MARA WAS LOCKED in her bedroom channeling the goddess Gula. Her grandfather and older sister tried to pretend they didn’t know, didn’t care, but every night when the incense started to seep down the hall to the sitting room they found themselves unable to read or talk or concentrate on anything but the smell. They couldn’t really hear Mara—the doors in the apartment were too thick for sound to travel—but they sat tensed, straining for the rise and fall of her voice.
Dr. Stonds invited Professor Verna Lontano to dinner one evening to inform Mara how utterly spurious was her knowledge of ancient Sumer and its deities. Professor Lontano, an old friend of the doctor’s, was the Assyriologist Mara phoned four years earlier, when she was trying to get information about Grannie Selena. Professor Lontano had spent her adult life on the literature of Sumerian deities, and had nothing but withering contempt for New Age goddess worship.
“You young women are intellectual slovens,” she said in her precise, accented English. “You want to imagine a gynocentric universe and so you totally pervert historical reality by assigning to the old goddesses a supremacy they never held. You are unwilling to do the hard work, the research”—pronounced with a great rolling of r’s that spattered the table like semiautomatic bullets—“to find out what the ancients actually said and believed. So you take a few translated texts and build a whole theology from them. Why? Why not stick to the gods you know—money, sex, the usual deities of your generation of American?”
To Harriet’s intense embarrassment, Mara bent her head, pulled her legs up to sit yoga-style on the dining room chair, and began a high-pitched wordless wail. After howling for a minute or two she began to chant in the same high nasal:
“The goddess speaks through her unworthy vessel. O Maiden, weak thou art but full of yearning for the truth, for the healing rays that Gula sheds on sick humanity, how many thousand years have I waited, bound in silence, weakening ever, until one came who could hear my Voice.”
“Mara! We’ve had enough of your showing off. Put your feet back on the floor and converse like a normal human being.” Dr. Stonds’s sharp voice usually silenced blethering subordinates, but Mara continued to wail as though her trance were too intense to acknowledge human speech.
“She’s not going to listen to you, Grand-père” Harriet said. “Why don’t we take our coffee across to the sitting room. As soon as her audience has disappeared she’ll quiet down fast enough.”
“This is what she does every night?” Professor Lontano stopped to admire the Louise Nevelson marble in the hall as they crossed to the living room. “She sounds intensely lonely. I’m surprised she’s taking Mrs. Ephers’s illness so hard—I never thought they got along. What’s the word from the rehabilitation hospital?”
“Oh, Mephers is recovering well,” Harriet said. “They say she can come home in another week, but of course we don’t want her to be under any stress, and if Mara is going to be difficult …”
She left the sentence hanging, but the doctor said, “She’ll have to leave. This was Hilda’s—Mrs. Ephers’s—home thirty years before Mara was ever thought of. I’m not sending Hilda to a nursing home because my own granddaughter is so ill-bred as to make life miserable for her. And, of course, to a certain extent we hold Mara responsible for the heart attack to begin with.”
Harriet thought the wailing in the dining room behind them stopped momentarily at that, like an electric current briefly dipping, but the maid from the temporary agency brought coffee in just then and the clatter of cups covered the texture of Mara’s chant. As soon as the woman withdrew, Harriet pulled the sliding doors shut.
“Out of curiosity,” she asked the professor, “who is Gula?”
“The Sumerian goddess of healing. Curious that Mara should have fixed on her—feminists usually choose Inanna because she was the most important female deity. They try to promote her to head the pantheon and go through some convoluted rigmarole showing the creation of patriarchy through the loss of power by the female gods.”
“Oh, Mara isn’t a feminist,” Dr. Stonds snorted. “She’s just a confused young woman who picks up ideologies as a cloak for her unhappiness.”
Professor Lontano looked around for a place to set down her coffee cup. The marquetry table next to her was clearly an art object. Harriet rose with her usual precise movements and put the cup on the tray.
“I didn’t know Mara was interested in Sumer,” Lontano said. “She did call me once, three or four years ago, to ask if I’d known Selena’s father.”
“I don’t believe you ever mentioned this. What did you say?” The doctor frowned.
Lontano shrugged. “There wasn’t much I could say, except what you’ve always known—that I met Selena briefly at the dig near Nippur. I sat in on a seminar Professor Vatick ran, but in those days we had very formal notions about the distinction between faculty and students—I didn’t know him or his family socially. Anyway, Mara wasn’t interested in him—she only wondered if there was any doubt about her grandmother’s death. At the time she called me I thought she was trying to cloak those stories she used to make up about Selena and Beatrix in some reality. She never brought up the matter again.”
“I wish Mara would cloak herself in reality,” Harriet said. “She claims she found a letter in Mephers’s room addressed to our mother, from someone in France, but her story was all gibberish. Mephers found Mara in there rummaging through her things. That was what brought on her heart attack, so I suppose Mara had to make up something to convince herself she wasn’t to blame for Mephers’s illness. I have to confess I was curious, so I looked myself. Of course there was nothing there.”
“She’s been nothing but trouble since the day she was born,” the doctor snorted. “But since getting kicked out of Smith she’s been intolerable.”
“I don’t think we should have made her go there when she’d set her heart on Michigan,” Harriet remarked, forcing up a smile, “but that’s an old story. Even though Mephers’s heart attack rattled Mara, she only started this chanting after—after—well, I was relating a problem at dinner that we’re having with a homeless woman.”
She stopped, uncomfortable at the memory. They’d been eating carry-out food, with Mephers out of commission and no one from the agency in place yet to take over the meals, and Harriet had mentioned the Pleiades’ problem to Grandfather.
“One of your residents from the psych department is championing the psychotic woman at the garage wall. The garage manager couldn’t remember his name but I thought you should know about it.”
And then she’d looked at Mara, muddy skin pale green with fury, cheeks swelled out in what Grandfather called her chipmunk face. “You’re cheering your fascist clients for hosing down a woman just because she’s hearing voices from the Virgin Mary? That could be Mother! This woman is homeless, which is good enough reason to be crazy, and you’re happy because you’re making her even more miserable. You two think you’re so perfect, but no one else can stand you. It’s no surprise to me that none of the suitors ever wanted to marry you, cold cruel bitch like you would freeze their balls off in five minutes.”
On that line Mara fled the table, fled the house. Grandfather had a serious talk with her the next day. You cannot stay here, young woman, if you are going to enact these kinds of hysterical scenes. You betrayed your sister’s trust by drinking on the job and getting fired. You almost killed Hilda with your unwarranted invasion of her room. You are walking very close to a precipice now. Either buckle down, get going on a job and an education, or look for someplace else to live.
The next day Mara took the commuter train down to Hyde Park. She holed up at the Oriental Institute and studied translations of ancient texts. She found a few scholarly papers written by her grandmother’s father and read those. Although they were for the most part impenetrable philological essays, he had translated a few incantations to Gula for warding off disease. Mara memorized those, then announced at dinner that the goddess Gula was speaking to her, and was most unhappy with Harriet’s coldness.
Harriet thought she hadn’t minded, except, of course, for the irritation one always felt with Mara’s histrionics. But now, talking with Professor Lontano, she wondered if she really was a cold person.
“Don’t you still attend the Orleans Street Church, Abraham?” Professor Lontano asked. “Why not have your minister talk to Mara? Surely a Christian ought not worship a goddess. I believe the Bible is full of women who brought down Jehovah’s wrath by putting up altars to the old goddesses.”
“The fewer people I advertise her stupidity to the happier I’ll be,” Grandfather snapped.
“Anyway, I doubt Mara would listen to Pastor Emerson,” Harriet said, leaning back in her chair. “She thinks all men in positions of authority are only trying to control women and that religious leaders are worse than most.”
“But you don’t agree with her feminist diatribes?” the professor asked.
’I’m not unhappy.” Harriet smiled. “I don’t need ideologies. But Mara is blaming herself for Mephers’s—illness—and it’s leading her into greater extremes than are typical even for her.”
“In my day we sent unhappy girls to visit relatives in the Dolomites. Hikes in the mountain air were supposed to cure you,” Dr. Lontano commented, remembering an older sister drenched in misery from a disastrous love affair. “If that failed, parents resorted to enemas. Then we had the war, and all that excitement and misery cured my generation of melancholy.”
“Mara seems to think she’s at war,” Dr. Stonds said. “With me as the convenient whipping boy for the world around her. When I was a young man I believed ardently in the effect of environment on human morality. But I raised three girls in the identical milieu, same school, same home, same housekeeper. One became a drunk and a waster, and Mara seems determined to follow in her steps. In my old age I’ve become convinced of genetics. The Bell Curve has a lot of truth to it, despite the cries from the liberal establishment.”
Harriet’s smile became strained. “Darling, I hate to think that everything I’ve been able to accomplish was predetermined by my DNA, Surely my personality had something to do with it. And to be honest, my memories of life with—with Mother are vague, but so painful they’ve driven me to make sure I never live that way. Poor Mara keeps wishing she had a mother.”
Dr. Stonds snorted. “Don’t start spouting pseudo-Freudian claptrap at me, Harriet, We have a young resident on the psychiatry service who’s been infected with those ideas. Fortunately Hanaper can be relied on to keep him in line.”
Professor Lontano’s wide mouth twisted in sardonic amusement. “My dear Abraham—I’ve no more patience than you with women who fancy themselves unwell and lie on a couch to talk to a doctor about their troubles—but surely a psychiatrist should be expected to believe in Freudian claptrap?”
She left a few minutes later. It was curious that the two sisters were so unalike. Or maybe not. She thought back to her own sister Constanzia, the one who’d been sent to the Dolomites when Lontano was seven—they didn’t have much in common, and they’d had the same father.
Why did Mara and Harriet both still live with Abraham? As beautiful as Harriet was, Professor Lontano used to assume her marriage would take place at any moment. Not that a woman needed a husband—after all, she, Lontano, had led a most satisfying life without one.
Although there had been a time—and then when she came to Chicago, she had thought, with Selena dead—but it was Abraham himself who proved unwilling, uninterested. He didn’t need a wife, not even to look after baby Beatrix, since he had a resident housekeeper. They enjoyed evenings at the opera, discussions of art or politics, dinner at the Drake Hotel, but not love. Already in those days a great surgeon, Stonds demanded as much devotion from those at home as he found in the operating theater, and he could not accept a lover who placed her own work above his. Sumerian literature, he would laugh. How many lives has it saved this week?
And she hadn’t really cared. After Emil—Lontano tried to push the thought away, but Harriet’s face tonight, a certain look, in the lamplight—what photo did that dreadful Hilda Ephers keep locked in her angry bosom?