Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

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.