Cynthia was so white that a pimple on her forehead glowed red. Mara, glancing at her, knew that as soon as he was alone with her Rafe would vent his furies on her. Suddenly, without thinking of anything except that she ought to do something to protect Cynthia, she climbed up on her wobbly metal chair. One or two people looked at her, but the rest kept up their arguments.
Patsy Wanachs, drawn by the furor, ran into the room. She took a police whistle from around her neck and blew into it, a long shrill blast that momentarily lulled the noise.
Into that relative silence Mara called, “The wall does perform miracles. On Tuesday night Madeleine cursed the garage manager, I heard her curse him with a plague of boils. This afternoon they took him to the hospital. One of the parking attendants told me: he broke out all over his body, he couldn’t even breathe, they were in his lungs.”
“It works.” LaBelle’s eyes were shining. “Praise Jesus! Praise Mary! I’m going down there. Maybe She’ll heal me or cure my bad knees. Nicole—you got female problems. Let’s see what She can maybe do.”
Mara grabbed Cynthia’s hand and dragged her into the buzzing heart of the swarm.
35
Wailing Wall
Looking for Starr through the streets beneath Michigan Avenue, or even in clay tunnels dug deep in the earth. The darkness so complete that it denies the presence of light in the world, but find my way without groping, as though the blood in my veins divines the route.
Suddenly the wall of the hotel appears, and Starr is there, at the far end of the scaffolding, the diva at her side like a cat belonging to a witch. Starr beckons, not with word, or even gesture, but some expression in her eyes, apparent even in the dark. The distance between overcome, the people between, milling chanting homeless women, miracle-seeking suburbanites, only shadows that can’t see or hear. The real miracle, that sweet inwardness, enveloping as if it were the earth itself, the underground tunnels, covering but not suffocating, home, I’m home, I’m—
He woke with the words on his lips. He was in his own bed, again at three in the morning, weeping with despair at the loss of the dream. He had been with her, in her, how could he be only here alone in bed?
He couldn’t remember leaving the hotel and returning to his apartment. He had stayed at the Pleiades garage long after Mara Stonds ran from him, long after the first miracle seeker appeared, drawn as Harriet feared by the television report.
Sat on the curb, too tired to move, expecting at any minute the simian Mr. Cassidy to emerge to confront me. Could picture him with his firehose, spraying me as he had Madeleine Carter. By and by one of the garage attendants came out. Recognized me from previous visits: was I the doctor who had looked after the poor loca ingenua It was a shame, a terrible shame, what had happened to her. But the boss, he was ill. Maybe stricken down by God, in response to his cruelty to the ingenua.
I never knew God to pay such intimate attention to the homeless and mentally ill, but maybe Madeleine special in divine eyes because of her attention to the Virgin Mary. Found out later that Cassidy was brought to Midwest Hospital, with severe asthma attack & hives—broke out after he was chased by TV cameras into hotel president’s office. He has history of asthma and allergies, and excitement or fear triggered the attack—as often happens without God’s involvement.
Garage attendant bustled off to deal with a car that was stopping at the garage entrance. A sightseer, drawn by television report of Madeleine’s wall. Sightseer, a long lean woman of forty-something, in jeans and a Notre Dame T-shirt, eyes bulging from hyperthyroidism. Assumed since I was sitting on curb I knew something about this miracle-producing crack. Tried to disclaim all knowledge, but garage guy said, oh, yes, this man doctor, he look after poor dead woman.
She tells me she is protected by the blue aura of Mary: “My husband didn’t want me coming here. Underneath Chicago? he says, It’s bad enough on the lighted streets. We live out in Downers Grove, you know, where we don’t really have any black people” (scrutinizing my Semitic features in the dim light to make sure she hasn’t committed a blunder), “but I told him the blue aura would look after me. If this wall is authentic my prayer circle will be out tomorrow to pray the rosary as a group. But why is the scaffolding up here? What were you thinking, to let someone block off what may be a sacred site?”
She tries to insinuate herself past spikes, gets T-shirt caught in one of them, but manages to touch the wall. The garage man, uselessly helpful, tells her the poor ingenua always sat further down, shows the sightseer a place ten feet further from the garage: “Isn’t that right, señor medico?” Maybe that was where Madeleine used to sit, I don’t know.
Hector couldn’t bring himself to move from the curb. As the evening deepened into night, other miracle seekers drifted by to inspect the wall. The woman protected by Mary’s blue aura stayed most of the evening, directing newcomers to the crack that Nicolo, the garage man, had shown her, then pointing out Hector. He was her doctor, he knows more than he’s telling.
What Hector couldn’t tell, wouldn’t tell himself, hidden in that underside of mind he didn’t want to inspect, was the reason he stayed at the curb: if he sat there long enough Starr might appear, as she had—was it only two nights ago? The winds of his emotional storms so buffeted him that every hour took on the weight of many days.
Around nine Nicolo brought me a plate of hot beans and rice. As I sat poking at food a great swarm of women arrived on foot. Was shrinking into shadows—couldn’t take another band of miracle seekers—when Jacqui emerged from the pack to hug me.
“Doctor! I knew you were a true friend of Maddy’s. How like you to be sitting in vigil for her.”
How unlike me. My thoughts have never been so little on the ill and halt entrusted to my care. I’m like a large raw patch of neediness, so much so that even the embrace of a middle-aged, overweight homeless woman feels like the clasp of true friendship.
Some fifteen or twenty women from Hagar’s House were suddenly filled with the Spirit, and led here to the wall. Jacqui’s partner Nanette was with her, Mara Stonds—pointed out to me by Jacqui—didn’t recognize her: she’d shaved her head bald sometime between six, when I talked to her, and now. And with her, looking terrified, the unfortunate daughter of Rafe Lowrie, whom I met two weeks ago dispensing Bibles at his study group.
The women didn’t know why they’d come—a surge of anger, or fear, over Madeleine’s suicide: they had to come to the spot, they couldn’t forget her, lest they themselves be consigned to oblivion.
The women began chanting conflicting demands: free beds for the homeless; arrest the killers of Madeleine Carter; let us get to the Virgin’s wall. LaBelle was so overcome with the desire to get to the wall, to feel the Virgin’s saving power wrapped around her, that she began to tug on the spikes, trying to tear them loose.
Nicolo, the garage attendant, seconded her enthusiastically. “What it will hurt, we take off this one small area belonging to the ingenua?”
He bustled into the back of the garage, emerging a few minutes later with a pipe wrench. He unscrewed a few spikes, enough for the women to go one at a time to the wall, bent over almost double, and touch the bleeding crack.
Tourists continue to come by in dribs and drabs, an almost festive air of protest. By and by the tumult rouses someone from aboveground. Or maybe one of the hotel guests complains in the upper lobby: not everyone enamored of the scene. Squarefaced man in suit and black Infiniti yells angrily for Nicolo. I’m paying for garage time, not a fucking carnival. Nicolo instantly changes: withdraws into himself, almost touches his forelock, smiles, ingratiating, so sorry, sir.
Anyway, around ten or so management arrives, bringing the cops (a patrol car has cruised by a few times without stopping). Now six or seven cars swarm to the scene. They love to turn on their flashing strobes, to gather, be a group of comrades, swashbuckling, gang members, the toughest gang. They turn to me, the white man on the spot, as if I knew anything. But I tell them these women are praying
for a dead friend, woman who committed suicide here.
Some man from the hotel demands the cops round up and arrest the women. If it were just the homeless maybe they would, but apparently the hyperthyroid woman protected by blue aura of Mary has some kind of important connection—brother a bishop, she a big donor to Holy Name Cathedral—so for now the police just stand by, watching.
Around ten the lights and everything must have woken the birds, confused them into thinking it was day.
The sparrows began chattering, swooping from the rafters to perch on the scaffolding, their cheeping so loud it drowned the women’s shouts and the static on the police walkie-talkies. Hector, looking up to see the bars darkened by the mass of birds, caught sight of Starr at the edge of the wall. His mind had tricked him so many times that day that he looked away, shut his eyes, held his breath, counted twenty, but when he turned she was still there, Luisa at her elbow.
36
Operatic Performance
UNDER THE LEGS of the grand piano Luisa’s dreams became feverish. At first she had been back at her apartment in Campania, nestled on soft grass in the garden. Suddenly the earth gave way and she was deep underground, bleeding from breasts and vulva. She tried to wipe the blood away, but found she was chained and couldn’t move her hands. Great copper shields bound her breasts to her body and a copper girdle encircled her vulva.
A chattering group passed, a happy family outing—the ruddy man carrying a great wooden bed, his parents and his own two sons at his side. She struggled through her drugged sleep to call to them, but in the nature of dreams could make no sound, and they did not see her.
Behind them came a procession, column upon column of drooping weary people, shuffling, not marching, heads bowed, each carrying a pitcher of beer. Luisa’s throat was raw; she yearned for that beer more than for life or freedom. As she watched, the people poured their beer in front of a giant crucifix. The earth opened and swallowed the family and the bed. The fissure was spreading across the ground to where she lay helplessly bound.
Boulders tumbled down from high cliffs, crashing and echoing, and then their booming turned into the threatening hum of violins and she was in her familiar nightmare: kneeling in front of the Madonna, bass viols, red-faced man threatening to kill her, world whirling as she shrieked for help, her voice in danger, the Madonna leering at her with hawk’s eyes under a horrific wig with cow’s horns. She woke, thrashing in Starr’s arms, to a pounding on the door.
“Who is in here! What’s going on in here?” The voice was muffled by the heavy door.
Luisa struggled upright. The familiar bile rose in her throat. In the dark, windowless room she scrabbled for a cup or waste can to catch the greenish dribble but could find nothing but her silk jacket. She wiped her face on the sleeve.
The man pounded on the door again, and then turned a key in the lock. Flashlight sprayed the room, bounced off the piano, found the two figures underneath.
“Who the hell let you in here? What are you doing here? Get out of the opera house. You hear me?” It was the night watchman.
The diva’s full-voiced scream as she dreamt had echoed eerily down the hall, bringing him running on clumsy feet to the practice room. He’d imagined horrors, someone held hostage, rape, murder, and had already pressed the alarm button on his phone to summon help, seeing himself in the morning paper: hero saves tourist.
Well, there were horrors here aplenty, but none that would get him a mayor’s medal. Food scraps and an empty beer bottle on the floor, a smell of stale vomit, two naked women, so flushed with sleep and sex that his own stomach churned with mixed loathing and desire.
He slapped the light on. “Get your clothes on. Sluts! How’d you get into the opera house, anyway? Get dressed and get out!”
“I am Madame Montcrief, my good ape.” Luisa spoke haughtily from her pile of clothes. “Have the common courtesy to get out of my practice room.”
“Madam? I’ll say you’re a madam. Get back to your whorehouse,’
The watchman was shrieking with embarrassment; he couldn’t bring himself even to think the words of what had been going on between the women, both naked, one with the largest breasts he’d ever seen, even in surreptitious studies of porn magazines. Those breasts were brushing the shoulders of the scrawny one who’d spoken to him, while the look of satiation on the large woman’s face—it was terrible, that two women could … His own wife’s face flashed in his mind, lying beneath him in bed, her expression as empty as if she were washing dishes, what if his wife and another woman—this woman—were—how would she look?
He longed to seize those giant breasts, but they filled him with fear as much as longing; he hovered over her, his hands out. The big woman looked at him and laughed, so harshly that his desire withered, turned to shame, and then to a greater anger. He yanked the scrawny one from under the piano, thrust her into the hall, kicked the clothes after her.
“Get dressed, get these clothes on, you bitch.”
The big woman, still laughing, climbed easily to her feet and pulled on a skirt and a T-shirt. Once she was clothed, he saw she was really quite an ordinary size, no taller than he was himself. It was only that ridiculous hair, sticking out around her head like the horns of a wild cow, that made her seem so large.
“I can’t believe the opera would hire a cretin like you. How dare you?” Luisa hooked her bra with shaking fingers. “When I’ve talked to the management you’ll be lucky if you still have a job. Singers are not to be disturbed in their practice rooms. I am Luisa Montcrief, a name which doubtless means nothing to an imbecile like you. I am preparing my comeback. I had planned to make it in Chicago, but if this is how Lyric Opera treats its stars, it will be a cold day in hell before I return.”
She picked up the gold blouse, now a mass of stains and rips, the black Valentino suit turned gray and shapeless from vomit, dust, nights of sleeping in it. She wouldn’t be bringing Clio back, either, not when the ungrateful bitch let her clothes get into this disgraceful shape.
The elevator pinged in the distance and heavy feet pounded up the hall toward them: a patrolman responding to the alarm, which the watchman had forgotten sending. The watchman waved his flashlight at the trash in the practice room, told the patrolman what he’d found: homeless women breaking into the opera house. And look at that, he shouted, seeing for the first time a pool of liquid inside the piano: the bitches poured beer into this Steinway. Seventy-thousand-dollar piano and the cunts trashed it.
They were everywhere, like rats, the patrolman agreed. Seeing Luisa naked from the waist down, you juice this one?
I think they were, you know, doing it together, the watchman’s face crimson. That one—pointing at Starr—you’ve never seen tits like that.
Doing it together? The patrolman’s eyes glistened: he’d always imagined, never seen. Maybe they need to see what a real man is like.
Pinning Luisa against the wall—asking for it, stupid bitch, standing there waving her bush in his face—unzipping his uniform pants; the watchman giving a warning as the other one came up behind him, kissing the back of his shirt with those breasts. One at a time, girls, he started to say, there’s plenty for everyone, when a weight—later, in his report, he claimed the woman had a stone, a boulder: it couldn’t have been her bare hands pushing him against the wall, shoving him to the floor, as the watchman stood with his mouth agape, too stupid to come to his help.
Luisa pulled on her clothes while Starr stood over the prone cop. Starr didn’t do anything else, just stood there roaring out that rasping mocking laugh, but in the morning, called to the First District to verify an assault of a police officer in the performance of his duties, the opera house watchman couldn’t remember Starr’s passive stance, positively saw her holding a weapon, yes, a slab of concrete, must have found it in the rubble around the side of the building. And then the one who said she was a singer, she picked up her suitcase and the two of them took off. No, he didn’t follow them, he was too worried ab
out the cop, although the officer got back on his feet without any trouble once the stairwell door banged shut on the women.
Starr and Luisa followed the river as it curved north and east through the city, stepping around sleeping bodies, bags of garbage, discarded refuse of every description. At Michigan Avenue they turned south and tracked through the maze of alleys to the Hotel Pleiades.
37
Princess in Trouble
FOR THE LAST three weeks, miracle seekers as well as ordinary sightseers from all over America have been flocking to this unprepossessing spot below Michigan Avenue to discover whether a homeless woman’s hope was true. Madeleine Carter believed with all her heart that the Virgin Mary was weeping tears of blood through a crack on this wall. So intense was her faith that she kept returning to this spot despite the most strenuous efforts of the hotel that owns it to drive her away.”
Don Sandstrom’s chiseled good looks were replaced on the television screen by a photograph of Madeleine Carter. Harriet, watching on the firm’s television, had already seen the snapshot: a copy was in the file that Scandon and Atter’s investigators were putting together for the hotel’s defense. The photograph showed Madeleine twelve years earlier, in between her second and third pregnancies, holding her year-old son while her two-year-old daughter clutched her hand. Madeleine’s hair was neatly combed, her dark sweater buttoned up to the throat. She was smiling for the camera, but there was a strained, anxious look around her eyes that made her appear older than twenty-three.
Harriet had started her file on Madeleine Carter the previous Friday, when Judith Ohana from the First Freedoms Forum filed suit on behalf of Mara Stonds, Jacqui Dotson et al, to require the Hotel Pleiades to maintain the garage wall as a place where people could worship the Virgin. Among the statements in the suit that the hotel—and Harriet—planned to contest was that the hotel had driven Madeleine Carter to kill herself because of the Pleiades’ extreme opposition to constitutionally protected expressive activity—in this case, worshiping at the wall.
Ghost Country Page 25