by Steven Clark
“It could be years.”
“Lee. Tell me.”
“Yes, that’s about right. Look, if you want to see a therapist—”
“I’ve had enough of them with my children. All of those sessions and cant. At least a priest absolves you at the end. Besides, he’s cheaper.”
She sipped tea, her glance warning me away from a deeper probe. I spoke. “Okay. Just know I’m here.”
Outside the window, the gardener clicked the gate shut as he walked under a canopy of lemon- and cherry-colored leaves.
“Philip and I had a good marriage,” she said. “There were quarrels. Indiscretions here and there, but on the whole, we worked things out.” She rubbed her thin knuckles and stroked her cane. Outside, a flicker winged onto a branch, its black- and gold-tipped wings and olive breast a delight, the red spot in back of its head almost a blood spot.
“We agonized over Lucas. He had such potential. All of those drugs …”
She stared, and I let her collect her thoughts. “I think it began when he was starting college. He’d acted strange. He refused to go with us to the ball.”
“Veiled Prophet?”
“Yes, the one on that night.” She closed her eyes briefly, remembering 1972 and all its awfulness. “When all of us returned, he was home, but was jittery. Morose. Kept looking out the window. It had to have been something.”
“Perhaps we should discuss that,” I said gently. “It was a long time ago, but when we lose people, it’s never so far away.” Margot nodded, and I moved closer, seeing her eyes gleam with unshed tears.
“I believe in family karma. Every family has things that are passed on, that have to be resolved. The children, or a new generation, must solve them or accommodate them to the present reality, and Lucas—” She stopped and looked at me.
“I want to talk about you, Lee. Your cancer.”
Again, a sharp turn from my plan. “This isn’t relevant to Lucas and what his loss means to you.”
“No more of Lucas. Please. Your cancer. I want to know what it was like. How did you manage it?”
She leaned forward, like a child ready for a story. Since this was what Margot wanted, and other people’s cancer might help her to cope with hers.
“Back in my twenties,” I began, “an area of my cervix had been watched, then biopsied. Five days later, they told me it was malignant, but was small and quite localized. It was removed, and it takes ten years for this type to become invasive.” I shrugged. “No more babies, but my days as a brood mare were over. I could chuck my birth control pills.”
“At least it was caught,” Margot said in quiet satisfaction. “Tell me more.”
“I am going to expound on a curious phenomenon. When people heard I had cancer … when people hear of cancer, they’re awed. To the lay person, more than any other diagnosis, cancer equals death. Their expressions … that hesitant look … it was as though I had undergone some kind of mystical experience and could no longer function like other people. At the hospital, none of the nurses discussed anything but the technical aspects of the surgery. Except an older one who had a hysterectomy and breast removal.”
“Yes.” Margot ‘s voice lowered. “What of the doctors?”
“Surprisingly, some were a little more open. Docs, you know, aren’t apt to verbalize.” I sipped cooling tea. “You understand this was diagnosed at Barnes’ Gynecology Clinic, so I was among friends.”
“But it’s so awful. Imagining you with cancer.” Her voice almost choked. “Being cut off from life—”
This was getting deeper than I wanted, so I moved back to the light. “One friend of mine at the time leaned forward and asked ‘it is cancer?’ in a good-grief tone of voice. When I said yes, but that they’d got it all, he went on to something else. A typical reaction.” I sighed. “Wow, I thought back then, ‘You’ve really walked in the valley of the shadow of death.’”
She brightened at my smile, almost reflecting it back to me.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Lee.”
I nodded. “Now, let’s talk about your fears.”
“You’re so unburdened and honest,” she said with a mix of sadness and approval. “Please, Lee. I must ask you another question. May I intrude upon your privacy?”
“Intrude away.”
“What was your first marriage like?”
I paused and blinked. We were stepping far beyond the patient-caregiver relationship. An immediate thought was to say I had to go, and save it for another day, but her soft hand touched mine.
“We really need to discuss what you’re going through,” I said instead. “I need to know. Please. Getting to know you better will be a comfort to me.”
A finger of sunlight cut between us. The gardener’s rake swished again. My eyes closed. “It was the worst mistake of my life,” I said.
I leaned back in my chair and wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Why was Margot so insistent on hearing my tales of woe? My first marriage was definitely NOT something I wanted to rehash. I’d heard once that Mark Twain blamed the Confederacy’s creation on too much reading of Sir Walter Scott, where southerner’s OD’d on chivalry. My rebellion—and hence my first marriage—might have come from too much Veiled Prophet.
When Len Marbles roared into Dubourg on his motorcycle, he seemed to be the answer to my prayers. I looked up from my much-read Daphne du Maurier and took notice. Len was blonde, inarticulate, and very definitely cool. He’d gotten out of the army and was going places, but not until he deflowered a few virgins along the way. I was number four.
Aunt Mary and Spud took an instant dislike to Len, and in my adolescent mind they immediately changed into two old fogies trapped in Dubourg. I was a terrier straining at the leash, wanting to trot straight to Len, a Brando prince in tight jeans and a leather jacket. Clichéd, but such are hormones. Such is cool. After a living room chat where Aunt Mary’s poise confronted Len’s slouch, she forbade me to see him. Two hours later, I crawled out my bedroom window for a midnight ride on the back of Len’s Harley.
That night, after I rolled over and lay by Len, he said, in a voice that drifted like loose sand, “So, whatcha think?”
It was at the abandoned chat dump, what we called the refuse of the mines. Slag heap is the usual term, but in Dubourg, chat dump sounds … well, romantic. We sipped the last of the six-pack he brought. Cans shone in the moonlight, ours and others from past couplings, some riddled with bullet holes. The dump was a popular spot for target practice.
I stretched, finding the sand soft and scratchy on my skin. “I think I’m a good lay.”
He crumpled his can. “Yeah. No shit.”
Wind hissed across the woods, followed by a distant pop of gunfire. The city dump was over the ridge, and guys liked to go there at night and shoot rats. Fortunately, we were at a higher elevation. Lust and guns. Such were the rural pleasures of Dubourg. I kissed Len, then frowned. He frowned back. I spoke.
“Hey. Why didn’t you use the rubbers I got?”
Len laughed. “Oh, shit. I don’t take a shower with my socks on.”
“I don’t follow the logic.”
He lit a cigarette, and we shared drags, its orange light bright compared to the pale moon. “So, you scared?”
“Naw.” I sighed. “Just what happens?”
“Nothing.”
“If it does?”
“I gotta blow this joint. It’s a bus stop with no bus coming. Like you. Hey: you and me?”
I crossed my legs and looked hard into the night. I picked up Len’s leather jacket and breathed in the musky scent of leather and cologne. “Yes. Hell, yes.”
Aunt Mary looked at me like I’d gone crazy.
“You’re out of your mind, Cindy Lee. Len Marbles has all the responsibility of a junkyard dog.”
“I’m seventeen, and I love him.”
Spud kept reading the sports page of the Dubourg Post. “Guy’s a hotshot.”
I narrowed my eyes. “We’r
e getting married.”
Aunt Mary glared at Spud. “Say something.”
He folded the page. “He’s a drugstore cowboy. Use your smarts, kid.”
“Look,” I said, “we’re getting married.”
Aunt Mary threw up her arms. “Why?”
Why? Because I’m an adolescent girl who’s had her first taste of sex and can’t get enough. Because Len looks like my dad. Len’s Harley is like Dad’s jet, and I’m emotionally insecure enough to want to bond to a father figure and act out against the pubescent displacement and abandonment by my mother. I wanted to be Veiled Prophet Queen, and marriage offered the bridal veil as crown of my womanhood.
Of course I didn’t say that. I didn’t even know that at the time.
No seventeen-year-old girl says or consciously thinks it, at least not in this novel. But they sense it, and that was what I sensed. Aunt Mary gave the final blow.
“Cindy Lee, I’m your guardian, and there’s no way I’ll let you marry Len. If you do, it will be the stupidest thing you’ll ever do. No matter how old you live to be, you’ll look on this as a tragedy. I forbid it.”
A smile almost came to my lips as I cocked the trigger and narrowed my eyes. “I’m pregnant.”
Aunt Mary and Spud swallowed their bile and came to the wedding, held in the Presbyterian church, then a reception in the knotty-pine VFW hall. So I had my coronation. I was queen. Len and I moved to St. Louis, where he worked in a body shop in Dogtown, near rail yards where trains clack-clacked like a steel heartbeat. For three weeks, Len and I were in newlywed paradise.
Then he hit me.
When I look back at that time, everything is tinted sepia, imitating the tight rows of brick flats that make up Dogtown. I recall it as a world of stubby houses, shoe-box like factories, dime store bars, and smeared windows of body shops and tawdry stores that defined those dun-colored years.
Turns out Len had been kicked out of the army for taking a swing at an officer. He’d sailed through eleven jobs since he and Uncle Sam parted ways. In our three room flat, I noticed the mood swings. He slept with a loaded snub-nose under his pillow. Once, after Pierce was born, I woke to find Len staring into the crib. When I got up, the floor creaked and he whipped around, his pistol inches from my nose.
“People tell me. Told me. About you.”
I swallowed. “What people?”
He stared and tapped his temple with the gun barrel. When I picked up Pierce, Len wandered into the kitchen for a shot of whiskey.
Aunt Mary cut me off. The Seven Dwarfs snickered, at least the ones not yet carried off by heart attacks, dementia, collapsing kidneys. You see? Just like her father. Ike always had wild blood.
It’s bitter, those years. That awful growing-up time, like the numbness of a case of frostbite. After another long night of Len mumbling to the walls, after he slapped me because his voices told him who I was seeing, what I was doing, I went to the local branch of the library, bouncing Pierce on my knee and ignoring the snoring bum across the table as I leafed through the dog-eared pages of a psychiatric textbook, seeing its description of schizophrenia a mirror of Len. Now what?
Len’s great love was still the Harley, and Dawg, a tick-shaped man who moonlighted selling stolen auto parts, was his chum. Dawg began to feel me up one day, and I pushed him away. Had I told Len, I knew his voices would blame me. There was an all-night poker game in Len’s body shop, and Len lost his Harley to Dawg. Booze flowed like a ninety-proof Niagara Falls. One of the Hoosiers kept needling Len. I knew Len probably twitched and blinked, like before he hit me. Four gunshots later, Dawg and a Hoosier sprawled on the floor as everyone else burst out through doors and windows. Len roared off on his Harley, headed to our flat to finish me off, too, but he ran a red light and crashed into a pick-up. Locals in the corner bar lifted their heads away from the Blues game on TV. Since it was neck-to-neck with the Blackhawks, it was only for a moment.
My screen door rattled as someone knocked on it. I lay down my copy of Catch-22 and opened the door to a baggy-eyed cop whose sleek black hair and five-o-clock shadow reminded me of a Greek waiter.
“Mrs. Marbles?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m Officer Hittler, and I have some bad news about your husband.” He was stiff, antiseptically polite.
I read his nameplate. “Your name’s really Hittler?”
“There’s been an accident, ma’am. Your husband’s at Barnes, but he’s being moved to Arsenal. And, yes, ma’am. That is my real name.”
Arsenal is St. Louis shorthand for the State Mental Hospital west of Tower Grove Park on Arsenal Street.
The mental hospital is perched on a hill just west of Tower Grove Park, and its green cupola and tall wings spread out in low-rent Baroque grandiosity. The hospital is a Versailles for the mad. After an interview with Len, the docs would never let him out. My visits to him were dutiful but pained as I traveled past dirty brick flats and shotgun houses across from the hospital. Len vowed to get out and kill me; he’d known all along, should have listened to the voices who knew me best.
I melted into a life of food stamps, WIC, and minimum wage, and Len melted into his art. His art therapist gushed. “Len has become very creative, a Picasso with shades of Van Gogh as he depicted what would happen to you, Mrs. Marbles.”
She spoke of his long suppressed innate artistic abilities, similar to those of many schizophrenic patients. Len won first prize for his Madonna and Child. His therapist continued: “The tones of red and silver for the knife are superb…and the expression of the Madonna’s pain recalls a flash of Guernica. And, her resemblance to you is uncanny.” I stared back as I held a grasping, wiggling Pierce, declining to view Len’s imagining of my demise.
One day when I went to visit, I was told Len was gone. My anxious hugging of Pierce ended when the measured steps of the chief resident approached. His voice rustled like pages of the latest psychiatric bulletin. There was overcrowding at the hospital, and Len was transferred to St. Vincent’s Hospital. He offered me Len’s artwork, smiling. The sketch of Jezebel was breathtaking. “Has your features,” he said, “although the cubist style makes it hard to see.”
St. Vincent’s Hospital was in the north suburbs on Natural Bridge Road, leading to the airport. My visits were less frequent because of the irregularity of bus schedules and the difficulty of getting a sitter for Pierce in that wondrous, pre-daycare era. Going through the northside, I was always being hit on by groups of black men.
Len filled out, and through clay and acrylic, continued his artistic doom of me. The hospital’s mansard towers and spacious grounds was another palace of insanity that looked like a château in France. Inside, I passed nuns, habits swishing as they glided to moans and shouts down the dimly lit corridors where Jesus and Our Lady sadly looked on, lacking Gadarene swine to cast demons into.
Two days before Pierce’s third birthday, I got the call. Len had hanged himself. As my son played in the backyard, and the next door neighbor polished his Impala, a pile of stolen car batteries semi-hidden in straw-like weeds on the lip of his shingled garage, I stared at the fingers of the barren trees surrounding the house and saw buds push out. The grass dared to green. Clouds blew back like puffy tumbleweeds to reveal a Botticelli sky. I sunk back into my chair, relieved. Once again, I lived in glorious Technicolor.
Margot shook her head as my narrative died away, her clear eyes shrouded in sadness. “Oh, Lee. How terrible.”
“Stupid.” I snapped into the clinical. “Aunt Mary was right, of course. It was my choice, and I don’t regret Pierce. He’s a fine son.”
“Does he live in St. Louis?” Margot brightened, like she seemed hopeful for an introduction.
“He lives in Germany. He’s a chemist. His wife is expecting.”
“Saul told me you have a daughter, too.”
“From my second marriage. Jama.”
“Jama? What an unusual name. Is it something Asian?”
“No,” I sighe
d, wanting to close the conversation, “she was named after the Journal of the American Medical Association.” I paused as Margot gave a gentle laugh. “It was my idea of childhood names. I named Pierce after my hero of the time, Hawkeye Pierce. Jama …” The less said about my wayward daughter, the better. “I want to know if you’ve reconsidered chemo. I’d like to discuss your care—”
“Children are such a consolation. At least it starts out that way.”
That last sentence darkened her already sunken face. I sensed the clue to her indecision about undergoing chemotherapy treatments. She gave me the opening, and I took it. “Margot … Pierre and Terri. Maybe it’s time for a reconciliation.”
“We can talk about my children another time. I’d like to hear how you became a nurse.”
Closing the door on her children and keeping mine open wasn’t what I had in mind. Besides, it was getting late.
“Margot, I’ve really been here too long—”
“It was because of Pierce, wasn’t it? So you could provide for him. I know you’d do anything for your child.”
There was an immediate, innate sadness to Margot’s tone, matching late afternoon shadows in the mansion’s dignified corners. Her hand touched my wrist, and like her eyes, its touch was soft and pleading, and I couldn’t help but think back to that time.
“Yes, anything. I scraped by. One day after I staggered up the stairs after a day of stocking canned goods and bagging groceries, my body was drained. I stared at my apartment door, and knew I couldn’t do this anymore, just piddling around. My body and brain froze. Pierce pushed at the door. I blinked and let him in.”
It was easy to remember. “The apartment still smelled of Len. A potpourri of leather, sweat, and a faint whiff of gun oil. It was chicken pot pie night, and I plopped onto the couch as Pierce played with his plastic cowboys and Indians.
“Then?” Margot asked softly, unblinking.
“I flipped on the TV. Lo and behold, the opening to South Pacific began. I delved into it. The tunes came back, and they were great, but I loved Nellie Forbush. It wasn’t so much her and the Frenchman, but her as the wisecracking, confident nurse. The princess gig was done, and Nellie scooted over into my psyche. A tiara replaced by a nurses cap.”