Mary Coin (7 page)

A spark landed ten feet in front of Mary. She stared, unable to move, as it ignited a tuft of grass. The flame caught a bush and burned through the dry leaves in seconds, until what remained was only a skeleton of branches, which was then engulfed as well. She was entranced by the sudden beauty of the thing turned back on itself; time reversed. She thought about her grandfather who had walked calmly out of his double-walled bunker toward the guns that killed him. She thought, too, of her father in his coffin, Betsy in hers. All those deaths. It seemed only right that hers would be added to the list. What had her mother said? A person couldn’t be dumb and lucky twice.

“Mama!” Ellie screamed.

A low-lying snake of fire slithered toward Mary and her children. She handed the baby to Ellie and pitched herself front-first on top of the flames until she suffocated them. And then all the women nearby began to do the same, racing to wherever they saw trouble begin and throwing themselves on top of that trouble before it did them and their children in.

The next day, Mary walked through the rubble of their destroyed house. They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were. A wind stirred the ashes on the ground. The air smelled of the turned-fruit odor of burned things. She searched for salvage while Toby packed what little there was—a few pots, a fork and spoon, the clawed end of a rake—in the Hudson, which had survived the blaze. A cough had settled into his chest from inhaling the smoke, a hard, dry sound that cut through the churchlike quiet that pervaded the town as people moved about, dazed by the quick violence that had been done to them. Toby lit cigarette after cigarette to open his lungs.

Mary thought she ought to cry, but crying seemed too general a reaction for the specific disaster that had occurred and the set of ramifications that unfurled from it. When she had gone to the Jew’s store in Tahlequah before the wedding, she’d watched as he flicked the spool and the grosgrain ribbon fell to the floor in lazy figure eights. This was her future now, she thought. A flick of the wrist, a wayward spark, and the spool unwound.

10.

Corcoran, California, 1931

M
ary had never thought much about her hands, but sometimes, when she needed to take a moment to ease out her back or to stare down the row of cotton to judge how long it would take her to work her way to the water wagon, she would catch sight of her ripped and ragged cuticles. She felt great sadness for them, as if they were not part of her but were some children she’d seen by the side of the road, waiting on parents who were, in turn, waiting on luck. She and Toby had each bought a pair of gloves, but it was impossible to pick the cotton off the stalks quickly enough with the thick material making their fingers clumsy. It was harder still to crack open the bolls to get at the late yield. She took a scissors to the gloves’ fingertips. But even with this adjustment, the bulky protection was a hindrance.

They had driven down from the lumber mills where even in the heat of summer you had only to walk into a nearby grove to find some shade and where newly fallen pine needles provided a cool carpet for your feet. They’d worked wherever there was work, picking peaches, drying grapes for raisins, packing tomatoes. Now they were in a flat, inland town where there were few trees to break up the relentless glare of the sun. When they’d first arrived, Mary’s eyes feasted on the even rows of white cotton, which seemed as soft and inviting as new snowfall and reminded her so much of home. But that siren loveliness revealed itself to be nothing more than a ruse, a pretty girl whose looks rope you in to a life of demand and perpetual inadequacy. Mary hated the cotton.

They lived at the pickers’ camp in a tent Toby had bought with the last of his mill wages. Ellie, Trevor, June, and Della attended a school held in a shed where there were few books and pencils. The teacher was a picker’s wife who said she’d been a schoolmistress in Arkansas, although Ellie complained her spelling was worse than half the kids’. While Mary worked the rows, James and Ray played alongside her. She told them to stay close, but inevitably Ray would run off, embroiled in some imaginary battle, slashing the air with a stick, and Mary would have to chase after him, losing valuable minutes and the pennies those minutes represented. Toby worked two rows over so that he would not have to mind the children and at least one of them would make a full day’s wage. Mary tried to ignore his constant coughing, willing herself not to look up every time she heard his wet heaves and the sound of him hawking phlegm out of his lungs. But when he had a fit so powerful that it brought him to his knees, she went to him. She looked for the water truck, but there was at least a quarter mile of picking before they would reach the end of the row and Toby could get a drink. On particularly hot days, there were pickers who fainted, but the foreman would sooner replace a dehydrated worker than drive the water truck into the field and remove a crew’s incentive to make it from one end of a row to the other. Toby recovered and told Mary she should get back to work. If she was caught dawdling, the foreman would yank her off the line. They had to work as fast and as hard as they could if they were to make enough that week to barely feed everyone. Mary returned to her row and adjusted her long white sack around her chest. A shout went out, and she heard the buzzing of a duster. She told James and Ray to put their heads down just as the plane flew low over the field, but James, entranced, stared up at the plane while Ray whooped and twirled in the falling powder. Mary bent over to fill her bag once more.

•   •   •

T
here was blood on Toby’s pillow each morning. He could no longer hold his body upright much less haul a sack of cotton down a line or climb up the ladder onto the truck bed to weigh his take. Mary went to the fields each day and tried to increase her pace, but the sun and the heat and the problem of the little boys made that impossible. At night, she began to look away when Toby undressed because the sickness had ruined his body. His back was a rutted map of disks and bone. His skin was sallow and loose.

When a doctor finally visited the camp, he held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and diagnosed tuberculosis. Mary spent the nights awake, holding Toby while he coughed, laying water-soaked rags over his forehead, cleaning the blood off his lips and chin. When the fever gripped him, she pressed her body on top of his to stop the shaking.

“What do I do? Tell me what I should do?” she said to him toward the end of the second week of fevers, when Trevor begged her to let him quit school and work in the fields to make up for his father’s lost pay. Toby’s eyes fluttered open. She wanted not just an answer for the present crisis but for every problem that might arise in a lifetime. When should Ellie be allowed to walk out with a boy? If June refused to put on a dress, should they just let her wear her brother’s overalls? For the rest of her life? But how would she get a husband? She knew the questions were unimportant, and yet she realized that if she could manage to ask them all, the answers would amount to her and Toby’s life together. If they could make every future decision ahead of time then it would be as if she had gotten all of him.

“James will be fine, don’t you think?” she said one night as she knelt by his side, trying to cool his fever with a moist cloth. “I know he doesn’t talk and people think he’s not right. But there’s a light in his eyes.” Toby’s breathing was so shallow that she had to put her ear to his mouth to know he was still with her.

“Fine,” he mumbled, barely moving his cracked lips.

“He might be the smartest of them all. You don’t have to be a loudmouth to have a brain inside your head.” She was babbling now, but she feared that if she stopped talking, he would forget to take his next breath. “Once James starts in school, we won’t let him stop. Don’t you think that’s right? But if he wants to work like his brothers, then . . .”

“Fine,” Toby exhaled.

“Which is it?” she said desperately. “Fine, he stays in school, or fine, he works? You have to tell me, Toby. You have to tell me right now.”

His eyes drifted to the right. She turned to see what had caught his attention. When she looked back at his face, he was gone.

•   •   •

H
e’s been taken away,” she said to her children, who were waiting outside the tent. And then she changed what she’d said, because right at that moment she stopped believing in God. “He’s left us,” she said. And that was not right, either, because it suggested that he had made a decision to abandon them. She sat down on the ground and let the children come to her. “We’re alone,” she told them. This is what it all amounted to in the end. Toby’s brothers and their wives had been generous through the worst of the illness, making up for Toby’s lost earnings by giving Mary extra potatoes or carrots, a bone for her soup. But they could not continue to cut into their own supplies to keep her and her kids going. And she couldn’t bear to stay with them. It was too difficult to watch Robert’s and Levi’s children run to greet their fathers when the day was done. It made her angry to see gestures of affection pass between the couples or to lie in bed and hear the low murmurs and laughter coming from their nearby tents. And although they would never say as much, Mary’s sisters-in-law counted Toby’s death as her failure just as they thought her six children were her folly. Mary knew it was the meanness of the times that made them think this way. Each day, the camps were flooded with families, and there was not enough work to go around. People became competitive in all sorts of ways, as if a better dress or a laughing child or a living husband was proof that a person would make it.

Mary sustained the weight of sorrow that would descend on her freshly each morning when she woke up and had to remind herself all over again that her husband was gone. But what terrified her most was that she knew that what had happened to her had not really happened yet. Right now there was only waking and feeding and sending the big children to school and taking the little ones into the field and wiping sweat and filling a bag and standing on lines. A larger grief was still out there, waiting to overtake her when she was not looking. She had to be careful.

•   •   •

O
n the day they left the camp, she sat behind the wheel of the Hudson while the children settled themselves in their seats. Ellie took James on her lap, and Trevor took Ray on his.

“Tell me,” Mary said, beginning the ritual she followed whenever they left a place.

“Lureen. She was nice,” Ellie said, about a girl she’d met in the camp who had given her a bracelet made of red beads.

“Trevor?”

“I liked it when you let me work in the fields,” he said softly.

June said she liked the schoolteacher, and Ellie said the schoolteacher was dumb as a turkey and didn’t even know the times tables, but Mary shushed her. Della liked the new comb Mary had bought at the company store after she’d broken the old one trying to get a rat’s nest out of June’s hair. Ray said he liked the day Mary had found a swimming hole, and James said, “Everthin’,” and they all laughed because everything was a lot for a boy who didn’t say much.

“So that’s how we’ll remember Corcoran,” Mary said, because it was important that a place stay in the mind as somewhere worthwhile.

“What about you, Mama?” June said.

“I’ll remember the smell of sage. Some nights, after you all were asleep, I went outside and stood there and just . . . sucked it in.”

“I’ll remember Daddy,” Ellie said.

Mary looked out the dusty windshield at the road ahead that narrowed and then disappeared over a small rise.

“Where will we go now?” Della said.

A man had told Mary that there were farms hiring to the east. Not cotton, she’d said. Anything but cotton. “There,” she said now, gesturing with her chin.

“What’s there?” Ellie said.

“Oranges.”

Vera

11.

San Francisco, California, 1920

I
t was a costume party to celebrate—well, no one really knew what was being celebrated. The loose collection of artists and poets and self-styled arbiters of taste Vera had befriended since moving to the city often seemed to spend more time playing than working, the parties themselves being a form of
tableaux vivants.
Vera was meant to wear something outrageous—she knew one man who was coming as an orangutan, pink buttocks and all—but what she decided at the last moment was that she would dress like the society women she had begun to photograph in her studio on Sutter Street. These ladies were much derided by Vera’s crowd as boringly conventional and corrupted by wealth, but they were the lifeblood of her work, and she was frankly mesmerized by the ease with which they moved through their lives. There was always a chauffeur-driven car following slowly behind them as they shopped in case they became too tired to walk. Tea in silver pots stood at the ready should they need refreshment. If it began to rain, an umbrella would suddenly appear, held aloft by a maid. Vera was devoted to these women because they paid for her photographic services and recommended her to their friends and provided her with a living enough to rent a studio and eat out at a café on Saturday nights if she stuck to home-cooked boiled onions and beef on weekdays. But there was something ineffable about them that captivated her beyond her economic pragmatism. Even the ones who had long noses or large foreheads held themselves as though these were the very attributes that defined elegance. The women knew they were rare prizes, and Vera had created a career of sorts taking photographs to prove them right. It would be interesting to try on that entitlement—at least for an evening.

Vera borrowed a dress from Mimi Van Der Mere, the daughter of a railroad manufacturer. A young woman besotted with all things artistic, Mimi was delighted when her photographer came up with the “marvelous idea” of dressing like her, her merriment a sure signal that she knew Vera could never pull off such a transformation.
My photographer.
Vera’s clients often used the possessive—
my driver, my girl at Gump’s—
as if Vera were one of a retinue, and, in fact, she supposed she was.

She stood in front of the mirror in the attic room she rented on Gough Street. The black velvet dress fell into a dangerous V down her back. The material gathered in loose folds over her chest and then again at her hips, ending mid-calf. It was the fashion of the day that Vera generally avoided, not because she was prudish but because she did not like to show her bum leg. But tonight she would be brave. Her limp could enhance the costume. It would lend her the air of insouciance she admired in her coterie of friends who walked down the street as if they had just been pulled from bed. Mimi had also lent her a string of false pearls, which Vera arranged as a choker with the extra length dangling down her back. When she moved, the pearls tapped against her spine like a man’s searching fingers, a sensation that kept her focused on her purpose: she wanted sex. She was twenty years old, new to San Francisco, and her inexperience made her feel alone among people for whom sex was casual currency. Her little skirmish in New York—Bremmer fondling her while she painted photographs in his uptown studio, staining lips and blueing eyes—had been enough to convince her that her withered leg did not make her hideous to a man in need. But Bremmer was old, his kisses dry and craven. Even if she had been willing, he hadn’t had the courage to do more than reach underneath her blouse while she rubbed her hips against him. Their encounter ended abruptly, with him slinking back into the studio, his hands covering the stain on the front of his trousers.

She reconsidered the party. It was foolish to think she could hide in an elegant outfit when her history was as plain as her plain face and was apparent to anyone the moment they saw her take a step. She could summon the exact details of her illness and its aftermath as if it had all just happened yesterday and not thirteen years before, when she was Vera Duerr, a seven-year-old in Hoboken, New Jersey. She’d woken in the center of night, feeling like she was balanced perfectly between dreaming and wakefulness. Her brother, Leon, was asleep in the bed next to hers; she could hear his adenoidal breathing, the slurp and effort of it. There was another person in the room, too, a dark shape by the closet door. She was not frightened the way she was when she had nightmares about kidnappers, only curious that a stranger should be standing near her closet, as if he wanted something to wear. She had always known there was a shadow world of ghosts and goblins and witches, known that life was made of things you could see and things that you couldn’t, like your thoughts or wind. These ideas often absorbed her, and Miss Hildt had sent a note home saying that if Vera didn’t learn to pay attention she would have to repeat the second grade. Her mother had given her a stinging
potch
on the fanny and said dreams were for sleep. Period.
Das Ende der Geschichte.
The end of the story.

Maybe the ghost wanted Vera’s favorite dotted-Swiss dress with the embroidery around the hemline or maybe her new boater. She would tell the ghost that it was all right to take her nice things because her mother had told her that this was what Christian people did to let other Christian people know they weren’t stingy. Vera started to speak, but she could not make her mouth form the words. When she tried to get out of bed, pain shot up her leg and spread through her chest, knocking her back against her mattress. And then the ghost disappeared, and there was her mother leaning over her, a mess of unbrushed hair and dangling hairpins, her eyes wide and her mouth pale and loose without the slash of lip rouge from the lovely enamel pot Vera coveted that her mother had promised to give her when it was finally empty.

“Shhh, shhh,” her mother insisted, shaking Vera by the shoulders. She put her lips to Vera’s forehead. “She’s burning up!” she cried, and then she was screaming in German the way she did whenever she argued with Vera’s father about why he was home so late, and why he forgot to bring the fish she asked for, and then Leon woke up and started crying. Next, Vera was in her father’s arms as he ran down the stairs of the apartment building. He wore only his nightshirt, even though it was winter, and she worried that maybe someone would see his thin, hairy legs and would laugh at him. Everything was odd and wrong and painful at the same time: to be awake at night when she had school the next day, to be visited by a ghost who wanted her dresses, to be sweating even though it was such a cold January that her mother had bought her a new pair of boots lined with lamb’s wool, which cost too much and her mother didn’t want to hear about it if Vera’s toes started to push against the front of the boots before the winter was out because money didn’t grow on trees. And now her father was running down the street with her in his arms, wearing his white nightshirt, which had once risen up when he reached for something on a high kitchen shelf, and she had caught a glimpse of his pink, wormy thing.

When she woke up the first time, she was alone. The unfamiliar room was a bright constellation of rectangles and squares that floated together and then drifted apart. She closed her eyes and slipped back into a dream of drowning. She struggled, working her hands against the heavy water and kicking her feet, only her legs wouldn’t move and she was pulled down again. She pumped her arms until she could see daylight glimmering above the surface of the water, and then down again she went until she could not hold her breath any longer. She had to let it out and she knew she would die when she did, and then her head finally broke through, and she gasped. She was awake. Drowning had been a dream of a strange and terrifying place, but now she was in an even stranger place where the light was dirty. She thought someone should wash it and make it clean because her mother said a filthy home was a sign of being poor. And they were not poor. Vera’s father had his own law office with Uncle Henrick. They had a maid named Grace who knew how to train Vera’s hair into sausage curls.

She slept again, and when she woke there was no light at all. She reached out her hand but could not see her fingers. When she tried to get out of the bed, she felt as if someone had driven a needle into her knee. She collapsed onto the cold floor, her right leg crumpling beneath her as if it were made of sand.

The ward was full, but the nurses kept the curtains pulled around each bed so that Vera could not see the other children. She tried not to be frightened by their cries, or by the angry-sounding bells, or the fast patter of feet in the hallway as they drew close, a signal that something was terribly wrong, maybe terribly wrong with her. Nurses came and went, their bright, serious eyes glittering like her mother’s jet necklace. Some were funny, their worn-out jokes blurry beneath their hygiene masks:
Why will you never starve in a desert? Because you can always eat the sand which is there!
She would smile and laugh, though it hurt to do those things. It hurt to eat and sometimes to breathe. Occasionally a nurse would sit in the chair by Vera’s bed and complain about her sore feet or about her useless husband while she glanced worriedly over her shoulder because, she would admit with a wink and a whisper, she was playing hooky. Each morning, white-coated doctors drew aside the curtain around Vera’s bed with a terrible whoosh, stared at her wordlessly, then turned toward one another and nodded while they muttered under their breath like the flock of albino pigeons, with their pink blind eyes, that pecked at the concrete of the schoolyard. When the nurses bathed and dressed her, Vera felt like someone was peeling off her skin. When she cried, the ladies would say, “Now, now,” or warn her not to disturb the other children.

“There’s no use you polios being in hospital,” Nurse Peg said, two weeks after Vera had been admitted. “There’s nothing we can do for you.” Peg was the fattest and meanest of the nurses. She never played hooky and never told jokes. She changed Vera’s sheets while Vera was still in bed because it took less time that way, even though being rolled back and forth was so painful that Vera had to stuff the corner of her pillow into her mouth so that she would not scream. Nasty as she was, though, Nurse Peg had a lovely way of talking, like the Irish who cleaned the gutters outside Vera’s building on Washington Street, calling back and forth to the firemen at the station house in their spongy accents.

“Will my leg work again?” Vera asked.

“If you’re lucky. But for sure you’ll be lame, so,” Peg said, as she stripped Vera’s bed out from under her, the faster to make it up for the next patient. As she fussed and huffed, her wool stockings rubbed against each other,
shhh, shhh,
like Vera’s mother, trying to hush the polio away as if it were an irritating child.
Lame.
It was a sweet word, buoyant like a runaway kite rising at an angle into the sky. As Vera waited for her father to come and collect her, she thought of the illustrations in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
that showed children marching after the man in his ragged cloak. One little boy followed at a distance, slowed by a dragging leg, his crutch made of a split branch tucked under his arm.
For sure you’ll be lame, so.

•   •   •

V
era took the trolley to Russian Hill. The party was already dense and loud with the giddy hysteria manufactured for such evenings. She felt her hips slide against the cool material of her gown as she steadied herself in the high-heeled shoes she was so unused to wearing. It was impossible for her to believe that every man and woman in the room was not studying her, judging her wanting, pathetic, even. But of course they weren’t looking at her when there were so many more magnetic, more dangerously self-aware people who did not wonder if they looked good in their outfits because there was no question that they did. She circulated among musicians she knew who were dressed as Indian pashas, and sculptors balancing high wigs and sporting beauty marks as though they were members of the Sun King’s court. Women who otherwise spent hours in cafés complaining about the denigration of their sex were dressed like Elizabethan whores, their breasts pouring out of tight bodices. A Russian violinist wore nothing but a diaper and sucked on a baby bottle filled with vodka. A poetess was dressed in rags because, she said, no one paid anything for poetry.

“I cannot make out your getup at all.” The voice behind Vera spoke in a slow, western slur. She turned and looked up—way up—at a tall man whose black cape was slung rakishly over one shoulder, revealing a frayed red lining. He held a cane that had a carved horse’s head for a handle. His long, smooth fingers folded over the nostrils in a way that made the horse seem alive and his mastery of it a matter of course. Her eyes traveled down the length of the stick until they reached the points of the man’s tooled boots. A cowboy? A magician? The man’s face was narrow, his nose beaked, and he stooped slightly, a habit, she imagined, formed from a lifetime of leaning down to listen to a shorter world. He sported a horseshoe mustache along with the louche demeanor that she had become accustomed to in her new acquaintances in the city.

She hadn’t thought of how to describe her costume. A privileged socialite? An elegant doyenne of the arts? She stumbled as she tried to think of the bon mot that would suggest that she was aware of the irony and wit of her choice, but what would come so easily to the sophisticates in the room eluded her. “I’m . . . I’m beautiful,” she said. She was immediately embarrassed by what this man would obviously perceive as the radical difference between her pronouncement and the reality of her short, squarish body and what her mother had always assured her was a strong face.

“That’s no costume at all,” he said.

“You haven’t seen me without it.”

“I will.”

“Clever,” she said. She had only begun to be comfortable with this kind of flirtatious gamesmanship. Each time she saw a woman arrive at the party with one man and leave with another, or with two others, or nuzzling another woman’s throat like a cat, she could not help but be mildly shocked. Casual infidelities and assignations were justified by theories of ownership or collectivism, or by the writings of an obscure French philosopher someone had met when he’d last been in Paris. It seemed that everyone was always going to or returning from Paris. She was not sure how anyone in this perpetually impoverished group could afford the trip, but the act of being about to go abroad seemed to be enough to suggest intellectual vigor and sexual adventurousness.