Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online

fluttering, and she stood and didn’t move and her head was filled with sorrow and it wasn’t the right kind of sorrow. She stood, the air barely moving, the sky muddy with late-afternoon muddiness, that dread feeling of stillness, which suggests no movement again, ever.
    At seven o’clock, the appointed hour, Marion on the edge of her bed thinking, This would have been the time, were I to have been so wayward, or less wayward (for doing without knowing why, that must be happiness).
    Somehow, still, she was awaiting his knock, could picture the door opening, his camel’s-hair-coat, hair-oil-glistening arrival, he like a man from a motion picture, on Kay Francis’s arm, towering over with broad shoulders and her hand slipping eagerly through the crook of his solid arm, he with a smile like Fredric March, like Robert Montgomery, like any of them. He was like any of them. All of them. Bright and shiny like polished dress shoes.
    So it was a long hour after that, radio playing, rasping out “Far away near Havana shores there lives a girl, whom I call dancing Cuban Pearl,” and Marion darning, like her crook-handed mother, stockings fuzzed with wear. She might have gone to the girls’ place on Hussel Street. Louise always said it was an open invitation and that Saturdays were always a scream, they made sure of it.
    But then there it was, like an air horn blast. Eight o’clock, or three minutes past, the sharp knock and frog-jawed Mrs. Gower, robe pulled across low-slung chest, saying, “A Mr. Lanigan should want you on the telephone, Mrs. Seeley. Told him I shan’t expect you to take calls this late but he said mightn’t I try. Couldn’t barely hear him. Sounds like he’s telephoning from a train station, or a rodeo.”
    Marion’s breath fast, her hand nearly damp on the mouthpiece, fingers pressed on the thrumming ringer box. “Mr. Lanigan?”
    Was that his voice amid the crunching sounds of the festivities, glasses tinkling, dishes clapping against each other, chairs skidding, a trombone drawling, but most of all waves of laughter, men and women laughing together?
    “Mrs. Seeley…I know you had declined me, but I do believe you have the wrong impression…should come…respectable celebration in honor of a fine civic leader and Mr. Solway himself would so appreciate your presence…might you consider attending?…You might take a trolley car down and I would meet you and escort you…”
     
    T HE TWO YOUNG MEN next to her on the trolley, both wheezing corn liquor, kept rustling her, each time apologizing, hat doffing, but still so caught up in their drunken stories that they’d inevitably fall to it again, one of them even jabbing her straight in the bosom.
    Don’t I deserve it, Marion thought. Her knees shaking, her heart vibrating like a tug spring, she cursed herself for not hesitating fifteen seconds before putting on her one fine dress, daffodil colored and ironed to shininess, borrowing trolley fare from no less than bristle-lipped Mrs. Gower (“It was my brother, Mrs. Gower. He needs me to wire him train fare home to see our dear mother.”). And now, heading alone to a downtown hotel to see a man she had no business seeing. No business seeing at all except the business of ruin. She felt her stomach flip three times, and could barely wait to get there.
    No one was waiting for her at the trolley stop. She could see the El Royale from where she stood and then she was walking there. She wondered, as she kept her eyes on the hotel, whichsprawled a full city block and had a front canopy of gold, if this awfulness in her was new, a spell cast, or something inside her that he had stoked or merely touched and watched enfold in her.
    But then, walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, cigar smoke and preening, she felt everything inside her held so tight for a week or more release itself. She saw only a handful of women, their dresses like glowing paint