Bury Me Deep (8 page)

Marion thought,
Why, she’s just playing, she always plays.
Besides, there was Joe Lanigan to think of. Joe Lanigan.

She wanted to share it all with Louise, but she really couldn’t, could she. What might Louise think? For Louise, bad behavior was coming by for supper with empty hands, or not paying mind to Ginny, so clearly itching to play Tiddly Chase or Chinese checkers. Sins were looking down long noses at unmarried girls while carrying on with parlormaids on the sly.

“So do tell where you and Joe Lanigan stole off to on Saturday, my little nightingale,” Louise said, over hoecakes she’d brought for them.

“We went for a drive,” said Marion, fingers to her mouth. She felt like everyone could see it on her, Louise most of all. Like the one time, the only time, seven years old and being fresh, she sassed her father and he made her stand under the cherry tree at the foot of their lawn with a writing slate hung round her neck that said,
I DO NOT FEAR OUR MAKER
.

“I thought you went the way of the Parker baby, but Ginny has a slyer eye,” Louise said, smiling the whole time. “She says to me, ‘Marion plays the prairie flower but she’s got a hot mitt on Gent Joe.’”

Marion could feel her chin shake. “He needed someone to talk to. You know, his wife is so ill.” This was true. Joe had talked about his wife, at length and in ways that made Marion feel he had sorrows deeper than her own.

“They do hot-air treatments,” Marion went on. “When it’s bad, her lips, they…” Here, telling her, he had touched his fingers to his mouth, embarrassed. “They taste of urine.”

He told her too that when his wife came to realize this herself, kisses stopped forever. Her humiliation was so great. She was dirty, she said. Dirty and foul.

Before she fell sick, he’d admitted, he’d never seen her lily-white bride flesh, even in low lamplight, curtains heavy across every window. He’d not seen an inch of it, only felt it, tense and wincing, under his hand, under two coverlets, under the grave dead dark of long winter nights.

Now he saw that flesh and it was pushed full with air, with sick, with awful inner squalls of illness. It was like touching the thin, skeiny membrane of a newborn birdling.

“Is that how it is,” Louise said to Marion now, nodding, eyes fastened hard. But she seemed to be, could she be, finding a giggle in all this.

“She has the Bright’s,” Marion said. “She’s infirm.”
Marion, you must understand,
he had told her, fingers on the ties that held her dress together,
I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.

“Is that what they’re calling it now? You don’t have to tell me about Mrs. Lanigan, Marion,” Louise said. “The three months I worked for her were the closest I’ve come to San Q.”

“You worked for her? You were her nurse?”

“When I first blew into town. It didn’t last. She’s no bed o’ roses and that’s how come I always felt so for dear Joe. Can’t be
pretty in that household. We try to keep his spirits up. Seems like you’re doing the same.”

“I never knew that,” Marion said, wondering why Louise had never mentioned it before, or Joe.

“Three months, best,” Louise said, waving her hand. “I got my better job and enough cabbage to pull Ginny from cooch dancing downtown. Just in the nick too. She was Camille up there on the stage and not enough meat on her chops to waggle anything but bones.”

W
ITHIN A WEEK,
Marion began to think of it as a kind of demonic possession. At her desk, on the streetcar, at Mrs. Gower’s roasting dinner table and especially at night in bed, her body twitching. In private moments in late night hours, she thought demons may have set in and taken her body and she might require an exorcism to be free.

Joe Lanigan. Mr. Joseph Lanigan. Entrepreneur. Beloved husband and father. Man about town. Friar. Knight of Columbus. Member, Chamber of Commerce. Lector at St. Mary’s Basilica. Gentleman Joe.

“If I cannot see you at your room, I don’t see any other way,” he said. He had telephoned Marion at the clinic. Mrs. Curtwin, Dr. Milroy’s secretary, was not pleased that Marion was receiving calls at work. Marion had to speak quietly, discreetly into the receiver. She felt as though the woman could hear everything.

“Mrs. Gower, she…It wouldn’t look…”

“I think you should come here, Marion.”

“To your home?” Marion’s voice turned rushed. The secretary’s eyes were fastened on her.

“Write down this address.”

She did. But she already knew where he lived, in that fine Victorian house on Lynbrook Street, three stories on a sloping hill and a large porch that curled around it.

She determined not to go. She said to herself,
This is it, Marion, your sin is great but you can save yourself from worse sins still.

B
UT STEPPING
on that streetcar she did not go home. Instead, she took the streetcar to his grand house on Lynbrook Street. She just had to, like it was a fever. It was a fever.

A nurse in white collar and apron answered the door and Marion said what he had told her to say.

“I’m from the clinic. I have brought Mr. Lanigan the late orders for immediate processing.” And, palms wet, she showed her the accordion file she had brought.

“This way, miss,” the nurse said, no expression. The house was dark, with shushing drapes drawn and thick-fringed brocaded chairs. Marion could smell mercury and rubbing alcohol.

“Right through that door,” the nurse said, gesturing down the hallway. Then she lifted a tray of medicine and rubber tubing she had set on a hallway table and silently ascended the towering staircase of carved walnut.

As Marion walked, she could feel the woman’s, the wife’s, Mrs. Lanigan’s, presence. Could feel the weight of her in her sickroom above. The house carried no sound.

She paused in front of the heavy door to which she had been directed. She paused, and nearly lost her nerve. But it was too late and Joe Lanigan, in shirtsleeves and smoking a cigar, opened it. Oh, the look he gave her, didn’t it say such things to her. She felt
like he could move her as if by invisible strings. He had such ways, you see.

It was his study, all mahogany and green leather with gold braid. The window behind the desk was draped and she saw the long tufted davenport and knew she was meant for it, that she would in moments be pinned there, one foot on the floor, and that he would have her, and he did.

Afterward, her body rubbed to roughness, to blood-pocked flushy ruin, she fastened garters with shuddery hands and watched him, standing now, leaning against the front of his desk, cover his face with his hands like he might cry. He did not cry and she was glad he did not, but she couldn’t guess what was in his heart. She never could.

For a moment, she felt he might finally have been struck by the ponderousness of their joint sin, here only a foot of plaster and wood separating him from his enfeebled wife one floor above.

“Oh, Marion,” he said. “Look what I have done.”

But when he pulled his hands from his face, she saw no grief at all, no trace of stricken remorse.

“I have made you a whore,” he said, and he couldn’t stop his smile. Saw no need to.

For her part, looking into her own battered heart, she could summon no anger, nor even fresh guilt. She believed that in his mind, which she now saw as disturbed in some way, the consequence of years of feeling lost and unmoored, like a widower with a wife, in his mind, he was giving her his highest praise. Her legs still damp, she reckoned this terrible revelation: she was strangely gratified. She had pleased him. Wasn’t that, in some odd way, wondrous?

This man, he has shamed me twice over, once by treating me like a whore and once more by showing me I am one.

I am a sinner, Dr. Seeley. What’s more, I grew to love my sin.

N
O ONE HAD TOLD
J
OE
L
ANIGAN
that she was a flower, a doll, an ornament of finely spun glass, something to rest on a mantelpiece. Somehow no one had told him he couldn’t fondle her, twist her filmy skin, grab her with his rough Irish hands and throw her on a bed and do just awful, awful things to her.

You are Pandora,
Joe Lanigan had said.
You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open.
As if it were her. As if she were the one. Was she?

She wondered if she’d showed him, without knowing it, that she could be treated like he treated her.
What had she shown him, and had she shown it to Dr. Seeley and had he not seen? Or, oh no, had he understood and been frightened and such the more cause of his private habits, so destructive to them all? Things too horrible to know.

But Joe did not bother with talk of sin. He never missed Sunday Mass and he saw no predicament, said the one had not to do with the other and there was a gospel of hedonism and she might follow it, but she with her Dutch ways, with her grim church and its coldnesses and not the hot, bloodied breath of Catholicism, she knew not where to turn except to pray and pray and pray to turn her back into a doll, or a flower, something inviolate on a shelf, never touched.

“M
ARION’S GOT A NEW BEAU,”
came Louise’s whisper across the table in the lunchroom that Monday. A prickling toothed thing dragged up from Marion’s knees to her chest.

“What did you say, Louise?”

“Oh, you just have that dreamy-eyed look, your little rosebud mouth all aquiver and eyes so loose they’ll go cross.”

Marion tried to smile. Louise, fingertips tapping on the waxed paper of Marion’s balogna sandwich, watched.

“Let me guess, Fair Mare, the Vagabond Lover climbs up Mrs. Gower’s trellis and into your window each night at the stroke of twelve. Marion’s beau would be no less gallant.”

“Oh no, Louise,” Marion said, watching as Louise rotated the sandwich, eyeing the pink meat suspiciously, then slid it back to Marion. “I was up late writing to Dr. Seeley.”

Louise grinned, picking up the fat apple she had brought. “Such a dutiful wife,” she said, extending her long arm, the apple glowing like some royal citrine.

“Have a taste, Fair Mare, do share.”

Marion started to speak—

“Or is your rosebud mouth too small?” Louise added, eyes cracking. It was like a saber lain before. It was a saber, a gauntlet, somehow. Marion saw it glinting. You could not miss it. Marion saw it but did not know why it had been lain there.

I told Mrs. Seeley to keep her distance from those two. But Marion, she liked their lively ways.

Everyone knew about Louise Mercer, like what happened at the Dempsey Hotel. How someone called the law because there was a ruckus and there she was in the fifth-floor corridor going on two o’clock in the morning, only one shoe on, and they brought her in and they let her go because some calls were made. She had friends. The right kinds, it seems. And all her friends have wives.

And that Mr. Lanigan. He’s one of those. All those big fellas strutting around with fancy waistcoats and running the town. Well, he’s an Elk. A Grand Knight with the Knights of Columbus. He sits on the Chamber of Commerce, handing out favors. If he weren’t a papist, he might be mayor.

All those comers, every June they send their wives eighty miles straight up into the mountains. The Hassayampa Mountain Club, they call it. Then, back here in town, they make hay all summer long. The office girls. Girls that work in the shops. And the nurses. Always the nurses. And there was talk of Marion being Mr. Lanigan’s summer gal, only it was still spring. I didn’t talk of it, but others did.

See, I walk in the Lord’s path of kindness, and I figure I’ll tell Marion that there’s buzzing in the air and she might do best to keep her quarter, to walk in churchly ways. After all, she is a married woman and, the way it sounds, those girls are running a regular operation there. Wild parties and who knows what. Those girls have no starch in their pleats, do you know what I mean to say? When Louise Mercer walks, there’s nothing that stays still. And the other one, one hears tell, she haint stood upright since Hoover took oath and sunk us all.

But Marion, she don’t care to listen. Like I said, she liked their lively ways.

—Mrs. Ina Curtwin
Secretary to Dr. Milroy, Werden Clinic
Interview,
Statesman Courier

It had been only a month, thirty-four days. Yet Marion could no longer remember the before of it. Her body, she would rest her hands on it and it was changed. The face in the mirror, hers yet not the face that had been there before.

Her fingers on the calendar, so glad that the blood had come, would go to church twice that week for the blood, had gone twice last week asking for it.

Fingertips on the calendar, she saw forty-six days before Dr. Seeley might come for Easter.

I
T WAS IN THIS MODE,
this reckless mode, that she, fevered head to toe, laid herself open. Would that she had her head about her, she would not have let him talk her, breathless and confused, into stealing away to the third-floor supply room at the clinic, three oxygen canisters rolling, rolling endlessly across the long floor as her legs curled and curved about him.

That evening, she had gone after work to Diamond’s department store intending to purchase the straw, grosgrain-ribboned hat of taffy pink in the front window with the five dollars Joe Lanigan had given her, twisting the bill between her breasts, saying, “Here’s a little candy, Marion. Show me something.” Once she arrived, however, she found herself in the undergarments department, lips tearing between her teeth, softly fingering lingerie. The salesgirl slipped the shirred ribbon garters and peach crepe de chine step-ins into a slim box of deep blue. Jostling on the streetcar, she tucked her hand in the bag and rested it on the top of the box the whole ride.

But he did not appear that night and apologized the next day, on the telephone, as she covered her face with her hand, elbow
resting on the typewriter. What’s more, he could not see her tonight either. Why could she not manage two days without, and what would she do if Dr. Seeley arrived, if money held and he forbore, and arrived in town now just over five weeks away.

That night, he with a daughter’s birthday dinner and she off to Louise and Ginny’s and Louise was going to henna her hair and Ginny decided that Marion should go platinum.

“Oh no, Ginny, Dr. Milroy wouldn’t like it and I don’t think it suits me.”

But Ginny, lips gleaming, was jiggling soap flakes into a footed dish tingling with peroxide and teary ammonia.

“Have a cocktail, Marion,” Louise said. “So’s you won’t notice while Ginny burns you like morning toast.”

An hour later, they were rubbing her head with a soft towel, one on either side of her, and when she looked into the waved mirror, it was like a swirling puff of cotton edged in bright silver. Trying, she could barely see herself from six months ago, the long thick sandy mane she had to soak in castor oil. Now she saw this twirling silver pinwheel. Who did she think she was, and Ginny twisting a tube of violet lipstick and dragging it across Marion’s lips dizzily, her happy breath on Marion’s face?

“What did you do to our fair girl?” A voice rang out from the front door, and wouldn’t you know it was Joe Lanigan there, carrying a creamy wedge of birthday cake.

“Joe!” Ginny squealed, and Louise ran over to take his coat.

Marion stood, shaking her hair, which felt unreal to her, like someone else’s silk trimming.

“Don’t she look like Joan Bennett?” Louise said, taking the cake wedge from him and lifting it to her outstretched tongue for a taste. “Isn’t she a dream?”

“It was my idea, I’ll have you mark it,” Ginny piped up.

Joe Lanigan, he was looking at Marion and she felt her neck
still wet from the sink. She felt the front of her shirt clinging to her and she felt his eyes on her. It did things to her.

“Do you like the new Marion?” Louise said.

“I like all Marions, old and new,” Joe said, running his icing-edged hand along his mouth. “And I like how many Marions there are. And how many you have to give,” he said, winking at this last bit.

“Look at Gent Joe getting an eyeful,” Marion heard Ginny say.

“So you like what we proffer, Joe,” and this was Louise. But Marion could only focus on Joe. She felt her skin raise up under his eyes. And she knew she was in trouble.

By the time he had walked over to her, her legs were quivering, vibrating—all with Louise and Ginny seeing everything. Knowing for certain what they may have only guessed before.

“Marion,” he was saying, and he was putting his hand in her hair and then he was right up against her.

“Maybe they want to be alone, Lou-Lou,” she could hear Ginny say, giggling.

“I don’t suppose they mind either way,” said Louise, as Joe Lanigan was pressing Marion into the small bedroom, pressing her against the shutter doors, skin pinching, his hand flat on her wet front, “but I’d just as soon play Parcheesi.”

“The hell you would,” Ginny was saying. “Wouldn’t you like to see Marion’s pretty skin?”

“I don’t need to watch that to see Marion’s pretty skin, Ginny.”

“What, dear heart, might you be suggesting, and please pass the peanuts, I got terrible hungry, just like that.”

From one of the girls’ twin beds beneath her, springs squeaking, Marion could hear them play Parcheesi, the dice clattering.

“I’m eating your pawn, Lou-Lou.”

“Eat away, little brute. Show me your teeth, and your tongue.”

A
N HOUR LATER,
maybe more, floating in and out of sleep on Louise’s bed, the peroxide tingling in her nose, her head, she could hear Louise talking, or thought she could, through the door.

“Remember, Gent Joe, remember. Remember, because I surely do. Watch the way my gums move up and down and up and down. When I have the inclination, I just can’t stop talking.”

And he, and she could hear the laughter in his voice, keen and sharp, and she could feel it jigsaw in her stomach as if his hands were back on her: “How could I forget, Louise? I wouldn’t want to. We all marvel at that gorgeous mouth of yours, don’t we? It’s worth all the noise it makes.”

“Don’t play. You got enough to play with.”

“That I do.”

Then Marion shook her head and felt a swell of the ammonia all through her head and there were no more voices, no voices except her own, recalling her own past words to Dr. Seeley,
Remember me. Do not abandon me here. Remember me.

What could her letters to Dr. Seeley say now after so many days of this?
Dr. Seeley, I have let this man in, this smiling gentleman, and the things he has done to me, could I list them for you? Could I share the time he pulled the ribbons from my dress and wrapped them tight round my baby wrists? Could I share the time he rubbed me raw, my face flat on the Oriental carpet of his drawing room, my face speckled red, knees strawberried raw, and not one curl of regret as he ruined me, Dr. Seeley, over and over again? Is this something I can share with you, Dr. Seeley, and have you forgive me still? Especially after your own sorrows and the ways in which I have punished you for them, for your private weakness? For some things
there can be no forgiveness, nor even words. Some things are meant only to be fevers in the brain.

“Y
OU KNEW ABOUT
Mr. Lanigan and me,” Marion said later, hours later, as Ginny played with her hair.

“Oh, Marion.” Louise smiled. “Oh, Marion.”

“You acted the goodly virgin, Marion,” Ginny said. “And all the time you were playing the hots with our Gent Joe.”

Marion felt her face rush red. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said, shaking her head away.

Ginny laughed and leaned back. She was rolling and unrolling something in her hand. Something green. She rolled the bills tight and fashioned a horn and blew into it.

“It’s all clover. Joe left behind something for us too,” Ginny said, winking.

“You figured it all,” Marion said, still dazed.

“We knew, Marion,” Louise said. “Of course we knew.” And she smiled again and there was something flickering in her eyes, gentle or not, but flickering, and Marion, Ginny’s fingers tangling in her hair, tried to read the thing in Louise’s eyes, tried to understand it. But she could not. She could not. There was no way to see.

I
T WAS A BALANCE.
A surprising and quite fragile and quite beautiful balance of all the elements, and it felt so delicate that Marion knew it could not last. But for a few weeks, it did. Louise and Ginny held Marion fast to their chests when Joe Lanigan spent nights away to parts unknown, or even in his own homestead. And Joe Lanigan continued to take Marion for long drives into dark corners outside of town where he whispered tender
things and placed his hands on her in ways that she couldn’t bear because the bearing was so sweet. But it was all like the pressure before a crackling summer storm, strangely still air knocking curtains ever so lightly against the window screens and the sky turning colors slowly, simmering from blue to brown to violet and you knew it was going to break, and break in ways for which there was no preparing.

It was within days that it all turned, as if in a second. Marion could even point to the exact moment that this man for whom she had broken herself to pieces and built herself anew, a platinum pleasure doll, showed her, showed her he had begun to grow a little bit bored.

“Aren’t you coming by, Joe? Mrs. Gower will be at her choir practice and I could make you supper.”

“I’d like to, Marion, I would. You know I’d like to see you all the time. It’s just this lodge function. They need me.”

And the next day hearing, from Louise, about the raucous smoker at the Silhouette Club where the men brought in ten burly-q dancers for the night, paid them each twenty-five dollars to dance on tabletops and
Oh, Marion, Mr. Trask told me, you know, he is a member of the lodge, he said, confidentially, more than one of those girls stripped down to her birthday suit and jumped into the big punch bowls. The janitors spent hours picking up spangles, sequins, fluttery feathers.
And she could see, in her head, Joe Lanigan, in some back room, in some side hallway, mouth pressed against sugared, sticky skin, oh, she knew, she knew it. She could taste it herself.

“And Mr. Lanigan,” Marion said, looking at her fingernails, pale and freshly torn from a night spent teeth to nub. “He was there.”

His eyes never stopped moving. What would it take to make his eyes stop moving?

What had she imagined? She as a desert Rapunzel preening in her tower, Joe Lanigan, fingers buried in her long locks, grappling to reach her, to rescue her, to save her and in so doing be saved? Oh, she couldn’t have possibly thought this. There was no time. It was all too fast.

“Don’t be jealous, kitten,” Louise said. “That’s how he is. It’s his way. It doesn’t mean he cares for you any less.”

How could it not mean that?
she said to herself, and Louise, as if mind reading, said, “You’ve an awful lot to learn, Marion. I do wish I could have saved you from learning.”

It was kind of her to say, but Marion did not want to hear Louise being kind. Louise always knowing so much more, about Joe Lanigan, about everything. “I don’t care what he does,” Marion said, chin up, like Lillian Gish playing prideful.

“Of course you don’t.” Louise smiled. “But do remember, Ginny and I, we are true to you. We’re always true.”

Thinking of Joe in that smoker, mouth covered with sequins, a filthy image, she could think of nothing else. She in the same company with those girls, those dancing girls. In a voice automatic like a thing possessed, she said, “I must live with it. If I were stronger, I would make myself stop. I would, Louise.”

“No one’s telling you to stop, Marion.”

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY,
Marion looked in vain for Louise, peering down every hallway at the clinic. Where was Louise, her swishing, fishtailing walk?

“She had to catch a night train,” Ginny told her. “Her brother got pegged in Calico on a vag charge. She didn’t even know he was out this far west. Last time she saw him was in St. Louis right after the Crash.”

Marion hadn’t even known Louise had a brother. She knew about vag charges, though. Dr. Seeley had three to his name, the last in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, not fourteen months before. Marion thought him gone forever, but he was only on the junk. On the junk, that was how the policeman put it, as if she would know what it meant, which she did.