Ghost Country (28 page)

As she played, as Starr sang, Luisa’s head was shot through with images, a slide show, where the pictures came slowly at first: a river; a gated city with brick towers; then a long and difficult journey by boat, carrying books of law, with an angry father in pursuit. Luisa’s fingers picked out passages from Schubert’s
Elf King
, and its urgent pounding of pursuit through the night.

The mood of Starr’s singing seemed to shift. Luisa found herself returning to her beloved Verdi while pictures cascaded more wildly through her brain.

The sky was the brilliant blue that arched over her villa in Campania. She sat under a tree whose long green branches curved and swayed like arms stretching to embrace her. A bird in the middle of the tree mocked her, fluttering just beyond her reach when she tried to drive it off. A man appeared, a ruddy man, who caught and removed the bird.

King David was described like that in the Bible: a ruddy man. Luisa had always thought that meant reddened, coarse, but she saw now it meant someone so vital that his skin glowed from the coursing of his blood.

She barely had time to realize that when she was lying with him on a giant wooden bed, riding him in an ecstasy she’d never known, urging him in language she couldn’t imagine uttering: plow me, plow my vulva, she was saying, but it wasn’t she riding, it was Starr, and there was no ruddy man, only herself, Luisa, so that her fingers left the keyboard, and sought Starr’s breasts, warm and firm as rising bread, and Starr’s lips were on her, glowing coals that burned her, froze her, then melted her again, and gold came pouring from her, cleansing her, creating her new.

She tried to twine her legs around Starr, but she was too small. Starr grew bigger and bigger, her black coiled hair became the horns of a wild cow, her nostrils expelled fire, and the earth itself was not as large as those breasts. Luisa clung to her, sobbing through her parched throat; her arms and legs too frail for the ride, clutching at the horns, fearing to let go, until the horns were suddenly clumps of sweaty hair, the fire breath only garlic, and the two women slept in a heap beneath the grand piano.

P
ERCHED IN THE
crotch of an iron girder, Mara watched the spikes go up on the wall. The garage manager, Brian Cassidy, stood almost directly below her, directing the operation.

Mara’s sleeping bag and few remaining clothes were stuffed into a plastic garbage bag at her feet. A man had stolen her backpack in the early hours of the morning. She woke from a restless half-sleep to feel him jerking the pack from beneath her head. When she tried to fight him he punched her in the mouth so hard, one of her front teeth broke. Her bank card was safe in her jeans, but she couldn’t squander money on a new backpack. She went from Dumpster to Dumpster until she found a thick black bag.

What would happen if she went to the family dentist? Would he report her to Grandfather, or would he let her bathe and then repair her tooth? She had only been on the streets for a week, but she couldn’t imagine how it felt to be clean.

It must be at Harriet’s command that the spikes were going up. Harriet, who hated her. She’d seen it in her sister’s face last night: revulsion, masked for nineteen years behind the gauze of Harriet’s perfect deportment, lay in front of Mara like the stage at the opera with the scrim pulled suddenly back.

Mara saw fragments of her own life, all those years of longing for Harriet’s love—Harriet’s first summer home from Smith, Mara riding her tricycle up and down in front of the building for hours, wanting to be the first to greet her sister, wearing makeup from Harriet’s dressing table, her five-year-old body suddenly snatched up by Mephers—don’t you know better than to break into other people’s rooms and steal their things?—whisked upstairs to be held and scrubbed under the kitchen tap, her cries of, I’m waiting for Hehwie, I want to look like Hehwie, ignored and drowned under the sluicing.

She was a fool. How could she have been so stupid her whole life long? It wasn’t enough that she was big and clumsy with hair that came from who knew what man, certainly nothing in the Stonds family tree would give rise to it. Harriet didn’t want her love—she wanted Mara gone. Now Harriet was exacting her revenge for all those years of living with a sister she hated by pounding spikes into the wall.

Mara’s blind dumb following of Harriet brought a flash of shame that made her skin prickle even now, as she perched on the girder. It was why she had run away from Harriet into the maze of alleys, why she had missed the departure of Jacqui, Madeleine, and the diva. And the woman with masses of black hair, bigger than Mara’s untamed bush, blacker, wilder, the woman who might be Mother.

Now she needed to find that woman. If it was Mother, she’d tell Mara why she’d left her alone with Grandfather. Not because of you, little daughter, but because—nothing credible came to her hurt, tired mind. Because Beatrix was too involved in drugs, as Mephers always said, to care about her baby—maybe that was the best Mara could hope for.

But the woman last night hadn’t looked like the druggies Mara saw around her on the streets every day. She held herself upright, her bright eyes assured, almost cocky (how can you know, she could hear Mephers ask, you only saw her for thirty seconds). But never mind, the woman would embrace Mara: little daughter, they
haven’t looked after you well. From a nest within those bronze arms Mara heard the Woman lecture Mephers and Grandfather, and then a special scolding for Harriet: how could you turn away from this little sister who only adored you?

The image made Mara’s eyes sting with tears. She cried, clutching the bumpy edge of the girder, and fell into a doze.

Madeleine’s howl jerked her awake some hours later. Mara looked over the side of her perch. Madeleine stood in front of the spiked cradle, wailing with misery at being blocked from her wall. After last night’s deluge the wall sported a whole network of hairline fractures, but Madeleine knew—or thought she knew—which was her original, the crack of the Blessed Virgin.

Mara couldn’t make out any words in the high-pitched mewling. But Brian Cassidy had been waiting for this moment. He almost ran from his lair in the garage, coattails flapping.

“This wall is off limits to you and your kind. Look at what you did, look at all the trouble and expense you’ve cost the hotel. Now get your ugly crazy face out of here or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t leave under your own steam.” He grabbed Madeleine’s shoulders and shook her.

The homeless woman dangled from his arms like a puppet, her skinny legs jerking up and down beneath the layers of her skirts. She panted with the effort to free herself, her breath coming in puffs, in rhythm to his shaking. When she couldn’t get away from him she spat at him. Cassidy dropped her and smashed her face with the flat of his hand. Mara sucked on her fingers in horror. Commuters on their way to the bus stop averted their eyes and crossed to the other side of the street.

Lying on the ground, Madeleine brandished her Bible at Cassidy. “You are an abomination, a desecration. The Holy Mother loathes all who deface Her temple, She will rain showers of curses on you. She will bring confusion and frustration to all that you do. She will smite you with the boils of Egypt, and with ulcers and scurvy and the itch. She will smite you on the knees and on the legs with grievous boils, of which you cannot be healed.”

“I’ll take my chances on that, cunt. Meanwhile, vamoose! Out! Am-scray.” Cassidy bent over her and grabbed her right arm with the Bible in it and twisted it back. “If you don’t, trust me: the street sweepers will be picking your dead body out of the rubble in back of the hotel tomorrow morning. And nobody’s going to cry over your fleabitten carcass.”

He stood over her while she crawled to the curb, hugging her Bible to her chest and weeping silently. He was about to kick her when he realized that a number of homebound commuters had stopped to watch. He turned abruptly and went back to the garage, where impatient customers snapped at him, wondering why he was lounging at his ease when they were waiting for their cars.

When Brian Cassidy vanished inside the garage, the commuters scuttled on to the bus stop. No one wanted to get involved with a specimen like Madeleine, with her filthy clothes and matted hair, muttering over her Bible.

Mara, ashamed of her own cowardice in not trying to intervene, climbed down from the girder and ran to Madeleine. She fished in her bag for something to wipe the other woman’s face, but could only come up with a pair of soiled underpants. She had a bottle of orange juice that still had a few swallows left in it, and finally persuaded Madeleine to drink some.

“We should get you some help. Maybe Jacqui and Nanette … Do you know where they are?”

Madeleine didn’t answer, only rocked on her heels and wept that the Mother of God would never forgive her for abandoning the wall. “I let the doctor give me a shot, and that made me forget Her. Now they ruined Her wall. She’ll curse me the same as She curses him.”

“It’s not your fault, Maddy; it’s my sister who did this. The—the Holy Mother”—Mara stumbled on the phrase, feeling like a hypocrite—“She knows you love Her. Let’s go over to the shelter and get a night’s sleep. We can figure something out in the morning if we’ve had some real sleep.”

She couldn’t get Madeleine to move, but the idea of a real night’s sleep grew vivid in Mara’s mind. If she got to Hagar’s House early enough, there would still be beds available. And a shower. She’d find Jacqui and Nanette and they’d tell her what to do to make Madeleine leave the wall. And they would know what had become of the woman with the hair.

Her heart beat harder as she slid through the underground streets. Past Corona’s and the other jazz bars on Kinzie and Hubbard, where people flattened back as she passed: wild hair, unwashed body, she carried a terrible contamination on her, the germ of uncertainty.

When she used to walk that route from her job at the hotel, she’d watch the way people shrank from Madeleine or the other homeless and think contemptuously, homelessness isn’t a disease, they’re not going to infect you. She saw now the repugnance ran deeper: if those secure in shelter and job acknowledged that someone like—like Mara, all right, like she herself, with her broken tooth and smelly clothes—if Mara was a person, then they’d have to believe that life was uncertain. It was a wild bull in a rodeo where you got on but couldn’t control where or how you were flung off. Plans and schedules, diets, workouts, and investments could disappear if a homeless person was human. That was too scary. So they had to look at Mara and say, we don’t see her. Or: she’s a problem child whom we can’t fix—let her go, let her follow her mother into that black hole of loneliness.

She stopped in front of a store that had little mirrored panels in its window frame and frowned at herself. She was still recognizably Mara, It was the hair. Patsy Wanachs would know her in a second, and then, if Grandfather or Harriet had put out a warning (must be shot on sight. Shot full of Haldol and stuffed into a psychiatry ward) …

She went into a convenience store on the corner to see if she could find something that would disguise her face. It was a tawdry little store that hadn’t given in yet to the renewal of the area, but
with its dirty aisles and half-bare shelves it wouldn’t survive much longer. The Lebanese clerk watched her indifferently—she could have stolen anything had she wanted to.

She finally bought a pair of knee-high stockings. Seventy-nine cents. Ten days ago she spent triple that on a cup of coffee without thinking. Now it made her anxious. That money could have gone for food.

She pulled one of the stockings over her hair and stopped to study herself in the mirrored panel. She looked—like a terrorist. A turnip. No, once the shock at the change was over, she was startled to find she had a face, cheekbones: gaunt now from a week of bad food and bad sleep, but a real face that she hadn’t known lay behind her messy curls. Her own mother wouldn’t know her, she burlesqued herself. And with her front tooth broken off …

You had to give a name through the intercom at Hagar’s House. She hadn’t thought about it. She couldn’t use “Mara”: it was too unusual; anyone on the staff would think immediately of Mara Stonds. Too bad Grandfather hadn’t called her Sue. Selena, she said quickly, in answer to the scratchy query. Selena Vatick.

She had to have an interview, with one of the volunteers, fortunately, not with Patsy, who would have seen through the stocking disguise in a second. Some friend of Sylvia Lenore’s was working tonight. Mara knew her by sight, from years of seeing her at church meetings, but the woman gave no sign of recognizing her.

Selena was new here, wasn’t she? The rules: no drugs or booze on the premises, no disruptive noise, no men. Where the bathroom was, if she needed to make a phone call, if she needed help finding permanent lodging, if she was eligible for social security, if she wanted clothes where the community grab bag was. If she needed counseling, Dr. Tammuz came on Fridays; if her feet hurt, a podiatrist on Thursdays; if her soul ached, there was Wednesday Bible study. Tonight was Tuesday, so no activities were planned. Beds became available at ten; she was assigned twenty-three, out of twenty-seven—she’d arrived in the nick of time—but she could shower now if she wanted to.

Like a puppy wriggling with pleasure under the touch of a hand, Mara squirmed under the shower. She rinsed out her underwear and her second T-shirt, helped herself to a clean sweatshirt from the clothing bag, debating between too-small jeans and too-large sweatpants, and finally, imagining herself on the girder, chose the sweats under the watchful eye of another volunteer; two pieces per woman per month, her name carefully written in the register; Vatick—that’s unusual—what nationality? Mara scowled below her stockinged head. Sumerian. The volunteer retreated, stopped trying out overtures.

In the activities room Mara found Jacqui and Nanette. She poured out Madeleine’s newest woes, begged for news of the strange woman, learned her name was Starr. Starr was at the hospital with Luisa and Maddy, but if they had released Maddy, then maybe the other two were gone as well. And, baby, we’re tired. We were at the hospital until three this morning. We have to let Maddy take her chances tonight—we need a bed. We’ll go to the wall first thing in the morning.