But no Ginny.
Marion could think of no way to reach Louise and it made her nervous to think of telling her. She thought of telephoning Joe Lanigan, thought he could help her, but she did not know what she might say if someone else answered the telephone. She sat down on the divan and tried to concentrate. It took her a long time to think of Mr. Loomis, and she was glad to see his name in the address book Louise kept in a wall nook in the kitchen.
She telephoned from the soda fountain three blocks away.
“Oh, sounds like Ginny’s on a tear,” Mr. Loomis said, called away from a winning poker hand by his anxious wife.
Marion could hear Mrs. Loomis in the background, crying out, “She’s like a trapped bird. It’ll be like the last time, smashing windows all through town.”
“Get, get, angel mine.” Mr. Loomis shushed his wife, who was always dancing the sharp edge of hysteria. “Get-get.”
“Louise will be panicked,” Marion said, fingertips edging along her teeth. She could picture Louise in some far-off county jail laying down bill after bill, her home emptying itself for the pawnshop, pearly bit by pearly bit.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Seeley,” Mr. Loomis assured her. “I bet she’s back with her old pals, those chickadees working the Hotel Dunlop.”
Marion recalled Louise saying Ginny used to work there, high-kicking it bare-legged to great acclaim.
And one night, one night at a party, Mr. Loomis had pulled Marion aside, sweaty-faced and brined, told her about the night he first met Ginny nearly two years back, about how he’d made his way, by virtue of sheer salesman charm, backstage at the Crimson Cavalcade. The showgirls all had red blotches smack in the center of their powdery cheeks, like baby dolls. Their ruffled panties, deep red and deeper violet, were trimmed with gold-flecked ribbons that dangled from them, slipping about between their half-gartered thighs.
There was Ginny, he said, curled daintily in their frilly center, like a doll’s doll, painted and trimmed and with a pink O for a mouth, an O open for all kinds of pleasures and now for the heavy bottle of moon passing among the dolls’ bright-gloved hands.
“My, that’s fine,” Ginny had said, not even noticing Mr. Loomis. “That’s mule for moon baying.”
Ginny had lived so many hundreds of lives, had she not?
“She doesn’t much care for alone,” Mr. Loomis said now. “Louise is her everything, you see. With her gone, she will find fluffy feathers elsewhere to plush her lil nest.”
It reminded Marion of something. Something seen, half in sleep, many weeks before. She had stayed the night with the girls, curling up on the sofa under Ginny’s muslin, a garment no doubt laced with heavy sickness but also popping whimsy, and awoke unsure of the time, staggering, blurry, to the sliver of a bathroom, and as she did, passing the girls’ bedroom. The accordion wall gaping slightly and the tableau like a gold-leaf painting. No, like a soft-wash painting on the wall of a pink-walled powder room in an elegant hotel, fairy nymphs at rest on a bed of clover. Ginny’s curving, marble-white thigh slung and Louise’s arm slid between Ginny’s bent leg, dimpled knee, and Louise only stockings, garters sapphire blue and her fingers spanning Ginny’s bitty doll breasts, lifting with anxious breaths.
Later, she would swear she’d dreamt it.
It was a purer love than Marion had ever known.
AND SO MARION WENT HOME. She went home and tried not to fret about Ginny and hoped in fact she was with friends who would take care of her. And at nigh on five o’clock in the morning, Joe Lanigan had found his way in through Mrs. Gower’s back door and up to Marion’s room and he crawled in beside her with a gust of applejack and confetti crinkling from his hair, seeping from his suit. A friend’s anniversary celebration, he whispered, and all I wanted was to get here, Marion, for I know I’ve been negligent and I so wanted to give you something new. And with that his fingertips were on her lips and—
—I wish I could help myself with you, Marion, he said, then she could feel him shake his head on the pillow. That is a lie. I don’t even wish it, not for a moment. I just want to do things to you, he said, and he rubbed something on her lips, her gums. And it was buzzing, and everything was buzzing. She tried to reach her fingers to her mouth, but there was nothing there, nothing there, it was like her hand would go straight through.
What is that, she asked. What is that, but it came out funny, and her heart was thudding and he began to do things, such things, and she did not stop him or ask any more questions.
MORNING, BEFORE WORK, coming on seven o’clock, Marion, cotton-headed and raw and sick with herself, took the streetcar to Hussel Street.
The house in even more disarray than the day before, Marion slipped on a throw pillow torn seam to seam on the floor, its feathers fluttering in the air like a chicken coop—and was that wax beans crushed into the carpet, she wondered. And what of the empty jug of Cheracol cough syrup nestled upright on the corner of the divan, like a child’s stuffed bear?
She found herself pausing before peering into the bedroom—what might she see? But before she worked up the nerve, she heard something like water lapping and the bathroom door was partially open and she called out, “Ginny?”
There was a familiar twitter. “Then she met a sailor man named Popeye the Skipper.”
Marion tentatively placed three fingers on the door, the steam glazing her face, the warble vibrating wetly, “When she was mean, boy how he used to whip her.”
Marion looked down at Ginny, eyes closed, naked as the Kewpie doll she had tucked in her arms, sinking in a half tub of water.
“Ship ahoy,” she crooned. “Ah, ship ahoy.”
“Ginny,” Marion said. “What goes on?”
Her eyes fluttered open, her red mouth smeary.
“It is the she herself,” she said, and the warble was gone and the voice was hissing, it was a keening hiss.
“It’s Marion,” she said, realizing her own hands were clasped to the doorframe, clasped tightly. “Ginny, are you all right?”
“It is the she herself. Why are you not in Calico, or something like it?” Ginny’s eyes, normally so baby-bird blue, crackled roughly.
“Ginny, it’s Marion,” Marion repeated, as if talking to a blind woman. “Louise is in Calico.”
Ginny tilted herself and a splash of water flew from the tub and caught Marion, ice-cold on the leg.
“I figured you was with her. I figured you was off with her,” she said, slanty-faced, that sheet-white face, blue in the temples. “I might do anything when it’s like this. I’ve done things. You can’t guess what you’d do until you’ve done it. Just you see what I can do.”
It was such a strange thing to say and Marion felt struck. “What do you mean, Ginny? You were the one who told me where Louise went. I’ve been looking for you. I was worried about you.” She had never seen her like this, never once. She remembered Louise once saying things, meaning things (Marion, Ginny is prone to dark moods. She must be watched. She must be kept bubbling, mustn’t be allowed to sink, sink).
Ginny’s eyes began to slowly soften and she squirmed in the tub. “Oh, Marion, well, I am glad. I am glad. You’re my friend, aren’t you, Meems? Aren’t you? You don’t leave me to sawdust, do you?”
“No, Ginny, no,” Marion said, finally stepping forward, shaking off her strange words. “Ginny, that water is like ice. You must come out.”
“I had a nosebleed and I thought it might help,” she squeaked.
Marion turned to reach for a towel hanging on a hook, but found it sticky, and before she could do more, Ginny let out a long scissoring hack straight from her ambered lungs.
Swinging around, Marion looked down to see Ginny, spread forsakenly, long strands of blood lashing down her face.
“Ginny,” Marion said, and could say no more.
“Don’t fret.” The minx grinned, breath wheezing from her like when putting your ear to a seashell. She covered her nose and mouth with a bone white hand and grinned more widely. “Don’t
fret.”
“OH, MARION, I am sorry for that mess Ginny sunk you in,” Louise said on Monday morning, her eyes feathered with red.
“It was all fine,” Marion said, placing her hand on Louise’s. “It truly was. I tucked her under every coverlet in the house and the hot-water bottle to boot.”
Louise rolled her eyes, wringing her kerchief and sniffling. “Well, let me tell you, she was in a bath all weekend, a pickle bath, that’s what’s what. I just hope that’s the worst of what she started up.”
“Oh, Louise.”
“I should have had you come over. I should have had you stay with her.”
“Louise, you—”
“By morning she was barking like a dog. Like a coal-mining dog with consumption.”
And Marion could see the worry painted all over Louise’s face, across her ruddy cheeks.
“And don’t get me started on that brother of mine,” she groaned. “Cost me four bills and then skipped town with a merchant marine.”
HER MAD WEEKEND behind her, Ginny skidded hard into a toffee-sludged, lung-clotted collapse and her face within days became edged with blue death. Blue rimed lips stretched across teeth, oh, it was not pretty.
Louise was frantic and finally hocked the Silvertone radio, but it was not nearly enough. Finding Marion at her desk at the clinic, she leaned against the doorframe and gave a cold look.
“Your lover man is ducking me like I was the bill collector, Marion.”
Marion saw anger and a gaunt fear twinning dangerously in her eyes. “I guess he’s occupied with business. He has that new store opening on the south side.”
“Well, I have some business for him. I need some lettuce or some packets of pink or anything else he can sling my way, or else my girl’s going to break a set of ribs, hacking like a piner miner.”
“He has been hard to reach in recent days,” Marion lied. She had been hot cheek to his thigh not ten hours before. She wondered why he could not help the girls. She believed he would if he knew, really knew. She must make him know. But he had only just returned to her after days of gallivanting sideways. What if he slipped loose again?
“Gent Joe’s old vanishing act,” Louise said, clacking her fingers, jittery and white, on the doorframe. “Word is, he’s papering a shopgirl downtown with Alexander Hamiltons.”
Marion looked up from her stack of patient records.
“I am sorry, Meems. You know I am. But it’s true.”
“There’s always gossip about Joe,” she said. Inwardly, she considered that Louise might be lying. But then there was the thing: the smell on Joe, on Joe’s wrist cuffs, frantic perfume and woman scents, and it was on his hands and other places and she had pretended not to notice. Because she did not want to know. And she did not want to look at the fact that knowing might not change anything. Not for her.
“I’m just saying, give a poke, Meems,” Louise said, clucking Marion roughly under the chin. “It’s not just about our radio and our chrome toaster. It’s rent and medicine and food on the plate.”
Marion nodded, but she was still thinking of shopgirls and nurses and office girls and could not focus.
“Marion, we need to take care of things,” Louise said, and she tugged Marion’s ear. “You gotta get off the dime. We need to keep our Mr. Lanigan local.”
That evening, Marion wrote a letter to Dr. Seeley in which she stated that her cough had returned, and some of her women’s troubles, and might he send an extra five dollars next time? She sealed the letter and walked to the mailbox to post it before she could change her mind. When the slot shut, she thought she might begin to cry, but she did not.
She would ask Joe for money for the girls. She would ask him. But not yet. Not while it seemed he might be flickering away, like some beautiful mirage.
MARION, do you know what it means to be willing to do anything? Louise had asked her that once, one night, so late, both nestled side by side, face to glowing radio, singing. I’m just a lonely romancer, Right at the end of my rope, Though I’ve had your answer, I can’t give up hope, and that was when Louise, eyes heavy with happy-tired and fingers tapping on the burning green dial, asked, Marion, do you know what it means to be willing to do anything?
I do, Marion thought. That I know. That I know. I didn’t once. I know it now.
And so much worse to suspect, privately, when all alone with thoughts, that he wasn’t worth it. Not even close.
Then again, maybe that’s what lies at its center.
He is nothing and yet still.
THE GIRLS COULD TALK of little but how to get their pawned radio back. Ginny was small as a dormouse on the sofa, a handkerchief to her face, but her spirits were still high, rabid even.
Louise, worry-browed, was mixing up a home cough brew, glugging in ammonia and chloroform boosted from the clinic.
“Don’t we got any glad stuff at all, beanpole?” Ginny mewled. “Better yet, how ’bout a li’l yen-shee suey?”
“Ask Marion,” Louise said. “Marion, have you talked to our Doc Joe?”
“I haven’t seen him yet,” Marion said, truthfully.
Louise’s eyebrows knitted together and Marion felt her heart pinch a little. She would talk to Joe. She would.
“I know you’re trying your darnedest, doll,” Louise said, touching her arm gently while, with the other, she stirred the pot with a wooden spoon. “We’ll make do.”
“We gotta be creative,” croaked Ginny, raising her legs in the air and doing wee kicks. “Like ’fore Gent Joe came along. We got on before him.”
“It was a lot more work,” Louise said.
Suddenly, Ginny said, “Have you ever done it for money, Marion?” and she was smiling and there was a shine on her lips, a shine gleaming and Marion felt her stomach flip. “It’s a cash register waiting to ring, ring, ring.”
“Look at her,” Louise said, thumb hooked back at Ginny. “Wouldn’t billfolds go fat ready for her?”
The two of them, so casual, Marion couldn’t speak. Were they truly asking this?
Ginny sliding around in her silk pajamas, arching her back and twisting feline in her favorite china blue lounging pajamas with long white lilies tipped in green twisting down the front, bought in San Francisco’s famous Chinatown by Mr. Burton Haskell, who owned Haskell’s Dry Goods and who had been such a good friend to the girls until transferred, tragically, to Oklahoma City.
Louise nodded her head in Ginny’s direction and said, “We can trot out that little slip of a thing again, Marion.”
And there was Ginny, fingers overspread, splayed across the dragon embroidered thickly, fierce red tongue vaulting between her bosoms.
A twitch in her brow, Marion felt like she was staring at one of those trick drawings where it looks like nothing but fancy women gossiping but then you stand back and see the face of the devil himself, begrimed and thick-lipped and dreadful.
She looked over at Ginny, who had started up a new cough that looked like it might make her face split.
“You never do such things,” Marion said softly, even as her hand set on the space the posh radio had sat. “You never do.”
“Fine coin she’d get with that,” Louise sighed, eyes on the thread of blood that had begun issuing from Ginny’s bluing lips.
Marion rushed to Ginny’s side and let her curl up against her, white hands clawing.
“She won’t put any food in her either,” Louise said, shaking her head.
Ginny held her hack back, punching her chest with her hands. “I’ll not eat,” she said, and her voice was stern, like a minister in a pulpit. Then softer: “I’m trying something,” she said.
“They say she’d best get lots of fresh air and lots of food,” Louise said. “So she stays in here and doesn’t eat.”
Ginny burrowed into Marion’s lap, tassels whipping round, twisting, “I bet they’d still spread bills for me. I got talents you’d cry over.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m crying now,” Louise said, stone f
aced. “Marion, don’t fall for her fairy dance. Let’s you and me settle. Won’t you rub my shoulders like before?” Louise sat down on the floor beneath them, dragging a pillow beneath her.
“Come here, Meemsie,” she went on. “Come here, Marion. You’re like a little buttercup over there.”
Marion slid away from Ginny’s stiff blue hands and huddled onto the floor beside Louise.
“Sit quiet with me and let me play with those goldilocks,” she said. “You’re so sweet. My, your face is warm.” And Louise’s hands, light and soft, played in Marion’s hair and along her downy cheek.
Marion wanted to comfort her, but it was Louise who comforted, she surely did. Something old and lovely fanned before Marion’s eyes, herself as a young girl, three or four, curled in her mama’s lap, her mama feeding her sugar lumps off sticky fingers. She could taste them. Oh, Mamy, darling thing.
“Isn’t it sad, Marion, to have no bosoms at all?” Ginny said, looking down at them from her perch on the sofa.
Marion looked up and saw it. It was something happening in Ginny’s face, a spectral thing. A flattening. Her face snapped flat like an Indian head.
“You’ve such small, lovely tulips,” Ginny went on, in the strangest high tone, like ice tapping on windows, “but I’ve not even that.”
Then there was a tug of the ribbon on her silky bed jacket—ta-da!—and Ginny’s baby-soft skin, only two rosy nipples like the blushing dots painted on a porcelain doll cheek. “I dab them with rouge, for effect,” she said, lifting a small rouge pot from the side table.
Marion felt her mouth open, then close.
“But Louise has enough tomato for both of us,” Ginny said, laughing, or looking like she was laughing but it was just the look of a laugh. She curled a puny finger into the rouge pot.