Sweet Mercy (3 page)

What I didn't include in my essay was how badly Prohibition had failed, how as soon as it was signed into law, the law began to be broken, how it had opened the floodgates to illegal liquor distribution and organized crime, ruining perfectly good cities like St. Paul. I'm sure I was unwilling to admit it, even to myself.

But none of that mattered now. Kicking off my canvas shoes, I stepped barefoot into the river, just up to my ankles. The water was cold and tingly. A few people were swimming
farther out; one of them, a girl about my age, rose up out of the water and moved toward shore.

“Hello,” she called to me in passing as she ran to grab a towel. She lifted it to her head and began vigorously rubbing her short curls.

“Hi,” I said. “Nice swim?”

“Yes,” she said, “but now I'm freezing.” She shivered as she wrapped the towel around her shoulders. “You going in?”

“No.” I laughed lightly. “Not right now. Maybe tomorrow. You staying at the lodge?”

She shook her head. “No, we live in town. We just came over for a few hours. How about you? You up from Cincinnati?”

“No. Actually I live here now. I live in the lodge.” I suppose I sounded proud, but I couldn't help it. “My uncle owns it.”

“Lucky you!” she said, wide eyed, and I was pleased that she was impressed. “How long have you lived here?”

“We've only just arrived. Just this evening. We moved down from Minnesota.”

“Lucky you,” she said again.

“Marlene!” A woman at one of the picnic tables raised a hand and waved. “We're packed and ready to go. We're waiting on you.”

“Coming, Ma!” The girl turned back to me. “Well, maybe I'll see you here again sometime.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “We could go swimming or rent a boat or something.”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “Now that summer's starting we'll be here a lot. Not much else to do in Mercy.”

“Marlene!”

“I said I'm coming!”

“Well,” I said, “nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, you too. Oh, and welcome to Ohio, I guess. But listen, just watch out for the red-eyed devil.”

“The what?”

“Marlene!”

“I said I'm coming!” She started to go, and then turned back. “But don't worry. You're pretty safe as long as it's daylight. He mostly comes out at night.”

I wanted to ask her what she was talking about, but before I could say another word she had run off, laughing, to join her family.

S
tanding in the hall, I tapped lightly on Mother and Daddy's door, opening it only after Mother said, “Come in.” She closed the book she'd been reading aloud, using one finger as a bookmark. “Well, Eve, how was the island?”

“As beautiful as ever,” I said dreamily.

“Are you off to bed now?”

“I don't know. I'm not tired at all. Maybe I'll read awhile too.”

Daddy, who was sitting in the overstuffed chair across from Mother, gestured toward the footstool. “You can join us, if you'd like. We've just started
Great Expectations.
I know you like Dickens.”

I nodded, thought a moment, shrugged. “I think I'd like to get acquainted with my new room.”

Daddy chuckled. “You're glad we're here, aren't you, darling?”

“You know I am, Daddy. This is going to be the most wonderful place to live. I've already met a girl who lives in town. Her name's Marlene. I think we're going to be friends.”

“How nice,” Mother said.

“Except . . .”

“Except what?”

I thought of her comment about the red-eyed devil, still not quite sure what to make of it. Maybe it was a joke or a bit of local color, a story told around the campfire at night. I decided not to mention it. “Except, I want you both to be happy here too,” I finished.

Mother and Daddy exchanged a glance. “We're going to make the best of it,” Mother replied.

“At least until the economy gets back on its feet,” Daddy said. “This is only temporary, after all.”

Mother must have seen the worried look on my face, because she hastily added, “But of course we'll be here through your senior year of school, Eve. Don't worry about that.”

I tried to smile. Their not wanting to be in Mercy dampened my spirits and made me sorry for them, for what they thought they had lost. I hoped all that would change once we got settled into a daily routine. They would see that life in Mercy was good. How could it not be?

“Well, I'll let you get back to reading,” I said. “Good night. See you in the morning.”

“Good night, Eve.”

“Sleep well, darling.”

I kissed them both, then slipped through the bathroom to my own room. I closed the bathroom door on my side gently, shutting off the sound of Mother reading. Mother had always read to Daddy, as long as I could remember, and as soon as I was old enough I'd started reading to him too. He loved stories but he was unable to read them to himself, or at least not without great difficulty. The letters kept turning
around, he said; they didn't stay where they were supposed to be. No one really knew what a page of type looked like to Daddy and why it looked different than it did to everybody else, but I did know it was one of the reasons he'd left Ohio at age eighteen without finishing high school. He had never felt good enough to be a Marryat. He wasn't like his brothers Cyrus and Luther. They were both honor-roll students who were being groomed for positions of leadership in the family businesses. Daddy would never have a place among them. He had to make his own place, and it wasn't going to be in Mercy. In the middle of their senior year, Daddy and his pal Stan Brewster ran away to Detroit, where they'd managed to get assembly line jobs at the Ford Motor Company, a journey that by happenstance, some twenty-nine years later, brought Daddy right back to the place he didn't want to be. Because he had ultimately failed to keep his job, he was back in Mercy.

I stood in the middle of my room and slowly turned around, taking it all in. It was much smaller than Mother and Daddy's room, but that was all right. A single bed, a wardrobe, a mirrored dresser, a desk and a reading chair—what else did I need? My clothes were hanging in the wardrobe, my shoes were under the bed, my photo albums and scrapbooks were tucked away in a drawer, and my treasure box was on top of the dresser. Already, I felt the place was mine.

Stepping to the dresser, I began untangling my long blond braid in front of the mirror. Unlike Cassandra, I had refused to cut my hair when the short bob came into fashion. I had no desire to be like my sister, who was eight years older than I and who had long ago made a pretty mess of her life.

I was serious about this one shot at living while she went
at it like a professional partier. I worked hard in school and tried to acquaint myself with the best of literature and art while Cassandra, awakened in adolescence to the intoxicating mix of crime and romance, devoured
True Detective
magazines. Though she was married now to a man who would no more break the law than Eliot Ness, once upon a time she had dreamed of being a moll, the girlfriend of an outlaw! She aspired to marry a man who robbed banks by day and came home to his lady at night to shower her in diamonds and dough, a man who dodged bullets and evaded arrest and was somehow invincible, a devilish Dick Tracy, a Bad-boy Buck Rogers.

She was nothing but a typical St. Paulite, always glamorizing the bad guys and longing to hang around the fringes of their world. As I brushed my hair, I remembered the time Cassandra and her friend Susan had run off giggling to the Hotel St. Paul. George “Bugs” Moran had been spotted there, and they thought if they hung around the lobby long enough they'd catch a glimpse of him. And they did.

They came back to our apartment and found me reading in the bedroom I unfortunately shared with Cassandra. Now my sister entered the room with her hands clenched in front of her heart. “Well, it was him,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Bugs Moran, silly. We saw him walk right through the lobby and go out the front door of the Hotel St. Paul.”

“So?”

Susan leaned up against the doorframe, as though weak-kneed with longing. “Eve, you wouldn't believe how good-looking he is in real life. Even more handsome than he looks in pictures.”

“So?”

“So don't you want to see him?” Susan asked.

“Why would I want to go look at one of the biggest gangsters in Chicago?”

“
Because,
” Susan exclaimed, “he
is
one of the biggest gangsters in Chicago! And so much better looking than Al Capone.”

“You guys are crazy.”

“And you're just no fun,” Cassandra snapped.

“And if you're not careful, you'll end up a moll!” I yelled.

“And if you're not careful, you'll end up an old maid!”

“Better an old maid than a gangster's girlfriend!”

Even as a very young child, I viewed my older sister as silly and shallow, a party girl tailor-made for the twenties. The years were to prove me right. The flapper craze sucked her up a willing participant and spat her out a reluctant wife and mother when, at age twenty, after years of speakeasies, bad boys, and hip flasks, she found herself pregnant and alone. Perhaps worst of all, she wasn't even sure who the father was. Mother and Daddy were horrified, though luckily several of Cassandra's former beaus suddenly materialized on our doorstep proposing marriage. These hapless suitors knew they were getting a two-for-one deal, but each was nevertheless willing to make an honest woman out of her. I could never understand that, except that Cassandra was uncommonly beautiful and perhaps her beauty knocked all the sense out of otherwise sensible men.

I leaned closer to the mirror and gazed judgmentally at what I considered my own plain face. My lips were too thin, my forehead too high. My nose was narrow and perhaps a bit too long, leaving it looking pinched and pretentious. I
longed for cheekbones but they hadn't yet appeared. The only good feature was my eyes. They were blue and bright, just like Mother's. And Cassandra's. But that was the only family resemblance I shared with my sister. As I studied myself in the mirror, I wondered briefly whether I would ever turn sensible men into fools, and decided it was unlikely.

But the beautiful Cassandra had her choice of men, and she chose Warren Lemming, which all in all was a wise decision, since Warren's father had made his fortune in the railroad and had barely felt the aftershocks of the recent stock market crash. Warren was set to inherit an enviable estate and in the meantime was doing quite well as a junior partner in his father's business. On top of that he was genuinely nice, always even-tempered, and not bad looking either, if you didn't mind a receding chin and an unfortunate mole or two. He gave Cassandra's baby his name and immediately afterward gave Cassandra another baby. Effie and Grace were four and three now and lucky to have Warren as a father.

While I think Cassandra loved Warren in her own way, she resented having to settle down into marriage and motherhood before she was ready. I didn't feel sorry for her, though. In fact, her quiet misery filled me with no end of secret delight; I figured she'd got what she deserved. She had drunk and danced her way toward what she herself called drudgery. Like Daddy was known to say, she'd made her bed.

I for one wasn't going to be making any beds. I was going to make something of myself. Not just for me but, more importantly, for the two people in the room next to mine. I was going to do something important, something that made a difference. Mother and Daddy didn't have anyone else to do good in the world and to make them proud. Certainly not
Cassandra. And not the son who'd been stillborn between Cassandra and me. I was the only one they had and I wasn't going to let them down.

Laying down the brush and turning away from the dresser, I didn't know what to do next. Sleep was out of the question; I was far too excited for that. I thought about reading or writing a letter to my best friend Ariel back in St. Paul, but I had too much pent-up energy for sitting. I needed to move, to walk somewhere, or I'd end up pacing the room.

I tied my hair back with a ribbon and stepped out into the hall, quietly tiptoeing past Mother and Daddy's room and descending the stairs to the front hall below. A man I didn't know was behind the front desk; Uncle Cy must have still been talking oats and chickens with the members of the town council. The dining room was dark and empty, but the spacious sitting room was well lighted and cheery with the presence of guests. I walked through, smiling and nodding at a few people, but my feet, as though by their own will, carried me on through the sitting room and down the short narrow hallway that led to the ballroom.

As wide as the lodge itself, the ballroom was a cavernous place, with a high ceiling and a glossy hardwood floor that even now shimmered faintly in the dim electric lighting. On the far side was a stage where surprisingly big-name bands came to play, bringing in the crowds from Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and even Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky. The air seemed to reverberate with the music that had bounced off these walls for years, and as I stood there staring, I could sense the presence of carefree couples dancing the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, the waltz and the fox-trot.

I had often gone to school dances with my friends, where
we were asked to dance by boys we didn't like. We accepted anyway and spent the time looking over their shoulders at the boys we longed to have ask us, but who never did. Nevertheless, I enjoyed dancing. I'd learned how to waltz along with everyone else as part of the physical education requirement in school. Once I was paired up with Scott Hampton, one of the handsome boys I contemplated from afar. I didn't want the song to end. I wanted to go on feeling what it was to have my hand on his shoulder, his arm around my waist, our other hands meeting palm to palm as we slid around the freshly waxed gym floor. Scott Hampton had never spoken to me before, and he didn't speak to me even then, but that was all right. While the song lasted I could pretend he had asked me out to the floor, that the look on his face had been one of delight rather than agony when my name was called with his.

A portable phonograph sat on the edge of the stage and, curious, I went to it. It was a big wooden box of a player, an RCA Victrola that looked brand-new, a far cry from the old gramophone back in our Edgecombe Court apartment that pumped out scratchy music through an ancient morning-glory horn. I looked at the record on the turntable.
Viennese Waltzes.
Perfect.

I turned the knob and lowered the needle. I shut my eyes, raised my arms, and imagined myself in Scott Hampton's embrace. I began to twirl, slowly at first, but then more rapidly, knowing the whole room was mine. Alone yet not alone, I moved with my imaginary lover in wide circles around the floor.

Oh, Scott! Oh, darling! You dance divinely. . . .

Oh!
With a jolt, I found myself tumbling face-forward and
landing with a thud on the floor. I'd backed into someone or something, but I couldn't imagine what. Stunned, I shook my head and pulled in a deep breath. I let the air out in a quiet moan as I turned over and sat.

An extended hand slipped into my field of vision. When I looked up, I fell back on one elbow and stifled a scream. Marlene had been telling the truth. The red-eyed devil was standing over me, looking for all the world as though he was ready to pounce.