14

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Ball Square, Somerville

DANTE SAT IN the car as it grew cold, watching the boardinghouse where Margo and Sheila had once lived together. One seventy-four Russell Street looked like it could have been a small nursing home, or a place where addicts like himself, or broken war heroes like Cal, came to forget the messes they’d left behind. The large boardinghouse was built in the Greek Revival style, and it sat upon a small hill, peeling white paint against the white of the snow. The bare arthritic maple trees gave the house a haunting perspective from the sidewalk. None of the steps had been cleared, and the smooth, untouched snow gave the place an aura of seclusion despite being in a relatively crowded neighborhood.

He kept the car’s engine running. The driver’s-side window fogged over, and he wiped at the moisture and watched the building for any signs of life. A gust of wind pulled pieces of newspaper across the front lawn. Two squirrels jumped from the long porch, one chasing the other, and then climbed the dark silhouette of a tree, scurrying one moment and, the next, seeming to disappear. The house was over a hundred years old, and it looked the worse for wear. The three columns on the front porch appeared slanted, perhaps one rough winter away from collapse. And the shutterless windows on the three floors had no curtains, giving the feeling that the place was vacant. He turned off the engine, leaned back in the seat. How awful Margo and Sheila had had it as foster children during the depression, a time when parents struggled to put food on the table for their own children, let alone ones they felt charitable enough to take in and give shelter to.

More bad things had happened to Sheila and Margo than good, and during his and Margo’s marriage, he regretted that she had kept all those things to herself. But sometimes in a rare moment of sharing, she had given him enough of a story to put the pieces together and form a sort of crude map of their lives. Their mother had left them at Saint Mark’s when Margo was seven and Sheila was three. And they’d gone from foster home to shelter to a new city to another town—from Quincy Center to Roslindale, Mattapan, Weymouth, a stint in Fields Corner and then Jamaica Plain. They’d once had their heads shaved for fear of their bringing lice into a new home; a man at an orphanage had broken Margo’s arm and it never set properly and got infected; when Sheila was six, she fell ill with pneumonia and missed a year of school. And the house before him was the first place Margo, and then Sheila, could call home—thanks to an old Brahmin couple, the Baxters, who, in return for their helping with cleaning and cooking, offered them the small room in the attic.

The windshield was now glazed with ice. The quiet in the car ate at him and filled him with anxiety. He felt like he was falling off the world again. A fix was waiting in his pocket, whispering a remedy. Just return the car to Cal, admit that your hunch went nowhere, and then go away for a while, see you tomorrow. But there was the thought that needed absolution, and it helped carry Dante out of the car and up onto the sidewalk that hadn’t been shoveled in weeks. For a moment he stood looking up at the lone window on the uppermost attic floor, a small black square that, against the white paint of the house, seemed impenetrable from the outside.

Dante pulled up his collar and moved through the snow along the sloping front lawn. Most of it was frozen solid, and every few steps the crust of ice caved in, leaving him in up to his knees. Eventually he made it up the hill and to the stairs slanted with snowdrift, up onto the long, wide front porch. He rang the doorbell and heard the chimes ring out a brief and stately melody, part of a Protestant hymn long forgotten. He waited and then opened the screen and knocked on the wooden door.

He peered in through one of the windows. A slight tapping on the pane startled him. It was a fly seeking escape. He left the columned porch and passed around the side of the house. Empty trash barrels without their lids tilted crookedly, half submerged and frozen in the snow. Using the wooden railing, he climbed the short porch that led to the kitchen. He knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then turned the doorknob. It opened. In the kitchen, the rotting stink of garbage, only slightly disturbed by the gust of cold air that poured in behind him.

A plate of untouched food sat on the kitchen table, what might have been mashed potatoes and carrots turned gray and black with mold. A lump of shriveled meat seemed to convulse as maggots squirmed upon it. Another fly crept over the fetid mass, and then paused and remained motionless, as if it were looking at him. Dante scanned the room. Pots and pans hung on their hooks beside the stove. The sink and countertops, though now covered in a fine layer of dust, had recently been clean. He turned back toward the plate of food, watched the fly exit the kitchen into the hallway.

He closed the door behind him. Beneath the silence, he could hear the house shifting, moaning as the wind pressed against it. There was a back staircase that led from the kitchen up the three floors to the attic. He remembered this, somehow, and entered the narrow, musty staircase, and in the darkness felt for a light switch. He found one and flipped it. The bulb was out.

His lighter provided enough light, a flickering glare that traveled a foot in front of him. The wood of the stairs groaned under his weight. He paused, feeling as if something or somebody was in the house listening to him, and he thought of the crippled woman who had once been a tenant here. She’d had a stroke at a young age, no more than thirty, and it had paralyzed half her body and left her with a shuffling limp. The woman’s hair had fallen out, and she had refused to eat, and had slowly wasted away, her body becoming emaciated and sexless. She hid in her locked bedroom all day, but at night she would roam the house barefoot, wearing nothing but her robe. Margo and the other women had complained of her frightening them: sitting in the bathroom with the lights off, just staring into the tiles on the floor, hiding in the basement where the washing tubs were, or in this very same dark staircase, waiting hours and hours until somebody came and found her.

He made it up to the third floor, paused for a moment at the door he knew led out to a long hallway past five of the bedrooms, and then continued up the narrow staircase to the fourth and uppermost floor, the attic. In the hallway he found a lightbulb and pulled on the cord with fingers still numb from the cold. The light chased away the darkness, as well as the memory of the woman. He opened the door and took one step into the room where Margo and Sheila had lived. A single window allowed in the weakening light of late afternoon. Except for a small bed where a sheet and a blanket lay strewn at one end, the room appeared stripped of everything else, as if it had always been this bare and empty, as if nobody had ever lived here.

Dante walked farther into the room. To his left, a small dresser stood against the wall. The drawers had been pulled out, forced from their runners. Whatever had been inside them was scattered about the floor: a pair of white panties, a small purse with floral design stitching, a silk slip, a roll of lace, several tins of rouge and powder, and crimson stockings. Someone had been through the room, and they’d done a thorough job, but had they found what they were looking for? He crouched to his knees, reached down, and grabbed the purse. Its lining had been torn out and nothing was left inside. He tossed it back into the mess of scattered clothes. A gust of wind pressed against the old wooden window frame, set the loose screen on the other side of the glass clacking loudly. Dante stood back up and, in fear of dirtying the clothes with his wet shoes, stepped carefully over them, only realizing after a moment that Sheila would never be wearing them again.

On the other side of the dresser, a small mirror had been smashed on the floor. In the pieces he saw fragments of himself, a shadow in reflection. Seven years’ bad luck for you, he thought, and reached over to the closet, the same closet that Margo used to store her meager belongings in. It was empty except for a few wire hangers. Deeper inside he saw a human shape, a pale torso. Startled for a moment, he realized it was just a dressmaker’s dummy, a headless, armless body on a pole. A sudden weight came down on him and he had to sit on the mattress.

This was the room where he and Margo had spent their first night together. And this had been their bed. The thin mattress bowed beneath him. For a moment it seemed he could smell her here, the cool touch of her arms on the back of his neck.

He looked down and spotted the board that didn’t quite match the rest of the floor, a slightly different grain against the dark-stained maple—the place where Margo used to keep her fixings. He tapped on the board with the heel of his shoe, and the echo of it ran hollow. He got on his knees, cigarette resting at the edge of his lip, and pushed at the floorboard. It was loose and without any nails holding it in. There was a groove beside it, not big enough for a finger to fit into. From the closet he grabbed a metal coat hanger and straightened the hook out. Forcing the metal into the hole, he raised the slat high enough to pull it free with his fingers. The space was empty. He sat back on his haunches, took a long pull on the cigarette. He didn’t know why he thought there would be something still here after all this time. He leaned facedown to the floor and peered first left and then right along the line of the joist.

A small box sat deeper in the hole in the shadow beneath the joists. He reached in, fingers scrabbling for a hold, and pulled it out, returned to the bed with the box on his lap. He wiped the dust and the cobwebs from the top and then slowly opened it. A nude photograph of Sheila propped up on an elbow and reclining amid the cushions on an ornate couch glared up at him. Through slitted eyes, thick with eyeliner and mascara, she stared at him, smeared lips puckered, blowing a kiss to whoever held the camera.

Another one of her standing naked in what looked to be a hotel room, posing like Betty Grable, with a leg bent upward behind her and her head thrust back as if in the midst of laughter. One was taken from the foot of a bed and centered on her spread legs, her glistening vagina thrust toward the camera lens. Her head was propped awkwardly upon the pillow, and the smile plastered to her face seemed unsure and anxious. There were others of her also, but in these the face was purposely blurred or the photos were cropped from the neck up. From the body alone he knew they were Sheila.

Repulsion turned in Dante’s stomach. He stared at the pictures even though he felt dirty, guilty, a Peeping Tom. This was all his fault. He inhaled, exhaled slowly, trying to stave off the sudden shame and guilt pressing in on him.

Beneath the stack of smut there were more photos, unlike the others. They were of Sheila at the dog track, smoking in the dim light of a club, on the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. And then there were older ones, blistered and cracked, taken from when she was a child. One showed a young Sheila holding the hand of Margo, probably nine years old at the time, each of them wearing dresses far too big and both staring blankly at the camera with coal-dark eyes. Another showed them standing out in front of Saint Mark’s church, the same church where their mother had abandoned them, the same church he and Cal had attended as children. Both of them stood beside a sturdy older woman who may have been the senile woman they called Auntie, the one they briefly lived with in South Boston. Also in the stack was a picture from Dante and Margo’s wedding, the bride and groom beaming in the bright flash, Cal standing next to him, squinting, and Sheila next to her sister, her eyes looking not at the camera but somewhere off in the distance.

He placed the photographs on the floor and began to search the rest of the box. To his side, the picture of Sheila’s spread legs and shockingly bared vagina stared up at him, and he found it hard not to glance at it. In the box there was a charm ring, a rabbit’s foot, a first report card, jewelry, trinkets, a dance card from a cocktail banquet at the Emporium Hotel, junk. It was like looking through the secret belongings of a young girl. But at the very bottom of the box was an envelope. Inside were ten one-hundred-dollar bills, perfectly pressed, without line or crease, all sticking to one another as if they had never been counted. He put the bills to his nose. Fresh off the press, steeped in that sharp tang of new money. He looked at his hands as if he expected to see green ink there, as if it might bleed from the notes and stain his skin.

He stood and folded the bills before sliding them into his pants pocket. He reached back down and picked up the photos, looking at the girl in them again. He flipped them over, searched for a photo shop imprint, a date, a name, but every one of them was blank except for the one pose that mimicked Grable, and on it was written My Only Pin-Up, Love, Your Man, Mario. He collected the trinkets and photos, placed them into his coat pocket, returned the box to its space in the floor, and left the room.

  

HE WALKED THE hallway floors, bare, water-damaged, and warped plywood, passing before open doors of empty bedrooms. All of them were gone; the middle-aged widows, or the wife waiting and praying for her husband to return home from Europe unharmed, the single girls who ached for a romance that wouldn’t materialize until the war was over, and the spinster who had told the younger girls that hearts could be broken only once. The sad, horrifying, deformed stroke victim in her early thirties, forever limping alone through the dark.

Downstairs he suddenly had the feeling of somebody’s presence in the next room and, feeling foolish, he called out, “Hello. Anybody there?”

There was only the distant buzzing of flies. He had seen two flies earlier, and now as he walked closer to the front room, he could hear, and smell, where the rest of them gathered. He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, covering his nose and mouth before entering the dining room.

The body lay on the floor. Its head was like a large decomposing vegetable that had fallen from its vine. The face was stretched and splitting. A blackened gouge ran along the side of the forehead and led down to a puddle of dried blood covering the edge of the carpet. The hair on the scalp was a sandy pale white, the hands liver spotted and bloated, one upturned on the floor, the other resting on his chest.

Mr. Baxter, the owner and patriarch of the house. Someone had used a tool to bash in the poor bastard’s skull. Probably the same someone who’d ransacked Sheila’s bedroom searching for something. At the body’s feet, the rug was ruffled and bunched up. With the handkerchief held tightly to his mouth, Dante offered up a muffled prayer. He glanced about the room. A small table and a wooden chair tucked under it. A phonograph, an unmade hospital bed in the corner, and a reading chair next to an aluminum table covered in books. With his free hand, Dante took an old afghan from the arm of the reading chair and tried to lay it over the upper body and head, but it bunched together and fell to the side. With the motion, a black cloud of buzzing flies flew up from their feasting, causing the head to shudder slightly, and then the head canted to the right and the skin came away from the skull. Fighting the urge to vomit, Dante backpedaled from the room.