Ghost Country (5 page)

Mara read the short text three or four times, looking for clues about her grandmother but finding none. Selena was given in marriage by her father, August Vatick, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago. The newlyweds planned to honeymoon in Mexico before Grandfather raced back to his medical studies.

Mara scrolled forward, looking for any other family news. Her mother’s birth was announced in the August 1946 paper, a Happy Event on the society pages, the column headed by a stork with a diaper in its mouth. Beatrix Vatick Stonds, seven pounds eight ounces at birth, home on Graham Street with Selena (Mrs. Abraham Stonds), both doing well.

In April 1947, the paper reported on a tragedy to the well-known Chicago Assyriologist August Vatick and his family. Wife and daughter dead with him in a snowstorm in the Taurus Mountains,
where he had been looking for remains of a temple to the goddess Gula. Selena, his only child, dead as well, survived by famous doctor husband and baby Beatrix in Chicago.

Mara thought the
Herald-Star
overdid the account of Grandfather’s grief at his wife’s death: she couldn’t imagine him caring enough about anyone to grieve for them. Maybe he was like Henry the First, a school friend suggested, burying his heart with his dead wife and never smiling again, but even someone with Mara’s storytelling proclivities couldn’t imagine Grandfather burying his heart anywhere but in himself.

By the time Harriet was born, the papers no longer had society pages. Neither Harriet nor Mara merited a line of type for entering the world. But Harriet’s father’s last name had been Caduke, so Mara searched for his death in 1972, to find if there was anything suspicious about it. Dr. Harold Caduke had died on Lake Shore Drive, the
Herald-Star
, reported, when the car he was driving crossed the median strip at the curve over the Chicago River and slammed into an oncoming station wagon. A medical student in the front seat with him was also killed in the collision. Ah ha! So Harriet’s father had been cheating on their mother. But that didn’t help Mara find out what became of their mother, or why Grannie Selena left Beatrix behind when she went to Iraq.

Mara looked up “Assyriology” in the dictionary: “the study of the language, history and antiquities of Assyria.” Very helpful. Ancient history, maybe. Grandfather had a friend who studied that, a Professor Lontano, who often came to dinner on Graham Street, or went to the theater with Grandfather. Mara called her to see if she knew anything about Great-grandfather Vatick.

“I told Abraham not to wrap Selena in such a cloud of mystery,” Professor Lontano said on the phone. “There was nothing mysterious about her or her family. Her father worked on the Assyrian Dictionary but his real love was excavation. He went back to Iraq as soon as the war was over…. No, not the Gulf War, what do they teach you in school, anyway? If it had been the Gulf War he’d still be alive today. World War Two. Your grandmother
went out to see them after your mother was born…. No, I don’t know why. I only met her briefly, Dr. Vatick was at my first dig, near Nippur, when Selena arrived…. But, Mara, I was a young student in philology, and he was a distinguished professor. We seldom spoke…. Your grandmother? Well, she was very beautiful, as I recall, perhaps somewhat willful, but we were really the slightest of acquaintances.”

Sucking her teeth thoughtfully—which distended her cheeks into what Grandfather called her “chipmunk” look: not your most attractive expression, Mara, so that she took to doing it whenever she wanted to irritate him—Mara checked out a selection of books on the history of ancient Iraq.

Mrs. Ephers demanded to know what made her want to read about that? in a tone which told Mara that the Ancient Near East was a sensitive nerve on Graham Street. But Grandfather said nothing when Mrs. Ephers mentioned it at dinner. He only said it was high time Mara showed an aptitude for something, and maybe archeology ran in her blood. Disappointed not to rouse a more active response to Assyriology, Mara returned the books to the library and went back to irritating Grandfather by rewriting operas.

When she was eleven and Harriet was busy with law school, Grandfather started taking Mara to the symphony and the opera. Mara, not used to attention, proclaimed an enthusiasm for opera—so difficult for a child to understand and respond to, therefore so much more meritorious in her to like. In her teens, she found a kind of release in the extravagant emotions onstage. Luisa Monterief, singing the “Willow Song” from
Otello
, carried Mara to the brink of suicide.

In her teens, too, she started calling herself a feminist, to annoy the doctor, who said that like all ideologies feminism was an excuse for mental sloth. Mara began fighting with him on all subjects relating to women, including opera. Why did the women always die, while their stupid lovers beat their chests in remorse? She wrote revisions of
Rigoletto
and
Madama Butterfly
, since she couldn’t revise her family’s history. Grandfather was disgusted: if you’re going to
start playing games with music as well as the rest of your life, we’ll have to discontinue these outings. And so their brief rapport dissolved.

Mara muddled on through Chicago Latin. Although she didn’t achieve Harriet’s stellar grades, she performed brilliantly on the SAT and was easily accepted at college. But a wish to choose her own school, perhaps a big state university, couldn’t stand up to the family tradition of Smith. After all, Harriet had gone there, had loved it. Mara knew by now she wouldn’t develop straight hair or smooth white skin if she went to Smith, but she could still imagine a glittering circle of friends and lovers like her sister’s.

But once there, away from the buckram of Grandfather Stonds to give her shape, she drifted, making few friends, finding no milieu, turning to alcohol as the easiest way to prove to one and all that, really, she was Beatrix Stonds’s daughter even if she had no father to identify with. Until after her third semester, the college—not liking to offend the grandchild of a rich donor, but really left with no choice—kicked her out.

Back in Chicago she got out of bed to go to work, but spent long hours listening to music and writing in her journal. At night she meandered through the netherworld of the city, to the jazz clubs, the dyke bars, the places where other rootless people swirled.

Blood will tell, Grandfather said grimly to Mrs. Ephers, I was right to name her Mara; for the Lord has dealt very bitterly with me.

E
VERY NIGHT WHEN
Mara climbed down the iron stairs that led from Michigan Avenue to the truck and bus routes below, the woman was in the same place. She sat cross-legged on a blanket, back against the wall, face hidden in the shadows. Some nights candle stubs, scavenged from the Dumpsters of nearby hotels, flickered in empty whiskey bottles in front of her. Between the candles lay a grimy photo of the Virgin Mary torn from a magazine. The woman leaned over it as if in prayer. Candlelight glinted gold from the icon in the photo, streaking the woman’s gray-white face and hair with yellow. Light flickered over the damp crack in the bricks behind her head where a pipe was leaking and dripping.

Mara, drifting through the Underworld on her way to the jazz bars on the other side of Michigan, stopped to stare at her. Mrs. Ephers’s warnings echoed in her head: You’re following in your mother’s footsteps. Be careful you don’t end up in a trash bin with the rest of the garbage of Chicago.

Is that what happened to Beatrix? Mara demanded. They kept telling her Beatrix was dead, but in such a way that she never believed them: no details given, only a pursing up of the lips, and “too painful for your grandfather to talk about.”

Harriet, when pushed, reported going to a funeral, Did you see the body? Are you sure it was Mother? Mara persisted, only to have Harriet snap, don’t be a ghoul. But Beatrix’s death wasn’t in the papers, under her married name or her birth name. Mara thought Grandfather and Mephers had thrown Beatrix out, but were ashamed to admit it. Her mother might be one of the army of street people marching unseen through the alleys and underground streets of the city.

Mara began to inspect every homeless white woman she came upon, searching for a resemblance to her grandfather or Harriet—not to her own face, which must have been taken from her father’s mold, Mrs. Ephers often said, since no one ever saw a Stonds with those cheekbones—trying to imagine Harriet wrinkled, gray-haired, that sleek golden beauty turned to ashes. Their mother would be only fifty or so if she were still alive, but everyone knew life on the streets aged you before your time, Of course, only a terrible mother would abandon her children, and everyone agreed that Beatrix had been a terrible mother—look what she’d done to poor golden Harriet, after all. But Mara couldn’t help thinking it was she herself, some particular defect in her that was obvious from the moment of her birth, that led their mother to disappear so completely. For, after all, until Mara was born, at least Beatrix came around from time to time. But no one had seen Beatrix since she drifted out of the apartment when her new baby was nine weeks old.

If you and Grandfather didn’t want me, why didn’t you put Beatrix in rehab and help her so she could have her own place with me? Mara asked Mrs. Ephers.

You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, Mara, she must have heard that saying three hundred thousand times or so in her nineteen years. We sent our bucket down into that well many times, probably too many, and it came up dry each time, Beatrix had to learn to come to grips with life herself. We prayed for her, but the Lord had other plans for all of us.

Mara waited for the day when Grandfather and Mrs. Ephers
would throw her out to join Beatrix on the garbage heap of life. They did keep rumbling about how she needed to support herself, she shouldn’t expect some trust fund was going to materialize to bail her out, not if she didn’t show she was responsible enough to manage money. After she’d been home from college for three months, Grandfather put his foot down: you cannot go out drinking all night, then sit in your room all day long, young lady, pretending you’re a writer. It would be one thing if you were in school, but as you’ve chosen to avoid education, I expect you to contribute to your living expenses.

Even Harriet chimed in, Going out to those bars isn’t the smartest way to use your evenings. Why don’t you register in one of the local writing programs if you don’t want to go back to college? That way at least you’d have some focus.

And anyway, Harriet added, how do you get into those jazz bars? Don’t you have to be twenty-one to drink in this state? Which of course Harriet knew, being a lawyer and knowing all the laws that ever were, those on the statute books as well as laws of conduct, of the jungle, even of gravity, since she’d been so good at physics in school along with every other subject.

Harriet tried to find Mara a job in the word processing room at her law firm, but Mara couldn’t type fast enough, and she was always drifting into daydreams when she should have been transcribing some brilliant exposition of securities law.

Harriet next persuaded one of her clients, the Hotel Pleiades, to give Mara a job in their Special Events office. She could answer the phone, sound pleasant to prospective customers, book weddings and bar mitzvoth—surely that was within her capabilities? So Mara put on pantyhose and lipstick every day—Did you run a comb through that bush of yours, miss? Mrs. Ephers would call to her as she left the apartment in the morning—Try to remember it’s not just your name that’s injured if you make a bad impression. Your sister went out on a limb for you: don’t you go hurting her career by making a mess of this job.

The Hotel Pleiades perched east of Michigan Avenue, one of
the skyscrapers that had suddenly erupted from the empty lots around the train station. The hotel’s white masonry and slate-colored glass shot thirty stories over the river, shutting out light from the old buildings on the avenue, but giving guests a clear view of Lake Michigan.

The hotel also sent down shoots to the Underworld, the shadow network of streets beneath the heart of downtown Chicago. The Pleiades parking garage opened onto Lower Wacker Drive, where delivery vans and garbage trucks bring supplies to downtown businesses, and ferry away their waste. Under rusting rebars in the roadbed to the bright city overhead, homeless people lived in makeshift boxes, protected from rain and snow, skin turning gray in the absence of light and air.

It was near the Pleiades garage that the woman at the wall camped. The exact location under the leaking pipe seemed important to her: one night, when Mara was climbing down the stairs to the Underworld, she saw a panhandler working a line of homebound office workers while they waited for one of the buses that had a terminus on Underground Wacker. The commuters stood in an unspeaking, unmoving line, as if by holding themselves completely still, the germ of homelessness would not infect them. When the bus arrived and the passengers surged through the doors in panicky relief, the panhandler snarled and moved up the street to the woman at the wall’s usual spot.

The woman wasn’t there. Watching the man unzip his pants to relieve himself against the bricks below the crack, Mara wondered if he’d forced the woman to leave, when she suddenly appeared at the corner of the building.

She drove him away, yelling curses at him: “The Mother of God knows you’ve defiled Her temple! She will curse you, She will wither your balls, She will turn your urine black!” The panhandler, twice her size, stumbled off without taking time to cover himself. Mara laughed. Street theater, performance art, right on, sister.

A couple who’d just left their car with the garage attendant backed away in horror, first from the panhandler, trying to zip
himself together as he shuffled along, and then from the woman’s curses which followed him down the street. As Mara walked past the garage she could hear the driver of the car complaining loudly to the garage manager: “Can’t you do anything to keep the street clean down here?”