“You know you’re trespassing on private property, young lady?” A black man in a police uniform loomed over her.
She gaped at him, suddenly aware of the empty potato chip bags strewn around her sleeping bag, of her grimy body, unwashed for several days, and the used tampons she’d stuck in her abandoned juice cartons.
“I’m—I’m a student,” she stammered.
“Then let’s see your ID, miss.”
“I don’t have it on me. Anyway, I’m not a student here, I’m a private student of Professor Lontano’s, Verna Lontano in the Oriental Institute. She’s an expert on Sumerian goddesses, you know, and—I’m testing some of the Sumerian chants. They have to be done under a full moon.”
Her heart was thudding so hard, she thought it might rise in her chest to choke her. She’d be taken to the police station. Another scene with Harriet, Grandfather arriving triumphant to lock her in the psych wing. Maybe she could give a fake name, and spend time in jail—unless one of Harriet’s suitors was in court, as would probably be the case again, But to the cop, sent over to investigate a report by the dean that there was a vagrant on the chapel grounds, Mara looked like many of the unkempt students who casually dropped their litter across campus. Her tangled coarse hair, so out of place on Graham Street, was normal here. It was only her nervousness that made him doubt her; he radioed his commander, who told him to get Professor Lontano to check the girl’s story.
“Why do you think Selena might still be alive?” Professor Lontano asked her, when they were alone.
“They’re always lying to me, Grandfather and Mephers, they hate me, they hated Selena, you can tell by how they talk about her. I thought—” Mara flushed and stumbled on her words. It did sound ridiculous to say it out loud: Grandfather bribed the paper to print the news of her death.
“The goddess Gula supplied you with this information, no doubt?” The professor saw Mara was about to cry, so she quickly added: “Your grandmother is really dead, Mara. I was in Nippur at the time. It was a terrible disaster, that expedition to the Taurus Mountains. A whole Iraqi family who’d gone along to do cooking and help with the rough digging was killed, buried in snow. Your grandmother, and her mother and father, starved to death before anyone could rescue them.”
Mara felt her body swell and grow ungainly. In the grim lines around Lontano’s mouth she read not the painful memories of a young student on her first expedition hearing about the death of an admired teacher—but contempt. She hates me, too, Mara thought, wanting only to flee the office, not to have those mocking gray eyes bore into her mind any longer.
Lontano shook her head, shaking herself out of the waters of the past, and looked at the disheveled young woman in front of her. “I never thought you were a coward, Mara, but here you are running away because you’re afraid to see Mrs. Ephers now that you made her ill.”
Mara’s cheeks puffed out in her fury. “It’s not like that. It’s because of the lies, all the lies. I found a secret letter Mephers was keeping locked away, it was written to my mother in French, at least, it was written to the daughter of Madame Selena Vatick Stonds, I can’t read much French but even I could tell that, and there was a picture of a man who looks like Harriet, but no one believes me, they only listen to Mephers. But Grandfather must know. Where is my mother? Was that a photograph of Harriet’s real father? Why doesn’t Grandfather want me to know, unless it’s something really awful?”
When Lontano didn’t say anything Mara cried, “You know who it is, don’t you?”
The professor leaned across her desk and spoke crisply, but not without sympathy. “Sometimes you can know too much, Mara. That’s strange advice from a woman who’s spent her life digging into the secrets of people long dead, you’re saying to yourself. But the nearer dead, surely they have a right to their privacy, don’t you think?
“Why don’t you go home, eh? You can’t camp out on the university grounds any longer, and you have a beautiful home, even if Abraham is not always an easy man to live with. Or go to university yourself, then you’d have a place of your own to live. Why don’t I get that young security cop to come get you, give you a ride back to Graham Street. When you’re calmer you can come see me again and talk about your education.”
Professor Lontano was Grandfather’s friend; she only wanted to send Mara back into his clutches. Mara lurched out of her chair, knocking it over. She ran down the wide stone steps, certain that Lontano would have the museum ringed by campus security before she got to the exit. She shoved the heavy door open and made it to the street without anyone trying to stop her. She ran down the street, past the old brick houses and narrow yards, the women with baby buggies, the knots of students, without seeing any of them, and finally, hot and gasping for air, onto the platform for the train.
At the South Water station, end of the line for the train, she stood at the sink in the washroom and poured water over her head, then, keeping an eye on the entrance, stripped herself in sections and washed her whole body. All her clothes were dirty now. It didn’t occur to her to sneak into Grandfather’s apartment while everyone was out to get something clean: Graham Street seemed to belong to a different city than the one she now inhabited, too far away for her to reach by ordinary means.
When she wandered out of the train station she was underground, only a block from the foundation of the Hotel Pleiades. For want of a better destination she walked over to the garage and looked at the wall. Someone had patched it over without repairing the damaged pipe behind the crack: a rusty stain was spreading around the edges of the cement. She walked around the corner, hunting for the woman at the wall. The splintered boards of the Westinghouse generator box were all that remained of Madeleine Carter’s refuge.
Mara sat among the splinters. Her head ached. She was tired. She knew she should get something to eat. Perhaps she should check into a motel for a few days so she could take a proper shower, get a good sleep and find a job. The thought flickered in her head like a falling star, quickly obliterated by the denseness of her fatigue and isolation.
She imagined Professor Lontano calling Grandfather to tell him about Mara’s visit. Grandfather was terrified that Mara was on the track of his wife and daughter: he had murdered them both. Lontano and Mephers were accomplices; they were sure they had obliterated all traces of their crime, but now the doctor panicked, thinking his granddaughter was going to find him out. He called the police, urged them to arrest Mara as a dangerous criminal, and shoved her into the locked wing at Midwest Hospital before she had a chance to denounce him.
But perhaps Harriet would come to her rescue. Instead of the police descending on her, her sister would arrive, her normal calm shattered, her beautiful blue eyes red with sobbing: Mara, dearest, how sorry I am I doubted you. You were right all along about Grandfather and Mephers—they’re indescribably monstrous. Mara leaned against a pillar and slept.
25
Digging Up the Past
PROFESSOR LONTANO had not even thought of calling Dr. Stonds. She was almost seventy-five and her mind was back in Iraq, her first winter in Nippur. One never thought of cold in the Middle East, but winters in Iraq were sufficiently bitter. The delicious-ness of making love inside a sleeping bag, while the wind drove snow through the chinks in the mud walls of her one-room house. The professor smiled to herself: you could only enjoy that when young. In old age one wanted a proper bed, warmth, and no worries that an angry wife might appear.
A letter in French to Beatrix? With a photograph of a man who looked like Harriet. Why had she never noticed that? Human perversity, the things one refused to acknowledge. She was not immune to that disease, but it was always a shock to realize it. Now that she thought of it the likeness was extraordinary. Perhaps a lack of sensuality in Harriet’s face caused Lontano to overlook the resemblance all these years. More likely, though, it was the desire not to know. The professor made a face—the irony that intimidated Mara not spared in looking at her own self.
But who coul
d have written Beatrix, and how did that gargoyle of a housekeeper come to hold the letter and the photo? Had the Ephers woman told Abraham about it? Probably not: his pride wouldn’t survive such news. Who had written, not knowing Beatrix was dead, for dead she surely was, despite Mara’s wishes to find her among the living. How long had that been now, since that blustery March day she’d gone with Abraham to a funeral chapel on the remote northwest side of the city: he refused to let anyone at the Orleans Street Church participate in the service, or have a church ceremony at all.
Years melted into each other. Lontano used to remember them by sharp events, a particular lover, an amazing linguistic discovery, but now, all occasions seemed equally remote.
At any rate, she had been at the funeral, Harriet and Mrs. Ephers the only other—not mourners, participants. Mara must still have been a baby, perhaps left with a sitter—Lontano couldn’t remember her in the chapel. What she remembered most about the occasion was Abraham’s fury, his refusal to talk about his daughter, his angry satisfaction in having silenced the papers: she isn’t going to embarrass me beyond the grave.
Lontano never understood why Beatrix’s death infuriated Abraham so much: in a way, he had almost chosen it. But the professor acquiesced in his desire to keep the matter secret—it was his family, she wasn’t going to pretend she understood all the complicated emotions that held families together or tore them apart By then, by whenever it was—she remembered suddenly wondering during the funeral about the plumbing in her Polish apartment; that was the spring she went to Krakow to lecture, instead of returning to Padua, as she usually did in the spring. So seventeen years ago. By that time, anyway, she had no illusions left about Abraham, the possibility of romance: he was utterly self-absorbed, past the point where he could see anyone except as a reflection of his own desires.
They were all like that: it’s the male condition. Helen Vatick used to say that—Selena’s mother, lecturing the wives in Nippur when they complained that their husbands cared for nothing but clay pots and inscriptions. They’re wrapped in their small worlds, Helen said, so jealous of Jehovah who made this great earth that they attempt to create their own universes. Or is that why they invented a god like Jehovah? They say we create gods in our own image, and from what I see of the Sumerian gods, humans have always expected their deities to be as small-minded and territorial as we are ourselves.
And Lontano, overhearing this, felt superior for being herself absorbed in pots and inscriptions, not a whiny wife with too little to do in the desert, unless one became like Sabine Tholuck, taking on her husband’s job so vehemently that she expected to be called “Frau Professor” by young students like Lontano. But Lontano also felt curiously unfeminine in Helen Vatick’s presence, unable to sit with the company of women and share their easy gossip about husbands and children. A very feminine woman, that was how Lontano remembered Mrs. Vatick. Selena, too, although a different type altogether.
Oh, what was the point of this maundering through recent history? The distant past was where she belonged, where she knew what to think, what conclusions to draw. Before she returned there, though, she should call Harriet, let her know where Mara was. Perhaps probe, delicately, to see what story Abraham had told his granddaughters about Beatrix’s death.
When Lontano phoned, Harriet was trying to get ready for a meeting. Lauren, her secretary, refused at first to interrupt her, but the professor persisted and Lauren, curious about the current upheavals in Harriet’s life, summoned her young boss to the phone.
Harriet was abrupt, her mind on a long-distance waste hauler who faced toxic-dumping charges. So Mara was taking her annoyances to the University of Chicago now? Many thanks for the news.
Lontano was startled by her brusquerie. “Harriet, Mara doesn’t look well. She’s been sleeping in the open. Can’t you do something to make it possible for her to come home?”
“She’s welcome to return any time she chooses, as long as she stops behaving like a prima donna in a soap opera.” Harriet looked at her desk clock: her clients would arrive in three minutes.
“She thinks Abraham is lying to her about your mother’s death. I think—I hope—I persuaded her that Selena really perished back in 1947. But can’t you make her realize that Beatrix is gone as well? I’m worried about her. I wouldn’t have thought she could become, well, deranged, but she’s got it in her mind that she should find Beatrix. If you talked to her, told her the truth?”
“I’ve told her many times. I was at the funeral. Mara just won’t believe me, she claims because I didn’t see her face. But even if Grandfather would have tolerated an open coffin, he said Beatrix drowned in her bath, and her face looked all swollen and disfigured.” Harriet broke off: she used to have nightmares about that swollen body rising from the coffin and coming to snatch her, to take her to a horrible underworld where they lived among broken furniture and rats.
“Mara says she found a letter to Beatrix written in French,” Harriet found herself blurting out to the professor. “And a photograph of some man who looked like me. Do you know who that was?”
As soon as she’d spoken Harriet wished the words unsaid. There was no man. Or maybe Harold Caduke wasn’t really her father—was that so awful? She hardly remembered him, anyway. Although she had always felt superior to Mara, for many reasons, but including the fact that unlike Mara she could name her father.
She was upset enough with herself for asking that she didn’t notice the pause at the other end of the phone and the unnatural voice in which the professor said, no, she had no idea, and she really thought Harriet should persuade Mara to get help.
“I’m one of your grandfather’s oldest friends, and I take a special interest in you and your sister. It isn’t good—for either of you—that she’s running around the city as upset as she is now.”
Lauren came back into Harriet’s office: the client, whose annual bill ran to six figures, was getting impatient. Harriet hung up. She wanted to go home and pull out her photographs of her parents, find a likeness in her own face to her father. More than that, she wanted to find Mara and punch her in the mouth: why couldn’t she keep the family’s private business private?
In response to Lauren’s impatient cough, Harriet got up and went to the conference room. She found herself unable to pull her mind together to think about rights-of-way or Superfund exposures. It frightened her, that she couldn’t remember the substance of recent conversations or documents. What did it mean, for her to fragment in this way? Was she, too, an inheritor of Beatrix’s bad blood, in abeyance all these years but suddenly showing up at the first real stress in her life?
After her meeting, she worked on reports demonically through lunch. Leigh Wilton had suddenly dumped two tricky new problems on her, one demand ng an answer before a three o’clock meeting on the other side of town. She drove her two paralegals to exhaustion with the demands she made for data and kept them at their desks, alongside her, through lunch, determined to prove that she was Grandfather’s girl, up to any challenge.
As she turned to her computer she heard one of the paralegals mutter, PMS. The second snickered. Harriet affected not to hear. PMS. Post-Mara Syndrome. It had been affecting her all day. Maybe all her life. Or perhips it was the weather, the unrelenting closeness of the air. At three, when she left the building with Leigh, she saw thunderheads building over the lake, great towers that stretched like the parapets of a giant’s castle. God’s chess pieces.
Her father—was he her father?—had called them that. The memory slipped over Leigh Wilton’s discourse on Rapelec’s patent fights in Malaysia: she couldn’t have been more than four or five. They were by the lake (where? not their Winnetka home, the country someplace) and her parents were fighting. She could still hear her mother’s horrific sobs—Harriet thought at first she was laughing, and had danced up and down in excitement. Her mother hit her across the mouth, furious at Harriet’s mocking of her grief, and Daddy swept Harriet into his arms, walked down the lake shore
with her, pointed to the white pillars spiraling overhead and said: God’s chess pieces. When he’s bored with running the universe he settles down for a game. The archangels always lose; this makes them mad and they throw the pieces down. That causes thunder.
Once again she couldn’t keep her mind on the client and his problems. She kept wondering why she never thought about her father. Was that distant quarrel between her parents over who Harriet’s real father was? He slept around, Harold Caduke, she didn’t like to admit that, but it was true: he’d been with some other woman the night he died. It was more likely that someone else was her mother—no, that was impossible. Mara was infecting Harriet with her hysterical fantasies. It didn’t matter whether Harold Caduke was Harriet’s father or not: Grandfather had adopted her, legally, when she was nine, and her name was Stonds. And she possessed Grandfather’s incisive mind, not the mush that lay between Mara’s ears! The many times Mephers had smacked Mara for fibbing—no blows had ever fallen on Harriet!
Back in the office she forced her paralegals to work on the follow-up to the afternoon meeting, until one of them wailed, I have tickets to the Who; do you know how hard those are to get? Harriet raised pale brows: and this job, was that easy to find as well? But she relented, let the two women leave at seven-thirty. At eleven, she realized in despair that she had read the same essay on company law in Indonesia three times without being able to figure out how to apply it to Leigh Wilton’s client, a recording studio in Tel Aviv.
Thunder was rumbling across the lake. She went to the window. If she craned her neck and squinted, she could see lightning flaring and dimming over the Chicago River. Maybe the storm would break, and with it end her own nervous fragmentation.
Ghost Country Page 18
