Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  “Who are Mr. and Mrs. Minsky?” Harriet asks, listless again.

  “Oh, your grandfather operated on his mother, must be ten years ago now. He couldn’t save the woman in the end, but of course the family was very grateful to him for everything he did. And poor Mr. Minsky, it’s his sister who’s been hanging out on the streets with Mara. That drunk singer, Luisa Monterief, your grandfather used to think she had the greatest voice he ever heard, but pride goeth before destruction, I always say.

  “When you meet him, you won’t believe Mr. Minsky’s her twin brother. Even stranger than thinking you and Mara are related—she’s only your half sister, after all, but twins! It seems as though there’s never enough character to spare for two children.”

  Harriet stands in the entryway, not moving, so Mephers prods her toward the living room. “Miss Harriet’s home, Doctor,” she says, performing as a servant whenever there are strangers in the place, and Harriet moves dully after her: it’s one thing to flee Leigh Wilton’s demands, but Harriet isn’t strong enough to evade Grandfather or Mephers. Grandfather is in his usual armchair, talking to a couple on the couch who look to be in their early forties.

  Harriet plants chaste lips on Grandfather’s smooth cheek, always shaved a second time on coming home, accepts introductions. Like Mephers, she’s startled that the man is Luisa Montcrief’s twin: in her photos the diva appears lean, slim, with aquiline features, while Minsky is short, with the face of a kindly but harassed toad. His wife is an unlikely partner to such homeliness, attractive in the subdued style of a suburban matron, sandy hair cropped short to display suntanned cheeks and wide blue eyes.

  “I’m glad you’re home, my dear: you can advise us here.” Grandfather hands her a glass of dry sherry. “As I told you, Harriet’s a lawyer. She’ll make sure we do this thing properly.”

  The Minskys launch into nervous explanation. Janice always a problem, but in the last three years totally out of hand.

  “Who is Janice?” Harriet tries to be interested.

  “Oh, that’s her real name. Luisa Montcrief is only her stage name,” Karen says, and proceeds to do most of the speaking for the couple.

  The Minsky name good enough to pay bills but not good enough for the stage—Harry interrupts to say maybe Janice had a point, anti-Semitism, hard to have a public career—Karen cuts him off: that’s neither here nor there. Janice always had a problem with alcohol, not usually seen in Jews, so it took them a long time to recognize it for what it was. The director of the Metropolitan Opera liked her, protected her career.

  Harry interrupts again: Karen, don’t cloak the facts, Ms. Stonds isn’t a baby. They were lovers, that’s why Piero Benedetti covered up for her. Then three years ago she passed out onstage at the Met in the last act of Otello. She’s kneeling in prayer in front of the Madonna, and is supposed to climb into bed while the bass viols announce Otello’s arrival. Instead, my sister passed out. A huge uproar, Benedetti refused to rescue her again, no one would sign her to sing—agent put out word she was ill. Since then, one thing after another. Spent all her money, resents me for selling her assets to pay her bills.

  Karen joins in again. She lived with us for a while, but after she charged forty thousand in hotel bills to Harry’s MasterCard we consulted your grandfather’s Dr. Hanaper. His advice on tough love.

  Karen recounts the disasters of the summer, her daughter Becca, impressionable teenager, infatuated with—not with her aunt so much, as with the romance of aunt’s life.

  “Now Luisa—Janice—is encouraging Becca to join her on the streets with this strange woman Starr she’s picked up. Becca thinks it’s exciting, she thinks Janice is a martyr in the cause of free speech. She—Becca—she’s started sneaking out of the house, coming into Chicago without telling us, to talk to lawyers, to picket with Janice and Starr at that wall. We said we wouldn’t pay any more bills for Luisa, that she has to face up to her problems. But now we’re too worried about what she may do to Becca. We want to get Janice off the streets and into a facility where Becca will have to acknowledge that her aunt is a very sick woman, not a free speech heroine. Dr. Stonds says he’s worried about his granddaughter as well. And, frankly, we think Becca is imitating Mara—Mara being close to her own age, but just enough older to look like a role model to her. So we came to talk it over with him.”

  Grandfather snorts. Mara as a role model to an impressionable girl, would be ludicrous if his granddaughter weren’t so destructive. Time to pick her up, put her under a psychiatrist’s care where she belongs. Promise to the parish council … as her guardian an obligation to look after her own well-being …

  Harriet sits up so abruptly, sherry spills onto the nubbed fabric of her skirt. “You’re hospitalizing Mara? When did you decide that?”

  Grandfather’s bushy brows flip up in surprise. “We’ve been discussing this since last week’s parish council meeting. I know you’re overworked these days, my dear, but surely you know I’ve asked a couple of men from hospital security to try to intercept her at your client’s garage this week. They haven’t been able to get near her: like all psychotics she’s crafty.”

  “Psychotic? Grand-père …” Harriet’s voice trails away: she doesn’t want to argue over Mara in front of strangers.

  The doctor, self-assured in his rectitude, doesn’t have such qualms. “Like her mother before her. Bad blood, I’m afraid it came into the family with my wife, and was accentuated in our only child, who died under difficult circumstances.

  “When that prize loser, Hanaper’s young resident Hector Tammuz, couldn’t talk Mara into coming in for treatment, I thought I’d let things run their course, but she gets worse, not better. Our local church is actually having a prayer service tomorrow on her account. If Mara finds out about that, her swollen ego will escape its boundaries altogether. No, my mind is made up. I’ve told the police that it’s time to track Mara down, get her into a psychiatric ward where she belongs.”

  Track her down. Grandfather in safari jacket with a large gun and a paddy wagon full of beaters.

  “Is that really necessary, Grand-père? Maybe Mara is uncomfortable out onthe streets, but she’s not doing anyone any harm.”

  “Not doing anyone any harm?” The doctor’s thick brows contract in annoyance. “I thought we three just made clear to you that she’s encouraging hysterical women, and corrupting the Minsky girl.”

  Harriet turns to the Minskys, asks what her sister has actually done to their daughter. Egged Becca on to run away from home, to flout their authority, is what it sounds like. In concert with Harry’s twin sister.

  “Surely, my dear,” Grandfather adds, “you yourself would like to see an end to your sister’s embarrassment of your clients at the hotel.”

  Harriet thinks that her clients have spent the day embarrassing her so badly that anything Mara did would be a fitting revenge, wishing her sister would find a bazooka and blow the Hotel Pleiades to atoms.

  Aloud she says only, “Illinois allows the incarceration of a mentally ill person only if you can prove that she is in imminent danger of hurting herself or others, and I don’t think Mara has shown any signs of that. You could probably force a hearing, I don’t know, maybe your tame head doctor Hanaper could persuade a judge that she’s suicidal, but I imagine really good counsel would prove she isn’t.”

  Grandfather is incredulous. “My dear Harriet, are you implying that you would defend Mara’s right to run wild through this city? Surely any judge would agree that a girl who abandons this apartment to live on the streets is by definition mentally unbalanced.”

  Harriet shakes her head. The chasm between them seems so wide that she can’t think of any words that might bridge it.

  She turns bleak eyes to the Minskys. “I’m sorry, Ms. Minsky. It certainly is a pity that Madame Montcrief isn’t able to perform anymore, but a judge might recommend that you try to resolve this through a family intervention, rather than in the courts. Mental health law isn’t my specialty, howev
er, so it would be better if you found a lawyer who knows the history of how courts have interpreted statutes on involuntary admissions to psychiatric hospitals.”

  Harriet puts her sherry glass down on the pearwood marquetry, not bothering about a coaster, not worrying about leaving a stain on the antique wood. She gets up abruptly, without even mouthing farewell platitudes to the Minskys, and goes to her own suite of rooms. The apartment is well soundproofed; she doesn’t hear the visitors leave, but a few minutes later Grandfather comes into her bedroom.

  “Harriet, I know you’ve been under a strain lately, but I must say I’m astonished at your behavior just now. The Minskys are most concerned about their daughter; they were consulting me and wanted to consult you, and you treated them with extraordinary rudeness. By the way, shouldn’t you take your shoes off before lying on that cover?”

  Harriet sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed, “I don’t want you to lock up Mara.”

  “Harriet! What has gotten into you? You surely don’t think she’s sane, do you, taking up with that woman Starr, hanging around on Underground Wacker with drunks and homeless people?”

  “She’s not crazy, just lonely, oh, as I am myself, lonely for someone who cares about me, about Harriet the person, I mean, not Harriet the showpiece who jumps through hoops for anyone who demands it.”

  “You’re overtired,” the doctor says coldly. “You’re starting to sound as melodramatic as your sister. Would a sane person confuse a homeless woman with her dead mother? Yet isn’t that what Mara did, the night that creature Starr appeared? You told me yourself that she claimed it was Beatrix, when she knows perfectly well that Beatrix has been dead and buried for seventeen years.”

  “I’m sure she knows it deep down,” Harriet says, “but whenever she asked about our mother, you or Mephers always frowned and changed the subject, so she thinks there’s a mystery attached to her death. If you’d talked about it, instead of only saying how evil Beatrix was, and the less said about her the better—”

  “It’s time Harriet knew the truth about Beatrix,” Mephers interrupts from the doorway, where she’s been standing without Harriet noticing. “Then she’d realize that the sooner Mara is put away where she can’t hurt herself the better.”

  Harriet stares. “The truth? I—I know the truth. Beatrix died when she fell in her bath, you told me that at the funeral.”

  Grandfather says, what good can it do to rake up all that ancient history now, but Mephers is angry at the idea of Harriet ranging herself with Mara. A dose of the truth, like a dose of salts, would clean her out, cure her.

  Grandfather and Mephers argue and Harriet listens, feeling ice build up around her, burying her in the heart of a glacier. Beatrix dealing drugs at the corner of Sixty-third and Cottage, arrested in a cheap motel along with the man—black man—she’d been having sex with that night. Grandfather furious, getting a court to declare her mentally incompetent, putting her in the psychiatric wing at Midwest. Beatrix, stealing a phonograph record from the recreation room, hiding it under her shirt, breaking it in the middle of the night and slicing her wrists open in the bathtub with the sharp plastic, dead before anyone checks on her.

  The embarrassment to Grandfather—in his own hospital, the ultimate insult of an ungrateful daughter. His successful efforts to suppress any report of her death, so no one would know she was connected to him or to Harriet. Truth withheld from Harriet to protect her, from Mara because why should even Mara realize how tainted her blood is.

  Harriet feels hysterical laughter rising in her that she tries to hold at bay. “An accident in her bath? You told me she fell in her tub and died in an accident. I’ve had nightmares all my life, her face swelling up, she’s coming to get me, but it’s you who came to get me, you who got her. Beatrix was your daughter. What did you do to her after Grannie Selena left? The same thing you did to poor little Beebie, telling her she was tarnished in some dreadful way?”

  “How dare you?” Grandfather shouts. “Are you going to turn on me now, like Selena or Beatrix or Mara herself? We gave Mara everything, the best education, the best neighborhood, a good religious environment, and she’s repaid us just like Beatrix by hanging out with drunks and whores. I’m calling the police right now. I want that damned brat picked up tonight. I’m sick of the looks at church and work, the sympathy, for Christ’s sake people are pitying me!”

  As if Abraham Stonds should always be on top, never subject to the humiliation of being seen as human. He storms into his study to set in motion the wheels of authority.

  Mephers stays behind to talk to Harriet. “I told him we should have let you know the truth at the time. You need to know what kind of creature Beatrix really is, I said, and Mara, too. All those stories Mara used to make up, turning her mother into a heroine out of some adventure story, if she knew what a moral weakling Beatrix was she’d have sobered up in a hurry. But your grandfather wanted to spare you, and now look at the mess we’ve got on our hands. You need to calm down: you’re upsetting your grandfather by carrying on like this. And you’ve got your job and your future to think of. This is old, old history, and nothing to do with you.”

  “It’s everything to do with me. Why don’t the two of you rent a billboard, a skywriter, something big, proclaim to the city: we’re perfect, we’ve done no wrong. Get the whole world to bow down at your feet with wonder at your ice-cold charity.”

  Mephers stares at her, her mouth drawn into a tight line of disapproval, then says she’ll overlook Harriet’s outburst, she knows Harriet’s been working too hard lately, and stalks from the room.

  Harriet flings herself onto the bed and cries so hard her whole body bucks against the bedspread. She becomes aware of Grandfather, standing over her once more.

  “Harriet. This is most unbecoming. Pull yourself together. Hilda is terribly hurt. I want to hear you apologize to her. She’s been more a mother to you than Beatrix ever was and you owe her more than common courtesy.”

  Pull herself together. When it was their careless revelation that unglued her in the first place. No, it started earlier, when Leigh Wilton patted her bottom. Or, no, when Mara ran away and Harriet felt herself split between remorse and relief. But maybe it began when her own father died, leaving her mother to spin recklessly out of control. Oh, if only Grannie Selena hadn’t vanished, everything would have been different, they would have had a female protector against Grandfather’s laws.

  She stares up at the rigid face. “Please leave.”

  “Hilda is waiting in the hall for your apology. I’ll tell her to come in.”

  She springs from the bed. “Get out of this room. Now.”

  When he doesn’t move she deliberately unbuttons her blouse, drops it on the chair, unhooks her bra, takes off her pantyhose. He’s stiff with embarrassment. As she drops her skirt and bra on the floor he backs out of the room.

  She locks the door on his hissing interchange with Mephers and stares at herself in her bathroom mirror. Everything in the room is marble or glass, cold smooth surfaces that reflect her back to herself. Her blondness, her fine bones, that set her apart from coarse, tainted Mara, all these are too cold to touch. She needs someone, anyone, to hold on to. She has to find Mara. Poor little Beebie, what will it do to her, to find out this mythical mother became a drug dealer and a whore and then cut her wrists open to get away from Grandfather?

  Where in this great city can she find her sister? And find her before Grandfather drops his butterfly net over her and drags her to the hospital. He’ll inject Mara full of drugs, she’ll know nothing, remember nothing in such a state.

  Harriet dresses fast, frantic to get to her sister before the police or hospital security guards find her. Not in an evening gown with deep cleavage, as Leigh Wilton demanded, but jeans, T-shirt. She stuffs a handful of bills into her pockets with her driver’s license and flees the apartment.

  43

  Under a Gibbous Moon

  FEED ME, FEED me, feed me. A const
ant howl for sustenance that rose wherever they went, at the wall, in the crowds of homeless who slept on the beaches at night, even among well-dressed commuters jostling past them in the coffee shops in the morning. The clamor filled her brain, drove Verdi from her mind; she couldn’t believe Mara heard nothing.

  Her head had always been filled with music, ever since she was five and reproduced a whole record of children’s songs that Grandma Minsky played for her and Harry. (Listen to her, Morris, Grandma called to Grandpa, working on accounts in the living room; the little one heard these only once and can sing them perfectly. Grandpa grunted, while Harry, furious with her for getting special attention, threw the record to the floor and jumped on it until it broke. After that, she could hardly hear speech unless it had something to do with song or her own voice, first children’s songs, then already in high school small concert pieces, Grieg or Purcell, besides always getting the lead in school musicals, Harry once more scowling as she got fitted for costumes, whisked to rehearsals, bowed to applause. The time she starred as Maria in New Trier’s West Side Story—their very first year in Highland Park when she beat out the local girls, whom the music director had worked with for years—her jealous twin poured ketchup on her costume, but even that couldn’t keep the music from flooding her.)

  Now all she could hear was feed me, cherish me, heal me, save me—as if her own thirst, that bottomless craving that not even a quart of whiskey could slake, were magnified a hundred thousand times.

  Mara only laughed when Luisa complained. “You’ve got perfect pitch, it’s why you can hear everything around you. All I have to do is hand out sandwiches and watch people be happy to have something to eat.”