Bury Me Deep (16 page)

“Dr. Seeley, though, Everett, what do you know of it? What do you know of keeping hold of oneself?” Her voice sounded low and nasty, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Not a soul knows more than me, Marion,” he said gravely. “Not a soul.”

And she supposed it was true. “You’ve managed, then,” she whispered.

“I’ve been simon-pure for four months, Marion. I haven’t touched the stuff. I haven’t dipped once.”

It was the longest since she knew him, since the Indiana State Hospital when he nearly died.

“What will I do? I wonder what I will do,” she said, her voice low, her face down.

“I will figure things out, Marion. I will.”

And she believed he would. He was not a man who took his responsibilities lightly. He was not a man of fancy, a man of caprice. He was a sober man, a man of purpose. A man on whom whole communities could rely, a family man, a family doctor, a trusted citizen, a pillar.

Were it not for that dark spot on his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.

“The dark spot,” Marion murmured as she sat beside him. “Now it is mine.”

A
T FIRST,
Dr. Seeley suggested they leave that night, take a train to Eagle Pass, Texas, and then move on to Coahuila.

Not without seeing that Mr. Lanigan, Marion persisted.
Not without that. She had to see him for herself. She had to see him and see that it was true, that he had abandoned her to this, and he would have to say it to her face.
The look in her eyes startled Dr. Seeley.

“Marion, that would be a mistake.”

Marion raised her fingertips to her temples and tried to stop the shaking in her chest. “But, Everett,” she said, and her voice
sounded tinny, like a machine. “I think it best that I go to work tomorrow. Explain that the girls ran off with these men. I don’t think we should raise suspicions.”

“I suppose,” Dr. Seeley said. “Yes. But in the meantime, I will be making inquiries. I will be making inquiries about this Joseph Lanigan.”

“I have told you all I know,” blurted Marion.

“I know you have, dear,” he said, “but you may not know everything.”

W
HEN HE SAW HER
lying bolt-straight trying to sleep, he took pity and gave her the smallest amount of chloral hydrate. She woke many times in the night and twice saw him sitting by the window, looking out. She wanted to call to him, but she could not make the words come.

She had to speak with Joe Lanigan. She had to.

D
R.
M
ILROY
summoned her to his office. He told her she looked quite pale and hoped she was well. “I am sorry to have missed work yesterday,” she said.

“Mrs. Curtwin tells me you have news of Nurse Mercer,” he said sternly. “You mean to say she has simply gone and left her post?”

“Yes, sir,” and she explained, as she knew to, that Louise and her friend Ginny had decided to strike it out in California.

“I am quite sorry, Doctor. It was all very sudden.”

“I should say it is. I have not heard a word from her. Am I to assume she has vacated her position?”

“I’m afraid she has, Dr. Milroy.”

“It all seems very rash,” he said, shaking his head, hands
across his chest in contemplation. “She has always been a spirited woman. And her friend. The both of them. How they are. I don’t understand it myself.” He shook his head.

Marion began to speak but stopped herself.

“But I’m not one to cotton to rumor, not I,” he went on. “And with this new development, well, I suppose it’s just exuberance. Perhaps a bit too much exuberance.”

“Perhaps, sir.”

“She has a suitor? Does she intend to marry?”

“I can’t say, Doctor. You see, it was all very headlong.”

“Well, there’s to be no gossip, Mrs. Seeley. I won’t tolerate that. I don’t want the community to think we employ the kind of women who…who are intemperate. Reckless.”

“No, Dr. Milroy. I won’t say a word.”

“Fine. Please take care to empty her locker, Marion. You can forward her things along to her.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Mrs. Curtwin tells me you wounded your hand. Let me take a look. What happened?”

“Oh no, Doctor. That’s not necessary. The file drawer caught it,” she said, marveling at her growing talent for deceit. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll take a look,” he said, then smiled. “And I won’t bill you.”

“Oh no, Doctor. My husband, you know, he’s a physician. He wouldn’t like that. I’m sure you understand.”

Dr. Milroy harrumphed, slapping his leg. “Damned if I don’t, Mrs. Seeley. God bless you both for taking me as a roué.”

The poem torn from a book and affixed inside of Louise’s locker. Marion poked her head inside to read the rest. The last stanza intoned,

At the bottom there was a watercolor image of a lily of the valley and Florence Nightingale.

I will not dwell,
Marion said, to herself,
I will not dwell…I will not let it be real, not real. It is not real.

Marion briskly shoved Louise’s things—a spare uniform, a nail file, a set of hairpins—into a laundry bag. In the back was one of Louise’s starched nurse’s caps and as Marion scuttled it into the bag she saw a silky red tendril still clipped under the bobby pin affixed.

It was Joe that did that. It was Joe. I’ll take the weight on my wretched soul for Ginny, but I had to do it to live. But I won’t take Louise. Never Louise. Not Louise.

Still her heart blooms forth its beauty.

She leaned her head against the locker and took long breaths, long, scraping breaths. Her lungs, they were hurting. They were hurting like it’d come back, like the consumption had come back, coating and enrobing her lungs, seeking to tear them to bloody pieces again.

She could look no longer and swept her arm through the locker and shoved everything into the large sewing bag Mrs. Curtwin had loaned her.

Her face flared hot and cold at once and she banished thoughts of Louise, Louise struck down, but not by her. Not by
her.

I
T WAS THREE O’CLOCK
when the telephone call came.

“Marion, what do you mean coming to my home? And when did you return? I can’t fathom you, Marion.”

“Did you catch any bucks?” her voice slid out, cool and polite. Oh, it was a strength in her that she could steel herself so tightly, so enwalled. Three, four days prior, could she have managed such control?

“Marion, I was only gone one night. It was critical, Marion, don’t you see? Everything needs to proceed as it normally would.”

“That nurse of yours said—”

“Don’t worry about that. What did you do? The trunks, Marion?”

“You abandoned me, Mr. Lanigan. You left me—”

“Marion, you don’t know what you’re saying. You need to calm down.”

I am calm. You should see what’s inside of me. You see the tempest in there and you would marvel at my calm.
“I guess you better see me if you want to know about the trunks,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.

“I will come to the rooming house. I will be there at six o’clock.”

“No. Not there,” she said calmly.

She told him he had best arrive at the clinic, the third-floor storage room, in thirty minutes or he would not like what she would do.

H
E WAS ALREADY
waiting when she arrived, and he held his sennit-straw hat in his hands and she could scarce believe it had been only three days since she’d seen him last. Looking at him now, she wondered, Who was this man?

And he so tidy in his natty suit the color of creamy pistachio nougats, his Scotch-grain brogues, that great lemony sweep of hair across his forehead, an opal tiepin flashing as he turned. But he did turn and he turned toward her, and he reached out and the flesh on her arm quilled.

What had she imagined, that it would all disappear, that the feel of his hands would suddenly fall to her thoughtless as a ticket taker, a train conductor?

“Oh, Joe, I just…” But she stopped herself from curling into his arms like a lost kitten. She stopped herself.

“Marion,” he said, and his eyes, she saw them, they were strangely blank. Blank like a man in an advertisement. Blank like a curtain had closed.

“Joe, I think you need to explain yourself. You left me to fend for myself. You have done what you said you’d never do. I had to take care of things as best I could.”

“Where are the trunks, Marion?” he said, setting his hat down on one of the supply carts. “You must tell me.”

“They’re in Los Angeles,” she said. “They remain there.”

“You’re to tell me everything. I need to know.”

“I will tell you no more than I have. I don’t know what you mean to do, Joe. But I know what you have done already.”

“What have I done, Marion? Now, truly.”

“The trunks are there. I left them there. I am telling all the lies. I have told all your lies, told them for you.”

“Marion,” he said, and there was just the faintest dampness on him. She could see it now. “Marion, I…” He crossed and un
crossed his arms. She could smell his heavy cologne and sense his nerves rubbing against each other. “Marion, I think you should leave town immediately. To Mexico. To your husband. It’s not wise for you to stay. The risks are too great.”

“But you intend to stay?”

“I have no choice. My family is here,” he said carefully, “and my business. And my stake in…in what happened is not the same either.”

“What can you mean by that?”

“Marion, you know what you did. For my share, I was protecting you.”

“How can you say such things? I was protecting myself.” It all seemed like an old dream now, Ginny’s twisty weight on her, the look in her mad eyes, the squirming danger of her. And the blast. “You know Ginny came at me with that gun. You know the gun exploded in our hands.”

“I only know what you told me. And things can get twisted, Marion. Your distinctions may not matter and, well…You must see now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this. I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go. The point is, Marion, I have more money for you and it should be sufficient to carry you to Mexico and—”

“Oh yes,” Marion said, her jaw rattling, her face filled with heat and rage. She had put her soul in jeopardy for this man. This man.

“Do give me those funds.” And she held her hands out, palms up.

He looked at them, at her outstretched hands, and smiled a little. “Marion, I…” Then he reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out an envelope, as before, idling at the train station. He rested it on her palms. “My, Marion, where is my little flower, my
little prairie girl?”

Marion felt her chest leap. “You have wretched nerve to say such…,” and her voice betrayed her, and she only let out a shallow gasp. She refused to cry for this man.

He looked at her. “I wonder if I was acquainted with you at all, or if you were some kind of cunning witch. They were, you know. Louise and Ginny. Casting spells and laying curses like backward things. Those polluted girls. But you too, I think. You find ways to get what you want.”

She felt her arms give out, the envelope dropping to the floor, and she began shoving him, violently. “How dare you…How dare you…”

But he was strong and clasped her forearms together and told her to hush before she was heard.

“I’m sorry, Marion. I am. You must see.” And his voice softened ever so slightly. “I did love you. I did as much as I’m able.”

She looked at him. She looked at him and his eyes, not blank, but dead.

There were remembered things tearing through her, things she’d felt sure she would not summon again, most of all the way he could curl his hand under her hair and hold her face in his palm and make things happen inside her that made her buckle, made blood surge through her, brought tears to her blinking eyes.

She would not remember that again, this was the last time, and it was a battering loss.

He was leaving, he was halfway to the door. But he was not done yet. She lifted her chin high, ready for it.

“I look at you, Marion,” he said, “and all I see is death. I see dead girls and sorrow. It is not fair, but there it is. I can’t look at you without thinking of that night. Your beauty is blinding but behind it I see death.”

There it was. There it was. And all the breath left her body, and her heart stopped, hammer struck.

But no. He could not have that too.

She bent down and picked the envelope off the floor. Opening it, she saw what looked like one hundred dollars, more than she had ever seen in her life. And all she was worth.

As she walked to the door, she tucked it cooly under her blouse.
I like to keep my money close to my heart, Louise always said, every time.

M
ARION SAT AT HER DESK,
her face still, her spine erect.

To her left, she saw, on top of her typewriter, the satchel with things from Louise’s locker, just where she’d rested it. For one crazy moment, she thought,
I guess I had better send these along…

Taking a breath, she reached over and opened it.

She could almost feel Louise just over her shoulder, coarse curls brushing up against the back of her neck, breath on her ear.

It was little more than a modest pile of papers and sundry items. Tucked between nursing association pamphlets,
Welcome to Werden! A Manual for New Staff,
old schedules, an announcement for a meeting of something called the SEIU, there was a snapshot of Louise and Ginny, their faces bursting with glee, arms nestled around each other, standing in front of a building somewhere, sometime when Ginny, wee teeth showing, was healthier, had such vim and flesh on her elfin bones and her blond curls jangling and Louise must’ve been laughing something fierce because her head was thrown back and her long throat so white and lovely and the two of them like sisters, like dear sisters with arms locked together forever. Forever.

And behind that, another snapshot of Ginny, this time with another girl, a blond and delicate girl. Here Ginny was sicker,
head leaning, cheeks pulled across bones, eyes darkened, but with that sly grin of hers. She was seated on the sofa, as always since Marion knew her, knees bent and legs tucked to chest tightly, and the other girl, her arms were stretched happily around Ginny’s legs, sweetly adoring Ginny. Ginny and her wily-angel, serene devil ways. It was adoration, to be sure, because the blond girl, cheek resting on Ginny’s white dimpled knees, was Marion herself. So she knew.

Now, looking, hand wrapped round her mouth, Marion did not let out the cry but swallowed it whole. Oh, Ginny, why did you do it? Why did you come fast upon me with that gun? Slugged dope? Delirium? But it seemed a dreadful rage. Something like,
Will you two leave me now? Will you abandon me to a Bugville camp and kick up your heels across the Great Golden West without me? Why, you will…but not if I can stop it. Not if I can stop you.

Marion dropped the snapshots into the satchel, but as she did she noticed, beneath them, a tidy stack of prescriptions tied with string. She pulled the knot loose and saw they were all nearly identical. Most listed Dr. Tipton as the physician, and several Dr. Jellieck, both of whom worked at the clinic. In the back of her head she remembered Louise shaking her head and saying,
These docs, Marion, they do the nastiest things when your eyes shut, or you turn corners, or, God help you, set foot on a stepladder. I got an eyeful of Dr. Tipton just last week….
Dr. Jellieck, Marion remembered seeing at the party at the El Royale Hotel. The one whose large gray shoulder nearly concealed the face of the woman whom she had been certain was Louise. Friends of Joe, both, no doubt. What man in this town, what man in possession of any small measure of sway or license was not a friend of Joe Lanigan?

It was then she noticed all the prescriptions were for Veronal and chloral, scopolamine, paraldehyde and more.

Six months of them, dating from January to March 1930.

All for a Mrs. Joseph Lanigan.

It seemed enough medication for two patients or more. Enough to keep a forgotten wife watching shadows on walls in blissful nothingness, a tingling oblivion.

Marion remembered Louise saying she’d worked for Mrs. Lanigan as a private nurse for a short time.

She has the Bright’s,
Marion had said. And Louise:
Is that what they’re calling it now?

“M
RS.
C
URTWIN,
when Nurse Mercer started here, where was she coming from? Where was her last employ?”

Mrs. Curtwin perched her glasses higher on her nose and sighed. “Oh, she was a private nurse for a fine lady.”

“And she left that position for this one?”

“Yes, she did.”

“For a higher salary?”

“Mrs. Seeley, that’s none of my affair.”

“I just wondered,” Marion said. She could feel Mrs. Curtwin’s haught. She knew she must use it. “I mean, I thought I knew her well and now, the way she just picked up and left. I wonder if I knew her at all.”

Mrs. Curtwin’s face broke like a bubble, so easy it was. “Oh my, it’s good you found out before it’s too late. I can’t begin…I shouldn’t say. But you can believe when she came here, she made such ridiculous insinuations to Dr. Milroy and some of the others. Claimed the man she worked for—a very prominent businessman whom we all know well and respect and admire—was not managing his wife’s health properly. Her charges were baseless, of course. She relented at last. Slander, that’s what it was. She’d kept it up, she’d’ve been run out of town on a rail. That’s what they would
have done where I come from. I’m from Cincinnati, you see. We don’t abide such flagrancy.”

M
RS.
L
ANIGAN
up high in her tower, stuffed full of a druggist’s trunk, puffed like some huffing hothouse flower. And Louise seeing and knowing and no one to listen. So she makes her choice.

You choose your fights, Marion,
she once said.
Some of us have fewer choices, alas.

Louise, breath sweet filmy rum on her ear, whispering words she never said but words so true,
You must understand, Marion, I am a person of goodwill. I can count my bad deeds on one white hand. And I see your delicacy, Marion, your goodness. But it’s a goodness easily worn. You haven’t earned it. You haven’t had to rescue it. You haven’t had to scrub with horsehair brush the soft flesh on the inside of your thighs, rubbing away things left behind by three gentlemen in pale suits who caught you practicing dance steps behind the church on a summer night. Or have you? Because that, my darling, would be some stroke of chance.

O
N THE STREETCAR,
she sat, hands folded, her face dry and powdery. The numbness, it was a relief, really. She felt as a shell, as a shell, and Joe Lanigan had gouged everything out and it was all gone and she was this walking, rattling shell.

With nothing left in her center, with that surging fever that had fallen on her these many months, with that fever gone, she could no longer fight off thoughts of the girls. The girls.

Suddenly, they loomed before her, gorgeous, slinking phantoms with crooking fingers.

She could see them there on the streetcar, Ginny sprawled
across three seats, blue-white skin pulsing, eyes glittering and teeth too, like some glossy vampire. Louise standing regal, red hair flaming, and one long arm reached out, dangling fingers toward Marion, smile sly and knowing, saying things, saying things, but what…

Oh, Louise, you had so much more to tell me. So much more and I…

D
R.
S
EELEY WAS GONE
for many hours and Marion had expected him there when she came home from the clinic and he was not and now supper had come and gone and Eddie Cantor sang “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” on the radio and Marion cleaned out her wound and looked in the mirror at the dark roots spreading through her platinum hair.