Free Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott Page B

could.
    For a moment, she felt he might finally have been struck by the ponderousness of their joint sin, here only a foot of plaster and wood separating him from his enfeebled wife one floor above.
    “Oh, Marion,” he said. “Look what I have done.”
    But when he pulled his hands from his face, she saw no grief at all, no trace of stricken remorse.
    “I have made you a whore,” he said, and he couldn’t stop his smile. Saw no need to.
    For her part, looking into her own battered heart, she could summon no anger, nor even fresh guilt. She believed that in his mind, which she now saw as disturbed in some way, the consequence of years of feeling lost and unmoored, like a widower with a wife, in his mind, he was giving her his highest praise. Her legs still damp, she reckoned this terrible revelation: she was strangely gratified. She had pleased him. Wasn’t that, in some odd way, wondrous?
    This man, he has shamed me twice over, once by treating me like a whore and once more by showing me I am one.
    I am a sinner, Dr. Seeley. What’s more, I grew to love my sin.
     
    N O ONE HAD TOLD J OE L ANIGAN that she was a flower, a doll, an ornament of finely spun glass, something to rest on a mantelpiece. Somehow no one had told him he couldn’t fondle her, twist her filmy skin, grab her with his rough Irish hands and throw her on a bed and do just awful, awful things to her.
    You are Pandora, Joe Lanigan had said. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open. As if it were her. As if she were the one. Was she?
    She wondered if she’d showed him, without knowing it, that she could be treated like he treated her. What had she shown him, and had she shown it to Dr. Seeley and had he not seen? Or, oh no, had he understood and been frightened and such the more cause of his private habits, so destructive to them all? Things too horrible to know.
    But Joe did not bother with talk of sin. He never missed Sunday Mass and he saw no predicament, said the one had not to do with the other and there was a gospel of hedonism and she might follow it, but she with her Dutch ways, with her grim church and its coldnesses and not the hot, bloodied breath of Catholicism, she knew not where to turn except to pray and pray and pray to turn her back into a doll, or a flower, something inviolate on a shelf, never touched.
     
    “M ARION’S GOT A NEW BEAU,” came Louise’s whisper across the table in the lunchroom that Monday. A prickling toothed thing dragged up from Marion’s knees to her chest.
    “What did you say, Louise?”
    “Oh, you just have that dreamy-eyed look, your little rosebud mouth all aquiver and eyes so loose they’ll go cross.”
    Marion tried to smile. Louise, fingertips tapping on the waxed paper of Marion’s balogna sandwich, watched.
    “Let me guess, Fair Mare, the Vagabond Lover climbs up Mrs. Gower’s trellis and into your window each night at the stroke of twelve. Marion’s beau would be no less gallant.”
    “Oh no, Louise,” Marion said, watching as Louise rotated the sandwich, eyeing the pink meat suspiciously, then slid it back to Marion. “I was up late writing to Dr. Seeley.”
    Louise grinned, picking up the fat apple she had brought. “Such a dutiful wife,” she said, extending her long arm, the apple glowing like some royal citrine.
    “Have a taste, Fair Mare, do share.”
    Marion started to speak—
    “Or is your rosebud mouth too small?” Louise added, eyes cracking. It was like a saber lain before. It was a saber, a gauntlet, somehow. Marion saw it glinting. You could not miss it. Marion saw it but did not know why it had been lain there.

Part Two

 
    I told Mrs. Seeley to keep her distance from those two. But Marion, she liked their lively ways.
    Everyone knew about Louise Mercer, like what happened at the Dempsey Hotel. How someone called the law because there was a ruckus and there she was in the fifth-floor corridor going on two o’clock in the morning, only one