A dark-red secretary stood in one corner, its writing surface empty. Mrs. Ephers was no reader—a Bible, an old edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a library biography of Queen Victoria stood rigidly to attention on the windowed shelves.
Mara glanced briefly in the drawers, where Harriet’s school reports were neatly laid, next to old books of household accounts. She looked for her own report cards but couldn’t find them. Her mouth puckered in hurt. She slammed the drawer shut, took a pin from the cushion on Mrs. Ephers’s dressing table and dug a deep scratch along the secretary’s glossy writing surface. Take that, you horrid old bag.
Mara slid open the dresser drawers, patted the underwear—white or beige, cotton briefs, formidable brassieres like breastplates—the neat stacks of cardigans, nightgowns—cotton for summer, flannel for winter—hard to imagine her seducing Grandfather Stonds in those.
The image of Mephers as Harriet’s mother receded along with Mara’s excitement. Her headache began to return and she started to feel ashamed. She heard Barbara slipslopping down the hall in her mules, and the door closing. Barbara left for the day at two. Had Mara been in here three hours? No, Barbara, must be on her way to the cleaners, or some such errand, Mara went to rub spit into the scratch she’d dug on the secretary. Now she’d really catch hell. She started to sniffle, unloved orphan, fired from her job, and now in deeper trouble for ruining a valuable piece of furniture.
As she rubbed she must have pressed a recessed catch; a drawer suddenly opened in the middle of the writing surface. Her self-pity vanished. Just like Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Housekeeper’s Secretary. The girl detective doesn’t hesitate but dives headfirst into the cache and pulls out a small bundle of papers.
On top was an old manila envelope addressed to Mademoiselle, la Fille de Mme Selena Vatick Stonds, in ink that had turned brown with age. Blue and gold stamps glowed brilliantly against the paper, Mara took it to the window: France. The postmark was blurred, so she couldn’t read the date or town.
She sat down at the secretary and pulled out the contents, nervous about what she might find. There was a letter in French, in the same browning ink, addressed, like the envelope, to the daughter of Selena. Mara had neglected French in high school. Now she cursed herself for ignoring Grandfather’s strictures: French the only language of a truly civilized person, speak it at mealtime until you show mastery. Mara had chosen instead to study Japanese, but much good that did her now.
She stumbled through the first few sentences. Dear Mademoiselle Stonds, I am a woman very old and very something else, and the time for something is long past. Selena Vatick Stonds and Nippur figured in the next paragraph, but Mara couldn’t tell what they were up to. Frustrated, she wondered if she dare take the letter away to photocopy, but what if Mephers checked her cache every night? Said her prayers: Lord deliver me from Mara and deliver the doctor into my bed, and then fondled this letter to Beatrix?
Maybe Mara could copy the gist of it, to worry over later with a dictionary. She took it to the desk and turned on a light. That was when the picture slipped from between the pages, a black-and-white photo of a blond, with the kind of ironic smile women sold their souls for. He was wearing a tweedy double-breasted jacket cut in the style of the fifties.
What struck Mara more than the smile and the probable age of the picture was his resemblance to Harriet. She held the picture next to Harriet in her law school robes. The man’s cheeks were broader, but around the eyes and nose the likeness was startling.
Mara jumped as Mephers dropped her purse in the doorway. “Just what are you doing in here, young lady?”
“Who is this man? How come you have this letter, when it was written to Mother?” Mara screamed. “What happened to Mother? You know where she is, don’t you?”
The housekeeper snatched the picture from Mara, stuffed it into her bosom. When Mara lunged for it, Mrs. Ephers grabbed her and yanked her to her feet, slapped her hard enough to give the girl a black eye, then fell against the bed, clutching her own left arm. Her face turned a waxy gray and her breath came in shallow bursts.
“Get out of here,” she whispered hoarsely. “Get out of here and call the doctor.”
12
Are You Washed in the Blood?
Jacqui and Nanette waiting for me at the Orleans St. Church clinic this afternoon, troubled about Madeleine. Not because of visions or voices, but harassment. Seems her Wall is part of the foundation for the Pleiades Hotel, one of those ultramodern, pricey places that’ve cropped up east of Michigan near the river. I’ve never noticed it, but apparently hotel garage is close by M’s vision, Management doesn’t want homeless women ranting about the Virgin—or anything else—to disturb the slumber of any incumbent. Jacqui says last night hotel hosed down the Wall during the evening when M was sitting there.
So much wanted just to go home, go to bed for an hour before starting weekend on-call shift. Read once that you sleep in bits and pieces when you’re overtired, even standing up or while talking to people. Wonder if that’s what I’m doing with patients these days—often seem to get only fragments of their complaints.
I like Jacqui, but worry, too, she’ll turn on me the way Mom used to: look at me when I’m talking to you, Hector—we named you for the bravest of all the Trojans, well, your father is always off on some engineering junket to the Middle East, it’s time you acted up to your name and behaved like the man around the house. So I did her bidding. Jacqui’s, that is, although almost always Lily’s as well.
After his last patient shuffled out, around six-thirty, Hector went with Jacqui and Nanette to the wall. Madeleine was kneeling in front of her crack, weeping over her treasures. The hosing had turned her photo of the Virgin into a sodden mess. She was trying to dry her Bible over the open flame of a candle, but Hector doubted it could be saved—the pages were gummed together like a Kleenex that’s been through the laundry.
When Hector went over to talk to her, she shrank back against the wall. He saw that the blanket she knelt on was also damp. He tried not to recoil from the smell of mold and must that rose from it, and gently asked if he could check her pulse. Although her eyes dilated and her breath came faster, she did let him hold her wrist. The pulse was feathery and irregular; he worried that she might have caught a chill from her dousing; her usual agitation seemed enhanced by fever.
As he was trying to talk to Madeleine, a man wearing a suit and tie came over to them. His enormous forearms strained his jacket sleeves. He introduced himself as Brian Cassidy, night manager of the hotel’s garage.
“Are you responsible for this woman?” Cassidy demanded.
Hector said, “No. She’s quite ill, but like all adults, she’s responsible for herself. Are you the man who turned a hose on her last night?”
“I’m in charge of the garage. That includes keeping the street clean so that our guests are comfortable walking here.”
“You destroyed her icon and her Bible. Was that essential for hotel hygiene?”
Unconsciously Hector’s voice took on some of his mother’s sarcastic inflection; the garage manager brisded defensively and leaned forward. “We asked her to move but she refused. I didn’t have any choice, since I had to clean the wall and the sidewalk there.”
Jacqui pointed at coffee cups and paper bags gray-brown with dirt that were packed along the curb. “Seems to me there’s a lot of debris right in front of your garage. You going to get that garbage cleaned up tonight, or you need one of us homeless folk to sit there before the street looks dirty to you?”
The garage manager looked at her for the first time: until she spoke she hadn’t been human.
Only I existed for him—because I’m white? A man? Well dressed? Anyway, he trotted out those tired old phrases of “following orders,’ All these years after Eichmann you’d think people would squirm in agony to hear themselves say it, but he seemed to think it was the most wholesome reason in the world for hosing down a homeless woman.
“Can’t she
move around to the other side?” Cassidy said. “We know she’s sleeping there in that Westinghouse box, but it’s not on our property, our guests can’t see it, so we try to look the other way. We’re not monsters here.”
Jacqui and I put it to Madeleine. She got very agitated.
“I have to sit on the north side. It’s written that the weeping women sit at the north gate. It’s written in here—” flapping her damp Bible at me. “I have to stay here. This is where the Virgin is crying.”
Felt acutely embarrassed to be associated with her, even in the eyes of the garage man. And that in turn embarrassed me more: mine is supposed to be a profession of empathy. I tried to shut out the man Cassidy and focus on Madeleine. Besides obvious mental problems she has chill, fever. Suggested she go into shelter so she wouldn’t get seriously ill.
“I can’t leave the Holy Mother now that She’s under attack,” Madeleine wailed.
“Madeleine, you’re undernourished, and you seem feverish. If you don’t get some help now, you’ll end up in an emergency room and then you’ll be away from your Holy Mother for a long time.” Hector tried to sound caring, not impatient. “You need antibiotics, warmth, and lots of fluids.”
“You listen to the doctor, Maddy,” Jacqui put in. “He could be home, but he’s come out here to look out for you because he cares whether you live or die.”
“Let me at least give you another shot of Prolixin,” Hector urged. “You know you do better with the drug: you feel safer and you come aboveground where you can get food and fresher air.”
“No!” Madeleine screamed. “You’re trying to cloud my mind. When you gave me that shot I couldn’t hear what the Virgin was telling me.”
Cassidy rolled his eyes. “She’s down here listening to the Virgin Mary?”
“The Holy Mother cries tears of blood, they come here through the wall.” Madeleine put her fingers into the rusty water and showed them to Cassidy, who backed away in disgust.
“She’s been down here for weeks,” Hector said. “How come you suddenly felt the urge to clean her part of the sidewalk?”
Got a highly colored story of a drunk woman attacking hotel guests as they left the garage. Jacqui pursed her lips, pulled me to one side: said Cassidy might mean Luisa—J sent Luisa here to doss down in their old generator box when Patsy Wanachs threw her out. Would Luisa attack someone? Might have the desire but certainly not the strength: she’s a pretty frail woman these days. More to the point, what’s become of her? Cassidy didn’t know, certainly didn’t care.
Jacqui said, Doc, you may not know this, but sidewalk doesn’t belong to hotel, belongs to the people. Can’t stop someone hanging out on the sidewalk.
Kind of legal information you pick up if you’re on the streets: I certainly would never have known about it. Cassidy, angry, trying to intimidate Jacqui, said the Pleiades had legal advice for what they’d done, did she want to sue the hotel? She just stared, didn’t say anything, so he turned to me, his face swelling into a listen-to-me-young-man expression—he was serving me notice here and now that homeless women were not going to camp out at his garage. And if I was going to encourage them, he’d see that the hotel sued me. Took my name and my hospital affiliation. Wonder if I should notify Hanaper? And get lecture on overstepping my responsibilities. Why rush it? Will doubtless come in time.
On that cheerful note, returned to hospital. Stopped at the library to do a computer search to see if Madeleine had company in her quest for the Virgin. Apparently her delusion becoming quite common as we close in on millennium—in some tiny Kansas town a wall painting of the Lady of Guadalupe is crying tears of blood. Is happening in Italy as well. Started reading a long New Yorker story on how the Catholic church investigates these claims, until my first Friday night crisis called me to emergency room.
It seems truly incomprehensible that someone like Rafe Lowrie, running Orleans St. Church’s Bible study, listening to God and repeating his words to anyone who will listen, is labeled a sane member of society, but Madeleine underground hearing messages from the Virgin is psychotic. Of course, she is psychotic, but why isn’t he also?
13
Call for a Goddess
MARA WAS LOCKED in her bedroom channeling the goddess Gula. Her grandfather and older sister tried to pretend they didn’t know, didn’t care, but every night when the incense started to seep down the hall to the sitting room they found themselves unable to read or talk or concentrate on anything but the smell. They couldn’t really hear Mara—the doors in the apartment were too thick for sound to travel—but they sat tensed, straining for the rise and fall of her voice.
Dr. Stonds invited Professor Verna Lontano to dinner one evening to inform Mara how utterly spurious was her knowledge of ancient Sumer and its deities. Professor Lontano, an old friend of the doctor’s, was the Assyriologist Mara phoned four years earlier, when she was trying to get information about Grannie Selena. Professor Lontano had spent her adult life on the literature of Sumerian deities, and had nothing but withering contempt for New Age goddess worship.
“You young women are intellectual slovens,” she said in her precise, accented English. “You want to imagine a gynocentric universe and so you totally pervert historical reality by assigning to the old goddesses a supremacy they never held. You are unwilling to do the hard work, the research”—pronounced with a great rolling of r’s that spattered the table like semiautomatic bullets—“to find out what the ancients actually said and believed. So you take a few translated texts and build a whole theology from them. Why? Why not stick to the gods you know—money, sex, the usual deities of your generation of American?”
To Harriet’s intense embarrassment, Mara bent her head, pulled her legs up to sit yoga-style on the dining room chair, and began a high-pitched wordless wail. After howling for a minute or two she began to chant in the same high nasal:
“The goddess speaks through her unworthy vessel. O Maiden, weak thou art but full of yearning for the truth, for the healing rays that Gula sheds on sick humanity, how many thousand years have I waited, bound in silence, weakening ever, until one came who could hear my Voice.”
“Mara! We’ve had enough of your showing off. Put your feet back on the floor and converse like a normal human being.” Dr. Stonds’s sharp voice usually silenced blethering subordinates, but Mara continued to wail as though her trance were too intense to acknowledge human speech.
“She’s not going to listen to you, Grand-père” Harriet said. “Why don’t we take our coffee across to the sitting room. As soon as her audience has disappeared she’ll quiet down fast enough.”
“This is what she does every night?” Professor Lontano stopped to admire the Louise Nevelson marble in the hall as they crossed to the living room. “She sounds intensely lonely. I’m surprised she’s taking Mrs. Ephers’s illness so hard—I never thought they got along. What’s the word from the rehabilitation hospital?”
“Oh, Mephers is recovering well,” Harriet said. “They say she can come home in another week, but of course we don’t want her to be under any stress, and if Mara is going to be difficult …”
She left the sentence hanging, but the doctor said, “She’ll have to leave. This was Hilda’s—Mrs. Ephers’s—home thirty years before Mara was ever thought of. I’m not sending Hilda to a nursing home because my own granddaughter is so ill-bred as to make life miserable for her. And, of course, to a certain extent we hold Mara responsible for the heart attack to begin with.”
Harriet thought the wailing in the dining room behind them stopped momentarily at that, like an electric current briefly dipping, but the maid from the temporary agency brought coffee in just then and the clatter of cups covered the texture of Mara’s chant. As soon as the woman withdrew, Harriet pulled the sliding doors shut.
“Out of curiosity,” she asked the professor, “who is Gula?”
“The Sumerian goddess of healing. Curious that Mara should have fixed on her—feminists usually choose Inanna because
she was the most important female deity. They try to promote her to head the pantheon and go through some convoluted rigmarole showing the creation of patriarchy through the loss of power by the female gods.”
“Oh, Mara isn’t a feminist,” Dr. Stonds snorted. “She’s just a confused young woman who picks up ideologies as a cloak for her unhappiness.”
Professor Lontano looked around for a place to set down her coffee cup. The marquetry table next to her was clearly an art object. Harriet rose with her usual precise movements and put the cup on the tray.
“I didn’t know Mara was interested in Sumer,” Lontano said. “She did call me once, three or four years ago, to ask if I’d known Selena’s father.”
“I don’t believe you ever mentioned this. What did you say?” The doctor frowned.
Lontano shrugged. “There wasn’t much I could say, except what you’ve always known—that I met Selena briefly at the dig near Nippur. I sat in on a seminar Professor Vatick ran, but in those days we had very formal notions about the distinction between faculty and students—I didn’t know him or his family socially. Anyway, Mara wasn’t interested in him—she only wondered if there was any doubt about her grandmother’s death. At the time she called me I thought she was trying to cloak those stories she used to make up about Selena and Beatrix in some reality. She never brought up the matter again.”
“I wish Mara would cloak herself in reality,” Harriet said. “She claims she found a letter in Mephers’s room addressed to our mother, from someone in France, but her story was all gibberish. Mephers found Mara in there rummaging through her things. That was what brought on her heart attack, so I suppose Mara had to make up something to convince herself she wasn’t to blame for Mephers’s illness. I have to confess I was curious, so I looked myself. Of course there was nothing there.”
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