Ghost Country (22 page)

Yes, she sniffled, yes, she would let Harriet know if Mara
phoned again; and she’d better run now, Daddy didn’t like her to tie up the phone at night. When she hung up Texas had scored another three runs. She tiptoed into her bedroom and wedged a dictionary between the dresser and the door to hold it shut.

At the other end, Harriet frowned into the receiver. Maybe Mara was right, maybe Rafe Lowrie did beat up Cynthia. It wasn’t natural for a nineteen-year-old girl to be so terrified of her father. Mara ought to live Cynthia’s life for a week or two, then maybe she’d know she was well off with
Grand-père.

During the week, after the bustle surrounding Mephers’s return wore off, Harriet became more uneasy about her sister. On Friday she had a call from Gian Palmetto at the Pleiades Hotel—just wanted to tell you that we cemented over that crack in the wall, and that homeless woman hasn’t been back. On the other hand, Brian Cassidy in the garage thinks he saw your sister there last night.

Harriet drove around the wall on Friday and Saturday night, but saw no one, not even two homeless women hunting for Madeleine Carter in the recesses of the underground roads. As Harriet slowed her Acura to inspect the wall, Jacqui and Nanette slid into the shadows with practiced ease.

On Sunday, accompanying Mephers to the eleven o’clock service at Orleans Street, Harriet waylaid Cynthia Lowrie outside the young singles Sunday school class. Cynthia, keeping a nervous eye out for Rafe, said no, she hadn’t seen Mara, her daddy didn’t like her hanging out with Mara since she got thrown out of Smith.

Harriet, used to dealing with lying and nervous witnesses, thought Cynthia knew more than she was saying, and finally—using more gentleness than she usually mustered—got Cynthia to admit to a second phone call from Mara, to her office, Friday after lunch.

“She was upset—she thought she could go to Iraq to look for her—your—I guess she’s yours, too—grandmother. She says your grandmother is really alive, she thinks Dr. Stonds paid off the newspaper to print a false report of her death. Only apparently you can’t
go to Iraq these days. So next Mara wanted me to try to find a detective for her, someone who could hunt for your mother, who she says is also alive. Only of course I couldn’t.”

Mara, you want a detective you go hire one, Cynthia told her on the phone, angry at the freedom her friend seemed to be enjoying. I’m going to get fired if they catch me making more personal calls here. Well, what about me? Mara demanded. I have to use a public phone in the park, I can’t even find a phone book.

No, Cynthia told Harriet, Mara hadn’t said where she was staying, only that she’d had a difficult time at the State Department, where they wanted to know every detail of her private life: didn’t she know there was an international boycott of Iraq? what was her grandmother doing there, anyway? And Mara, terrified that they would report her to Dr. Stonds, had fled the building without giving her name, and phoned Cynthia.

Harriet felt her shoulders sag: why couldn’t her sister know someone more focused? Not that Mara was so focused, either. Imagine going off the deep end like that, getting so wrapped up in her fantasies about Selena that she actually thought she could find her in Iraq.

“Please, Cynthia, if she calls you again, will you let me know right away? I’m really worried about her. You and Mara always have indulged in dramatic fantasies, but this isn’t a game, you know.”

And Cynthia, with a rare flash of spirit, retorted, “I know it’s not a game, Harriet. You and Dr. Stonds want to lock her in an insane asylum. How would you feel if that was you?”

Harriet flushed. “Don’t be impertinent with me, Cynthia. All he wants is for someone competent to evaluate Mara. Naturally, she—and you—turned that into a threat of forced hospitalization.”

Patsy Wanachs, the director of Hagar’s House, came down the hall just then. She was surprised to see Harriet in agitated private talk with Cynthia Lowrie. She made a pretext for stopping, to discuss the Family Matters seminar Rafe wanted to run at the church in early August.

“I know it’s a spirituality session for businessmen, but I wonder if your father should invite some of the homeless men who come to Dr. Tammuz’s Friday clinic. It could show them some realistic options for taking charge of their lives.” And then broke off. “Oh, I’m sorry, Harriet—I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something important with Cynthia. This can wait.”

“We’re finished.” Harriet turned on her heel and walked back to join Mephers in the sanctuary.

Mephers didn’t so much have friends in the congregation as sycophantic well-wishers. These were clustered around her in the Stonds family’s traditional pew. Harriet took her seat and tried to attend to the sermon. The text, from the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, said that God would know Israel had amended her ways if she stopped oppressing the widow and the fatherless orphan, and stopped worshiping Baal and other foreign gods.

Pastor Emerson preached for half an hour, with his usual sincere eloquence, on the many Baals Americans turned to: sex, money, power. “It’s not surprising that some women have revived the real Baals, or the Asherim, that the prophet preached against. Money and sex are poor substitutes for the living God. At the same time, truly taking on a commitment to Jesus is too hard for some, so they turn to goddess worship as an easy way out. Faith is a gift; grace is a gift; but they are not ours just for the asking, if we discard them as a spoiled child does his toys when they don’t do exactly what he demands. We need to strengthen each other in our quest for faith. Brother Lowrie thinks he has a way to help some of the men in the congregation on their spiritual journey. We all know Brother Lowrie’s a persuasive salesman—well, he’s persuaded me to let him hold a seminar here in the church, but he hasn’t got me to understand exactly what it’s about, so I’m going to let him tell you. Brother Lowrie?”

Rafe bustled up the chancel stairs, furious with the pastor for his patronizing tone: if he ran this church, things would be different. He climbed up in the pulpit and began to wax eloquent on the
Family Matters group. Men need to reclaim the home … Children don’t respect fathers, because fathers have ceded all authority…

Harriet’s attention quickly wandered, back to her sister, this time thinking about Mara’s chants to the goddess Gula. The text for the sermon, on looking after the fatherless orphan, and not worshiping foreign gods—Jeremiah would probably warn Mara that she was going to bring serious wrath on her head, but wasn’t Mara—wasn’t Harriet herself—a fatherless orphan? Shouldn’t she receive compassion as well as wrath?

D
O YOU KNOW
this girl, Professor?” The campus security officer shoved Mara into Professor Lontano’s office.

Verna Lontano looked up from her computer. “Certainly, Officer. It’s Mara Stonds. What are you doing down here, Mara? Catching up on your goddess studies?”

“She was camping on the grounds, ma’am, and claimed to be a student of yours.”

The professor’s ironic eyes took in Mara’s dishevelment—the sleeping bag trailing from the sides of her backpack, her uncombed hair and heavy eyes—and sent the cop on his way. “You may safely leave her in my care, Officer.”

There was a brief ceremony, the cop asking the professor to sign a form, the professor thanking him with a flourish, and then he shut the door on them.

“Well, Mara? Did the air-conditioning break down on Graham Street, that you needed to seek refuge in the wide-open spaces of the South Side?”

An hour before Mara’s head had been full of the buzzing that comes from too many days away from human contact. Now she felt
a roaring from too much contact as fear, anger, embarrassment, chased each other through her mind.

When the cop picked her up, Mara was sitting on her sleeping bag with her back against the museum, arms around her knees, rocking herself. After five nights under the bushes near the chapel she was feverish from lack of sleep, and lack of conversation. She couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t remember why she thought Grannie Selena or her mother might still be alive.

Her first two days on the run she had tried to keep clean, using the bathroom in one of the classroom buildings on campus. She tried to make a plan for tracking down either Beatrix or Selena. Then that woman at the State Department started acting like Mara was some kind of spy, like Mara wanted to sneak into Iraq and work for Saddam Hussein. Thanks a bunch, she felt like saying: travel eight thousand miles to work for another man on a heavy authority trip, just like Grandfather, except Saddam had a whole country full of places to lock people up in, instead of only the psych ward in a hospital. Instead, afraid that the official would call Dr. Stonds if Mara said too much, she took to her heels.

If she couldn’t go to Iraq, couldn’t prove Grandfather lied about Grannie Selena, then Mara would find out the truth about her own mother. They all said Beatrix died when Mara was two. If that was so, how come her death hadn’t been written up in the papers the way everyone else’s was: hated daughter of Abraham, discarded mother of Harriet.

Harriet always snapped at Mara, yes she’s dead, you stupid brat, I was at the funeral. Did you see her body in the coffin, Mara would persist, are you sure it was Beatrix they buried? Of course Harriet hadn’t seen the body: Grandfather had too much taste to expose everyone to the vulgarity of an open coffin.

But that meant Beatrix might still be alive. It would be like Grandfather to dust his hands off, well, we’re rid of her, when his own daughter was still wandering the streets looking for food. But how could Mara possibly find her mother, after so many years? She didn’t even know the names of her mother’s friends, let alone the
man who’d gone to bed with Beatrix the night Mara started her journey from ovum to unhappy teenager.

Cynthia wouldn’t help her find a private detective—Cynthia thought she was playing a game. Or was jealous because Mara was finally taking steps. All those years they’d talked over how they would find Beatrix, or get rid of Rafe and move in with Cynthia’s mother, and Mara was actually doing—what? Dramatizing herself as Harriet and Mephers and Grandfather always said. Chanting to the goddess Gula, Mara knew deep down that was only to annoy Grandfather. But why couldn’t he believe her about that photograph she’d seen in Mephers’s room? Why did it always have to be Mephers or Harriet he listened to? She hugged her knees and rocked harder.

“You know you’re trespassing on private property, young lady?” A black man in a police uniform loomed over her.

She gaped at him, suddenly aware of the empty potato chip bags strewn around her sleeping bag, of her grimy body, unwashed for several days, and the used tampons she’d stuck in her abandoned juice cartons.

“I’m—I’m a student,” she stammered.

“Then let’s see your ID, miss.”

“I don’t have it on me. Anyway, I’m not a student here, I’m a private student of Professor Lontano’s, Verna Lontano in the Oriental Institute. She’s an expert on Sumerian goddesses, you know, and—I’m testing some of the Sumerian chants. They have to be done under a full moon.”

Her heart was thudding so hard, she thought it might rise in her chest to choke her. She’d be taken to the police station. Another scene with Harriet, Grandfather arriving triumphant to lock her in the psych wing. Maybe she could give a fake name, and spend time in jail—unless one of Harriet’s suitors was in court, as would probably be the case again, But to the cop, sent over to investigate a report by the dean that there was a vagrant on the chapel grounds, Mara looked like many of the unkempt students who casually dropped their litter across
campus. Her tangled coarse hair, so out of place on Graham Street, was normal here. It was only her nervousness that made him doubt her; he radioed his commander, who told him to get Professor Lontano to check the girl’s story.

“Why do you think Selena might still be alive?” Professor Lontano asked her, when they were alone.

“They’re always lying to me, Grandfather and Mephers, they hate me, they hated Selena, you can tell by how they talk about her. I thought—” Mara flushed and stumbled on her words. It did sound ridiculous to say it out loud: Grandfather bribed the paper to print the news of her death.

“The goddess Gula supplied you with this information, no doubt?” The professor saw Mara was about to cry, so she quickly added: “Your grandmother is really dead, Mara. I was in Nippur at the time. It was a terrible disaster, that expedition to the Taurus Mountains. A whole Iraqi family who’d gone along to do cooking and help with the rough digging was killed, buried in snow. Your grandmother, and her mother and father, starved to death before anyone could rescue them.”

Mara felt her body swell and grow ungainly. In the grim lines around Lontano’s mouth she read not the painful memories of a young student on her first expedition hearing about the death of an admired teacher—but contempt. She hates me, too, Mara thought, wanting only to flee the office, not to have those mocking gray eyes bore into her mind any longer.

Lontano shook her head, shaking herself out of the waters of the past, and looked at the disheveled young woman in front of her. “I never thought you were a coward, Mara, but here you are running away because you’re afraid to see Mrs. Ephers now that you made her ill.”

Mara’s cheeks puffed out in her fury. “It’s not like that. It’s because of the lies, all the lies. I found a secret letter Mephers was keeping locked away, it was written to my mother in French, at least, it was written to the daughter of Madame Selena Vatick Stonds, I can’t read much French but even I could tell that, and
there was a picture of a man who looks like Harriet, but no one believes me, they only listen to Mephers. But Grandfather must know. Where is my mother? Was that a photograph of Harriet’s real father? Why doesn’t Grandfather want me to know, unless it’s something really awful?”

When Lontano didn’t say anything Mara cried, “You know who it is, don’t you?”

The professor leaned across her desk and spoke crisply, but not without sympathy. “Sometimes you can know too much, Mara. That’s strange advice from a woman who’s spent her life digging into the secrets of people long dead, you’re saying to yourself. But the nearer dead, surely they have a right to their privacy, don’t you think?