She wondered if she’d showed him, without knowing it, that she could be treated like he treated her. What had she shown him, and had she shown it to Dr. Seeley and had he not seen? Or, oh no, had he understood and been frightened and such the more cause of his private habits, so destructive to them all? Things too horrible to know.
But Joe did not bother with talk of sin. He never missed Sunday Mass and he saw no predicament, said the one had not to do with the other and there was a gospel of hedonism and she might follow it, but she with her Dutch ways, with her grim church and its coldnesses and not the hot, bloodied breath of Catholicism, she knew not where to turn except to pray and pray and pray to turn her back into a doll, or a flower, something inviolate on a shelf, never touched.
“MARION’S GOT A NEW BEAU,” came Louise’s whisper across the table in the lunchroom that Monday. A prickling toothed thing dragged up from Marion’s knees to her chest.
“What did you say, Louise?”
“Oh, you just have that dreamy-eyed look, your little rosebud mouth all aquiver and eyes so loose they’ll go cross.”
Marion tried to smile. Louise, fingertips tapping on the waxed paper of Marion’s balogna sandwich, watched.
“Let me guess, Fair Mare, the Vagabond Lover climbs up Mrs. Gower’s trellis and into your window each night at the stroke of twelve. Marion’s beau would be no less gallant.”
“Oh no, Louise,” Marion said, watching as Louise rotated the sandwich, eyeing the pink meat suspiciously, then slid it back to Marion. “I was up late writing to Dr. Seeley.”
Louise grinned, picking up the fat apple she had brought. “Such a dutiful wife,” she said, extending her long arm, the apple glowing like some royal citrine.
“Have a taste, Fair Mare, do share.”
Marion started to speak—
“Or is your rosebud mouth too small?” Louise added, eyes cracking. It was like a saber lain before. It was a saber, a gauntlet, somehow. Marion saw it glinting. You could not miss it. Marion saw it but did not know why it had been lain there.
Part Two
I told Mrs. Seeley to keep her distance from those two. But Marion, she liked their lively ways.
Everyone knew about Louise Mercer, like what happened at the Dempsey Hotel. How someone called the law because there was a ruckus and there she was in the fifth-floor corridor going on two o’clock in the morning, only one shoe on, and they brought her in and they let her go because some calls were made. She had friends. The right kinds, it seems. And all her friends have wives.
And that Mr. Lanigan. He’s one of those. All those big fellas strutting around with fancy waistcoats and running the town. Well, he’s an Elk. A Grand Knight with the Knights of Columbus. He sits on the Chamber of Commerce, handing out favors. If he weren’t a papist, he might be mayor.
All those comers, every June they send their wives eighty miles straight up into the mountains. The Hassayampa Mountain Club, they call it. Then, back here in town, they make hay all summer long. The office girls. Girls that work in the shops. And the nurses. Always the nurses. And there was talk of Marion being Mr. Lanigan’s summer gal, only it was still spring. I didn’t talk of it, but others did.
See, I walk in the Lord’s path of kindness, and I figure I’ll tell Marion that there’s buzzing in the air and she might do best to keep her quarter, to walk in churchly ways. After all, she is a married woman and, the way it sounds, those girls are running a regular operation there. Wild parties and who knows what. Those girls have no starch in their pleats, do you know what I mean to say? When Louise Mercer walks, there’s nothing that stays still. And the other one, one hears tell, she haint stood upright since Hoover took oath and sunk us all.
But Marion, she don’t care to listen. Like I said, she liked their lively ways.
—Mrs. Ina Curtwin
Secretary to Dr. Milroy, Werden Clinic
Interview, Statesman Courier
It had been only a month, thirty-four days. Yet Marion could no longer remember the before of it. Her body, she would rest her hands on it and it was changed. The face in the mirror, hers yet not the face that had been there before.
Her fingers on the calendar, so glad that the blood had come, would go to church twice that week for the blood, had gone twice last week asking for it.
Fingertips on the calendar, she saw forty-six days before Dr. Seeley might come for Easter.
IT WAS IN THIS MODE, this reckless mode, that she, fevered head to toe, laid herself open. Would that she had her head about her, she would not have let him talk her, breathless and confused, into stealing away to the third-floor supply room at the clinic, three oxygen canisters rolling, rolling endlessly across the long floor as her legs curled and curved about him.
That evening, she had gone after work to Diamond’s department store intending to purchase the straw, grosgrain-ribboned hat of taffy pink in the front window with the five dollars Joe Lanigan had given her, twisting the bill between her breasts, saying, “Here’s a little candy, Marion. Show me something.” Once she arrived, however, she found herself in the undergarments department, lips tearing between her teeth, softly fingering lingerie. The salesgirl slipped the shirred ribbon garters and peach crepe de chine step-ins into a slim box of deep blue. Jostling on the streetcar, she tucked her hand in the bag and rested it on the top of the box the whole ride.
But he did not appear that night and apologized the next day, on the telephone, as she covered her face with her hand, elbow resting on the typewriter. What’s more, he could not see her tonight either. Why could she not manage two days without, and what would she do if Dr. Seeley arrived, if money held and he forbore, and arrived in town now just over five weeks away.
That night, he with a daughter’s birthday dinner and she off to Louise and Ginny’s and Louise was going to henna her hair and Ginny decided that Marion should go platinum.
“Oh no, Ginny, Dr. Milroy wouldn’t like it and I don’t think it suits me.”
But Ginny, lips gleaming, was jiggling soap flakes into a footed dish tingling with peroxide and teary ammonia.
“Have a cocktail, Marion,” Louise said. “So’s you won’t notice while Ginny burns you like morning toast.”
An hour later, they were rubbing her head with a soft towel, one on either side of her, and when she looked into the waved mirror, it was like a swirling puff of cotton edged in bright silver. Trying, she could barely see herself from six months ago, the long thick sandy mane she had to soak in castor oil. Now she saw this twirling silver pinwheel. Who did she think she was, and Ginny twisting a tube of violet lipstick and dragging it across Marion’s lips dizzily, her happy breath on Marion’s face?
“What did you do to our fair girl?” A voice rang out from the front door, and wouldn’t you know it was Joe Lanigan there, carrying a creamy wedge of birthday cake.
“Joe!” Ginny squealed, and Louise ran over to take his coat.
Marion stood, shaking her hair, which felt unreal to her, like someone else’s silk trimming.
“Don’t she look like Joan Bennett?” Louise said, taking the cake wedge from him and lifting it to her outstretched tongue for a taste. “Isn’t she a dream?”
“It was my idea, I’ll have you mark it,” Ginny piped up.
Joe Lanigan, he was looking at Marion and she felt her neck still wet from the sink. She felt the front of her shirt clinging to her and she felt his eyes on her. It did things to her.
“Do you like the new Marion?” Louise said.
“I like all Marions, old and new,” Joe said, running his icing-edged hand along his mouth. “And I like how many Marions there are. And how many you have to give,” he said, winking at this last bit.
“Look at Gent Joe getting an eyeful,” Marion heard Ginny say.
“So you like what we proffer, Joe,” and this was Louise. But Marion could only focus on Joe. She felt her skin raise up under his eyes. And she knew she was in trouble.
By the time he had walked over
to her, her legs were quivering, vibrating—all with Louise and Ginny seeing everything. Knowing for certain what they may have only guessed before.
“Marion,” he was saying, and he was putting his hand in her hair and then he was right up against her.
“Maybe they want to be alone, Lou-Lou,” she could hear Ginny say, giggling.
“I don’t suppose they mind either way,” said Louise, as Joe Lanigan was pressing Marion into the small bedroom, pressing her against the shutter doors, skin pinching, his hand flat on her wet front, “but I’d just as soon play Parcheesi.”
“The hell you would,” Ginny was saying. “Wouldn’t you like to see Marion’s pretty skin?”
“I don’t need to watch that to see Marion’s pretty skin, Ginny.”
“What, dear heart, might you be suggesting, and please pass the peanuts, I got terrible hungry, just like that.”
From one of the girls’ twin beds beneath her, springs squeaking, Marion could hear them play Parcheesi, the dice clattering.
“I’m eating your pawn, Lou-Lou.”
“Eat away, little brute. Show me your teeth, and your tongue.”
AN HOUR LATER, maybe more, floating in and out of sleep on Louise’s bed, the peroxide tingling in her nose, her head, she could hear Louise talking, or thought she could, through the door.
“Remember, Gent Joe, remember. Remember, because I surely do. Watch the way my gums move up and down and up and down. When I have the inclination, I just can’t stop talking.”
And he, and she could hear the laughter in his voice, keen and sharp, and she could feel it jigsaw in her stomach as if his hands were back on her: “How could I forget, Louise? I wouldn’t want to. We all marvel at that gorgeous mouth of yours, don’t we? It’s worth all the noise it makes.”
“Don’t play. You got enough to play with.”
“That I do.”
Then Marion shook her head and felt a swell of the ammonia all through her head and there were no more voices, no voices except her own, recalling her own past words to Dr. Seeley, Remember me. Do not abandon me here. Remember me.
What could her letters to Dr. Seeley say now after so many days of this? Dr. Seeley, I have let this man in, this smiling gentleman, and the things he has done to me, could I list them for you? Could I share the time he pulled the ribbons from my dress and wrapped them tight round my baby wrists? Could I share the time he rubbed me raw, my face flat on the Oriental carpet of his drawing room, my face speckled red, knees strawberried raw, and not one curl of regret as he ruined me, Dr. Seeley, over and over again? Is this something I can share with you, Dr. Seeley, and have you forgive me still? Especially after your own sorrows and the ways in which I have punished you for them, for your private weakness? For some things there can be no forgiveness, nor even words. Some things are meant only to be fevers in the brain.
“YOU KNEW ABOUT Mr. Lanigan and me,” Marion said later, hours later, as Ginny played with her hair.
“Oh, Marion.” Louise smiled. “Oh, Marion.”
“You acted the goodly virgin, Marion,” Ginny said. “And all the time you were playing the hots with our Gent Joe.”
Marion felt her face rush red. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said, shaking her head away.
Ginny laughed and leaned back. She was rolling and unrolling something in her hand. Something green. She rolled the bills tight and fashioned a horn and blew into it.
“It’s all clover. Joe left behind something for us too,” Ginny said, winking.
“You figured it all,” Marion said, still dazed.
“We knew, Marion,” Louise said. “Of course we knew.” And she smiled again and there was something flickering in her eyes, gentle or not, but flickering, and Marion, Ginny’s fingers tangling in her hair, tried to read the thing in Louise’s eyes, tried to understand it. But she could not. She could not. There was no way to see.
IT WAS A BALANCE. A surprising and quite fragile and quite beautiful balance of all the elements, and it felt so delicate that Marion knew it could not last. But for a few weeks, it did. Louise and Ginny held Marion fast to their chests when Joe Lanigan spent nights away to parts unknown, or even in his own homestead. And Joe Lanigan continued to take Marion for long drives into dark corners outside of town where he whispered tender things and placed his hands on her in ways that she couldn’t bear because the bearing was so sweet. But it was all like the pressure before a crackling summer storm, strangely still air knocking curtains ever so lightly against the window screens and the sky turning colors slowly, simmering from blue to brown to violet and you knew it was going to break, and break in ways for which there was no preparing.
It was within days that it all turned, as if in a second. Marion could even point to the exact moment that this man for whom she had broken herself to pieces and built herself anew, a platinum pleasure doll, showed her, showed her he had begun to grow a little bit bored.
“Aren’t you coming by, Joe? Mrs. Gower will be at her choir practice and I could make you supper.”
“I’d like to, Marion, I would. You know I’d like to see you all the time. It’s just this lodge function. They need me.”
And the next day hearing, from Louise, about the raucous smoker at the Silhouette Club where the men brought in ten burly-q dancers for the night, paid them each twenty-five dollars to dance on tabletops and Oh, Marion, Mr. Trask told me, you know, he is a member of the lodge, he said, confidentially, more than one of those girls stripped down to her birthday suit and jumped into the big punch bowls. The janitors spent hours picking up spangles, sequins, fluttery feathers. And she could see, in her head, Joe Lanigan, in some back room, in some side hallway, mouth pressed against sugared, sticky skin, oh, she knew, she knew it. She could taste it herself.
“And Mr. Lanigan,” Marion said, looking at her fingernails, pale and freshly torn from a night spent teeth to nub. “He was there.”
His eyes never stopped moving. What would it take to make his eyes stop moving?
What had she imagined? She as a desert Rapunzel preening in her tower, Joe Lanigan, fingers buried in her long locks, grappling to reach her, to rescue her, to save her and in so doing be saved? Oh, she couldn’t have possibly thought this. There was no time. It was all too fast.
“Don’t be jealous, kitten,” Louise said. “That’s how he is. It’s his way. It doesn’t mean he cares for you any less.”
How could it not mean that? she said to herself, and Louise, as if mind reading, said, “You’ve an awful lot to learn, Marion. I do wish I could have saved you from learning.”
It was kind of her to say, but Marion did not want to hear Louise being kind. Louise always knowing so much more, about Joe Lanigan, about everything. “I don’t care what he does,” Marion said, chin up, like Lillian Gish playing prideful.
“Of course you don’t.” Louise smiled. “But do remember, Ginny and I, we are true to you. We’re always true.”
Thinking of Joe in that smoker, mouth covered with sequins, a filthy image, she could think of nothing else. She in the same company with those girls, those dancing girls. In a voice automatic like a thing possessed, she said, “I must live with it. If I were stronger, I would make myself stop. I would, Louise.”
“No one’s telling you to stop, Marion.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Marion looked in vain for Louise, peering down every hallway at the clinic. Where was Louise, her swishing, fishtailing walk?
“She had to catch a night train,” Ginny told her. “Her brother got pegged in Calico on a vag charge. She didn’t even know he was out this far west. Last time she saw him was in St. Louis right after the Crash.”
Marion hadn’t even known Louise had a brother. She knew about vag charges, though. Dr. Seeley had three to his name, the last in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, not fourteen months before. Marion thought him gone forever, but he was only on the junk. On the junk, that was how the policeman put it, as if she would know what it meant, which she did.
&
nbsp; “Is she going to post bail?” Marion asked.
Ginny nodded. “Don’t I know it. We were at Slanty’s at the crack of dawn pawning all our honey. Everything but our sweet lil six-shooter and the Silvertone. I made her promise me that. He’s blood, sure, but I worked hard for that radio. And the pistol, well, Joe Lanigan gave us that after a suitor with a bad case of the rapes got itchy for Louise and tried to squeeze in our bedroom window. It’s good to be heeled. Did the doc leave you heeled, Miss Silk?”
Once, when Dr. Seeley had gone to the hospital for ten days in Victorville, he left her with a flare gun. Marion hid it under the bed, afraid to look at it, and when the doctor got out, he sold it for the thing he sold everything for.
“How can I help, Ginny?” Marion said, trying not to think of Ginny doing as she did sometimes, pretending to twirl the gun like Annie Oakley and shoot the cigarette out of Floyd’s mouth. “Do you have everything you need while she’s gone?”
“Do I ever. She wants you to keep an eye on me, but that’s how she is. She knows what’s best, but if she’s gone, who needs best?”
“But, Ginny, you don’t want Louise to have to worry about you too.”
“She should worry about me. I count more than her lousy brother, goes off with sailors, gets lockjaw, always in some scrape.”
THERE HAD BEEN something in Ginny’s face. It was an avid insolent look, even a defiant one, and Marion thought of it more than once throughout the day. After work, she took the streetcar to the girls’ place. Ginny didn’t answer the door, but it wasn’t locked and Marion went inside, ylang-ylang and jasmine flooding her nostrils and mouth and bright clothes strewn everywhere, even an errant peacock feather on the sofa trembling from the draft. On the coffee table was a bottle of Auntie Sheba’s Lung Syrup and a highball glass red-bottomed with the remnants of its glossy charms.
Marion poked her head in the bedroom, which, pocket-sized as it was, was in similar disarray, a long red strand drizzling from a bottle that read Heering Crème de Cerise oozed from the head to the foot of Ginny’s bed and Louise’s was stacked high with phonograph records flung from their sleeves, empty jars of cold cream, a corset that could’ve wrapped around Ginny three times.