Murder in Little Egypt (8 page)

After a two-week honeymoon at a lake in northern Minnesota, they settled into an apartment at Canterbury Gardens, in the University City section of St. Louis. Marian returned to nursing, working in a doctor’s office. She found the routine tedious after the freedom of flying, but she knew that the job was temporary.

Marian assumed that once Dale completed his internship at St. Louis Maternity Hospital, he would become a resident there or at some other city hospital. As usual he was taking on as much as anyone could, learning surgery as well as obstetrics and gynecology, and acquiring advanced techniques in anesthesiology. He would end up so well qualified that he would have his pick of jobs anywhere, she believed; he might even think better of his rejection of the Baltimore offer and return East, a prospect Marian would still have welcomed, although she loved St. Louis as always. Any city in the Midwest or East appealed to her, any place with energy and cultural attractions.

When in June 1954 Dale abruptly announced to her that they would be moving to southern Illinois in September, Marian was dumbfounded. There was a small hospital in McLeansboro, Dale said. The town’s main doctor was retiring, leaving a ready-made practice behind. Dale and another young St. Louis doctor, Ed Everson, were going to take everything over. It would be like having his own hospital. He would have total control. It was a great opportunity.

“Where is it?” Marian asked.

“Where’s what?”

“McLeansboro. What’s it near?”

“It’s just a few miles north of Eldorado. You’ll like it.”

If Marian seemed unenthusiastic, and she tried not to be, Dale ignored it. He was so excited about the position, and he presented it so forcefully as an accomplished fact, that she could hardly register objections. Nor did she believe, in spite of her misgivings, that it was her place as a wife to argue with Dale about his professional decisions. But she did a lot of thinking.

She tried to understand Dale’s reasoning. There must have been a great deal going on inside of him that she had failed to notice. There had never been so much as a hint, that she had picked up on anyway, of his desire to return to southern Illinois. She had taken the change in the cornerstone at Pearce Hospital as a symbol, and an unambiguous one, that the Eldorado chapter of Dale’s life had closed along with his first marriage.

Why had he not confided in her? Had he been afraid that she would object, throw a fit, even threaten to leave him? That was absurd. She felt wholly committed to him. His experience with Helen Jean must have scarred him. He was probably still unable to trust any woman. Whether it was true or not that Helen Jean had married him only to get out of Eldorado—and Marian doubted this—Dale must still have suspected as much. Helen Jean had gone on to marry Chet Williams; they had moved to a large city in the Southwest. It would not do for Dale to suspect that Marian had married him only on condition that they live in a big city. If he thought that, he would never trust her.

Marian decided that somehow she would have to try to overcome Dale’s doubts by being absolutely loyal and unquestioning. He was still at the outset of his career; he must be full of misgivings in spite of his outward self-confidence. He was human; time would take care of his skittishness. She found his frailty endearing, even amid her deep disappointment at the prospect of southern Illinois, which she had thought depressing the moment she had laid eyes on it. The idea of actually living there!

The more she ruminated, the more signs Marian recognized of Dale’s having made up his mind long ago to return home. Why else would he have refused the Baltimore offer? And his specializing in obstetrics and gynecology and basic surgery—that fit in as well. Those would be exactly the skills required of a country doctor. Most of his practice would consist of delivering babies, diagnosing routine ailments, performing appendectomies, that sort of thing. He must have known what he was going to do from the start. He had simply been awaiting an opportunity to return.

Marian sought to discover some fault in herself, some selfish lack of understanding that might have contributed to Dale’s secretiveness about his plans. Maybe she had enjoyed New York and Washington too much. Maybe she had been too obviously enthusiastic about things like the Muni Opera in St. Louis. But she could only conclude that the circumstances of Dale’s divorce outweighed any other possible factors behind his silence. In some obscure way, he was returning to southern Illinois to prove something: that he could succeed there without Helen Jean and without Dr. Pearce’s help.

Marian chose to believe that once he had established himself down there, Dale would no longer have anything to prove and would feel free to move on again. After a couple of years, three or four at the most, they would be able to return to St. Louis or go on to some other city. Surely Dale would eventually chafe at the limitations of southern Illinois. She had never imagined him as a man content with low horizons. She would try to make the best of the move and to count on the future. She decided to draw on some of her mother’s cheerfulness: How lucky she felt compared to what her mother had faced with never a complaint!

Marian did not visit McLeansboro before moving there. Dale said that he would take care of everything. He made several trips down to secure a house and make it ready for her. His mother was eager to help. He and Noma would fix the place up, hang new wallpaper, lay in the essentials.

Marian appreciated Dale’s apparent eagerness to please, but as September approached she had to struggle to conceal her sadness at leaving St. Louis and the friends and relatives she loved. To her brother, to Uncle Eddie Bell and the Yards she spoke only of the excitement of a new life and the challenge of Dale’s having his first practice and a hospital to run, but the hundred and fifty miles to southern Illinois began to seem a thousand. She could not get the coal pits out of her mind, and it was as if the streets and parks and tall buildings of St. Louis were begging her to stay.

It had been a long time since she had written any poetry, but one night when Dale was down in southern Illinois she sat at her kitchen table and this came to her:

The night is cool.

The soft summer air comes through the window

brushes my hair,

and is gone.

I watch the city.

Its lights throw shining beams

like a million stars

each undisturbed

by the city’s din.

I see smokestacks.

Silhouetted against the brightness

the smoke curls,

lingers and drifts away.

A train goes by.

Its lonely whistle,

Its monotonous roll presses onward.

The sound fades.

Listen! The wind.

My eyelids droop.

The night’s characters blur

To dreams that won’t come true.

But there’s tomorrow—

It was a common saying among the men of Little Egypt that if you wanted to give the state of Illinois an enema, you would inject the nozzle at McLeansboro. Half the size of Eldorado and with fewer trees, the town had lost whatever point it might once have had, a remnant without so much as a bar to enliven it. In all of Hamilton County, which in area was bigger than St. Louis County and of which McLeansboro was the seat, there were only nine thousand people; the county courthouse in the middle of the town was McLeansboro’s principal attraction. Oil had been discovered in the county in 1939, and a few farmers had profited with their one-eighth royalties from leases on their land; but because most of the money, like that from the coal mines, went to absentee owners, who brought in skilled workers from Oklahoma and Texas to do the drilling and maintain the rigs, oil had not meant the prosperity McLeansboro had dreamed of when the local newspaper had cheered in a headline running across the front page:

HURRAH! WE’LL ALL WEAR DIAMONDS!

The house Dale selected was out in the country on a hill, about three miles from town. Marian was glad of that, after seeing McLeansboro. If she was going to make a life here for herself and Dale and their children, for they were ready to start a family, better to be able to do it on her own without worrying about the customs and opinions of neighbors. And out in the country she would not have to contend with Noma and other in-laws next door. Noma made herself felt as it was, dropping by unexpectedly at any hour for what seemed to Marian an inspection.

One morning, before she had been able to settle in, Marian was in jeans on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when Noma entered without a knock, accompanied by three other ladies from Eldorado wearing little mink stoles. They were on their way to a funeral. They stood in the kitchen doorway, peering down, Noma advising on the proper proportions of ammonia and vinegar and recommending her preferred brand of floor wax. Noma was playing so much the classic mother-in-law, Marian didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She suggested that the ladies return at a more appropriate time, when she would be prepared and delighted to give them a decent welcome.

“We didn’t mean to intrude,” Noma said. “I just wanted to see how you were getting on, dear.”

With Noma, Marian adhered to a strict no-comment policy. Even when Noma criticized her clothes—“Do you really think Bermuda shorts and knee socks are appropriate for a doctor’s wife? Is that what young women are wearing in St. Louis these days? Married women?”—Marian kept her mouth shut. She would just smile. She enjoyed thumbing through copies of
Vogue
or
Harper’s Bazaar
in front of Noma and feeling the disapproval drift across the room like a breeze off a snowdrift.

Dale threw himself into his work at Hamilton Memorial Hospital, which had forty-eight beds but usually needed no more than twenty. His friend from St. Louis, Dr. Everson, quickly tired of McLeansboro and departed for a bigger town, so Dale had his hands full. His patients grew in number as his reputation spread. People were delighted to have a bright, energetic young doctor available. He kept office hours well into the evening, so that patients would not have to lose pay from work to visit him, and he made house calls when someone who could not get into town needed him. Marian sometimes went with him to keep him company.

She got to know Little Egypt well, better than she would have preferred, driving around with Dale. The poverty depressed her, and she decided that she had never been cut out to be a nurse, because she permitted herself to become too much affected by disease and death. It was worse seeing people suffering in their own houses: A big, impersonal place like Barnes Hospital separated illness from daily life and made it easier to forget when you went home.

One house call in particular got to her. They visited an old woman dying of cancer in the village of Macedonia. She had retreated to the basement of her decaying house, lying on a cot in the damp and the dark, her head swathed in dirty rags. The stench was terrible. When Dale urged her to let him remove the rags from around her head, she refused, throwing her hands up to protect herself, rocking back and forth and moaning, “No! No!” He took her pulse, listened to her heart, gave her some pills.

Afterward Marian wanted to know why the woman had clung so adamantly to those old rags. Dale said that she had lost all her hair, not from radiation treatment, she was too far gone for that, but from the disease itself. The rags were her last vanity.

“Can’t she be moved someplace? Doesn’t she have any relatives?”

“I won’t charge her for the visit,” Dale said. “She couldn’t pay me anyway. She’s got nothing. Don’t worry, she won’t last long. I give her another week or two.”

It took Marian days to get over that scene. She envied Dale his ability to move on to the next case, to put unpleasant things behind him, to forget about one patient because another always needed him. The memory of the woman in the basement never left her.

In the middle of one night Dale got an emergency call from the hospital. A young man had been brought in badly injured from an automobile accident

“You come, too,” Dale said. “You be the E. R. tonight. There’s no one on duty. I won’t have to get anyone up.”

“You know I’m no good in emergency,” Marian said. “I get flustered. It’s too hectic.”

“Come on. You’ll be fine.”

Marian monitored the vital signs as Dale tried to attend to the boy, who could not have been more than twenty or twenty-two at the outside. His face had been obliterated, his skull crushed. They hadn’t the equipment or the staff to deal with such a traumatic case. Dale said that the boy was already brain-dead. There was nothing to do but prepare him for the ambulance ride over to Evansville, Indiana, the nearest major hospital.

Marian begged off emergencies after that.

During their time in McLeansboro, only one incident marred Dale’s practice. A baby girl on whom he had performed a hernia operation seemed to be recovering normally. Dale sent her home. A week later she was back in the hospital with a fever, and she died.