“Don’t feel left out, Marion. You’ll meet him soon enough and you’ll love him just as much as we do.”
“We’d never have met any of our friends without his kindnesses.”
“He brings ukuleles and big jars of cocktail onions and maraschino cherries.”
“All kinds of crazy stuff.”
“He calls himself the Greater Downtown Benevolence Committee.”
“He’s the welcome wagon!” Ginny said, voice tumbling giddily.
“He’s the big-brother type,” Louise said, her hand on Marion’s arm. “We all need big brothers, don’t we, now?”
NEW YEAR’S EVE CAME and the crowd was just as big as the girls said, the house burning up at near 90 degrees and the men stripping down to shirtsleeves.
Someone had brought a big chrome cocktail shaker shaped like a bell, which Louise swung like a town crier when she mixed the cocktails.
Marion limited herself to one small glass of blackberry cordial, which Jibs’s mother made herself with beaten loaf sugar and stored in her cellar.
Everyone was dancing and the music was rushing through her body even when she stood still.
Suddenly, there was a big whoop and Marion thought it must be midnight even as she knew the electric wall clock had struck eleven no more than ten minutes before.
But no, it was all because of the Big Arrival. There was a swirl of looping bodies, everyone in the room but Marion caught in some kind of cyclone, sucking them toward the opening door creaking with their weight as they crushed against it.
The top of his hat, she saw that first and would always remember it. It had a teardrop crease in the center and it was burgundy, the first time she’d ever seen a man in a burgundy hat.
She was standing in the corner of the room and they were all around him and oohing and cooing and cuddling and backslapping, “How the hell you been, Joe?” “Oh, Joe, we thought we’d never see that pretty mug again,” “Joe, wait till I tell you about the new plot up for sale on Banville. It’s a sweet deal,” “My dear, Joe, that’s the biggest bottle of hooch I’ve seen since Ma died.”
And finally, tall bottles, cans of herring and silver anchovies, a crate of pearly oysters, a tilting pile of tin hand clackers, a few sliding away from the tangle and clattering to the floor, and there he was. There he was. And Marion would remember it just like that, like everyone falling away, a package unwrapped just for her. How could she not? A motion picture actor, that’s what he looked like, with that burgundy felt hat and his broad-shouldered topcoat and shoes shining like church floors on Easter. A smile like a swinging gate and smelling strong of sweet tobacco and slivered almonds and wind and travel and far-off places. When he took the hat off, his hair, blond and bright, shone nearly pink under the overhanging paper lantern, and Marion felt herself inhale fast and her eyes unfocus.
“Who’s the peach?” he was saying, and before she knew it he’d swept her up into his overcoat and the lapel rustling up, crushing her nose, pressing into her mouth, which was somehow open.
Peering up over his coat collar, she could see his eyes dancing, his bemused smile.
“That’s Marion,” she heard someone, Ginny, say, and everyone started singing, “Mary, Mary’s the girl for me, Mary, and I married soon will be.”
She felt a hand on her wrist, cold and strong, and she was yanked from the soft cocoon.
“But, Joe,” Louise was saying, and it was her hand Marion had felt, and now Louise flung her sidewise. “We haven’t wrapped her for you yet.”
And then Ginny popped a cork and it hit Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, in the eye, but he didn’t seem to notice. Everyone swarmed forward with their empty glasses and Louise wriggled behind Joe Lanigan to take his coat, running her hand down on it. “Cashmere, my love?” she asked.
“Vicuna, kiddo,” he said with a grin, clapping his hand against her face.
Men didn’t do that with Louise, not that Marion had ever seen. Not at the hospital, where they held doors for her and lifted things for her and tipped their hats. They might give lingering looks as she walked by them but they never did any wink and tickle like with so many of the nurses. And the men here, the men who came to her home, as careless as it was here, well, they sure liked to bring her presents, and maybe, maybe, they’d go as far as asking for a cuddle on the corner of the settee.
But not this. Not as Gent Joe was. Not so blithe, not so relaxed like she was a hatcheck girl, a girl in the elevator to press buttons and take pinches. Marion, even head fuzzy as it was, fuzzy like someone had run a dust rag across the whole world, took notice.
And then the crowd swallowed him again and Louise turned back toward Marion and leaned close, pressing against Marion, her velvety breast shining with spilt champagne, foam dappling.
“Help me, dear,” she said, Marion in the crook of her elbow, like a coach talking to his star player, whispering the next play deep in the ear. “Will you help me?”
“What is it, Louise?”
“In here,” she said, hitching Marion toward the door and into the hallway.
They were in the narrow bathroom and Louise was propped up on the sink. She was lifting her bristly bronze skirt up over her knees, and this time her garters were garnet colored with silver ribbon curling through.
“What are you doing, Louise?” She wondered if it was feminine troubles like Ginny was always having, Ginny who had pains lasting two weeks each month, requiring massages, low lights and a steady supply of something called Cardui Treatment, which came in a green bottle and which she’d spoon into her favorite highball glass. “Blessed thistle, black haw and goldenseal,” Ginny would lisp, finger pressed on the bottle label. “Stops flooding spells, heaviness in the abdomen. Giddiness.” Am I less giddy, Marion, am I? She was not.
Here was Louise slipping her fingers under her ruffling bloomers and pulling out loose pills, one after another, into her other palm still sticky from squeezing lemons for the drinks.
“Can you take these for me, Marion? I don’t want Ginny to find them,” Louise said. “She thinks whatever I get is all for her. But I have to pay the rent with something other than my fine bottom.”
“Where did they come from, Louise?” Marion asked. Her husband’s face flashed before her eyes. He was the first person to show her such pills, without meaning to, tucked in his trouser cuffs, on their honeymoon trip from Grand Rapids to St. Louis. When she lifted his suit from the trunk, pressing her hand into the knife pleats, the pills scattered all over the floor of the train car and his gasp was loud and pained.
“Mr. Lanigan, of course,” Louise said. “Isn’t he kind?”
“Louise, what are you doing with…with narcotics?”
“Oh, Marion, don’t pull a face with me. They’re just medicine. You know how the other fellows, Mr. Gergen and Mr. Scott and Mr. Worth, all bring us notions? Even Sheriff Healy once brought us a marble bust with a bullet in it from that big raid at the Dempsey Hotel. I sold it for four dollars. Why, Mr. Worth brought us the baby lamb just last Sunday. They all bring us the things they sell. Well, Mr. Lanigan, he sells medicines. And he knows Ginny’s in such terrible, terrible pain and so he brings me little treasures. And I dole them out one by one. But, Marion, Ginny loves pills of any kind, she’s not particular, she just loves them such a darn lot and I’ve tried to hide them but don’t you know she finds them, the little minx.”
Marion looked at her in the tiny bathroom, Louise all legs and hot breath atop the sink, her damp hands dotted with pills, eyes on her so anxiously.
“But you said something about paying your rent.”
“If I were to buy her medicine, all of it, my darling, I couldn’t rub together two dimes for rent. I couldn’t, Marion. Don’t you know it? Sure, I could pawn the radio. Do you want me to pawn Mr. Loomis’s lovely radio, Marion? Mr. Loomis was so happy to give us that radio.”
Mr. Loomis had been awfully pleased to give them the Silvertone cathedral radio. Marion had heard the story many times, inc
luding from Mr. Loomis himself, who spoke breathlessly about how he’d had it wheeled in on a dolly while the girls were at Sunday services (that’s what he said, though she had never heard of either Louise or Ginny attending church), and when they came home, there it was in the living room, trilling Eddie Cantor singing, “Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper, Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.”
So Marion slipped the pills into the pocket of her dress, but Louise said that was not near good enough and she wrapped the pills in a handkerchief for Marion and told her to tuck them in her step-ins. Marion felt her face go red and she would not do it and Louise laughed and laughed and laughed. They strode back to the party arm in arm and Louise was still laughing and so beautiful.
Opening the door to the room—the door was vibrating with music, with music so frenetic, that “Tiger Rag” song they’d played five times before, and when the door opened it was like a blast of moist heat in the face, all the energy of so many in such small spaces and the men with collars sprung loose and the women with no shoes.
Mrs. Loomis was waving around the girls’ tiny Colt pistol and shouting she’d blow everyone to pieces at midnight and one of the other women screamed.
“Aw, hold your hokum, that ain’t nothing but a cig lighter,” someone groaned, but Louise said that wasn’t true and tried to stop Mrs. Loomis, who was spinning the pistol around her finger, dancing some kind of crazy jig.
And there was Ginny pouring champagne into the oysters on a big silver platter and then walking around with one in each hand to tilt in someone’s mouth.
It was the most exciting thing Marion had ever seen.
But she’d had enough spirits and she liked her head steadier and she found her way to a corner of the room by the window and she curled herself up over there and watched everything and turned down lunging offers to dance with smiles, even as Ginny shook her head and murmured, “Marion, there’s not enough girls to go around. Take your turn around before we wilt.”
So she did one turn with Mr. Gergen, his hands like ham-hocks slapping against her, the smell of gin and pickles gusting from his mouth, and when he finally released her, he hurled her right into the chest of Joe Lanigan, who was standing, amused, by the accordion wall, a bottle of Triple XXX root beer in his hand.
She backed up quickly but not before he’d reached forward and lifted, with one finger, a wayward curl from her forehead.
“He likes Marion,” she heard one of them whisper in the background behind sweated palm.
It happened so fast she almost missed it because Mr. Worth had his arm around her waist for his turn.
She was being twirled, she was being twirled, and it was like she was a spindle top.
And then Joe Lanigan, he turned to her. He turned to her and focused on her and she felt as small as a baby doll rocking in the corner. She thought if she opened her mouth baby goos would come out. So she didn’t say anything. And he folded his arms and looked at her and nodded and she knew he knew everything. About the starch in her underthings, the Isabey powder she passed up and down each leg after bathing and about the baby doll rocking in the corner. He knew it all.
LATER, THE ORDER OF THINGS, she wouldn’t be able to piece it together. Not because of the charging liquor but because of everything else, the whole gypsy tumult of it. Later, what she would remember most were flashes, flickers like when the film’s running off projection reels. Herself, hand holding a champagne glass, the champagne sloshing over her pink fingers:
…pinches my nose, Mr. Lanigan.
…they all say that, who doesn’t like a pinch, and call me Joe, call me Joe, Mrs. Seeley, Mrs. Seeley you don’t seem like any doctor’s wife I ever knew and I’ve known them all.
…you’ve known them all, how is that?
…well, Mrs. Seeley, I own some stores, you see.
…he owns a dozen stores, Marion—that was Louise, suddenly there—Marion, he’s Valiant Drugs where you buy your lemon soap, isn’t that something? Where you buy your witch hazel and your talc and your tooth powder.
…what else do you buy at my stores, Mrs. Seeley? Is that where you buy the sweet magnolia in your hair, the sweet magnolia I will smell on my shirt collar tomorrow, on my cuffs and collars and in my dreams when I dream of you tonight?
MONDAY, Louise looked pale and pinched.
“My head, Marion, it’s two cotton balls wadded with spit,” she groaned. “Two days and still hanging heavy as my granddad’s long johns.” She had a compress on her head like Barney Google in the comic pages.
Marion gave her a cup of weak tea with geranium. She had so many questions about the party but didn’t know how to ask them, which words to use.
“You’re the shiny penny. Why couldn’t I keep temperance like you? Bet you could dance a Virginia reel and still keep that liverwurst down.” Louise peeped out from underneath the compress. “Listen, Meems, did I by any chance give you something to hold for me the other night, or did I just dream it?”
Marion nodded quickly, fingering the handkerchief of pills in her pocket.
“Well, that’s fine,” Louise said, smiling broadly. “That’s fine. Do you have them here?”
Marion plucked them from her pocket and handed them to Louise, who smiled like Christmas morning.
They went to her locker and Louise put the pills in the heel of her spare shoe.
“Ginny, she likes to take pills, pills like that?”
“Well, don’t she. She suffers mightily, Marion, and who would hold a little peace against her?”
“Not I,” she said, twisting her ring around her finger. “My husband, he…”
“Oh, I’m sure, as a doctor, he sees such things all the time. I’m sure he understands that in these gloomy days one must pass out glimmers where one may. Isn’t that so, Marion?”
“He does understand that,” Marion agreed, thinking of her husband, hand covering his face, covering it from her as he lay on his hospital bed, sat on the bench in the county jail, walked in from five days missing, eyes hooded from her, not bearing to touch her. “Yes, he does.”
THE DARK SPOT on his brain. That was how Dr. Seeley explained it to her long ago. It was like a dark spot, pulsing. He said were it not for the dark spot the size of a thumbprint, a baby plum, he would be living the life of the man he so clearly was. Intelligent, stalwart, respectable. The town doctor, the trusted citizen. The doting husband. The kindly father.
The dark spot, shaped, perhaps, like a crooked star, a pinwheel, a circle fan.
What it was, exactly, he could not explain, even to her, even as he cried in her arms in hospital wards in three states. It was his private curse.
He had not even known of its presence until age twenty-nine when, while seated in the audience of the Savoy Theatre in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a large eave of plaster ceiling fell upon him, upon his leg and hip, and twenty other audience members. The picture was called A Love Sundae, he always remembered that.
He was in the hospital for four days and, a young doctor himself, he knew his injuries were far from critical. But his body, the way it moved, never felt the same again. And the medicine they gave him, why, it was a wonder, shuttling his body to Kubla Khan, and there was nothing else like it. Nothing at all. He tried. There was nothing.
Shaking hands, some stolen medicine found in his automobile, that little girl’s jaw set wrong. He knew he had to stop. But he could not. That was when he became aware of the dark spot. Its pulsing points, the way it lived in his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.
MR. JOE LANIGAN had many reasons to be at the clinic. His pharmacies, three within city limits, brought him into business with Werden and they knew him well. He was there in Dr. Milroy’s office and there was no reason to be surprised, to be struck. Marion heard his voice first, the big quality of it, like he was on a stage or in a pulpit.
“…that’s the stuff. That’s the future right there. All the docto
rs back east are using it. Just back myself and that’s what they all said. Chicago. Cleveland. Philadelphia. Boston. Even New York City.”
Dr. Milroy stuttered a reply Marion couldn’t make out and then it was Joe Lanigan again.
“…ammonium chloride with codeine and, if the cough is loose, the heroin of terpin hydrate. Call me old-fashioned, Doctor, but you can use those ultraviolet contraptions till we’re all moon men and it won’t shake the rug without some fine chemical assistance.”
They talked some and Marion stood by the door with her legs trembling and she felt silly about herself, she a grown woman with legs trembling from some big-voiced man. But what could she tell her body? Nothing. Her body knew things she didn’t and it shook like a spring toy and then the door began to open and she saw him there and he saw her.
“Why, Mrs. Seeley, my New Year’s baby,” he said, his eyes dancing, his body, cloaked in brush-soft flannel, still and easy.
She said hello, Mr. Lanigan, and nearly curtsied, seeing him as she had, three days before, under a sugared skein of girl-pink champagne, under the heavy weight of parlor heat, thick on their skins, thick with their own energies, own high spirits. And now here like this, in the cool, bleachy hallways of the blasted-brick clinic, didn’t it look so inoculated? Yet it was a pox, vermin in every sweating pore, sputum lining every crevice no matter how swabbed and brush-scoured it was.
“You tend to all the lungers? God’s work,” he said serenely, so upright, so upright in this place, at this time, amid no popping corks.
She said it was not quite tending and explained her job in ways that didn’t include days filled with her ear to the Dictaphone, with listening to doctors droning on wax cylinders, with stamping ink onto forms with small boxes enfolding smaller boxes enfolding smaller boxes still. She explained it quickly and simply and he nodded, as though listening, as though listening and caring. He asked her about how Dr. Milroy treated her, did he make her work long hours, did he make sure she got home safely, and how did her coworkers treat her, had they made her feel at home here?