Ghost Country (18 page)

Today, though, when she tried to see Dr. Tammuz, she hated Grandfather for owning the hospital. It meant she had no privacy on a most private errand. Although she slid into the building sideways, with a group of clerks returning from lunch, she felt as though at any moment a voice would bellow over the intercom:
“Dr. Stonds, your granddaughter has entered the hospital. She is now on the second floor of the Kobold Pavilion, heading south.”

Since her last visit five years ago, the hospital had ballooned, much as she felt her body had, into an ungainly place with unexpected useless lumps. She had trouble finding the psychiatry clinic, but wouldn’t ask directions in case someone recognized her.

Her caution proved useless. Despite her effort to resist, the admissions clerk bullied Mara into giving her real name. The next thing she knew, Grandfather was on the phone bellowing at her for washing the family’s dirty clothes in public: it’s not enough that you drag me down to a police station, where I have to endure a lecture from a fat desk cop on poor discipline in the modern American family. Now you have to humiliate me in front of my colleagues and students. Including Hector Tammuz of all people, the weakest resident we’ve had at Midwest in twenty years, flaunts the advice of people with enough experience to teach him. I forbid you to see him.

What good could Dr. Tammuz do her, anyway? She’d only gone because of the dream about her mother in the spaceship. When she woke up she felt unbearably bereft. The recollection of herself with Luisa, the diva’s drunkenness, her own theatrical chant to the goddess, and the distress of that poor woman who heard the Virgin speaking, made her writhe with self-hatred.

She went into the bathroom to shower, and caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror on the door. Usually she immediately glanced away, but now she made herself stare. Hulking body, large brown breasts, coarse black hair at crotch and armpit. You loathsome lump, she whispered to the mirror. The wide cheeks twisted into sobs; she slapped her face. What do you have to cry over, you blubber ball?

She showered, scrubbing herself with fury, and then, desperate for reassurance, called Cynthia Lowrie at her desk in the insurance company. “Grandfather wants to throw me out of the apartment. He says I can’t be here tomorrow when Mephers comes back from the rehabilitation clinic.”

“You can’t come live with me, Mara, you know my dad would never let me invite you.”

“I don’t want to live with your stupid father. He’s even worse than Grandfather. But—but Cynthia, what am I going to do?”

She poured out the whole story of the previous night’s adventure. Cynthia was shocked, but envious: Mara had so much courage, even if it led her into really stupid actions. It wasn’t the first time Mara had called after getting in trouble from her impulsive exploits, but this was the most extreme act she’d ever reported.

“Do you think I might be crazy? Grandfather talks so much about my bad blood, I’m starting to wonder if he’s right, if there’s something wrong that everyone who meets me can tell by looking at me.”

“You are crazy, Mara, to go squatting under a wall pretending you’re talking to some old goddess. But you know what you should do, you should talk to a psychiatrist and find out the truth. There’s a guy at your grandfather’s hospital who comes to Hagar’s House to counsel the homeless women. Daddy says your grandfather doesn’t like him much, and that’s why he was picked for such a thankless job. Daddy hates him, on account of he’s a Jew, or maybe because he looks down on him, on Daddy, I mean, but that wouldn’t bother you, would it? Him being a Jew, I mean. And he’s really cute.”

When Mara called the hospital she learned that Hector was seeing patients that very afternoon in the psychiatry clinic. Synchronicity. Maybe the goddess Gula really was guiding her steps.

Dr. Tammuz was cute, Mara had to agree when he stopped to talk to her in the waiting room. And he had a very kind face. Mara imagined talking to him, telling him about Harriet and Grandfather; he would fall in love with Harriet just from hearing her described. Like the assistant state’s attorney last night, he would help Mara in the hopes of getting close to her sister. And Harriet, ignoring all the suitors from Orleans Street Church, all the Christian young men who’d been Grandfather’s students or at law school with her, would see that Mara had a crush on Dr. Tammuz and
marry him just to spite her. By the time Grandfather started yelling at her on Gretchen’s phone—the receiver stuffed through the hole in the bottom of the glass where patients slid their insurance documents for photocopying—Mara was sniffing at the picture of herself, Cindermara, forgotten in some garret while Harriet and Dr. Tammuz honeymooned on a Greek island.

“I don’t know what to do with you, young lady,” Grandfather concluded. “If I set you up in your own apartment you’ll lie around all day drinking, without lifting a finger to find a job. You’re too old for boarding school. You refuse to go to college. What do you suggest?”

“You should have let me stay in jail. At least you’d be happy,” she flashed through her tears.

“Don’t be melodramatic with me, young lady, I’m not in the humor for it. You are seriously disturbed; it may be that hospitalization will help you. Dr. Tammuz is hardly competent to evaluate your mental state, but since you’re already here in the hospital I’m asking Dr. Hanaper to examine you.”

“No! I won’t.” Dr. Hanaper was a regular dinner guest at the Graham Street apartment. Mara hated him for the coldness in his eyes while his mouth smiled at Grandfather and Harriet. “He’s just one of your flunkeys, he’ll put me on the locked ward if he thinks that’s what you want. That’s where my mother is, isn’t it? You got tired of her and had her committed so she—”

“That’s enough, Mara. My mind is made up. I’m going to make sure he talks to you this afternoon. Put that clerk back on the line.”

Mara dropped the phone and ran from the clinic.

Plenty there for Gretchen and Charmaine to talk over. The line of patients waiting to check in, which had swelled while Mara used Gretchen’s phone (Charmaine listening in on her extension), ground to a complete halt as the two clerks retreated to the file cabinets to dissect the conversation—from which they were roused only by Dr. Stonds’s summons of Dr. Tammuz.

When Hector finished with his last scheduled patient, a few minutes before five, Gretchen and Charmaine were talking to each other while they cleared their desks for the day. They ignored Hector, who was standing in front of Gretchen, waiting for a break in the flow.

Finally, furious, he said, “Gretchen, what became of Ms. Stonds?”

She looked up at him. “Doctor, the computer system crashed. Me and Charmaine were so busy trying to bring it back up we didn’t have time to keep track of walkins.”

“Why did you call Dr. Stonds, when she was trying to make an appointment with me?”

Gretchen glanced at Charmaine. “The problem with America today is the breakdown of the family. Everybody knows that. I couldn’t let an uninsured minor sign up for health care without informing her parent or guardian: it wouldn’t be right.”

“In other words, you were afraid Dr. Stonds might find out you knew she had come to the clinic, and you were determined to stand in good with him. Very right. You can’t afford to be too careful about your job in these cost-cutting days. Do you know if Dr. Hanaper saw her?”

Gretchen’s round cheeks were pulled away from her teeth in a rictus of venom. “I suggest you ask him,
Doctor
Tammuz. He thinks you’re so special I’m sure he’d be glad to tell you all his patients’ secrets. Now, if that’s all, Doctor, I have a baby-sitter who charges me double time after six
P
.
M
. I don’t suppose that matters to a doctor, but it does to a lowly reception clerk.”

She slammed her drawers shut, locked them ostentatiously, and stormed out of the office, Charmaine in her wake. All Hector could think was that now he’d never get any cooperation from them.

He slumped in one of the waiting room chairs, his bones aching from the confrontations of the afternoon. Gretchen was right about one thing: he ought to find out whether Hanaper had examined
Ms. Stonds, but the thought of talking to his department chairman was more than Hector could bear. He wanted to go home to bed, but he needed to find out if Madeleine Carter was still in jail.

He had no idea how to approach the police. Perhaps Mara Stonds might be able to tell him where the police had taken Madeleine.

He went back to the office he shared with the other psychiatry residents to dictate his notes from the afternoon’s sessions, and saw the hospital directory out on Melissa Demetrios’s desk. It gave Stonds’s home address and phone number. Feeling a little queasy, he dialed the number. When a woman answered in a cool, remote voice he felt even more nervous, but he identified himself, and asked for Ms. Stonds.

H
ARRIET WASN’T USUALLY
home so early in the evening. Client meetings, discovery, consultations with her senior partner Leigh Wilton, usually carried her workday past seven, often later. Lack of sleep and worry about Mara sent her home early today.

She’d had another hysterical call from Gian Palmetto after lunch. The president of the Hotel Pleiades wanted to know what steps she was taking to guarantee that her sister wouldn’t create a disturbance again outside the garage.

“I don’t know, Gian,” she said, trying to fight back fatigue and irritation, to speak with calm attentiveness. “Let’s take a look at this wall and see what your options are.”

Her afternoons were usually scheduled so solidly that it was hard to find time to eat. It was part of her pleasure in her skills that she could turn from a sanitary engineer at two-thirty to a ballerina at three-fifteen, and show the same clarity in understanding the problems of both. Today she was having trouble remembering who she was speaking to at any given moment, let alone what troubles brought them into their lawyer’s office.

Everything about the day had been difficult, starting with the phone call that summoned her to the police department, but the
hardest part had been saying “no” to
Grand-père
, that she wouldn’t find an apartment for Mara. And then Mara gave her no thanks of any kind for this support. Now here was Gian Palmetto howling in her ear, as if Harriet had sent Mara there on purpose to harass him.

She smacked the phone with the flat of her hand, wishing it were Gian’s face, no, really Mara’s face, and told her secretary to reschedule her remaining appointments; she was going over to the Pleiades to get a handle on their crisis, and then home.

“I’m too ill today to do my clients justice. If anyone’s desperate, ask one of the other associates to see them.”

Her secretary paused fractionally before agreeing: competitive young lawyers like Harriet normally guard their client lists with the ferocity of junkyard dogs. Either Harriet was ill, or she’d lost her fighting edge. In the latter case, the secretary would look for a new assignment: Harriet’s only grace as a boss was that she was a winner, which meant she brought glory to her overworked, underthanked staff. If she’d lost her will to win, there was no reason to stay with her.

Once on the street, Harriet started to get into a cab, then waved the driver away. Maybe if she walked the mile to the hotel her head would clear.

The July air was warm. In her office, the seasons passed in reverse: the building’s heating system made the rooms so toasty in winter that woolen clothes chafed her skin, while in summer she had to wear long sleeves and jackets against the cold. Outside, her dress, with its suggestion of a military cape in the back and long epauletted sleeves, clung to her like a plastic glove. Not for her tennis shoes on the street, that sloppy look that turned women into unprofessional slatterns. As she walked east her toes began to hurt inside her high heels.

Her route took her along the Chicago River, and she stopped near one of the bridges to rest her feet. A lake-bound boat, packed with tourists, passed below her. She couldn’t imagine finding pleasure in such an outing, crammed among strangers, breathing diesel fumes mixed with stale grease from frying food in the galley. And
yet her own vacations, passed in solitude at ski resorts or remote islands, did they bring her greater pleasure than these people experienced?

Was Mara right? Was she a cold person who lived in fear of Grandfather? Well, maybe she did fear him, but Mara didn’t understand the nature of Harriet’s dread: not that he would bellow at her, as he did at his students or Mara, but that Harriet would somehow be reduced in his eyes, that he would see her as less, and lose his affection for her. She called him
“Grand-père”
and often spoke to him in French to bolster his opinion of himself as a cosmopolitan man—setting herself further apart from Mara, who refused to learn the language.

Since the time he and Mephers took her in, Harriet knew she had to be as different from Beatrix as possible if she was going to be allowed to stay there. After the arrival of the baby, that little sister she feared might unseat her in the throne of
Grand-père
affections, she had tried harder still to attain perfection. If she wasn’t the best in an activity, such as tennis or horseback riding, she gave it up. Failure was too risky.

The tour boat hooted a warning to a smaller craft. Harriet looked at her watch in alarm: she’d dawdled there at the bridge for seven minutes without once thinking of her client’s legal problems. She shoved her feet back into her shoes and hurried over to the hotel.

By the time she reached the Pleiades, her feet were swollen and her hair was clinging to her neck in limp, sticky strands. The melancholy insights she’d had at the river vanished as her sore feet dominated her mind. She was demeaning herself in front of Gian Palmetto, leaving her office to meet him at his tiresome garage wall; damn Mara, anyway, for being so self-centered, so volatile, as to create last night’s scene.

The air-conditioning in the lobby blew through the wet armpits of her dress; she was shivering when she reached Palmetto’s office. His secretary gave her a cardigan and a cup of coffee with the bright promise that Mr. Palmetto would be with her soon.