Authors: Sara Paretsky
Ghost Country (9 page)
A
GAIN IN HER
sleep the double basses menaced her. Again the angry man approached, a chorus of angry men sang that she should be strangled, her voice silenced forever. She thrashed herself awake and blinked once more at a strange room. After years of waking in one city after another, she should be used to strange rooms, but instability mounted with time rather than diminishing. She longed to wake up always in the same place, to know exactly where she was.
No pictures by the bed to give her a clue, neither Becca as Queen Esther nor her own talisman, a signed photo of Rosa Ponselle (the legendary diva came to a student recital at Cincinnati when Luisa was nineteen, praised her voice, signed a photo, where was it now?).
Next to the lumpy bed a nightstand, rickety, scarred wood where someone had stubbed out cigarettes. Empty of anything but her own red-and-black scarf. It hung wantonly, ends trailing on the dusty floor.
“Clio should know better, a Valentino scarf, you don’t throw three-hundred-dollar scarves on the floor,” she grumbled.
Of course Clio stopped working the day she cashed her last
paycheck. No one had any loyalty in this business, it was all look out for number one, even if you found them in tears fighting deportation, took care of their legal battles with the immigration service—okay, Leo found the right lawyer and did the day-to-day work, but she made it happen, she recognized Clio’s genius the day the Greek woman handled Luisa’s quick change in—in—her head was one searing mass of pain, why wasn’t Clio there with a massage, her French
cachets
—the only reliable headache cure. Even those stupid bitches who looked down their noses at her, Dame This, Dame That, agreed that Luisa’s
cachets blancs
were better than Alka-Seltzer.
That little chemist on the Rue Charpentier, his sour face lighting up when she came into his shop,
“Bonjour
, Madame! All Paris misses you when you are gone, and from the burst of sun on the Seine this morning I knew you had returned! You need another order of
cachets blancs
, Madame?
Mordieu
, that you with the voice of an angel should suffer these torments, it is an injustice, but I will make it right for you.”
If she could only get to Paris the little chemist wouldn’t allow Leo or Harry or Clio to torment her as they were doing now. Piero would book her a seat to Paris. Piero was the one person who didn’t yell at her when she talked to him. He was still under her spell, he’d fallen in love with her when he heard her sing Violetta in Houston, oh, that Sunday in his apartment overlooking Central Park, yes, I knew as soon as I heard the opening bars of “Sempre libera” that the audition would be a formality, they are eating from your hands,
carina
, not since Tebaldi made her debut here—I was a third assistant stage manager then, only twenty-five, but that voice! Yours is the first I’ve heard since that approaches her lyricism, although it’s darker, richer, you should sing Aida, not Violetta, but if he didn’t want her to drink so much champagne why did he keep pouring it for her?
It wasn’t true that she was a drunk, people kept saying that, it was that bitch Cesarini who started the rumor because she wanted to sing Fenena when they revived
Nabucco
at Covent Garden and
couldn’t stand it when Luisa got the role. She started telling everyone Luisa drank, as if the opera world was some kind of Teetotalers’ Paradise, if Luisa had a dime for every time she’d found someone backstage with a bottle or a bag of white powder she couìd have built herself a villa in Campania instead of that tiny apartment Harry kept screaming about, only eight rooms and not even a private beach, she’d had to share it with the condo next door.
Harry would never understand that you can’t compete in the opera world without a pied-à-terre in Italy, bastard sold the apartment, furniture, everything without talking to her, used the money to pay some bills that he probably made up, or maybe were Karen’s, Karen always harping on how Luisa ruined some stupid suit or other, some off-the-rack Donna Karan, when Galanos himself used to pin the fabric of her concert dresses at her fittings—it takes your genius to carry off this gown, Luisa, the two of us together are making a symphony of sight, eh, to go with the symphony of sound you produce—what did she care about Karen’s petulance?
She stumbled to her feet looking for her purse. Besides the bed and nightstand the room held only a chair and a lopsided dresser with a small mirror, a circle just big enough for her to see her face. But not with those lines grooved from nose to chin, the light here was abominable, why had Leo picked such a terrible hotel? Where was she, anyway?
She was ill, flu, too many performances, she’d lost track of time and place, she thought she was in Chicago, staying at Harry’s in between engagements, but this little room looked like the dreadful place the taxi driver had taken her to in Istanbul. All that confusion at the airport, she wanted to fire Leo for not having a limo there to meet her, for making her spend the night in a fleabag just like this place—it was far too late for her to be finding her way around a strange city and the idiot taxi had dumped her and torn off with a great screeching of wheels—but Piero talked her out of it, these mistakes happen,
carina
, and Leo is the best, the best for a woman of your moods and sensitivity, your voice, he soothed. And look where that got her—Leo yelling at her now every time she phoned
him—if she could get him to speak to her at all. Hiding, telling that bitch who worked for him to say he was out all the time.
Her purse was in the top drawer of the bureau, but her address book wasn’t there. Surely she knew Piero’s number by heart, though, it was he she had phoned from that miserable Turkish delight, reeling his number off by heart to the international operator, sobbing her woes to him collect, everything fixed by magic.
She sat on the bed and stretched an autonomic hand for the receiver. And realized there was no phone. She scrambled around the room, but there was no phone anywhere, not even under the bed. Panic swept through her, covered rapidly by anger. No phone, and no bathroom. She, Madame Montcrief, was expected to dress in this tiny hovel, with only that shocking mirror that distorted her face, and no private bath? And where was her robe? Her fingers shook as she found her suitcase, Clio, or maybe Karen, had stuffed her clothes in any old way, they were wrinkled, her gold silk Ungaro blouse had a long stain down the front, someone used it as a floor mop by the looks of it. She dug out her makeup case and robe and staggered down the hall looking for a bathroom.
The hall smelled of old cabbage, but the bathroom, when she found it, smelled worse. She picked up a newspaper that someone had left on the back of the toilet and spread the sheets on the floor around the ruststained tub. Her name jumped at her from an inside page.
How dare Leo let the press print lies about her? It was high time he started earning his commission, twenty-five percent and what did she get in return? A sordid rooming house and this—this slander.
Police were called yesterday to break up a brawl at Six-fifty South Wabash. Not between rival gangs or outraged Bulls fans, but between a diva and her students. Chicago native Luisa Montcrief, on indefinite leave of absence from the opera world because of health problems, was giving a rare master class at the Midwest Conservatory of Music which, according to those present,
degenerated into an ugly physical confrontation. Faculty aren’t commenting, but students say Montcrief’s remarks were crude and personal, having little to do with vocal technique, and that she sang over student performances in a voice that was loud but seldom in tune. The class was finally terminated when Montcrief picked up a student’s flute and threw it at a window. The shattering glass injured pregnant Mildred Gomez, walking underneath with her husband Albert, so badly that Gomez required twenty-two stitches in her scalp and neck. It was not possible to reach the diva. Her spokesmen in New York did not return calls to this paper.
Becca’s fingers plaited into a knot. “But where did you take her?”
“Daddy found a room for her in the city. She can’t stay here, Becca, you know that. When she was drunk only occasionally it wasn’t so bad, but for the last six months it’s turned into a nightly occurrence. None of us can go on like this, her least of all. If she has any voice left it’s a miracle.”
“But what will she live on?”
“Social security. Daddy’s lawyer looked into it all for her.” Karen lifted her daughter’s chin in a gentle hand. “Darling, she spent all of her share of the money Grandpa Minsky left her and Daddy. Years ago. She spent all the money she ever made from singing. Leo Golub advanced her thousands of dollars on her recording earnings and he’ll never get any of it back. Since she returned to Chicago last year Daddy has, well, let her have over forty thousand dollars. We can’t afford to support her on the scale that she spends. And every time she shows up here in Highland Park it blows holes in my relationship with your father. The last straw was this master class she conducted down at the Midwest Conservatory.”
“Just because she came home from it a little drunk—”
“It wasn’t
just
because of that.” Karen Minsky dropped her hand; her voice sharpened to the knifepoint Becca couldn’t stand,
“And throwing up in the hall is not a
little
drunk. She was outrageous: she broke a window, she yelled unbelievable swear words at the students. I will not let her in this house one more time. That is final.”
“She’s in an SRO, isn’t she? You could have asked me. If you don’t want her here I’d let her live on my trust fund so she wouldn’t have to be in a place like that.”
“Darling, we’re hoping if no one rescues her she’ll finally realize she needs treatment. Dr. Hanaper told us tough love is the only solution to someone who is denying her problems the way your aunt is. And be honest: you don’t like your friends here when she shows up, you told me that last week after she draped herself around Corie in the living room.”
“But where is she? Where have you dumped her?”
The patience lines around Karen’s mouth tightened. “We didn’t dump her, darling. Your father found a place that she can afford on her social security.”
“Money, money, that’s all you and Daddy care about, you don’t care that she’s an artist, she’s too sensitive to survive in an SRO.” Becca, hiccuping with sobs, fled the kitchen so that her mother couldn’t make her admit she was being unreasonable.
Bible Study
Rafe Lowrie asked—told?—me to come to a Wednesday night prayer session so I could see what he—in his words, what the Spirit—is trying to accomplish with women at H House. Stange experience—my only other experience of Christian church at weddings of friends, & those always formal occasions, with set ritual.
Rafe’s meeting freeform prayer and Bible study, stressing a personal God who’s wrapped up in individual lives and concerns. That certainty seems both ridiculous and enviable to me. How nice it must be to think that someone in the Universe cares about the hairs on your head. From where I sit it looks like a bleak and random place. Jesus save us from homelessness or rape, and if he doesn’t, well, God’s ways are not ours.
The ancients used to cast lots to find out what they had done to displease the gods. If you were Jonah and unlucky they threw you overboard where you were swallowed by a whale, but the great storm was stilled and everyone else was saved. Today they’re doing the same thing, but in a less direct way: God is smiting us because of pregnant teenagers, or welfare mothers, or feminists or queers. Cast all those overboard and the seas of the Republic will be quiet again.
Lowrie’s daughter came along to hand out Bibles, do whatever else the great man deems too menial for his own hands. She directed women
to their seats, went around trying to hush ones who were carrying on private conversations. Stoop-shouldered, face drawn down, looked much older than nineteen (of course learned her age from Jacqui!).
The class or meeting or whatever it was began with Lowrie praying. His voice is hoarse after yelling all day in the commodities pits.
“Jesus, send Your Holy Spirit so that we may understand the Word You have given us. Make us worthy to receive that Word, let it lead our feet in the paths of righteousness for Your name’s sake. Lord, many come to You like the woman in the Book of Joel, who sold her daughter for a bottle of wine, and then drank it, and yet even for her God promises salvation if she truly repents. Others are like the man in the tombs of Gerasenes, so violent from the force of the demons who possessed him that he could not be held even with chains, and yet through faith and through prayer the Lord cast out these demons.
“Let us pray that the Holy Spirit who already makes Himself felt and known within us, will empower us to cast out demons, for with faith are all things possible, even the curing of disease that baffles medical wisdom.” Rafe concluded his prayer and opened his eyes to address the women on the subject of the Gospel’s healing power. “Remember the woman in Mark’s Gospel? She had a flow of blood that lasted twelve years, and spent all the money she had on physicians who were unable to cure her. Yet she had only to lay her hands in faith on Jesus’ robes for the bleeding to stop.”
Hector felt himself flush with anger. Lowrie had clearly insisted on Hector’s coming to show him, or the women, or both, that psychiatry was not welcome at the Orleans Street Church.
“Some of you come here in torment, torment worse than that woman’s in the Gospel, and you think that the power of medicine may heal you. But what has that power done for you, other than to take your money and send you into the streets, just as it did to her? And just as the mere touch of the robes of the Lord was enough to cure her, where doctors and their science had failed, so if you truly
believe that the Holy Spirit is among us, you may also be made whole.”
Don’t know why Lowrie should feel competitive with me. I’m a struggling resident, working seventy hours a week for thirty-eight thousand a year, just enough to make my debt payment schedule for med school, rent on a four-room apt, no family (not forgetting Lily’s presence looming over me) while he has a successful career, children, gracious living in one of those lofty apartments on Elm Street.
Jacqui, of course, gave me all these details before the prayer meeting. Asked her how she knew so much about my life, Lowrie’s.
She threw back her head and laughed, “You think I’m psychic, Doctor? I’m only homeless, and black: you can’t be more invisible than that in America. People talk around me, they think they’re talking to the furniture. But why Rafe Lowrie is an unhappy man, that I can’t tell you, not without I really was psychic. Maybe Jesus is trying his soul for some reason. But Jesus doesn’t talk to me the way he talks to Brother Rafe.”
