DON’T TELL ME it’s for my own good. Its for yours, yours and Mephers’s. You’ve been dying to throw me out ever since I was born and now you have the perfect excuse. Mrs. Ephers is old and fragile and needs quiet. Let’s get rid of the last trace of the evil Beatrix and her loathsome mother Selena. Their genes somehow bypassed the perfect golden Harriet, but we need to root them out when they crop up again in Mara.”
Once again Grandfather had called Mara into his study. If she didn’t stop her chanting and find a job—or, better yet, go back to school—she would have to move. That was an ultimatum.
“I’m not ordering you to leave, although you are not attractive to live with. But it’s time you learned that your actions have consequences. Having to look after yourself in your own apartment might be a good experience for you—it would teach you how much Hilda has done for you over the years.” Grandfather spoke coldly. “Not to mention me. Perhaps we made a mistake in allowing you to think you always had a room here.”
“How much rent does Harriet pay you? I suppose it’s a lot, since she makes a bundle at the firm and you gave her that three-room suite.”
Mara’s cheeks, swollen with misery and anger, made Dr. Stonds feel even less charitably toward her. “Yours and Harriet’s situations are very different. If you showed the same desire to make the most of your opportunities as she has, I’d be glad to give you a suite like hers. But if you mean, how are you going to afford a home as nice as this one, you should have thought of that before you started on your current disastrous course. I am prepared to help you pay rent on a decent apartment elsewhere. Provided you find a job to take care of your remaining expenses. And, of course, there is no need for you to leave at all if you will start living like a civilized person.”
“I’ll behave like your version of a civilized person if you’ll behave like my version of a truthful one,” Mara said. “I found a letter to Mother from someone in France in Mephers’s room, along with a photograph of some man who looks just like Harriet. I want to know where Mother really—”
“I’ve had enough of your self-dramatizing.” The doctor’s face reddened. “Your mother is dead. I have told you that many times, but you refuse to listen. Mrs. Ephers will be released from the rehabilitation hospital on Thursday. That gives you two days to decide on your course of behavior.”
A bell tinkled in the background: the cook from the agency had dinner ready. She would have to stay on when Hilda returned, the doctor realized: he and Harriet needed to make sure Hilda didn’t overdo it. She had always sacrificed her own well-being for his, ever since he left her alone with Selena when he was in the army. After Selena and Beatrix, Hilda didn’t deserve Mara. Maybe send Mara to see Hanaper? Stonds didn’t believe in psychotherapy as a rule, but someone needed to straighten her out.
A hot spot started to burn under his rib cage as he thought of the many times Mara had behaved abominably, the tantrums as a child, a blue velvet dress she had cut to ribbons when she was four, flowers stolen from the Historical Society garden, files deleted from his computer when he was finishing a paper for the American College of Neurosurgeons. He used to take her to the opera, when he’d far rather have gone with Verna Lontano or some other intelligent adult, and Mara repaid him by making up ludicrous parodies at a dinner with the opera’s artistic director. He sent her to the same camps and after-school activities they’d given Harriet; Mara responded by being expelled from college. He had punished, bribed, pleaded. Nothing had any effect on her. Bad blood would always tell.
“It’s dinnertime, Mara. Try to get those nuts out of your cheeks so that you look like a human being and not a chipmunk at the dinner table.”
“I have plans for dinner elsewhere.” She got up to leave, hoping Grandfather couldn’t see her trembling hands, hoping she wouldn’t start to cry in front of him.
In her mind she swept from the room, velvet skirts swirling around her in a graceful eddy. In her mind she was beautiful, coarse dark hair long and shiny, pulled into a chignon, waist so slender a man could span it with his hands.
Grandfather was like Aunt Reed in Jane Eyre, Or maybe he was the bullying cousin; Mrs. Ephers, the ever-effervescent, could be a ringer for Aunt Reed, playing favorites with her children, letting them tell lies and then punishing Jane for them. But Jane was small, birdlike, slipped in and out of rooms unnoticed. As Mara bumped against a table, knocking over a stack of papers, Grandfather said, you’ve made your point sufficiently, you don’t need to vandalize this room. Or should I have it padlocked as well?
Referring to Mrs. Ephers’s locked room, which Mara had entered by crawling along the outside wall, like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, easy, really, because of the balconies, but then she had made too much noise breaking the window. I want to prove to you that these papers are here, Mara told Harriet, when her sister and Grandfather came running to the housekeeper’s room, but of course the secret drawer in the secretary was empty. Mrs. Ephers had moved them, or told Grandfather or Harriet to do so. Mara’s only hope, and she didn’t put real stock in it, was for a vision from the goddess Gula that would lead her to the papers.
Maybe Grandfather had locked Beatrix in the psych ward at the hospital. That was why he stayed on teaching and operating, to make sure she didn’t escape. He wanted to lock Mara up alongside her mother, so he was trying to make people think Mara was crazy, that she imagined papers that didn’t exist. Maybe she was crazy. Or would be soon if she stayed much longer in this mausoleum.
She shut herself in her bedroom and phoned Cynthia Lowrie to pour out her tale of woe. Fortunately Cynthia answered the phone herself. Her father wasn’t home, so she could talk, for a short time: if her brother Jared knew she was talking to Mara, Jared would tell Rafe and then Cynthia would be in trouble again.
“Maybe it would be a good thing if you did move out, Mara. You know you’re not happy there. I’d be happy if I could have my own apartment.”
“Why don’t we get a place together?” Mara said. “You’d get away from your father and your asshole brother. You’d never have to hand out Bibles to homeless women again or clean whiskers out of the bathroom sink.”
Cynthia snorted. “You going to clean the bathroom if we get a place? I’d like to see you clean anything. Anyway, Daddy would never let me move out, not unless it was to get married, I mean—he’s getting all wound up by Family Matters, you know, that group where men get together to prove they’re really in charge of their families. Some of them even go and pick husbands for their daughters. Daddy started a chapter at the church, which you would know if you ever showed up there. He says he could rest easy if he knew I was going to a good Christian home, not off with some guy who’d encourage all my worst faults.”
“You don’t have to marry anyone you don’t want to,” Mara said hotly. “Anyway, if we got a place together what could Rafe do to you? He might be totally pissed off, but so what? They’re pissed off with me all the time around here.”
“Oh, Mara, it’s not the same, you know it’s not…. Help, I think he just came in, gotta go.” She dropped the receiver clumsily into the switch hook.
Mara walked the two miles downtown to Corona’s on Kinzie. She supposed Cynthia was even worse off than she was, although she grudged the ceding of any misery to her friend. But she had to be honest—no one would let Cynthia shag out to a bar. Grandfather might rant at her, but he didn’t lock her in her room or beat her.
At Corona’s, Jake the bouncer knew he was supposed to card her, knew she was too young, but he accepted her ten, her sadgirl grin, and let her in.
“You know it’s Tuesday, Mara: slim pickings tonight.”
“Yeah, I know, Jake, but my blues are good enough to fill in even for a voiceless white chick.”
He laughed. “That’s just what we have on tap for you tonight: a voiceless white chick. Go over to the Gold Star and listen to Patricia Barber.”
Mara went on in. They always carded her at the Gold Star—she’d never been able to bribe the doorman there. The hostess showed her to a table near the door and brought her a bourbon while a white woman with a thin reedy voice sang “Bottom of My Soul” as if the distance from bottom to top were a micron wide. When she left the stage, to polite applause, the painist doodled variations on “Bottom of My Soul,” speaking into the mike above the piano as he did so.
“It’s not amateur night at Corona’s, you know that, When you pay your five bucks at the door and buy those pricey drinks, Queenie treats you right, doesn’t palm cheap imitations off on you. But tonight we have an unexpected guest here in the club, a singer, and she’s offered to do a song or two for us. I want you to welcome Chicago’s own … Luisa Montcrief.”
Mara sat up. Luisa Montcrief, the diva? Surely not in a jazz dive. But when an aquiline woman in a crimson dress climbed the short step to the stage. Mara recognized her as the singer who’d ravished her as Aida, Desdemona, and a dozen other heroines over the years.
Luisa looked alert and regal. Even though she was too thin, so that the dress hung on her, her presence made the small stage seem overcrowded. So it wasn’t true, what Grandfather told her—that Madame Monterief ’s family brought her into see that slimeball Hanaper because the diva was drunk and incompetent. Liar, liar, he lied about everything.
The diva put a hand on the piano, raking the crowd with an imperious glance. At the spindly-legged tables patrons were talking, softly, it’s true, but Luisa was used to the silence of awe when she walked onstage. When a trio of men continued their conversation—one of them giving a loud shout of laughter—Madame Montcrief leaned forward.
“If you would like your conversation to be part of the performance, could you kindly join me here on the stage? Otherwise, have the courtesy to be silent while I sing.”
A few people clapped, but the three men got up to leave. The hostess ran after them, trying to collect their money, but they were offended: they didn’t come into Corona’s to be insulted, and that by some singer who wasn’t even on the advertised program.
“Oh, go back to whatever two-bit town you come from,” Mara called. “Luisa Montcrief is one of the greatest singers in the world. No one wants to listen to your chatter about football or computer sales or whatever boring topic is so important to you. You’d have to pay a hundred dollars to get this close to her at the opera. Maybe more.”
“No one lectures me on how to act in public.” The biggest of the three men came over to Mara’s table and glared down at her.
“What a pity.” The diva spoke from the stage. “You have so much to learn.”
The pianist began playing variations on “Troubled in Mind.” “Let’s have a few songs, Luisa, while Minnie settles things at the door. She’s an expert at sorting things out, you’re an expert at singing, so you leave the sorting out to her.”
Luisa was reluctant to abandon the battlefield, but still sober enough to realize her audience agreed with the pianist. She bowed again to their applause and began singing. She’d sung a lot of ballads and Broadway in her student days, and pulled “Careless Love” from her old repertoire. An intelligent performer, she muted her big voice to fit the small room, and reached into her lower register for a smoky undertone. The audience, suspicious at first, began to respond, clapping hard as the last notes melted past the bar.
Luisa paused to drink most of a glass of amber liquid, then sang Maria’s song from West Side Story. As she began her third song, the three loud men worked something out with Minnie and returned to their table. They immediately began laughing, emphasizing their humor by slapping the table. When Luisa finished “Thievin Boy,” they applauded loudly and whistled.
“I see our cretinous friends here have decided to join the party,” Luisa announced. “Perhaps I should sing a song just for them, and loudly enough for them to make it out.”
She began singing in German, using her full voice, which was so powerful, it set up a whistling feedback in the sound system. The piano player gamely followed her, although Mara could tell from his expression that he was annoyed. The three men continued their loud, staged remarks, but no one could hear them over the diva in full throttle.
When she finished the song there was a smattering of doubtful clapping. “Ah—since that was in German, and our friends here can barely understand English, I had best translate. It is, of course, by Hugo Wolf, from his famous Italienisches Liederbuch—for the ignorant, the Italian Songbook—and it means:
Who called you? Who invited you here? Who told you to come, if it’s such a burden to you? Go where your fancy calls, You willingly forgo your coming to me.
So, you troglodytes, like Hugo Wolf I gladly forgo your presence here. Leave now so I can continue this concert.”
One of the men stood and cupped his hands to bellow, “Hey, you snot-nosed bitch, we came here for music by American singers with American words. Go back to whatever foreign rock you crawled out of.”
“She is American, you great ape,” Mara yelled from her table. “If I was as stupid as you I’d stay home instead of coming and showing it off in public.”
Some of the crowd was laughing, but others began to gather up their handbags and briefcases, preparatory to departing. The hostess hurried over to Luisa and started a whispered entreaty that she ignore the men and return to pop music. Luisa turned a shoulder to her, and began singing, again at fall voice, “Sempre libera,’ from La Traviata.
Minnie ran around behind Luisa to the sound system and turned off Luisa’s mike. Even without it her voice filled the room, but Minnie went to the pianist’s mike and was able to speak over the diva.
“I’m sorry, folks, but we have a temporary malfunction of the sound system. You’ll be getting drinks on the house while we sort it out.” She hustled Luisa from the stage.
The three men applauded, giving loud sports cheers. Mara stomped over to their table. She picked up a drink with either hand and dashed the liquor in their faces.
They sat frozen for a moment, then roared with fury and jumped her. She was on the floor, kicking and squirming, when the bouncer pulled the men from her. He tossed the trio from the bar.
Jake came back inside, his breathing only slightly hurried. “And as for you, Mara, out you go. You know Queenie doesn’t tolerate any nonsense in her club. If she was here you might be barred permanently, so you’re lucky she’s not.”
“Okay, Jake, okay. Can I clean up first? They’ll kill me if I come home like this.”
Unlike the bouncer Mara was panting hard. She was wet and dirty from being rolled around on the floor. Her feet were sticky inside her high-heeled sandals. In the dim toilet light she saw a bruise forming below her left eye and blood on her left arm. Her tank top had a tear under one arm.
“Huh. I look like that woman at the wall.”
She washed off what parts of her arms and face she could fit in the tiny sink and let Jake escort her outside. The diva was there, arguing with Minnie about getting Corona’s to give her cab fare.
“Ah, the little heroine.” Luisa grabbed Mara’s arm and stood on tiptoe to plant European kisses on both cheeks. “How brave you were, and how kind, to come to my support amidst that band of Philistines.”
Her breath stank of whiskies past and present.
“I’ve been an admirer of yours for years,” Mara muttered. “It’s too bad Queenie wasn’t here tonight. She’s a pretty cool head, she wouldn’t have let those guys get out of hand the way they did.”
“I pay no attention to the canaglia.” Luisa snorted, like Harriet’s horse, Mara thought, suppressing a giggle. “Chicago is a vulgar town with no regard for artistry. My own brother is the example par excellence of that. A cretin, more at home on a scrap metal heap than a concert hall. Can you believe we shared a womb? I was born first: I couldn’t wait to leave him. Even in utero I knew him for a Philistine.”
This time Mara couldn’t help giggling, but she said, “I hope you don’t think everyone in Chicago is as ignorant as those guys. I love your singing. I own all your recordings. I bet I’ve listened to your Tosca a thousand times.”
Luisa bridled again, this time with pleasure. “You are young to have such an appreciation for opera, I could use an amanuensis in this town. My dresser, my agent, they have all abandoned me; my own brother threw me out on the street. I’m reduced to making appearances in nightclubs, and that malandrina—excuse me—robber—I’ve lived so many years in Italy that their language comes first to me—wouldn’t even give me cab fare, after agreeing to pay me for my performance.”
“I live with my grandfather,” Mara said. “He threatened to throw me out because I got fired from my job. Also because he doesn’t want to admit he knows what happened to my mother.”
“Hah! These men and their fixation about jobs. My brother would be happy to see me teaching music to kindergartners. I, who sing routinely at the Met and the Berlin Staatsoper, I who got fifteen curtain calls at La Scala after my debut as Carmen—” She lost the thread of her declamation. “He thinks only of money, and of scrap metal. Come! You may take me home with you.”
“I’m not going home tonight. They had to choose between me and the housekeeper, so they chose the housekeeper.” Mara gulped down a sob of self-pity. “I’m going to teach them a lesson.”