A boat captain that morning had seen a man pulling a child’s red wagon on a pier below Fort Mason. When the captain looked again, too soon for the man to have gone back up the pier, the wagon was standing at the end of it. Two hours later, when a body was raised from the water, the police deduced that the wagon had contained the heavy chain the man had locked around his neck and shoulders before jumping. The wagon, a well-made toy of solid steel, its red enamel still bright, had once been a Christmas gift to Shirley, later a stand for potted geraniums behind the house. Marion never read the note that her father had left behind while her mother was out breakfasting with her friends, but it was apparently not an apology or a farewell but simply a confession of the financial situation he’d hidden from her. The family’s debts were hopeless, there were liens on everything, multiple liens, a tissue of fraud and bankruptcy. The last conceivably leverageable dollars had been spent on Shirley’s first semester at Vassar.
In the story Marion told Sophie about herself, a story she’d worked out in the hospital and in her years of Catholic introspection, her guilt was inextricable from her ability to dissociate. Two nights after her father’s death, with the definitive thunk of a light-board switch, she turned herself into Phronsie Pepper, telling herself that the show must go on, and proceeded to be adorable onstage for two hours. After each of the show’s three performances, she returned to her grief and her guilt. But now she knew that a switch inside her could be flipped at will. She could turn off her self-awareness and do bad things for the momentary gratification of them. The trick of dissociation was the beginning of her own illness, although she didn’t know it yet.
She and Shirley were allowed to finish the semester at their respective schools, but the house was about to be repossessed, its furnishings sold at auction. Her mother crisply informed her that she, Isabel, was going to stay for a while as a houseguest of the richest of her friends. Shirley, who hadn’t bothered to come home for the funeral, which some previously unseen cousins of her father had materialized to pay for, intended to find work and lodging in New York City. But what to do about Marion? Her maternal grandmother was senile, and Marion would be one houseguest too many at her mother’s friend’s. The only people who might take her in were her mother’s brothers. If her mother had sent her to her uncle in Arizona, James, the landscape painter, Marion still might have been saved from herself. But Isabel believed that Jimmy was a homosexual, unsuitable as a guardian, and so her younger brother, Roy, in Sonoma, had agreed to house Marion until she finished high school.
Roy Collins was a man of many hatreds. He hated his forebears for pissing away money that should have been his. He hated Roosevelt, labor unions, Mexicans, artists, fairies, and socialite phonies. He especially hated Jews and the socialite phony sister who’d married one. But he wasn’t one of those weak men, like his fairy brother or his suicide brother-in-law, who shirked a man’s family duties. He had four kids of his own whom he supported by working hard at the farm-machinery distributorship he’d started with the pittance his grandparents had left him. Although his wife and his children were too cowed to disagree with him, he liked to remind them, at nearly every meal, how hard he worked. Marion didn’t find Roy especially suitable as a guardian, but he did have money. He was the opposite of her father, a lot richer than one might have guessed from the plainness of his house in Santa Rosa. He’d kept his business solvent through the heart of the Depression, and, as the sole trustee of the family orchards and vineyards, he’d borrowed from himself so heavily, on the trust’s behalf, that his own name ended up on the titles to the land. Marion didn’t learn about this until she went to Arizona, but it went some way toward explaining why Roy had fed and clothed her for three and a half years, and why he so hated his sister and his brother. It would have been harder to rob them if he hadn’t.
Until she was fifteen, Marion had been the mild daughter, the easy daughter, but to live with Roy Collins was to flip the switch in her. The two of them fought about the cigarettes she’d started smoking. They fought about the way she wore her socks, the friends she brought home from Santa Rosa High, the lipstick he couldn’t prove she’d stolen from the drugstore. Once she flipped the switch, she hardly knew what she was shouting. At her new school, she gravitated toward the theatrical girls, the fast girls, and the boys who chased them. Her own fast credentials were in order because she came from the city and her father had killed himself. She smoked fiendishly and used the suicide to upset people. She thought that if she was bad enough, hateful enough, Roy might give up and send her somewhere else. But he knew what she wanted, and he sadistically refused to give it to her. Much later, she had the thought that he’d been sexually attracted to her; that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.