Ghost Country (13 page)

After his last patient shuffled out, around six-thirty, Hector went with Jacqui and Nanette to the wall. Madeleine was kneeling in front of her crack, weeping over her treasures. The hosing had turned her photo of the Virgin into a sodden mess. She was trying to dry her Bible over the open flame of a candle, but Hector doubted it could be saved—the pages were gummed together like a Kleenex that’s been through the laundry.

When Hector went over to talk to her, she shrank back against the wall. He saw that the blanket she knelt on was also damp. He tried not to recoil from the smell of mold and must that rose from it, and gently asked if he could check her pulse. Although her eyes dilated and her breath came faster, she did let him hold her wrist. The pulse was feathery and irregular; he worried that she might have caught a chill from her dousing; her usual agitation seemed enhanced by fever.

As he was trying to talk to Madeleine, a man wearing a suit and tie came over to them. His enormous forearms strained his jacket sleeves. He introduced himself as Brian Cassidy, night manager of the hotel’s garage.

“Are you responsible for this woman?” Cassidy demanded.

Hector said, “No. She’s quite ill, but like all adults, she’s responsible for herself. Are you the man who turned a hose on her last night?”

“I’m
in
charge of the garage. That includes keeping the street clean so that our guests are comfortable walking here.”

“You destroyed her icon and her Bible. Was that essential for hotel hygiene?”

Unconsciously Hector’s voice took on some of his mother’s sarcastic inflection; the garage manager brisded defensively and leaned forward. “We asked her to move but she refused. I didn’t have any choice, since I had to clean the wall and the sidewalk there.”

Jacqui pointed at coffee cups and paper bags gray-brown with dirt that were packed along the curb. “Seems to me there’s a lot of debris right in front of your garage. You going to get that garbage
cleaned up tonight, or you need one of us homeless folk to sit there before the street looks dirty to you?”

The garage manager looked at her for the first time: until she spoke she hadn’t been human.

“I can’t leave the Holy Mother now that She’s under attack,” Madeleine wailed.

“Madeleine, you’re undernourished, and you seem feverish. If you don’t get some help now, you’ll end up in an emergency room and then you’ll be away from your Holy Mother for a long time.” Hector tried to sound caring, not impatient. “You need antibiotics, warmth, and lots of fluids.”

“You listen to the doctor, Maddy,” Jacqui put in. “He could be home, but he’s come out here to look out for you because he cares whether you live or die.”

“Let me at least give you another shot of Prolixin,” Hector urged. “You know you do better with the drug: you feel safer and you come aboveground where you can get food and fresher air.”

“No!” Madeleine screamed. “You’re trying to cloud my mind. When you gave me that shot I couldn’t hear what the Virgin was telling me.”

Cassidy rolled his eyes. “She’s down here listening to the Virgin Mary?”

“The Holy Mother cries tears of blood, they come here through the wall.” Madeleine put her fingers into the rusty water and showed them to Cassidy, who backed away in disgust.

“She’s been down here for weeks,” Hector said. “How come you suddenly felt the urge to clean her part of the sidewalk?”

M
ARA WAS LOCKED
in her bedroom channeling the goddess Gula. Her grandfather and older sister tried to pretend they didn’t know, didn’t care, but every night when the incense started to seep down the hall to the sitting room they found themselves unable to read or talk or concentrate on anything but the smell. They couldn’t really hear Mara—the doors in the apartment were too thick for sound to travel—but they sat tensed, straining for the rise and fall of her voice.

Dr. Stonds invited Professor Verna Lontano to dinner one evening to inform Mara how utterly spurious was her knowledge of ancient Sumer and its deities. Professor Lontano, an old friend of the doctor’s, was the Assyriologist Mara phoned four years earlier, when she was trying to get information about Grannie Selena. Professor Lontano had spent her adult life on the literature of Sumerian deities, and had nothing but withering contempt for New Age goddess worship.

“You young women are intellectual slovens,” she said in her precise, accented English. “You want to imagine a gynocentric universe and so you totally pervert historical reality by assigning to the old goddesses a supremacy they never held. You are unwilling
to do the hard work, the research”—pronounced with a great rolling of r’s that spattered the table like semiautomatic bullets—“to find out what the ancients actually said and believed. So you take a few translated texts and build a whole theology from them. Why? Why not stick to the gods you know—money, sex, the usual deities of your generation of American?”

To Harriet’s intense embarrassment, Mara bent her head, pulled her legs up to sit yoga-style on the dining room chair, and began a high-pitched wordless wail. After howling for a minute or two she began to chant in the same high nasal:

“The goddess speaks through her unworthy vessel. O Maiden, weak thou art but full of yearning for the truth, for the healing rays that Gula sheds on sick humanity, how many thousand years have I waited, bound in silence, weakening ever, until one came who could hear my Voice.”

“Mara! We’ve had enough of your showing off. Put your feet back on the floor and converse like a normal human being.” Dr. Stonds’s sharp voice usually silenced blethering subordinates, but Mara continued to wail as though her trance were too intense to acknowledge human speech.

“She’s not going to listen to you,
Grand-père”
Harriet said. “Why don’t we take our coffee across to the sitting room. As soon as her audience has disappeared she’ll quiet down fast enough.”

“This is what she does every night?” Professor Lontano stopped to admire the Louise Nevelson marble in the hall as they crossed to the living room. “She sounds intensely lonely. I’m surprised she’s taking Mrs. Ephers’s illness so hard—I never thought they got along. What’s the word from the rehabilitation hospital?”

“Oh, Mephers is recovering well,” Harriet said. “They say she can come home in another week, but of course we don’t want her to be under any stress, and if Mara is going to be difficult …”

She left the sentence hanging, but the doctor said, “She’ll have to leave. This was Hilda’s—Mrs. Ephers’s—home thirty years before Mara was ever thought of. I’m not sending Hilda to a nursing home because my own granddaughter is so ill-bred as to make life
miserable for her. And, of course, to a certain extent we hold Mara responsible for the heart attack to begin with.”

Harriet thought the wailing in the dining room behind them stopped momentarily at that, like an electric current briefly dipping, but the maid from the temporary agency brought coffee in just then and the clatter of cups covered the texture of Mara’s chant. As soon as the woman withdrew, Harriet pulled the sliding doors shut.

“Out of curiosity,” she asked the professor, “who is Gula?”

“The Sumerian goddess of healing. Curious that Mara should have fixed on her—feminists usually choose Inanna because she was the most important female deity. They try to promote her to head the pantheon and go through some convoluted rigmarole showing the creation of patriarchy through the loss of power by the female gods.”

“Oh, Mara isn’t a feminist,” Dr. Stonds snorted. “She’s just a confused young woman who picks up ideologies as a cloak for her unhappiness.”

Professor Lontano looked around for a place to set down her coffee cup. The marquetry table next to her was clearly an art object. Harriet rose with her usual precise movements and put the cup on the tray.

“I didn’t know Mara was interested in Sumer,” Lontano said. “She did call me once, three or four years ago, to ask if I’d known Selena’s father.”

“I don’t believe you ever mentioned this. What did you say?” The doctor frowned.

Lontano shrugged. “There wasn’t much I could say, except what you’ve always known—that I met Selena briefly at the dig near Nippur. I sat in on a seminar Professor Vatick ran, but in those days we had very formal notions about the distinction between faculty and students—I didn’t know him or his family socially. Anyway, Mara wasn’t interested in him—she only wondered if there was any doubt about her grandmother’s death. At the time she called me I thought she was trying to cloak those stories she
used to make up about Selena and Beatrix in some reality. She never brought up the matter again.”

“I wish Mara would cloak herself in reality,” Harriet said. “She claims she found a letter in Mephers’s room addressed to our mother, from someone in France, but her story was all gibberish. Mephers found Mara in there rummaging through her things. That was what brought on her heart attack, so I suppose Mara had to make up something to convince herself she wasn’t to blame for Mephers’s illness. I have to confess I was curious, so I looked myself. Of course there was nothing there.”

“She’s been nothing but trouble since the day she was born,” the doctor snorted. “But since getting kicked out of Smith she’s been intolerable.”

“I don’t think we should have made her go there when she’d set her heart on Michigan,” Harriet remarked, forcing up a smile, “but that’s an old story. Even though Mephers’s heart attack rattled Mara, she only started this chanting after—after—well, I was relating a problem at dinner that we’re having with a homeless woman.”

She stopped, uncomfortable at the memory. They’d been eating carry-out food, with Mephers out of commission and no one from the agency in place yet to take over the meals, and Harriet had mentioned the Pleiades’ problem to Grandfather.

“One of your residents from the psych department is championing the psychotic woman at the garage wall. The garage manager couldn’t remember his name but I thought you should know about it.”

And then she’d looked at Mara, muddy skin pale green with fury, cheeks swelled out in what Grandfather called her chipmunk face. “You’re cheering your fascist clients for hosing down a woman just because she’s hearing voices from the Virgin Mary? That could be Mother! This woman is homeless, which is good enough reason to be crazy, and you’re happy because you’re making her even more miserable. You two think you’re so perfect, but no one else can stand you. It’s no surprise to me that none of the
suitors ever wanted to marry you, cold cruel bitch like you would freeze their balls off in five minutes.”

On that line Mara fled the table, fled the house. Grandfather had a serious talk with her the next day. You cannot stay here, young woman, if you are going to enact these kinds of hysterical scenes. You betrayed your sister’s trust by drinking on the job and getting fired. You almost killed Hilda with your unwarranted invasion of her room. You are walking very close to a precipice now. Either buckle down, get going on a job and an education, or look for someplace else to live.