Ghost Country (49 page)

The professor pulled a small blue tube from her handbag. “I shouldn’t have this with me: It belongs to the museum. It’s a lapis lazuli seal from ancient Sumer, almost five thousand years old. The figure with the horns is the goddess Inanna, the most important female deity to the Sumerians.”

The young people bent over her hand. Lontano held a magnifying glass over the stone so they could make out the carvings.

“So you think Mara really brought the goddess Gula to life with her chants,” Hector teased the professor.

Lontano didn’t know what she thought. She couldn’t help wondering about Mara, and her penchant for fabricating drama. Had the girl examined the old seals and then persuaded a homeless woman to dress her hair like Inanna’s? Lontano could imagine Mara, in her unhappy loneliness, rocking the city to its foundations by creating a cult around Madeleine Carter’s visions of the Virgin Mary’s blood.

“She wasn’t like that, Starr, I mean,” Mara stammered. “You couldn’t make her do anything—she pretty much did whatever she felt like. She liked me to comb her hair, though. Every night she’d unbraid it, and in the morning I would comb it and wind it up
again. So I know it was real hair, not like these on the seal, these are cow’s horns.”

Lontano didn’t know whether to believe Mara or not: She had heard the girl tell so many stories over the years. But Hector had been there, and he didn’t seem to think Starr was some creation of Mara’s.

“You don’t really think she was a goddess, do you, Professor?” Harriet asked. “I know people got hysterical about her for a while—had she performed miracles, did she raise Luisa Montcrief from the dead in church that day. But you know there’s a rational explanation for everything that happened. Even
Grand-père
thought at first that Luisa was dead, but he said someone as drunk as—well, as she used to be—she seems to be recovering now—but anyway, someone that drunk could have passed out so thoroughly that she didn’t seem to be alive.”

“Oh, why does it matter?” Mara said. “Why do you have to label her? It’s enough that she was here. She healed me, she healed Hector and dozens of other people. She saved my life, and Luisa’s too. Does it matter whether she did something supernatural or not? You looked into her eyes, and you saw yourself, just as you were. For some people that reflection was too horrible to endure, like Rafe Lowrie—he couldn’t bear to see himself as he really was. But if you could stand your own reflection, you discovered you could like yourself.”

Inevitably, the fervid interest in Starr—both her life and her death—grew less intense. Hector stopped trying to find her missing body. In the first months after her death, people were constantly reporting that they’d seen her: in a garage, a football field, a shopping mall. Hector would drop everything and run to the site, only to suffer a horrible letdown. Finally he would merely shrug on hearing of a sighting: Mara was right, the image they carried of Starr in their minds was the only sighting they would be given. Perhaps it was the only one they needed.

Harriet for her part stopped trying to force the state’s attorney to make an arrest in Starr’s murder. No one could—or would—
testify to who had actually struck the blows that killed Starr, his office kept telling her. The television footage wasn’t helpful; it showed the mob in action but not the faces of those around Starr. And to make mass arrests in a congregation so filled with wealthy Chicagoans as the Orleans Street church—the state’s attorney blanched at the thought of such deliberate political suicide. Harriet finally put the matter to rest.

With the coming of autumn, Jacqui and Nanette stopped visiting Mara in Rogers Park and retreated to their old haunts on the streets. Professor Lontano returned to Padua, as she did every winter. Talk shows stopped mentioning Starr, and Don Sandstrom found himself stuck in Chicago still, Grandfather Stonds’s death seemed to Mara to bring an end to the first stage of her own life. She wanted to move on, but she didn’t know to what. Her new closeness to Harriet was losing its first intensity as well She would always cherish Harriet, but the two didn’t need to cling to each other now as they had for the past three months.

The growing intimacy between Harriet and Hector also made Mara—oh, face it: jealous. Okay, Hector was Harriet’s new suitor, just as Mara had foretold the day she first saw Hector in the clinic. It wasn’t that Mara wanted Hector to be her own lover—rather, she was jealous of him for taking Harriet’s attention just when she and her sister were coming together for the first time.

Midwest Hospital hadn’t fired Hector despite Dr. Stonds’s last dictated order to that effect. The residency committee, reviewing Hector’s record with Dr. Hanaper, said perhaps young Tammuz had gone overboard in his support of the homeless women downtown, but that situation had resolved itself, and they really couldn’t afford to run the psychiatry department short a resident so late in the year.

Even though he still had his job, Hector didn’t think he could bear to spend another eighteen months doling out drugs and little scraps of therapy. It became natural for him to talk over his plans with Harriet: She was his own age, after all, and, like him, was
trying to decide whether she still wanted the profession she’d begun training for at twenty.

Harriet started meeting Hector for dinner before he had to go on call. When Sylvia Lenore asked Harriet to be the general counsel for a new foundation that would focus only on the homeless, Harriet talked it over more with Hector than with Mara. Harriet saw a role for Hector in Sylvia’s plan, to provide consistent mental health care for those on the streets. Hector began to feel excitement for his discipline again. He talked to Dr. Boten, the man he’d hoped to work under when he first came to Chicago, about getting supervision as a therapist while he finished his residency at Midwest. Hector and Harriet stayed up late at night, not to discuss Starr, but to laugh and talk over the brave new world they planned to create—and, naturally enough, Mara thought, those discussions ended in Harriet’s bed.

It was natural, too, then, for Hector to join them at Grandfather’s funeral, and Mara tried to be glad that Harriet was comforted by his presence as much as by her own.

The overflow crowd at the service included generations of Dr. Stonds’s students and colleagues, along with most of the members of the Orleans Street Church. The congregation thought the man filling in after Pastor Emerson’s abrupt retirement did a beautiful job on the eulogy. Still, as Wilma Thirkell whispered to Patsy Wanachs, it was shocking to see Mara Stonds sit there so boldly, as if she hadn’t brought on the doctor’s stroke by her outrageous behavior in this very building. And that Jewish doctor, Patsy whispered back, what’s he doing here—and didn’t he grab Harriet’s hand when they sat down?

Linda Bystour leaned over the back of their pew to join in. I hear she’s living with him.

Of course, Mrs. Thirkell muttered under cover of the voluntary, I never thought Harriet was as good as she made herself out to be: too perfect to be true, that cat-in-the-cream-pitcher smile, those polished manners—all window dressing, I always said.

Mrs. Ephers was beside herself when Harriet and Mara took
their seats with Hector in the Stonds family pew. Not noticing, or not minding the avid interest of her neighbors, she called angrily to one of the ushers to escort the sisters elsewhere.

Harriet tried to talk to her. “Please, Mephers, I know you’re upset but can’t we sit in harmony for
Grand-père’s
sake—”

Mrs. Ephers cut her off “Don’t call me by that name, and don’t you dare refer to the doctor as your
’Grand-père!’
You turned against him in life, you and that—that Mara—you brought on his stroke—” She went on and on, her voice rising to a shriek, until the sisters and Hector moved across the aisle.

The doctor’s illness had affected Hilda Ephers sadly, Patsy Wanachs noticed. The housekeeper’s rigid grooming was a thing of the past; she often appeared at Sunday worship with dribbles of food down her unironed dresses. At meetings of the parish council she kept interrupting discussions with incoherent rants against Harriet, who now loomed as a larger villain in her eyes even than Mara.

On Graham Street, while the doctor lay between life and death in a nursing home, Mrs. Ephers moved herself into his king-size bed. She ate all her meals there, and seldom stirred from the building, except to attend church. Today, as Mrs. Thirkell pointed out, she was wearing one of the doctor’s old T-shirts beneath her ill-buttoned dress.

Linda Bystour hissed back, Look at Mara! What right does she have to appear so triumphant?

Similar comments rippled around the nave, in a sigh like wind through spring wheat: Mara was gloating at the doctor’s death. That was the only way people like Patsy Wanachs or Linda Bystour could label the change in Abraham Stonds’s younger granddaughter. Mara had slouched scowling in the Stonds pew for so many years that to see her sitting upright, looking—well, not pretty—she would never be pretty—but striking, anyway, with those strong cheekbones and green eyes—such a transformation could have come only at the doctor’s expense.

As the service wore on, Mara’s feelings for Grandfather surprised her. She didn’t mourn him, but she realized she felt sorry for
him. Hector claimed Grandfather couldn’t possibly be an object of pity, both because of the power he’d wielded, and his international renown—far more recognition than most people ever achieved. But to a nineteen-year-old, professional success couldn’t make up for the anger that made Grandfather push his own wife and child away from him. Not that Beatrix was his own child, but he hadn’t known that when he was raising her. As the interim pastor extolled Abraham Stonds’s virtues, Mara shook her head in pity for a life wasted on grudges.

After the interment, she and Harriet hosted a reception at the church. Cynthia Lowrie pushed her way through the crush of people to Mara. It was the first time the two had met since that Saturday in church three months earlier. Mara hadn’t felt like talking to Cynthia since. She didn’t exactly blame Cynthia for pointing Starr and the others out to the mob to save herself another beating by Rafe. But when she imagined a conversation, Mara pictured Cynthia waving her arms wildly as she thought up one excuse after another, while Mara said, sure, sure, and patted her on the shoulder. Mara felt she’d changed too much to want to join in Cynthia’s tearful complaints.

Cynthia had changed as well, at least on the surface: She had cut her lanky hair and was wearing makeup, a fierce application of color like a warrior’s battle paint. Mara’s eyes widened at her old friend’s startling face. The two greeted each other awkwardly.

“So, the old doctor died. You sorry?” Cynthia asked.

A shrug—Mara didn’t want to explain her feelings about Grandfather. “New hairdo, huh? What’s Rafe say about the makeup?”

“Rafe isn’t talking. He lost his voice when—that day, you know. He’s been to all kinds of specialists, I guess. No one can figure out what the problem is. I can’t say I care much. I’m leaving, anyway.”

Life had changed in the Lowrie apartment. With the loss of his voice Rafe seemed shrunken and fearful. He stopped going to the exchange, since he couldn’t scream out his orders, and he wandered
around home in angry bewilderment. Cynthia forced him to add her signature to his bank accounts so that she could buy herself clothes and a car. She told him she wasn’t cooking for him anymore. If he wasn’t working, he could hire a housekeeper or get his own meals, she didn’t care. She was moving out, anyway, to go to college, which he would also pay for, and he and Jared could do as they damned well pleased.

It didn’t seem to please Jared to do much. He spent his nights wandering from one whore to another, hoping to recover from the impotence that had afflicted him ever since that Saturday in church. He didn’t bother to open the letters from his college asking whether he planned to return for his senior year, letting them stack up on the floor of his bedroom with his empty bourbon bottles. Like Rafe, he seemed to fear his sister now, moving out of any room she entered, talking to her only when he wanted to beg a fresh bottle of whiskey.

Cynthia didn’t feel like telling Mara about the changes at home, or her gloating in her new power, and said only that she was off to the University of Illinois in January. “I hear Harriet’s going to dedicate her life to the homeless with that dreary do-gooder Sylvia Lenore. You going to team up with her?”

The jeer in Cynthia’s voice made her sound uncomfortably like her brother and father used to. Mara backed away. She marveled at a time when she and Cynthia had spoken every day: She couldn’t imagine sharing her most personal feelings with this truculent person. After a few more awkward half-sentences the two young women parted, never to speak in the future except at public events.

Everywhere Mara turned at the reception she was aware of a sense of strain, of people staring at her but not wanting to talk to her. When they looked at Mara they had to remember their own madness the last time they saw her, and no one wanted to think of that. In fact, the parish had voted to close Hagar’s House, so they wouldn’t have the homeless women around to remind them of the day their passions boiled into murderous frenzy. It was hard to find anyone who would admit even being in the church when Starr was
killed, although Sylvia Lenore was only too happy to remind Wilma Thirkell and Patsy Wanachs that she’d seen them led off in handcuffs. Members of the parish preferred to think of “that dreadful Saturday when the homeless women invaded the church and caused so much damage.” The sight of Mara Stonds brought the memory of what really happened too close to the surface.

Mara was finding it hard to remember she had promised Harriet not to snarl at anyone. When she saw the interim pastor bear down on Hector with an enthusiastic description of the church’s adult inquiry classes, Mara decided she’d had enough.

“Dr. Tammuz would love to hear more about this, but we have to take my sister home. She’s worn out from the strain of Grandfather’s death and from organizing today’s revelries.”

The sisters’ exit with Hector allowed the condolers to speak without restraint on the arrogance of Abraham Stonds’s granddaughters.