Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  “She’s been nothing but trouble since the day she was born,” the doctor snorted. “But since getting kicked out of Smith she’s been intolerable.”

  “I don’t think we should have made her go there when she’d set her heart on Michigan,” Harriet remarked, forcing up a smile, “but that’s an old story. Even though Mephers’s heart attack rattled Mara, she only started this chanting after—after—well, I was relating a problem at dinner that we’re having with a homeless woman.”

  She stopped, uncomfortable at the memory. They’d been eating carry-out food, with Mephers out of commission and no one from the agency in place yet to take over the meals, and Harriet had mentioned the Pleiades’ problem to Grandfather.

  “One of your residents from the psych department is championing the psychotic woman at the garage wall. The garage manager couldn’t remember his name but I thought you should know about it.”

  And then she’d looked at Mara, muddy skin pale green with fury, cheeks swelled out in what Grandfather called her chipmunk face. “You’re cheering your fascist clients for hosing down a woman just because she’s hearing voices from the Virgin Mary? That could be Mother! This woman is homeless, which is good enough reason to be crazy, and you’re happy because you’re making her even more miserable. You two think you’re so perfect, but no one else can stand you. It’s no surprise to me that none of the suitors ever wanted to marry you, cold cruel bitch like you would freeze their balls off in five minutes.”

  On that line Mara fled the table, fled the house. Grandfather had a serious talk with her the next day. You cannot stay here, young woman, if you are going to enact these kinds of hysterical scenes. You betrayed your sister’s trust by drinking on the job and getting fired. You almost killed Hilda with your unwarranted invasion of her room. You are walking very close to a precipice now. Either buckle down, get going on a job and an education, or look for someplace else to live.

  The next day Mara took the commuter train down to Hyde Park. She holed up at the Oriental Institute and studied translations of ancient texts. She found a few scholarly papers written by her grandmother’s father and read those. Although they were for the most part impenetrable philological essays, he had translated a few incantations to Gula for warding off disease. Mara memorized those, then announced at dinner that the goddess Gula was speaking to her, and was most unhappy with Harriet’s coldness.

  Harriet thought she hadn’t minded, except, of course, for the irritation one always felt with Mara’s histrionics. But now, talking with Professor Lontano, she wondered if she really was a cold person.

  “Don’t you still attend the Orleans Street Church, Abraham?” Professor Lontano asked. “Why not have your minister talk to Mara? Surely a Christian ought not worship a goddess. I believe the Bible is full of women who brought down Jehovah’s wrath by putting up altars to the old goddesses.”

  “The fewer people I advertise her stupidity to the happier I’ll be,” Grandfather snapped.

  “Anyway, I doubt Mara would listen to Pastor Emerson,” Harriet said, leaning back in her chair. “She thinks all men in positions of authority are only trying to control women and that religious leaders are worse than most.”

  “But you don’t agree with her feminist diatribes?” the professor asked.

  ’I’m not unhappy.” Harriet smiled. “I don’t need ideologies. But Mara is blaming herself for Mephers’s—illness—and it’s leading her into greater extremes than are typical even for her.”

  “In my day we sent unhappy girls to visit relatives in the Dolomites. Hikes in the mountain air were supposed to cure you,” Dr. Lontano commented, remembering an older sister drenched in misery from a disastrous love affair. “If that failed, parents resorted to enemas. Then we had the war, and all that excitement and misery cured my generation of melancholy.”

  “Mara seems to think she’s at war,” Dr. Stonds said. “With me as the convenient whipping boy for the world around her. When I was a young man I believed ardently in the effect of environment on human morality. But I raised three girls in the identical milieu, same school, same home, same housekeeper. One became a drunk and a waster, and Mara seems determined to follow in her steps. In my old age I’ve become convinced of genetics. The Bell Curve has a lot of truth to it, despite the cries from the liberal establishment.”

  Harriet’s smile became strained. “Darling, I hate to think that everything I’ve been able to accomplish was predetermined by my DNA, Surely my personality had something to do with it. And to be honest, my memories of life with—with Mother are vague, but so painful they’ve driven me to make sure I never live that way. Poor Mara keeps wishing she had a mother.”

  Dr. Stonds snorted. “Don’t start spouting pseudo-Freudian claptrap at me, Harriet, We have a young resident on the psychiatry service who’s been infected with those ideas. Fortunately Hanaper can be relied on to keep him in line.”

  Professor Lontano’s wide mouth twisted in sardonic amusement. “My dear Abraham—I’ve no more patience than you with women who fancy themselves unwell and lie on a couch to talk to a doctor about their troubles—but surely a psychiatrist should be expected to believe in Freudian claptrap?”

  She left a few minutes later. It was curious that the two sisters were so unalike. Or maybe not. She thought back to her own sister Constanzia, the one who’d been sent to the Dolomites when Lontano was seven—they didn’t have much in common, and they’d had the same father.

  Why did Mara and Harriet both still live with Abraham? As beautiful as Harriet was, Professor Lontano used to assume her marriage would take place at any moment. Not that a woman needed a husband—after all, she, Lontano, had led a most satisfying life without one.

  Although there had been a time—and then when she came to Chicago, she had thought, with Selena dead—but it was Abraham himself who proved unwilling, uninterested. He didn’t need a wife, not even to look after baby Beatrix, since he had a resident housekeeper. They enjoyed evenings at the opera, discussions of art or politics, dinner at the Drake Hotel, but not love. Already in those days a great surgeon, Stonds demanded as much devotion from those at home as he found in the operating theater, and he could not accept a lover who placed her own work above his. Sumerian literature, he would laugh. How many lives has it saved this week?

  And she hadn’t really cared. After Emil—Lontano tried to push the thought away, but Harriet’s face tonight, a certain look, in the lamplight—what photo did that dreadful Hilda Ephers keep locked in her angry bosom?

  14

  Barroom Balladeer

  DON’T TELL ME it’s for my own good. Its for yours, yours and Mephers’s. You’ve been dying to throw me out ever since I was born and now you have the perfect excuse. Mrs. Ephers is old and fragile and needs quiet. Let’s get rid of the last trace of the evil Beatrix and her loathsome mother Selena. Their genes somehow bypassed the perfect golden Harriet, but we need to root them out when they crop up again in Mara.”

  Once again Grandfather had called Mara into his study. If she didn’t stop her chanting and find a job—or, better yet, go back to school—she would have to move. That was an ultimatum.

  “I’m not ordering you to leave, although you are not attractive to live with. But it’s time you learned that your actions have consequences. Having to look after yourself in your own apartment might be a good experience for you—it would teach you how much Hilda has done for you over the years.” Grandfather spoke coldly. “Not to mention me. Perhaps we made a mistake in allowing you to think you always had a room here.”

  “How much rent does Harriet pay you? I suppose it’s a lot, since she makes a bundle at the firm and you gave her that three-room suite.”

  Mara’s cheeks, swollen with misery and anger, made Dr. Stonds feel even less charitably toward her. “Yours and Harriet’s situations are very different. If you showed the same desire to make the most of your opportunities as she has, I’d be glad to give you a suite like hers. But if you mean, how are
you going to afford a home as nice as this one, you should have thought of that before you started on your current disastrous course. I am prepared to help you pay rent on a decent apartment elsewhere. Provided you find a job to take care of your remaining expenses. And, of course, there is no need for you to leave at all if you will start living like a civilized person.”

  “I’ll behave like your version of a civilized person if you’ll behave like my version of a truthful one,” Mara said. “I found a letter to Mother from someone in France in Mephers’s room, along with a photograph of some man who looks just like Harriet. I want to know where Mother really—”

  “I’ve had enough of your self-dramatizing.” The doctor’s face reddened. “Your mother is dead. I have told you that many times, but you refuse to listen. Mrs. Ephers will be released from the rehabilitation hospital on Thursday. That gives you two days to decide on your course of behavior.”

  A bell tinkled in the background: the cook from the agency had dinner ready. She would have to stay on when Hilda returned, the doctor realized: he and Harriet needed to make sure Hilda didn’t overdo it. She had always sacrificed her own well-being for his, ever since he left her alone with Selena when he was in the army. After Selena and Beatrix, Hilda didn’t deserve Mara. Maybe send Mara to see Hanaper? Stonds didn’t believe in psychotherapy as a rule, but someone needed to straighten her out.

  A hot spot started to burn under his rib cage as he thought of the many times Mara had behaved abominably, the tantrums as a child, a blue velvet dress she had cut to ribbons when she was four, flowers stolen from the Historical Society garden, files deleted from his computer when he was finishing a paper for the American College of Neurosurgeons. He used to take her to the opera, when he’d far rather have gone with Verna Lontano or some other intelligent adult, and Mara repaid him by making up ludicrous parodies at a dinner with the opera’s artistic director. He sent her to the same camps and after-school activities they’d given Harriet; Mara responded by being expelled from college. He had punished, bribed, pleaded. Nothing had any effect on her. Bad blood would always tell.

  “It’s dinnertime, Mara. Try to get those nuts out of your cheeks so that you look like a human being and not a chipmunk at the dinner table.”

  “I have plans for dinner elsewhere.” She got up to leave, hoping Grandfather couldn’t see her trembling hands, hoping she wouldn’t start to cry in front of him.

  In her mind she swept from the room, velvet skirts swirling around her in a graceful eddy. In her mind she was beautiful, coarse dark hair long and shiny, pulled into a chignon, waist so slender a man could span it with his hands.

  Grandfather was like Aunt Reed in Jane Eyre, Or maybe he was the bullying cousin; Mrs. Ephers, the ever-effervescent, could be a ringer for Aunt Reed, playing favorites with her children, letting them tell lies and then punishing Jane for them. But Jane was small, birdlike, slipped in and out of rooms unnoticed. As Mara bumped against a table, knocking over a stack of papers, Grandfather said, you’ve made your point sufficiently, you don’t need to vandalize this room. Or should I have it padlocked as well?

  Referring to Mrs. Ephers’s locked room, which Mara had entered by crawling along the outside wall, like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, easy, really, because of the balconies, but then she had made too much noise breaking the window. I want to prove to you that these papers are here, Mara told Harriet, when her sister and Grandfather came running to the housekeeper’s room, but of course the secret drawer in the secretary was empty. Mrs. Ephers had moved them, or told Grandfather or Harriet to do so. Mara’s only hope, and she didn’t put real stock in it, was for a vision from the goddess Gula that would lead her to the papers.

  Maybe Grandfather had locked Beatrix in the psych ward at the hospital. That was why he stayed on teaching and operating, to make sure she didn’t escape. He wanted to lock Mara up alongside her mother, so he was trying to make people think Mara was crazy, that she imagined papers that didn’t exist. Maybe she was crazy. Or would be soon if she stayed much longer in this mausoleum.

  She shut herself in her bedroom and phoned Cynthia Lowrie to pour out her tale of woe. Fortunately Cynthia answered the phone herself. Her father wasn’t home, so she could talk, for a short time: if her brother Jared knew she was talking to Mara, Jared would tell Rafe and then Cynthia would be in trouble again.

  “Maybe it would be a good thing if you did move out, Mara. You know you’re not happy there. I’d be happy if I could have my own apartment.”

  “Why don’t we get a place together?” Mara said. “You’d get away from your father and your asshole brother. You’d never have to hand out Bibles to homeless women again or clean whiskers out of the bathroom sink.”

  Cynthia snorted. “You going to clean the bathroom if we get a place? I’d like to see you clean anything. Anyway, Daddy would never let me move out, not unless it was to get married, I mean—he’s getting all wound up by Family Matters, you know, that group where men get together to prove they’re really in charge of their families. Some of them even go and pick husbands for their daughters. Daddy started a chapter at the church, which you would know if you ever showed up there. He says he could rest easy if he knew I was going to a good Christian home, not off with some guy who’d encourage all my worst faults.”

  “You don’t have to marry anyone you don’t want to,” Mara said hotly. “Anyway, if we got a place together what could Rafe do to you? He might be totally pissed off, but so what? They’re pissed off with me all the time around here.”

  “Oh, Mara, it’s not the same, you know it’s not…. Help, I think he just came in, gotta go.” She dropped the receiver clumsily into the switch hook.

  Mara walked the two miles downtown to Corona’s on Kinzie. She supposed Cynthia was even worse off than she was, although she grudged the ceding of any misery to her friend. But she had to be honest—no one would let Cynthia shag out to a bar. Grandfather might rant at her, but he didn’t lock her in her room or beat her.

  At Corona’s, Jake the bouncer knew he was supposed to card her, knew she was too young, but he accepted her ten, her sadgirl grin, and let her in.

  “You know it’s Tuesday, Mara: slim pickings tonight.”

  “Yeah, I know, Jake, but my blues are good enough to fill in even for a voiceless white chick.”

  He laughed. “That’s just what we have on tap for you tonight: a voiceless white chick. Go over to the Gold Star and listen to Patricia Barber.”

  Mara went on in. They always carded her at the Gold Star—she’d never been able to bribe the doorman there. The hostess showed her to a table near the door and brought her a bourbon while a white woman with a thin reedy voice sang “Bottom of My Soul” as if the distance from bottom to top were a micron wide. When she left the stage, to polite applause, the painist doodled variations on “Bottom of My Soul,” speaking into the mike above the piano as he did so.

  “It’s not amateur night at Corona’s, you know that, When you pay your five bucks at the door and buy those pricey drinks, Queenie treats you right, doesn’t palm cheap imitations off on you. But tonight we have an unexpected guest here in the club, a singer, and she’s offered to do a song or two for us. I want you to welcome Chicago’s own … Luisa Montcrief.”

  Mara sat up. Luisa Montcrief, the diva? Surely not in a jazz dive. But when an aquiline woman in a crimson dress climbed the short step to the stage. Mara recognized her as the singer who’d ravished her as Aida, Desdemona, and a dozen other heroines over the years.

  Luisa looked alert and regal. Even though she was too thin, so that the dress hung on her, her presence made the small stage seem overcrowded. So it wasn’t true, what Grandfather told her—that Madame Monterief ’s family brought her into see that slimeball Hanaper because the diva was drunk and incompetent. Liar, liar, he lied about everything.

  The diva put a hand on the piano, raking the crowd with an imperious glance. At the spindly-legged tables patrons were talking, softly, it’s true, b
ut Luisa was used to the silence of awe when she walked onstage. When a trio of men continued their conversation—one of them giving a loud shout of laughter—Madame Montcrief leaned forward.

  “If you would like your conversation to be part of the performance, could you kindly join me here on the stage? Otherwise, have the courtesy to be silent while I sing.”

  A few people clapped, but the three men got up to leave. The hostess ran after them, trying to collect their money, but they were offended: they didn’t come into Corona’s to be insulted, and that by some singer who wasn’t even on the advertised program.

  “Oh, go back to whatever two-bit town you come from,” Mara called. “Luisa Montcrief is one of the greatest singers in the world. No one wants to listen to your chatter about football or computer sales or whatever boring topic is so important to you. You’d have to pay a hundred dollars to get this close to her at the opera. Maybe more.”

  “No one lectures me on how to act in public.” The biggest of the three men came over to Mara’s table and glared down at her.

  “What a pity.” The diva spoke from the stage. “You have so much to learn.”

  The pianist began playing variations on “Troubled in Mind.” “Let’s have a few songs, Luisa, while Minnie settles things at the door. She’s an expert at sorting things out, you’re an expert at singing, so you leave the sorting out to her.”

  Luisa was reluctant to abandon the battlefield, but still sober enough to realize her audience agreed with the pianist. She bowed again to their applause and began singing. She’d sung a lot of ballads and Broadway in her student days, and pulled “Careless Love” from her old repertoire. An intelligent performer, she muted her big voice to fit the small room, and reached into her lower register for a smoky undertone. The audience, suspicious at first, began to respond, clapping hard as the last notes melted past the bar.