by Megan Abbott
And Marion looked up at Ginny’s face, steaming red, and stone-cold ecstatic, like Saint Bernadette.
MARION STAYED and Joe Lanigan kept his suit jacket on, even as Floyd, three slugs into the new round of drinking, stripped down to his undershirt and suspenders and threw Ginny round the room.
Louise dragged out a big punch bowl and filled it with gin, black pepper and a can of consommé.
Marion could feel Joe Lanigan standing behind her chair, but she did not look back.
“Lou-Lou, don’t we got some tomato juice to toss in there?” Ginny said, breathless, still dancing.
“Mrs. Seeley, would you like a glass?” Joe Lanigan was saying, and he set one hand on Marion’s shoulder and the tremble through her body, well, she felt the floorboards might crack.
“No thank you,” she said.
“Mims is a two-finger girl,” Ginny said, finally stopping long enough to run for a can of tomato juice and slinging it into the bowl. “She’ll do two fingers of sherry. Two fingers of champagne. Maybe two fingers of crème de menthe if you push it. But never more than two fingers a night.” She cocked the bottom of the can for one more glug and added, grin broad, “Just you try to get more than two fingers in her, Joe Lanigan.”
“Tut-tut,” Louise said, grabbing the can from Ginny. “That’s enough.”
“It makes my head hurt,” Marion explained, now the only one sitting. She felt surrounded.
“That’s ’cause you’ve been drinking bad hooch, doll,” Floyd said, taking a glass from Louise’s hand. “Try the new medicine, doctor approved.”
“Which doc?” Ginny said.
“Why, Doc Joe,” Floyd said.
Joe walked around Marion’s chair and looked down at her, folding his arms across his chest. “Mrs. Seeley, I know you don’t generally partake, but it might do you some good. And you’re among friends.”
“How’s she look, Doc?” Floyd said.
Marion let him meet her eyes. She felt like the killjoy. The church girl at the beer blast. She wasn’t sure what to do. She showed him everything in her face and let him decide.
“Hmm, the patient looks pale,” he said, and his hand reached out and touched her chin, tilted it up. And everyone saw. But it seemed so natural and no one said a word. “One might even say consumptive. She likely needs to go home and rest.”
“Eh,” Floyd said, waving his hand dismissively. “How about a second opinion?” He strode over, skin as white as his undershirt only bluer, carrying a fresh glass. “Dr. Floyd prescribes an immediate transfusion.”
“She should go home,” Joe repeated. “No good can come from this. She is a delicate thing.”
“Guess we’re a couple of log-splitters,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Marion, don’t let these gees tell you you can’t have fun. You might be a taxi dancer yet.”
“I don’t wish to go home,” Marion blurted out. “I don’t wish to. I will have a glass. I will.”
“How about five fingers?” Floyd said, eyebrows mast high.
“Five fingers full,” Ginny hiccupped from behind her.
And Marion took a sip.
HE GAVE HER her first taste and it set her teeth on edge. He’d slugged it with long shots of sugar to cut the grain sting and it swelled in her mouth, a gritty cotton-candy swirl, then a rush of heat sending tears to her squinting eyes (My, did he love that, laughing, calling her baby snooks). Her belly warm and loose and everything turning, stretching, she reached for his hands, wanted them, urgently, on her. She’d never taken a man’s hands like that, placed them on her, on her thighs so his fingers fell between. Those soft, peppermint-oiled, half-moon-nailed hands that’d find their way in there, in everywhere, as the hooch bloomed, just bloomed.
IT WAS AN HOUR LATER, maybe two, and Joe Lanigan had his arms around her and they were outside, a hot gust twining her skirt between her legs and he pointing to his car, and Marion held on tight because she was spinning, like she was doing the jig trot in her head.
And before she knew it, they were in his car, all leather and chrome, and the backseat big and the leather soft and his hands on her stockings, her only good pair, and his hands between her legs and it was raining softly outside, the first time in weeks, wasn’t it, and then she felt his whiskers prickling along her stomach and thighs and then she felt the rocking start and then she felt and then there was all feeling and the rain, like a t-pit, t-pit, t-pit and…
MONDAY, THE CLINIC, Marion sat at her desk, still blurry-headed, no sleep, long hours spent writing and unwriting Dr. Seeley and reading his latest correspondence over and over again, its skeiny pages tattooed blue with India ink:
My dearest Marion, I am heartsick to hear of your loneliness. There is a song the natives sing at night, when drinking. It is called “La Golondrina” and it is all about a wandering swallow caught in storm and wind, so far from home. También yo estoy en la región perdida, ¡Oh, Cielo Santo! y sin poder volar…It is the most beautiful of all songs, Marion.
Marion, do not doubt my shame in leaving you as I have. My father, your father, these are men. I wish to be men such as these. My desire and commitment to take care of you was the most noble of my life—a life I have time and again thrown away. I intend to restore that part of myself strong enough, and good enough to be worthy of you. But to do so I must confront my own weaknesses and I must cure myself of them. I am working on just this with more diligence than ever in my life. What I mean to say is this: I have not touched the stuff, Marion, I swear to you, I haven’t had one taste.
Oh, what did she care, what did she care…Reading it now, the tenth time in so many missives…how much could it mean, this man who’d plucked her from her sawmill Midwest town, who’d danced with her at her church social and spoke of a cottage on a river and tousle-locked children and all that a committed young doctor could give…
It meant nothing.
And now, in her swivel chair, working, trying to do her work.
In her head, it was like this:
You turn your heel and press the ball of your foot, feel the quiver there. Because when he looks at you, you feel it five different places, places you did not know about, like a violin string vibrating. Like a string vibrating hot under your fingertips. A trickle hot now in the small of your back slipping from knot to knot on your spine. And most of all of course in that place where your cotton underthings meet, pressing against the metal of the garter, down to where the garter tugs mercilessly, as if gnawing the wool tops of your stocking itching, rubbing you raw, metal clasp cold, stockings rough, slashing strands of cold sweat, the friction unbearable and there and there again and the typewriter keys clapping, tapping, 4 DAYS FROTHY MUCUS SPUTUM, SOME NOCTURIA, MORPHINE, BROMIDES AND HYPNOTICS ADMINISTERED AS NEEDED. DIGITALIS LEAVES, GRAM 0.1, 3X/DAY, even as you feel everything twisting, churning, rubbing. Enough to make you sick and you’re smiling, you realize you can feel it on your hot-cold face. DR. WARNER ATTENDING, SCHED. UV RM. 2X/WK. Oh, to put him out of the head, to put him in a drawer and shut the drawer, she pictures herself—clap clap clap keys—putting the thinking of Joe Lanigan in the cardboard-bottomed drawer of her dresser and shutting it and shutting it and then the thinking of him gone and her legs stop trembling and and and…
LOUISE WAS CHATTERING away in the lunchroom yet again, chattering in such dipping lovely lyrical ways and Marion didn’t have to listen too closely and she could just let it hop along, brush up against her, keep her distracted.
“Oh, she’s a fine one, did you see her with no girdle swinging her stuff around? No sale here, swivel hips.”
Then:
“That orderly, he wants some of her honeypot, but I ask you, has he two dimes to spark? Orderlies, they can make time with chambermaids, factory girls. This is America, Marion, doll. Stars bursting.”
Then:
“Oh, Marion, did you see that? Myra. She’s always giving me the fisheye. She thinks I cost her friend Fern a job. And she’s right.”
Marion glanced over
at Myra, a broad-faced country girl known for good spirits and a clear, sunny whistle that the patients loved.
The look she was giving Louise twisted that face into something rigid and brow-beetled.
“What did you do, Louise,” Marion asked, trying to focus, trying not to slip back away.
“That two-faced crackpot Dr. Milroy…I had to go back east to see my ma last fall. Was gone for nine days. Just nine days. Two days coming and going. And while I’m gone, he had no one to run the new X-ray machine. I’d gone for special training to learn and it cost me forty dollars. So I’m gone not three days and Dr. Milroy decides to show this other nurse, this claptrap Fern, how to use the machine to make X-ray pictures. He told everyone, ‘She’s from a farming town and is familiar with equipment.’ What, tractors? So I come back and they don’t want to pay me the extra four bits a week anymore.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. Nor safe,” Marion said. “Those machines can be dangerous.”
“You don’t have to tell me, buttercup. But I showed them,” Louise said, grinning. She leaned forward. “First chance, I went into the X-ray Department right before her shift and turned the voltage up real high. The next day, darling Fern uses it and near burns a hole right through some poor clod.”
Marion looked up at Louise, wondered if she could be serious.
Louise grinned, red-lipped like a baby caught with hands in the jam jar. “Well, shouldn’t she pay for being such a louse, such a nasty little s.o.b.? Myra best keep her talons short. She causes trouble, wait and see. Wait and see what I got cooking.”
Marion thought, Why, she’s just playing, she always plays. Besides, there was Joe Lanigan to think of. Joe Lanigan.
She wanted to share it all with Louise, but she really couldn’t, could she. What might Louise think? For Louise, bad behavior was coming by for supper with empty hands, or not paying mind to Ginny, so clearly itching to play Tiddly Chase or Chinese checkers. Sins were looking down long noses at unmarried girls while carrying on with parlormaids on the sly.
“So do tell where you and Joe Lanigan stole off to on Saturday, my little nightingale,” Louise said, over hoecakes she’d brought for them.
“We went for a drive,” said Marion, fingers to her mouth. She felt like everyone could see it on her, Louise most of all. Like the one time, the only time, seven years old and being fresh, she sassed her father and he made her stand under the cherry tree at the foot of their lawn with a writing slate hung round her neck that said, I DO NOT FEAR OUR MAKER.
“I thought you went the way of the Parker baby, but Ginny has a slyer eye,” Louise said, smiling the whole time. “She says to me, ‘Marion plays the prairie flower but she’s got a hot mitt on Gent Joe.’”
Marion could feel her chin shake. “He needed someone to talk to. You know, his wife is so ill.” This was true. Joe had talked about his wife, at length and in ways that made Marion feel he had sorrows deeper than her own.
“They do hot-air treatments,” Marion went on. “When it’s bad, her lips, they…” Here, telling her, he had touched his fingers to his mouth, embarrassed. “They taste of urine.”
He told her too that when his wife came to realize this herself, kisses stopped forever. Her humiliation was so great. She was dirty, she said. Dirty and foul.
Before she fell sick, he’d admitted, he’d never seen her lily-white bride flesh, even in low lamplight, curtains heavy across every window. He’d not seen an inch of it, only felt it, tense and wincing, under his hand, under two coverlets, under the grave dead dark of long winter nights.
Now he saw that flesh and it was pushed full with air, with sick, with awful inner squalls of illness. It was like touching the thin, skeiny membrane of a newborn birdling.
“Is that how it is,” Louise said to Marion now, nodding, eyes fastened hard. But she seemed to be, could she be, finding a giggle in all this.
“She has the Bright’s,” Marion said. “She’s infirm.” Marion, you must understand, he had told her, fingers on the ties that held her dress together, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.
“Is that what they’re calling it now? You don’t have to tell me about Mrs. Lanigan, Marion,” Louise said. “The three months I worked for her were the closest I’ve come to San Q.”
“You worked for her? You were her nurse?”
“When I first blew into town. It didn’t last. She’s no bed o’ roses and that’s how come I always felt so for dear Joe. Can’t be pretty in that household. We try to keep his spirits up. Seems like you’re doing the same.”
“I never knew that,” Marion said, wondering why Louise had never mentioned it before, or Joe.
“Three months, best,” Louise said, waving her hand. “I got my better job and enough cabbage to pull Ginny from cooch dancing downtown. Just in the nick too. She was Camille up there on the stage and not enough meat on her chops to waggle anything but bones.”
WITHIN A WEEK, Marion began to think of it as a kind of demonic possession. At her desk, on the streetcar, at Mrs. Gower’s roasting dinner table and especially at night in bed, her body twitching. In private moments in late night hours, she thought demons may have set in and taken her body and she might require an exorcism to be free.
Joe Lanigan. Mr. Joseph Lanigan. Entrepreneur. Beloved husband and father. Man about town. Friar. Knight of Columbus. Member, Chamber of Commerce. Lector at St. Mary’s Basilica. Gentleman Joe.
“If I cannot see you at your room, I don’t see any other way,” he said. He had telephoned Marion at the clinic. Mrs. Curtwin, Dr. Milroy’s secretary, was not pleased that Marion was receiving calls at work. Marion had to speak quietly, discreetly into the receiver. She felt as though the woman could hear everything.
“Mrs. Gower, she…It wouldn’t look…”
“I think you should come here, Marion.”
“To your home?” Marion’s voice turned rushed. The secretary’s eyes were fastened on her.
“Write down this address.”
She did. But she already knew where he lived, in that fine Victorian house on Lynbrook Street, three stories on a sloping hill and a large porch that curled around it.
She determined not to go. She said to herself, This is it, Marion, your sin is great but you can save yourself from worse sins still.
BUT STEPPING on that streetcar she did not go home. Instead, she took the streetcar to his grand house on Lynbrook Street. She just had to, like it was a fever. It was a fever.
A nurse in white collar and apron answered the door and Marion said what he had told her to say.
“I’m from the clinic. I have brought Mr. Lanigan the late orders for immediate processing.” And, palms wet, she showed her the accordion file she had brought.
“This way, miss,” the nurse said, no expression. The house was dark, with shushing drapes drawn and thick-fringed brocaded chairs. Marion could smell mercury and rubbing alcohol.
“Right through that door,” the nurse said, gesturing down the hallway. Then she lifted a tray of medicine and rubber tubing she had set on a hallway table and silently ascended the towering staircase of carved walnut.
As Marion walked, she could feel the woman’s, the wife’s, Mrs. Lanigan’s, presence. Could feel the weight of her in her sickroom above. The house carried no sound.
She paused in front of the heavy door to which she had been directed. She paused, and nearly lost her nerve. But it was too late and Joe Lanigan, in shirtsleeves and smoking a cigar, opened it. Oh, the look he gave her, didn’t it say such things to her. She felt like he could move her as if by invisible strings. He had such ways, you see.
It was his study, all mahogany and green leather with gold braid. The window behind the desk was draped and she saw the long tufted davenport and knew she was meant for it, that she would in moments be pinned there, one foot on the floor, and that he would have her, and he did.
Afterward, her body rubbed to roughness, to blood-pocked flushy rui
n, she fastened garters with shuddery hands and watched him, standing now, leaning against the front of his desk, cover his face with his hands like he might cry. He did not cry and she was glad he did not, but she couldn’t guess what was in his heart. She never could.
For a moment, she felt he might finally have been struck by the ponderousness of their joint sin, here only a foot of plaster and wood separating him from his enfeebled wife one floor above.
“Oh, Marion,” he said. “Look what I have done.”
But when he pulled his hands from his face, she saw no grief at all, no trace of stricken remorse.
“I have made you a whore,” he said, and he couldn’t stop his smile. Saw no need to.
For her part, looking into her own battered heart, she could summon no anger, nor even fresh guilt. She believed that in his mind, which she now saw as disturbed in some way, the consequence of years of feeling lost and unmoored, like a widower with a wife, in his mind, he was giving her his highest praise. Her legs still damp, she reckoned this terrible revelation: she was strangely gratified. She had pleased him. Wasn’t that, in some odd way, wondrous?
This man, he has shamed me twice over, once by treating me like a whore and once more by showing me I am one.
I am a sinner, Dr. Seeley. What’s more, I grew to love my sin.
NO ONE HAD TOLD JOE LANIGAN that she was a flower, a doll, an ornament of finely spun glass, something to rest on a mantelpiece. Somehow no one had told him he couldn’t fondle her, twist her filmy skin, grab her with his rough Irish hands and throw her on a bed and do just awful, awful things to her.
You are Pandora, Joe Lanigan had said. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open. As if it were her. As if she were the one. Was she?