Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  Harriet managed to calm herself enough to sit by Grandfather for an hour, holding his hand and talking softly to him, but the actions seemed to be performed by an empty body. Her own mind, her own feelings no longer existed.

  It seemed as if when she left the apartment to find Mara Friday night, Harriet had stepped into a canoe at the head of a rapid, where she’d been tossed willy-nilly ever since. The shock of learning that Grandfather was (probably) not related to her was extreme. She had received so many shocks in the last few days, though—the news of her mother’s forced hospitalization and ultimate suicide, the dawning realization of Grandfather’s coldness, no, not just coldness but cruelty, to Mara, to Beatrix, really to Harriet herself, everything culminating in the horrible events in church on Saturday—that she could barely bring herself to think about Grandfather, or Grannie Selena, or Emil Farrenc.

  These blows didn’t matter as much to Mara. It wasn’t just that Harriet was the adored, Mara the abhorred, child, but Mara’s life had been so changed by her time with Starr and Luisa on the streets that nothing else seemed important to her. Yes, Mara remembered the picture she found in Mephers’s desk, the face that looked like Harriet’s, but Harriet should stop worrying about all that old history. What happened now was what mattered, what they made of their lives now, Sunday afternoon Harriet sat in her ivory-colored bed, knees to her chin, thinking, he gave me a home, education, love—and then she tried to remind herself of occasions of his love, and found herself remembering only his self-congratulatory praise when she pleased him: we were right to take you in, he would often repeat. Her past with Grandfather was like a spiral nebula, with chunks of rock flying from it as it wound further and further into itself, until she saw that the end of their relationship had been there from the beginning, from that first day she tiptoed around the apartment in her new patent Mary Janes, afraid to touch or speak lest the doctor and his formidable shadow Mrs. Ephers send her back to Beatrix. Grandfather angry, with Mara, or a hospital committee, she saw it many times over the years, until she forgot how hard she worked as a small child to keep him from ever being angry with her.

  When his rage spilled over onto her on Sunday she flinched from it, and almost started to placate him. All afternoon, as she and Mara packed and talked, she could feel his fury pulsing through the apartment, pounding into her like a bruising fist. Was this what you felt all these years, she asked Mara. How did you ever survive?

  Sunday night, before she and Mara went out to a restaurant for dinner, she told Grandfather she’d be gone by Tuesday, that she and Mara would move into their own apartment and leave him in peace. His face crumpled briefly, like a child whose mother is leaving it. But on Monday evening, when he returned from his normal rounds at the hospital, he had shellacked his shell of anger over the hurt. He announced to Harriet that he wanted Mara kept out of Hilda’s sight: Hilda was old, she’d had a dangerous heart episode, she didn’t need any more shocks from this monstrous thing he’d nurtured.

  When Harriet tried to defend Mara, Mrs. Ephers bounced from her chair and began pouring out her own vitriol, directed equally against Harriet and Mara. Harriet was appalled, as much by the housekeeper’s contorted face as her words, and tried to still her furies, but Mephers had moved beyond reason into a fantastic zone where Harriet became the cause of all the doctor’s misfortunes. If not for Harriet the doctor would never have taken in Mara. Even more, if not for Harriet, the doctor would have married her, Hilda Ephers, who had given her whole life to his care.

  “You think Mara is a changeling,” she screamed at the doctor. “They both are.”

  Stonds, confused by the outburst, thinking Hilda beside herself with fatigue, bustled her down the hall to her bedroom, where he hoped to induce her to take a pill, calm herself: Remember your heart, he counseled. In the privacy of that room, where Mrs. Ephers thought to consummate her love, she pulled out the damning letter from Zoe Farrenc, the photograph of Emil, thrust them and her own iron bosom on the doctor.

  Harriet heard Mephers’s thin voice rise to a squeal of rage and felt ill with disgust. She was exhausted by the day’s passions—by the week’s passions—and left Graham Street while the doctor was still closeted with his housekeeper. Mara had found a furnished apartment they could rent by the month. When Harriet got there, in a reversal of roles Mara rubbed her sister’s hands, made her tea and coaxed her into bed.

  In the morning, after Mephers’s assault on her at the hospital, Harriet spoke to the senior neurologist about her grandfather. The neurologist knew Harriet from those dinners at Graham Street and spoke to her gravely but frankly: They were doing their best for Dr. Stonds, but even if he regained consciousness he would be very ill. People did make amazing recoveries: Dr. Stonds himself had presided over many, but the neurologist did not want Harriet to feel an unwarranted optimism.

  Harriet sat with Grandfather until it was time to go to the funeral home to receive Starr. By that point, the news that Starr’s body was gone seemed like a minor disturbance, a small swell at sea after a ferocious storm.

  56

  Funeral Games

  DR. STONDS DIED two weeks before Thanksgiving. During the months of his illness, Harriet went to the hospital every morning to see him. She sat next to the stertorous figure, talking softly, dredging up what memories she had of joyous times with him and recounting them.

  In the afternoons she returned to the house she had bought with Mara at the northeast tip of city. While the weather held, the sisters swam and walked and tried to construct the past for each other: What was their mother like? Why did she take to drugs and drink? How much did it matter that Mara would never know who her father was? And what difference did it make if Emil Farrenc was their blood grandfather?

  They talked about it with Hector, and with Professor Lontano. The professor was a frequent visitor during that period. Lontano came in part because she’d been one of Abraham Stonds’s few real friends, but she also welcomed the chance to talk to Harriet and Mara about their grandmother Selena, and about Emil Farrenc.

  At first when Lontano came around, Mara treated the professor with her old rudeness. She was incredulous of the professor’s claims that she never noticed Harriet’s resemblance to Emil Farrenc in all the years she’d visited them at Graham Street.

  It was Hector who made Mara see things differently. People have an amazing capacity for denial, he said, and for putting things into boxes. Surely Mara had noticed that with Dr. Stonds and Mrs. Ephers—even in her own life? For the professor, if she was ashamed of herself for falling in love with a man who didn’t care for her, she might easily have blocked the memory of his face: And after all, by the time Grandfather Stonds adopted Harriet, Lontano’s affair with Farrenc had been over for more than a quarter century. It was surely the last thing the professor would have expected to see her old lover’s features in the face of the doctor’s granddaughter.

  Mara grudgingly accepted Hector’s interpretation but didn’t greet the professor with any warmth until the day Lontano said that Grandfather’s ideas about blood were outdated rubbish. The sisters had been arguing about whether to try to dig up information about Emil Farrenc’s family. Harriet had discovered that Zoe Farrenc had died two years earlier, leaving no heirs. Now Harriet wanted to find out what she could about Emil, perhaps because she looked so much like him, while Mara argued against the idea: Emil Farrenc didn’t sound like much of a prize, based on the letter from Zoe to their mother—why get involved with one more beastly grandfather?

  Over dinner that night, Harriet taxed Lontano. “Surely you must know something of his family. All I need is the name of the town where he was born—with that I could find out the rest.”

  The professor raised thin brows. “And why do you want to know, my dear Harriet?”

  Harriet flushed at the ironic tone. “His blood is in our veins, after all, and if I ever have a child—”

  “This obsession with blood.” Lontano threw up her hands. “I never could talk Abr
aham out of it, but don’t you girls start on it. It’s at the root of every horrific act of the twentieth century. I sometimes think you Americans, are as bad as the Nazis ever were, worrying about mixed races, or degenerate races, and the effect of Asian or African peoples on your Nordic blood. It’s a social construction, nothing else. For you, Abraham was your grandfather. I see no reason to stop calling him that, or to dig into that long-dead past.”

  After that Mara started looking forward to meals with Lontano. The professor, rummaging through old papers at the Oriental Institute, even found a diary that Grannie Selena’s mother had kept. It had been shipped to Chicago with all of August Vatick’s papers after his death, but no one had ever looked at it—what light could the scribblings of a mere wife shed on ancient Sumer, after all?

  In those brown and curling pages, Mara and Harriet read about their grandmother’s decision to pursue Emil Farrenc first in Iraq, and then on the ill-fated expedition in the Taurus Mountains. The diary recorded Selena’s death in a blizzard, when she wandered astray trying to find Farrenc’s tent in the storm. After the blizzard ended, Farrenc, as the strongest survivor in their party, hiked out to summon help It took him two weeks to reach the nearest village. By the time the rescue party returned, the Vaticks and the rest of their team had died.

  Harriet and Mara read the faint scrawl of Helen Vatick’s final entry:

  I see this journal is full of petty whining about August and Selena. If I could start over—try to find joy. Life is so short, don’t waste it on reproaches. I wish I could get that message to Abraham Stonds, and to my little granddaughter, whom I’ll never see.

  That last sentence pleased Mara: Someone had wished her mother joy, even if it was only a grandmother whose good wishes she never heard. At the same time, Mara threw up her hands in amazement over Selena: How could you be so foolish, and so passionate, that you’d go out in a blizzard after a man who wasn’t interested in you?

  Lontano looked quizzically at Mara: You fled this same house with that same kind of foolish passion. It was Mara’s turn to flush and grow silent.

  One night, Professor Lontano asked the question she’d wondered about since the day she saw Starr at the wall: Had Mara found Starr on the streets and dressed her hair to look like the horns of the gods on old Sumerian cylinder seals? The question popped out at a dinner where Jacqui and Nanette were explaining why they’d sat in on a television debate on Starr: Was she a saint or a demon, a homeless psycho or a supernatural creature (“That Don Sandstrom, he offered us a hundred dollars each,” Jacqui told Hector apologetically. “That’s a lot of money for a couple of homeless women”).

  “I remembered your researches at the museum last spring, Mara, and the question has been troubling me,” Lontano said.

  Mara was puffing out her cheeks in belligerence, but Hector and Harriet asked what a cylinder seal was.

  The professor pulled a small blue tube from her handbag. “I shouldn’t have this with me: It belongs to the museum. It’s a lapis lazuli seal from ancient Sumer, almost five thousand years old. The figure with the horns is the goddess Inanna, the most important female deity to the Sumerians.”

  The young people bent over her hand. Lontano held a magnifying glass over the stone so they could make out the carvings.

  “So you think Mara really brought the goddess Gula to life with her chants,” Hector teased the professor.

  Lontano didn’t know what she thought. She couldn’t help wondering about Mara, and her penchant for fabricating drama. Had the girl examined the old seals and then persuaded a homeless woman to dress her hair like Inanna’s? Lontano could imagine Mara, in her unhappy loneliness, rocking the city to its foundations by creating a cult around Madeleine Carter’s visions of the Virgin Mary’s blood.

  “She wasn’t like that, Starr, I mean,” Mara stammered. “You couldn’t make her do anything—she pretty much did whatever she felt like. She liked me to comb her hair, though. Every night she’d unbraid it, and in the morning I would comb it and wind it up again. So I know it was real hair, not like these on the seal, these are cow’s horns.”

  Lontano didn’t know whether to believe Mara or not: She had heard the girl tell so many stories over the years. But Hector had been there, and he didn’t seem to think Starr was some creation of Mara’s.

  “You don’t really think she was a goddess, do you, Professor?” Harriet asked. “I know people got hysterical about her for a while—had she performed miracles, did she raise Luisa Montcrief from the dead in church that day. But you know there’s a rational explanation for everything that happened. Even Grand-père thought at first that Luisa was dead, but he said someone as drunk as—well, as she used to be—she seems to be recovering now—but anyway, someone that drunk could have passed out so thoroughly that she didn’t seem to be alive.”

  “Oh, why does it matter?” Mara said. “Why do you have to label her? It’s enough that she was here. She healed me, she healed Hector and dozens of other people. She saved my life, and Luisa’s too. Does it matter whether she did something supernatural or not? You looked into her eyes, and you saw yourself, just as you were. For some people that reflection was too horrible to endure, like Rafe Lowrie—he couldn’t bear to see himself as he really was. But if you could stand your own reflection, you discovered you could like yourself.”

  Inevitably, the fervid interest in Starr—both her life and her death—grew less intense. Hector stopped trying to find her missing body. In the first months after her death, people were constantly reporting that they’d seen her: in a garage, a football field, a shopping mall. Hector would drop everything and run to the site, only to suffer a horrible letdown. Finally he would merely shrug on hearing of a sighting: Mara was right, the image they carried of Starr in their minds was the only sighting they would be given. Perhaps it was the only one they needed.

  Harriet for her part stopped trying to force the state’s attorney to make an arrest in Starr’s murder. No one could—or would—testify to who had actually struck the blows that killed Starr, his office kept telling her. The television footage wasn’t helpful; it showed the mob in action but not the faces of those around Starr. And to make mass arrests in a congregation so filled with wealthy Chicagoans as the Orleans Street church—the state’s attorney blanched at the thought of such deliberate political suicide. Harriet finally put the matter to rest.

  With the coming of autumn, Jacqui and Nanette stopped visiting Mara in Rogers Park and retreated to their old haunts on the streets. Professor Lontano returned to Padua, as she did every winter. Talk shows stopped mentioning Starr, and Don Sandstrom found himself stuck in Chicago still, Grandfather Stonds’s death seemed to Mara to bring an end to the first stage of her own life. She wanted to move on, but she didn’t know to what. Her new closeness to Harriet was losing its first intensity as well She would always cherish Harriet, but the two didn’t need to cling to each other now as they had for the past three months.

  The growing intimacy between Harriet and Hector also made Mara—oh, face it: jealous. Okay, Hector was Harriet’s new suitor, just as Mara had foretold the day she first saw Hector in the clinic. It wasn’t that Mara wanted Hector to be her own lover—rather, she was jealous of him for taking Harriet’s attention just when she and her sister were coming together for the first time.

  Midwest Hospital hadn’t fired Hector despite Dr. Stonds’s last dictated order to that effect. The residency committee, reviewing Hector’s record with Dr. Hanaper, said perhaps young Tammuz had gone overboard in his support of the homeless women downtown, but that situation had resolved itself, and they really couldn’t afford to run the psychiatry department short a resident so late in the year.

  Even though he still had his job, Hector didn’t think he could bear to spend another eighteen months doling out drugs and little scraps of therapy. It became natural for him to talk over his plans with Harriet: She was his own age, after all, and, like him, was trying to decide whether she still wanted the professi
on she’d begun training for at twenty.

  Harriet started meeting Hector for dinner before he had to go on call. When Sylvia Lenore asked Harriet to be the general counsel for a new foundation that would focus only on the homeless, Harriet talked it over more with Hector than with Mara. Harriet saw a role for Hector in Sylvia’s plan, to provide consistent mental health care for those on the streets. Hector began to feel excitement for his discipline again. He talked to Dr. Boten, the man he’d hoped to work under when he first came to Chicago, about getting supervision as a therapist while he finished his residency at Midwest. Hector and Harriet stayed up late at night, not to discuss Starr, but to laugh and talk over the brave new world they planned to create—and, naturally enough, Mara thought, those discussions ended in Harriet’s bed.

  It was natural, too, then, for Hector to join them at Grandfather’s funeral, and Mara tried to be glad that Harriet was comforted by his presence as much as by her own.

  The overflow crowd at the service included generations of Dr. Stonds’s students and colleagues, along with most of the members of the Orleans Street Church. The congregation thought the man filling in after Pastor Emerson’s abrupt retirement did a beautiful job on the eulogy. Still, as Wilma Thirkell whispered to Patsy Wanachs, it was shocking to see Mara Stonds sit there so boldly, as if she hadn’t brought on the doctor’s stroke by her outrageous behavior in this very building. And that Jewish doctor, Patsy whispered back, what’s he doing here—and didn’t he grab Harriet’s hand when they sat down?

  Linda Bystour leaned over the back of their pew to join in. I hear she’s living with him.

  Of course, Mrs. Thirkell muttered under cover of the voluntary, I never thought Harriet was as good as she made herself out to be: too perfect to be true, that cat-in-the-cream-pitcher smile, those polished manners—all window dressing, I always said.