Ghost Country
Page 39
Mrs. Ephers was beside herself when Harriet and Mara took their seats with Hector in the Stonds family pew. Not noticing, or not minding the avid interest of her neighbors, she called angrily to one of the ushers to escort the sisters elsewhere.
Harriet tried to talk to her. “Please, Mephers, I know you’re upset but can’t we sit in harmony for Grand-père’s sake—”
Mrs. Ephers cut her off “Don’t call me by that name, and don’t you dare refer to the doctor as your ’Grand-père!’ You turned against him in life, you and that—that Mara—you brought on his stroke—” She went on and on, her voice rising to a shriek, until the sisters and Hector moved across the aisle.
The doctor’s illness had affected Hilda Ephers sadly, Patsy Wanachs noticed. The housekeeper’s rigid grooming was a thing of the past; she often appeared at Sunday worship with dribbles of food down her unironed dresses. At meetings of the parish council she kept interrupting discussions with incoherent rants against Harriet, who now loomed as a larger villain in her eyes even than Mara.
On Graham Street, while the doctor lay between life and death in a nursing home, Mrs. Ephers moved herself into his king-size bed. She ate all her meals there, and seldom stirred from the building, except to attend church. Today, as Mrs. Thirkell pointed out, she was wearing one of the doctor’s old T-shirts beneath her ill-buttoned dress.
Linda Bystour hissed back, Look at Mara! What right does she have to appear so triumphant?
Similar comments rippled around the nave, in a sigh like wind through spring wheat: Mara was gloating at the doctor’s death. That was the only way people like Patsy Wanachs or Linda Bystour could label the change in Abraham Stonds’s younger granddaughter. Mara had slouched scowling in the Stonds pew for so many years that to see her sitting upright, looking—well, not pretty—she would never be pretty—but striking, anyway, with those strong cheekbones and green eyes—such a transformation could have come only at the doctor’s expense.
As the service wore on, Mara’s feelings for Grandfather surprised her. She didn’t mourn him, but she realized she felt sorry for him. Hector claimed Grandfather couldn’t possibly be an object of pity, both because of the power he’d wielded, and his international renown—far more recognition than most people ever achieved. But to a nineteen-year-old, professional success couldn’t make up for the anger that made Grandfather push his own wife and child away from him. Not that Beatrix was his own child, but he hadn’t known that when he was raising her. As the interim pastor extolled Abraham Stonds’s virtues, Mara shook her head in pity for a life wasted on grudges.
After the interment, she and Harriet hosted a reception at the church. Cynthia Lowrie pushed her way through the crush of people to Mara. It was the first time the two had met since that Saturday in church three months earlier. Mara hadn’t felt like talking to Cynthia since. She didn’t exactly blame Cynthia for pointing Starr and the others out to the mob to save herself another beating by Rafe. But when she imagined a conversation, Mara pictured Cynthia waving her arms wildly as she thought up one excuse after another, while Mara said, sure, sure, and patted her on the shoulder. Mara felt she’d changed too much to want to join in Cynthia’s tearful complaints.
Cynthia had changed as well, at least on the surface: She had cut her lanky hair and was wearing makeup, a fierce application of color like a warrior’s battle paint. Mara’s eyes widened at her old friend’s startling face. The two greeted each other awkwardly.
“So, the old doctor died. You sorry?” Cynthia asked.
A shrug—Mara didn’t want to explain her feelings about Grandfather. “New hairdo, huh? What’s Rafe say about the makeup?”
“Rafe isn’t talking. He lost his voice when—that day, you know. He’s been to all kinds of specialists, I guess. No one can figure out what the problem is. I can’t say I care much. I’m leaving, anyway.”
Life had changed in the Lowrie apartment. With the loss of his voice Rafe seemed shrunken and fearful. He stopped going to the exchange, since he couldn’t scream out his orders, and he wandered around home in angry bewilderment. Cynthia forced him to add her signature to his bank accounts so that she could buy herself clothes and a car. She told him she wasn’t cooking for him anymore. If he wasn’t working, he could hire a housekeeper or get his own meals, she didn’t care. She was moving out, anyway, to go to college, which he would also pay for, and he and Jared could do as they damned well pleased.
It didn’t seem to please Jared to do much. He spent his nights wandering from one whore to another, hoping to recover from the impotence that had afflicted him ever since that Saturday in church. He didn’t bother to open the letters from his college asking whether he planned to return for his senior year, letting them stack up on the floor of his bedroom with his empty bourbon bottles. Like Rafe, he seemed to fear his sister now, moving out of any room she entered, talking to her only when he wanted to beg a fresh bottle of whiskey.
Cynthia didn’t feel like telling Mara about the changes at home, or her gloating in her new power, and said only that she was off to the University of Illinois in January. “I hear Harriet’s going to dedicate her life to the homeless with that dreary do-gooder Sylvia Lenore. You going to team up with her?”
The jeer in Cynthia’s voice made her sound uncomfortably like her brother and father used to. Mara backed away. She marveled at a time when she and Cynthia had spoken every day: She couldn’t imagine sharing her most personal feelings with this truculent person. After a few more awkward half-sentences the two young women parted, never to speak in the future except at public events.
Everywhere Mara turned at the reception she was aware of a sense of strain, of people staring at her but not wanting to talk to her. When they looked at Mara they had to remember their own madness the last time they saw her, and no one wanted to think of that. In fact, the parish had voted to close Hagar’s House, so they wouldn’t have the homeless women around to remind them of the day their passions boiled into murderous frenzy. It was hard to find anyone who would admit even being in the church when Starr was killed, although Sylvia Lenore was only too happy to remind Wilma Thirkell and Patsy Wanachs that she’d seen them led off in handcuffs. Members of the parish preferred to think of “that dreadful Saturday when the homeless women invaded the church and caused so much damage.” The sight of Mara Stonds brought the memory of what really happened too close to the surface.
Mara was finding it hard to remember she had promised Harriet not to snarl at anyone. When she saw the interim pastor bear down on Hector with an enthusiastic description of the church’s adult inquiry classes, Mara decided she’d had enough.
“Dr. Tammuz would love to hear more about this, but we have to take my sister home. She’s worn out from the strain of Grandfather’s death and from organizing today’s revelries.”
The sisters’ exit with Hector allowed the condolers to speak without restraint on the arrogance of Abraham Stonds’s granddaughters.
57
The Swan
THE SECOND WEEK in December Luisa Montcrief gave a recital at the Northwestern University campus in suburban Chicago. She had wanted to burst forth in full splendor in Berlin or London, but the big opera houses and concert halls of the world weren’t ready to take a chance on her recovery. The rehabilitation experts in Philadelphia and Luisa’s agent, Leo, both advised her to start with recitals in small venues.
Her glory would return as soon as people heard her, Leo said: Luisa’s voice had never sounded so rich as it did now. Leo hadn’t wanted to waste his time on the train ride to Philadelphia to hear her sing at the rehabilitation institute, but when she finished he could hardly contain himself. What miracle had transpired, that her years of alcohol poisoning had left her with a voice so rare you might go a lifetime without hearing its equal? She had been a lustrous soprano in the past, but in comparison to her sound today, her voice of ten years ago was thin and amateurish.
She also quelled his doubts about her drinking: she was th
e same self-absorbed, temperamental diva she’d always been, but in a rare burst of honesty told him she knew she’d almost destroyed herself with drink. She even apologized for anything unpleasant she might have said to him while drunk.
Leo returned to New York and bullied Northwestern into adding her to their winter concert schedule. He called not only the New York critics but those in Hamburg and London and told them they would regret it forever if they were late in climbing onto Luisa Montcrief’s comeback wagon.
On a day when the wind was whipping waves over the boulders onto Lake Shore Drive, Luisa arrived at the Ritz. In addition to Leo, her entourage included her old accompanist, a new dresser, and her personal trainer. The diva kept her throat tightly wrapped against the cold. She refused to leave her suite until it was time to climb into her limousine the next afternoon. She did, however, ask Leo to dispatch tickets to her niece, to Mara, and to Jacqui and Nanette.
Luisa and Leo had chosen the program carefully: the centerpiece was to be Mozart’s “L’amerò, sarò costante,” Around it they added a series of shorter heder and arias that all had as their theme the idea of song itself. The concert ended with Grieg’s brief “Ein Schwan,” in which a dying swan bursts into such extraordinary song that the singer wonders if she was hearing a phantom, not a living bird. Leo thought the Grieg too somber for the concert’s conclusion, but Luisa insisted on it.
Sitting in the front of the recital hall with Jacqui and Nanette, Mara was amazed by the change in the diva. In their months on the streets, Luisa had been so emaciated that she walked with difficulty. Since leaving Chicago she had gained weight. Skin and hair both shone with health; when she entered the stage in her flame-colored gown, she walked with impressive assurance.
By the end of the concert, Mara had forgotten all she knew of last summer’s querulous drunk. The audience was on its feet roaring acknowledgment, but Mara sat weeping, unable to move. The beauty of that voice, taking her to heaven, what could she ever do with her life that could compare with Mozart’s music, or Luisa’s singing of it?
Luisa had invited Mara to join her at a small post-concert party in the recital hall. Mara stayed briefly to congratulate Luisa, but the diva, sipping herbal tea, was so besieged by critics that she had time for only the most perfunctory greeting. Becca Minsky, her eyes glowing, could hover near her aunt, soaking up the plaudits, but Mara didn’t want to be on the fringe of Luisa’s triumph, as she was on the fringe now of Hector and Harriet’s life together.
The next morning Mara walked south along the lakefront to the little spit of land where she had sometimes camped with Starr. The wind biting her face during the four-mile trek matched the bleakness of her mood.
As she wandered through the prairie grass, she came on the remains of her old sleeping bag. She had abandoned it that August night she fled from Grandfather’s security patrol and had forgotten about it. The blue fabric was faded and torn and most of the lining had spilled out; no one would get any warmth from it again. She tossed the remnant into the wind and watched it cartwheel down the shore.
The tall grasses, brown in the winter, rustled in a comforting way. Mara knelt within them, scattering the small birds who nested there, and stared unseeing at the water.
Starr had changed her life by allowing her to stop hating herself. Mara thought at first that meant all decisions would flow easily to her, that she would know what to do next, or even more, that she would be given some wondrous gift like Luisa’s that would move her hearers to tears.
She saw now that the journey was not to be so easy. She could not will the world around her into one where the homeless had shelter, or grandfathers spoke only words of loving praise to their wards. She would still have days of despondency. She still sometimes wanted to be cruel to Harriet. Her own healing was not a completed thing, but something she would have to struggle every day to maintain.
Perhaps she needed to return to school, as Grandfather had always insisted. That would be funny, to be doing in the end what he had demanded of her. She still yearned for a great gift, like Luisa’s, or a strong vocation, like Hector’s or Harriet’s, but she would not find that by lingering in the house in Rogers Park with her sister. Tomorrow morning, no, this very afternoon, she would go to the library and choose a college that might help her on her way.
She sat awhile longer among the grasses, letting the winter wind blow through her hair, enjoying the peace that came from reaching a decision. She sat still for so long that the sparrows gathered again, cheeping loudly as they pecked among the plants for food. Their cries grew so shrill that Mara looked around, to see who was approaching.
A swan that had strayed from the lagoons into the open lake swam to shore and moved toward her through the brown grass. When it came on her it stopped, and cocked its head to examine her. Mara stared into the flat black eye and thought she saw herself reflected back, sweet, not bitter, with strong wings of her own poised for flight.
The swan fluffed out its feathers and took to the air, scattering the sparrows. The sands were empty. Mara got to her feet and slowly started home.
SARA PARETSKY lives in Chicago with her husband. She is the author of ten V. I. Warshawski novels, and a short story collection, Windy City Blues. She is also the editor of A Woman’s Eye and Women on the Case.
A Delta Book
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Copyright © 1998 by Sara Paretsky
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eISBN: 978-0-307-48543-4
May 1999
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