Ghost Country (4 page)

And his elder granddaughter Harriet, the beauty, yes, she led her life according to his precepts. At thirty-two she had her reward, senior associate at Scandon and Atter, the dervish of a half-dozen clients, including the Hotel Pleiades, where she handled lawsuits by angry guests, trips and falls by careless employees, attempts by the city to duck responsibility for sidewalks in front of the building, doing it all with so much energy that during the day she’s almost invisible, matter moving at the edge of light, a translucent pillar of color—turquoise today for the fabric of her suit.

But the doctor’s wife and daughter, well, Mrs. Ephers could only say it was a blessing in disguise that they died while pursuing their separate unpleasant destinies. And as for Mara, the doctor’s younger granddaughter—as she glowered at Mrs. Ephers across the
dinner table, her large frame and wiry black hair a repulsive contrast to Harriet’s pale petiteness—the housekeeper wished for the five thousandth time that she’d talked the doctor into putting Mara up for adoption when the child was dumped in their laps.

When Mara was little, she knew the Ugly Duckling turned into a Swan, that Cinderella got the handsome prince, that the poor homely sister who waited patiently by the hearth, taking abuse from the stepmother, would encounter a witch who showered her with gold, while the spoiled older sister found her brocaded gowns covered in pitch.

Mara was sure that one day she would look in the mirror and see her mass of rough curls transformed into long straight hair, soft as silk, just like Harriet’s. It would still be black, not golden, but that was all right, for Snow White had hair the color of a raven’s wing. But her skin would change from its muddy olive to Harriet’s—Snow White’s—Cinderella’s—clear pinky-white. She would have a wide circle of friends and suitors, as Mara labeled her sister’s boyfriends in her six-year-old, fairy-tale language, and be magically gifted in ballet or tennis.

And Harriet, well, Mara couldn’t wish her magical sister evil, Harriet wouldn’t be permanently deformed, but something very bad would happen to her that would make her sorry for all the times she had ignored or ridiculed Mara, told on her to Grandfather or Mrs. Ephers. And then Mara, magnanimous in victory, would tell the witch that she forgave her sister, to take the spell off her, please. And Harriet would be restored to her normal beauty, her normal circle of friends, but she would give them all up to look after Mara. I’m so sorry, she would say, curtseying low to the ground. Can you ever forgive me for all the pain you’ve suffered?

At that point, Mrs. Ephers appeared in the doorway of Mara’s bedroom. Young lady, dinner is on the table. As it always is at this hour. You’re big enough to tell time, you shouldn’t need me to fetch you. Your grandfather is waiting for you. He works hard all day to make a nice home for you; the least you can do is be
punctual at the dinner table. Are your hands washed? And did you even try to run a brush through that hair? Although a garden rake might be more useful.

Mara set herself secret goals and tests. If she could walk to school every morning for a week without once stepping on a crack … if she made Mephers smile and say “thank you” to her three days in a row (for the housekeeper could be wooed, with a cup of tea brought while she was ironing Grandfather’s shirts—no laundry could be trusted to get them just right—or a bouquet of flowers, until some bigmouth complained they’d seen Mara picking them out of the Historical Society’s garden) … if she got a perfect score on two spelling tests, or arithmetic, and Grandfather said, “Well done” … when she turned eight … But at no point did her hair straighten or her skin turn creamy pink. And when she got her first period, two weeks before her twelfth birthday, and no change occurred in her crackling bush of hair, she knew she was doomed for life.

The
next
thing everyone knew she was a moody teenager. What happened to you? Mrs. Ephers said. You were always so good at school; your grandfather is not going to be happy with this report card.

Long sessions with Grandfather, impatiently taking time from his crowded schedule to coach Mara. It’s a quadratic equation—what does that mean? I know you know the answer to this, Mara: don’t play stupid, it isn’t cute. There’s a big competitive world beyond these walls and I’m trying to prepare you to take part in it. You won’t always be able to live here, you know.

“I know,” she screamed one night. “I know you’ll leave the apartment to Harriet, she gets everything, she even had her own father. You hate me for being born and now you want to prove I can’t do anything right so that I kill myself or run away and leave you and Mrs. Ephers and Harriet in your little heaven here.”

And slammed into her bedroom, in total defiance of the household law against slamming doors.

It was Harriet, getting ready for her bar exams, who came into Mara’s room later that night. “They’re old. They don’t know how to talk to a teenager.”

“So I’m supposed to feel sorry for them? They’re always telling me how ugly I am. Nothing I do will ever be as good as what you did.”

“You’re not ugly. When you don’t scowl you have a strong and interesting face. Godfrey was saying so last night.” Godfrey Masters, the suitor of that particular era.

“He did?” Mara’s dark brows met in suspicion, but her scowl lightened, even though strong and interesting was a poor second to beautiful and charming.

None of the suitors stayed around for long. Mara wondered if Harriet drove them away on purpose, fearing that if she married, she would follow their mother and grandmother into the ether.

First Grannie Selena, who got pregnant while Grandfather Stonds was finishing his residency. She could have waited—after all, he’d come home from a difficult war, to finish the medical training he interrupted to serve, but
selfish
was the first word you’d think of with her.

That was from Mrs. Ephers, who had known Selena since Dr. Stonds installed his bride in the family apartment in 1942. Even when he was in love with Selena, haunted by her quicksilver charm, he knew she’d never manage a house. So Mrs. Ephers arrived, not so much to spare Selena any worry (you couldn’t imagine such a self-indulgent woman worrying about anyone else’s comfort, anyway) as to make sure the doctor had nutritious meals waiting when he got home, and freshly ironed shirts morning and evening. For even at twenty-five, sweetly sick with love, Dr. Stonds liked an orderly schedule.

In those days the doctor’s mother was still alive, but something about Selena drove her from her own home, Mrs. Ephers never did understand what exactly. Words were exchanged behind closed doors. Selena emerged with her secretive inward smile and old Mrs. Stonds, eyes still red from weeping, packed her things—including
the Stonds family silver, a gift to her own husband’s mother from Princess Marguerite, grateful for the treatment to her epileptic son—and moved out to Palm Springs where her married sister lived.

And then Mrs. Ephers had to put up with Selena for those two long years the doctor was overseas. Maybe Selena hoped to drive Mrs. Ephers away along with the doctor’s mother, but the housekeeper was not one to turn her back on her friends, or leave a poor man like the doctor in the lurch. Selena, dreaming, head always in a book when the doctor was around, certainly didn’t languish dreamily in the family temple during his war years. Mrs. Ephers could tell you a thing or two about Selena, if she weren’t too well brought up to gossip.

No sooner did the doctor return, with his star for the Battle of the Bulge, and a suitcase full of Chanel No. 5 from his stint with the Army of Occupation, than Selena got herself pregnant. Mrs. Ephers well remembered his frustrated anger when Selena told him. She was in her fourth month and just beginning to show. He’d been furious, and who could blame him. I thought you used a diaphragm, he shouted. I lost it, Selena replied. When all the time it was in her dresser under the silk camisole she’d also stopped wearing when the doctor came home.

Mrs. Ephers pulled out the diaphragm and handed it to her after Dr. Stonds left the next morning: I didn’t realize you were looking for this, Mrs. Stonds. And of course Selena hadn’t known what to say. She should have known by then not to tell fibs around Mrs. Ephers—this with a meaningful look at Mara, prone to fibbing, to dramatizing herself and her orphan situation.

Well, Selena had a healthy girl, named her Beatrix—without consulting her husband, who planned on naming the baby for his own mother—nursed the infant for a time, and then, one day the poor doctor came home from the hospital, where he was already making a name for himself in neurosurgery despite his youth and two-year absence and whammo, there he was with a baby and no wife, just a note saying Selena had gone looking for something.

Mara knew this much because Mrs, Ephers told her, oh, about
once a week, as a prelude to a lecture on getting off her lazy butt and helping out, doing her homework, practicing her ballet, after all, when Harriet was her age she was already—winning the Nobel prize in physics, dancing
Swan Lake
with Nureyev, winning Olympic medals for horseback riding—Mara would shout, to drown Mrs. Ephers’s litany of her sister’s accomplishments. But that wasn’t until she was thirteen or fourteen, by which time well aware that compared to her sister—there was no comparison.

Where did Grannie Selena go? Mara used to ask Mrs. Ephers when she was little. Didn’t my mommy ever hear from her? Is that why I never hear from my mommy? Trying to get some assurance against her terror, that Beatrix left because Mara was in some inherent way evil, that even as a baby it was so obvious that Beatrix fled from her.

Did I invite you to mind other people’s business? Mrs. Ephers would respond. Your grandmother’s life came to a fitting conclusion, and as for your mother, the less said, the better.

Beatrix means “the voyager.” In her note Selena said she hoped her daughter would grow up to be a great adventurer, an explorer. And no, the note was no longer in existence: the doctor had chosen not to keep reminders of this painful episode.

At first Beatrix looked as though she was going to be a credit to Mrs. Ephers and the doctor. She went briefly to Smith—old Mrs. Stonds’s school—before marrying one of her father’s residents when she was nineteen. She set up housekeeping on the North Shore, gave birth to Harriet, busied herself with the Women’s Board at the hospital, seemed primed for a life of home and service.

But then Harriet’s father died, in a car accident toward the end of the Vietnam War, and Beatrix began to drift. She wandered into the hippie world, a little late in the day. The doctor started hearing ominous reports through the hospital gossip network, of booze and men, drugs and rock stars. Much as the doctor would like to believe in nurture over nature, Beatrix obviously had Bad Blood in her, or she wouldn’t have made a mockery of his wonderful rearing of her.

Against his will Grandfather had to take Harriet in, poor little
thing wouldn’t have had a scrap to eat or wear if he hadn’t come to the rescue. A disgrace, the way Beatrix left her alone at night in that big house up in Winnetka, and the filth—her husband’s life insurance could have paid for a housekeeper, but Beatrix just put that money up her nose.

Dr. Stonds had already raised one child. Oh, well, Mrs. Ephers did the hands-on work—changed the diapers, nursed Beatrix through chicken pox, saw she had new shoes for school, and that she got her homework done on time—but his had been the guiding genius. After one girl on the premises without a mother, he didn’t want another.

But what a doll Harriet turned out to be, what a perfect gem, taking to law and order like a proverbial duck flung into Lake Michigan. The doctor doted on Harriet. Mrs. Ephers doted on her. She let Harriet call her “Mephers,” even though it was hard to imagine someone with so rigid a back unbending to a nickname. Harriet had curls like spun silk, she got straight A’s all the way from Chicago Latin through Smith and then her University of Chicago law degree, she rode horseback, ice-skated, dated only socially acceptable men.

From age six to thirteen she and her grandfather led an idyllic life, Mrs. Ephers hovering around tying their shoes and combing their hair and generally singing celestial hymns morning, noon, and night, at least as Mara heard the story. Every now and then Beatrix popped in on them, but Harriet very properly turned her back on her mother’s expensive gifts: they all knew where she’d found money to buy them, thank you very much.

Then one day, when Harriet was thirteen, Beatrix showed up nine months pregnant. After an eighteen-month stretch where she never even gave Harriet a phone call. What a mother. And Mara’s father? Who knows who the man in question was, although, given the muddy skin and curly dark hair that the baby emerged with, one suspects the worst. Beatrix provided Harriet with an unwanted sister, and then, like her own mother, drifted off, never to be seen again.

“Drugs,” Mrs. Ephers would say, brushing Mara’s hair so hard her eyes teared. “Drugs and booze were all she cared about. Voyager.” Yes, she liked to laugh and say she was a voyager, that she had tripped out…. Stand still, missy, while I put a ribbon in your hair so you look nice for dinner. Harriet would stand like a little princess while I brushed her, and then give me a kiss and thanks for making her pretty. What do I get from you besides fussing and cussing? There’s no doubt who your mother was, that’s for sure. If it weren’t for your grandfather I’d let you run around like the savage you want to be. He works hard to make it possible for you to live in this nice apartment, you do your part by looking pleasant and speaking nicely to him.”

One afternoon when she was fifteen Mara went downtown to the
Herald-Star’s
offices and looked through back copies of the paper until she found her grandfather’s wedding. Her grandmother wore a glossy veil that covered her shoulders and merged with the fabric of the wedding gown. The microfilm blurred the photograph; Mara couldn’t tell if Selena had been dark or fair. She was almost as tall as Grandfather, who was five foot ten, and she was smiling, not in rapture like some of the brides, but inwardly, as if she knew some secret that you longed to learn.