Mary Coin

by Marisa Silver

  Walker finds a link to an article from a 1982 edition of the San Jose Mercury News. The headline reads: “An Appeal for a Face from the Depression.” It is a direct request for money on the part of Mary Coin’s family. The article describes how she is in a weakened condition after an ill-advised trip to San Francisco. Her children have vowed to give her the best care possible, but the cost of nursing and medication is prohibitive. “That picture’s done a lot of good for a lot of people,” a daughter, Ellie Velasquez, says. “And she never got anything from it. Not one dime. As far as I’m concerned, she’s owed.” A son, James Coin, remarks, “She never wanted anybody to know she was the one in the picture. I hope we’re doing the right thing.”

  26.

  The basement is not insulated. It is so cold at night that Walker has to wear his jacket, and even then, his hands stiffen as he tries to figure out the best way to proceed. He knows it is foolish to start this job now when he is so tired and when he has to get back to the city, but he can’t sleep, and the basement tantalizes. Mismatched file cabinets with rusted corners are lined up against one wall. Cardboard boxes are stacked five or six high. Some are so collapsed that the towers lean precariously and threaten to spill their contents over the concrete floor. A quick perusal of one of the most accessible boxes reveals years of tax statements. Another is filled with random brochures advertising agricultural products. In the far corner of the basement sit crates filled with plaques: 1960 Central Valley Businessman of the Year, 1962 Orange Growers Award, commendations from the YMCA and the Elks Club. Walker cannot deny the familiar tightening in his chest, the adrenaline he feels when he walks into a newspaper archive or someone’s dusty junk-filled barn or when he finds a shoebox overflowing with photographs.

  He is suddenly overcome by the feeling he gets each time he begins one of his projects, when he encounters an immediate sense of failure and questions why he has driven all the way to a town in Nebraska or Idaho to investigate some notion that any of his colleagues would find jejune. At these times, he feels certain that he will not discover a way to penetrate beneath the charm of a stiffly posed marriage portrait to find the particular character of a place and its people, to unearth the human experience of history. He reminds himself of what he always does in these moments of doubt: that what he seeks exists because everything does. The Dead Sea Scrolls, black holes, pharaonic tombs—all these things existed before men understood how to find them. It is the human fallacy to believe that we discover any single thing. It is only that we are slow to learn how to see what is in front of us.

  After two hours, he feels that he has a sense of the general chronology of the boxes and he begins to dig in, starting with the earliest papers. He finds a land deed dating from 1902: The State of California. Kern County. Know all Men by these Present that for and in consideration of Five Hundred Dollars in hand paid by Theodore Harris Dodge to the Southern Pacific Improvement Company the following described real estate, to wit: The South West Fourth of Section Five T 14 (south)—Range 12 west containing one hundred and sixty acres more or less.

  More or less. More now. Thousands of acres more.

  He finds purchase orders for seed, for plows and horses. There is a bill from a farrier. A familiar ease settles over Walker. This is what he loves, this slow, careful excavation through time. He studies the elegantly slanted handwriting and carefully crafted signatures on the documents, takes pleasure in the arcane formality of the transactions. He discovers a roll of architect’s drawings: the original schematics for the Queen Anne. A room marked “Child’s Room” was his father’s boyhood bedroom, then his own. His life, laid out before him here as a plan, an imagined future made manifest by the determination and luck of his forebears, moves him. He finds a notebook filled with arithmetic so faded that he can only make out that the numbers have to do with costs and profit. He imagines his great-grandfather Theodore’s hand making these markings. He finds a payroll ledger that lists the farmworkers and their weekly take. In 1910, only twenty men were listed. Even adjusting for inflation, the pay is negligible. As Walker makes his way from box to box, from year to year, he finds many such ledgers. He studies the names and the human geography they represent. At first the surnames are mostly Chinese. But in ten years the rolls are filled with Japanese names, and ten years after that, with the signatures of East Indians. Soon, the workers are almost all Mexican or Filipino. By the 1930s, the farmworkers are predominantly white, the huge wave of Dust Bowl migrants having descended. He reads down the rolls. Hubert Mills, Robert Worth, Renata Coleman . . . The names are so evocative to him that he begins to recite them out loud, his voice echoing off the walls of the basement. Each represents a constellation of hope, wives and husbands and children relying on the dollar and twenty-eight cents that Mabel Fox made that week or the dollar and ninety-five cents William Streeter collected. These people are all dead now. But here are their names written by each of their hands, the same hands that pulled citrus off ornery branches. Each worker and each family so intimately connected with Walker’s own, their meager earnings a stark reminder of the exploitation and moral ambiguity that lie at the heart of the Dodge fortune. Victor Emerson, Willie Frank . . .

  It quickly becomes obvious to him that his great-grandfather and his grandfather, and even George, despite condemning Walker’s chosen path, were inadvertent historians. Why else does someone save items that have no immediate use except that he recognizes the commemorative value of the moment even as it is lived? He knows that a simple bill for baling wire is as resonant an artifact as an ancient potsherd, and that within the transaction—money for wire—lies the story of a particular person and the time in which he lived. Walker used to think his father hid his identity behind his work. Now he sees that he had it backward, and that work itself might be the key to understanding George. He looks around for the boxes containing information from the year his father took over the farm. But then he decides to back up and start with the year of George’s birth. He finds the box from 1935 and studies the contents. Despite the economy, the company bought two new Ford trucks . . . electric bills . . . water bills . . . He scans the payroll ledger for that year, reads the names of the workers. Robert Mills, Eulalia Murphy, Curtis Sharp, Mary Coin.

  Walker feels an unnerving displacement, as if he has missed a tread on a stairway. It is the same sensation he felt many years ago, when he lost Isaac in the grocery-store aisles. He’d turned around, and in the space where Isaac was standing only seconds before there was emptiness. In that moment, Walker knew that life was a set of extravagantly enacted delusions to mask the fact that all the relied-upon verities were meaningless. Mary Coin. Her face comes to him immediately. He studies the ledger. Oddly, she has been paid more than anyone else on that particular payday—twice as much, in fact. It is hard to believe that the frail woman in the photograph could pick twice as many oranges as Robert Mills or Curtis Sharp, but there it is. He skips ahead in the ledger. Her name appears week after week. And then it is gone.

  27.

  He is back in San Francisco, correcting papers at the university, when Lisette calls. Alice has been suspended from school.

  “They found pills in her locker,” she says.

  “Pills? What are you talking about? What kind?”

  “The bad kind, Walker. Vicodin. Oxy.”

  “Did you know?”

  “Fuck you, Walker.”

  He takes a breath. “Where is she now?”

  “Here. Grounded. For the rest of her life. Except for parent-escorted trips to rehab.”

  “Rehab?” Too much information is coming at him.

  “Yes. Rehab. Every day. School rules, if she wants to be readmitted. If she wants to get a high school diploma and have a chance at a life.”

  He’s still trying to bridge the distance between what he thought was happening in his life and what is actually occurring. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  “Wake up, Walker,” s
he says, fighting with the emotions that are thickening in her throat. “Your daughter is popping pills.”

  He drives to Petaluma that evening. When Lisette answers the door, she looks shrunken. She seems to have exhausted all energy for facial expressions. She points up the stairs then disappears into the back of the house.

  Walker tries to open Alice’s door but finds it locked. He leans his forehead against the frame. “Let me in, honey,” he says.

  After a few moments, she opens the door. Without greeting him, she turns and goes back to her bed. She lies down and stares at the ceiling. He starts to summon the energy to be jolly and enthusiastic, to prove to her that his love will not diminish no matter what she has done, but he can’t.

  “You messed up,” he says, sitting on the edge of her bed.

  “Thank you for stating the obvious,” she says.

  “Why were you taking that stuff?”

  “Really, Dad? Are you going to be like my therapist now?”

  “I’m going to be like your father. What’s going on with you?”

  “I was stupid. I got caught.”

  “Getting caught is the least of your problems.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  He tries to figure out what comes next. “Look,” he says. “We’ll get you help. You’ll go to this rehab.”

  “I’m not a drug addict. I just took some pills.”

  I smoked but I didn’t inhale. She is too young for the reference, and sarcasm will get him nowhere with her. “So what’s your plan?” he says.

  “I don’t have a plan. I got kicked out of school. I guess I’ll have a stimulating career in fast food.”

  Her attitude creates havoc in him. “You can be a snob about the people who work at Burger King, but the fact is most of them are high school graduates.”

  “Is this your idea of a pep talk?”

  “I’m not here to give you a pep talk, Alice.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  They are both quiet.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he says.

  “Free country.”

  “What kind of person do you want to be?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that at a certain point you have to decide who you want to be. You either want to be the person who is getting high all the time or you don’t.”

  “Well, I guess I want to be the person who gets high all the time.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me some things about you. Tell me who you are.”

  Alice sits up. She is crying. “How am I supposed to know that?” she says. “You act like it’s so easy. Like pick one from column A and one from column B and then, presto chango, you are this perfect person who everybody loves and who is pretty and smart and is going to go to a good college and have this perfect life . . .”

  “Oh, Alice.” He reaches for her, but she pulls back.

  “I fucked up, okay? I fucked up. Tell me how bad I am. Tell me how I have disappointed you and Mom. Tell me whatever the fuck you want to tell me and then please get the fuck out of my room.”

  • • •

  He spends the night on the couch in Lisette and Harry’s living room. He turns on the television, muting the sound so that he doesn’t bother anyone. A late-night talk show is playing. He has no idea who the celebrity is, but she laughs and preens and waves and yanks down her too-short dress as the host teases and cajoles and pretends to flirt, or really flirts. The condition of watching the talk show is that you must accept that what is false is real and that what is real is false. Either Alice is a drug addict or Alice is not a drug addict, but the condition of being her parent is that he must accept that he can never be sure what is truth and what is the opposite of truth. All that he is certain of is that he has not provided her with whatever she needs. What is she missing? Security? Love? Or is it that he has not adequately shared himself with her and so denied her the firm foundation of history that anyone needs in order to say, “This is who I am”?

  It is not so different for him. His history is lopsided. He can trace the Dodge lineage back, but what about the missing quarter of his heritage? The story has always been that George’s mother died in childbirth. Either this is true or it is not. And if it is false, then it is also true, since the woman was erased from the family history as if she never existed. Not in a name, not in a piece of heirloom jewelry, not in a photograph of happier days. Mary Coin’s face comes to him. Her skin baked and etched by the sun. Her thin lips gripped against—what? Eyes looking off toward—what? You know, that picture of the woman and her children in the Depression. It’s all you have to say and people’s faces open in recognition. They nod, a hundred suppositions falling into place about a woman they think they know.

  You look but you don’t see. It’s what he’s told his students hundreds of times over the years. You have to see past looking.

  Isaac comes downstairs, barefoot but otherwise fully dressed.

  “Do you sleep in your clothes now?”

  Isaac smiles, sweetly embarrassed. “It’s faster in the morning.”

  “You’re ready to make a clean getaway.” Walker is joking but he realizes that there might be some truth to this. He pats the couch beside him, and Isaac sits down.

  “What will happen to Alice?” Isaac says.

  “We’ll figure things out.”

  “How will you figure things out?”

  Walker looks at his son’s earnest expression and comes clean. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s my fault,” Isaac says.

  “You didn’t put the pills in her locker.”

  “She says things, and I get upset, and then Mom yells at her for saying mean things to me, and then Alice goes and does shit—I mean stuff. Sorry.”

  Walker puts his arm around Isaac. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I just wish . . .” Isaac says, but he doesn’t finish.

  “What do you wish?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They watch the silent hilarity on the television. Isaac hunches, his shoulders turning in as if he wants to fold up. His sense of his insignificance is palpable. The storm of his sister rages around him, and there is nothing he can do to stop it or flee its path.

  “Hey,” Walker says. “What new apps have you invented lately?”

  “Do you even know what an app is, Dad?”

  “Yes I know what an app is. What do you take me for?”

  “A Luddite.”

  “Good word. Although it sounds like an insult coming from you.”

  Isaac smiles down at his lap, shy and proud.

  “I could use your help with all this computer stuff, actually,” Walker says.

  “How?”

  “Do you think you can find anybody online?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even if they’re not famous?”

  “You can find anybody,” Isaac says, the devilish gleam of a proto-hacker in his eye. “You just have to know where to look.”

  28.

  Empire, California. Another town. When Walker arrives in a new place, he knows without ever having been there how it will be laid out. Historically, certain areas, often the north or the west sides, were typically the wealthiest, and if any remnants of architectural grandeur remain, this is where they will be. Whether there are actual train tracks or not, there is always the other side of something—a river, a gully, a dump—some division that allows a town to organize itself along class lines so that people know where they belong. Things are less insidious now than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, but the psychic territories remain
.

  Although there is sometimes a modestly refurbished old hotel in towns such as this one—a Mission Inn or a Pacific Arms—Walker always chooses whatever version of a Motel 6 lies off the highway. He likes the practical sterility of these places, the way the rooms seem to float in and out of time, bare stages on which scenes appear and then evaporate daily. It is June now, and the heat of the Central Valley has settled in for the duration of the summer. His room is dark. He forgoes the overhead fluorescents and turns on the bedside lamp. Somehow, the stucco-ceilinged room looks more correct in a tawdry weak light, as if shadows and obscurity are the natural characteristics that allow for what takes place in motel rooms. He phones the rest home, learns that visiting hours begin at four o’clock.

  He reminds himself that a newspaper article and a name on a payroll do not add up to much and certainly not a fanciful notion that he has allowed to blossom into a full-fledged idea just shy of fact: that somehow Mary Coin’s connection to his family is intimate, that an article secreted between the pages of a poetry book signifies a buried emotion and that Walker’s father’s ambivalence about his position at the head of the Dodge clan, and his final wish to be burned, all add up to the answer to a question that was never allowed to be asked. Isaac’s computer searches turned up the names of Mary Coin’s children, all but one of whom are dead.

  The nursing home is a beige, single-story building that, to judge from the small figure-eight planter that still bears the iron structure of a nonexistent diving board, must have once been a motel. Despite the season, the lobby is heated; the smells of industrial cleaners and food hang in the viscid air.

  “I don’t have you down for a visit,” the woman behind the front desk says. She wears a scrub top printed with teddy bears. Her fingernails are long and elaborately lacquered with flowers. The manicure alone suggests the nature of the place. There is no medical heavy lifting here. This is where people wait for the end.