Ghost Country (35 page)

D
AY TWENTY-THREE
on Lower Wacker Drive,” Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom intoned.

The television screen showed the scaffolding, with a calendar superimposed. “Since the Orleans Street shelter began barring any women who come to the wall, most of the homeless have left this site at the Hotel Pleiades garage. However, the church’s action has not halted the steady stream of miracle seekers. Channel 13 talked with Mathilde Ledoq from Belgium, whose five-year-old daughter Bette suffers from leukemia.”

Don’s thick blond hair and square jaw were replaced by a still shot of a gaunt, anxious woman of about forty. “Madame Ledoq, speaking through an interpreter, says that after bathing her child in water from the wall for three days, Bette is already stronger…. Dr. Clyde Hanaper, head of psychiatry at Midwest Hospital where the little girl has been sent for examination, says it is not unusual for parents to delude themselves about the health of a child with a life-threatening illness.”

A brief clip with Hanaper, looking sad but understanding in his richly furnished office, explaining the power of self-delusion that allowed people to believe in miracles. Sandstrom turned next to the
archdiocesan miracle expert, Monsignor Mulvaney, who looked authoritative but caring as he explained that prayer can achieve many miracles, but if women are relying on pagan substitutes for the Christian faith, then God is unlikely …

Day twenty-five on Underground Wacker. “Hector Tammuz, the doctor who treated Madeleine Carter while she was alive, continues to haunt the place where she died. On this Wednesday evening we caught up with him at the wall around seven
P
.
M
. He was on his way to his post at Midwest Hospital’s psychiatry department, where all the residents are working extra shifts because of the influx of tourists visiting the wall: a number end up needing emergency psychiatric care….”

Hector haunted the wall at dusk because that was when Starr and Luisa often came. Some miracle seekers claimed it was Starr’s presence, not the wall, that healed them. They brought her flowers or money, or the strong beer she seemed to favor. Others believed in the wall’s powers, and hung wreaths from the scaffolding, or burned candles underneath the bleeding crack. They pasted prayers on the concrete around the crack: Blessed Mother, help Leon find a job … heal my arthritis … cure Melanie’s cancer … make me pregnant … end my pregnancy … stop Mark’s drinking … his infidelities … his beatings. Messages in Polish and Spanish and English, petitions in Korean, Russian, Arabic, in all the languages of the city.

Don Sandstrom, knowing he was working the story of his career, attacked it from every angle. Did Starr speak some language of her own? Did the diva really interpret those grunts, or were the two involved in some elaborate con? Sandstrom dug up philologists and ventriloquists to debate the matter on the air. Starr and Luisa would not come to the studio, so Sandstrom had to use footage of the two at the wall, where it was difficult to make out what either woman was saying, or how the crowd reacted to them.

Verna Lontano, from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, agreed to be one of the panelists, along with three men from other area institutions. Ordinarily Lontano regarded that kind of
program with a mocking contempt, but her connection to the Stonds family made her interested in what young Mara was doing.

Before their on-air appearance, the four philologists gathered in a Channel 13 sound studio to go over tapes of Starr and Luisa. Starr was hard to hear amidst the noise from cops and miracle seekers, of traffic and road construction, but studio engineers pulled as many of her grunts as possible out of the mélange and made a ten-minute master that focused on her and Luisa.

Lontano and the other scholars played it over and over. They couldn’t decide, privately among themselves or on the air, whether the sounds broke down into groups that might be a language. The only thing they did agree on was that despite Starr’s vaguely Middle Eastern appearance, with her bronze skin and beaked nose, whatever she was saying wasn’t in a modern Semitic language.

The philologists lingered in the studio after their forty-five seconds on air, reviewing footage of Starr. The three men made no secret of their interest in Starr’s bosom, and kept stopping the tape on some of the more revealing shots. Lontano, impatient with her colleagues’ raucous jokes, studied Starr’s hair, with its elaborately coiled and braided loops on the side. If she squinted, they looked like the horns of figurines on old Sumerian cylinder seals.

When she suggested this, her colleagues were scornful. No resemblance at all, Verna. Are you trying to suggest this creature might be a Sumerian, some science fiction figure who’s been in suspended animation for four thousand years and suddenly had her DNA reactivated?

No, Lontano didn’t think that. She wondered, though, whether Mara had pushed her chants to the goddess Gula one step further. Perhaps the unhappy adolescent had persuaded some homeless woman to let Mara dress her hair to resemble a figure from an old cylinder seal.

Lontano hesitated to suggest that to Dr. Stonds: he was already so incensed with Mara for parading his name around town in such raffish company, that Lontano didn’t want to fuel the flames by accusing Mara either of delusions or malevolence. The professor
did, however, go to Lower Wacker Drive several times after her TV debut to try to see Starr in person. The crowds were always heavy, and the professor, never tolerant of group hysteria, was unwilling to wait in the lines that formed whenever Starr and her entourage appeared.

The police kept anyone from sleeping around the wall, or from simply standing and watching. If people wanted to pray, fine, otherwise they had to keep moving. So after a short stint at the wall Starr, Luisa, and Mara would disappear through the underground streets, occasionally appearing at one of the shelters, but more often dossing down with other homeless men and women in the warm sand beside Lake Michigan.

After videotaping for a week, Jared Lowrie got tired of hanging out to see whether anyone from Hagar’s House was violating the shelter’s edict, and no one else felt like wasting their summer afternoons down there with a camera. A few women from Hagar’s House began to return to the wall, or to wander with Starr and Luisa. Jacqui and Nanette came most often, along with LaBelle, the woman who had been eager to test the wall’s healing powers to begin with.

If the miracle seekers gave them money, Mara would buy food and hand it out to any other homeless people they encountered. A rumor even spread about an evening when Mara had fed a large crowd at the beach from one bag of day-old bread.

When the TV crews heard about the story they were ecstatic: the fantasy of everyone in broadcast, to be live at Galilee. Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom joined the hunt for a reliable witness. He couldn’t find Luisa or Mara Stonds. He tracked down LaBelle at Hagar’s House, where she wouldn’t answer questions, fearful that Patsy Wanachs would bar her from the shelter if she saw LaBelle on television.

The best that Sandstrom could come up with was a drunk man who rocked back and forth on his heels, laughing. “That Starr, she somethin’, man. Whew, she touch that bread and it turn into ham
sandwiches, fried chicken, whatever you most got a taste for. Everybody got some, must have been two hundred people lined up for dinner. She suck out of that beer bottle and hand it around, and, boy howdy, it turn into enough Colt 45 to drown everybody’s thirst.”

The station didn’t think the footage with the drunk made an attractive impression, so they only ran a report of the rumor, and an interview about it with Monsignor Mulvaney and the Orleans Street Church’s Pastor Emerson. Both clergymen were outraged by the blasphemy that Starr and Luisa—and Mara Stonds—were stirring up.

“It’s one thing for women to believe that the Virgin is hearing their prayers,” Mulvaney said, “but quite another for this creature Starr to pretend to recreate the miracles Our Lord performed at Galilee. This is blasphemy, bordering on witchcraft. I strongly urge you to stop publicizing this woman’s activities—it only encourages her.”

Naturally Channel 13 wasn’t about to stop its broadcasts—its ratings had never been higher. Unfortunately for Don Sandstrom, he and his camera weren’t on Lower Wacker Drive the day Pastor Emerson and Monsignor Mulvaney decided to take matters into their own hands and confront the women in person. They were joined by Dr. Hanaper from Midwest Hospital, who had met the two clerics on numerous television shows that discussed the women at the wall.

Midwest’s psychiatric wing was doing land-office business with the people who were flocking to the wall. The summer heat, the expectations tourists brought with them, the strangeness of the city for foreigners or country dwellers, all exacted a toll from miracle seekers. A family from upstate New York, overwhelmed by the vastness of the city and the cavernous reaches of Lower Wacker Drive, jumped into the Chicago River together, all nine holding hands. Other visitors developed amnesia, or fancied themselves as incarnations of the Messiah, or the Virgin Mary. At least once a
day, sometimes more often, police on Lower Wacker had to summon a Fire Department ambulance to escort a frenzied tourist to the hospital.

Hanaper, conducting rounds, listening to tales of the wall, to tales of Starr—her electric energy, her eyes that saw into the bottom of your soul, her miraculous cures—listening to vivid fantasies about Starr, wanted to see her for himself. He went to the wall several times, stopping on his way to work or drifting over during lunch, but Starr was never there when Hanaper arrived, and he had to rely on television footage, or the garish snapshots tourists on the ward managed to take.

Starr was a clear example of feminism run amok, Hanaper told his residents and medical students. Her extreme sexuality, bordering on nymphomania, made her expose herself to men in the hopes of personal validation through sexual fulfillment. “You’ve seen her a number of times yourself, haven’t you, Dr. Tammuz? You’re the expert on Freud. Wouldn’t you agree? She rouses the latent appetites that the women who seek her out have repressed.”

Hector, seeing the glitter in his chief’s eyes, realized that Hanaper’s own latent appetites were close to the surface. I’ll protect you from him, Starr, he whispered to himself, and when Hanaper asked Hector for the most likely time to encounter Starr and her entourage, that ragtag troop of Luisa, Mara, Jacqui, and Nanette, Hector sent him at noon or dawn, never at sundown.

It was just a fluke, then, that brought Starr to the wall one day at noon when Hanaper, Monsignor Mulvaney, and Pastor Emerson were there as well. The monsignor explained to the police who he was, that he had come with a doctor and a Protestant minister to try to talk some sense into these deluded creatures. The police promptly escorted the men through the crowd so that they stood in front of Starr and her friends. There was a ripple of indignation from women who had been waiting since dawn for a sight of Starr, but none of the men paid any attention to it.

Hanaper whistled appreciatively under his breath. Just as he thought: her body, a handicap for the poor creature, probably had
been made to feel self-conscious in adolescence and had adopted a provocative posture as a defense mechanism, the attitude of “if you can’t lick your tormentors, join them,” then the adage set off a vision of himself licking those breasts, cream flowing into his mouth…. Hanaper’s glance flickered upward to the woman’s face. He had a momentary illusion that she could read his mind, as if his fantasy were written on his face.

’These women belong in a hospital,” Hanaper said to Monsignor Mulvaney.

Mara, hearing him, was frightened: they’ll lock me up, they’ll lock up Starr. She pulled on Starr’s arm, then besought Luisa to explain the danger they were in, but Starr only laughed and Luisa said, Oh, don’t worry, they’re just here to show how important they are.

The three men lectured Starr about her pernicious influence on impressionable women. Faced with those unwinking black eyes, Pastor Emerson faltered in the midst of a plea to let the miracle seekers return to their homes and families.

I’m sure you don’t mean to, Emerson said, but you’re inspiring unreachable fantasies in all these people.

Dr. Hanaper said, no, she can’t help it, this is the kind of condition modern medication is designed to control.

Oh, nonsense, the monsignor snapped. We use medical conditions as a shield, to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. She knows exactly what she’s doing—look at her expression.

And while the men argued among themselves, and lectured Starr, none of the three could take their eyes from her body, the full red lips with their promise of fuller lips below, the arms like bronze cradles that could rock you close. Faces shining, trouser fronts bulging, all three men talking louder, harder, to overcome their treacherous bodies. And then Dr. Hanaper, furious at Starr’s laugh—a raucous blast that echoed from the steel girders like an elephant’s trumpet—announced he would have the police bring her by force to the hospital. But when the doctor ran over to summon one of the patrolmen he suddenly collapsed, gasping for air. By the time
the police found someone to give Hanaper first aid, Starr, Luisa, and Mara had melted through the underground alleys into the dark stretch of land along the river.

Pastor Emerson blamed Mara Stonds for exacerbating the situation. He summoned an emergency session of his parish council. The church felt a personal responsibility for the situation, since the initial uproar about the wall was caused by women at their shelter. And Mara Stonds, who was really the group’s ringleader, had been baptized in this very building.

Everyone on the parish council had some memory of Mara’s shocking conduct over the years or the extravagant stories she made up. The time she’d spread news of Harriet’s wedding, and Mrs. Thirkell bought Harriet a silver chafing dish; the time she told them her grandfather was getting the Medal of Honor for his work as a cold war spy; that her mother was imprisoned in a Russian labor camp because of Dr. Stonds; the time that … the time that … Rafe Lowrie, more in sorrow than anger, recounted numerous occasions Mara had led his own precious Cynthia astray (Cynthia’s eye healing from her last beating, she was back in church, more breathless and nervous than ever).