Ghost Country (39 page)

“It’s everything to do with me. Why don’t the two of you rent a billboard, a skywriter, something big, proclaim to the city: we’re perfect, we’ve done no wrong. Get the whole world to bow down at your feet with wonder at your ice-cold charity.”

Mephers stares at her, her mouth drawn into a tight line of disapproval, then says she’ll overlook Harriet’s outburst, she knows Harriet’s been working too hard lately, and stalks from the room.

Harriet flings herself onto the bed and cries so hard her whole body bucks against the bedspread. She becomes aware of Grandfather, standing over her once more.

“Harriet. This is most unbecoming. Pull yourself together. Hilda is terribly hurt. I want to hear you apologize to her. She’s been more a mother to you than Beatrix ever was and you owe her more than common courtesy.”

Pull herself together. When it was their careless revelation that unglued her in the first place. No, it started earlier, when Leigh Wilton patted her bottom. Or, no, when Mara ran away and Harriet felt herself split between remorse and relief. But maybe it began when her own father died, leaving her mother to spin recklessly out of control. Oh, if only Grannie Selena hadn’t vanished, everything would have been different, they would have had a female protector against Grandfather’s laws.

She stares up at the rigid face. “Please leave.”

“Hilda is waiting in the hall for your apology. I’ll tell her to come in.”

She springs from the bed. “Get out of this room. Now.”

When he doesn’t move she deliberately unbuttons her blouse, drops it on the chair, unhooks her bra, takes off her pantyhose. He’s stiff with embarrassment. As she drops her skirt and bra on the floor he backs out of the room.

She locks the door on his hissing interchange with Mephers and stares at herself in her bathroom mirror. Everything in the room is
marble or glass, cold smooth surfaces that reflect her back to herself. Her blondness, her fine bones, that set her apart from coarse, tainted Mara, all these are too cold to touch. She needs someone, anyone, to hold on to. She has to find Mara. Poor little Beebie, what will it do to her, to find out this mythical mother became a drug dealer and a whore and then cut her wrists open to get away from Grandfather?

Where in this great city can she find her sister? And find her before Grandfather drops his butterfly net over her and drags her to the hospital. He’ll inject Mara full of drugs, she’ll know nothing, remember nothing in such a state.

Harriet dresses fast, frantic to get to her sister before the police or hospital security guards find her. Not in an evening gown with deep cleavage, as Leigh Wilton demanded, but jeans, T-shirt. She stuffs a handful of bills into her pockets with her driver’s license and flees the apartment.

F
EED ME, FEED
me, feed me. A constant howl for sustenance that rose wherever they went, at the wall, in the crowds of homeless who slept on the beaches at night, even among well-dressed commuters jostling past them in the coffee shops in the morning. The clamor filled her brain, drove Verdi from her mind; she couldn’t believe Mara heard nothing.

Her head had always been filled with music, ever since she was five and reproduced a whole record of children’s songs that Grandma Minsky played for her and Harry. (Listen to her, Morris, Grandma called to Grandpa, working on accounts in the living room; the little one heard these only once and can sing them perfectly. Grandpa grunted, while Harry, furious with her for getting special attention, threw the record to the floor and jumped on it until it broke. After that, she could hardly hear speech unless it had something to do with song or her own voice, first children’s songs, then already in high school small concert pieces, Grieg or Purcell, besides always getting the lead in school musicals, Harry once more scowling as she got fitted for costumes, whisked to rehearsals, bowed to applause. The time she starred as Maria in New Trier’s
West Side Story
—their very first year in Highland Park when she
beat out the local girls, whom the music director had worked with for years—her jealous twin poured ketchup on her costume, but even that couldn’t keep the music from flooding her.)

Now all she could hear was feed me, cherish me, heal me, save me—as if her own thirst, that bottomless craving that not even a quart of whiskey could slake, were magnified a hundred thousand times.

Mara only laughed when Luisa complained. “You’ve got perfect pitch, it’s why you can hear everything around you. All I have to do is hand out sandwiches and watch people be happy to have something to eat.”

“But they’re not happy.” Luisa was hung over and querulous. “Free food doesn’t stop them fighting—yours is bigger than mine, I wanted turkey not ham, I hate cheese or mayonnaise. Why can’t they just be grateful for what they get?”

“And you,” Mara retorted. “You were happy with what you got? A diva with an international reputation, but you fought with everyone just the same.”

Luisa stalked off in dudgeon, as she did once or twice a day. The first time it happened Mara started after her to apologize, to beg her to come back, but Starr seized her arm as she darted down the street and pulled Mara to her side. Even though Mara couldn’t interpret her grunts and glances as Luisa claimed to, Starr’s touch on her arm made her think—Luisa has to sort this out for herself; she’s not Grandfather, I don’t have to placate her. And then, as Starr drew Mara to herself, kissed her, licked her broken stub of a tooth so that the throbbing in it eased, Mara thought, no, I don’t have to placate him, either, I can just be me, Mara. Grandfather named me Mara because I was a bitter pill to him, but I don’t have to be bitter to myself. And when Luisa returned some hours later, to where Mara lay with Starr in the tall grasses, Mara rose to kiss Luisa in turn, to wipe the trail of dried beer from her mouth, to lay her tenderly in the sand next to Starr.

Despite the days and nights in the open air, the shortage of food, showers in beach houses without soap or towels, so that she
woke each morning with sand in her hair, Mara felt—not just happy, but strong, as if she could run the length of the city and not be winded. On nights when they had food to hand out to people she seemed able to walk, touch, calm screaming infants, feed a whole crowd without fatigue.

By day they roamed the streets and parks with thousands of other homeless Chicagoans, and at night they slept where they landed. Their second night in the open they had wandered into the northern suburbs, to the clean beach Luisa remembered from her high school years. Police roused them around two in the morning, smacked Mara hard enough to leave her with a black eye the next day, pushed the three women into the back of a squad car, drove them to the Chicago border and warned them never to return.

Luisa had screamed curses at them: do you have any idea who I am, you oafs? I grew up in this redneck suburb and became the greatest interpreter of Verdi your generation will ever hear, and tried to launch herself into “Sempre libera,” her voice coming out in a hoarse parody of music. The young cop, his fair chin still free of hair, kicked Luisa in the kidneys as he dumped the trio over the city line.

The next day Luisa was bleeding and feverish. Mara wanted to get her antibiotics, but that meant seeing a doctor, who might lock them up. She tried to explain the problem to Starr, while Luisa lay green-faced and waxen in the big woman’s arms. Mara began to weep with frustration as the black eyes stared unwinking at her. Her explanations became more difficult to understand, even to an English speaker, until, to Mara’s futile fury, Starr began to chew a piece of bread. Mara was about to throw away all her cautions and phone for an ambulance when Starr took the mushy bread from her mouth and forced it down Luisa’s throat. Luisa choked and gagged, but within half an hour the waxy greenness had faded from her face. By afternoon she seemed very much herself again—imperious, impervious, and longing for liquor.

“What did you feel?” Mara demanded. “Did Starr heal you? What was it like when you swallowed that bread?”

But Luisa had no recollection of Starr and the bread. She thought she had been chained to the ground, that a terrifying old woman had hovered over her, wanting to keep her bound for all eternity. “And then one of my fans, one of the common people in Italy who still love music so, came along with a bottle of beer, just when I thought I might die of thirst.”

Mara gave it up: Luisa had been delirious. But if Starr could cure Luisa’s kidney injury, why not her alcoholism, too? When she put it to Starr, the dark woman only stared at her until Mara felt uncomfortable, as she had all those times as a child when Mephers asked her if it was really necessary to mind other people’s business. And then Starr patted her hair, a signal that she wanted Mara to comb the sides out and wind them up again in their elaborate coils.

Around nightfall Starr liked to go to the wall, but they couldn’t stay long: the cops were under orders to move them off, and threatened Mara and Starr with arrest if they lingered. Their favorite camping place at night was a little spit of land at the end of Montrose Harbor which had been planted with prairie grasses, but Luisa didn’t always have the stamina to trek that far. For some reason the little promontory was usually deserted after dark, so that Luisa could have some relief from the clangor that beset her whenever they were in a crowd.

They reached the promontory tonight around sundown. Families with small children were starting to pack up for the day, while dopers and bikers began joining necking couples on the rocks that lined the harbor. Mara watched Luisa stomp off to the rocks. She would cadge a bottle and come back drunk in an hour.

Mara had no way of knowing if Starr hated Luisa’s absences, or her drunkenness. When the diva was gone there was no one to explain the world to Starr—or Starr to the world—but the big woman never showed any impatience with the diva.

Mara sometimes wondered if she’d only imagined the episode with Luisa’s bleeding, and Starr’s piece of bread. She could hear Grandfather chewing her out for making up stories in the hopes of being the center of attention. He would dismiss Starr and Luisa
with a snort as well: histrionics, ignore them and they’ll behave in a civilized manner fast enough.

Mara laughed to herself, trying to picture Luisa and Starr in the Graham Street apartment, Harriet prim and flustered, Mephers furious but forced into silence. And Grandfather thoroughly humiliated once and for all, as had happened to Dr. Hanaper and Pastor Emerson the day they came to the wall with some Catholic priest who claimed to be an authority on miracles.

Tonight Mara took off her clothes, hiding them with her sleeping bag behind a rock: torn and dirty though they were, someone might easily steal them while she swam. The day before, the waves had been six feet high, crashing over the breakwaters and slamming against the sand. Tonight the water was as calm and gentle as a cradle. July had slipped into August. In a few more weeks the water would turn cold, but right now it was warm, caressing her naked body like silk.

Mara swam hard around the spit of land, then turned over and floated gently back toward her cache. Out on the lake she could see the lights of dozens of sailboats. Maybe Harriet was out there with a suitor.

Mara suddenly felt a pang of longing for her sister: beautiful Harriet, did I ruin your career? Will you ever speak to me again? She couldn’t stay in the park with Starr forever. If she went to Harriet, would her sister welcome her back, or at least help her find a place to live and something to live on? Or would she slam the door on Mara, her fine-boned face as rigid as Grandfather’s?

The waning moon hung pendulous above her, its belly distended like a pregnant woman’s. The moon’s face was sallow, and looked angry and crumbly with age. Mara suddenly felt alone in the water, despite the calls of parents and lovers from further down the shore. She turned onto her stomach again and swam as fast as she could to shore, running from the water to pick up her clothes, arriving breathless at their little campsite.

Luisa had returned, bringing with her Jacqui, Nanette, and La-Belle, a tepid bottle of muscat, and a bag of cold hamburgers. The
four women were hunkered down near Starr, eating. When Mara stumbled up next to them they nodded to her, and handed her a burger, but no one spoke.

The night was filled with winking lights—cookout fires, cigarettes, bicycle lamps. A flashlight stuck prying fingers around the edge of the prairie grasses. At first Mara, filling herself with the glutinous lumps of meat, paid no attention, but as the light poked through the grass, she realized it was an organized search.

She clutched Starr’s arm, choking on the burger. “Someone’s hunting us.”

Jacqui and Nanette stopped their murmured talk and turned to watch. Suddenly, behind the lights, a hoarse voice shouted, “Starr, it’s Hector. I’m here with men from the hospital, Starr! We want to put you in restraints again, feed you on drugs. We’ll take you away with us, Starr, away from the sand and the streets. Come now, Starr, come with me if you want that.”

H
ARRIET HAD BEEN
running since she left the apartment, running to her car, pushing on the steering wheel so hard her shoulders ached. Let Mara be at the wall. Let me find her before Grandfather. The chant moved through her head as she idled at lights, tears of impatience pricking her—why don’t they change? A narrow miss at the corner of Michigan and Upper Wacker—furious honking, swollen-faced man giving her the finger, but she so bound in her terrors she didn’t notice—swinging the car into the main drive at the Pleiades, forcing a smile for the doorman, who recognized her Acura and trotted over to open her door.

“You coming to pick up the gentlemen from headquarters for dinner, Ms. Stonds?”

With a great effort she slid her mask of calmness into place and smiled at him. “No, Dimitri, I’m not able to join them. I just need to go down to the garage, check on things there. Can I leave the car here for five minutes?”