Bury Me Deep (15 page)

Joe Lanigan, safe in his rich man’s bed, thinking she would
surely end up in some doomy prison cell, so love-struck as to never breathe his complicitous name, or so disordered, so hopeless, who would believe her?

“B
UT
I’
M TELLING YOU,
he’s not home yet, miss.” It was that private nurse again.

“You put him on the telephone,” Marion said, and it was a voice she’d not known before, a voice filled with iron vibrating, a blade struck to quiver. “You tell him for me, nurse, that he must speak to me, or he won’t like what occurs. You tell him that.”

“Yes, miss,” she replied, voice trembly.

Marion waited, tucked in the lobby’s telephone booth, the woman in the red hat giving her a witchy stare and clicking her heels on the floor, tugging up the ends of the threadbare rug, throwing dust into the air. It was quite a show. It was quite a show this crimson-lipped tootsie was giving, and it reminded Marion, achingly, of Ginny. For a moment, she thought,
Oh, I miss Ginny.

The mind can do what it wants, she thought. It can make anything so.

“Mrs. Seeley.” Joe’s voice hustled into Marion’s ear, and it was his softest, deepest, kindest voice and she found herself wishing he were here, wishing he were still caring for her. “Are you with Mr. Wilson? Has he mended your hand?”

“Mr. Wilson never came, Mr. Lanigan. I had to take care of things on my own. I am trying to fix things, but I…” She felt her throat seal around the words. The gaudy red-hatted woman was now tapping her fingers along the glass of the booth, clamoring at Marion to hurry off the telephone. Her face was nearly pressed against the glass, a face from a burlesque handbill, a carnival poster. Marion couldn’t speak, couldn’t look, couldn’t stop shaking.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Seeley,” he said. “Are you at the station?”

“No,” Marion whispered, voice pitching high, “I couldn’t stay there, don’t you see? I am all alone and the trunks, Mr. Lanigan, the trunks are so large and they can’t be hidden. Everyone can smell them. Everyone can see them. There’s no hiding them.”

“Mrs. Seeley, I want you to listen to me—”

“Don’t forget me, Mr. Lanigan.”

“I would never, Mrs. Seeley. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t. Tell me where you are and I will reach Mr. Wilson and make sure he comes to you directly.”

Marion felt something crackling in the back of her brain. Joe’s voice, the way he was speaking. The promises and now this.

The woman outside the booth was still rapping on the glass, her shiny red nails rattling away. Marion thrust open the booth door and whispered, rough and raw, “I will call the police, ma’am. Don’t doubt it. I will call the police else I set my nails to your face.”

The woman backed away with a low curse.

“Mrs. Seeley?” Joe was saying.

“Who is this Mr. Wilson?” Marion demanded, face turned back to the mouthpiece.

“He’s an associate. He is my California medical supplier. Tell me where you are, Marion.”

She began to speak, but then stopped herself. A picture came to her, shimmered before her, of that look on his face when he had dropped her off at the station. That look on his face that almost seemed to say,
I’ll not see you again.

“I don’t think I will,” Marion blurted. “I don’t feel like I will meet Mr. Wilson.”

“Marion, listen to me, Marion, my darling…I know you are in a dark, obscure place right now. I cannot bear to think of it. Please, Marion, I want you to listen to me and very closely.”

“I don’t think I will,” she said, and hung up before she began
to cry. Taking her forehead between her fingers, she told herself she would not submit to despair. She would not.

R
ETURNING TO HER ROOM,
she saw a small card on the floor had been slid under the door in her absence. It read:
Dr. Bell, Room 402. Please see me.

She stepped back into the hallway and saw a woman with sunken shoulders walking slowly in the other direction.

“Did you leave this card?” she called out. “Do you work for Dr. Bell?”

The woman turned around, spectacles balancing on the bridge of her nose, and jerked her head, gesturing Marion to follow.

Marion, pulling her own door shut behind her, did follow. Somehow it seemed she was to follow. She kept her purse in front of her bad hand and followed.

The room was larger than her own, was in fact two rooms with an adjoining door. The smell of ammonia was even stronger than in her own. A steel cart stood in the middle of the room, packed with smoked bottles and a tray with a tangle of pokey instruments.

Marion could feel her wounded hand throbbing chalk white and monstrous behind her handbag, which barely concealed it. Looking at the forceps and iodine swabs made the wound seem to pucker and dilate and she felt herself wincing.

“Do you know how far along, Mrs. Dove?” the woman asked her.

“Pardon?” How does she know my name? Marion wondered, and then thought of the man at the front desk.

“Do you know how far along you are? You can’t be more than six weeks.” She was eyeing Marion closely.

“Oh no!” Marion said. “I’m not…No, no. Why did you think—”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Dove,” she said, fingering the stethoscope, which curled around her hand like a licorice rope. “It’s completely discreet, I can promise you.”

The woman’s eyes were soft, and Marion almost felt like consenting, even though there was nothing to consent to. That was how eager and tender she felt, so ready for some comfort. Any comfort.

“You’re Dr. Bell, then?”

“Yes. Listen, Mrs. Dove, it will not take long and then your troubles, which seem so immense at this moment, will be gone.”

“But I’m—”

“Times are hard and fifteen dollars will do the job, Mrs. Dove.”

“But I am not here for that, ma’am—Doctor,” she said. “My troubles are not those troubles. But they are troubles.”

And she set her purse down and slipped off her stained glove, strained and pulled to seam tears by her swollen skin.

“Discretion is discretion,” Dr. Bell said, taking Marion’s hand in hers and turning it slowly for a better look. Metal glinted from the center of her doughy palm. “Three dollars. And you can keep the slug.”

B
ACK IN HER ROOM,
Marion was both satisfied with herself and freshly terrified. The baggage claims man, the driver, the desk clerk, the doctor.
How many witnesses must I collect,
she thought.
How many will know? Every hole I dig myself out of brings in another party who may hang me.

The smell was getting stronger and she knew it was time to decide some things.

She turned off the lamp and the room was quite dark, and
when she pulled the blind on the window, there was no light but the thin band under the door.

When she was very young, six or seven, she was afraid of the dark, afraid of the night world and the world of sleep, the creeping, terrible feeling of a sleeping house, a sleeping street, a sleeping town and what dangers might come with she alone awake, wide-eyed. To fight this fearsome battle, she had created a creaky passageway in her head and at the end of the passageway, which took some time to reach, like putting a mesmer on herself, there was a special place of gossamer-winged fairies with ruby eyes, palaces etched from sparkling rock, velvet vales with streams threading through and she herself alighting from a white horse with a mane of flowing silver strands. Oh, each time she went to bed, the place grew grander and she fell in deeper and deeper, sinking herself until she could feel the horsehair against her legs, could feel her hands dug deep into that mane, the mane curling between her fingers, pulling her still closer.

Lying in the dark, she remembered that place, could even see it, dip her fingers into the mossy riverbanks and gaze, wonder-eyed, into the curling clouds of endless sky, remembered how easy it was to make everything else disappear.

Those trunks would have to be opened.

They would have to be opened.

My, there was so much she knew, who might’ve guessed, she thought.
Who might’ve guessed my mind could think such thoughts, know such things?

Hospitals, she knew—oh, and there was first meeting Dr. Seeley at the hospital, remember, not dashing, but so dignified, so refined, and the way he tended to patients with tender words and gentle hands and had been so many places, had lived all over and had a snap cigarette lighter from San Francisco and cuff links that looked like little gold monkey fists and he was so patient with her,
and listened to her with such care, she a flossy-headed junior nurse volunteer, nigh on eighteen years old but felt even younger—how was it she had forgotten all that?—but hospitals, yes, she knew that they would look at teeth, just like the baggage man said. That’s how they find them out. They look at the teeth. It was hard to think of Ginny having dental records, but she might well.

And then there were fingerprints. She knew all about that from the time the San Diego County Hospital called her to retrieve her husband, rolled on the docks and unconscious, and no wallet but fingerprints on file with the Los Angeles Police Department from the vagrancy arrest, or the practicing-medicine-without-a-license violation.

She unfolded the train schedule.

If she did things now, she could be on the seven o’clock train. Back at work Tuesday and nearly unmissed.

If she did things now.

T
HE LATEST PILL,
she let it roll around on her tongue, she let it scatter its dust around the tomb of her mouth, and her head tingly from the last one and from her trip to her childhood vale, she knew she had worked herself into a way of doing, a way of getting things done.

Next thing, she had walked to the five-and-dime and purchased a claw hammer, a box of matches, six towels, thumbtacks, cleaning gloves and a small jug each of borax and carbolic acid.

It was going to be the opening that would destroy her. She knew that what she would see would never be unseen, what she would see would tattoo itself in dark ridges into her brain forever. Her dark spot on the brain.

Yet she did not pause.

There was no time to pause.

Oh, Joe Lanigan, he would not believe she could ever…Oh, Joe Lanigan, did he not always take her too lightly?

She knelt down and slid open the latches on the larger trunk, chest galloping, heart ballooning up her throat.

She felt it give, felt her fingers tuck underneath and lift.

The air seemed alive with the smell, the air itself seemed muddy, a fog, and Marion’s eyes unfocused and her stomach curled on itself.

That was when she saw the blond hair, like a wig in a shop window, loosely curled and filled with shades of honeycomb, sweet butter, daffodil and, as Marion’s eyes locked into focus, foamed through with black spray.

Then, dipping a gloved hand in, she had to—she had to, don’t you see—she twisted her arm deep, past the shiny black shell, like a mussel plucked from the sea, that had been Ginny’s face. Pushing heel of hand in, she groped deeper, sunk herself into it, fought off the smell and the horror. Her fingers touching everything, her stomach rising in her chest, she felt for teeth, she felt for hard enamel, and in finding, oh, it was an awkward move, and oh, she had to grab a hair hank to make it work, raised the hammer, and punched down hard.

She would not hear the sound. She would not hear the sound of the teeth going.

Then, digging hands in farther, hands sinking into sticky patches of horror, she pulled up both wrists, soft like tuggy blue sponges, and wrapped the carbolic-soaked towel around the bloated fingers, barely fingers, barely solid, but like some loose glove lying limp on top of a dresser. She pressed and pressed. The loops, ridges, slopes and furrows—gone.

Both hands done, she closed the trunk, walked over to the corner of the room, gloves dripping on the towels she’d stretched from trunk to door, and wept. Long, loping tears.

Then she walked over to the other trunk, which looked so small, so dainty, and braced herself for Louise, whose heart she felt beating in her own chest, and whom she now knew loved her with depths as to drown out a thousand Gent Joe Lanigans with his snide beaver coats and shallow heart.

Oh, Louise.

L
OUISE’S LUSH THICKET
of dark red hair.

And an eye open, turned up, glittering.

The other eye covered by a sleeve.

Something so strange, the elbow resting on her chin. How could it be, her elbow up there like that, a puzzle with the pieces pushed together wrong.

She thought of that old song played on the banjo on summer porches in houses less God-fearing than hers.

It was the thing she must’ve known—
he has operated on Louise, he has fixed it so we can take them away
—but now seeing it.

Slowly, with such shaping dread even through her medicine fog, she reached for the elbow, the arm and felt the arm rise light, rise, rise, rise, with her own hand. She could lift it as far as the heavens.

So terrible, so terrible, there could be no words.

Oh, Louise, love me yet.

The Golden State Limited pulled into the station just after seven. A scant thirty-six hours had passed, the same bleary-eyed hobo she had noticed the day before still curled in the corner of the platform, leaning against a jutting wall, shielded from wind and the eyes of conductors.

Thirty-six hours,
Marion thought,
and I have changed forever.

She had done the things and she would not speak of them again. She latched the trunks. She soaked the towels in the borax solution. When she was sure the corridor was empty she tacked the towels to the bottom of the door, closed it and left the St. Curtis Hotel, not bothering to check out.

She left with only her purse.

No one said a word.

It was easy.

How easy it was, it shamed her more.

On the trip home, lulled by the pills and the churn of the train, she slept dreamlessly.

I
T WAS NOT SO EARLY,
but the streets were echoey and lonesome. The heat had already lowered fierce, settling like an iron pressing to her face and neck.

The streetcar rattled her slowly across town. She put a hand to her jaw, felt the dampness of her dirty hair. Her clothes gave off musky odors and her body too, which was radiating an unclean heat. Her eyes felt to be popping from rusty sockets.

“Lynbrook Street,” the conductor bellowed, and suddenly her heart rose up in her chest.

There it was, his cool, careless fortress, indifferent and immaculate, one stray silver roller skate dangling from its leather strap on the steep slope of the front lawn.

She flitted up the lawn as fast as her shaking legs would take her.

Without stopping, nearly pressing her body against the heavy door, she raised her good hand and clapped the knocker as hard as she could, her whole body swinging into it.

He would answer her. He could speak to his actions.

“Yes?” The door opened and the prim nurse in the white collar and starched apron squinted out at Marion, eyes straining from the sunlight, that house so dark, like a funeral home or a cinema.

“I need to see Mr. Lanigan immediately,” Marion said, trying to stand as upright as possible, as upright as this nurse who looked and smelled as clean as freshly boiled sheets.

“He’s not here, ma’am. Shall I relay a message?” The face, unmarked, empty and serene. Serene as only a young girl’s could be.
What was she, twenty? Twenty-one? Marion,
ma’am,
was once twenty, twenty-one, a million years ago.

“I will see him. I will see him now,” Marion said, voice jangling wildly, a trilling hurdy-gurdy. How dare he hide himself away behind the nurse’s skirts like a little boy. “Please tell him I’m here and he’s to show me his Shanty Irish face.”

“He’s not here, ma’am. But I shall give him any message you would like to—”

Marion felt herself lunging forward. The words tumbled forth, uncontrollably. “Do you mean to tell me he’s not here at this early hour? Why, he is a married man, is he not? A family man with children? And he is not at home at just past dawn? Is that what you mean to say?”

In her head, worse still, voices scurrying, saying,
This, a man so degenerate, so dissolute and perverse that he stalks the streets for girls all night like a vampire, like Jack the Ripper.

She could not control herself.

She could not even stop her mouth from gaping and cawing and shrilling like a handsaw. The nurse, standing there so calm, so cool-browed, as if to mock her, to mock her as a hysteric, a madwoman.

“Ma’am, I do not know what you mean,” the nurse said, firm and unflustered, a Sing Sing prison warden in handkerchief cap and bib. “Mr. Lanigan is in the mountains on a hunting party with friends. He returns later in the week.”

Marion could hear a thudding in her head like a wood plank thwacking against a hollow wall.

“Is that what is claimed?” she said, her voice now a wheeze. “Am I to believe that?”

“I have to attend to my duties, ma’am,” the nurse said, trying to close the door. Oh, wasn’t life ever so easy for her? Wasn’t this just another nuisance in a day of nuisances, of filling syringes,
pushing pillows about, standing straight in sickrooms, counting clock ticks. What did she know of sorrow, of life?

“You tell your esteemed employer,” Marion said, nearly biting her own tongue, “you tell him that Mrs. Seeley has returned home and he’s to see me and if he declines, he will not like what happens. He will not like it one bit. There’s things I can do. You tell him that. You tell him that.”

M
RS.
G
OWER
was not home and the rooming house was hushed as Marion bolted up the stairs to her room, and her head was still doing the thudding and she felt things crawling under her nails, under her skin, and she was not going to take any more pills, and she was going to cover herself in water and never let dirt or ugliness touch her again.

Joe Lanigan, you have broken, burned and beaten me and still I am here. I wear on even as you seek to obliterate and undo me. Even as you have ruined me twice, three times over. Ravishing me, ravaging me and razing me. I stand here still.

The door whinnied open and the familiar smell of old wood and butcher polish, of mothballs and Breath O’ Pine felt like a warm coat and she let it fold over her.

But as she stepped in, eyes adjusting to the light from her window, she saw something moving on the bed, and for one fleeting, appalling moment she was sure it was Louise and Ginny, spread out nude and bloodied like some nightmare come to life. A penny dreadful with bodies under groaning floorboards calling out to guilty souls.

It was only the start of a scream before she shoved her fist to her mouth and slammed the door shut behind her and the thing shifted and her eyes drew together.

“Is that you, Marion?”

And the body—the man—turned and set his feet to floor, and there was Dr. Everett Seeley. There was her husband, or was it? He looked so different. She had not seen that ruddy color on his cheeks in so long, since they married, perhaps, and those knotty cheekbones were draped softly now, his dark hair no longer baby wisping but richly toned, molasses dipped.

He rose and began to walk to her, and then she knew it was him, knew by the familiar slope-shouldered, defeated gait. His eyes, they were soft suddenly, as if with tears.

Before she could take a breath, his hands were gently on her shoulders. He tried to embrace her, but she was still clasping her purse to her chest with both arms, like some rogue-threatened waif.

“Marion, I am a few days early. When I received your last letter about your cough returning, and that you needed money, well, I was concerned. You know how it felt to me to leave you here. I shall never forgive myself for it, even as I saw no other choice. One of the mine captain’s sons was heading up this way and offered me a ride, so I took it.”

He was talking, but Marion could not follow, her eyes growing wider, her fingers digging helplessly.

“But, you see, Marion, I arrived last night and found you gone. Were you staying with those girlfriends of yours? Marion, do you intend to speak?”

She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe she was seeing him. She wasn’t sure he was even there. But his hands, they held her arms so firmly, they spanned her, and his face, she knew it so well, or she did once. Now it was more like a photograph, like the snapshot she kept in her Holy Bible, the one where he stood proudly in front of his brand-new 1927 Model A Ford.

“Marion, you must know there is nothing you cannot say to me. Not after what I have put you through. Marion, believe me, there is nothing—”

Her knees hit the floor and stars were everywhere.

T
HE AMMONIA SPIRITS
tickled her nose and her lashes fluttered fast. On her bed, her legs turned at funny angles, she saw Dr. Seeley, still there, squinting at her, face drawn in concern.

“Marion,” he said. “Marion…”

There could be no dissembling. She could not reckon any more dissembling. She could not teeter one more atrocity upon the towering bank.

“Dr. Seeley,” she whispered.

“Yes, Marion.”

“Dr. Seeley, you must forgive me.”

And she told him.

“M
ARION,”
he said to her, holding her shaking hands in his, having listened for an hour or more to her litany of mortification. The illicit lunches, the parties, the seduction, the descent into sin and, finally, the bloody night and everything thereafter. She told him as best she could.

His mouth remained open, but he could not speak, and his face—everything that had been moving in it stopped moving. It seemed to sink in on itself. It had turned old once more in that hour.

By the time she disclosed the dark day she left town with those trunks and, far worse, the things she had done to the bodies within them, his eyes dimmed and something happened. When his eyes fastened on her once more, it was as though he were
looking at a stranger, an alien thing. The beast or witch that had taken possession of his dear blond wife.

Turning from her, he rose and walked to the window. She watched him, watched his stillness. She watched him for what seemed ages and more.

“Murder,” he finally whispered, his hand curling over his mouth, as if to muffle his own voice. “It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t that.”

“No, no,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, a scratchy hiss. Crazily, it reminded her of Ginny’s. “But it feels the same. What have I done, what have I done.” She brought her hands to her face and her body began rocking. It was like a scene from a melodrama. The sinning wife’s mad scene.

But he would not turn to face her. He would not look.

“Marion,” he said, “it is clear to me now, and it should have been when I received your last letters, each more desperate, that you had fallen into such despair that you…you lost all reason. Lost all reason at all.”

“I did,” she rasped. “I did.”

“Things happen, Marion,” he said, finally turning toward her, eyes ringed red and feathered through, “when we fall off the path we’re meant to follow. Because of my weakness, I took you off the path and placed you at peril, and dangers that never should have touched the farmost edges of your life have hit you square in the heart.”

“I didn’t wish to harm her—,” Marion started, feeling her face wrenching as if she might sob. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what has become of me. I don’t know myself.” Her own words frightened her.

But looking, she could see his face softening, his eyes. She thought he must be the kindest man who ever lived.

He sat down beside her. She thought he might touch her, but it seemed he couldn’t. Not yet.

“Marion,” he said, “I understand the…the indignities you’ve suffered on my account. And for my behalf. I never meant for you to have this kind of life. You were not meant to have this kind of life.” He looked across the room and she knew he was looking at their wedding portrait, which sat on the small dresser. “You are a pure and good girl. It has always been as it first was, as the first moment I saw you. Do you recall, Marion? At the hospital, you on the stairwell above, carrying a stack of bedding—brilliant white—and you’d stopped to look out the window on the landing. The sun was coming off the lake and you were struck by it. That’s what I decided. You were struck by the light and you stopped even with arms heavy and you were looking at the light, it broke across your face and it was like some biblical illumination, it was like something you’d see in a very old book with gilded pages. That’s how it was.”

And then this, to bring you to this low state.
He didn’t say that, wouldn’t say that. But should have. That’s what she thought. Here she was, a ruined girl, a girl who’d let liquor cover her face, who’d let a man’s hands between her knees, her thighs, who’d set herself before a man, knees on carpet, begging him to drag her down to awful places.

A girl who’d held a gun in tensile fingers and shot the life out of some slip of a thing. Shot the life out of her.

Somehow that last thing mattered less. Somehow that mattered less than that she was the girl who let a man bring his hand, dusted with that tingling white powder, between her legs, and he…and he…how could that have…how could she…

He put a hand to her lips and said, thusly, “Marion, what I see now shakes me to the core. But that is because it is me. Do you see? The shame is mine. The shame is mine. I took you from your father’s parsonage. I took you from the leafy, God-loving groves of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I sunk you in the pits of hell.”

Eyes shining with sudden brightness, he added, “It is my stake to redeem you.”

T
AKING HER ARM
in one hand and his medical bag in the other, he walked her down the hallway to the bathroom. There, he tended to her wound and redressed it. She did not wince. He watched her a moment, then said, “Marion, did he give you any medicine? Did this man give you any pills or powders?”

She dug in her pocket and held out her sticky palm, showing him the last of the pills Joe Lanigan had given her.

Dr. Seeley put his nose and tongue to one and asked her how she felt after she took them, taking her chin in his hand and lifting it and peering into her eyes. Then he dropped them down the sink drain while Marion watched from the doorway.

“Marion,” he said when he returned, sitting her back down on the bed, “promise me you don’t have any more of those. They will knock your nervous system to a fare-thee-well. You want to get hold of yourself. It’s important, if we’re to get through this, that you get hold of yourself.”

“Yes, Dr. Seeley, yes,” she said. But then she remembered his letters and how he always told her to settle herself, to take things as easy as she could, to come home at five o’clock and rest and eat and sleep in a decent manner. He told her, as lonely and bereft as she might feel, she must use self-control and not indulge in sorrow and malaise. The scolding, like the other one, the other one who said, while feeding her pills,
You must pull yourself together here…. You can’t fall to pieces on me.
Both of them scolding her, reprimanding her, as if they had no part. As if they had no share in the chaos.