It was a testament to her father’s abilities that, even when the light in his eyes had gone out, he not only saved the house but put meat on the table and continued to pay for Shirley’s dancing and voice lessons. He now worked as the sales manager for Western All-Sport, which he’d sold, for less than its book value, to cover his other losses. In a mental state like the one for which Marion was later hospitalized, if not worse, he dragged himself out of bed every weekday morning, dragged a razor across his cheeks, dragged himself to the streetcar, dragged himself through meetings for a company he had no hope of making his again, and then dragged himself home to an unforgiving wife, a favored daughter whose disappointment tortured him, and Marion, who felt responsible for what had happened. Because she was invisible, she’d noticed things the other three of them hadn’t. She’d known that something wasn’t right.
As her father, too, became invisible—a gray-skinned ghost who slept in his study, spoke in a murmur, shook his head when asked to repeat himself—she did her best to be his caretaker. She met him at the streetcar in the evening and asked him how his Golden Bears were doing. She tapped on the terrible closed door of his study and braved the bad smell in it to bring him a piece of fruit she’d cut up. He’d always loved fruit above all other foods, the Californian freshness and variety of it, and even now a light flickered in his eyes when she urged a cut-up pear on him. He didn’t smile when he ate it, but he nodded as if it had to be admitted: the pear was good. And Marion, at ten and eleven and twelve, was already aware of how inextricably mixed up good and evil were. When she got her father to enjoy a piece of fruit, there was no telling if the glow she felt was purely love or also the satisfaction of being a better daughter than her sister.
Like the Great Depression, the dark years seemed to have no end. In the fall of 1935, Shirley boarded an eastbound Pullman sleeper, as happy to be escaping San Francisco as Marion was glad to see her go. With something of his old financial magic, her father had come up with a semester’s tuition money for Vassar College, thereby fulfilling a long-standing promise to Shirley. But the effort seemed to have finished him. Within weeks of his darling’s departure, nothing could induce him to dress and go to work. Isabel, who for six years had occupied herself with such threats to her way of life as the rage for contract bridge, a game which, horribly, only four women at a time could play, now finally was forced to reacquaint herself with reality. She obtained a small loan from her Jew-hating brother in Sonoma and persuaded the owners of Western All-Sport to grant her husband a short furlough. Although Marion always felt that she and Shirley had drawn very poorly in the mother lottery, she had a grudging admiration for Isabel’s resourcefulness in a pinch. Isabel’s self-preservative instincts, her ultimately successful battles to maintain her standing in her fivesome, were both laudable and pitiable in their way. And so, as ever, Marion blamed herself for what her father did.
The problem was that she’d discovered theater. Shirley had been the family’s presumptive talent, Marion the invisible one, but as soon as her sister left for Vassar, Marion and her best friend had tried out for their school’s fall production of The Five Little Peppers. Aided, perhaps, by the fact that she was short, she’d landed the part of the smallest and most adored Pepper, Phronsie, and discovered that she, too, had talent. With a familiar sense of ambiguity, uncertain if she was doing something good or something bad, she became a different person in rehearsals, became visible to the other players, entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness. Because the school theater was where this happened, she was smitten with the wobbly paint-smelling flats, the great thunking toggle switches of the light board, the backstage hanging sheet of tin that was endlessly fun to make thunder. After school, instead of going home to look after her father, she stayed to rehearse and paint flats.
In early December, during the play’s first dress rehearsal, she was being Phronsie, preparing to charm a real audience, when a gray-braided school administrator entered the theater and called her down from the stage. It was a rainy afternoon, already dark at four thirty. The administrator silently walked her to her house, where all four of her mother’s friends had already gathered. Her mother was sitting by the cold grate, her expression blank, a folded sheet of stationery in her lap. There had been, she said, an accident. Perhaps embarrassed to be mincing words in front of her friends, she shook her head and corrected herself. Her expression still blank, she told Marion that her father had taken his own life. She spread her arms, beckoning Marion to come and be embraced, but Marion turned and ran from the room. To get to her father’s study, to find him there and show them they were wrong, she had to run up two flights of stairs, but it seemed to her that she was going down, hurtling down a tunnel of guilt toward her punishment. She could hear, strangely distant, the screaming of the girl being punished.