have missed work yesterday,” she said.
“Mrs. Curtwin tells me you have news of Nurse Mercer,” he said sternly. “You mean to say she has simply gone and left her post?”