“It worked enough to get her in bloomers and pointy shoes at the Crimson Cavalcade at the Hotel Dunlop downtown.”
“Is that a very grand establishment?” Marion asked.
“So grand you can only get in with a referral.”
“My.”
“And two bits.”
“And the referral usually means whispering ‘sarsaparilla’ through a sliding peephole,” Louise said, then clanged her ladle against a pot lid and whistled. “Soup’s on, kiddos.”
Lifting her golden head from the cushion with a sly smile, Ginny tucked her hands under the edges of the muslin and stretched her arms, spreading the muslin wide, showing long ribbons of blaring music notes stitched in Turkey red floss. The hot-water bottle glugged to the floor.
CRIMSON CAVALCADE. Just the name painted such plush-throated images in Marion’s head. She had never known women who had been to such places. She had certainly never known women who worked in them. Back home, when her brother had his troubles, he’d taken to killing his sad evenings in a little place called the Silver Tug Club, or so she found out when her father and Dr. Seeley went looking for him after he’d not shown up for dinner or work at the insurance office in nigh on four days. Dr. Seeley explained to her that such places were really just gentlemen’s clubs but that gentlemen, not like her father but other types, sometimes liked to sit back after a long workday and have a postprandial beverage with other gentlemen and smoke a cigar and talk over current events, and there was nothing really wrong with that, was there, and shouldn’t she know her brother’s had hard times enough, what with losing his bank job in ’27 and losing his wife to a railroad man in ’28?
THERE WAS HASH with a glistening egg on top and chow chow crackling with vinegar, and there were pickled peaches with some kind of delicious glaze on them that made Marion’s mouth go hot. The girls all sat around the pocket-sized card table, tilting despite three matchbooks under one leg.
Louise ate eagerly, sopping up egg with puffy dinner rolls and chatting away at Ginny, who almost never stopped giggling and who never seemed to lift fork or spoon, only her glass.
As they talked, Marion’s eyes found their way through the pink-lit enchantment around her. So different from any home she had ever been in, so different from her room at Mrs. Gower’s, with its bare walls (save the Currier & Ives calendar) and heavy curtains faded from the sun. There, she had nowhere to look except the rippled mirror above her washstand.
Here, her eyes bounced off everything. The gleaming stand mixer on the kitchen counter that still had store tags on it, a Silvertone cathedral radio, an amber decanter with cordial glasses, a portable Carryola Master phonograph, a silver-plated ice bucket into which someone, Louise, she’d guessed, had dumped peppermint candies of the kind they kept in the children’s ward at the clinic.
Random, she thought, to have such a high-tone radio but only a rickety card table on which to eat. And over there, a Hot-point samovar that stood eighteen inches tall and must have held twelve cups of coffee, all for two girls, yet only one easy chair with thin velvet worn through to the spongy netting beneath.
“We met at a clinic in Denver,” Louise was saying, although Marion hadn’t asked. She poured a long syrupy slug of something terribly sweet and beguiling into their glasses, something tasting of plums and covering Marion’s mouth as if she were swallowing big gummy tablespoons of warm honey.
“I did Ginny’s X-rays,” Louise said. “Looked like someone spattered her chest with birdshot.”
“I’d come from a year in Illinois,” Ginny said, pronouncing the s with a smiling slur. “The winters clogged me up but good. I was headed west when I got very poorly in Denver and had run out of coin withal.”
“We got on like a house afire and I decided I needed a change of scene. When she was hale enough, I cracked open my piggy bank and bought us two tickets out of Dodge. And what better place than this, a place in which one is expected, nearly required to rise up from one’s own ruins. Renewal from one’s own ashes.”
“You got to haul your ashes,” Ginny said. “Haul ’em but good.”
“Starting anew,” Marion said, thinking about Dr. Seeley, thinking about the promises he had made of new starts.
“Lou-Lou’s always been an absolute peach,” Ginny said, more seriously now, shaking her head fiercely. “She works double shifts when things get tight. I’m a drag on her.”
Marion nodded in sympathy.
“Fuh,” Louise said, waving her hand in the air, “what else should I spend my dime on? Even if I get hitched again, my insides are tied up good. Might as well throw mama sugar on this yellow chick.”
“Tied up?” Marion said, her face feeling so glowy, the conversation going so fast. Was she really understanding? “You mean you can’t have children?”
A thread of nerve whipped across Ginny’s face as she looked at Marion.
Louise tilted back in her chair and you could feel a swell of plain-eyed sorrow pass across her, turning her into the suffering Gaelic mother of yore, like the brown-tinted portrait of Dr. Seeley’s beloved mother, anchored on the fireplace ledge of their home, when a home was still something they had.
“They scraped me so bad when I lost my boy,” Louise said quietly. “After that, it all went to ruin with me and Frank.”
Marion had heard Louise was married but hadn’t known if it was true, or what had happened to Mr. Mercer if it was. Louise’s long, ruddy fingers were bare.
Ginny slid from her chair and collapsed herself on Louise’s lap, arm around her long neck. “Oh, Lou-Lou, don’t. Don’t let’s fall down that mine shaft.”
And Louise, in a second, squiggled out a smile and squeezed little Ginny tight. “You’re right, Gin-Gin. We have Marion here. We have our wonderful new girl Marion and, not only that, we have Golden Glow parfaits!”
These parfaits, they were beautiful, shivering golden cloud in fine-stemmed glasses. Marion scarcely wanted to dip her spoon and disturb it, but she did and the taste on her tongue was like summer lemons dipped in sugar.
Marion asked her what it all was, her voice starting to do funny things, the words slipping around in her mouth and the s’s stretching out. Her temples throbbing hotly, she began to feel certain that the plum juice they had been drinking was very likely wine.
Louise replied that the parfaits were so simple, lemon junket, milk, an egg white, sugar, stewed apricots.
Marion told them both she’d never had dessert except on special Sundays, and on her honeymoon.
And then Marion found herself telling them, as they sat across from her, eager-eyed and rapt, how she left home the first time on her wedding night, three weeks past her nineteenth birthday, and that honeymoon trip was the first time she’d ever set foot in the lobby of a fine hotel (the Palace Hotel in Cincinnati, she still remembered her hand on the rail at the foot of the walnut and marble staircase, looking up), the first time she’d dined in a restaurant (turtle soup, an encarmined roast beef and maraschino ice cream for dessert, served in a chilled dish of sterling silver that tinkled like a bell when her spoon hit it), watched Gilbert Roland make love to Norma Talmadge in a motion picture, or seen a motion picture at all, the first time she’d seen a stage show (The Cameo Girl ), or put on roller skates, or spotted a lady smoking on the street.
“First for other things too, don’t I guess,” Louise said, her smile filled with mischief. Ginny laughed and squeezed Marion’s hand, which made her feel cared for.
“The only first on Louise’s honeymoon,” Ginny said, still clinging to Marion, swinging her arm, fingers interlaced, “was putting her real name on the hotel register.”
“That ain’t true,” Louise said, twisting her lips like butterscotch hokum. “I didn’t sign the register at all. The bum still had desertion charges outstanding courtesy of the old battle-ax down in Sacramento.”
And she and Ginny laughed together, a giddy, earthy, delightful laugh, and Marion laughed too. She laughed too and it was all so grown-up. Sh
e’d never met any women so young yet so grown-up. So beautiful and no husbands around or downy babies, and if it weren’t for the tubercular rack that ripped through Ginny’s laugh as it further unpeeled, everything would seem too perfect for words.
SOON, MARION WAS COMING for supper two or three nights a week. It was too much fun. They would play cards, look through Screen World, it didn’t matter.
There were often new treats to be had, new ones all the time. Once, Marion noticed the big samovar was gone. “Louise cleaned it with bleach and nearly killed us all,” Ginny said. “I made her pawn it for that.” She pointed to a satin nickel roll-around cigarette box with a red handle. Marion, charmed, lifted the handle and noticed no cigarettes inside. “Who has dough enough for more than one pack at a time?” Louise shrugged.
One night, Louise made Marion take all the pins from her long, springy hair and they sheared six inches off, giving her a shingle bob and declaring, save the blond hair, Marion looked all the world like Sylvia Sidney. They told her she was now ready for one of their parties, which, they said, were very famous. What kind of parties were they, Marion wondered. And who would come? Who did these girls know?
AND SOON ENOUGH, shimmering pictures in the distance assembled themselves and it was all there before your eyes.
“Marion, can you hop on the streetcar quick as a wink? Ride a mile and smile the while, dontcha know. Promise me you will.”
It was a Tuesday night, nearly eight o’clock and the first time Marion had ever received a telephone call at the rooming house. She told Louise she had work to do, a sheaf of case files, fist thick, her fingers sore, her forearms tingling even as she spoke. She never seemed to get any faster, always taking work home. Her fingers just didn’t move that way. They fluttered, danced—they didn’t, as the other office girls’, march in tight formation, march with the clack, clack, clack of industry, of invading armies, of Progress.
“Don’t be a killjoy, Meems. You’re off the clock. Your fingers should be tickling the ears of handsome men, tickling their lobes, softer than all keys.”
Marion felt her face go red as she stood in the rooming-house hallway. The hallway smelled as always of cabbage, cabbage for pickling, gusts of vinegar heat wafting through every time Mrs. Gower came in or out the kitchen door.
“Marion,” Louise said, “put on that yellow dress of yours. Mr. Abner Worth is here, he of Worth Brothers Meat Market, and the Loomises. Sheriff Healy and his hollow leg. Mr. Worth brought his hand organ. We told them that you were in your church choir and now they all want to hear you sing ‘After the Roses Have Faded Away.’ They’ve decided to call you the Prairie Canary.”
AND AN HOUR LATER, from the rose-hued corner of the girls’ living room, she was singing. Surrounded by the red-faced Loomises, she with paper fans for everyone, brought in, inexplicably, from Spokane, Washington, and he with a serape from Tia Juana, a serape now wrapped around little Ginny, who vamped it like Dolores del Rio, Mrs. Loomis dotting her cheek with a jet-black beauty mark, to everyone’s delighted approval. Sheriff Healy, still wearing his uniform and tin star, twirled Ginny around like a Russian ballerina. And Marion singing, “The Mansion of Aching Hearts,” “My Mexicana Queen,” “Sipping Cider Through a Straw” and “In Old Ireland Where the River Kenmare Flows,” and Abner Worth spinning his hands, rotating them to unfurl the deep trill of the hand organ. And Mr. Loomis finally crying, crying as Marion warbled, “When you lose your moth-er, you can’t buy an-oth-er, If you had all the world and its gold” and Louise having to drag him down to the sofa, bring his teary head to her bosom, stroke his pink bald head, cooing assurances and reminders that we all love our mothers and it can never be enough.
She would not forget this: Pulling Marion aside in the cramped pullman kitchen, Mr. Worth said, “Another world, my girl, you’d be bright-lighting it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago now. You’d be high stepping it with governors and making Scar-face Capone cry in his beer.”
Marion, the only one, need you say it, the only one not gurgling bootleg all eve, smiled, sweet and gracious, as she did to the men in her father’s church, praising with warm eyes her stirring rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross.”
But inside, inside, my, this was fine. Oh, there were other worlds, weren’t there? Worlds just beyond her tired fingertips. What she might sink those tips into, soft like clover.
“JUST YOU WATCH OUT FOR THEM, DARLING,” Louise whispered as they strode down the clinic’s main hall together, Marion’s arms filled with patient charts and Louise’s with the sputum cups. “The docs ask you to their house for dinner. Trot out the wife. You think it’s all copacetic. They’re just being grand old dad to you. Next thing you know, they have you knees to flat wood at Old Church of Fair Splinters twice a week plus Thursday night Bible study.”
Marion smiled as if she knew what Louise meant and shook her head. “Dr. Milroy has been very kind to me.”
“Oh, boy,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go to the supply room and sneak a smoke, dontcha think? I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about all this starch-collar-’n’-high-boots act they’re pulling.”
Marion did not smoke, but she started going all the time with Louise and she liked how Louise would lift up her long skirt and flash her leg like a can-can dancer, heel propped up high on a supply cart to slide a creased pair of Old Golds from under her garter belt, a ruffle of surprisingly bright orange. Marion had never seen garter elastics in colors like that. It was like the French lady in the pictures Dr. Seeley kept under his talc and his foot powder and the blond strand of baby hair from his brother who died, age six, from diphtheria and his special pills and two francs and a subway token from New York City and his Silver Star.
“These docs, Marion, they do the nastiest things when your eyes shut, or you turn corners, or, God help you, set foot on a stepladder. Keep your wits about you. I got an eyeful of Dr. Tipton just last week,” she whispered, loudly, shaking her match and blowing smoke at Marion.
“What did you see?”
“He was doing something for that pretty redheaded lunger, the one with enough wind left in her sails to blow for a doctor with a snug wallet and a way with the soft solder.”
“Oh, Louise, are you sure?” Marion said. Dr. Tipton was nearly forty years old with grown children and a wife famous for her church hats and ladylike ways. But then again, Louise seemed to know everything that went on at the clinic, and sometimes it seemed like the doctors made special efforts to ensure she was well treated. You never saw Louise carrying bedpans or on laundry duty.
“Sure as summer rain, dolly girl,” Louise said, flicking tobacco off her lower lip like Warner Baxter. Then she gave Marion a long look and shook her head. “You’re lucky you met me.”
NIGHTS, SHE’D THINK about Dr. Seeley leaving her here, even as there was no helping it, even as he was not to blame, could never be to blame, her devoted husband going on four years but seemed both longer and much shorter, much shorter. Sometimes wondering who this man was they’d spent so much time apart, so much time in hospital wards, in clinics, in such places. In her head, thinking of him, it was no longer that elegant doctor, a dozen years her senior, with the kind voice, so soft, soft like the soft, gentle pads of his long, elegant fingers. Instead, it was the picture of herself walking down long, milky hospital corridors, seeing him at the other end, seeing him turning the corner to face her, dark-ringed eyes and he smoothing that long forelock and fighting off his shame and she wishing he would not feel it, did not deserve to feel it. Whose fault, after all?
Lying in bed now, she thought of him as if on a holy mission to heal and provide salvation, conjuring vivid images of him in deep-riven Mexican mines, primitive climes where Aztec rites still held sway, like she’d seen in the pictures, like she’d seen in the magazines she peeked at while at the five-and-dime when she was very small. When she let herself, after those first rough days at the clinic, hours spent fingers pressing into typewriter ribbon, carbon stuck,
ink pressed under her nails, nails torn tugging, doctors stern in white coats intoning in her ear, intoning about patients waiting and her incompetence—nights after days spent in this head-aching, body-aching fashion, she’d permit herself exactly sixty seconds of anger at her husband, of hating him even. Her husband who couldn’t keep his shaking hands off the morphia canisters, all for that gluey, glazed descent into the plush velvet, making his voice slow like an old man, flush-faced and pin-eyed, just like the hollow-chested patients at the veterans hospital in Grand Rapids. Oh, Dr. Seeley—Everett. Everett. Was it worth it? Was it that wondrous a thing?
HE’D BEEN GONE, the doctor had, two months, including even her birthday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve now coming upon, and if it weren’t for Louise and Ginny, she’d have spent it sobbing over piecework in her cold room like some kind of lost lady in a melodrama, lungs coated with coal soot or prairie dust while her husband fought in the Argonne, in Manila Bay, at San Juan Hill. But Louise and Ginny had big New Year’s Eve plans that involved a friend of theirs, one Jibs McNeary, bringing a crate full of tin-pan noisemakers, horns with blower tips, table bangers and jaunty foil hats, the latest stack of race records piled high in the arms of Mr. Scott, fresh off a sales trip through honeysuckled towns all through the South and pink champagne from Canada drunk gushingly and splashing sweetly over upturned faces gay with pleasure, red with heat, sparkling with the endless confetti purchased by the Santa sackful from the five-and-dime.
Most of all, they were glad because their friend Gentleman Joe Lanigan, gone since before Thanksgiving on a business trip back east, would be back for the party and there would be toasts and music and merriment marking his triumphant return.
Gentleman Joe was the girls’ favorite among all the men, the one they never talked about without smiling rosy cheeked and making side jokes and winking and tickling each other even, if it was late and the girls were feeling silly.