Bury Me Deep

Part One

THRILL PARTIES EVERY NIGHT over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why, it’s 600 square feet of percolating, Wurlitzering sin. Those girls with their young skin, tight and glamorous, their rimy lungs and scratchy voices, one cheek flush and c’mon boys and the other, so accommodating, even with lil’ wrists and ankles stripped to pearly bone by sickness. They lay there on their daybed, men all standing over round, fingering pocket chains and hands curled about gin bottle necks. The girls lay there on plump pillows piled high with soft fringes twirling between delicate fingers, their lips wet with syrups, tonics, sticky with balms, their faces freshly powdered, arching up, waiting to be attended to by men, our men, the city’s men. What do you do about girls like that?

He was a kind husband. You couldn’t say he wasn’t kind.

He found her a rooming house and paid up three months, all he could manage and still make his passage to Mazatlán, where he would take up a steady post, his first in three years, with the Ogden-Nequam Mining Company, for whom he would drain fluid thick, yellow as pale honey from miners’ lungs.

He purchased for her, on credit (who wouldn’t give credit to a doctor, even one in a suit shiny from wear), a tea set and a small Philco radio for her long evenings, sitting in the worn rose chair writing letters to him, missing him so.

He purchased for her a pair of kidskin gloves and tie shoes and a soft cloche hat the deep green of pine needles.

He took her on strolls around the neighborhood so they might look for the one hundred varieties of cactus promised in the pamphlet given to them at the Autopia Motor Court, where they’d spent their first two nights after the long drive from California. He found the cholla and the saguaro and the bisnaga, which had saved the life of many a thirsty traveler who, beaten down by the sun, cut off the spiky top and mashed the pulp within.

He helped her fill out all the papers to begin her new job, which he had found for her. She would start Monday as a filing clerk and stenographer at the Werden Clinic. She passed the typing test and the dictation test and Dr. Milroy, the director, who was very tall and wore tinted spectacles and smelled sweetly of aniseeds, hired her right then and there, taking her small hand between his palms deep as serving dishes, as softly worn as the leather pew Bibles passed through three generations’ hands in the First Methodist Church of Grand Rapids, and said, “My dear Mrs. Seeley, welcome to our little desert hideaway. We are so glad you will be joining us. I have assured your husband you will be happy here. The entire Werden community welcomes you to its bosom.”

On Sunday night, late, he packed his suitcase for his long trip, first to Nogales, then Estación Dimas, then ninety miles on muleback to Tayoltita. The mining company didn’t care about revoked medical licenses. They were eager to have him. But, with her, he had always been clear: where he was going was no place for a woman. He would have to go alone.

When he was finished packing, he sat her down on the bed and spoke softly to her for some time, spoke softly of his grief in leaving her but with solemn, gravely worded promises that he would return in the spring, would return by Easter, arms filled with lilies, and with all past troubles behind them.

And on Monday morning at seven o’clock her husband, having made all these arrangements, walked her to the trolley and kissed her discreetly on the cheek, his chin crushing her new hat, and headed himself to the train depot, one battered suitcase in hand. As she watched him through the trolley window, as she watched him, slope-shouldered in that ancient brown suit, hat too tight, gait slow and lurching, she thought, Who is that poor man, walking so beaten, face gray, eyes struck blank? Who is that sad fellow? My goodness, what a life must he lead to be so broken and alone!

THE DOCTORS AT THE CLINIC were all kind as could be, and all seemed concerned that she felt comfortable and safe in her rooming house. They left a cactus blossom on her desk as a welcome gift and offered her a tour of the State Capitol, pointing proudly to its copper dome, which could be viewed from the clinic’s third-floor windows. Right away, Dr. Milroy and his wife began inviting her to Sunday dinner and she heard again about the one hundred varieties of cactus she might see around town and she heard that no other place in the world is blessed with so many days of sunshine and she heard how, as she must know, the desert is God’s great health-giving laboratory. Then, at the end of the evening, Mrs. Milroy always sent her home with a dish steaming over with creamed corn casserole, a knot of pork, sweet carrots in honey glaze.

“You’re nothing but a whisper of a girl. But you’ll need something on your bones for when you start your family. When Dr. Seeley comes back, you know he’ll be ready for a son. Am I right?”

She smiled, she always smiled. Dr. Seeley hadn’t talked of sons, of children since before the first monthlong stretch at St. Bartholomew’s narcotics ward. They’d never talked much of babies, even as she was sure when she married three years, seven months back that she’d be near the third time large with child by now, like all the girls she knew.

IT WAS FRIDAY, her fifth day at the clinic, and she had seen Nurse Louise stalking the halls more than once, stalking them, a lioness. A long-limbed girl with a thick brush of dark red hair crowning a pale, pie face, painted-on brows thin as kidsilk and a tilting Scotch nose. When she walked, her hips slung and her chest bobbed up round apples and the men on the ward took notice—my, how could they not? She was not beautiful, but she had a bristling, crackling energy about her and it was like she was always winking at you and nodding her head as if saying, always, even when stacking X-rays, C’mon, sweet face, c’mon.

And now here was Nurse Louise dropping herself, hard, in the chair across from Marion in the luncheon room. She smelled like licorice and talcum powder.

“That’s for beans, kid,” she said, jabbing her thumb dismissively at Marion’s jelly sandwich. “Have a hunk of my brown bread. Ginny—that’s my roommate—swabbed it up good with plum butter. Tell me that ain’t the stuff.”

And Marion took the wedge offered her and it smelled like Mother’s kitchen even if Mother never made any bread but white or sometimes milk-and-water bread. And the plum butter, well, that stung sweet in her mouth since she hadn’t had much but bean soup since Dr. Seeley left her, left her all alone five days past.

“What’s your name, answer me now with your cakehole plug full,” she said, laughing. “I’m Louise Mercer. I’ve been here going on a year now, so I guess there’s not much I don’t know. I’m happy to show you all the dials and knobs and pulleys, if you like. So nothing crashes down on that slippery blond head of yours.”

“Well, I’m Marion. Marion Seeley,” she finally got out, eyeing a dab of butter still smeared on her thumb.

“Go on, Marion.” Louise smiled, nodding toward the pearly butter. “We don’t believe, none of us, in wasting fine things.”

SUDDENLY, she was under Louise’s red-tipped wing and everything became easier. She learned the best place to hang her hat and coat so they didn’t smell of disinfectant, the trolley route that’d get her home seven minutes faster and two blocks closer to boot and that you should punch the clock before you even set your purse down each morning.

Each day, they ate lunch together and Louise gave her the what’s what on everyone at the clinic. The doctors no longer seemed half so frightening once Louise had told her about the one who was always pinching nurses’ behinds, and the one who tipped his bill in his office all day long, the one who never even gave a pretty penny to the St. Ursula’s Annual Blind Children Drive and the one who had ended up here on account of losing his medical license in the state of Missouri for operating a still in his office.

Louise always brought treats—small cakes, a glass canister of baked beans with brown sugar, a sack of jelly nougats, a crimson jar of pickled beets. Wanting to return the favor, Marion brought in her mother’s sturdy currant jelly and, later in the week, steamed bread she had spent all evening making in the kitchen of the rooming house. Neither could eat it. Louise crossed her eyes like Ben Turpin.

“It’s for the birds, kid,” she said. “But a girl as pretty as you, what could it matter?”

Marion was embarrassed, mostly because she thought she was a very good homemaker and Dr. Seeley had dined on her food for years with never a complaint. He always smiled and said, “Very good, Marion. Very fine, indeed.”

“You come by our place,” Louise said. “You should try my creamed onions. You’ll think your tongue ran across a cloud.”

What might a cloud taste like, she wondered. Like Mother’s snow pudding made for birthdays and Sunday summer suppers. No, no, like dew, like rain gathering on the edge of your winter muffler, brushing against your lips.

THAT NIGHT, Marion took the streetcar to Louise’s duplex on Hussel Street, not two miles away. As she approached the house, she could hear female voices pitching delightedly at each other. Swinging open the front door, Louise yanked her inside, the first time Marion had seen her out of her nurse’s starchy whites. The housedress she wore was very plain, but cut tight across her chest, and when she walked it all twisted into glamorous shapes.

The place was as small as her own room at Mrs. Gower’s, only with an accordion wall that separated the living and sleeping quarters and it had a kind of pullman kitchen. There must have been cracked walls and chipped ceiling tiles and water stains, but you didn’t notice these things because there was an abundance of feminine enchantment. Never seen anything like it, except maybe in that Greta Garbo picture Dr. Seeley took me to where Garbo lived in a harem and her bedroom all overhung with filmy scarves of twisting, winding, billowy loveliness through which chimes tinkled, oh, like such bird songs from far-off heavens. Ev’ry time you saw the long, looping chimes the piano player tinkle-tinkled those keys and you felt your heart lift and tickle you under your chin like you’d do a baby in a high chair and laugh giddily at how wonderful it all was.

“Sit and entertain Ginny, Marion, doll,” Louise said, waving a long arm over at a blond thing reclining on the settee with the claw feet. “I already burned the casserole and am out a dollar sixty-five.”

Marion looked across the room at the blond thing called Ginny, wrapped in intermittent muslin.

“Grab a cush, darling,” she rasped, her mouth candied over like she’d just eaten a cherry mash. On her chest rested an India rubber hot-water bottle. Her teensy pink fingers tapped across it in time to the radio.

Seating herself in a wobbly chair beside her, Marion smiled and asked Ginny if she was feeling poorly.

“Comme-ci, comme-ça,” she said. “Don’t you love ole Al Jolson? He makes you laugh and cry at the same time.” Up close, Marion marveled at how tiny the girl was, like a yellow feather.

“Ginny’s a lung-er,” Louise said briskly from the kitchenette, like saying she had blue eyes, which Ginny did, china blue. With the whiteness of her skin and how small she was, a little doll was all you could think of. “Was out of town for two weeks last year, they tried to put her in a Bugville. You know, those camps?”

“I’m sorry,” Marion said to Ginny, who just kept grinning. “My, aren’t I. I’ve had some health troubles too, but nowhere near as bad.”

“You look it a bit,” Ginny said. “I might say, you look a little of the lunger yourself.”

Marion knew she did, knew she had a wisp of that drawn look, that pulled look. As a teenager, they’d drained her lungs and she’d twice stayed a month or more in hospital wards. For these reasons, and others, she could not go with Dr. Seeley to Mexico. He would not permit it. My darling wife, I cannot bear the thought of you, of your dainty ways and your face so like an angel in these dark parts. All those days on muleback, journey by mailboat, bayoneted soldiers. Why, when I think of it! One fellow here, an engineer, brought his wife. A burro ran into her and tore her kneecap off. That is nothing. I do not dare share with you what I see because I would not risk, not for anything, tainting you.

“Good thing Dr. Milroy han’t spotted your Golden Stamp,” Ginny said, and Marion’s hand flew up to her neck, the spot the doctors effused to a gapy pucker a dozen years past. It had not returned. For years, so many years, in moments quiet and nervous, her hand would go there, her fingertips searching for a return, something gathering beneath the skin.

“Tuber-cu-lo-sis, my dear,” Louise said, dropping her voice low—this was her Dr. Milroy imitation and it was a good one, Louise stretching her whole face long and lanternly like Dr. Milroy was right there. “It is a disease of depletion. A disease in which vital energies are continuously exhausted at a rate no replenishment can match. A vermin eating away at our most vital organs, those which allow us to breathe, to breathe and thus to live.”

“My family,” Ginny threw in, “they got the Christian Science. Who needs them.”

“Do not be afraid, my dear,” Louise went on, winking over at Marion. “Never has a nurse of mine succumbed. As my mentor, the renowned Dr. Harry Ellington Brook, has said, germs are mere scavengers, feeding their gullets on waste, septic matter long dead or dying. Now pick up those sputum cups, pick them all up. They will do you no harm.”

“Before my lungs gave,” Ginny said, craning her neck out toward Marion, who tried to lean forward in the chair beside her, “I had a proper job.” She reached out, her forearm white to almost blue and delicate as a teacup handle, and touched Marion’s wrist, as if to make sure she was playing close attention, as if to make sure Louise’s antics were not drawing Marion away.

“Ginny has had many vocations,” Louise said, shaking out place mats and setting them on a card table that sat just behind Ginny.

“I once taught elocution,” Ginny said, squirming into ramrod-straight posture, “and poise. At the Miss Venable Charm School in St. Louis, Missouri.”

“She was very popular,” Louise asserted.

“I’m sure you were,” Marion said, although she couldn’t picture silky Ginny, her bosom in danger of sliding out from under her inconstant buttons, standing in front of a classroom, ruler in hand.

“Well, the girls enjoyed me on account I was young and I had been on the stage and had traveled beyond the four stoplights of our grand thoroughfare.”

“She was a star of the stage,” Louise assured Marion, straight-faced but a smirk nestling there somewhere.

“I never said I was a star.” Ginny flounced. “I never said that but once to get a job here. And it worked, my lovely Irish rose.” Marion wasn’t sure who was the Irish rose, she or Louise.

“It worked enough to get her in bloomers and pointy shoes at the Crimson Cavalcade at the Hotel Dunlop downtown.”

“Is that a very grand establishment?” Marion asked.

“So grand you can only get in with a referral.”

“My.”

“And two bits.”

“And the referral usually means whispering ‘sarsaparilla’ through a sliding peephole,” Louise said, then clanged her ladle against a pot lid and whistled. “Soup’s on, kiddos.”

Lifting her golden head from the cushion with a sly smile, Ginny tucked her hands under the edges of the muslin and stretched her arms, spreading the muslin wide, showing long ribbons of blaring music notes stitched in Turkey red floss. The hot-water bottle glugged to the floor.

CRIMSON CAVALCADE. Just the name painted such plush-throated images in Marion’s head. She had never known women who had been to such places. She had certainly never known women who worked in them. Back home, when her brother had his troubles, he’d taken to killing his sad evenings in a little place called the Silver Tug Club, or so she found out when her father and Dr. Seeley went looking for him after he’d not shown up for dinner or work at the insurance office in nigh on four days. Dr. Seeley explained to her that such places were really just gentlemen’s clubs but that gentlemen, not like her father but other types, sometimes liked to sit back after a long workday and have a postprandial beverage with other gentlemen and smoke a cigar and talk over current events, and there was nothing really wrong with that, was there, and shouldn’t she know her brother’s had hard times enough, what with losing his bank job in ’27 and losing his wife to a railroad man in ’28?

THERE WAS HASH with a glistening egg on top and chow chow crackling with vinegar, and there were pickled peaches with some kind of delicious glaze on them that made Marion’s mouth go hot. The girls all sat around the pocket-sized card table, tilting despite three matchbooks under one leg.

Louise ate eagerly, sopping up egg with puffy dinner rolls and chatting away at Ginny, who almost never stopped giggling and who never seemed to lift fork or spoon, only her glass.

As they talked, Marion’s eyes found their way through the pink-lit enchantment around her. So different from any home she had ever been in, so different from her room at Mrs. Gower’s, with its bare walls (save the Currier & Ives calendar) and heavy curtains faded from the sun. There, she had nowhere to look except the rippled mirror above her washstand.

Here, her eyes bounced off everything. The gleaming stand mixer on the kitchen counter that still had store tags on it, a Silvertone cathedral radio, an amber decanter with cordial glasses, a portable Carryola Master phonograph, a silver-plated ice bucket into which someone, Louise, she’d guessed, had dumped peppermint candies of the kind they kept in the children’s ward at the clinic.

Random, she thought, to have such a high-tone radio but only a rickety card table on which to eat. And over there, a Hot-point samovar that stood eighteen inches tall and must have held twelve cups of coffee, all for two girls, yet only one easy chair with thin velvet worn through to the spongy netting beneath.

“We met at a clinic in Denver,” Louise was saying, although Marion hadn’t asked. She poured a long syrupy slug of something terribly sweet and beguiling into their glasses, something tasting of plums and covering Marion’s mouth as if she were swallowing big gummy tablespoons of warm honey.

“I did Ginny’s X-rays,” Louise said. “Looked like someone spattered her chest with birdshot.”

“I’d come from a year in Illinois,” Ginny said, pronouncing the s with a smiling slur. “The winters clogged me up but good. I was headed west when I got very poorly in Denver and had run out of coin withal.”

“We got on like a house afire and I decided I needed a change of scene. When she was hale enough, I cracked open my piggy bank and bought us two tickets out of Dodge. And what better place than this, a place in which one is expected, nearly required to rise up from one’s own ruins. Renewal from one’s own ashes.”

“You got to haul your ashes,” Ginny said. “Haul ’em but good.”

“Starting anew,” Marion said, thinking about Dr. Seeley, thinking about the promises he had made of new starts.

“Lou-Lou’s always been an absolute peach,” Ginny said, more seriously now, shaking her head fiercely. “She works double shifts when things get tight. I’m a drag on her.”

Marion nodded in sympathy.

“Fuh,” Louise said, waving her hand in the air, “what else should I spend my dime on? Even if I get hitched again, my insides are tied up good. Might as well throw mama sugar on this yellow chick.”

“Tied up?” Marion said, her face feeling so glowy, the conversation going so fast. Was she really understanding? “You mean you can’t have children?”

A thread of nerve whipped across Ginny’s face as she looked at Marion.

Louise tilted back in her chair and you could feel a swell of plain-eyed sorrow pass across her, turning her into the suffering Gaelic mother of yore, like the brown-tinted portrait of Dr. Seeley’s beloved mother, anchored on the fireplace ledge of their home, when a home was still something they had.

“They scraped me so bad when I lost my boy,” Louise said quietly. “After that, it all went to ruin with me and Frank.”

Marion had heard Louise was married but hadn’t known if it was true, or what had happened to Mr. Mercer if it was. Louise’s long, ruddy fingers were bare.

Ginny slid from her chair and collapsed herself on Louise’s lap, arm around her long neck. “Oh, Lou-Lou, don’t. Don’t let’s fall down that mine shaft.”

And Louise, in a second, squiggled out a smile and squeezed little Ginny tight. “You’re right, Gin-Gin. We have Marion here. We have our wonderful new girl Marion and, not only that, we have Golden Glow parfaits!”

These parfaits, they were beautiful, shivering golden cloud in fine-stemmed glasses. Marion scarcely wanted to dip her spoon and disturb it, but she did and the taste on her tongue was like summer lemons dipped in sugar.

Marion asked her what it all was, her voice starting to do funny things, the words slipping around in her mouth and the s’s stretching out. Her temples throbbing hotly, she began to feel certain that the plum juice they had been drinking was very likely wine.

Louise replied that the parfaits were so simple, lemon junket, milk, an egg white, sugar, stewed apricots.

Marion told them both she’d never had dessert except on special Sundays, and on her honeymoon.

And then Marion found herself telling them, as they sat across from her, eager-eyed and rapt, how she left home the first time on her wedding night, three weeks past her nineteenth birthday, and that honeymoon trip was the first time she’d ever set foot in the lobby of a fine hotel (the Palace Hotel in Cincinnati, she still remembered her hand on the rail at the foot of the walnut and marble staircase, looking up), the first time she’d dined in a restaurant (turtle soup, an encarmined roast beef and maraschino ice cream for dessert, served in a chilled dish of sterling silver that tinkled like a bell when her spoon hit it), watched Gilbert Roland make love to Norma Talmadge in a motion picture, or seen a motion picture at all, the first time she’d seen a stage show (The Cameo Girl ), or put on roller skates, or spotted a lady smoking on the street.

“First for other things too, don’t I guess,” Louise said, her smile filled with mischief. Ginny laughed and squeezed Marion’s hand, which made her feel cared for.

“The only first on Louise’s honeymoon,” Ginny said, still clinging to Marion, swinging her arm, fingers interlaced, “was putting her real name on the hotel register.”

“That ain’t true,” Louise said, twisting her lips like butterscotch hokum. “I didn’t sign the register at all. The bum still had desertion charges outstanding courtesy of the old battle-ax down in Sacramento.”

And she and Ginny laughed together, a giddy, earthy, delightful laugh, and Marion laughed too. She laughed too and it was all so grown-up. She’d never met any women so young yet so grown-up. So beautiful and no husbands around or downy babies, and if it weren’t for the tubercular rack that ripped through Ginny’s laugh as it further unpeeled, everything would seem too perfect for words.

SOON, MARION WAS COMING for supper two or three nights a week. It was too much fun. They would play cards, look through Screen World, it didn’t matter.

There were often new treats to be had, new ones all the time. Once, Marion noticed the big samovar was gone. “Louise cleaned it with bleach and nearly killed us all,” Ginny said. “I made her pawn it for that.” She pointed to a satin nickel roll-around cigarette box with a red handle. Marion, charmed, lifted the handle and noticed no cigarettes inside. “Who has dough enough for more than one pack at a time?” Louise shrugged.

One night, Louise made Marion take all the pins from her long, springy hair and they sheared six inches off, giving her a shingle bob and declaring, save the blond hair, Marion looked all the world like Sylvia Sidney. They told her she was now ready for one of their parties, which, they said, were very famous. What kind of parties were they, Marion wondered. And who would come? Who did these girls know?

AND SOON ENOUGH, shimmering pictures in the distance assembled themselves and it was all there before your eyes.

“Marion, can you hop on the streetcar quick as a wink? Ride a mile and smile the while, dontcha know. Promise me you will.”

It was a Tuesday night, nearly eight o’clock and the first time Marion had ever received a telephone call at the rooming house. She told Louise she had work to do, a sheaf of case files, fist thick, her fingers sore, her forearms tingling even as she spoke. She never seemed to get any faster, always taking work home. Her fingers just didn’t move that way. They fluttered, danced—they didn’t, as the other office girls’, march in tight formation, march with the clack, clack, clack of industry, of invading armies, of Progress.

“Don’t be a killjoy, Meems. You’re off the clock. Your fingers should be tickling the ears of handsome men, tickling their lobes, softer than all keys.”

Marion felt her face go red as she stood in the rooming-house hallway. The hallway smelled as always of cabbage, cabbage for pickling, gusts of vinegar heat wafting through every time Mrs. Gower came in or out the kitchen door.

“Marion,” Louise said, “put on that yellow dress of yours. Mr. Abner Worth is here, he of Worth Brothers Meat Market, and the Loomises. Sheriff Healy and his hollow leg. Mr. Worth brought his hand organ. We told them that you were in your church choir and now they all want to hear you sing ‘After the Roses Have Faded Away.’ They’ve decided to call you the Prairie Canary.”

AND AN HOUR LATER, from the rose-hued corner of the girls’ living room, she was singing. Surrounded by the red-faced Loomises, she with paper fans for everyone, brought in, inexplicably, from Spokane, Washington, and he with a serape from Tia Juana, a serape now wrapped around little Ginny, who vamped it like Dolores del Rio, Mrs. Loomis dotting her cheek with a jet-black beauty mark, to everyone’s delighted approval. Sheriff Healy, still wearing his uniform and tin star, twirled Ginny around like a Russian ballerina. And Marion singing, “The Mansion of Aching Hearts,” “My Mexicana Queen,” “Sipping Cider Through a Straw” and “In Old Ireland Where the River Kenmare Flows,” and Abner Worth spinning his hands, rotating them to unfurl the deep trill of the hand organ. And Mr. Loomis finally crying, crying as Marion warbled, “When you lose your moth-er, you can’t buy an-oth-er, If you had all the world and its gold” and Louise having to drag him down to the sofa, bring his teary head to her bosom, stroke his pink bald head, cooing assurances and reminders that we all love our mothers and it can never be enough.

She would not forget this: Pulling Marion aside in the cramped pullman kitchen, Mr. Worth said, “Another world, my girl, you’d be bright-lighting it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago now. You’d be high stepping it with governors and making Scar-face Capone cry in his beer.”

Marion, the only one, need you say it, the only one not gurgling bootleg all eve, smiled, sweet and gracious, as she did to the men in her father’s church, praising with warm eyes her stirring rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

But inside, inside, my, this was fine. Oh, there were other worlds, weren’t there? Worlds just beyond her tired fingertips. What she might sink those tips into, soft like clover.

“JUST YOU WATCH OUT FOR THEM, DARLING,” Louise whispered as they strode down the clinic’s main hall together, Marion’s arms filled with patient charts and Louise’s with the sputum cups. “The docs ask you to their house for dinner. Trot out the wife. You think it’s all copacetic. They’re just being grand old dad to you. Next thing you know, they have you knees to flat wood at Old Church of Fair Splinters twice a week plus Thursday night Bible study.”

Marion smiled as if she knew what Louise meant and shook her head. “Dr. Milroy has been very kind to me.”

“Oh, boy,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go to the supply room and sneak a smoke, dontcha think? I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about all this starch-collar-’n’-high-boots act they’re pulling.”

Marion did not smoke, but she started going all the time with Louise and she liked how Louise would lift up her long skirt and flash her leg like a can-can dancer, heel propped up high on a supply cart to slide a creased pair of Old Golds from under her garter belt, a ruffle of surprisingly bright orange. Marion had never seen garter elastics in colors like that. It was like the French lady in the pictures Dr. Seeley kept under his talc and his foot powder and the blond strand of baby hair from his brother who died, age six, from diphtheria and his special pills and two francs and a subway token from New York City and his Silver Star.

“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. Keep your wits about you. I got an eyeful of Dr. Tipton just last week,” she whispered, loudly, shaking her match and blowing smoke at Marion.

“What did you see?”

“He was doing something for that pretty redheaded lunger, the one with enough wind left in her sails to blow for a doctor with a snug wallet and a way with the soft solder.”

“Oh, Louise, are you sure?” Marion said. Dr. Tipton was nearly forty years old with grown children and a wife famous for her church hats and ladylike ways. But then again, Louise seemed to know everything that went on at the clinic, and sometimes it seemed like the doctors made special efforts to ensure she was well treated. You never saw Louise carrying bedpans or on laundry duty.

“Sure as summer rain, dolly girl,” Louise said, flicking tobacco off her lower lip like Warner Baxter. Then she gave Marion a long look and shook her head. “You’re lucky you met me.”

NIGHTS, SHE’D THINK about Dr. Seeley leaving her here, even as there was no helping it, even as he was not to blame, could never be to blame, her devoted husband going on four years but seemed both longer and much shorter, much shorter. Sometimes wondering who this man was they’d spent so much time apart, so much time in hospital wards, in clinics, in such places. In her head, thinking of him, it was no longer that elegant doctor, a dozen years her senior, with the kind voice, so soft, soft like the soft, gentle pads of his long, elegant fingers. Instead, it was the picture of herself walking down long, milky hospital corridors, seeing him at the other end, seeing him turning the corner to face her, dark-ringed eyes and he smoothing that long forelock and fighting off his shame and she wishing he would not feel it, did not deserve to feel it. Whose fault, after all?

Lying in bed now, she thought of him as if on a holy mission to heal and provide salvation, conjuring vivid images of him in deep-riven Mexican mines, primitive climes where Aztec rites still held sway, like she’d seen in the pictures, like she’d seen in the magazines she peeked at while at the five-and-dime when she was very small. When she let herself, after those first rough days at the clinic, hours spent fingers pressing into typewriter ribbon, carbon stuck, ink pressed under her nails, nails torn tugging, doctors stern in white coats intoning in her ear, intoning about patients waiting and her incompetence—nights after days spent in this head-aching, body-aching fashion, she’d permit herself exactly sixty seconds of anger at her husband, of hating him even. Her husband who couldn’t keep his shaking hands off the morphia canisters, all for that gluey, glazed descent into the plush velvet, making his voice slow like an old man, flush-faced and pin-eyed, just like the hollow-chested patients at the veterans hospital in Grand Rapids. Oh, Dr. Seeley—Everett. Everett. Was it worth it? Was it that wondrous a thing?

HE’D BEEN GONE, the doctor had, two months, including even her birthday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve now coming upon, and if it weren’t for Louise and Ginny, she’d have spent it sobbing over piecework in her cold room like some kind of lost lady in a melodrama, lungs coated with coal soot or prairie dust while her husband fought in the Argonne, in Manila Bay, at San Juan Hill. But Louise and Ginny had big New Year’s Eve plans that involved a friend of theirs, one Jibs McNeary, bringing a crate full of tin-pan noisemakers, horns with blower tips, table bangers and jaunty foil hats, the latest stack of race records piled high in the arms of Mr. Scott, fresh off a sales trip through honeysuckled towns all through the South and pink champagne from Canada drunk gushingly and splashing sweetly over upturned faces gay with pleasure, red with heat, sparkling with the endless confetti purchased by the Santa sackful from the five-and-dime.

Most of all, they were glad because their friend Gentleman Joe Lanigan, gone since before Thanksgiving on a business trip back east, would be back for the party and there would be toasts and music and merriment marking his triumphant return.

Gentleman Joe was the girls’ favorite among all the men, the one they never talked about without smiling rosy cheeked and making side jokes and winking and tickling each other even, if it was late and the girls were feeling silly.

“Don’t feel left out, Marion. You’ll meet him soon enough and you’ll love him just as much as we do.”

“We’d never have met any of our friends without his kindnesses.”

“He brings ukuleles and big jars of cocktail onions and maraschino cherries.”

“All kinds of crazy stuff.”

“He calls himself the Greater Downtown Benevolence Committee.”

“He’s the welcome wagon!” Ginny said, voice tumbling giddily.

“He’s the big-brother type,” Louise said, her hand on Marion’s arm. “We all need big brothers, don’t we, now?”

NEW YEAR’S EVE CAME and the crowd was just as big as the girls said, the house burning up at near 90 degrees and the men stripping down to shirtsleeves.

Someone had brought a big chrome cocktail shaker shaped like a bell, which Louise swung like a town crier when she mixed the cocktails.

Marion limited herself to one small glass of blackberry cordial, which Jibs’s mother made herself with beaten loaf sugar and stored in her cellar.

Everyone was dancing and the music was rushing through her body even when she stood still.

Suddenly, there was a big whoop and Marion thought it must be midnight even as she knew the electric wall clock had struck eleven no more than ten minutes before.

But no, it was all because of the Big Arrival. There was a swirl of looping bodies, everyone in the room but Marion caught in some kind of cyclone, sucking them toward the opening door creaking with their weight as they crushed against it.

The top of his hat, she saw that first and would always remember it. It had a teardrop crease in the center and it was burgundy, the first time she’d ever seen a man in a burgundy hat.

She was standing in the corner of the room and they were all around him and oohing and cooing and cuddling and backslapping, “How the hell you been, Joe?” “Oh, Joe, we thought we’d never see that pretty mug again,” “Joe, wait till I tell you about the new plot up for sale on Banville. It’s a sweet deal,” “My dear, Joe, that’s the biggest bottle of hooch I’ve seen since Ma died.”

And finally, tall bottles, cans of herring and silver anchovies, a crate of pearly oysters, a tilting pile of tin hand clackers, a few sliding away from the tangle and clattering to the floor, and there he was. There he was. And Marion would remember it just like that, like everyone falling away, a package unwrapped just for her. How could she not? A motion picture actor, that’s what he looked like, with that burgundy felt hat and his broad-shouldered topcoat and shoes shining like church floors on Easter. A smile like a swinging gate and smelling strong of sweet tobacco and slivered almonds and wind and travel and far-off places. When he took the hat off, his hair, blond and bright, shone nearly pink under the overhanging paper lantern, and Marion felt herself inhale fast and her eyes unfocus.

“Who’s the peach?” he was saying, and before she knew it he’d swept her up into his overcoat and the lapel rustling up, crushing her nose, pressing into her mouth, which was somehow open.

Peering up over his coat collar, she could see his eyes dancing, his bemused smile.

“That’s Marion,” she heard someone, Ginny, say, and everyone started singing, “Mary, Mary’s the girl for me, Mary, and I married soon will be.”

She felt a hand on her wrist, cold and strong, and she was yanked from the soft cocoon.

“But, Joe,” Louise was saying, and it was her hand Marion had felt, and now Louise flung her sidewise. “We haven’t wrapped her for you yet.”

And then Ginny popped a cork and it hit Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, in the eye, but he didn’t seem to notice. Everyone swarmed forward with their empty glasses and Louise wriggled behind Joe Lanigan to take his coat, running her hand down on it. “Cashmere, my love?” she asked.

“Vicuna, kiddo,” he said with a grin, clapping his hand against her face.

Men didn’t do that with Louise, not that Marion had ever seen. Not at the hospital, where they held doors for her and lifted things for her and tipped their hats. They might give lingering looks as she walked by them but they never did any wink and tickle like with so many of the nurses. And the men here, the men who came to her home, as careless as it was here, well, they sure liked to bring her presents, and maybe, maybe, they’d go as far as asking for a cuddle on the corner of the settee.

But not this. Not as Gent Joe was. Not so blithe, not so relaxed like she was a hatcheck girl, a girl in the elevator to press buttons and take pinches. Marion, even head fuzzy as it was, fuzzy like someone had run a dust rag across the whole world, took notice.

And then the crowd swallowed him again and Louise turned back toward Marion and leaned close, pressing against Marion, her velvety breast shining with spilt champagne, foam dappling.

“Help me, dear,” she said, Marion in the crook of her elbow, like a coach talking to his star player, whispering the next play deep in the ear. “Will you help me?”

“What is it, Louise?”

“In here,” she said, hitching Marion toward the door and into the hallway.

They were in the narrow bathroom and Louise was propped up on the sink. She was lifting her bristly bronze skirt up over her knees, and this time her garters were garnet colored with silver ribbon curling through.

“What are you doing, Louise?” She wondered if it was feminine troubles like Ginny was always having, Ginny who had pains lasting two weeks each month, requiring massages, low lights and a steady supply of something called Cardui Treatment, which came in a green bottle and which she’d spoon into her favorite highball glass. “Blessed thistle, black haw and goldenseal,” Ginny would lisp, finger pressed on the bottle label. “Stops flooding spells, heaviness in the abdomen. Giddiness.” Am I less giddy, Marion, am I? She was not.

Here was Louise slipping her fingers under her ruffling bloomers and pulling out loose pills, one after another, into her other palm still sticky from squeezing lemons for the drinks.

“Can you take these for me, Marion? I don’t want Ginny to find them,” Louise said. “She thinks whatever I get is all for her. But I have to pay the rent with something other than my fine bottom.”

“Where did they come from, Louise?” Marion asked. Her husband’s face flashed before her eyes. He was the first person to show her such pills, without meaning to, tucked in his trouser cuffs, on their honeymoon trip from Grand Rapids to St. Louis. When she lifted his suit from the trunk, pressing her hand into the knife pleats, the pills scattered all over the floor of the train car and his gasp was loud and pained.

“Mr. Lanigan, of course,” Louise said. “Isn’t he kind?”

“Louise, what are you doing with…with narcotics?”

“Oh, Marion, don’t pull a face with me. They’re just medicine. You know how the other fellows, Mr. Gergen and Mr. Scott and Mr. Worth, all bring us notions? Even Sheriff Healy once brought us a marble bust with a bullet in it from that big raid at the Dempsey Hotel. I sold it for four dollars. Why, Mr. Worth brought us the baby lamb just last Sunday. They all bring us the things they sell. Well, Mr. Lanigan, he sells medicines. And he knows Ginny’s in such terrible, terrible pain and so he brings me little treasures. And I dole them out one by one. But, Marion, Ginny loves pills of any kind, she’s not particular, she just loves them such a darn lot and I’ve tried to hide them but don’t you know she finds them, the little minx.”

Marion looked at her in the tiny bathroom, Louise all legs and hot breath atop the sink, her damp hands dotted with pills, eyes on her so anxiously.

“But you said something about paying your rent.”

“If I were to buy her medicine, all of it, my darling, I couldn’t rub together two dimes for rent. I couldn’t, Marion. Don’t you know it? Sure, I could pawn the radio. Do you want me to pawn Mr. Loomis’s lovely radio, Marion? Mr. Loomis was so happy to give us that radio.”

Mr. Loomis had been awfully pleased to give them the Silvertone cathedral radio. Marion had heard the story many times, including from Mr. Loomis himself, who spoke breathlessly about how he’d had it wheeled in on a dolly while the girls were at Sunday services (that’s what he said, though she had never heard of either Louise or Ginny attending church), and when they came home, there it was in the living room, trilling Eddie Cantor singing, “Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper, Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.”

So Marion slipped the pills into the pocket of her dress, but Louise said that was not near good enough and she wrapped the pills in a handkerchief for Marion and told her to tuck them in her step-ins. Marion felt her face go red and she would not do it and Louise laughed and laughed and laughed. They strode back to the party arm in arm and Louise was still laughing and so beautiful.

Opening the door to the room—the door was vibrating with music, with music so frenetic, that “Tiger Rag” song they’d played five times before, and when the door opened it was like a blast of moist heat in the face, all the energy of so many in such small spaces and the men with collars sprung loose and the women with no shoes.

Mrs. Loomis was waving around the girls’ tiny Colt pistol and shouting she’d blow everyone to pieces at midnight and one of the other women screamed.

“Aw, hold your hokum, that ain’t nothing but a cig lighter,” someone groaned, but Louise said that wasn’t true and tried to stop Mrs. Loomis, who was spinning the pistol around her finger, dancing some kind of crazy jig.

And there was Ginny pouring champagne into the oysters on a big silver platter and then walking around with one in each hand to tilt in someone’s mouth.

It was the most exciting thing Marion had ever seen.

But she’d had enough spirits and she liked her head steadier and she found her way to a corner of the room by the window and she curled herself up over there and watched everything and turned down lunging offers to dance with smiles, even as Ginny shook her head and murmured, “Marion, there’s not enough girls to go around. Take your turn around before we wilt.”

So she did one turn with Mr. Gergen, his hands like ham-hocks slapping against her, the smell of gin and pickles gusting from his mouth, and when he finally released her, he hurled her right into the chest of Joe Lanigan, who was standing, amused, by the accordion wall, a bottle of Triple XXX root beer in his hand.

She backed up quickly but not before he’d reached forward and lifted, with one finger, a wayward curl from her forehead.

“He likes Marion,” she heard one of them whisper in the background behind sweated palm.

It happened so fast she almost missed it because Mr. Worth had his arm around her waist for his turn.

She was being twirled, she was being twirled, and it was like she was a spindle top.

And then Joe Lanigan, he turned to her. He turned to her and focused on her and she felt as small as a baby doll rocking in the corner. She thought if she opened her mouth baby goos would come out. So she didn’t say anything. And he folded his arms and looked at her and nodded and she knew he knew everything. About the starch in her underthings, the Isabey powder she passed up and down each leg after bathing and about the baby doll rocking in the corner. He knew it all.

LATER, THE ORDER OF THINGS, she wouldn’t be able to piece it together. Not because of the charging liquor but because of everything else, the whole gypsy tumult of it. Later, what she would remember most were flashes, flickers like when the film’s running off projection reels. Herself, hand holding a champagne glass, the champagne sloshing over her pink fingers:

…pinches my nose, Mr. Lanigan.

…they all say that, who doesn’t like a pinch, and call me Joe, call me Joe, Mrs. Seeley, Mrs. Seeley you don’t seem like any doctor’s wife I ever knew and I’ve known them all.

…you’ve known them all, how is that?

…well, Mrs. Seeley, I own some stores, you see.

…he owns a dozen stores, Marion—that was Louise, suddenly there—Marion, he’s Valiant Drugs where you buy your lemon soap, isn’t that something? Where you buy your witch hazel and your talc and your tooth powder.

…what else do you buy at my stores, Mrs. Seeley? Is that where you buy the sweet magnolia in your hair, the sweet magnolia I will smell on my shirt collar tomorrow, on my cuffs and collars and in my dreams when I dream of you tonight?

MONDAY, Louise looked pale and pinched.

“My head, Marion, it’s two cotton balls wadded with spit,” she groaned. “Two days and still hanging heavy as my granddad’s long johns.” She had a compress on her head like Barney Google in the comic pages.

Marion gave her a cup of weak tea with geranium. She had so many questions about the party but didn’t know how to ask them, which words to use.

“You’re the shiny penny. Why couldn’t I keep temperance like you? Bet you could dance a Virginia reel and still keep that liverwurst down.” Louise peeped out from underneath the compress. “Listen, Meems, did I by any chance give you something to hold for me the other night, or did I just dream it?”

Marion nodded quickly, fingering the handkerchief of pills in her pocket.

“Well, that’s fine,” Louise said, smiling broadly. “That’s fine. Do you have them here?”

Marion plucked them from her pocket and handed them to Louise, who smiled like Christmas morning.

They went to her locker and Louise put the pills in the heel of her spare shoe.

“Ginny, she likes to take pills, pills like that?”

“Well, don’t she. She suffers mightily, Marion, and who would hold a little peace against her?”

“Not I,” she said, twisting her ring around her finger. “My husband, he…”

“Oh, I’m sure, as a doctor, he sees such things all the time. I’m sure he understands that in these gloomy days one must pass out glimmers where one may. Isn’t that so, Marion?”

“He does understand that,” Marion agreed, thinking of her husband, hand covering his face, covering it from her as he lay on his hospital bed, sat on the bench in the county jail, walked in from five days missing, eyes hooded from her, not bearing to touch her. “Yes, he does.”

THE DARK SPOT on his brain. That was how Dr. Seeley explained it to her long ago. It was like a dark spot, pulsing. He said were it not for the dark spot the size of a thumbprint, a baby plum, he would be living the life of the man he so clearly was. Intelligent, stalwart, respectable. The town doctor, the trusted citizen. The doting husband. The kindly father.

The dark spot, shaped, perhaps, like a crooked star, a pinwheel, a circle fan.

What it was, exactly, he could not explain, even to her, even as he cried in her arms in hospital wards in three states. It was his private curse.

He had not even known of its presence until age twenty-nine when, while seated in the audience of the Savoy Theatre in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a large eave of plaster ceiling fell upon him, upon his leg and hip, and twenty other audience members. The picture was called A Love Sundae, he always remembered that.

He was in the hospital for four days and, a young doctor himself, he knew his injuries were far from critical. But his body, the way it moved, never felt the same again. And the medicine they gave him, why, it was a wonder, shuttling his body to Kubla Khan, and there was nothing else like it. Nothing at all. He tried. There was nothing.

Shaking hands, some stolen medicine found in his automobile, that little girl’s jaw set wrong. He knew he had to stop. But he could not. That was when he became aware of the dark spot. Its pulsing points, the way it lived in his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.

MR. JOE LANIGAN had many reasons to be at the clinic. His pharmacies, three within city limits, brought him into business with Werden and they knew him well. He was there in Dr. Milroy’s office and there was no reason to be surprised, to be struck. Marion heard his voice first, the big quality of it, like he was on a stage or in a pulpit.

“…that’s the stuff. That’s the future right there. All the doctors back east are using it. Just back myself and that’s what they all said. Chicago. Cleveland. Philadelphia. Boston. Even New York City.”

Dr. Milroy stuttered a reply Marion couldn’t make out and then it was Joe Lanigan again.

“…ammonium chloride with codeine and, if the cough is loose, the heroin of terpin hydrate. Call me old-fashioned, Doctor, but you can use those ultraviolet contraptions till we’re all moon men and it won’t shake the rug without some fine chemical assistance.”

They talked some and Marion stood by the door with her legs trembling and she felt silly about herself, she a grown woman with legs trembling from some big-voiced man. But what could she tell her body? Nothing. Her body knew things she didn’t and it shook like a spring toy and then the door began to open and she saw him there and he saw her.

“Why, Mrs. Seeley, my New Year’s baby,” he said, his eyes dancing, his body, cloaked in brush-soft flannel, still and easy.

She said hello, Mr. Lanigan, and nearly curtsied, seeing him as she had, three days before, under a sugared skein of girl-pink champagne, under the heavy weight of parlor heat, thick on their skins, thick with their own energies, own high spirits. And now here like this, in the cool, bleachy hallways of the blasted-brick clinic, didn’t it look so inoculated? Yet it was a pox, vermin in every sweating pore, sputum lining every crevice no matter how swabbed and brush-scoured it was.

“You tend to all the lungers? God’s work,” he said serenely, so upright, so upright in this place, at this time, amid no popping corks.

She said it was not quite tending and explained her job in ways that didn’t include days filled with her ear to the Dictaphone, with listening to doctors droning on wax cylinders, with stamping ink onto forms with small boxes enfolding smaller boxes enfolding smaller boxes still. She explained it quickly and simply and he nodded, as though listening, as though listening and caring. He asked her about how Dr. Milroy treated her, did he make her work long hours, did he make sure she got home safely, and how did her coworkers treat her, had they made her feel at home here?

Then he invited her to lunch. He said he had some questions about Mrs. Lanigan’s care and hoped she might offer her thoughts, you see, his wife was ill, very ill.

She supposed she had known he had a wife. They all had wives. But hearing him speak of her made something twitch under her skin and her fingers sought, quietly, the effusion scar on her neck, the Golden Stamp, as Ginny called it.

“Well, Mrs. Seeley, will you?” he asked again.

What could be wrong about having lunch with a man who wanted help in matters concerning his wife’s health? Surely anyone would approve, would think it proper, kind even.

THE BRIGHTLY LIT dining room of McBewley’s stretched before her, with crisp white tablecloths and freshly cut petunias and sweet baskets of crumbly breads that came with little glass tumblers small as thimbles of seedy jam that slid on her fingers and under her nails, and she would taste it for hours back at the clinic just flicking secretly her hand along her lower lip, along her part-open mouth.

They served tea in steaming pots dotted with cornflowers and the sandwiches came on porcelain plates and there were tall glasses of tea and crisp-cut lemon wedges.

And Joe Lanigan sat across from her and the table was small and even leaning back, as he tended to do to grant her proper distance, even then his leg crossing still sometimes grazed her skirt. But he paid no notice and talked seriously, gravely, with solemnity, about his dear wife struck down not by lung evils but by kidney ailments and other private disorders, and now confined to bed. Confined to bed now near three years.

Many a doctor had recommended he send her to a clinic for full-time care but he’d have none of it. As long as he could manage a nurse in the home, he would keep her there, keep her with him and their two children, ages seven and nine, who needed a mother, even if that mother seldom left her darkened room, air always thick with camphor and eucalyptus. As long as he could work dawn to dusk making a success of his stores, he would keep her there—wasn’t that the right thing, God’s will? Didn’t she agree?

WHEN HE LOOKED AT HER, she could feel it like his finger, the tip of his finger, was tickling the lace bristles on her underthings. Like it was flicking up and down down there. And she didn’t know where she got this idea because nothing like that had ever happened to her. No man’s fingers there, not like that, light and teasing and slow. Not like Dr. Seeley, whom she only remembered ever touching her underthings as if they were delicate pages of an ancient screed, beginning on their wedding night when he had to coax her for hours with patting strokes or nothing ever would have happened at all, scared as she was that his plan—any man’s plan—was to rip her in two. That’s what her church friend Evangeline, who’d married at seventeen and left school, said it was like. Marion saw her at the Sunday social two weeks after the wedding where Vangy had worn her mother’s heavy dress, weighed five pounds. She and Vangy carried their plates slick with watermelon juice from the tables and snuck down to the Willow Run Creek and Vangy had said, Oh, Marion, wait long as you can. I’m riven in two and I never knew from such pain like a hot poker stuck. Each time like wire sticking in me. Don’t relent till you can’t wait for a baby a moment longer. Once I get two children I’m turning face to the wall in bed each night and just he try and make me lay still for him one more time. Just he try.

MR. LANIGAN, Gent Joe, took her to lunch twice more that week. They spoke again, and at length, of his poor wife, buffered in cotton balls, glossed with ointments, wrapped tight like a swaddled baby, eyes glazed over with narcotics. And then, as they shook their napkins of crumbs and settled into tea at the end of the third lunch, he looked across the table and said, “And, Mrs. Seeley, how is your Dr. Seeley? How does he come to be so far from your side?”

Marion had been lifting her teacup and as the words struck her ear, for they did strike and with some force, the handle slid round her finger and slid from the crook her fingers made and cracked in two perfect pieces on the table. A chip flew in Marion’s eye and her lashes rustled against and a spot of blood flecked up and starred her brow.

It was all so terrible, with the crash and clatter and Joe Lanigan rushing round to assist her and the waitress walking her, more than half blind, to the ladies’ parlor to flood her eye under the sink, head cracking the sink twice, water running everywhere, even down her uniform, sopping her chest and trickling deep between her breasts and rivuleting down to her belly.

(For hours afterward, with each blink she’d think the porcelain pock was still there, still there and scraping, ridging her eye with each flutter.)

Riding from the tearoom in his motorcar, her hair slipping from beneath her scarf, she told him she couldn’t, no, couldn’t come to lunch again on Monday. And, far more, she would not be able to take up his recent invitation to attend, as his new friend, the birthday revels of one Ephraim Solway, a fellow Knight, in the banquet room of the El Royale Hotel.

She could not fathom what had come over her that had let it go and go and go. Sitting in restaurants together, legs sweeping against legs, hand on her back, the center of it, fingertips there, as she seated herself. It was dreadful. It was unforgivable at the core. In her head, she began formulating a letter to Dr. Seeley. (How was it now she could only think of him as “Dr. Seeley”? The longer he was away, the more impossible to name that looming absence “Everett,” much less some coo-cooing term, as she might let slip from her lips in their sweetest times, their private afternoons, he pressing his face gentle into her hair and calling her his darling, his dimple-cheeked dearest. When were those times?)

Yes, she told herself, she would write Dr. Seeley directly, chronicle the whole series of luncheons, and make him understand she’d stumbled—foolishly, yes, but she was young and all by herself and in a strange place for so long—into something improper and found her way out quickly, before a single observer could disapprove.

Oh, Dr. Seeley, you alone in fierce surroundings, tending nobly to the ruined lungs of sad-eyed Cornish miners, their own days trapped under bauxite, silver, manganese miles thick, nights spent brining their grief in sugarcane liquor. Oh, Dr. Seeley, your sacrifices so great and your soul beating off the dark furies inside you, that depthless, dooming taste for the needle and its bloom? Your sufferings so immense, and here I sit in comparative comfort and ease, defaming our marriage by degrees.

By the time Joe Lanigan had driven her, hand to wounded eye, back to the clinic, it was all she could do to fight off a heavy sob in her chest. As if he knew it, Mr. Lanigan was more the gentleman than ever, treating her with the delicacy and gentility he might his starch-gloved grandmother.

But when he’d delivered her to the front door, he touched her arm lightly, which he ought not to have, fingers sliding down her arm to her hand. And he turned her toward him and spoke quietly, solemnly, far too close to her twitching face, tears gluing on her lashes still. And he said this, and it was like a claw hammer to her heart:

“For all the world, Mrs. Seeley, I’d not leave your side. Were you my wife, for all the world, I’d not lose my way from you. I’d not abandon you to the world. Not in such hard times, not in any time. I’d not leave you out there in the dark middle, not you with that angel’s face, that beating chest, the pulse in your wrist I can feel even now. I’d not leave your side, Mrs. Seeley. I’d like to meet the man who could.”

That night, under covers and eyes still twitching, flickering back into her head, she dared think of a world where she, barely out from behind her father’s coats, would have fumbled her way to the likes of Joe Lanigan rather than her husband, brushing middle age even at thirty-five. Dr. Everett Seeley, with each passing year more like some gaunt returning soldier from far-off battles, those once-gallant features half ruined, those dark-ringed eyes and blue-edged cheekbones and the slow shuffle and the smell of his shirts on the ironing board. Dr. Seeley, so noble, so kind, but slipping from her with every passing second since they met. All he was was what was almost gone. The only thing that truly remained was the very thing that stripped their pockets clean twice a year since they’d married and finally sent him miles away, leaving her here, lovelier than ever and ripe for picking.

Oh, Joe Lanigan, you’ve found yourself a fellow sinner—how did you know it? Was it on my face like a witch’s mark? Or was it something vibrating in my eyes, something that said I am yours, I am yours.

MARION WAITED. She waited and Joe Lanigan did not call again the next day, nor the following. And the weekend came, and there was Saturday, the day of the planned birthday gala for Mr. Ephraim Solway at the El Royale Hotel, to which he had invited her and she had firmly, frantically declined.

At noon, collar itching and feeling squirmy and hot, she walked to the Pay’n Takit to buy laundry starch. On the way out, head heavy with thoughts, the bent ceiling fan stirring dust and rustling moth flies, she saw a wire canister by the register filled with chocolate nougatines wrapped in sticking waxed paper. Her hand clasped over one like a crow’s claw, she walked out of the store and onto the street, tearing off the wrapper and tucking it into her mouth and letting it sit there, strips of the wax still sticking to it, powdering her tongue, taking just enough of the pleasure away to send her back to the store, mouth clotted, to buy a second and pay for both, even as it would mean, for her at least, for the way she judged herself, no new shampoo for the week and she’d have a bologna sandwich for supper.

At one o’clock, she carried her laundry basket across the street to the Maddens, who let Mrs. Gower’s boarders use their electric washing machine if they brought their own soap flakes and put change in the kitty. Marion had grown up washing with a board and wringer, big kettle and bluing—it took a day or more. But then she was washing for the whole family and now she was just washing her own two work dresses, her nightgown, her underthings, her sheets and bath towel, which Mrs. Gower was supposed to launder but did not.

The hours stretched, arched, curled back, and Marion stood in the Gowers’ backyard where her dresses hung, paper dolls fluttering, and she stood and didn’t move and her head was filled with sorrow and it wasn’t the right kind of sorrow. She stood, the air barely moving, the sky muddy with late-afternoon muddiness, that dread feeling of stillness, which suggests no movement again, ever.

At seven o’clock, the appointed hour, Marion on the edge of her bed thinking, This would have been the time, were I to have been so wayward, or less wayward (for doing without knowing why, that must be happiness).

Somehow, still, she was awaiting his knock, could picture the door opening, his camel’s-hair-coat, hair-oil-glistening arrival, he like a man from a motion picture, on Kay Francis’s arm, towering over with broad shoulders and her hand slipping eagerly through the crook of his solid arm, he with a smile like Fredric March, like Robert Montgomery, like any of them. He was like any of them. All of them. Bright and shiny like polished dress shoes.

So it was a long hour after that, radio playing, rasping out “Far away near Havana shores there lives a girl, whom I call dancing Cuban Pearl,” and Marion darning, like her crook-handed mother, stockings fuzzed with wear. She might have gone to the girls’ place on Hussel Street. Louise always said it was an open invitation and that Saturdays were always a scream, they made sure of it.

But then there it was, like an air horn blast. Eight o’clock, or three minutes past, the sharp knock and frog-jawed Mrs. Gower, robe pulled across low-slung chest, saying, “A Mr. Lanigan should want you on the telephone, Mrs. Seeley. Told him I shan’t expect you to take calls this late but he said mightn’t I try. Couldn’t barely hear him. Sounds like he’s telephoning from a train station, or a rodeo.”

Marion’s breath fast, her hand nearly damp on the mouthpiece, fingers pressed on the thrumming ringer box. “Mr. Lanigan?”

Was that his voice amid the crunching sounds of the festivities, glasses tinkling, dishes clapping against each other, chairs skidding, a trombone drawling, but most of all waves of laughter, men and women laughing together?

“Mrs. Seeley… I know you had declined me, but I do believe you have the wrong impression… should come… respectable celebration in honor of a fine civic leader and Mr. Solway himself would so appreciate your presence… might you consider attending?… You might take a trolley car down and I would meet you and escort you…”

THE TWO YOUNG MEN next to her on the trolley, both wheezing corn liquor, kept rustling her, each time apologizing, hat doffing, but still so caught up in their drunken stories that they’d inevitably fall to it again, one of them even jabbing her straight in the bosom.

Don’t I deserve it, Marion thought. Her knees shaking, her heart vibrating like a tug spring, she cursed herself for not hesitating fifteen seconds before putting on her one fine dress, daffodil colored and ironed to shininess, borrowing trolley fare from no less than bristle-lipped Mrs. Gower (“It was my brother, Mrs. Gower. He needs me to wire him train fare home to see our dear mother.”). And now, heading alone to a downtown hotel to see a man she had no business seeing. No business seeing at all except the business of ruin. She felt her stomach flip three times, and could barely wait to get there.

No one was waiting for her at the trolley stop. She could see the El Royale from where she stood and then she was walking there. She wondered, as she kept her eyes on the hotel, which sprawled a full city block and had a front canopy of gold, if this awfulness in her was new, a spell cast, or something inside her that he had stoked or merely touched and watched enfold in her.

But then, walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, cigar smoke and preening, she felt everything inside her held so tight for a week or more release itself. She saw only a handful of women, their dresses like glowing paint streaks—poppy, turquoise, parrot green. They were young like her, but their dresses dipped low, showing shiny flesh, and their eyes were fringed with dark lashes and their cheeks were like berries bursting, crinkly hair marcelled, and it was all very, very wrong that she should be here, and one man, a stout patrician type with a bulging pocket-watched vest, he had his hands clambering down a girl’s lightly clad, shimmery gold back nearly toward her behind and then, definitely, there. The music hammered at her and the floors felt sodden with champagne and maybe it wasn’t so different from Louise and Ginny’s and yet it was. It was. It was because that was their party and this was not. This was not. It was something else and it felt a little bit like these girls had, stiff-faced and cold-eyed, punched a clock.

Then, from the corner of her eye, something: a swath of dress the color of crème de menthe and it was a dress she knew, as Mrs. Loomis had worn it on New Year’s Eve, and it fit so snug across her swelling chest that the trim kept tearing. But it didn’t look like Mrs. Loomis, not the way the dress was hanging, swinging.

Her eye followed the dress, followed its peacock spread, trailed it as it spanned and tucked and then settled behind the large gray shoulder of a man she recognized as one of the doctors at the clinic, Dr. Jellbye, Dr. Jellieck, Dr. Jellineck…and then he turned and behind him Marion could see that bristle of deep red hair and then Louise’s kohl-rimmed eyes, jittery with pleasure.

“It’s my prairie canary,” came a voice slipping rough in her ear, startling Marion, making her flinch. But it was only Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, and he took Marion’s arm in his sausage fingers and plucked her from the crush and as he did said, “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit.” And she felt overwrought and angry and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. And you may tell him I have gone.”

But Marion’s voice seemed to get swallowed up by Mr. Gergen and his big double-breasted suit jacket and then, like a game of Pass the Parcel, she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world, and she caught his eyes and she said, in a voice that surprised her, “Mr. Lanigan, you will remove me from this place,” a strong, spiky voice like Louise telling a noisy patient, “I suppose you know you’re disturbing the entire ward, Mr. Milksop.”

He did as she said. He removed her with great speed.

Then they were in front of the hotel and the cold pinpricking her and he putting his tuxedo jacket around her.

“These are not the kinds of places I can…”

He pulled his jacket tighter around her and said, mournfully like those Irish can do, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. But I saw no other way. You had closed the door on me. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. I should have realized this was no place for you. That’s a lie, Mrs. Seeley. I knew this was no place for you. And yet.”

He said he’d take her home in his motorcar and she didn’t like it but could think of no other way. The trolleys ran an hour apart this time of night.

In his car, she sat far against the door, feeling suddenly like he’d seen her without her clothing. She felt like, in coming, she’d shown him everything. She knew she had. And now she must retreat.

The sedan was filled with him, he was so large a presence, so tall and with that hair thick like a layer cake, and the way he talked, which was big, like the best salesman, filled with tricks of tone and turns of phrase—there was this way he had of always reminding you how important and marvelous what was happening to you just then was.

“And that El Royale Hotel, I’ve invested a substantial amount in it, it will be colossal. Did you know, they put circulating ice water in every room and automatic cooled air that changes every three minutes? I timed it. But listen to me sitting here talking nonsense about circulating water and I get these moments with you and it’s a thing of glory, just like this, this is all I wanted, Mrs. Seeley, and I just didn’t know how else to make it happen.”

He drove three miles past Mrs. Gower’s house, would not stop pressing until she turned and let a snarl loose like none she knew was in her.

“What kind of husband,” she said, “with an invalid wife at home no less, spends his evenings like this, Mr. Lanigan?”

“What kind of husband is your Dr. Seeley,” he replied, rough as a razor strap, “leaving his wife behind and packing off to savage Mexico?”

And that was a terrible thing for a man to say, for anyone to say, what did he know of her husband’s sorrows and burdens, and Marion felt it like a hot iron to her chest and she hated Joe Lanigan, she did.

IN BED THAT NIGHT, face greasy with cold cream, she recalled the way, after apologizing and apologizing once more for his harsh words, for his poor behavior, he opened the car door and doffed his hat and followed her to the front door and his head, the top of it, brushed the porch lamp and his hair shot through with light and his face so grave, long shadows meeting beneath his chin. “I wish you could see, Mrs. Seeley, what this is. This thing that has happened, that is happening still, that cannot be stopped from happening. I wish you could see what this is.”

“I know what it is, Mr. Lanigan,” she’d said, clipped and abrupt, shutting the door behind her.

THEN NOTHING FOR DAYS and Marion, head down in work and evenings spent writing a long letter to Mazatlán:

Each day the idea of another evening spent in her room was near too much to bear. And so she threw herself into the girls’ mad embrace and was so grateful for it.

A midweek supper at Louise and Ginny’s, Louise trying out a new dish she’d created called February Surprise and it was canned cream of celery soup and egg noodles with baking-powder biscuits on top and everyone agreed it was wretched and Ginny tried to throw it out the window and there was screaming laughter. Marion was so glad she’d come.

Even still, seeing Louise, she found herself worrying about the party at the El Royale Hotel. Had it been Louise, and had Louise seen her? Somehow, she had come to persuade herself that she had misseen, as distressed as she was.

But then Ginny, breaking a fever and feeling sour, said, “Marion, do you think it’s nice that Louise leaves me alone so often? I wonder if she’ll go out on the town this weekend, like she did last. I had to entertain myself with Chubby Parker and Pie Plant Pete on the radio instead.”

“Poor little baby,” Louise said, singsong. “Did you need me to wash your hair, Princess Virginia?”

And then Ginny broke the onion face and did laugh and Marion said, almost a whisper, “Where did you go, Louise?”

“Birthday party.” Louise smiled, lifting Ginny’s ankles off the sofa, and settled herself beneath them, squeezing Ginny’s pink-slippered feet.

“And my, did she tie one on.” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Came home near three o’clock and drank bicarbonate all Sunday.”

“I’d’ve just as soon stayed in Saturday night, but someone was rattling like a diamondback.”

“So I drove you out, that it? Drove you to ruin.”

“Something like, kitten.”

Marion almost spoke up but didn’t. To say anything would be to admit she was at the party and that she could not do. She could say nothing, not even to her new, her dearest friends. She would have to live with her shame, but she didn’t need to share it with others. Never that.

LATER, LOUISE MADE MARION a bed of the settee, muslin tucked tight.

“You are a lonely girl,” she said. “We won’t let you be lonely.”

Marion smiled.

“It’s funny,” Louise whispered, head tilted confidingly. “For Ginny, men are only to play with.”

“But not for you?” Marion whispered back.

“Not for me,” Louise said, shaking her head. “Sometimes one gets under my skin and poppoppop like a needle.”

“Yes, that’s what it’s like,” Marion admitted, in spite of herself. “That’s just what it’s like, poppoppop.”

FRIDAY STRETCHED LONG at the clinic. Six new patients were admitted, papers needed to be put in order for the state inspection on Monday, and two nurses had been dismissed the day before (Louise heard tell and shared with Marion they were caught in the east utility room with a male patient and a jar of corn liquor, not a stitch on and he with hands on them both).

The day never broke and Marion’s stockings itched and her back had a mean twist three notches long and Mr. Joe Lanigan had forgotten her forever, hadn’t he, and Marion had never finished the letter to Dr. Seeley and had torn the half-finished draft into pieces and hidden them in the toe of one of her wedding shoes because she was afraid if she threw it in the wastepaper basket Mrs. Gower might find it.

On the streetcar home, she set her handbag, heavy with the medical histories she had not finished, across her lap so that she might slip her hand underneath and between the buttons on her skirt and scratch her legs, tickling unbearably underneath her stockings, worn and no new funds from Mexico for three weeks. Under her bag, her fingertips found her thighs and she chanced only a few deep scores before lifting her hand away. The man opposite her, standing, looming, hat on, close-set eyes and toothpick prancing between lips, he looked like he could see and there was a nasty flicker in his eyes and something curling, raw, in his lips. Marion’s face fell hot with shame.

TWO HOURS LATER, after a starchy supper with Mrs. Gower and the other two boarders, unmarried girls glum with no dates that night, after helping with the dishes and mouth top still burning with macaroni custard, Marion retired to her room and turned on the radio and opened the window as high as it would go and sat listening to The Misadventures of Si and Elmer and knew she should be doing the work she had brought home, or working on the cross-stitch on the handkerchiefs she would send to her mother for her birthday. But she sat by the window and sat until near nine o’clock and that was when she saw the flash of Joe Lanigan’s oyster-white topcoat under the streetlamp below.

Later, she would try to tell herself the story of that hour as if it were a fairy tale: the knight climbed up the tower clasped in three centuries of black ivy and he cut through the ivy with a mighty sword and found the fair maiden and she was his.

Later, she would see that hour as if it were a motion picture: the leading man, so handsome, and the leading lady, bathed in white light, and he moving toward her and she toward him, jittery and lovely. And they embraced like in all the pictures, and it was filled with all the things—magic, longing—that picture kisses are filled with. And the darkness on the edges spiraled toward the center and swallowed the screen black.

Later, she would recall again and again the events of that hour while coverlet to chin in her bed approaching three o’clock and hidden under the hood of late-night melancholic dark where everything means so much and everything is so raw and tender and open and it would be like this, like this:

He stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand, and he said, “Mrs. Seeley, you are an honorable woman. I would not for all the world’s fortune test your honor. But you must see there are things I have to say to you. Will you let me come inside?”

But she would not. How could she, into her room, the room the good doctor had secured for her. The thought of him in that small space, with only one rose chair, one chair and a bed.

He reached across the threshold and his eyes were on her and wouldn’t let go. His hand went out and she jumped back as though he were made of fire, and wasn’t he?

“Mrs. Seeley, might you step outside with me, then? Might you walk with me a little?”

But she would not. To be seen on the street with a man, this man, a man all knew was married, with a stricken wife and—

“Mrs. Seeley, what if you were to take a drive with me? There are things I wish to tell you. Private things.”

She said she would not, but he stood there still. He looked so weary and the things that touched her about him flew forward for her. She liked to think of herself as the kind of person in whom another person might confide. This is what she told herself even as she knew the things he would say would unravel her. She knew that and she agreed anyway. She agreed and soon enough she was in his Packard, the two of them rumbling down the dark streets, turning corners and not speaking and continuing to go forward until they broke free of the snarls of houses and the dots of street-lamps and into the desert.

And he pulled the car on the side of the road and turned to her. She tried to keep her eyes straight ahead, fixed on the velvety black. But of course she could not. And she waited for a speech from him, a declaration, a confession. Maybe, maybe a sad story about the weight of illness in his house and how it twisted his heart and nearly broke him.

But no speech came.

He reached out to her and took her hand.

Then he asked her to move closer to him.

She would not.

Then he moved closer to her and she could feel him everywhere, his linen coat pressed against her. He whispered something in her ear, but she could not hear it, because his hands had started their way, ways she knew they would find, under her dress and buttonholes gaping and the weight of him and she could stop herself no longer. It was all too much. It was all the kinds of things that had never happened to her and now that they were happening she would not stop it. As she felt herself slide flat against the car seat, as she found herself gripping tight the fine linen of his coat in her hands, lashes fluttering against his face and the roughness of his cheek good and hard on hers, very good. It was then she realized what he’d said, what he’d whispered in her ear.

Marion Seeley, you are mine.

THAT WAS HOW IT BEGAN. And the biggest surprise was that there were no tears, no tears at all for her, that night or the following day. And on Tuesday night, when he arrived again at her door, it happened all over again, this time slow and stretched fine and lovely as blown glass, and then he left and when he did he took her close to his chest and kissed her with great force and told her that he had waited life long for something to mean half as much.

“WHEN IT RAINED DOWN sorrow it rained all over me. ’Cause my body rattles like a train on that old SP. I’ve got the T.B. blues….”

This is what the man with the Adam’s apple thick-knotted in his long neck was singing in Ginny’s ear, plucking at a banjo.

“You need a har-monica, Floyd,” Ginny was saying. “That’s the way they do it in the colored joints.”

“What do you know from colored joints, Gin-Gin,” Louise said, running the carpet sweeper by them, trying to pick up this Floyd’s cigarette ashes and the crumbs from the oyster crackers he had brought in a big tin all the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“Why’s Marion standing there in the doorway like the Fuller brush man?” Ginny chirped.

They all looked at Marion, who had just arrived and only stepped a few feet into the room.

“I’d buy a Fuller brush from her anytime,” Floyd said, then dropped his long black-rimmed fingernails across the banjo strings. “I’ve been fighting like a lion, looks like I’m going to lose…”

He did not seem to recall her, but Marion had met Floyd at least twice at the clinic, where he’d come, sick as a dog, from taking gold cyanide given to him by some doctor in Montana.

“Mims looks like she saw a ghost,” Ginny said, talking over Floyd’s snoring croon.

“…’cause there ain’t nobody ever whipped those Fuller brush blues.”

“Likely she wasn’t expecting such a crowd,” someone said, and it was Joe Lanigan, standing by the pullman kitchen, suit jacket off and suspenders twisted, smoking.

Marion stepped in finally, her head jumbled. What was he doing here? This man who had pledged such momentous words to her not two days earlier, now standing in the home of other women in the morning hours as if a dandy bachelor in a red-light bordello?

“We had a late-night gala,” Louise said, tugging at carpet with the sweeper, even as Joe Lanigan was dropping fresh ashes from his cigarette. “Maybe you read about it in the society pages of the morning paper.”

Knowing Joe Lanigan was a regular guest here, was in fact how she had met him, did not change the fumbling horror of the moment. Joe Lanigan here, like this, at 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Was this how it was and would continue to be?

Not twelve hours before, on the telephone in Mrs. Gower’s dark hallway, whispering into the dark slot of the mouthpiece, I cannot see you tonight, Mr. Lanigan. I cannot leave here at this hour. You should not ask me to. You know, oh, you know, it’s not for not wanting. The wanting is a burning in me. I am all wanting.

Talking like a French novel, cover creased, in her brother’s dresser drawer. How could such words slip from Marion Seeley’s lips? And she had naughtier words than that, that was certain. She offered them to Joe Lanigan’s curving, shaving-oil-scented ear, offered them in fast torrents, florid as The Sheik, which Marion’s schoolmates read behind sewing machines in Home Economics, but with words one hundred times as raw. Where did she come to know these words? Had he given them to her secretly in the night as she slept?

“Gent Joe here came over going on midnight,” Louise said, flopping down next to Ginny, who curled up against her, sucking on an oyster cracker, blond curls springing and whirling about.

“We were in our bedclothes counting sheep,” said Ginny, poking a bare toe, painted violent purple, at Floyd, who, prompted, started again.

“Lord, but that graveyard is a lonesome place. They put you on your back, throw that mud down in your face. I’ve got the T.B. blues….”

“We really tied one on.” Louise yawned. “When did Floyd get here? I don’t even remember. Suddenly, he was here.”

“Like a fairy sprite,” Ginny chirped.

Marion’s eyes were still on Joe Lanigan, who was now smiling lightly at her. She did not smile in return.

“Marion, don’t you like Gent Joe?” Ginny cooed, stretching her toes out.

Louise looked over at Marion. “Yes, Marion, for goodness’ sake, sit down. You’re like Sister Abigail over there.”

“My good gal’s trying to make a fool out of me,” Floyd sang. “Trying to make me believe I don’t got that old T.B.”

“He’s back to the beginning again,” Ginny announced.

“I will sit down,” Marion said abruptly. A party, that was all. A party that went on too long, as their parties often did. They never stopped them. They never cared to.

“You should have invited that bright thing last night,” Floyd said. “She could have brought her brushes. I’d’ve bought several myself.”

Sitting closer now, Marion could smell the alcohol wafting from him, from all of them.

“We would have, had we known,” Louise said, looking harder at Marion now. “There was not time enough to issue the engraved invitations.” Something seemed queer in Louise’s tone, but Marion couldn’t stay on it, couldn’t focus. Her thoughts kept caroming back to Joe. When she declined him the night before, she had pictured him wandering despondently in the sickly hallways of his sick house, not here, not here like this. Was it possible he was not her tortured swain?

“Mrs. Seeley is not that sort of woman,” Joe Lanigan said, moving toward them, leaving his perch by the kitchenette. His speaking, moving, broke some awful pressure, scissored it clean. But it also tied new knots.

“Marion likes to have fun,” Louise asserted, straightening up slightly. “She’s always ready for high times.”

“There is a difference, Louise, that may be subtle for you but is actually legions wide and fathoms deep,” Joe said. “Mrs. Seeley may be alone in these parts, left to fend in our wilderness, but she retains her proper bearing, her breeding, her fine womanly ways. She does not degenerate, she is evolved. She does not come here and let herself be transformed into a backward thing. She is Mrs. Seeley from a good family, good and proper still.”

Ginny plucked one of Floyd’s banjo strings with her outstretched finger. “Well,” she said, feigning to scratch her underarm, “guess I’d better twist myself a banana.”

Louise’s face was tight, but Marion was too distracted to pause over it. Instead, Marion felt herself unspool inside and it was lovely and she wanted to touch Joe Lanigan’s arm, lightly, as she wanted to smile to him and even curl herself at his feet.

He knew her, he knew her, he knew even as he dallied and caroused and sauntered through red rooms everywhere. He might let spangles and sin cover his upturned face so handsome, but in his heart… In his heart…

“What are Ginny and I, then, Joe?” said Louise, mouth just a shade hard. “Some Friday-night taxi dancers?”

“I wasn’t speaking of you, Louise. Nor Virginia. I was speaking of Mrs. Seeley, whom we have made uncomfortable, which is the last thing I would want.” He reached for his jacket slung over the back of a chair and put it on.

“Aren’t we talking high tone,” Louise started.

“Don’t fluster, Louise,” Ginny piped. “Gent Joe is just brushing his boots clean on our bosoms to flatter our lady. What’s the harm? Sing us some more, Floyd. Sing us out of our hungover blues.”

“This one’s dedicated to my stalwart former employer, King Copper,” Floyd said, “for whom I toiled the smelter, 1924 until they took my breath away.” With great flourish, he raised his arm and dropped it down fast like a jackhammer on the strings, peeling into a frenzied jazz number.

“That’s the stuff,” Ginny said, and she leapt up from the sofa as if the picture of health and commenced dancing. Marion had never seen her move a hundredth as fast. Her legs kept twisting around each other and kicking backward as she spun so fast, Marion was sure she’d collapse, but Floyd only played faster and faster and Louise was finally laughing. Looking over at Marion, she said, “Get a load of that jig trot. She made us four bits on that once when we were broke outside Albuquerque.”

And Marion looked up at Ginny’s face, steaming red, and stone-cold ecstatic, like Saint Bernadette.

MARION STAYED and Joe Lanigan kept his suit jacket on, even as Floyd, three slugs into the new round of drinking, stripped down to his undershirt and suspenders and threw Ginny round the room.

Louise dragged out a big punch bowl and filled it with gin, black pepper and a can of consommé.

Marion could feel Joe Lanigan standing behind her chair, but she did not look back.

“Lou-Lou, don’t we got some tomato juice to toss in there?” Ginny said, breathless, still dancing.

“Mrs. Seeley, would you like a glass?” Joe Lanigan was saying, and he set one hand on Marion’s shoulder and the tremble through her body, well, she felt the floorboards might crack.

“No thank you,” she said.

“Mims is a two-finger girl,” Ginny said, finally stopping long enough to run for a can of tomato juice and slinging it into the bowl. “She’ll do two fingers of sherry. Two fingers of champagne. Maybe two fingers of crème de menthe if you push it. But never more than two fingers a night.” She cocked the bottom of the can for one more glug and added, grin broad, “Just you try to get more than two fingers in her, Joe Lanigan.”

“Tut-tut,” Louise said, grabbing the can from Ginny. “That’s enough.”

“It makes my head hurt,” Marion explained, now the only one sitting. She felt surrounded.

“That’s ’cause you’ve been drinking bad hooch, doll,” Floyd said, taking a glass from Louise’s hand. “Try the new medicine, doctor approved.”

“Which doc?” Ginny said.

“Why, Doc Joe,” Floyd said.

Joe walked around Marion’s chair and looked down at her, folding his arms across his chest. “Mrs. Seeley, I know you don’t generally partake, but it might do you some good. And you’re among friends.”

“How’s she look, Doc?” Floyd said.

Marion let him meet her eyes. She felt like the killjoy. The church girl at the beer blast. She wasn’t sure what to do. She showed him everything in her face and let him decide.

“Hmm, the patient looks pale,” he said, and his hand reached out and touched her chin, tilted it up. And everyone saw. But it seemed so natural and no one said a word. “One might even say consumptive. She likely needs to go home and rest.”

“Eh,” Floyd said, waving his hand dismissively. “How about a second opinion?” He strode over, skin as white as his undershirt only bluer, carrying a fresh glass. “Dr. Floyd prescribes an immediate transfusion.”

“She should go home,” Joe repeated. “No good can come from this. She is a delicate thing.”

“Guess we’re a couple of log-splitters,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Marion, don’t let these gees tell you you can’t have fun. You might be a taxi dancer yet.”

“I don’t wish to go home,” Marion blurted out. “I don’t wish to. I will have a glass. I will.”

“How about five fingers?” Floyd said, eyebrows mast high.

“Five fingers full,” Ginny hiccupped from behind her.

And Marion took a sip.

HE GAVE HER her first taste and it set her teeth on edge. He’d slugged it with long shots of sugar to cut the grain sting and it swelled in her mouth, a gritty cotton-candy swirl, then a rush of heat sending tears to her squinting eyes (My, did he love that, laughing, calling her baby snooks). Her belly warm and loose and everything turning, stretching, she reached for his hands, wanted them, urgently, on her. She’d never taken a man’s hands like that, placed them on her, on her thighs so his fingers fell between. Those soft, peppermint-oiled, half-moon-nailed hands that’d find their way in there, in everywhere, as the hooch bloomed, just bloomed.

IT WAS AN HOUR LATER, maybe two, and Joe Lanigan had his arms around her and they were outside, a hot gust twining her skirt between her legs and he pointing to his car, and Marion held on tight because she was spinning, like she was doing the jig trot in her head.

And before she knew it, they were in his car, all leather and chrome, and the backseat big and the leather soft and his hands on her stockings, her only good pair, and his hands between her legs and it was raining softly outside, the first time in weeks, wasn’t it, and then she felt his whiskers prickling along her stomach and thighs and then she felt the rocking start and then she felt and then there was all feeling and the rain, like a t-pit, t-pit, t-pit and…

MONDAY, THE CLINIC, Marion sat at her desk, still blurry-headed, no sleep, long hours spent writing and unwriting Dr. Seeley and reading his latest correspondence over and over again, its skeiny pages tattooed blue with India ink:

Oh, what did she care, what did she care… Reading it now, the tenth time in so many missives…how much could it mean, this man who’d plucked her from her sawmill Midwest town, who’d danced with her at her church social and spoke of a cottage on a river and tousle-locked children and all that a committed young doctor could give…

It meant nothing.

And now, in her swivel chair, working, trying to do her work.

In her head, it was like this:

LOUISE WAS CHATTERING away in the lunchroom yet again, chattering in such dipping lovely lyrical ways and Marion didn’t have to listen too closely and she could just let it hop along, brush up against her, keep her distracted.

“Oh, she’s a fine one, did you see her with no girdle swinging her stuff around? No sale here, swivel hips.”

Then:

“That orderly, he wants some of her honeypot, but I ask you, has he two dimes to spark? Orderlies, they can make time with chambermaids, factory girls. This is America, Marion, doll. Stars bursting.”

Then:

“Oh, Marion, did you see that? Myra. She’s always giving me the fisheye. She thinks I cost her friend Fern a job. And she’s right.”

Marion glanced over at Myra, a broad-faced country girl known for good spirits and a clear, sunny whistle that the patients loved.

The look she was giving Louise twisted that face into something rigid and brow-beetled.

“What did you do, Louise,” Marion asked, trying to focus, trying not to slip back away.

“That two-faced crackpot Dr. Milroy…I had to go back east to see my ma last fall. Was gone for nine days. Just nine days. Two days coming and going. And while I’m gone, he had no one to run the new X-ray machine. I’d gone for special training to learn and it cost me forty dollars. So I’m gone not three days and Dr. Milroy decides to show this other nurse, this claptrap Fern, how to use the machine to make X-ray pictures. He told everyone, ‘She’s from a farming town and is familiar with equipment.’ What, tractors? So I come back and they don’t want to pay me the extra four bits a week anymore.”

“That doesn’t seem fair. Nor safe,” Marion said. “Those machines can be dangerous.”

“You don’t have to tell me, buttercup. But I showed them,” Louise said, grinning. She leaned forward. “First chance, I went into the X-ray Department right before her shift and turned the voltage up real high. The next day, darling Fern uses it and near burns a hole right through some poor clod.”

Marion looked up at Louise, wondered if she could be serious.

Louise grinned, red-lipped like a baby caught with hands in the jam jar. “Well, shouldn’t she pay for being such a louse, such a nasty little s.o.b.? Myra best keep her talons short. She causes trouble, wait and see. Wait and see what I got cooking.”

Marion thought, Why, she’s just playing, she always plays. Besides, there was Joe Lanigan to think of. Joe Lanigan.

She wanted to share it all with Louise, but she really couldn’t, could she. What might Louise think? For Louise, bad behavior was coming by for supper with empty hands, or not paying mind to Ginny, so clearly itching to play Tiddly Chase or Chinese checkers. Sins were looking down long noses at unmarried girls while carrying on with parlormaids on the sly.

“So do tell where you and Joe Lanigan stole off to on Saturday, my little nightingale,” Louise said, over hoecakes she’d brought for them.

“We went for a drive,” said Marion, fingers to her mouth. She felt like everyone could see it on her, Louise most of all. Like the one time, the only time, seven years old and being fresh, she sassed her father and he made her stand under the cherry tree at the foot of their lawn with a writing slate hung round her neck that said, I DO NOT FEAR OUR MAKER.

“I thought you went the way of the Parker baby, but Ginny has a slyer eye,” Louise said, smiling the whole time. “She says to me, ‘Marion plays the prairie flower but she’s got a hot mitt on Gent Joe.’”

Marion could feel her chin shake. “He needed someone to talk to. You know, his wife is so ill.” This was true. Joe had talked about his wife, at length and in ways that made Marion feel he had sorrows deeper than her own.

“They do hot-air treatments,” Marion went on. “When it’s bad, her lips, they…” Here, telling her, he had touched his fingers to his mouth, embarrassed. “They taste of urine.”

He told her too that when his wife came to realize this herself, kisses stopped forever. Her humiliation was so great. She was dirty, she said. Dirty and foul.

Before she fell sick, he’d admitted, he’d never seen her lily-white bride flesh, even in low lamplight, curtains heavy across every window. He’d not seen an inch of it, only felt it, tense and wincing, under his hand, under two coverlets, under the grave dead dark of long winter nights.

Now he saw that flesh and it was pushed full with air, with sick, with awful inner squalls of illness. It was like touching the thin, skeiny membrane of a newborn birdling.

“Is that how it is,” Louise said to Marion now, nodding, eyes fastened hard. But she seemed to be, could she be, finding a giggle in all this.

“She has the Bright’s,” Marion said. “She’s infirm.” Marion, you must understand, he had told her, fingers on the ties that held her dress together, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.

“Is that what they’re calling it now? You don’t have to tell me about Mrs. Lanigan, Marion,” Louise said. “The three months I worked for her were the closest I’ve come to San Q.”

“You worked for her? You were her nurse?”

“When I first blew into town. It didn’t last. She’s no bed o’ roses and that’s how come I always felt so for dear Joe. Can’t be pretty in that household. We try to keep his spirits up. Seems like you’re doing the same.”

“I never knew that,” Marion said, wondering why Louise had never mentioned it before, or Joe.

“Three months, best,” Louise said, waving her hand. “I got my better job and enough cabbage to pull Ginny from cooch dancing downtown. Just in the nick too. She was Camille up there on the stage and not enough meat on her chops to waggle anything but bones.”

WITHIN A WEEK, Marion began to think of it as a kind of demonic possession. At her desk, on the streetcar, at Mrs. Gower’s roasting dinner table and especially at night in bed, her body twitching. In private moments in late night hours, she thought demons may have set in and taken her body and she might require an exorcism to be free.

Joe Lanigan. Mr. Joseph Lanigan. Entrepreneur. Beloved husband and father. Man about town. Friar. Knight of Columbus. Member, Chamber of Commerce. Lector at St. Mary’s Basilica. Gentleman Joe.

“If I cannot see you at your room, I don’t see any other way,” he said. He had telephoned Marion at the clinic. Mrs. Curtwin, Dr. Milroy’s secretary, was not pleased that Marion was receiving calls at work. Marion had to speak quietly, discreetly into the receiver. She felt as though the woman could hear everything.

“Mrs. Gower, she… It wouldn’t look…”

“I think you should come here, Marion.”

“To your home?” Marion’s voice turned rushed. The secretary’s eyes were fastened on her.

“Write down this address.”

She did. But she already knew where he lived, in that fine Victorian house on Lynbrook Street, three stories on a sloping hill and a large porch that curled around it.

She determined not to go. She said to herself, This is it, Marion, your sin is great but you can save yourself from worse sins still.

BUT STEPPING on that streetcar she did not go home. Instead, she took the streetcar to his grand house on Lynbrook Street. She just had to, like it was a fever. It was a fever.

A nurse in white collar and apron answered the door and Marion said what he had told her to say.

“I’m from the clinic. I have brought Mr. Lanigan the late orders for immediate processing.” And, palms wet, she showed her the accordion file she had brought.

“This way, miss,” the nurse said, no expression. The house was dark, with shushing drapes drawn and thick-fringed brocaded chairs. Marion could smell mercury and rubbing alcohol.

“Right through that door,” the nurse said, gesturing down the hallway. Then she lifted a tray of medicine and rubber tubing she had set on a hallway table and silently ascended the towering staircase of carved walnut.

As Marion walked, she could feel the woman’s, the wife’s, Mrs. Lanigan’s, presence. Could feel the weight of her in her sickroom above. The house carried no sound.

She paused in front of the heavy door to which she had been directed. She paused, and nearly lost her nerve. But it was too late and Joe Lanigan, in shirtsleeves and smoking a cigar, opened it. Oh, the look he gave her, didn’t it say such things to her. She felt like he could move her as if by invisible strings. He had such ways, you see.

It was his study, all mahogany and green leather with gold braid. The window behind the desk was draped and she saw the long tufted davenport and knew she was meant for it, that she would in moments be pinned there, one foot on the floor, and that he would have her, and he did.

Afterward, her body rubbed to roughness, to blood-pocked flushy ruin, she fastened garters with shuddery hands and watched him, standing now, leaning against the front of his desk, cover his face with his hands like he might cry. He did not cry and she was glad he did not, but she couldn’t guess what was in his heart. She never could.

For a moment, she felt he might finally have been struck by the ponderousness of their joint sin, here only a foot of plaster and wood separating him from his enfeebled wife one floor above.

“Oh, Marion,” he said. “Look what I have done.”

But when he pulled his hands from his face, she saw no grief at all, no trace of stricken remorse.

“I have made you a whore,” he said, and he couldn’t stop his smile. Saw no need to.

For her part, looking into her own battered heart, she could summon no anger, nor even fresh guilt. She believed that in his mind, which she now saw as disturbed in some way, the consequence of years of feeling lost and unmoored, like a widower with a wife, in his mind, he was giving her his highest praise. Her legs still damp, she reckoned this terrible revelation: she was strangely gratified. She had pleased him. Wasn’t that, in some odd way, wondrous?

This man, he has shamed me twice over, once by treating me like a whore and once more by showing me I am one.

I am a sinner, Dr. Seeley. What’s more, I grew to love my sin.

NO ONE HAD TOLD JOE LANIGAN that she was a flower, a doll, an ornament of finely spun glass, something to rest on a mantelpiece. Somehow no one had told him he couldn’t fondle her, twist her filmy skin, grab her with his rough Irish hands and throw her on a bed and do just awful, awful things to her.

You are Pandora, Joe Lanigan had said. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open. As if it were her. As if she were the one. Was she?

She wondered if she’d showed him, without knowing it, that she could be treated like he treated her. What had she shown him, and had she shown it to Dr. Seeley and had he not seen? Or, oh no, had he understood and been frightened and such the more cause of his private habits, so destructive to them all? Things too horrible to know.

But Joe did not bother with talk of sin. He never missed Sunday Mass and he saw no predicament, said the one had not to do with the other and there was a gospel of hedonism and she might follow it, but she with her Dutch ways, with her grim church and its coldnesses and not the hot, bloodied breath of Catholicism, she knew not where to turn except to pray and pray and pray to turn her back into a doll, or a flower, something inviolate on a shelf, never touched.

“MARION’S GOT A NEW BEAU,” came Louise’s whisper across the table in the lunchroom that Monday. A prickling toothed thing dragged up from Marion’s knees to her chest.

“What did you say, Louise?”

“Oh, you just have that dreamy-eyed look, your little rosebud mouth all aquiver and eyes so loose they’ll go cross.”

Marion tried to smile. Louise, fingertips tapping on the waxed paper of Marion’s balogna sandwich, watched.

“Let me guess, Fair Mare, the Vagabond Lover climbs up Mrs. Gower’s trellis and into your window each night at the stroke of twelve. Marion’s beau would be no less gallant.”

“Oh no, Louise,” Marion said, watching as Louise rotated the sandwich, eyeing the pink meat suspiciously, then slid it back to Marion. “I was up late writing to Dr. Seeley.”

Louise grinned, picking up the fat apple she had brought. “Such a dutiful wife,” she said, extending her long arm, the apple glowing like some royal citrine.

“Have a taste, Fair Mare, do share.”

Marion started to speak—

“Or is your rosebud mouth too small?” Louise added, eyes cracking. It was like a saber lain before. It was a saber, a gauntlet, somehow. Marion saw it glinting. You could not miss it. Marion saw it but did not know why it had been lain there.