Bury Me Deep (5 page)

(For hours afterward, with each blink she’d think the porcelain pock was still there, still there and scraping, ridging her eye with each flutter.)

Riding from the tearoom in his motorcar, her hair slipping from beneath her scarf, she told him she couldn’t, no,
couldn’t
come to lunch again on Monday. And, far more, she would not be able to take up his recent invitation to attend, as his new friend,
the birthday revels of one Ephraim Solway, a fellow Knight, in the banquet room of the El Royale Hotel.

She could not fathom what had come over her that had let it go and go and go. Sitting in restaurants together, legs sweeping against legs, hand on her back, the center of it, fingertips there, as she seated herself. It was dreadful. It was unforgivable at the core. In her head, she began formulating a letter to Dr. Seeley. (How was it now she could only think of him as “Dr. Seeley”? The longer he was away, the more impossible to name that looming absence “Everett,” much less some coo-cooing term, as she might let slip from her lips in their sweetest times, their private afternoons, he pressing his face gentle into her hair and calling her his darling, his dimple-cheeked dearest. When were those times?)

Yes, she told herself, she would write Dr. Seeley directly, chronicle the whole series of luncheons, and make him understand she’d stumbled—foolishly, yes, but she was young and all by herself and in a strange place for so long—into something improper and found her way out quickly, before a single observer could disapprove.

Oh, Dr. Seeley, you alone in fierce surroundings, tending nobly to the ruined lungs of sad-eyed Cornish miners, their own days trapped under bauxite, silver, manganese miles thick, nights spent brining their grief in sugarcane liquor. Oh, Dr. Seeley, your sacrifices so great and your soul beating off the dark furies inside you, that depthless, dooming taste for the needle and its bloom? Your sufferings so immense, and here I sit in comparative comfort and ease, defaming our marriage by degrees.

By the time Joe Lanigan had driven her, hand to wounded eye, back to the clinic, it was all she could do to fight off a heavy sob in her chest. As if he knew it, Mr. Lanigan was more the
gentleman than ever, treating her with the delicacy and gentility he might his starch-gloved grandmother.

But when he’d delivered her to the front door, he touched her arm lightly, which he ought not to have, fingers sliding down her arm to her hand. And he turned her toward him and spoke quietly, solemnly, far too close to her twitching face, tears gluing on her lashes still. And he said this, and it was like a claw hammer to her heart:

“For all the world, Mrs. Seeley, I’d not leave your side. Were you my wife, for all the world, I’d not lose my way from you. I’d not abandon you to the world. Not in such hard times, not in any time. I’d not leave you out there in the dark middle, not you with that angel’s face, that beating chest, the pulse in your wrist I can feel even now. I’d not leave your side, Mrs. Seeley. I’d like to meet the man who could.”

That night, under covers and eyes still twitching, flickering back into her head, she dared think of a world where she, barely out from behind her father’s coats, would have fumbled her way to the likes of Joe Lanigan rather than her husband, brushing middle age even at thirty-five. Dr. Everett Seeley, with each passing year more like some gaunt returning soldier from far-off battles, those once-gallant features half ruined, those dark-ringed eyes and blue-edged cheekbones and the slow shuffle and the smell of his shirts on the ironing board. Dr. Seeley, so noble, so kind, but slipping from her with every passing second since they met. All he was was what was almost gone. The only thing that truly remained was the very thing that stripped their pockets clean twice a year since they’d married and finally sent him miles away, leaving her here, lovelier than ever and ripe for picking.

Oh, Joe Lanigan, you’ve found yourself a fellow sinner—how did
you know it? Was it on my face like a witch’s mark? Or was it something vibrating in my eyes, something that said I am yours, I am yours.

M
ARION WAITED.
She waited and Joe Lanigan did not call again the next day, nor the following. And the weekend came, and there was Saturday, the day of the planned birthday gala for Mr. Ephraim Solway at the El Royale Hotel, to which he had invited her and she had firmly, frantically declined.

At noon, collar itching and feeling squirmy and hot, she walked to the Pay’n Takit to buy laundry starch. On the way out, head heavy with thoughts, the bent ceiling fan stirring dust and rustling moth flies, she saw a wire canister by the register filled with chocolate nougatines wrapped in sticking waxed paper. Her hand clasped over one like a crow’s claw, she walked out of the store and onto the street, tearing off the wrapper and tucking it into her mouth and letting it sit there, strips of the wax still sticking to it, powdering her tongue, taking just enough of the pleasure away to send her back to the store, mouth clotted, to buy a second and pay for both, even as it would mean, for her at least, for the way she judged herself, no new shampoo for the week and she’d have a bologna sandwich for supper.

At one o’clock, she carried her laundry basket across the street to the Maddens, who let Mrs. Gower’s boarders use their electric washing machine if they brought their own soap flakes and put change in the kitty. Marion had grown up washing with a board and wringer, big kettle and bluing—it took a day or more. But then she was washing for the whole family and now she was just washing her own two work dresses, her nightgown, her underthings, her sheets and bath towel, which Mrs. Gower was supposed to launder but did not.

The hours stretched, arched, curled back, and Marion stood
in the Gowers’ backyard where her dresses hung, paper dolls fluttering, and she stood and didn’t move and her head was filled with sorrow and it wasn’t the right kind of sorrow. She stood, the air barely moving, the sky muddy with late-afternoon muddiness, that dread feeling of stillness, which suggests no movement again, ever.

At seven o’clock, the appointed hour, Marion on the edge of her bed thinking,
This would have been the time, were I to have been so wayward, or less wayward (for doing without knowing why, that must be happiness).

Somehow, still, she was awaiting his knock, could picture the door opening, his camel’s-hair-coat, hair-oil-glistening arrival, he like a man from a motion picture, on Kay Francis’s arm, towering over with broad shoulders and her hand slipping eagerly through the crook of his solid arm, he with a smile like Fredric March, like Robert Montgomery, like any of them. He was like any of them. All of them. Bright and shiny like polished dress shoes.

So it was a long hour after that, radio playing, rasping out
“Far away near Havana shores there lives a girl, whom I call dancing Cuban Pearl,”
and Marion darning, like her crook-handed mother, stockings fuzzed with wear. She might have gone to the girls’ place on Hussel Street. Louise always said it was an open invitation and that Saturdays were always a scream, they made sure of it.

But then there it was, like an air horn blast. Eight o’clock, or three minutes past, the sharp knock and frog-jawed Mrs. Gower, robe pulled across low-slung chest, saying, “A Mr. Lanigan should want you on the telephone, Mrs. Seeley. Told him I shan’t expect you to take calls this late but he said mightn’t I try. Couldn’t barely hear him. Sounds like he’s telephoning from a train station, or a rodeo.”

Marion’s breath fast, her hand nearly damp on the mouth
piece, fingers pressed on the thrumming ringer box. “Mr. Lanigan?”

Was that his voice amid the crunching sounds of the festivities, glasses tinkling, dishes clapping against each other, chairs skidding, a trombone drawling, but most of all waves of laughter, men and women laughing together?

“Mrs. Seeley…I know you had declined me, but I do believe you have the wrong impression…should come…respectable celebration in honor of a fine civic leader and Mr. Solway himself would so appreciate your presence…might you consider attending?…You might take a trolley car down and I would meet you and escort you…”

T
HE TWO YOUNG MEN
next to her on the trolley, both wheezing corn liquor, kept rustling her, each time apologizing, hat doffing, but still so caught up in their drunken stories that they’d inevitably fall to it again, one of them even jabbing her straight in the bosom.

Don’t I deserve it,
Marion thought. Her knees shaking, her heart vibrating like a tug spring, she cursed herself for not hesitating fifteen seconds before putting on her one fine dress, daffodil colored and ironed to shininess, borrowing trolley fare from no less than bristle-lipped Mrs. Gower (“It was my brother, Mrs. Gower. He needs me to wire him train fare home to see our dear mother.”). And now, heading alone to a downtown hotel to see a man she had no business seeing. No business seeing at all except the business of ruin. She felt her stomach flip three times, and could barely wait to get there.

No one was waiting for her at the trolley stop. She could see the El Royale from where she stood and then she was walking there. She wondered, as she kept her eyes on the hotel, which
sprawled a full city block and had a front canopy of gold, if this awfulness in her was new, a spell cast, or something inside her that he had stoked or merely touched and watched enfold in her.

But then, walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, cigar smoke and preening, she felt everything inside her held so tight for a week or more release itself. She saw only a handful of women, their dresses like glowing paint streaks—poppy, turquoise, parrot green. They were young like her, but their dresses dipped low, showing shiny flesh, and their eyes were fringed with dark lashes and their cheeks were like berries bursting, crinkly hair marcelled, and it was all very, very wrong that she should be here, and one man, a stout patrician type with a bulging pocket-watched vest, he had his hands clambering down a girl’s lightly clad, shimmery gold back nearly toward her behind and then, definitely, there. The music hammered at her and the floors felt sodden with champagne and maybe it wasn’t so different from Louise and Ginny’s and yet it was. It was. It was because that was their party and this was not. This was not. It was something else and it felt a little bit like these girls had, stiff-faced and cold-eyed, punched a clock.

Then, from the corner of her eye, something: a swath of dress the color of crème de menthe and it was a dress she knew, as Mrs. Loomis had worn it on New Year’s Eve, and it fit so snug across her swelling chest that the trim kept tearing. But it didn’t look like Mrs. Loomis, not the way the dress was hanging, swinging.

Her eye followed the dress, followed its peacock spread, trailed it as it spanned and tucked and then settled behind the large gray shoulder of a man she recognized as one of the doctors at the clinic, Dr. Jellbye, Dr. Jellieck, Dr. Jellineck…and then he turned and behind him Marion could see that bristle of deep red hair and then Louise’s kohl-rimmed eyes, jittery with pleasure.

“It’s my prairie canary,” came a voice slipping rough in her ear, startling Marion, making her flinch. But it was only Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, and he took Marion’s arm in his sausage fingers and plucked her from the crush and as he did said, “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit.” And she felt overwrought and angry and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. And you may tell him I have gone.”

But Marion’s voice seemed to get swallowed up by Mr. Gergen and his big double-breasted suit jacket and then, like a game of Pass the Parcel, she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world, and she caught his eyes and she said, in a voice that surprised her, “Mr. Lanigan, you will remove me from this place,” a strong, spiky voice like Louise telling a noisy patient, “I suppose you know you’re disturbing the entire ward, Mr. Milksop.”

He did as she said. He removed her with great speed.

Then they were in front of the hotel and the cold pinpricking her and he putting his tuxedo jacket around her.

“These are not the kinds of places I can…”

He pulled his jacket tighter around her and said, mournfully like those Irish can do, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. But I saw no other way. You had closed the door on me. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. I should have realized this was no place for you. That’s a lie, Mrs. Seeley. I knew this was no place for you. And yet.”

He said he’d take her home in his motorcar and she didn’t like it but could think of no other way. The trolleys ran an hour apart this time of night.

In his car, she sat far against the door, feeling suddenly like he’d seen her without her clothing. She felt like, in coming, she’d
shown him everything. She knew she had. And now she must retreat.

The sedan was filled with him, he was so large a presence, so tall and with that hair thick like a layer cake, and the way he talked, which was big, like the best salesman, filled with tricks of tone and turns of phrase—there was this way he had of always reminding you how important and marvelous what was happening to you just then was.

“And that El Royale Hotel, I’ve invested a substantial amount in it, it will be colossal. Did you know, they put circulating ice water in every room and automatic cooled air that changes every three minutes? I timed it. But listen to me sitting here talking nonsense about circulating water and I get these moments with you and it’s a thing of glory, just like this, this is all I wanted, Mrs. Seeley, and I just didn’t know how else to make it happen.”

He drove three miles past Mrs. Gower’s house, would not stop pressing until she turned and let a snarl loose like none she knew was in her.

“What kind of husband,” she said, “with an invalid wife at home no less, spends his evenings like this, Mr. Lanigan?”