Ghost Country (48 page)

How like Luisa, Jacqui said, to think only of herself at such a moment—couldn’t she have waited one more day before trundling off to see that voice doctor? And couldn’t she have left a message of mourning for Starr, instead of a celebration of her own recovery?

Word of the funeral location whipped around the news community, so that even before the chief mourners arrived, television crews were outside the funeral parlor, along with a phalanx of print photographers. An hour after the body was supposed to arrive, everyone was getting restive. That was when Harriet called the medical examiner’s office and heard the news.

“What do you mean, you’ve lost the body? Aren’t there sheriff’s
deputies at the morgue? No one could just come in and help themselves, I presume?”

Dr. Ciliga said
lost
was too strong a word: the toe tag had probably fallen off, or been switched somehow. They were inspecting all the cadavers. Ms. Stonds needed to realize there were several hundred in the morgue at any one time; they had released eleven today and were contacting all the funeral homes involved to make sure everyone had the right body. It was very unfortunate, he understood how difficult this was for the family, but if she would only be patient …

By the time the six o’clock news came on it was clear that Starr had disappeared. As Don Sandstrom explained, it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to get access to a body unlawfully: they’d only have to fill out the right information on a standard request form from an authorized funeral home (the camera zoomed onto such a form). Who would have wanted to take Starr’s body was, of course, a mystery, but viewers could count on Channel 13 to pursue the story zealously.

“What do you think?” Hector asked through his mask of bandages, when the commercial came on and they switched off the sound. “Could Mrs. Ephers have taken Starr away in her rage against you and Mara?”

Harriet made a gesture of helplessness. “I’m beyond thinking, about her or anyone. My whole body aches, as though I’d been tied up and beaten with sticks. Up in intensive care this morning she was wild, screaming that I was no grandchild of his, that I wasn’t to go near him—I always thought she loved me but couldn’t express it—now I—I don’t know what to think, about her or him or anything.”

Grandfather—and Harriet could think of him by no other name—had suffered a stroke in the night. Harriet learned about it only when she arrived at the hospital to visit Hector. She ran up to the intensive care unit.

Mephers, patrolling the hall, launched herself on Harriet, raking the younger woman’s cheek with her fingernails. You killed
him, Mephers screeched, turning on him like that, taking Mara’s side against him. After all he did for you, you turned into the worst viper in the nest!

Harriet backed away from her, into the arms of a nurse, who cleaned her face and told her it was not uncommon for family members to crack under the strain of an illness like her grandfather’s, that Harriet must not take Mephers’s outbreak personally.

Harriet managed to calm herself enough to sit by Grandfather for an hour, holding his hand and talking softly to him, but the actions seemed to be performed by an empty body. Her own mind, her own feelings no longer existed.

It seemed as if when she left the apartment to find Mara Friday night, Harriet had stepped into a canoe at the head of a rapid, where she’d been tossed willy-nilly ever since. The shock of learning that Grandfather was (probably) not related to her was extreme. She had received so many shocks in the last few days, though—the news of her mother’s forced hospitalization and ultimate suicide, the dawning realization of Grandfather’s coldness, no, not just coldness but cruelty, to Mara, to Beatrix, really to Harriet herself, everything culminating in the horrible events in church on Saturday—that she could barely bring herself to think about Grandfather, or Grannie Selena, or Emil Farrenc.

These blows didn’t matter as much to Mara. It wasn’t just that Harriet was the adored, Mara the abhorred, child, but Mara’s life had been so changed by her time with Starr and Luisa on the streets that nothing else seemed important to her. Yes, Mara remembered the picture she found in Mephers’s desk, the face that looked like Harriet’s, but Harriet should stop worrying about all that old history. What happened now was what mattered, what they made of their lives now, Sunday afternoon Harriet sat in her ivory-colored bed, knees to her chin, thinking, he gave me a home, education, love—and then she tried to remind herself of occasions of his love, and found herself remembering only his self-congratulatory praise when she pleased him: we were right to take you in, he would often repeat.
Her past with Grandfather was like a spiral nebula, with chunks of rock flying from it as it wound further and further into itself, until she saw that the end of their relationship had been there from the beginning, from that first day she tiptoed around the apartment in her new patent Mary Janes, afraid to touch or speak lest the doctor and his formidable shadow Mrs. Ephers send her back to Beatrix. Grandfather angry, with Mara, or a hospital committee, she saw it many times over the years, until she forgot how hard she worked as a small child to keep him from ever being angry with her.

When his rage spilled over onto her on Sunday she flinched from it, and almost started to placate him. All afternoon, as she and Mara packed and talked, she could feel his fury pulsing through the apartment, pounding into her like a bruising fist. Was this what you felt all these years, she asked Mara. How did you ever survive?

Sunday night, before she and Mara went out to a restaurant for dinner, she told Grandfather she’d be gone by Tuesday, that she and Mara would move into their own apartment and leave him in peace. His face crumpled briefly, like a child whose mother is leaving it. But on Monday evening, when he returned from his normal rounds at the hospital, he had shellacked his shell of anger over the hurt. He announced to Harriet that he wanted Mara kept out of Hilda’s sight: Hilda was old, she’d had a dangerous heart episode, she didn’t need any more shocks from this monstrous thing he’d nurtured.

When Harriet tried to defend Mara, Mrs. Ephers bounced from her chair and began pouring out her own vitriol, directed equally against Harriet and Mara. Harriet was appalled, as much by the housekeeper’s contorted face as her words, and tried to still her furies, but Mephers had moved beyond reason into a fantastic zone where Harriet became the cause of all the doctor’s misfortunes. If not for Harriet the doctor would never have taken in Mara. Even more, if not for Harriet, the doctor would have married her, Hilda Ephers, who had given her whole life to his care.

“You think Mara is a changeling,” she screamed at the doctor. “They both are.”

Stonds, confused by the outburst, thinking Hilda beside herself with fatigue, bustled her down the hall to her bedroom, where he hoped to induce her to take a pill, calm herself: Remember your heart, he counseled. In the privacy of that room, where Mrs. Ephers thought to consummate her love, she pulled out the damning letter from Zoe Farrenc, the photograph of Emil, thrust them and her own iron bosom on the doctor.

Harriet heard Mephers’s thin voice rise to a squeal of rage and felt ill with disgust. She was exhausted by the day’s passions—by the week’s passions—and left Graham Street while the doctor was still closeted with his housekeeper. Mara had found a furnished apartment they could rent by the month. When Harriet got there, in a reversal of roles Mara rubbed her sister’s hands, made her tea and coaxed her into bed.

In the morning, after Mephers’s assault on her at the hospital, Harriet spoke to the senior neurologist about her grandfather. The neurologist knew Harriet from those dinners at Graham Street and spoke to her gravely but frankly: They were doing their best for Dr. Stonds, but even if he regained consciousness he would be very ill. People did make amazing recoveries: Dr. Stonds himself had presided over many, but the neurologist did not want Harriet to feel an unwarranted optimism.

Harriet sat with Grandfather until it was time to go to the funeral home to receive Starr. By that point, the news that Starr’s body was gone seemed like a minor disturbance, a small swell at sea after a ferocious storm.

D
R. STONDS DIED
two weeks before Thanksgiving. During the months of his illness, Harriet went to the hospital every morning to see him. She sat next to the stertorous figure, talking softly, dredging up what memories she had of joyous times with him and recounting them.

In the afternoons she returned to the house she had bought with Mara at the northeast tip of city. While the weather held, the sisters swam and walked and tried to construct the past for each other: What was their mother like? Why did she take to drugs and drink? How much did it matter that Mara would never know who her father was? And what difference did it make if Emil Farrenc was their blood grandfather?

They talked about it with Hector, and with Professor Lontano. The professor was a frequent visitor during that period. Lontano came in part because she’d been one of Abraham Stonds’s few real friends, but she also welcomed the chance to talk to Harriet and Mara about their grandmother Selena, and about Emil Farrenc.

At first when Lontano came around, Mara treated the professor with her old rudeness. She was incredulous of the professor’s claims
that she never noticed Harriet’s resemblance to Emil Farrenc in all the years she’d visited them at Graham Street.

It was Hector who made Mara see things differently. People have an amazing capacity for denial, he said, and for putting things into boxes. Surely Mara had noticed that with Dr. Stonds and Mrs. Ephers—even in her own life? For the professor, if she was ashamed of herself for falling in love with a man who didn’t care for her, she might easily have blocked the memory of his face: And after all, by the time Grandfather Stonds adopted Harriet, Lontano’s affair with Farrenc had been over for more than a quarter century. It was surely the last thing the professor would have expected to see her old lover’s features in the face of the doctor’s granddaughter.

Mara grudgingly accepted Hector’s interpretation but didn’t greet the professor with any warmth until the day Lontano said that Grandfather’s ideas about blood were outdated rubbish. The sisters had been arguing about whether to try to dig up information about Emil Farrenc’s family. Harriet had discovered that Zoe Farrenc had died two years earlier, leaving no heirs. Now Harriet wanted to find out what she could about Emil, perhaps because she looked so much like him, while Mara argued against the idea: Emil Farrenc didn’t sound like much of a prize, based on the letter from Zoe to their mother—why get involved with one more beastly grandfather?

Over dinner that night, Harriet taxed Lontano. “Surely you must know something of his family. All I need is the name of the town where he was born—with that I could find out the rest.”

The professor raised thin brows. “And why do you want to know, my dear Harriet?”

Harriet flushed at the ironic tone. “His blood is in our veins, after all, and if I ever have a child—”

“This obsession with blood.” Lontano threw up her hands. “I never could talk Abraham out of it, but don’t you girls start on it. It’s at the root of every horrific act of the twentieth century. I sometimes think you Americans, are as bad as the Nazis ever were, worrying about mixed races, or degenerate races, and the effect of
Asian or African peoples on your Nordic blood. It’s a social construction, nothing else. For you, Abraham was your grandfather. I see no reason to stop calling him that, or to dig into that long-dead past.”

After that Mara started looking forward to meals with Lontano. The professor, rummaging through old papers at the Oriental Institute, even found a diary that Grannie Selena’s mother had kept. It had been shipped to Chicago with all of August Vatick’s papers after his death, but no one had ever looked at it—what light could the scribblings of a mere wife shed on ancient Sumer, after all?

In those brown and curling pages, Mara and Harriet read about their grandmother’s decision to pursue Emil Farrenc first in Iraq, and then on the ill-fated expedition in the Taurus Mountains. The diary recorded Selena’s death in a blizzard, when she wandered astray trying to find Farrenc’s tent in the storm. After the blizzard ended, Farrenc, as the strongest survivor in their party, hiked out to summon help It took him two weeks to reach the nearest village. By the time the rescue party returned, the Vaticks and the rest of their team had died.

Harriet and Mara read the faint scrawl of Helen Vatick’s final entry:

That last sentence pleased Mara: Someone had wished her mother joy, even if it was only a grandmother whose good wishes she never heard. At the same time, Mara threw up her hands in amazement over Selena: How could you be so foolish, and so passionate, that you’d go out in a blizzard after a man who wasn’t interested in you?

Lontano looked quizzically at Mara: You fled this same house
with that same kind of foolish passion. It was Mara’s turn to flush and grow silent.

One night, Professor Lontano asked the question she’d wondered about since the day she saw Starr at the wall: Had Mara found Starr on the streets and dressed her hair to look like the horns of the gods on old Sumerian cylinder seals? The question popped out at a dinner where Jacqui and Nanette were explaining why they’d sat in on a television debate on Starr: Was she a saint or a demon, a homeless psycho or a supernatural creature (“That Don Sandstrom, he offered us a hundred dollars each,” Jacqui told Hector apologetically. “That’s a lot of money for a couple of homeless women”).

“I remembered your researches at the museum last spring, Mara, and the question has been troubling me,” Lontano said.

Mara was puffing out her cheeks in belligerence, but Hector and Harriet asked what a cylinder seal was.