Bury Me Deep (3 page)

Marion smiled as if she knew what Louise meant and shook her head. “Dr. Milroy has been very kind to me.”

“Oh, boy,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go to the supply room and sneak a smoke, dontcha think? I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about all this starch-collar-’n’-high-boots act they’re pulling.”

Marion did not smoke, but she started going all the time with Louise and she liked how Louise would lift up her long skirt and flash her leg like a can-can dancer, heel propped up high on a supply cart to slide a creased pair of Old Golds from under her garter belt, a ruffle of surprisingly bright orange. Marion had never seen garter elastics in colors like that. It was like the French lady in the pictures Dr. Seeley kept under his talc and his foot powder and the blond strand of baby hair from his brother who died, age six, from diphtheria and his special pills and two francs and a subway token from New York City and his Silver Star.

“These docs, Marion, they do the nastiest things when your eyes shut, or you turn corners, or, God help you, set foot on a stepladder. Keep your wits about you. I got an eyeful of Dr.
Tipton just last week,” she whispered, loudly, shaking her match and blowing smoke at Marion.

“What did you see?”

“He was doing something for that pretty redheaded lunger, the one with enough wind left in her sails to blow for a doctor with a snug wallet and a way with the soft solder.”

“Oh, Louise, are you sure?” Marion said. Dr. Tipton was nearly forty years old with grown children and a wife famous for her church hats and ladylike ways. But then again, Louise seemed to know everything that went on at the clinic, and sometimes it seemed like the doctors made special efforts to ensure she was well treated. You never saw Louise carrying bedpans or on laundry duty.

“Sure as summer rain, dolly girl,” Louise said, flicking tobacco off her lower lip like Warner Baxter. Then she gave Marion a long look and shook her head. “You’re lucky you met me.”

N
IGHTS, SHE’D THINK
about Dr. Seeley leaving her here, even as there was no helping it, even as he was not to blame, could never be to blame, her devoted husband going on four years but seemed both longer and much shorter, much shorter. Sometimes wondering who this man was they’d spent so much time apart, so much time in hospital wards, in clinics, in such places. In her head, thinking of him, it was no longer that elegant doctor, a dozen years her senior, with the kind voice, so soft, soft like the soft, gentle pads of his long, elegant fingers. Instead, it was the picture of herself walking down long, milky hospital corridors, seeing him at the other end, seeing him turning the corner to face her, dark-ringed eyes and he smoothing that long forelock and fighting off his shame and she wishing he would not feel it, did not deserve to feel it. Whose fault, after all?

Lying in bed now, she thought of him as if on a holy mission to heal and provide salvation, conjuring vivid images of him in deep-riven Mexican mines, primitive climes where Aztec rites still held sway, like she’d seen in the pictures, like she’d seen in the magazines she peeked at while at the five-and-dime when she was very small. When she let herself, after those first rough days at the clinic, hours spent fingers pressing into typewriter ribbon, carbon stuck, ink pressed under her nails, nails torn tugging, doctors stern in white coats intoning in her ear, intoning about patients waiting and her incompetence—nights after days spent in this head-aching, body-aching fashion, she’d permit herself exactly sixty seconds of anger at her husband, of hating him even. Her husband who couldn’t keep his shaking hands off the morphia canisters, all for that gluey, glazed descent into the plush velvet, making his voice slow like an old man, flush-faced and pin-eyed, just like the hollow-chested patients at the veterans hospital in Grand Rapids. Oh, Dr. Seeley—Everett. Everett. Was it worth it? Was it that wondrous a thing?

H
E’D BEEN GONE,
the doctor had, two months, including even her birthday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve now coming upon, and if it weren’t for Louise and Ginny, she’d have spent it sobbing over piecework in her cold room like some kind of lost lady in a melodrama, lungs coated with coal soot or prairie dust while her husband fought in the Argonne, in Manila Bay, at San Juan Hill. But Louise and Ginny had big New Year’s Eve plans that involved a friend of theirs, one Jibs McNeary, bringing a crate full of tin-pan noisemakers, horns with blower tips, table bangers and jaunty foil hats, the latest stack of race records piled high in the arms of Mr. Scott, fresh off a sales trip through honeysuckled towns all through the South and pink champagne from Canada
drunk gushingly and splashing sweetly over upturned faces gay with pleasure, red with heat, sparkling with the endless confetti purchased by the Santa sackful from the five-and-dime.

Most of all, they were glad because their friend Gentleman Joe Lanigan, gone since before Thanksgiving on a business trip back east, would be back for the party and there would be toasts and music and merriment marking his triumphant return.

Gentleman Joe was the girls’ favorite among all the men, the one they never talked about without smiling rosy cheeked and making side jokes and winking and tickling each other even, if it was late and the girls were feeling silly.

“Don’t feel left out, Marion. You’ll meet him soon enough and you’ll love him just as much as we do.”

“We’d never have met any of our friends without his kindnesses.”

“He brings ukuleles and big jars of cocktail onions and maraschino cherries.”

“All kinds of crazy stuff.”

“He calls himself the Greater Downtown Benevolence Committee.”

“He’s the welcome wagon!” Ginny said, voice tumbling giddily.

“He’s the big-brother type,” Louise said, her hand on Marion’s arm. “We all need big brothers, don’t we, now?”

N
EW
Y
EAR’S
E
VE CAME
and the crowd was just as big as the girls said, the house burning up at near 90 degrees and the men stripping down to shirtsleeves.

Someone had brought a big chrome cocktail shaker shaped like a bell, which Louise swung like a town crier when she mixed the cocktails.

Marion limited herself to one small glass of blackberry cordial, which Jibs’s mother made herself with beaten loaf sugar and stored in her cellar.

Everyone was dancing and the music was rushing through her body even when she stood still.

Suddenly, there was a big whoop and Marion thought it must be midnight even as she knew the electric wall clock had struck eleven no more than ten minutes before.

But no, it was all because of the Big Arrival. There was a swirl of looping bodies, everyone in the room but Marion caught in some kind of cyclone, sucking them toward the opening door creaking with their weight as they crushed against it.

The top of his hat, she saw that first and would always remember it. It had a teardrop crease in the center and it was burgundy, the first time she’d ever seen a man in a burgundy hat.

She was standing in the corner of the room and they were all around him and oohing and cooing and cuddling and backslapping, “How the hell you been, Joe?” “Oh, Joe, we thought we’d never see that pretty mug again,” “Joe, wait till I tell you about the new plot up for sale on Banville. It’s a sweet deal,” “My dear, Joe, that’s the biggest bottle of hooch I’ve seen since Ma died.”

And finally, tall bottles, cans of herring and silver anchovies, a crate of pearly oysters, a tilting pile of tin hand clackers, a few sliding away from the tangle and clattering to the floor, and there he was. There he was. And Marion would remember it just like that, like everyone falling away, a package unwrapped just for her. How could she not? A motion picture actor, that’s what he looked like, with that burgundy felt hat and his broad-shouldered topcoat and shoes shining like church floors on Easter. A smile like a swinging gate and smelling strong of sweet tobacco and slivered almonds and wind and travel and far-off places. When he took
the hat off, his hair, blond and bright, shone nearly pink under the overhanging paper lantern, and Marion felt herself inhale fast and her eyes unfocus.

“Who’s the peach?” he was saying, and before she knew it he’d swept her up into his overcoat and the lapel rustling up, crushing her nose, pressing into her mouth, which was somehow open.

Peering up over his coat collar, she could see his eyes dancing, his bemused smile.

“That’s Marion,” she heard someone, Ginny, say, and everyone started singing,
“Mary, Mary’s the girl for me, Mary, and I married soon will be.”

She felt a hand on her wrist, cold and strong, and she was yanked from the soft cocoon.

“But, Joe,” Louise was saying, and it was her hand Marion had felt, and now Louise flung her sidewise. “We haven’t wrapped her for you yet.”

And then Ginny popped a cork and it hit Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, in the eye, but he didn’t seem to notice. Everyone swarmed forward with their empty glasses and Louise wriggled behind Joe Lanigan to take his coat, running her hand down on it. “Cashmere, my love?” she asked.

“Vicuna, kiddo,” he said with a grin, clapping his hand against her face.

Men didn’t do that with Louise, not that Marion had ever seen. Not at the hospital, where they held doors for her and lifted things for her and tipped their hats. They might give lingering looks as she walked by them but they never did any wink and tickle like with so many of the nurses. And the men here, the men who came to her home, as careless as it was here, well, they sure liked to bring her presents, and maybe, maybe, they’d go as far as asking for a cuddle on the corner of the settee.

But not this. Not as Gent Joe was. Not so blithe, not so relaxed like she was a hatcheck girl, a girl in the elevator to press buttons and take pinches. Marion, even head fuzzy as it was, fuzzy like someone had run a dust rag across the whole world, took notice.

And then the crowd swallowed him again and Louise turned back toward Marion and leaned close, pressing against Marion, her velvety breast shining with spilt champagne, foam dappling.

“Help me, dear,” she said, Marion in the crook of her elbow, like a coach talking to his star player, whispering the next play deep in the ear. “Will you help me?”

“What is it, Louise?”

“In here,” she said, hitching Marion toward the door and into the hallway.

They were in the narrow bathroom and Louise was propped up on the sink. She was lifting her bristly bronze skirt up over her knees, and this time her garters were garnet colored with silver ribbon curling through.

“What are you doing, Louise?” She wondered if it was feminine troubles like Ginny was always having, Ginny who had pains lasting two weeks each month, requiring massages, low lights and a steady supply of something called Cardui Treatment, which came in a green bottle and which she’d spoon into her favorite highball glass.
“Blessed thistle, black haw and goldenseal,”
Ginny would lisp, finger pressed on the bottle label.
“Stops flooding spells, heaviness in the abdomen. Giddiness.” Am I less giddy, Marion, am I?
She was not.

Here was Louise slipping her fingers under her ruffling bloomers and pulling out loose pills, one after another, into her other palm still sticky from squeezing lemons for the drinks.

“Can you take these for me, Marion? I don’t want Ginny to find them,” Louise said. “She thinks whatever I get is all for her.
But I have to pay the rent with something other than my fine bottom.”

“Where did they come from, Louise?” Marion asked. Her husband’s face flashed before her eyes. He was the first person to show her such pills, without meaning to, tucked in his trouser cuffs, on their honeymoon trip from Grand Rapids to St. Louis. When she lifted his suit from the trunk, pressing her hand into the knife pleats, the pills scattered all over the floor of the train car and his gasp was loud and pained.

“Mr. Lanigan, of course,” Louise said. “Isn’t he kind?”

“Louise, what are you doing with…with narcotics?”

“Oh, Marion, don’t pull a face with me. They’re just medicine. You know how the other fellows, Mr. Gergen and Mr. Scott and Mr. Worth, all bring us notions? Even Sheriff Healy once brought us a marble bust with a bullet in it from that big raid at the Dempsey Hotel. I sold it for four dollars. Why, Mr. Worth brought us the baby lamb just last Sunday. They all bring us the things they sell. Well, Mr. Lanigan, he sells medicines. And he knows Ginny’s in such terrible, terrible pain and so he brings me little treasures. And I dole them out one by one. But, Marion, Ginny loves pills of any kind, she’s not particular, she just loves them such a darn lot and I’ve tried to hide them but don’t you know she finds them, the little minx.”

Marion looked at her in the tiny bathroom, Louise all legs and hot breath atop the sink, her damp hands dotted with pills, eyes on her so anxiously.

“But you said something about paying your rent.”

“If I were to buy her medicine, all of it, my darling, I couldn’t rub together two dimes for rent. I couldn’t, Marion. Don’t you know it? Sure, I could pawn the radio. Do you want me to pawn Mr. Loomis’s lovely radio, Marion? Mr. Loomis was so happy to give us that radio.”

Mr. Loomis had been awfully pleased to give them the Silvertone cathedral radio. Marion had heard the story many times, including from Mr. Loomis himself, who spoke breathlessly about how he’d had it wheeled in on a dolly while the girls were at Sunday services (that’s what he said, though she had never heard of either Louise or Ginny attending church), and when they came home, there it was in the living room, trilling Eddie Cantor singing, “Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper, Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.”

So Marion slipped the pills into the pocket of her dress, but Louise said that was not near good enough and she wrapped the pills in a handkerchief for Marion and told her to tuck them in her step-ins. Marion felt her face go red and she would not do it and Louise laughed and laughed and laughed. They strode back to the party arm in arm and Louise was still laughing and so beautiful.