Riven Rock

1. HOW HIS HAND

How his hand came into contact with her face — her sweet plump irritating little burr of a wifely face that found a place beside his each night on the connubial pillow — was as much a mystery to O‘Kane as the scalloped shell of the sky and the rain that fell as one angry inveterate thing over all this weary part of the earth. It wasn’t late — not ten o’clock yet. And he wasn’t angry. Not yet, anyway. On the contrary, he’d been celebrating — polluting himself, as she would say, living it up, for he’s a jolly good fellow and three cheers for this one and that one and rah, rah, rah — celebrating with Nick and Pat and Mart, and with Dr. Hamilton, yes, with him too. Celebrating the rest of his life that had just been turned on like an electric switch, flooding him with light, light that poured from his nostrils and ears and his mouth and no doubt his rectum too, though he hadn’t yet had occasion to look down there, but he would, he would eventually. And then he had come home, and there she was, stalking the sitting room like a bristling tireless little rat-gnawing thing, all primed and ready to pounce.

He hadn’t meant to hit her — and he’d hit her only once, or maybe twice, before — and the thing was, he wasn’t even angry, just… irritated. And tired. Drained to the core. The noise she made, and the baby squalling in the back room, and the way she kept thrusting her face at him as if it was a volleyball, tanned, stitched and puffed up to regulation pressure, and she wouldn’t let him have this, not even this, after all the gut-wrenching and indecision it had cost him over the past two months, and when the inflated ball of her face had come at him for maybe the fiftieth time he slammed it right up and over the net, just as if he was still in school and diving for a low one on the hard foot-compacted turf of the volleyball court. That opened her up, all right, and there was no peace for him after that, she was like an artesian well, a real gusher, tears and blood and rage exploding at him, and all he could think of, dodging away from that streaming face till he was so drained and exhausted he toppled into a blackness deeper than the last dying wink of consciousness, was Mrs. McCormick—Katherine—and what a lady she was, and Rosaleen stuck to him like flypaper and howling till the windows went to pieces and the roof collapsed and the whole drugged and dreaming town fell away into some deep fissure of the earth.

Earlier that day, in the morning, it had been different. He’d awakened at first light and saw her there beside him, the soft petals of her eyelids and her lashes and lips and the fragile composition of her face, and he thought about kissing her, leaning over and brushing his lips against the down of her cheek, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to wake her — or his son either. It was too peaceful, the submarine light, the stealthy tick of the clock, the rudiments of birdnoise, and he didn’t want to have to talk to her about the McCormicks and the meeting and what he feared and what he hoped — he hardly knew himself. He stripped off his flannels at the side of the bed and slipped naked into the sitting room with his good Donegal tweed over one arm and a fresh suit of underwear over the other, and dressed like a thief of clothes. Then he was out the door and into another life.

The year was 1908, and he’d just turned twenty-five. He was a hair under six feet, with the pugilist’s build he’d inherited from his father (who’d put the prototype to good use in a series of mostly victorious bare-knuckle fights in the nineties), and his mother’s wistful sea-green eyes with the two hazel clock hands implanted in the right one, inflexibly pointing, for this lifetime at least, to three o‘clock. His mother had always told him that chronometric eye would bring him luck — great luck and fortune — and when he questioned her, skeptical even at ten and eleven, she just pointed to the proof and insisted that the hour was preordained. But what about you? he would say, lifting his eyes to the colorless walls of the four rooms they shared with his grandmother, his uncle Billy, his four sisters and three cousins, where’s your three o’clock luck? And she would frame his face with her hands, the softest touch in the world, and whisper, “It’s right here, right here, between my hands.”

The morning flew. He’d started off at the White Street house, where they’d installed Mr. McCormick to get him away from the disturbing influence of the other patients, and then he’d gone on to McLean and now he was late, cutting across the lawn out front of the administrative building on a day that was like a wet dishrag, though it was the last week of April and he would have sacrificed to the gods to see a ray of sun — he was late and hurrying and he didn’t give a damn for the fact that he’d left his hat and overcoat back in the nurses common room and the cuffs of his good Donegal tweed trousers were soaking up the damp like a pair of fat swollen sponges tied to his ankles. He should have, because when the tailor came over from Ballyshannon and settled into the rooming house down the street from them and his mother said he should take advantage of the opportunity and have one nice suit made because if he ever hoped to work with his brains instead of his back he’d have to look like one of the quality, he’d laid out eighteen dollars for it. Eighteen dollars in good hard Yankee coin he’d earned at the Boston Lunatic Asylum scraping blood, vomit and worse off the walls. And here it was, wet through in the shoulders and crawling up his shins and sure as the devil it was going to shrink, but what did he care? It was two minutes to eleven, the hair was hanging wet in his eyes and Dr. Hamilton was waiting for him. If things worked out, he could buy six suits.

It wasn’t like him to be late — it was unprofessional, and Dr. Hamilton was a stickler for the “three p‘s,” as he called them: punctuality, propriety and professionalism — and O’Kane, already wrought up, felt like a piece of fat in the fryer as he charged across the wet lawn. He was sweating under the arms and the hair was dangling like rope in his face. It wasn’t like him, but he was behind his time because he’d gotten distracted over at White Street, and then in the back ward, and all because of the apes. Apes and monkeys, that is. They were all he could think about. And it was funny too because this was the kind of day that got the violents stirred up — it wasn’t just the full moon, it was any change in the weather, even from perpetual gloom to a driving downpour — and as he hurried across the lawn he could hear Katzakis the Mad Greek and the one they called the Apron Man hooting at one another from the maximum ward, hooting just like apes. Violents he knew inside and out — he ought to after seven years in the profession — but his experience with hominoids, as Dr. Hamilton called them, was limited. And why wouldn’t it be? South Boston, Danvers and Waverley weren’t exactly tropical jungles.

In fact, aside from the usual boyhood encounters with the organ-grinder’s monkey, the sideshow at the circus, the zoo and that sort of thing, he’d only come within spitting distance of an ape once, and that was in a barroom. He’d gone into Donnelly’s one afternoon for a pint and a chat, and when he looked up from his beer there was a man sitting beside him at the counter with a one-eyed chimpanzee on a leash. For a shot of rye whiskey and a beer chaser the man got the chimp to pull out his organ and piss in a beer glass and then drink it down as if it was the finest eighty-six-proof Irish — and smack his lips to boot. When the man had chased his third shot he gave a look up and down the bar and said he would challenge anybody in the place to arm-wrestle the thing for half a dollar — this scrawny half-bald one-eyed little monkey that stank like all the souls in hell boiled in their own juice and then left out in the sun for a week after that — and there was a lot of elbowing and obscene commentary from the patrons as they worked themselves up to it. Finally, Frank Leary, a big squareheaded loudmouthed bull of a man who worked for the railroad, took him up on it, and the thing pinned Leary’s wrist to the bar in half a second and wouldn’t let go of his hand till there were tears in his eyes.

The experience didn’t exactly qualify O‘Kane as a hominoid expert, as he would have been the first to admit, and he’d spent a painful hour in the library after work yesterday squinting into an encyclopedia in the vain hope of learning something — anything — that might impress Mrs. McCormick. Or, if not impress her, at least keep the level of humiliation down to a minimum if she suddenly took it into her head to grill him on the subject. The library was an alien place to O’Kane, damper than a Chinese laundry and three times as cold, the lighting hominoidally primitive and the illumination offered by the encyclopedia on the subject of apes nearly as dim. “Apes,” he read, “are intelligent animals and are more closely related to man than any other living primates. They are popular zoo and circus animals. They also have figured widely in the legends and folktales of many countries.” After a while he pushed himself up, replaced the book on the shelf and ambled over to Donnelly’s to fix this vast reservoir of knowledge in his brain with the aid of a mnemonic whiskey or two.

And now he was late and his one good suit was crawling up his shins and he was wondering how he was going to break the staggering news to Mrs. McCormick, the Ice Queen herself, that apes were popular zoo and circus animals. But as he reached the verge of the lawn and vaulted the retaining wall there, crossed the flagstone walkway and started up the steps of the ad building, the multifarious marvel of his congested brain surprised him — the apes flew right out of his head and he was thinking about California. Or he wasn’t thinking about it, not exactly — he had a vision, a sudden vivid recollection of a place there, date palms shimmering beneath the golden liquefaction of the sun and orange trees with fruit like swollen buttocks and a little bungalow or whatever they called it snug in the corner — and this was odd, more than odd, since he’d never in his life been west of Springfield. It took him a minute to realize it must have been one of those orange crate labels he was calling up, the ones that make you want to throw down the snow shovel right that minute and catch the next train west. But there it was, real or illusionary—California—hanging in his head in all its exotic glory where the apes had been a moment before.

And then finally, as he stepped through the big beveled-glass doors and into the dim paste-wax-and-coal-dust-smelling hall, he thought of his own Rosaleen, his sorrow and his joy, his sweet, randy, pugnacious, clover-lipped bride of three months and mother of his green-eyed boy, Edward Jr. What was she going to think when he told her they were moving to California for the sake of Mr. Stanley McCormick, late of the McCormick Reaper Works and the International Harvester Company, Mr. McCormick and a troop of apes? And what was her mother going to think and her cauliflower-eared brothers and her quibbling old stump of a father who’d wanted to skin him alive for getting her in trouble in the first place? As if it was all his fault, as if she hadn’t seen her chance and taken it — and hadn’t he done the right thing by her, and wasn’t she at that very moment sitting snug in the walkup on Chestnut Street with her baby and her new curtains and everything else a woman could want?

He passed by Dr. Cowles’s office at a stiff-legged trot, swiping at his hair and wrestling with his tie and trying to contort his shoulders to fit the sodden confines of the suit, and it was all he could do to flick a little wave at Miss Ianucci, Dr. Cowles’s typewriter. Miss lanucci was a spaghetti twister from Italy who couldn’t seem to find a shirtwaist big enough to accommodate her appurtenances and who never ceased touching her lips and crossing and uncrossing her legs whenever O‘Kane got a chance to stop in and chat with her — which was every time he passed by unless he was on his way to a fire. People were always grousing about the immigrants — the I-talians this and the Polacks that, the Guineas and wops and bohunks, and his father was one of the most vocal and vehement, though he’d come over himself in an empty whiskey barrel aboard a transatlantic steamer not thirty years ago — but for his money they could let in all the Miss lanuccis they wanted. And wouldn’t that be a job, standing there at the bottom of the gangplank, and passing judgment on this one or that: Nah, send her back — she’s flat as an ironing board. Her? Yeah, we’ll take her. Come on over here, miss, and step into the examining room a minute won’t you? A man could create an entire race, a whole new breed based on tits alone — or hips or legs or turned-up noses and pinned-back ears. Look what they’d done with dogs….

Anyway, he had to content himself with a wave this time because he knew how much this meeting meant to Dr. Hamilton — and to himself, himself and Rosaleen — and he hustled down the hall while Miss Ianucci stuck a finger in the corner of her mouth and sucked on it and crossed and uncrossed her legs and gave him the richest smile in all the world. Two doors down, three, and it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a run. He glanced up as he hurried past the portrait of John McLean, the decidedly unsmiling and bewigged philanthropist who’d given a hundred thousand dollars back in 1818 to open the doors of this fair institution, and though he was late, though he looked like hell and the smells of fear and hope were commingled in his sweat and his sweat was flowing as if it were the middle of July and he was carrying the entire McCormick family up a hill on his shoulders, apes and all, he couldn’t help thinking, for just the fleetingest instant, of what he could do with a hundred thousand dollars — and it wouldn’t be to endow any charitable organization, that was for sure, unless it was the Edward James O‘Kane Benevolent and Fiduciary Fund. But enough of that. Suddenly he was there, at the far end of the hallway, breathing hard, three minutes past eleven, half-soaked, sweating and wild-eyed, tapping respectfully at the smooth varnished plane of Dr. Hamilton’s door.

He could detect the purl of conversation from within, and his heart sank. This was what he’d been fearing since he’d slipped out of the house and into the festering gray maw of the dawn, what he was afraid of as he emptied bedpans and jerked rigid lunatics and simple morons down from the barred windows and up from the beds: she was there already. Which meant he was late. Officially. He cursed himself and tapped again, this time with a little more vigor, and felt even worse when the murmur broke off abruptly, as if he were interrupting something. There was an agonizing silence during which the wild thought that they were conspiring to leave him out of it altogether raced through his head, and then he heard Dr. Hamilton murmur, “That must be him now,” and any trace of composure he might have been able to muster evaporated in that instant. “Come in,” the doctor called, and O‘Kane felt his face flush as he pushed open the door and entered the room.

The first thing he noticed was the fire — a lavish crackling devil-may-care blaze that played off the paneled walls and cast a soft glow on the doctor’s collection of wax impressions of the human brain, the first fire O‘Kane had ever seen in this particular fireplace, even in the dim frozen mists of January or February. But there it was, a fire to take the dampness out of the air and create a relaxed and cozy atmosphere, as Dr. Hamilton had no doubt calculated. It was a surprise, a real surprise, as was the tray of finger sandwiches, a teapot and the decanter of sherry set out on the low table in front of the settee, and O’Kane’s estimation of Hamilton, already high, shot up another notch. “Oh, hello, Edward,” the doctor purred, coming up off the edge of his desk to take O‘Kane’s hand and give it a squeeze. “We were just about to begin.”

Anyone watching this performance would have seen nothing but good nature and cordiality in that hand-squeeze, but O‘Kane felt the black blood of anxiety and irritation pulsing through the doctor’s fleshless fingers and the damp recess of his palm: O’Kane was in the wrong, he was late, he’d violated the dictum of the three p’s and put everything in jeopardy. Despite all the doctor’s warnings of the previous day, despite skipping breakfast and leaving the house early and wearing his tweeds and collar under the hospital whites to save time and keeping the apes hurtling through the crowded jungle of his mind, limb by limb and minute by minute, he was late. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot. Already.

Awkward, red-faced, too big for his shrinking suit and towering over the room like some club-wielding troglodyte, O‘Kane could only duck his head and mumble an apology. He saw that Mrs. McCormick was already there — the younger Mrs. McCormick, the wife, not the mother. She was running the show now, and the older Mrs. McCormick, Mr. McCormick’s mother, was back in Chicago, sitting on her golden nest and laying her golden eggs and counting up the dividends. As far as Stanley’s — Mr. McCormick‘s — care was concerned, she’d left the field to the younger woman. For the moment, at least.

Since O‘Kane wasn’t wearing a hat or overcoat, it was just a matter of giving his tie a quick twist and bending from the waist to greet Mrs. McCormick and the woman who seemed at that instant to have sprung up beside her on the settee. He was momentarily confused. It seemed he was always confused in Mrs. McCormick’s presence, whether he was holding the door for her like a lackey as she stepped regally into the front hall at White Street or trying his aphasic best to respond to one of her multitiered questions about her husband’s progress — or lack of it. She was a society lady, that’s what she was, cold as a walking corpse, all fur, feathers and stone, and O’Kane wasn’t part of society. Not by a long shot. He wasn’t even part of the society that aspired to be part of society. He was a working man, son of a working man, grandson of a working man, and on and on all the way back to the apes — or Adam and Eve, whichever you believed in. Still, every time he saw her, locked in the cold hard glittering shell of her Back Bay beauty, it made him ache to be something he wasn‘t, to impress her or make her laugh or lean in close and whisper something filthy in her ear, and it took a tremendous effort of will simply to bend forward and touch his fingertips to her gloved hand and then turn to the older woman beside her, a woman with a face like a squashed bird framed in the riot of feathers that was her hat, a woman he knew as well as his own mother but couldn’t… quite. seem to—

But then he was seated — in the chair closest to the fire — an inoffensive smile attached to his face, the sweat already starting up again under his arms, and he had a moment to catch his breath and let recollection come roaring back at him. This older lady, the one dressed like a funeral director’s wife, was Mrs. McCormick’s mother, Mrs. Dexter. Of course she was. Dr. Hamilton was saying something now, but O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He worked his neck muscles and twitched his shoulders till he caught Mrs. Dexter’s attention and broadened his smile to a kind of blissful grimace. “And a good morning to you, Mrs. Dexter,” he said, hearing his father’s Killarney brogue creeping into his own booming, baleful voice, though he tried to fight it down.

Dr. Hamilton paused in the middle of whatever he’d been saying to give him an odd look. “And to you, Mr. O‘Kane,” the old lady returned cheerily, and this seemed to reassure the doctor, so he went on.

“As I was saying, Mrs. McCormick, if the terms are acceptable to you — and your mother, of course — I think we have a bargain. I’ve spoken to Mrs. Hamilton and to the Thompson brothers, and they’re all committed to the move — and to Mr. McCormick’s care and welfare, of course. Edward, here, can speak for himself.”

O‘Kane shifted in his seat. He hadn’t understood till that moment just how much this whole thing meant to him — it was a new start, a new life, in a part of the country as foreign to him as the dark side of the moon. But that was just it — it wasn’t dark in California, and it didn’t snow, and there was no slush and drizzle and there were no frozen clods of horse manure in the streets and life there didn’t grind you down till you barely knew you were alive. A single acre of oranges could make a man comfortable — oranges that practically grew by themselves, without even the rumor of work, once they were in the ground — and ten acres could make a man rich. There was gold. There was oil. There was the Pacific. There was sun. “Oh, I’m committed, all right,” he said, trying to avoid the wife’s eyes.

How old was she, anyway? She couldn’t have been much more than thirty, and here he was, a lusty strong big-shouldered hundred-and-ninety-pound Irishman from the North End who routinely stared down the craziest of the crazy, and he was afraid to look her in the eye? He made an effort and raised his head to take in the general vicinity of her. “Even if it means forever.”

“And your wife — Mrs. O‘Kane?” At first he thought the voice had come out of the ceiling, as voices tended to do for so many of the unfortunates on the ward, but then he realized that the old lady was moving her lips. He tried to look alert as the birdy face closed on him. “How does she feel about it?”

“Rose?” The question took him by surprise. He saw his wife in the kitchen of the walkup, stirring a pot of broth and potatoes, ignorant as a shoe, contentious and coarse and loud — but goodhearted, as good-hearted as any girl you’d find, and the mother of his son. “I–I guess I haven’t told her yet, but she’ll be thrilled, I know she will.”

“It’ll mean leaving behind everything she knows — her parents, her relations, her former schoolmates, the streets where she grew up,” Mrs. Dexter persisted, and what did she want from him anyway? They were both watching him, mother and daughter, and they were two birds — both of them — beaky and watchful, waiting for the faintest stirring in the grass. “And where did you say she was from?”

He hadn’t said. He was tempted to say Beacon Hill, to give an address on Commonwealth Avenue, but he didn’t. “Charlestown,” he mumbled, staring down at his wet and glistening shoes. He could feel the eyes of the younger one boring into him.

“And for you too,” the old woman said. “Are you prepared to say good-bye to your own mother and father — and for as long as it takes for Mr. McCormick to be well again?”

There was a silence. The fire snapped, and he felt the heat of it chasing the steam from his cuffs and flanks and the shrinking shoulders of his jacket. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, darting a glance at the younger woman. “I think so. I really do.”

And then, thankfully, Hamilton took over. “The important thing,” he said, or rather, whispered in the narcotic tones he used on his charges, “is Mr. McCormick. The sooner we’re able to move the patient and establish him in the proper way in California, the better it will be for all concerned. Especially the patient. What he needs, above all, is a tranquil environment, with all the stresses that led to his blocking removed. Only then can we hope to—” He faltered. Mrs. McCormick had cleared her throat — that was all: cleared her throat — and that stopped him cold.

Dr. Hamilton — Dr. Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, future author of Sex in Marriage, as well as “A Study of Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys and Baboons”—was a young man then, just thirty-one, but he cultivated a Vandyke and swept his dun-colored hair straight back from his brow in an attempt to add something to his years. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed pince nez identical to the president‘s, and he always dressed carefully in ash-colored suits and waistcoats and a tie that was such an unfathomable shade of blue it might as well have been black, as if any show of color would undermine his sense of duty and high purpose. (“Avoid bright clothing,” he’d admonished O’Kane on the day he hired him; “it tends to excite the catatonics and alarm the paranoics.”) Young as he was, he was a rock of solidity, but for one disconcerting little tic that he himself might not have been aware of: every thirty seconds or so his eyes would flick back behind his upper lids in a spasm so instantaneous it was like watching a slot machine on its final revolution. Needless to say, when he was nervous or wrought up the tic became more pronounced. Now, as he looked expectantly at Mrs. McCormick, his pupils began a quavering preliminary little dance.

O‘Kane was looking at her too. He couldn’t help but look at her, as long as it didn’t involve eye contact. She was fascinating to him, a real specimen, the kind of woman you saw only in glimpses — a silhouette behind the windowscreen of the long thrusting miracle of a Packard motorcar, a brisk commanding figure in a cluster of doormen and porters, the face of a photograph in a book — and how could he help contrasting her with his own Rosaleen? Sitting there perched on the very fractional edge of the settee with her finishing-school posture and her cleft chin stuck up in the air like a weathervane, wearing a dress of some satiny blue material that probably cost more than he would make in six months, she was like an alien, like the shining representative of some new and superior species, but for one thing: her husband was mad, as mad as the Apron Man or Katzakis the Greek or any of them, and all the manners and all the money in the world couldn’t change that.

“About the apes.,” she said, and O‘Kane realized it was the first time she’d opened her mouth since he’d entered the room.

Hamilton’s voice fell away to nothing, the whisper of a whisper. “Yes?” he breathed, lounging back against the corner of the desk and resting his weight casually on his left ham, the doctor in his office, nothing the matter, nothing at all. “What about them? If there’s anything that you—”

“They are necessary, aren’t they — in your estimation, Dr. Hamilton? I understand that in order to lure such a promising young psychologist as yourself all the way out to the West Coast and uproot your family and your practice here at McLean, there has to be a quid pro quo”—and here she held up a finger to silence him, because he was up off the desk again and his mouth was already working in the nest of his beard—“and that your hominoid laboratory is a major part of it, in addition to your salary considerations, relocation expenses and the like, but is there really any hope of these apes figuring in Stanley’s cure?”

This was Hamilton’s cue, and with barely a flick of his eyes, he launched into a speech that would have done a drummer proud. He made no promises — her husband’s case was more complex than anyone had originally believed, far more complex — but he’d personally supervised dozens of cases just as severe and he’d seen those patients make huge steps toward recovery, even complete recovery, with the proper care. New advances were being made not only in the treatment of dementia praecox — or schizophrenia, as it was now more commonly called — but across the whole spectrum of human behavior and psychology, and new figures like Freud, Jung and Adler had begun to emerge to build on the work of Charcot, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. O‘Kane had heard it all before, and he found himself drifting, the heat making him drowsy, the heavy material of his trousers adhering to his flanks like a second skin — and itching, itching like the very devil. Hamilton’s voice droned on, hypnotic, soporific, the gloom beyond the windows like the backdrop of a waking dream. He came back to himself when the doctor finally got round to the question of the apes.

“—and while the behavioral sciences are in their infancy,” Hamilton was saying, “and ours will be among the first hominoid laboratories in the world, Katherine” (Katherine,he was calling her Katherine now), “I really and truly do expect that my intensive study of the lower primates will lead to any number of breakthroughs in human behavior, particularly with regard to sexual tendencies.”

Ah, and now it was out of the bag, O‘Kane thought, the crux of the matter, the subject you don’t discuss in mixed company, the thing men and women discover together in the dark. He watched the wife’s perfectly composed face, with its stingy lips and little turned-up nose and sculpted ears, for a reaction. There was nothing. Not a flicker. She was a scientist herself — the first female baccalaureate in the sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and no quirk of the human organism could ruffle her. She was made of ice. Layers of it, mountains — she was a glacier in human form, an Ice Queen, that’s what she was.

“Yes, I understand,” she said, pursing her lips and shooting a look at O‘Kane that wilted him on the spot, as if he were the one who’d brought up the subject, “but apes are one thing and human beings quite another. I really don’t see how any discovery you make as to the”—and here she paused, for just a beat—“sexual proclivities of apes and monkeys can be applied to my husband’s case. I just fail to see it.”

This was a critical juncture, and O‘Kane, impelled by the heat of the fire, the closeness of the room and the sudden fear that the whole thing — orange trees, bungalow and all — was about to collapse like a house of cards, suddenly plunged in with a speech of his own. “But we’ll take the best care of him, ma’am, I and the Thompson brothers and Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Meyer too. He asks for us specially, you know, and we feel a real… a real compassion for him that we don’t always feel with the other patients… he’s such a gentleman, I mean, and bound to improve. And I admit I don’t know the first thing about apes — hominoids, that is — but I’m young and willing and I can learn, I can. You’ll see.”

There was a silence. Mrs. McCormick—Katherine—looked startled, as if the chair or the hat rack had suddenly begun to speak, but the old lady seemed satisfied — she had a sort of fixed benevolent old lady’s smile pasted to her lips — and Dr. Hamilton, his eyes jumping, paused only to stroke his beard for effect before coming in with the heavy artillery. ‘That’s right, Edward: it will be a learning process for all of us, and for the sciences in general, and beyond the good we’ll do for Mr. McCormick, we have an excellent chance of doing something good and valuable for all of humankind, and, what’s more“—spreading his hands wide with the flourish of an old character actor—”for every poor unfortunate sufferer like your husband, Katherine.“ His eyes held steady. He was slowing down, decelerating his delivery till every word could have been a paragraph in itself: ”And for every wife that suffers with him.“

The doctor’s words hung there a moment, the rain beating at the windows, the wax impressions — corpus callosum, medulla oblongata, pineal gland — glowing as if they’d come to life. Very faintly, so faintly O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d actually heard it, came the anguished cry of the Apron Man echoing across the rain-slick grounds. And then suddenly, without warning, Mrs. McCormick, Katherine, the Ice Queen, was weeping. It began with a sharp insuck of breath, as if someone had pricked her with a pin, and then the ice melted and in the next moment she was sobbing her heart out.

She tried to hide her face beneath the brim of her hat as she bent to fumble through her purse for a handkerchief, but O‘Kane saw that face naked and transformed, crumpled like a flower, and he saw the pain blossom in those rich insulated eyes. It was a revelation to him: she was human, after all, and more than that, she was female, intensely female, and never more female than in that moment. Her shoulders shook, her breath came in gasps, and even as her mother reached out to comfort her, O’Kane felt something give inside him. He wanted to get up and take charge, wanted to touch her, take her by the hand, but all he could do, roasting in the chair as the flames snapped and the sobs caught in her throat and the doctor wrung his hands, was murmur, “There, there,” over and over, like an idiot.

And then she looked up, the fire catching the sheen of her eyes and illuminating her wet face till it glowed like the face of some tortured saint amongst the cannibals. When she spoke, after a long, rending moment, her voice was soft and small, so small you could barely hear it. “And you meant to stick by your injunction then?”

This caught Hamilton by surprise. He groped behind him for the edge of the desk, sat himself down for half an instant and jumped up again as if it had been electrified. “What injunction? What do you mean?”

In the tiniest, most miserable voice: “No visitors.”

Hamilton drew himself up and let out such a deep rattling sorrowful breath it sounded as if he’d turned his lungs inside out. His eyes jumped and jumped again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not even his wife?”

But the doctor was already swiveling his head back and forth on his shoulders like a human metronome, and O‘Kane, welded to the chair in awestruck silence, could see where he was beginning to develop the jowls that would be his badge of high seriousness in the future. The man was a master negotiator, and he knew when to give and when to stand firm. “Not even his wife,” he said.

Long after Hamilton had disappeared and Nick and Pat Thompson begged off on the grounds of marital concord, O‘Kane sat over his beer and a plate of cold baked beans, hard-boiled eggs, salt herring and crackers with Martin, the third and youngest of the Thompson brothers. It was past nine o’clock and the barroom was raging with light and noise against the cold rain and lifeless streets beyond. O‘Kane picked up an egg, feeling half-boiled himself, what with the sainted whiskey and the good cleansing Boston brew percolating through his veins, and he began to peel it as if it were the very precious and frangible skull of an infant — or a monkey. Mart, though his eyes were glazed and his hair sticking straight up from his parting like the ruff of a grouse, watched with a kind of rapt fascination, as if he’d never seen anything like it before. He was big-headed and big-shouldered, like his brothers, but he was young yet — just twenty — and from the ribcage down he faded away to nothing. O’Kane carefully arranged the fragments of eggshell on the bare wood of the table, one at a time, then bit the denuded egg in two and washed it down with a swig of beer.

“Guess I ought to be going,” Mart sighed. “If I’m ever going to get up for work tomorrow.”

O‘Kane said, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” but it was a matter of form. He didn’t feel like leaving, not yet. He felt like. finishing his egg, to get something on his stomach, and then having another beer. No more whiskey, though: he’d had enough. That much he understood.

Rosaleen would be expecting him. Or no: she’d been expecting him for three hours and more now, and she would be laying for him like an assassin, furious, burnished to a white-hot cutting edge, her voice gone off into another, higher, shriller register, the accusatory register, the vituperative and guilt-making register. She would call him a drunk, a social climber, a puppet of the McCormicks, and she would mock his tweeds and howl anathema to California.

“One more?” O‘Kane said.

Someone at the bar behind him — he didn’t bother to turn round and see who — shouted out, “You damned fool, if I‘d’ve known you were going to salt the damn thing instead of smoking it or even jerking it, for crying out loud, I would’ve give the whole damn carcass to the orphanage.”

Mart seemed to take an unnaturally long time in answering. His eyes were small and seemed even smaller in proportion to that outsized head, and as O‘Kane gazed hopefully into them, already picturing the yellow sizzle of a final tasteless and dilatory beer, they were no more than distant grayish specks, planetary bodies faintly revealed in the universe of that big numb face, and receding fast. Mart shrugged. Reached down to scratch his calf. “I don’t see why not,” he said finally, and his enunciation could have been clearer, a whole lot clearer. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. One more.”

These were the dregs of their celebratory party: the half-filled glasses, the cold beans and herring, the shouts and smells of the crapulous strangers hemming them in on every side, the dead rinsed-out April night and the rain drooling down the windows — and above all, the lingering boozy glimmer of the golden fraternity of California. They would be leaving in two weeks by special car — a car called the Mayflower, customized by the Pullman Company with locks on the doors and restraints on the windows, and was O‘Kane the only one who saw the pure and lucent beauty of that resonant name? It was an omen, that’s what it was. They were pilgrims, leaving Plymouth Rock and North Boston and Waverley behind for the paradise in the west, for the hibiscus, the jasmine, the tangerines and oranges and the dates that rained down from the palms like a reward just for being alive.

They’d never have to buy another scuttle of coal for as long as they lived. And overcoats — they could throw away their overcoats and the moth-eaten mufflers and mittens that went with them. And if that wasn’t enough, their McLean salaries were to be doubled the minute they stepped aboard that train with Mr. McCormick. That would mean forty dollars a week for O‘Kane, and he just hoped the grapefruit ranchers, cowboys, oil barons, hidalgos and señoritas of Santa Barbara would leave him something to spend it on. If he let himself drift a minute he could feel that forty dollars in his pocket already, two tens and a twenty, or maybe four tens or eight fives. Forty slips of green-backed paper, a whole groaning sack of silver coins. He felt like he’d won the lottery.

But then he thought of Rosaleen again — saw her as vividly as if she were standing there before him, gouging him with her eyes, her jaws clamped in rage and resentment, going to fat at nineteen and always demanding more, more, more from him, as if he were the original cornucopia — or one of the McCormicks himself. She was the kind to kick up a fuss when he went out after work, even if it was only for a glass or two, even if it was only on a Saturday, because she was like a child, like an infant, always afraid of missing out on something — but give her a taste of it and she drank like a brewer’s horse. Sure. And there was no way in the world she was going to leave her own mum and da and her saintly brothers and traipse halfway around the globe with the likes of him and he must be as crazy as his idiots and morons to think she’d so much as budge because good Christ in heaven Waverley was enough of a trial as it was. That’s what she’d told him, time and again, California, and she spat all four syllables in his face like the stones of some sour inedible fruit, I’d as soon go to hell and back.

Something clenched in his stomach, his holy whiskey burning away down there in a sea of beer and immolating the hard white albumen of the egg as if it were paper put to fire, and he wondered briefly if he was going to be sick. He fought it down, swiveled round in his seat and shouted “Waiter!” in the direction of the bar, but with no one specific in mind. The mob there was just a blur, nothing more. “Waiter! Two more over here!”

Dr. Hamilton had bought the first two rounds, like a sport, like a creature of flesh and blood and a friend of the working man, and it must have been five-thirty or six at the time, still light beyond the windows, though with the rain and gloom you could hardly distinguish day from night. O‘Kane would never have described the doctor as a convivial man, or even a cheerful one — he was too much the worrier, the stickler for detail, too much the scientist — but tonight he was nothing short of giddy, for him at least, offering up a crusty joke or two and making a toast to “the healing sun and gentle zephyrs of California.” He was flushed to the roots of his beard with pride and pleasure — he was was going to have his apes and California too, and he was going to be known from here on out as personal psychiatrist to Stanley Robert McCormick, of the Chicago McCormicks. Of course, he would be overseen by one of the most exacting men in the field, Dr. Adolph Meyer, but Dr. Meyer was going to be three thousand miles away in his warren at the Pathological Institute of New York — a very long three thousand miles.

They all stood to shake hands with the doctor when he left (after an hour or so, during which he’d sipped at a single stale beer like somebody’s maiden aunt out celebrating a third-place citation at the flower show), and everybody felt fine. And then Nick bought a round of whiskies, and O‘Kane found himself narrating the events of the morning’s meeting for the table at large. The Thompsons were hungry for the details — this concerned their lives and careers too, and the lives of their families — and they leaned in to crowd the space of the little table with their massed heads and lumpen arms and the crude architecture of their shoulders. They hadn’t been invited to the meeting and O’Kane had, because O‘Kane was head nurse and Dr. Hamilton’s right-hand man and they weren’t, even though both Nick and Pat were older than he and had more years in at McLean. Neither seemed resentful — or at least they didn’t show it — but still O‘Kane felt compelled to give them the fullest accounting he could, with dramatic shadings and embellishments, of course. He was Irish and he loved an audience.

He told them how he’d worked himself into a sweat just trying to get there on time, nervous and unsure of himself, how he’d charged across the wet lawn with the Greek and the Apron Man hooting at his back and dashed by Miss Ianucci’s desk without stopping — and he gave them a moment to consider the picture of Miss Ianucci sitting there with her mobile legs and the spill of her uncorseted front in that taut shirtwaist — and then he was describing Mrs. McCormick and what she was wearing and how the old lady, Mrs. Dexter, had grilled him. All that was fine, all that he enjoyed. But when he came to the part about Mrs. McCormick‘s — Katherines — breaking down, he couldn’t do justice do it, couldn’t even begin to. “She was like a child,” he said, trying to shape the scene with his hands, “a little lost child. She broke down and cried right there in Hamilton’s office, and there was nothing her mother or anybody else could do. It was so… I felt like crying myself.”

“Yeah, sure,” Nick said. He spoke in a measured growl, like a chained dog, the smoke of the cigarette squinting his eyes till they were no more than slashes in the blank wall of his face. “And I guess that’s supposed to prove she’s human then, just like us peasants.”

Pat sniggered. Mart’s eyes flitted round the table. There was a crash in the vicinity of the bar, followed by a curse and a thin spatter of applause. Nick just sat there, huge and squinting, watching O‘Kane.

All of a sudden O‘Kane felt the anger coming up in him — what did they know, they hadn’t been there, none of them — and before he could stop to think he was defending her, the Ice Queen herself. “You can be as hard-nosed as you want about it, Nick, and I felt the same way myself, I did — until this morning. And you know what made her break down? It was Dr. Hamilton. ’No visitors,‘ he said, ’not even his wife,‘ and that’s what got to her. She loves her husband, no matter how crazy he is, and she wants to be with him — it’s as simple as that. And I don’t care what you say.”

They were quiet a moment, pulling at their cigarettes and solemnly rearranging the glasses on the table, all three watching him out of identical eyes. Then Pat, reflectively: “They say she’s in it for the money. Her husband committed, and all those McCormick millions just there for the taking.”

“And she’s legally entitled to it.” Nick was massaging the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray. His head floated up like a balloon, bobbing over the table on the taut cord of his neck. “So long as the McCormicks don’t buy her off or get the marriage annulled. She’s his wife, and that’s the long and short of it. But all that aside — and I think Eddie’s gone sweet on her, is that it, huh, Eddie?” He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest and gave his brothers a leer. “Who’s going to give Rosaleen the bad news — you, Pattie? How about you, Mart?”

They all three guffawed and slapped the table and dug their fingers in their ears, while O‘Kane put on a sheepish grin and ducked his head, all part of the ritual. But he was raging inside: they didn’t understand, they weren’t there, they didn’t see her.

“But as I was saying,” Nick went on, and the smoke and alcohol had roughened his voice till it wasn’t much more than a croak, “all that aside, Dr. Hamilton was right, absolutely and unconditionally — you can’t let Mr. McCormick have any visitors, and especially not the wife. Or the mother or sister either — or any woman, for that matter. Not after what he did to that little nurse from Rhode Island, what was her name — Florabelle? Christabel? Something like that”

“Arabella,” O‘Kane said. “Arabella Doane.”

Nick just shook his head, and no one was laughing now. They looked down the long tunnels of their beers, stretched their legs under the table, stared vacantly round the room as if seeing it for the first time. Mart suppressed a belch, patting his lips gently with the back of his hand. “That was a crime,” Nick said finally, “a real crime. And frankly, it makes me wonder what I’m doing going all the way out to California for a man like that.”

O‘Kane had nothing to say to this. He was thinking about Arabella Doane. She was a shadow in a back corner of his mind, a cat you pick up to stroke and then put down again when it stops purring. He remembered her hair — amazing hair, the exact color of ripe peaches— and the locket she wore with a miniature of Florence Nightingale, the Lady of the Lamp, inside. O’Kane knew about that locket because he’d played with it where it dangled between her breasts, and he knew the acid-sweet taste of her mouth like an apple split in two, and the strange wild scent of her when she was aroused. That was before Mr. Stanley McCormick got to her — and how he managed it was a mystery to all of them. But he got to her, all right, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she broke away long enough to scream there would have been hell to pay, real hell, the kind that involved the police and maybe even the mortician…. Now she was back in Rhode Island, with her mother, but the look of her that day, the way her eyes had melted away to nothing and the color had gone out of her so you could see every lash and hair on her head like brushstrokes in oil, came to him in infinite sadness.

Up at the bar, two drunks in working clothes had begun to harmonize on a doleful faltering version of “In the Sweet By and By,” their heads down low to the polished mahogany counter, and O‘Kane felt so depressed in that moment it was as if a mountain had collapsed on him. He was making a mistake, he was sure of it, the whole thing was wrong, absolutely and irreparably, and California was no dream but a nightmare, a sandpit, a trap. A man like that. Arabella Doane, Katherine Dexter McCormick. In the sweet by and by, the drunks sang, joined now by a chorus of ragged whiskey-choked voices that mocked the promise of the refrain, We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

But then Pat gave his brother a shove and said, “The man’s disturbed, Nick — you can’t blame him for that. He needs help, is all, like the rest of them.”

“That’s right,” O‘Kane heard himself saying, and the moment had passed. What had happened to Arabella Doane was regrettable — horrible, unconscionable — but they were on a mission now, and the mission was called Mr. Stanley McCormick. He was going to get well — they were going to make him well — and when he was well he was going to reward them and then they’d have their orange groves and their bungalows and all the rest. That was it, that was what it was all about.

Suddenly, and maybe it was the whiskey — sure it was, of course it was — he found himself in the grip of a strange pounding exhilaration that was like a rocket going off inside him, and he could barely contain himself. He wanted to get up and dance, lead a parade, roll over Niagara Falls in a barrel. “Come on,” he said, “cheer up, Nick. This is supposed to be a celebration, isn’t it?” And in the next moment, the blood pounding in his ears from the rapid ascent, he was on his feet and roaring, “Who’ll drink with me?” and the Thompsons were rising from their chairs like statues come to life and they were all banging their mugs together in a percussion of joy. “To California!” he shouted, and his voice leapt an octave to drown out the funereal maunderings of the drunks at the bar. “To California!”

But now it was just O‘Kane, Mart and the herring. The vocalists were long gone, and Nick and Pat and Dr. Hamilton too. The crackers were stale, the eggs like wood pulp. And here was the last beer, served up on a wet cork tray, just like the first one. He lifted it to his lips, but it didn’t smell right — it smelled like vinegar, like must, like the warm yellow fluid in the chimp’s gtass — and he set it down untasted before pushing himself up from the table, bidding farewell to the ghost of Mart’s fading eyes and making his way to the door, where somebody conveniently shoved his hat and overcoat into his face. And then he was on the street, five blocks from home, and the wind picked up the rain and poured it down his collar.

It wasn’t so late—9:30 by his watch — but no one was out, not even the last lonely man in town, and the streets were silent but for the incessant hiss of the rain. The storefronts were a wall of nothing, holes punched in the night, and the trees clawed at the dim globes of the streetlights. His head ached. The suit grabbed at him under the arms, and the cuffs of his trousers were already wet through again, and he could barely drag his feet for the weight of them. At the first corner he stopped to turn his face to the sky and smell the night, but there was nothing to smell except the wet cobbles and the cold, if the cold has a smell. He stood there a long moment, solitary in the dark, until he was sure his collar was ruined and his suit shrunk beyond repair, and then he turned and headed home to his wife.

2. EVE

The first woman Stanley McCormick ever saw — really saw, in the way that Adam saw Eve — was his sister, Mary Virginia. Stanley was nine at the time, a skinny, precocious, secretive boy with skittish eyes and a burrowing instinct. He used to like to get underneath things — beds, settees, ramparts he would construct of pillows in the drawing room or folding chairs in the lofty cavern of the ballroom. These were his secret places, his lairs and hideouts, where he could evade his brother Harold, dodge the piano teacher and elude the governess, his sisters and whichever starchy long-nosed missionary-of-the-day had been invited to breakfast, tea or supper. But most of all, when he was hidden and secure, a bag of hard candy to hand, an adventure by Jules Verne or James Fenimore Cooper propped up on his chest and the lamp softly glowing, he could escape his mother. She was the one, the one whose love could pulverize rock and draw all the planets out of their orbits to come crashing down and obliterate him in his bed, she was the one he most wanted to escape — and most wanted to be with.

It was May of 1884, just after his father died. The house was in mourning — the city of Chicago was in mourning, the nation, the whole vast roofless world — and Stanley didn’t know what to do with himself. No one had ever died before, not in his experience, and what upset him more than the death itself was that he didn’t know what was expected of him, other than to look sorrowful. Should he beat his breast, throw himself down the stairs, carry on like Mary Virginia? People patted him on the head, bent down to whisper things in his ear and peer into his startled eyes. Did they expect him to cry, was that it? Or was he supposed to bear up like a man?

His mother was no help. She never stopped moving, not even to sit down, her face battered with grief till it looked like a piece of luggage dragged from port to port, and everywhere she went she was exiled from him — from him, Stanley, her last and youngest child, her baby — by a phalanx of mourners. He wanted to be earnest, wanted to be good, wanted to grieve properly, acquit himself well, please her, but whenever he looked up for approval, all he saw was hair and ears and the backs of heads. The heads converged on her, supported on shoulders like moving walls, there was a sudden blossoming of black armbands, and at the level of his eyes he could see nothing but hands that vanished and reappeared like some conjurer’s trick, big-knuckled veiny hands glittering with jewelry and clutching the drinks and sandwiches the servants scurried to provide through the din of grieving. He was there, startled, in kneepants and a collar that was too tight, trying to avoid the crash. He’d never realized death could be so loud.

And it got louder. Telegrams arrived nonstop, newspapers ran headlines and front-page eulogies. The employees of the McCormick Reaper Works sent over a replica of the reaper composed of five thousand flawless gardenias, with the main wheel symbolically broken, and four hundred workers shuffled in a solemn double line past the catafalque. Presidents, premiers, sultans, grand viziers, emperors and beglerbegs sent their condolences. Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the reaper, multimillionaire, recipient of the Cross of the French Legion of Honor, cranky, old, bullheaded, unloving, rheumatic, wheezy and tyrannical, was dead at seventy-five. Dead, and lying there in the drawing room in his coffin, as pale as a toad preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

When it came time to pay his last respects, Stanley was led into the drawing room by his big brother, Cyrus Jr. Cyrus Jr. was then a bearded young man of twenty-five who suddenly found himself in control of a business that grossed seventy-five million dollars a year and whom everybody said looked just like Papa. Stanley couldn’t see the resemblance. His father was an old man, the oldest person of either sex he’d ever seen, sixty-five when Stanley was born, seventy by the time Stanley began to understand who he was, and finally, in the end, a fleshless, soulless artifact as ancient and unfathomable as a fossilized dinosaur egg. Stanley liked dinosaurs — he liked to dream about the rending teeth of the big carnivorous ones and the armor they all wore to protect themselves, even the slowest and smallest — but he didn’t like his father. Or hadn’t liked him.

And as he approached the coffin, Cyrus’s hand huge and soft in the feeble grip of his own and burning like a furnace, like a steam engine, like molten rock, he felt nothing but guilt. Not sorrow, not loss, but guilt. People looked at him and saw a grieving son, but what they didn’t know was that when his mother had convened the family nightly to pray for his father’s recovery, Stanley had bowed his head and pleaded with God to take the old Reaper King away forever. And God had listened, because Stanley didn’t love his progenitor and provider the way a son should — he feared him, feared and loathed him and shrank away from his booming wheeze and his twisted shellacked hands and the smell of something gone dead and rotten that seeped like poison from his flaring old hair-choked nostrils. It was a terrible thing not to love your father, a sin that reverberated through all the chasms of hell and howled in the very ears of the Devil himself. Stanley was a patricide, an ingrate, a worm. And he was only nine years old.

But there it was, the casket, huge, big as a boat and polished till you could see your face in it, and not just in the brass or gold or whatever it was, but in the wood too. It was elevated on a dais in the center of that familiar room with its old French furniture and wainscoted walls and the vaulted ceiling painted to mimic a summer sky replete with cottony clouds and birds on the wing, and that made it seem even bigger. This was the ship that would take the Reaper King on his final voyage, down to a place where it was always dark and wet and where the insects would burrow into his flesh and lay their eggs to hatch… and then to heaven, because Stanley’s father was a good man who’d served humanity and God too and fed the multitudes, just as Christ had — Stanley knew that and would never deny it. He knew it because his mother had told him so. Told him again and again till he’d grown up with a whole litany of his father’s goodness to hold up against the living picture of the crabbed bitter old immitigable figure sunk into the wheelchair in the upper hallway.

Stanley’s legs were leaden, his feet stuck to the floor. There must have been two hundred people there, friends, relatives, strangers, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, and he couldn’t look into their faces, couldn’t even lift his head. He watched his feet, studying the sheen of his high-button shoes as they stuck and pulled free of the carpet, stuck and pulled free, step by step, closer and closer. The drinks and sandwiches were gone now, but the whole house smelled of them still, and this room especially. It smelled like a kitchen, reeking of canapes, smoked sausage, fish eggs and something else, something indefinable — perfume, he guessed it was. But not the sort of perfume ladies wore — something deeper, harsher, more intense and astringent. He was thinking about that, about what kind of perfume that might be and how the undertaker and his silent gliding palm-rubbing assistants just might happen to know, when all at once Cyrus Jr. squeezed his hand, a sudden violent pressure, and Stanley looked up to see the bright stony rail of the casket right there in front of him and his dead father’s nose projecting above it like some etiolated mushroom springing up out of the ground after a storm. He felt dizzy, as if he’d been etherized, and his legs almost failed him — they didn’t seem to have any bone left in them, weren’t even attached to his hips anymore — and then his mother was there, rising up from beside the coffin to wrap him in her arms.

She’d been kneeling in the shadows like some sort of supplicant, like the maharajah’s widow who throws herself on the funeral pyre, and he saw that his sister Anita was there too, eighteen and bereft, her wide baleful face like a picked-over field, and Missy Hammond, the governess, with the swollen hump of her disfigurement and the little red-flecked clots of her eyes staring up at him in misery. And Harold — Harold was kneeling beside them, his shoulders bunched and his hands clasped before him, Harold, his confidant and playmate, only two years older than Stanley and a virtuoso of sinuosity who only wanted to throw a ball and tackle and be tackled till he was indistinguishable from the sod itself, and here he was transformed into a professional mourner, as hollow and cringing as one of the undertaker’s assistants. It was a shock: Harold had loved their father, really loved him, and Stanley hadn’t. The shame burned into him, and he buried his face in his mother’s dress.

And then, somehow, he found himself up on the dais with his mother, staring down at the unhinged face of his dreams. There he was, his father, monstrous in death, as big as any giant or ogre, stretched out on his back as if he were sleeping, his eyes closed, his beard thrust up in a gray spume that shrouded his throat and chin and the new tie they were going to bury him in… but he wasn’t sleeping, he was dead, and there was a rigidity to his fresh-shaven cheeks and a depth to the pits and trenches beneath his eyes that all the mortician’s powder in the world couldn’t conceal. Stanley tried his best to look sad, aggrieved, troubled and heartsore, his mother right there beside him, clergymen fluttering on the periphery like a flock of crows, aunts, uncles and perfect strangers mewling and weeping and dabbing at their eyes, but he only managed to look the way he felt: scared. He wanted to bolt, break away from his mother and all her insuperable power to hold him there, and run before they saw the truth in his eyes, before the rotting stiff perfumed corpse of his father lurched upright in the casket and roared out his perfidy. And he might have, he might have broken for the door and shamed them all, if it wasn’t for Mary Virginia.

All this time she’d been waiting in the wings, weeping and gnashing her teeth, a prisoner of grief, but now, finally, her moment had come. Stanley wasn’t aware of it. He was only aware of himself, slouching on the dais with all those people looking at him and wanting only to run, hide, burrow, hating his mother for holding him there and the mourners for invading his house and his father for dying and for having been alive in the first place. He was vaguely aware that someone was missing, someone vital, but he wasn’t thinking and he didn’t care and he only wanted to die himself, die on the spot and get it over with — until he heard his sister’s first shattering cry. Everything changed in that moment. Suddenly he was outside of himself, floating high over the room with the painted birds and watching his big sister annihilate the whole sorry long-faced crowd with the violence of her grief.

She came hurtling in from the hallway in a black shift that was like an undergarment, her arms naked, her feet bare, her hair kinked and wild and beating at her face like a flail, and all on the crest of that first rising shriek. Everyone in the room, even Mama the all-powerful, was frozen in place — or no, not frozen but melted down like silica and then quick-cooled to the fragile inanimacy of glass. But that first heart-seizing shriek was nothing more than a preface, an overture, a promise of what was to come. The next cry, protracted and operatic, crescendoing in a series of gut-wrenching whoops that sounded as if some animal were being eviscerated and eaten alive, scoured the walls and the ceiling and polished those glass faces and glassy eyes till nothing existed but Mary Virginia McCormick, the fount and apotheosis of grief.

Unimpeded, all but unrecognizable, her mouth open in a rictus of screaming and her limbs jerking and twitching with the exaltation of some uncontainable force, she darted across the rug and through the pall of smoked sausage and embalmer’s perfume, past the mourners and undertaker’s assistants and the members of her own family, vaulted the rail and plunged into the coffin as if she were diving into a swimming pool. “It’s me!” she cried, thrashing at what was left of the Reaper King till it seemed to Stanley’s stricken eyes that the corpse had come to life in a hideous rehearsal of his worst fears. No one moved. No one breathed. “Papa,” she sobbed, “it’s me, Mary Virginia,” and her hands were right there, right in the thick of it, wrapped tight round the rigid throat and reanimated beard. “Don’t you recognize me?”

It was a shame, everyone agreed, because Mary Virginia was the beauty of the family, a roll of the genetic dice that comes round only once in a generation. And she was as talented as she was pretty, good with languages and clever at drawing, an accomplished pianist who played with the subtlety and compassion of a woman twice her age and all the courage and ferocity of a man. She was twenty-three and unmarried at the time of her father’s death, though there had been no lack of suitors, her physical attractions enhanced as they were by the allure of her father’s fortune. In the two years since her coming out, there had been three offers for her hand. Her mother — Nettie Fowler McCormick, a real force in Chicago society and a matchmaker nonpareil — had convoked a family council on each of the three occasions, and each time, though the aspirants were well connected and had money of their own, Papa had to take them aside and gravely decline on his daughter’s behalf. And that was a shame, a real shame. But the McCormicks were scrupulous to the point of rigidity, and they felt they had no choice but to let the young men in question understand just what they were letting themselves in for.

The sad truth was that Mary Virginia was sick, sick in a way that didn’t show, not right away and not on the surface. Hers was a sickness that seemed to deepen as she grew into it, stretching and elongating to accommodate her like the skin of an anaconda. Ever since her thirteenth birthday she’d become increasingly distant, detached from the world of people, things and obligations, as if some essential thread had been cut in her mind. There were times when she didn’t seem to recognize her parents, the governess, her own sisters and brothers. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t talk. For hours at a time she crouched over her bruised knees, praying frantically, hysterically, chanting the name of God the Father until it was like a curse. Other times she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, dashing from room to room in a panic, blue in the face, choking for air when there was air all around her. And then she couldn’t sleep, sometimes for days, for weeks, and it would terrify Nettie to creep into her room at two or three in the morning and see her lying there rigid, staring into the crown of some private universe, awake but no more conscious of her mother than if she were blind and deaf.

At fifteen she came to life again, resurrected, hyperkinetic, throwing sparks from her fingers and laughing openmouthed at the great ongoing joke of the world, her every motion arrested and then accelerated and accelerated again till she rushed aimlessly from one room to another in a spastic herky-jerky trot that was like a cruel parody of poor Missy’s affliction. Where before she’d been without affect, wiped clean of emotion, now suddenly she became as passionate as a lover with Nettie, her own mother, clinging frantically to her at bedtime, protracting a goodnight kiss till it was a torture. She walked in her sleep, talked gibberish, scared off her schoolmates. And then, just after her sixteenth birthday, she began to mutilate herself.

It was one of the nurses, a French girl by the name of Marie Lherbette, who first reported it. Nettie was in the drawing room nestled in a Louis XVI chair across from an eager, well-fed young man whose passage to China she had agreed to pay on behalf of the Presbyterian Missionary Society. On the low table between them stood a tray of finger sandwiches and a pot of tea draped in a cozy crocheted by her grandmother in the early days of the century. The young man was making a complicated point about the Asiatic mind and the woeful lack of a Christianizing influence in so ancient but corrupt a culture, when Marie Lherbette knocked and entered the room with a low bow.

“Yes?” Nettie said. “What is it, Marie?”

The nurse looked down at her feet. She was twenty, pretty enough in her own way, and dutiful, but to Nettie’s mind too much imbued with, well, Frenchness, to be entirely trustworthy. “If madame please, may I have a word in private?”

“Now? Can’t you see that I’m occupied? ”

“There is”—the nurse searched for the word—“gravity in what I must tell you.”

Gravity? Nettie took one look at the nurse’s face and then rose and excused herself to the young man. A moment later she was following the nurse up the stairs to the children’s rooms. “What is it?” she demanded. “Is it Anita? Mary Virginia?”

“Miss Mary Virginia,” the nurse whispered over her shoulder, hurrying up the stairs and down the hall with quick nervous thrusts of her feet. Nettie struggled to keep up, her skirts tugging at her knees and clinging obstinately to her ankles, the carpet hissing beneath her, the furniture turned to stone. And then they were through the door and into her daughter’s room, and Nettie saw Mary Virginia stretched out on the bed in her insomniac’s trance, naked but for a pair of socks, saw the perfect bloody handprints on the flowered wallpaper and the long glistening runnels that trailed away from her private place and down her inner thighs as if some animal had been at her.

They took her to the McLean Hospital in Waverley, Massachusetts, where she was prodded, pinched, weighed, measured, auscultated, analyzed and interrogated by the biggest men in the field of psychiatry the McCormick money could attract — which is to say, all of them. Unfortunately, none of the experts could agree. One felt her problem was neurasthenia, another, delusional insanity, and yet another, dementia praecox. They wanted to keep her for observation — and for her own protection. She hadn’t bloodied herself again, except for two barely noticeable puncture marks she’d worked into her right underarm with a pen nib, but during the trip from Chicago in the private Pullman car, she’d begun to hold passionate conversations with phantoms out of thin air, and twice she’d attempted to throw herself from the train. Fortunately, Cyrus Jr. was there to restrain her, but Nettie was crucified with the burden of it.

Six weeks, the doctors said. At least. And so, reduced nearly to prostration herself, what with Mary Virginia’s collapse, Papa’s illness and her little ones pining for her in Chicago, Nettie decided to rent a house in Waverley and send for Harold and Stanley. It was one of Stanley’s earliest memories. Missy Hammond and their French nurse, Marie, were going to take him and Harold on a vacation trip for six whole weeks — and did he know how long six weeks were? And how many days were in a week? And what the first letter of the alphabet was? Yes. And they were going to go on the choo-choo train all the way across the great state of Illinois, through Indiana — could he say Indiana? — and Pennsylvania and New York to Massachusetts, where Mama and Big Sister were. Big Sister was sick, very sick, but she would be better soon and then they would all come home.

Stanley was two at the time, Harold five. Of the trip, he recalled a sensation of intense, blinding greenness, a sea of green beyond the moving windows, vast and oceanic, a world bigger than comprehension would allow. And of the house in Waverley he remembered nothing, except that the sun was there to illuminate this new, expansive and undifferentiated world of green, and that the deep grass beyond the edge of the yard was a place where snakes lived. His mama told him about them, lean hard whiplike things with the false glitter of a present wrapped for Christmas, little hidden gifts of poison and death that he must never touch. That was what he remembered of that trip to Massachusetts in the summer of ‘77, that and his big sister. Who was sick.

Mary Virginia improved at McLean. There was no miraculous cure, certainly not the sort of cure Nettie was expecting, demanding, hounding the doctors for day and night, but at least the imaginary conversations ceased and there were no more bloody stigmata on the walls. They all went home together, back to the brownstone mansion on Rush Street, with the ballroom that could accommodate two hundred and the steam-heated stable for the horses and the goat and cow (the Reaper King liked his milk fresh) and the pony Anita would get for her sixteenth birthday five years later. Mary Virginia grew older and prettier, but she had to withdraw from the Misses Kirklands’ Academy before graduation because Miss Nevelson, her Latin teacher, had a detachable head and kept putting it on backward and Mary Virginia couldn’t abide that — it was just the sort of thing she’d always hated — and so Nettie had arranged for a private tutor at home. There was a year of tenuous peace, and then, at eighteen, Mary Virginia broke down again, victim of amorphous fears, and she had to be hospitalized — this time for six months.

A relatively smooth period followed, a time during which she haunted the rooms of the house at all hours of the night like some lost and wandering soul — but placid, thankfully — and then gradually, as in the unfolding of some natural event, she grew more excitable, and in her excitement, she turned to the piano. Suddenly she was up at dawn, hammering away at the keys with a fury that would have paralyzed a Chopin or even a Liszt, thundering and banging till her fingers were blunted and there was blood on the keys, using her elbows, her chin, even her teeth, and she went on for hours, sometimes seven or eight hours at a stretch, and nothing could distract her or dissuade her. Nettie wouldn’t have objected if only she’d play nicely, play properly, play some discernible tune. But no, her playing was an atonal orgy, senseless, barbaric, animalistic — it was disturbing, that’s what it was, and she was disturbed, her daughter was disturbed, and Nettie meant to put an end to it.

One night, as Mary Virginia lay tranced in her room, Nettie had the piano removed and taken to her brother-in-law’s place on East Erie Street, on permanent loan. If she never heard another note of piano music as long as she lived, Nettie would account herself blessed. As for Mary Virginia, she woke at dawn as usual, went to the place in the parlor where the piano had been, and without a word fell to her knees and began to pray. She prayed through the morning and afternoon and into the evening, through that night and into the next morning and the night and morning after that, her prayers stentorian, jangling, beating at the hallowed air of the McCormick sanctuary like the outraged hammers of fifty-six ivory keys.

She prayed herself into the hospital that time, but she was back at home and more or less placidly tranced as her twenty-first birthday approached. Nettie was against a coming-out party, but the Reaper King insisted. What would people think? That Cyrus Hall McCormick’s eldest daughter was mad? That he had no confidence in her? That her life was over before it had begun? Nonsense. She would have a coming-out party like any other girl of her age and class, and furthermore, it would be conceived and conducted on the grandest McCormick scale, a scale calculated to leave the Armours, Swifts and Pullmans in the dust. Was that clear?

It was. And in the grip of a February cold snap Nettie opened the house to six hundred and fifty guests, who were served champagne and oysters by an army of servants, followed by a formal dinner for fifty in the library and dancing till twelve in the third-floor ballroom. Mary Virginia, cool as the waxing moon in a white crepe gown and three-button French gloves, stood calmly — some said lethargically — in the receiving line, along with her parents, Cyrus Jr., and six white-clad alumnae of the Misses Kirklands’ Academy, and smiled at each of the six hundred fifty guests.

“Good evening,” she said to them, to each of them, individually, her voice disconnected from her body and her glorious, shining face, “my name is Mary Virginia McCormick and I am very pleased that you could come on the occasion of my entrance into society.” There were no prayers, no screams, no conversations with imaginary auditors, and the whole thing went off without a hitch, but for a very tricky half hour during which Johnnie Hand, the bandmaster, had acceded to the guest of honor’s request to sit in at the piano. Mary Virginia bent over the keys with a frown of concentration as the guests, band members and servants put on their about-to-be-charmed faces, and then launched into something that at first bore the faintest passing resemblance to a Chopin polonaise, but which quickly degenerated into the jangling, horrid, obscene cacophony her mother knew so well. The polite smiles dissolved from one face after another, the bandmaster looked stricken, and Mrs. Eulalia Titus, of Prairie Avenue, had to be assisted to the ladies’ room after one of her spells came up on her.

Nettie tried to end it with applause after the first minute or so, and the audience took it up dutifully, enthusiastically, and for a moment Mary Virginia’s efforts were drowned out by a tidal wave of applause, but when the clapping subsided, she was still at it. Head bent over the keyboard, elbows flailing, all thumbs and knuckles and flashing wrists, she tortured the instrument with variations no civilized ear had ever conceived of. At the five-minute mark, Nettie tried again, crying “Bravo!” and beating her hands together so forcefully she thought she’d dislocated both her wrists. And again the audience took it up, thankfully, beseechingly, crying “Bravo!” as if sounding a retreat. But Mary Virginia played on, played on till the ballroom was empty and Cyrus Jr. and one of his Princeton classmates had to take her by the wrists and pry her fingers away from the last thunderous chord that reverberated through the room like the end of a barrage.

Yes. And now she was mourning for her father.

Initially — for the first few seconds, anyway — Stanley was all right. No one was paying any attention to him — they were all looking at Mary Virginia, his big sister, the savior rushing in at the last minute to cow them all and rescue her little brother, and he soared, he really soared… but when she went right by him and threw herself on that cold dead thing that used to be their papa, Stanley plummeted from the ceiling like a clay pigeon. This was his big sister, the angel in human form who used to take Harold and him on outings to the park, the furnace of affection who bundled him up on wintry afternoons for skating and hot chocolate on the lake and whispered in his ear till he shivered and pampered him when he caught cold, and she was ignoring him. She hadn’t come for him — she didn’t even see him.

Someone screamed. There was a rush for the coffin, Mama’s face lit with the sudden hellfire of her fury, Harold gaping in bewilderment and Missy and Anita biting down on their knuckles as if they were beef ribs or chicken wings, and Stanley made himself invisible. As soon as his mother let go of his hand, he was gone, vanished in the midst of the confusion, chairs rumbling, people crying out, all those oversized bodies in furious concerted movement. He didn’t stay to see his big brother and his uncles Leander and William wrest Big Sister away from his dead father, didn’t see the look of savagery and puzzlement on her face, didn’t see her toss and bite and kick till the flimsy rag of her shift pulled up over her hips to expose the scored and naked flesh beneath it. No: he ran straight downstairs to the oak wardrobe in the linen closet and burrowed.

Later, much later — it must have been past midnight — he ventured out into the hallway. He’d missed supper and Mama hadn’t come for him, which meant she was suffering with one of her headaches and mewed up like a prisoner in her room. He’d heard Marie calling for him, and then later Missy and Anita, but he’d just burrowed deeper among the towels and bedthings. He didn’t need them — he didn’t need his big sister or his mother or anybody — and even if he did, he couldn’t have done a thing about it. Once he climbed into the big bottom drawer of that wardrobe and inched it closed by applying his right shoulder to the rough unfinished surface of the plank above, he was powerless. There was something inside him gnawing its way out, something he’d swallowed, something alive, and it wouldn’t let him catch his breath or move his arms and legs or even lift his head to see where it was slashing through the skin of his belly with its claws and teeth and filling that hermetic space with a beard that wouldn’t stop growing till there was no room left in the box and no air either. For Stanley, a good boy, a bright boy, a pleasing and normal boy, it was the beginning of terror. From now on, there would be no place to hide.

The evening became the night, and all that while Stanley lay there rigid, listening to the enveloping sounds of the house, all the noise of the comings and goings and the clatter of silverware and crystal and the murmurous voices of the servants in the hall. He fought down his hunger, denying himself, shriving himself, lying there as still as the corpse of his father in the drawing room below. Finally, though, it was a need of the living that drove him out of his box: he had to pee.

By the time he crept from the wardrobe and stuck his head out the door to make sure no one was about, he had to go so badly he was squeezing himself, squeezing his peepee, though Mama wouldn’t let him call it that anymore. It wasn’t a penis either, not in Mama’s vocabulary. No: it was just a dirty thing little boys had attached to them for a dirty purpose and he wasn’t ever to touch it except to make pee, did he understand that? He didn’t understand, but every time she told him he nodded his head, looked down at the floor and let his eyes lead the retreat.

The hallway was deserted. Someone had left a light burning at the far end of it, outside the room they still called the nursery, and there was another light on in the bathroom across the hall. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. The mourners had taken their big blunt shoes and their furs and jewelry and their long condoling faces and gone home, and everyone else had turned in for the night — there was a funeral to attend in the morning, after all. Stanley squeezed himself. Two miniature goads stabbed at him down there, on either side, just above the groin. He held his breath a moment, listening, and then he darted across the hall to the bathroom, swinging the door shut behind him. He was peeing — relieving himself, and yes, it was a relief, the only relief he’d had all day — when he glanced up at the mirror and saw that someone was easing open the door behind him.

“I’m in here,” he sang out, turning away instinctively to shield himself. There was no answer but the faintest metallic grating of the hinges, the door swinging inexorably open, the noise of his urine in the porcelain bowl a sudden embarrassment, a steady boiling pent-up stream he was helpless to stop. He shot a nervous glance over his shoulder, expecting Harold. “Just a minute!” he cried, but it was too late.

It wasn’t Harold standing there in the doorway, but Mary Virginia, in her black shift and bare feet. She looked puzzled, as if she’d never seen a bathroom — or Stanley — before.

As for Stanley, he tried to force his penis back into his pants before he was finished and got hot pee all down the front of himself. Dirty, dirty, dirty, he could hear his mother saying it already. His face flushed. The blood thundered in his ears. He backed away from the toilet.

For a long moment, Mary Virginia stood there rocking to and fro on feet that were so white they seemed to glow against the checkered tiles. “Stanley the elf,” she said finally, and her voice wasn’t right. Her words were slurred and slow, as if she had something in her mouth. “The little hobgoblin,” she said. “The boy who can snap his fingers and disappear. ”

Stanley watched her feet move across the floor, fascinated by the way her toes gripped and released the tiles. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she reached out to tousle his hair, “they’ve sedated me, that’s all. For my peace of mind. So I can rest.”

Stanley tried to smile. His pants were wet and uncomfortable, and his underpants too, already binding in the crotch, and he was hungry and tired, exhausted from the strain and terror that had crept up on him as he lay in that drawer all through the day and into the night.

Mary Virginia — Big Sister — gave him a wan smile in return, and then, just as casually as if he wasn’t there at all, she hiked up her shift and sat on the toilet. She looked off into space and he heard the fierce hissing sound of her pee as he turned away to wash up—Always wash up, his mother told him, always.He was confused. His face was hot. He wanted his mother.

But then Mary Virginia began to laugh, a high hoarse chuckling laugh that startled him and made him turn round again despite himself. “Stanley the moper,” she said. “You’re always so mopey, Stanley — what’s the matter? Is it Mama?” And then: “I’ll bet you’ve never seen a woman pee before, have you?”

Stanley shook his head. His sister’s legs were white, whiter than her feet, and the shift was hiked up over her knees.

“Women sit down when they pee, did you know that? Because we don’t have a little peepee like boys do — women are different.” She rose awkwardly, as if she couldn’t catch her balance, and muttered something he didn’t catch. Then she said, “Would you like to see?”

He didn’t know what to do. He just stood there at the sink, frozen in place, and watched his big sister pull the shift up over her head until she was white all over. Hugely white. White as a statue. And he saw her breasts, heavy and white under the glow of the gaslamp, and her navel, and the place where her penis should have been and there was only hair, blond hair, instead. “You see?” she said, the words thick in her mouth, and he thought for a minute she was eating candy, caramel candy, and she was going to give him some — she was only teasing him, that’s what this was all about.

But there was no candy, he knew that, and he wanted only to run, run for the drawer in the wardrobe that would never give him a moment’s comfort again, run to his mother, run to Harold, Missy, Anita, anyone — but he didn’t. He stood there at the sink and stared at the white glowing naked body of his sister, his big sister who was very beautiful and very sick, until she bent for the shift and covered herself again in the featureless black of her mourning.

After that, after the funeral and the letters of condolence and the black crepe, Mary Virginia went away. Stanley couldn’t place the time exactly — it could have been a week after the funeral, two weeks, a month — but Mama saw to the arrangements, and Big Sister was gone. He never told anyone about that night in the bathroom, not even Harold, but it stayed with him long after the funeral, a deep festering pocket of shame. Girls were different from boys and women from men, everyone knew that, but now Stanley, alone among his friends and schoolmates, knew how and why they were different, and it was a knowledge he hadn’t asked for, a knowledge that complicated his dreams and made him shy away from his mother, Anita, Missy and all the other females who crowded into his life. He looked into their faces, looked at their hair, their skirts, their feet, and knew how white they were underneath their clothes, the palest bleached-out belly-of-a-frog sort of white, with breasts that hung there like the stumps of something missing and that scar between their legs where there should have been flesh. It was an excoriating vision, a waking nightmare, more than any nine-year-old boy could be expected to carry with him for long, and it took all that spring and a summer in the Adirondacks before it finally began to fade.

Mary Virginia visited Rush Street only once a year from then on, always in the company of her doctor, a small thin-lipped woman with the figure of a man and great wide bulging eyes that so fascinated the boys they couldn’t look at her without giggling. These visits were brief — two or three days at a time that had Mama and Anita so wrought up and fearful you would have thought Mary Virginia was an anarchist with a ticking bomb, but in fact she was as docile as a cow and nearly as fat. She made her last visit to Chicago in 1892, for the Christmas holidays, descending on the house in a storm of servants, white-clad nurses and luggage. Stanley was no longer a boy. He’d begun his freshman year at Princeton that fall, involved with a thousand things and arduously growing into the six-foot-four-inch frame that left him towering over his classmates, and he hadn’t given a thought to his crazy big sister in months — she was gone, out of sight, an embarrassment to him and the family. But when he saw her that Christmas coming down the stairs like a somnambulist or sitting beside her mannish little doctor at the dinner table, he was shocked at the change in her. His big sister the beauty had been transformed into a clinging overweight spinster who would burst into tears if you stopped talking to her even for a minute.

She kept to her room mostly, and with the whirl of festivities, the parties, presents, songs and toasts, Stanley saw little of her. In fact, over the course of the three days she spent with them, he was alone with her only once — after lunch on the last day, when she suddenly looped her arm in his and asked him to take her out for a turn round the garden. It was raw and drizzling and her skirts would be ruined, but both Mama and the bug-eyed doctor gave him a look, and he went.

Stanley wasn’t good at small talk, but he chattered away at the swollen moon of her face, afraid to stop for fear of setting her off, and they went round the yard twice before she said a word. They were passing through the denuded arbor for the second time when all of a sudden she tugged violently at his arm and pulled herself close to him, face to face, as if they were dancing a minuet. She was trying to tell him something, but she stuttered now and drawled out her words till they were whole private symphonies of meaning — utterly unintelligible, even to her doctor. The drizzle beaded her lashes and brows and glistened on her hat. It was cold. He looked into her eyes and they were floodplains of madness. “St-Stanley,” she said, making an effort. “Little brother—”

She was puffy and white, soft as dough, and he knew how white she was underneath — saw it in a flash, the whole thing coming back to him in that instant — and while his mad hopeless fat-faced sister clutched at his arms and breathed in his face he felt himself growing hard in a sudden shock of shame and desire. And hate — hate too. What was she doing to him? What did she want from him? Couldn’t she just leave him alone? He tried to push her away but she held on, drawing him down till their faces were inches apart, her lips cracked and flushed with blood, her tongue moving against the roof of her mouth like some amphibious thing crawling up out of the mud. “St-Stanley,” she stuttered, fighting to get the words out through the tight weave of her sickness. “You-you’re my favorite, you are, you know why?”

He didn’t know why. His groin was throbbing. He was a member of the Guitar and Mandolin Club and the tennis team and he had a term paper to write on the poetry of Robert Herrick and in two days he’d be back on the train to New Jersey. There was a dog barking somewhere. He could smell beef and gravy on her breath.

“Because you… because you’re just like me.”

3. PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

It was their second day out of Boston on the New York Central Line, and Massachusetts was already behind them — and half of New York too. O‘Kane studied the timetable and let the names of the stops whisper in his head: Albany, Schenectady, Herkimer, Utica, Syracuse. To him, these were exotic ports of call, every one of them, places he’d heard about for years but never thought he’d see — the cities whose names sat so lightly on the tongues of the drummers and other worldly types he encountered while shoveling up beans and egg salad at the lunch counter or sipping a whiskey in the hotel bar, all the while trying his level best not to seem as ignorant, circumscribed and provincial as he was. He’d got down at Albany and walked to the end of the platform and back, just so he could say he’d been there, but he really didn’t get much of a thrill out of it — the whole time he was afraid the train would suddenly lurch out of the station and leave him palpitating in the dust. And what was there to see, anyway? Tracks. Refuse. A dead pigeon with feet as rigid as window poles and half a dozen lumps of petrified human waste.

Schenectady, Utica and the rest he watched from the window, but he wanted to be awake and alert and ready to jump down when they pulled into Buffalo, where McKinley had breathed his last, and he wanted to see the Canadian border when they crossed over into Ontario for the run down to Detroit. His mother had given him a new Kodak to record the trip for her and he’d dutifully snapped away at the picturesque and the quotidian alike — the meandering stream, the lone horse in the field, the back end of a barn in need of paint — but it was Buffalo he meant to capture and preserve. That and Canada. And the West, of course.

Nick and Pat were at the far end of the car in a pair of red plush chairs, playing cards and smoking five-cent cigars, looking like nabobs on their way out to inspect the tea plantations. Dr. Hamilton was in his compartment, frowning over a leatherbound book that featured pen-and-ink drawings of apes in their natural habitat, and Mart was in the forward compartment, sitting with Mr. McCormick. And since Mr. McCormick was calm — catatonic, actually, his legs crooked at the knee, his eyes locked on the ceiling and his head frozen in the air six inches from the pillow — there was nothing for O‘Kane to do but stare out the window and wait for his turn to relieve Mart at Mr. McCormick’s bedside. He gazed out beyond the flickering ghost of his own reflection and into the neutral wash of the evening and saw the same scrim of trees, hills and creeks he’d been seeing for the last day and a half, scenery served up like something on a tray, too much scenery, a long unbroken visual glut. A town hurtled by like a hallucination, two streets, clothes on a line, a dog sniffing at something in a muddy yard. Then trees. The yawning gape of a farm. More trees.

O‘Kane pushed himself up and stretched. In the back of his mind was an inchoate notion of letting himself out of the car and wending his way up through the train to the diner, where he envisioned the Negro waiter pouring him a cup of black coffee and maybe serving up something sweet on the side, some vanilla ice cream with maybe a bit of that dry Canton ginger sprinkled on it or some Bent’s Biscuits or even a bite of cake. The Mayflower was the last in a train of fourteen cars, plus locomotive and tender, and because Dr. Hamilton felt it was too dangerous to risk bringing a cook along, they were taking all their meals in the dining car — as if Mr. McCormick could do anybody any harm in his present condition. Hamilton wouldn’t even allow a porter to come in and tidy up, and that was one more thing the nurses had to do, though O’Kane could hardly complain since he was the worst offender when it came to generating a private little midden of newspaper, used crockery and the like or forgetting where he’d dropped his socks and trousers in the cramped compartment he shared with Mart. But the food was good, the best he’d ever had, six courses for dinner with consommé to start and a selection of cheeses before the dessert and coffee, real first-class and no limit to the luxury of it. Of course, it ought to have been, for what the McCormicks were paying. Nick had told him they’d had to buy twenty first-class tickets all the way from Boston to Santa Barbara just for the privilege of hooking up a private car.

But he was tired. And he did think he would take an amble and stretch his legs if nobody needed him, and maybe he’d have more than one cup of coffee — he definitely meant to be awake for Buffalo. He folded his hands behind his head, arched his back and stretched again. He hadn’t slept well the past two nights — last night because of the excitement of finally being underway, the rails beating time with his racing heart till he began to think he was part of a drum corps, rat-tat-tat and high-stepping it down the dusty road all the way to Cali-forn-eye-ay. The night before that he was with Rosaleen, their last night together under the roof of the cute little walkup on Chestnut Street that had somehow managed to become a stone round his neck, a big hollowed-out stone full of furniture and baby things and pots and pans and doilies cinched tight round his windpipe and the water rising fast. But it was their last night and she was sweet and wet and pulled him to her with a fierceness that made his blood rise again and again till they were at it all night long. They’d forgotten their differences and made up beforehand and they’d had a nice dinner she fixed of lamb chops and new potatoes with the mint jelly he liked, the baby hot and soft in his lap and sleeping away like a little saint. Who’re you going to choose, and he’d put it to her point-blank, your husband or yourfather?And she’d given him that melting coy down-arching big-eyed look and said, You, Eddie, you, and that was it. She was going to come out in a month or so, with Nick and Pat’s wives and little ones, courtesy of the McCormicks — once everything was settled. And that was all right. He guessed.

The train reared under his feet and he was a kid on skis again, coming down the big hill out back of the glue factory, and then he caught his balance and called out to Nick, “Think I’ll stretch my legs and maybe get a cup of coffee — anybody want anything?”

Nick was in a mood. He didn’t like traveling. He’d traveled once all the way from Washington, D.C., to Boston, for his father’s funeral — and it wasn’t in any private car, either, as he’d reminded them a hundred times already — and by the time he got there his father was six feet deep in the ground and his mother’s heart was permanently broken — and then she went and died three months later. And if it wasn’t for Pat and Mart and his looking out for them to get ahead in life, he wouldn’t be traveling now. He never even bothered to turn his head, and O‘Kane had to repeat himself before Pat finally looked up from his cards and said, “No, no thanks, Eddie — nothing for me.”

O‘Kane stood there a moment, the car rolling and bucking under his feet, the chandeliers swaying to some phantom breeze and the scenery racing along on both sides as if it would never catch up — which it wouldn’t, of course, because they were leaving it all behind, everything, and a whole lot more to come — and then he decided he’d better look in on Mart and the doctor and see if they wanted anything. He’d learned to take smaller steps than usual, adjusting to the movement of the car, but he was awkward on his feet and he wound up shuffling down the long tongue of red carpet like a drunk on his way to bed. He slammed off the wall just outside the doctor’s compartment, but the door was closed and there was no sound from within, so he continued on past till he got to the last compartment on the left, Mr. McCormick‘s, and stuck his head inside the door.

Mart was sitting there beside the bed, the gaslamp glowing, a book spread open in his lap. The book was one of Mr. McCormick‘s — a fat handsome volume called The Sea Wolf, one of two dozen or so pressed on them by Mrs. McCormick just before they left Boston. She’d appeared on the platform fifteen minutes after they’d carried her husband aboard and got him settled in his compartment, and O’Kane was the one she collared, though Pat and Mart were right there beside him in a welter of baggage and porters and the two coffin-sized steamer trunks marked HAMILTON they had to wrestle aboard. “Mr. O‘Kane,” she called, hurrying up the platform in a dress the color of Catawba grapes, her little weasel-faced chauffeur at her side.

O‘Kane was struck dumb. He hadn’t laid eyes on her since that morning at McLean, and here she was, calling out his name in a public place, her face warm and animated, her ankles chopping at her skirts and showing off the dark ribbed stockings and buckled pumps as if there were nothing more natural in the world. She glided effortlessly through the crush of people, and he was surprised to see how tall she was, taller than he’d remembered — five-eight or five-nine even, and that was subtracting an inch for the heels. O’Kane’s smile was slow-growing, stealthy almost, and before he could compose himself she was standing right there before him in her wide-brimmed hat and the clocked veil and her Catawba-colored gloves. He was an idiot. An oaf. He didn’t say hello. He said “Yes?” instead, as if he were a clerk in a shoe store.

The chauffeur gave him a look. O‘Kane had disliked him on sight the first time they’d met — or been thrust into one another’s company. He was a little man, even smaller than he’d first appeared, especially in contrast to Mrs. McCormick — Katherine, that is. He was wearing one of those monkey caps, and his arms were laden with brown-paper parcels.

“I was afraid we’d miss you,” she breathed, aspirating each syllable to show that she really had been hurrying. She was flushed — or was it his imagination? And if it was, why would he want her to be flushed? It was nothing to him. Her eyes locked on his and he tried not to flinch. “I was with my mother all the way out in Brookline and we just rushed the whole way… but it was — is my husband all right? Is he comfortable?”

“Oh, yes,” O‘Kane assured her, “we carried him in not fifteen minutes ago and we’ve got Nick right there locked in the compartment with him, but of course he’s blocked still and not really all that aware of his surroundings….”

She had nothing to say to this. Though she hadn’t been allowed to see him, she must have known perfectly well the sort of state her husband was in. O‘Kane had seen it before, too many times to count. With this sort of catatonia a patient would seize up to the point where he wouldn’t walk or eat and he became totally mute, as if he’d never acquired the power of speech. Sometimes he would freeze in a single attitude like a living sculpture, and then, without warning, break loose in all sorts of violent contortions, as if all that pent-up energy and fear and fury had suddenly burst like a blister inside him. For the past month they’d been force-feeding Mr. McCormick, the tube down his throat, the mush in the tube, and either he or Nick or one of the other nurses working the patient’s throat to make sure he was swallowing and not asphyxiating on his food. There was a young girl of eighteen at the Boston Lunatic Asylum who died that way, the food all fouled up in the passage to her lungs, and O’Kane remembered one old man scalded to death when they lowered his rigid form into a bath nobody had bothered to check and he was so far gone he never flinched or cried out or anything.

She looked down at her feet and then raised her head and looked past O‘Kane to where Pat and Mart were struggling to hoist one of the doctor’s trunks up into the car. “I’ve brought some things for him,” she said, and that was the signal for the chauffeur to disburden himself, unceremoniously dumping the packages in O’Kane’s arms. There were six of them, and they couldn’t have been heavier if they were stuffed with gold bullion. “Books, mostly,” she said, “but I’ve included two boxes of the chocolates he likes, the foil-wrapped ones from Schrafft‘s, and some stationery in case he — well, if he should feel up to writing. And I do expect that if my husband hasn’t improved enough to read to himself, then certainly you and the other nurses will sit by him and read aloud. You can’t imagine the difference it would make.”

O‘Kane wasn’t much of a reader himself, and he doubted that even the second coming of Christ and all his trumpeting angels, enacted live in the railway car, would have had much effect on Mr. McCormick in his present condition. But she was paying the bills, and O’Kane was on his way to California. “Of course, we’ll be happy to read to him,” he said, trying on his smile of depthless sincerity, the one he’d used on every woman and girl who’d ever crossed his path till Rosaleen caught up with him. “You can rest assured on that score.”

But now, rocking gently in the moving doorway and staring down at the insensate form of his employer and the broad bristling plane of the back of Mart’s head nodding over the open book, he saw that if anything, poor Mr. McCormick would have to dream his own books in his poor blocked hallucinatory mind. “Hey, Mart,” he said, “I’m going down for a cup of coffee and maybe a bite of something — you want anything?”

Mart swung round in his seat and gave him a faraway look, the spread wings of the book taking flight across his lap. All three of the Thompson brothers had been born with enormous heads, like bulldogs — and it was a wonder their mother survived any of them — yet it didn’t seem to affect them like some of the hydrocephalics you saw on the ward. No one would mistake any of the brothers for a genius, but they got on well enough — especially Nick — and Pat and Mart would lay down their lives for you. Mart wasn’t too good with sums, and simple division was beyond him, but he was a reader, and aside from the fact that there was too much space between his eyebrows and his hairline and he had to have his hats specially made, you’d never know he was any different from anybody else. Besides, when you came right down to it, it didn’t exactly take a Thomas Edison to pin a delusional paranoic to the floor or usher a bunch of halfwits out into the yard for a little exercise.

“Good book?” O‘Kane asked.

“Huh?” Mart scratched the back of his head, blunt fingers digging in luxuriously and fanning white to the white scalp beneath. “Oh, yeah, sure. It’s a sea story.”

O‘Kane tried again. “You want a cup of coffee from the diner?”

Mart had to think about it. He let the flecks of his eyes settle on O‘Kane as the train shook itself down the length of its couplings and thundered over a rough patch of the roadway, reminding them that, appearances to the contrary, they weren’t in a house, hotel or saloon but hurtling through the fall of night at speeds faster than any human being was meant to travel.

The book suddenly snapped shut like a set of jaws and sailed across the compartment; O‘Kane had to brace himself against the doorframe to keep from pitching forward into Mart’s lap. Catching himself, he glanced down instinctively at Mr. McCormick, but his employer just lay there undisturbed and unchanged, riding out the rough patch like lint on a blanket, his eyes moist and unblinking, a thin stream of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth and radiating across one cheek. He wore the strangest expression, halfway between mild surprise and unholy terror, as if he’d misplaced something trivial — an umbrella, his checkbook — but in that instant realized it was buried beneath a pile of rotting corpses. His hair was combed and precisely parted and he was dressed in the suit and tie and stiff formal collar the McCormicks insisted upon for his daytime attire, as if they expected him to spring out of bed at any moment, shake it off and go back to the office.

“Black,” Mart said finally. “Two lumps. You going to relieve me soon?”

Still braced in the doorway as the train picked up speed on a straightaway and the wheels settled into a smooth placatory drone, O‘Kane fished out his watch. “I’ve still got an hour or so,” he said. “What I think I’m going to do is sit awhile in the diner or maybe the club car, just for the change of scenery….”

There was no response. Mart just stared at him.

“Mart, it’s a joke — change of scenery?” O‘Kane gestured at the windows and the shadowy blur beyond. Still nothing. He shrugged and gave it up. “Anyway, give me twenty or thirty minutes and I’ll be back with your coffee, okay?”

The train lurched again, a sudden violent jolt that rocked the car like a rowboat, and the book slid back across the floor as if attached to a string. Distracted, Mart never said yea or nay — he merely reached down to pluck up the book and thumb through the pages till he found his place. Then he swung his legs round, adjusted himself in his seat and cleared his throat. “Now, you remember this part of the story, Mr. McCormick,” he said, speaking to a spot on the wall just above the pillow and the frozen drained grimacing mask of their employer’s face. “The shark bit off Mugridge’s foot and Humphrey realized he knew who the lady was.” There was no reaction from Mr. McCormick, and as O‘Kane turned to leave he could hear Mart begin to read in a soft, hesitant voice: “ ’Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the Ghost which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of my love for Maud Brewster… ‘ ”

O‘Kane made his way back to the head of the car, his internal gyroscope adjusting to the little leaps and feints of the wheels, thinking he might just stop in the parlor car for the added stimulant of a whiskey or two before he had his coffee. Booze was nothing to him, though it had ruined his father — and his father before him — and he could take it or leave it. Tonight, though, he felt he would take it, and the more he thought about it the more he could taste the premonitory bite of it at the back of his throat and feel the tidal surge of the blood as it carried little whiskey messages to the brain. He was wearing the new suit he’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck even before he ruined the Donegal tweed — both the Mrs. McCormicks insisted that all of Mr. McCormick’s attendants be dressed as proper gentlemen at all times because Mr. McCormick was a gentleman and accustomed to the society of gentlemen — and he stopped a moment to admire his reflection in the barred glass of the doorway. He was looking uncommonly good tonight, he thought, in his Hecht & Co. fancy black-and-blue-plaid worsted with the sheeny black bow tie and brand-new collar — like a swell, like a man who had his money in oranges or Goleta oil. And the suit had only cost him thirteen-fifty at that, though the outlay had exhausted his savings and got Rosaleen screeching and flying around the apartment like some hag on a broom.

At any rate, he’d just turned his key in the lock when he became aware of a sudden sharp hiss behind him, as if someone had let the air out of a balloon, and even as he glanced over his shoulder to see the apparent figure of Mart sailing through the air in defiance of gravity, he didn’t yet appreciate what was happening. It wasn’t until Mr. McCormick burst through the doorway half a second later that O‘Kane made the connection, seeing and understanding wedded in the space of a single heartbeat: Mr. McCormick was loose. Unblocked, untangled, unfrozen. And loose. O’Kane made the connection, but he made a fatal error too. Caught up in the engine of the moment, Mart lying there in a heap against the paneling like an old rug and Nick and Pat already springing up from their cards to intercept their employer and benefactor as he raged down the length of the carpet in a milling frenzy of limbs and feet and fists, O‘Kane surged forward and forgot all about the key.

He was a big man, Mr. McCormick, no doubt about it, thirty-three years old and in his prime, with a gangling reach and the muscle to qualify it, and when the fit was on him he was a match for any man, maybe even the great John L. himself. He never hesitated. Jaws clenched, eyes sunk back into the cavity of his head till they were no human eyes at all, he came on without a word, and Nick, shouting “No, no, Mr. McCormick, no, no!” flung himself at his right side while Pat went for the left.

Their efforts were in vain. Nick missed his hold and went sprawling into a low mahogany table in an explosion of crystal, and Pat, who’d managed to lock his arms around Mr. McCormick’s neck and shoulder, took half a dozen sharp jabs to the gut and fell away from him like a wet overcoat. Mr. McCormick wouldn’t listen to reason. Mr. McCormick was in the grip of his demons, and his demons were howling for bloody sacrifice. There was no sense in cautioning him, no sense in wasting breath on mere words, and so O‘Kane just lowered his shoulder and came at him down the full length of the car in a linebacker’s rush. Unfortunately, Mr. McCormick was in motion too, having kicked Pat free of his left foot, and the two met head-on in the center of the car.

They met, of that much O‘Kane was certain, but things were a bit hazy beyond that. Something sharp and bony, some whirling appendage, calcareous and hard, came into contact with the ridge of bone over his left eye and for a moment he wasn’t sure where he was — or even who he was. Mr. McCormick, on the other hand, wasn’t even winded and had somehow managed to stay on his feet, knees and elbows slashing, a sort of long drawn-out whinny coming from deep inside him, goatish and stupid. “Ooooooouuuuuuut!” he seemed to be saying. “Ooooooouuuuuuut!” And then O’Kane was on his knees, Pat and Nick scrabbling behind him, the doctor aroused and livid and shouting out unintelligible commands, and Mr. McCormick was at the door and the door had a key in it and the key was turning under the concerted pressure of Mr. McCormick’s long, dexterous and beautifully manicured fingers.

O‘Kane saw that key and thought his heart would explode. What was he doing? What had he been thinking? That was his key in the lock and Dr. Hamilton would find that out soon enough and give him the dressing down of his life, maybe even sack him for dereliction of duty and yet another violation of the three p’s (Never allow a patient access to the keys, never!). Even as he sprang desperately forward, O’Kane could see the orange groves and the jasmine-hung patios and wistful señoritas dissolving like a mirage. Sprinting through the car for all he was worth, Nick and Pat at his heels, he could only watch in horror as Mr. McCormick tore open the door and flung himself headlong into the vestibule, already grabbing for the door to the next car… and what sort of car was it? A sleeper. A Pullman sleeper with murals, chandeliers, plush green seats that converted to berths — and women. Women were in that car.

“Stop him!” Nick roared. “He’s got a key!”

But it was too late to stop him. He was already in the adjoining car, his angular frame thrashing from side to side, already reduced to a pair of oscillating shoulders rapidly diminishing down the long tube of the aisle. By the time O‘Kane reached the door of the sleeper, Mr. McCormick was at the far end of it, startled faces gaping pale in his wake, an elderly gentleman sprawled in the middle of the carpet like a swatted fly, the train screeling down the tracks and the whole darkling world violent with the rush of motion. O’Kane was the fastest man in his high school class, a natural athlete, and he poured it on, vaulting the old man, brushing back passengers, porters and conductors alike, but still Mr. McCormick kept his lead, wheezing and bucking his head and throwing out his long legs like stilts. He reached the head of the car, jerked open the door, and disappeared into the next car up the line.

What went through O‘Kane’s head in those frenetic moments was probably little different from what was going on in his employer’s convoluted brain, a whirling instinctual process that supersedes thought and allows the limbic system to take over: it was as simple as chase and flee. O’Kane was pugnacious, smart, tough in the way of the man who could survive anything, anywhere, anytime, and he was determined to have his way. And Stanley? Stanley was like a rubber band twisted back on itself till it was half its normal length and then suddenly released, he was a cork shot from the bottle, a bullet looking for the wall to stop it.

O‘Kane finally caught up with him in the dining car, but only because Mr. McCormick had been distracted by a passenger seated at one of the tables, a passenger who had the misfortune to be of the gender that was both his nemesis and his obsession: a woman. He’d led the chase through three cars, bobbing and weaving in his maniacal slope-shouldered gait, apparently looking to run right on up through the length of the train, over the tender and across the nose of the locomotive to perch on the cowcatcher and trap insects in his teeth all the way to California. But there was a young woman seated in the diner, facing the rear of the train and having a genteel, softly lit evening meal with an older woman, who might have been her mother or a traveling companion, and O’Kane watched in horror as Mr. McCormick pulled up short, snapped his head back like a horse tasting the bit, and in the same motion skewed to the left and fell on her. Or no, he didn’t fall — he dove, dove right on top of her. Plates skittered to the floor, food flew, the elder woman let out a howl that could have stripped the varnish from the walls.

“Mr. McCormick! ” O‘Kane heard himself cry out like some school-yard monitor, and then he was on him, grabbing at the taller man’s pumping shoulders, trying to peel him away from his victim like a strip of masking tape and make everything right again, and all the while the lady gasping and fighting under all that inexplicable weight and Mr. McCormick tearing at her clothes. He’d managed to partially expose himself, rip the bodice of her dress and crumple her hat like a wad of furniture stuffing by the time O’Kane was able to force his right arm up behind his back and apply some persuasive pressure to it. “This isn’t right, Mr. McCormick,” he kept saying, “you know it isn‘t,” and he kept saying it, over and over, as if it were a prayer, but it had no effect. One-armed, thrashing to and fro like something hauled up out of the sea in a dripping net, Mr. McCormick kept at it, working his left hand into the lady’s most vulnerable spot, and — this was what mortified O’Kane the most — taking advantage of the proximity to extend the pale tether of his tongue and lick the base of her throat as if it were an ice in a cone. “Stop it!” O‘Kane boomed, tightening his grip and jerking back with everything he had, and still it wasn’t enough.

That was when Nick arrived. In the midst of the pandemonium, the flailing and the shrieking and the useless remonstrances, plates overturned and the roast Long Island spring duck in the elder woman’s lap, Nick brought his vast head and big right fist in over O‘Kane’s shoulder and struck their employer a blow to the base of the skull that made him go limp on the spot. Together they hauled him off the distraught young woman and hustled him back down the aisle like an empty suit of clothes, leaving the apologies, excuses, explanations and reparations to Hamilton, Pat and a very pale and rumpled Mart, who were just then making their way through the door at the rear of the car.

The doctor’s color was high. The spectacles flashed from the cord at his throat and his eyes were spinning like billiard balls after a clean break. “Sheet restraints,” was all he could say, looking from the slack form of the patient to O‘Kane, Nick and the devastation beyond. The lights flickered, the train rocked. A dozen anxious faces stared up at them from plates of beef Wellington, Delmonico steak and roast squab. “And don’t you even think about loosening them until we reach California.”

Now it was night. The train licked over the rails with a mournful, subdued clatter, barreling through the featureless void for Buffalo and points west. The lamps had been turned down and the car was dark but for a funnel of light in the far corner, where Mart, a puff of cotton gauze decorating the flaring arch of his forehead, shuffled through the motions of a game of solitaire. Nick and Pat had retired to their compartment, from which a steady tremolo of contrapuntal snores could be heard against the perpetual dull rumble of the train’s buffeting. Mr. McCormick was in his compartment at the rear of the car, awake and rigid as a board, wrapped in a web of sheets dampened and twisted until they were like tourniquets and watched over by no one, at least not at the moment. O‘Kane had relieved Mart and it was his job to sit with the patient through the night, reading aloud from Jack London or Dickens or Laphroig’s Natural History of California till the windows became translucent with the dawn, but O’Kane wasn’t at his post. No, he was sitting opposite Dr. Hamilton in the latter’s cramped compartment, listening to a lecture on the nature of responsibility, vigilance and the three p’s.

“There really is no earthly excuse for having left that key in the lock,” Hamilton was saying, his voice never rising above its customary whisper despite his obvious agitation. The presidential spectacles threw daggers of light round the little box of a room. He fidgeted with his hands and tugged spasmodically at his beard. O‘Kane shifted in his seat. To his reckoning, this was the twelfth time the issue of culpability had come up, and now, as on each of the previous eleven occasions, O’Kane pursed his lips, bowed his head and gave Hamilton the look his mother called “the choirboy on his deathbed.”

“We’ve got to understand, each and every one of us, what a danger Mr. McCormick is in his present condition, not only to others but to himself,” the doctor went on. “Did you see what he did to that young woman in the space of something like thirty seconds? Shocking. And believe me, I’ve seen the whole range of psychosexual behavior.”

There wasn’t much O‘Kane could say to this. He was waiting to be dismissed, waiting to do his penance at the patient’s bedside and get it over with, let life go on and the dawn break and Buffalo appear on the horizon like some luminous dream. And he was waiting for something else too, something Hamilton couldn’t guess at and would never suspect: he was waiting for the doctor to retire so he could slip up to the parlor car and have a couple whiskies to steady his nerves and ease the tedium of the coming hours — if he hadn’t actually needed them before, he needed them now.

But the doctor wasn’t finished yet. He was going to make O‘Kane squirm, make him appreciate the hierarchy of the McCormick medical team and what he expected of his underlings, because he wouldn’t tolerate another lapse in security like the one tonight, even if it meant instituting certain personnel changes, and he hoped O’Kane caught his meaning. “I don’t have to emphasize,” he said, pulling at his beard with one hand and fumbling around for his pipe with the other, “how much Mr. McCormick’s health and welfare means to all of us, to me and Mrs. Hamilton, to you and your wife and your coworkers and their wives. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I will not have any unprofessional behavior or personal shoddiness jeopardize it.”

O‘Kane watched the doctor’s hands tremble as he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his big curved flugelhorn of a pipe and lit it. He’d never seen him so worked up and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like being lectured to either. And while he might have looked composed and contrite, all the while he was seething, thinking he could just reach out and snap the doctor’s reedy stalk of a neck like a match-stick and never have to listen to another word.

Hamilton shook out the match and looked up from his pipe. “What I mean is, I’m afraid we’re going to lose him if he gets free again.”

“Lose him? You don’t think he’s suicidal, do you?”

“Pfffft!” The doctor waved an impatient hand and turned away in disgust, pulling vigorously at his pipe. The smoke rose in angry plumes. He wouldn’t dignify the question with a response.

O‘Kane was irritated. “I may not have the clinical experience you do, or the education either, but believe me I’ve seen more cases of dementia praecox than you could—”

“Schizophrenia,” the doctor corrected. “Kraepelin’s configuration — literally, ‘early insanity — isn’t half so useful as Dr. Jung’s.”

The smell of incinerated tobacco filled the compartment till there was no other odor in the world. Smoke wreathed the lamp, settled on the pages of the ape book spread open on the bed beside the doctor’s flank, drew a curtain over the room. “Think of it this way,” Hamilton went on, lecturing out of habit now, “ ‘schizo,’ a splitting, and ‘phrenia,’ of the mind. A schizophrenic, like Mr. McCormick and his sister before him, has been split down the middle by his illness, withdrawing from our reality into a subsidiary reality of his own making, a sort of waking nightmare beyond anything you or I could imagine, Edward.” The way he pronounced the name was a goad in itself, a slap in the face. I’m in charge here, he was saying, and you’re an ignoramus. “And if you don’t believe these patients are eminently capable of doing anything they can to escape that nightmare, including inflicting violence on themselves — extreme violence — then you’re a good deal less observant than I give you credit for.”

“Yes, yes, all right — schizophrenic, then. It’s all the same to me.” O‘Kane was hot, angry, humiliated by this whole idiotic scene. He’d left the key in the lock. He was wrong. He admitted it. But Hamilton just wouldn’t let it go. “Call it what you will,” O’Kane said, and he couldn’t help raising his voice, “I’ve seen them so blocked they’ve had to have their fingers pried away from the toilet seat, and while you’re home in bed in the middle of the night I’m the one who has to hose them down after they’ve smeared themselves with their own, their own—”

“I’m not questioning your experience, Edward — after all, I hired you, didn’t I? I’m just trying to acquaint you with some of the special considerations of this case. The greatest threat to Mr. McCormick is himself, and if you want to live in California and tramp through those orange groves you’re always talking about, you’re going to have to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day. We can’t have a repetition of what happened here this evening, we just can’t. And we won’t. If it wasn’t for the serendipity of the young woman’s being there, as callous as that may sound, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would have thrown open the last door in the last car and kept on going out into the night — and by the way, did you see how much she resembled Katherine?”

“Who?”

“The young woman — what was her name?”

“Brownlee,” O‘Kane said. “Fredericka Brownlee. She’s from Cincinnati,” he added, not because it was relevant but because he loved the sound of it: Cincinnati. “I found out she’s on her way home from Albany, where her mother and her were visiting — I think it was her mother’s aunt.” The reference to Katherine had taken him by surprise — he hadn’t seen the resemblance and he hated to admit that Hamilton was right, not now, not tonight, but maybe there was something there after all. She was younger than Mrs. McCormick — twenty-two or twenty-three maybe — and not really in her league at all, but there was something in her eyes and the set of her mouth and the way she threw back her shoulders and stared straight into you as if she were challenging you to anything from a game of chess to the hundred-yard dash, and that was like Katherine, he supposed. They were both part of that class of women used to getting their own way, the ones who wanted the vote and wanted to wear pants and smoke and turn everything upside down — and had the money to do it.

Hamilton had made him come along when they paid Miss Brownlee a visit, checkbook open wide, after they’d got Mr. McCormick secured and she’d had an opportunity to change clothes and treat the two minor abrasions on her left cheek where Mr. McCormick had ground her face into the fabric of the seat. It was an awkward meeting, for obvious reasons, but Dr. Hamilton was at his smiling, genial, smooth-talking, manipulative best, and O‘Kane, after having given each of the porters a dollar and a five-spot to the old gentleman who’d been trampled, didn’t have to do much more than look sympathetic and work up a rueful grin when the occasion demanded it. Mrs. Brownlee, her features pinched with outrage, said she was incapable of believing that even the most depraved monster would attack an innocent child absolutely without warning or provocation and in a public place no less and that in her estimation this wasn’t a matter for apology or even remuneration but the sort of thing the police and the courts of law ought to take up, not to mention the authorities of the New York Central Line who’d allowed this person to be brought aboard in the first place.

Hamilton purred and simpered and pursed his lips, squeezing out apologies and mitigations in short whispery bursts while the elder lady scorched him with every sort of threat known to mankind, short of surbate and crucifixion, and Miss Brownlee stared down at her clasped hands and then at the black gliding window before finally settling her eyes on O‘Kane. She’d been badly frightened, physically injured, subjected to a humiliating and vicious assault, but now she was bored — or so it seemed to him — profoundly bored, and she just wanted to forget the whole business. And she was looking into O’Kane’s eyes to see if he was bored too, and there was something complicitous in that look, something challenging, flirtatious even.

O‘Kane stared back at her, saying nothing, letting the doctor carry the weight of the negotiations — five hundred dollars was the figure they finally settled on, and it was only because Mrs. Brownlee was willing to make an exception for the McCormick name and agree to hush the thing up and abjure all mention of courts and lawyers — and he couldn’t help seeing her as she was half an hour earlier, bleeding and impotent, Mr. McCormick on top of her and her face twisted with fear, and that gave him a strange sensation. He’d rescued her and should have felt charitable and pure, should have remembered Arabella Doane, but he didn’t — he wanted to see her nude, nude and spread out like dessert on the thin rolling mat of his berth. There was a thread of crusted blood just under the slash of her cheekbone and a blemish at the corner of her mouth, the flawless bone-white complexion tarnished and discolored, and he looked at that blemish and felt lewd and wanton, felt the way he did when Rosaleen rolled over in bed and put her face in his beneath the curtain of her hair and just breathed on him till he awoke in the dark with a jolt of excitement. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t admirable, but there it was.

“You really think she looks like Mrs. McCormick?” O‘Kane said after a moment.

The doctor hadn’t responded to his comment regarding the Brown-lees’ itinerary, apparently finding the destinations of Cincinnati and Albany considerably less exotic than O‘Kane did. Pipe dangling from between clenched teeth, he shifted his buttocks and took up the ape book with both hands, glancing at O’Kane as if surprised to see him there still. “I would have thought it was obvious,” he murmured, his eyes flipping in a weary, mechanical way. The lecture was over. He looked sleepy, already disengaging himself, thinking now only of his pajamas, his toothbrush and his apes. “Not that this girl has the hundredth part of Katherine’s charm and sophistication,” he sighed, fighting back a yawn, “but physically, I think there’s no question—”

For the past fifteen minutes O‘Kane had wanted nothing more than to escape this miserable little box of a room, his ears burning, the foretaste of whiskey teasing his tongue and dilating his throat, but now he lingered, puzzled. “So what you’re saying is of all the women on the train he could have, well, assaulted — he chose her purposely? Given that the fit was on him, of course.”

The doctor’s eyes were dead behind his spectacles. He yawned again and bunched his shoulders against a sudden dip of the rails. “Yes. That’s right. He might have attacked any woman — or he might have thrown himself under the wheels, as I said… but he chose her.”

“But why? Why would he want to attack a woman that reminded him of his own wife?”

The question hung there a moment, the noise of the train clattering in to fill the void; deep down, O‘Kane already knew the answer.

Hamilton sighed. He rocked on the edge of his bed, spewing smoke and wearing a faint thin-lipped smile. “Psychopathia Sexualis,” he said.

O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d heard him, what with the sacerdotal rasp of the Latin and the uncontainable rushing silence that magnified every nick and fracture of the rails till it roared in his ears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

But instead of repeating himself, Hamilton set down the pipe and bent over to slide a suitcase from beneath the bed. He unlatched it and threw back the lid and O‘Kane saw that it was filled with books. The doctor fumbled through them a moment and fished out a thick volume bound in leather the color of dried blood. “Krafft-Ebing,” he grunted, dropping the book in O’Kane’s lap. “Here, Edward — educate yourself.”

The night rolled on toward morning. Buffalo came and went. O‘Kane, fortified by three quick whiskies and as many beer chasers, sat by the glow of the gaslamp and studied the wooden form of his employer. Mr. McCormick was blocked again, frozen and immobilized and no more harm or trouble than a gargoyle or bookend, but he was in a more restful position now, held in place by the sheets like an Egyptian mummy that would fall to pieces if it weren’t for its wrappings. It was sad, though, as sad as anything O’Kane had seen at the lunatic asylum in Boston or in his two years at McLean. Mr. McCormick was a fine figure of a man, really, as handsome as any stage actor or politician — if you could get past the bughouse look in his eyes, that is — and here he was, in the prime of his life and with all his wealth and education and a wife like Katherine, reduced to this. He was no better than an animal. Worse. At least an animal knew enough to keep itself clean.

O‘Kane watched his employer’s face for signs of life — the clamped lips, inflexible jaw, the nose like a steel rod grafted to his face and the pale blue gaze of the eyes focused on nothing — and wondered what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all. Did he know he was traveling? Did he know he was going to California? Did he know about oranges and lemons and the kind of money a man could make? But then what did he want with money? He had all the money any hundred men could ever want, and look at all the good it did him.

For the past hour O‘Kane had been reading, but he wasn’t reading aloud and he wasn’t reading The Sea Wolf either. No, the book spread open in his lap was the one Dr. Hamilton had given him, and it took his breath away. It was nothing short of an encyclopedia of sexual perversion — and never mind the title and degrees attached to the author or the resolutely clinical tone. A parade of sexual cannibals, pederasts, satyrs, urine drinkers and child molesters the likes of which no human fancy could have invented marched across the page, rank upon rank, each filthy obsession leading to a yet filthier one. It was scandalous, is what it was, though all the climactic moments were rendered in Latin to mask the shock of it, and O’ane had to rely on context, a vivid imagination and his early training as an altar boy to piece it out.

He’d been deep into a section called “Lust Murder (Lust Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous Lust Extending to Anthropophagy),” the alcohol working in his brain like a chemical massage, totally unconscious of where he was or what he was doing, when Mr. McCormick suddenly made a noise deep in his throat. It was a croak or groan, the sort of deep regurgitant sound a dog makes when it’s working up a puddle of vomit. But then, just as abruptly as it arose, the noise ceased, and Mr. McCormick never moved a muscle the whole time, his eyes still fixed and his head frozen over the pillow like the high dive at the city pool that never got any closer to the water.

Suddenly he groaned again and his lips parted. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,” he said.

“Mr. McCormick? Are you all right?” O‘Kane reached out a hand to touch his shoulder and reassure him.

This gave rise to a vibrato ratcheting, like a door opening on un-oiled hinges: “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”

“It’s all right. I’m here with you. It’s me, O‘Kane. Lie still now — you need your rest.”

“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”

The eyes hadn’t moved, not even to blink. The teeth were clenched tight and the ratcheting, creaking, back-of-the-throat rasp seemed to be forcing itself right through the bone and enamel. “There, there,” O‘Kane murmured. “Would you like me to read to you, is that it?” And he was leaning forward to set down Krafft-Ebing and pick up Jack London, when he caught himself. Sea stories were such a bore — all those spars and jibs and tortured cockney accents. He hated sea stories. He’d always hated them. It was then that an idea came to him, a wonderful golden perverse inspiration. What the hell, he thought, the whiskey barreling through his veins on its admirable journey to his brain and his tongue and the fingertips that turned the pages. Educate yourself,Edward.

“Let’s see,” he said, leafing through the big volume in his lap, “ ‘Koprolagnia, Hair Despoilers, Mutilation of Corpses,’ ah, here we are. Oh, you’ll like this, Mr. McCormick. You’ll really like this.” And then, in the precise, well-modulated voice the nuns had dredged out of him fifteen years earlier, he began to read aloud as the train beat through the night and his audience of one lay rigid and enthralled: “ ‘Case 29, the Girl-Cutter of Augsburg.’ ”

4. FALSE, PETTY, CHILDISH AND SMUG

All her life Katherine Dexter had been disappointed in men. Men had failed her in more ways than she could count — some actively and with malice aforethought, others passively, through no fault of their own. They’d let her down when she most needed them, broken her heart, stood in her way, barred the door and thrown up the barricades. She didn’t like to generalize, but if she did she would find the average man to be false, petty, childish and smug, an overgrown playground bully distended by nature and lack of exercise until he fitted his misshapen suits and the ridiculous bathing costume he donned to show off his apelike limbs at the beach. He was unreliable, loud, demanding, clannish, he defended his prerogatives like a Scottish chieftain, and he expected the whole world to bow down to him and fetch him his pipe and newspaper and coffee brewed just the way he liked it, with cream and sugar and the faintest hint of chicory. And why? Because men were the patriarchs and providers of the earth and obeisance was their due, and that was the way of things, ordained by God, Himself a male.

She let out a sigh. She was tired, cranky, disoriented, her nose had begun to run and she could feel a headache coming on. She’d wrapped up her affairs on the East Coast in a sustained frenzy of list-making, shopping and packing, her mother more a hindrance than a help, and she’d been stuck on the train for six days on top of that. And now here she was, seated on the divan in the reception room of her suite at the Potter Hotel in palmy Santa Barbara, with an invigorating view of the brown-sugar beach and the naked glaring belly of the ocean, in the process of being disappointed all over again.

The men in question this time were Cyrus Bentley, a beaky glabrous little functionary of the McCormicks who never seemed to stop talking, even to pause for breath, as if it were some sort of trick, like fire breathing or sword swallowing, and his accomplice, Dr. Henry B. Favill. Dr. Favill was a tall, elegant and icily imposing man who was inordinately proud of his dog-eating Indian ancestors, unhappy in marriage and stuffed to the eyeballs with McCormick money. They were the family attorney and physician, respectively, solid men in their late forties, universally admired and petted and accustomed to getting their own way. The theme of their little gathering was Stanley. Stanley had provided the context for all previous relations between these two gentlemen and Katherine, and they always took care on these occasions to refer to him by his Christian name and never “Mr. McCormick,” “your husband” or even “the patient,” by way of asserting previous claims. They’d been looking after the family’s legal and medical interests since she was a girl at Miss Hershey’s School in Boston, and they made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she was the interloper here.

Katherine was thirty-two, a newlywed who might as well have been a widow. Stanley was beyond her now, locked away in the prison of his excoriated mind, but she was hopeful of a cure, always hopeful, and she wasn’t about to be cowed by anyone. She swooped in low over the plate of fresh orange and pineapple slices that lay like a gauntlet on the low table between them and cut Bentley off in the middle of an unpunctuated sentence. “So what you’re saying, in crude terms, is that you want to buy me off — is that it?”

Bentley had been leaning forward in his seat and idly rubbing at the place on his right calf where the garter was cutting into his flesh, but now he jerked upright like one of those mechanical bell-ringers carved into a village clock in the Tyrol. Before she’d finished he was sputtering and blustering for all he was worth. “Not at all, not at all,” he was saying, and he just had to spring up and pace round the room, protesting and expostulating and waving his hands like flags of truce. “It was just that the family thought that under the circumstances it would be more convenient for you if perhaps the marriage were terminated — or annulled, we could arrange that, no problem there — and of course the first thing we thought of was your comfort and accommodation, and please forgive me if I feel obliged, through my legal training, to attach a specific sum to such considerations….”

She wasn’t going to let them get to her, no matter how exhausted she was or how much her head ached and her nose dripped. And she wasn’t going to be talked down to like one of the empty-headed heiresses and overfed widows they’d grown sleek on, and she knew the type, weak as watered milk, running round in a dither till the big strong lawyer and the big strong doctor took charge of all their little trials and tribulations. “What about my marriage vows?” she said, making sure to enunciate each word even as she pressed the handkerchief to her recalcitrant nose. “In sickness and in health, Mr. Bentley. What do you say to that?”

There was a silence. For once, Bentley had nothing to say — at least not immediately. She looked beyond him, out the open window to the veranda and the sea and the strange brown-girded islands across the channel. “My husband needs me,” she said, “now more than ever. Did that ever occur to you?”

This was Favill’s cue. He uncrossed his legs and planted his big feet firmly on the carpet, as if he were getting ready to spring at her. “But that’s just the point, Katherine. He doesn’t need you, not according to Dr. Meyer — or your own Dr. Hamilton either. Women upset him. They disturb him. And if it wasn’t for…,” he trailed off suggestively, watching her out of eyes the color of chopped liver.

“For what?” Suddenly her blood was up. It had been a long, frustrating day, the culmination of a frustrating week, month, year. She’d been obliged to breakfast that morning with her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sane sister, Anita, and the atmosphere had been so acidic that everything tasted like grapefruit and vinegar, and then she’d spent the forenoon with the new chauffeur grinding along an endless labyrinth of dusty roads in one of the two Packard motorcars the McCormicks insisted on Stanley’s having, trying to find the celebrated Montecito hot springs, where even now her mother was soaking her arthritic joints while Katherine was left alone here to fend off the McCormick hounds. “Go ahead,” she demanded, “say it: if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be like this. Isn’t that what you mean?”

Favill never took his eyes off her. He never so much as blinked. He didn’t give a damn for her and her Dexter heritage that went back to the founding of the Colonies and six centuries in England before that or the fact that she had her own fortune and could buy and sell any ten Indian chiefs — all he cared about was the McCormicks, parvenus one generation removed from the backwoods of Virginia, people who couldn’t even have licked her father’s boots. “More or less,” he said.

“No reason to be uncivil, Henry,” Bentley clucked, circling round them like the referee at a boxing match. He put his hands on the back of the chair in which he’d been sitting a moment before and leaned forward with an air of false intimacy, a lawyer right down to his socks. “No reason at all,” he said, addressing Katherine now. “But if you’ll forgive me, we have reason to believe that — how shall I say this? — that given Stanley’s mental and physical condition during the period of your connubial relations, the marriage was never, well—” He threw his hands in the air, like a Puritan at a peep show. “You’ve been trained in the sciences, Katherine. I think you know what I mean, from a biological standpoint, if not a legal one.”

So that was what this was all about.

She felt very tired all of a sudden, tired and defeated. The bastards. The unfeeling, unthinking, meretricious, sheet-sniffing bastards. They’d gone snooping after every last shameful shred of bile and gossip, interrogating chambermaids and butlers, extracting testimony from her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sisters and brothers and the team of psychiatrists they’d had swarming all over him since his breakdown, and they thought they had something on her, thought they could shame and bully her and beat her down. But they were wrong. She wouldn’t crack, she wouldn’t. She sat there like a pillar, though she hurt all the way through to the marrow and a hundred nights came back to her in a shattering rush and the look on Stanley’s face and his fright and rage and the unyielding impregnable fortress of his outraged flesh and impacted mind. She sat there and fought the itch in the back of her throat and the seepage in her sinuses. They wouldn’t dare talk to her like this if her mother were here. Or her father. But her mother was soaking her bones in a hot tin tub of mineral water in the middle of a dusty eucalyptus grove somewhere in the hills, and her father was eighteen years dead, another disappointment.

All right, she decided, if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way it would be. She stood. Rose so quickly that Favill had to spring from the chair like a bouncing ball to avoid being stranded there. Bentley looked deeply pained — or perhaps it was just constipation. “Did you—?” he began, exchanging a look with Favill. “Or rather, do you need some time to consider our proposal, because we’re perfectly willing, that is, we, I—”

Still she said nothing. She just stood there, her heart pounding, the hat clamped to her head like a war bonnet, staring them to shame. “I won’t bother showing you the door,” she said finally, and she couldn’t control the edge in her voice. “And you tell the McCormicks there’s no price in blood or money or all the kings’ ransoms in the world that could ever sway me, not one iota. I’ll be married to Stanley when you’re all in your graves, and he’s going to get well, he is, do you hear me? Do you?”

The next disappointment was Hamilton. Though he’d been tiptoeing around her, doing his whispery, smooth-talking, eye-flipping best to avoid putting her out in any way, shambling and shuffling and all but kissing the ground she walked on, he’d yet to relent on the one issue that mattered most: allowing her access to her husband. If she could only see Stanley, even for an hour, she knew she could help bring him out of it. The very sight of her would spark him, it would have to — for all anybody knew, he might think she’d deserted him. And even if his response was, well, difficult, at least it would be something, at least he’d know she was there still and that somebody besides his lantern-jawed nurses cared about him. Stanley had been at Riven Rock for just over a month now — and she’d given Hamilton that month, willingly, though she could hardly sleep for worry and felt like one of the walking dead dragging herself around the corridors of her mother’s house on Commonwealth Avenue and she hadn’t been to the theater or the symphony or even out to dinner — and now she wanted to exercise her rights and prerogatives as a wife, and not coincidentally as the patroness who signed the doctor’s checks and underwrote his ape colony. She’d waited long enough, she’d been patient, she’d listened to every excuse in the book and a whole codicil more. The time had come. Tonight — and she was determined in this — she would see Stanley.

But first, as the sun settled in to slather the sea and baste the pale walls and exotic trees till everything seemed to glow and drip with a thick oleaginous light, Katherine went in to draw a bath and cleanse herself of Bentley and Favill and the lingering taint of the McCormicks. She knew they resented her, her mother-in-law in particular, as stifling and selfish a woman as ever walked the earth, but it was a shock to realize how deeply they must have despised her to unleash the dogs and set them on her without a second thought — and on her first day in Santa Barbara, no less. That hurt. On top of her headaches and her cold and everything else. She wasn’t looking for acceptance — she couldn’t have cared less about the McCormicks and their pathetic little circle — or even warmth, but civility, that much she expected. What did they think she was, some passing whim of Stanley’s? Another McCormick conquest — or purchase? Did they think they were the only ones pacing the floor at all hours of the night and so keyed up they couldn’t even keep a piece of toast on their stomach? She’d been there with him when he broke down. She’d seen the eyes recoil in his head, watched him punish the walls and the furniture and all the dumb objects that fell across his path. She was the one who’d had to listen to his ravings and lock the door of her bedroom and hide in the closet till she thought she was going to suffocate, she was the one who’d run from the house as if it was on fire. And where were the McCormicks then?

Standing there in the hotel bathroom, listening to the water thunder into the big porcelain tub while the brainless sun pressed at the windows and some alien bird croaked from the cover of the palms as if it were half dead and hoping something would come along and finish it off, she felt like crying all over again. She’d never felt so sick and miserable in her life, not even when they’d denied her admission to MIT and made her crawl on her belly through four years of basic science classes the boys had got in high school as a matter of course. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even decent. Favill she could understand — at least he was a real man, long-boned, big-shouldered, with an Ottawa chief’s blood in his veins and the power to crush his adversaries in a fair fight, but Bentley, Bentley was a worm, a creeping spineless thing that made its living in the gut of something greater, or at least larger. She had no respect for either of them, but even less for Bentley, if that was possible. He wasn’t even a man.

She studied her image in the mirror, staring into her own eyes till the moment passed. It was a trick she’d learned as a girl, a way of focusing her anger when they tried to beat her down, and they always tried to beat her down — boys, men, insinuating lawyers, smug administrators and hypocritical teachers alike. She remembered the chess club she’d organized at school in Chicago before her father died and they moved to Boston. It was a good school, the finest the city had to offer, catering to the children of the moneyed class and with no expense spared for teachers, books and facilities, but to Katherine’s mind the best thing about it was that the sexes weren’t segregated. Boys and girls sat side by side in the classroom, given equal access to the best that was known and thought in the world and encouraged to compete as equals. And when Katherine started up the club, her teacher, Mr. Gregson, an extremely old young man with a wispy two-pointed beard and the faraway look of a high-wire artist, encouraged her. At first. But she soon played herself out of competition with the other girls, who were only marginally interested in the game to begin with, and into the realm of the boys. And the boys played as if this game of war were war in fact and never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it. The club lasted two and a half weeks and Katherine took on all comers, the line of boys waiting to be the first of their fraternity to beat the girl sometimes four and five deep. But then all of a sudden Mr. Gregson discovered an obscure prohibition against board games buried deep in the school code, and the club was disbanded.

Steam rose. The water hissed and rumbled. She felt the cool of the tiles beneath her feet and the faintest touch of the steam against her skin, and it calmed her. She bent over the sink and shook out her hair. Loose and unpinned, it was an avalanche of hair, uncontainable, the hair of a wildwoman, an Amazon, and she threw back her head and teased it with her stiff fingers till it was wilder still. She wiped a palm across the glass and stood back for a better look. She saw a naked young woman with flaring eyes and aboriginal hair, strung tight as a bow with the calisthenics she sweated through each and every morning of her life, as fierce and hard and pure as any athlete, though the whole world saw her as nothing more than an ornament, another empty head for the milliner to decorate, one more useless mouth for chattering about the weather and plucking hors d‘oeuvres from the tip of a toothpick. But she wasn’t just another socialite, she was Katherine Dexter McCormick, and she was inflexible, She wouldn’t break — she wouldn’t even bend. She’d fought her way through the Institute against an all-male faculty and a ninety-nine-percent-male student body that howled in unison over the idea of a female in the sciences, and she would fight her way through this too. The McCormicks. They were poor, primitive people. Not worth another thought.

She pulled open the door. “Louisa!” she called, poking her head into the hall while the steam wrapped its fingers round her ankles and the water uncoiled from the faucet with a roar.

The maid came running. A brisk skinny girl from a pious family in Brookline who must have thought California the anteroom to heaven judging from the look on her face, she scurried across the room with a stack of towels three feet thick. Katherine took the towels from her, and she didn’t attempt to cover her nakedness, not at all. Louisa looked away.

“Lay out my blue skirt — the crepon — and the velvet waist. And my pearls — the choker, that is.” She paused, the towels clutched to her, the sun across the room now, in flood, the steam escaping in wisps. “What’s the matter with you? Louisa?”

The girl looked up and away again. “Ma‘am?”

“You don’t have to be shy with me. Surely you’ve seen a woman’s body before — or maybe you haven’t. Louisa?”

Again the look, whipped and defeated, as if the human body were an offense, and suddenly Katherine was thinking of a girl she knew in Switzerland when she was sixteen — Liselle, of the square hands and muscular tongue, the first tongue besides her own Katherine had ever held in her mouth. “Ma‘am?” the maid repeated, and still she wouldn’t look, suddenly fascinated by something on the floor just to the left of where Katherine was standing.

“Nothing,” Katherine said, “it’s nothing. That’ll be all.”

At five that evening, the sun still looming unnaturally over the shrubbery and the hidden bird tirelessly reiterating its grief, the car came for Katherine and her mother. Katherine wasn’t ready yet, though she’d had all afternoon to prepare herself, and when the front desk called to say that the chauffeur had arrived, she was seated at the vanity, pinning her hair up in a severe coil and clamping her black velvetta hat over it like a lid. Her nose had stopped running — and she wondered vaguely if she wasn’t allergic to some indigenous California pollen — but her headache was with her still, lingering just behind the orbits of her eyes like a low-rumbling thundercloud ready to burst at any minute. More than anything, she felt like going to bed.

Her mother, on the other hand, was jaunty and energetic, having poached herself for three hours and more in the gently effervescing waters of the spa, and every time Katherine glanced up from the mirror she saw her bustling round behind her in a new hat, a hat that to Katherine’s mind had been better left in its box. Permanently. And then buried in a time capsule as an artifact of the civilization that had been blindly building toward this millinery apotheosis since the time of the Babylonians. The hat — a Gainesboro in turquoise and black with so many feathers protruding at odd angles you would have thought a pair of mallards was mating atop her mother’s head — was all wrong. Josephine was dressed in black, her shade of choice since widowhood had overtaken her eighteen years ago, and while Katherine had no quarrel with her mother’s injecting a little color into her apparel, this wasn’t the time for it. Or the place. Who could guess what Stanley would be like — or what his reaction to such a hat would be? And Katherine couldn’t help recalling the time, just three weeks into their honeymoon, when he’d flown into a rage and demolished seventeen of her mother’s most cherished hats, and half of them purchased in Paris.

But she was having enough trouble with her own outfit, which she’d changed a dozen times now, to worry about her mother’s. She’d finally settled on a dove-gray suit of Venetian wool, though the climate was a bit warm for it, over a high-collared silk shirtwaist in plain white. She didn’t want to wear anything provocative, given Stanley’s excitability, but then there was no need to look like a matron either, and she’d spent a good part of the afternoon crossing and recrossing the strip of carpet between the mirror and the closet, trying on this combination or that and quizzing her mother and Louisa until she was satisfied. Stanley had always liked her in gray, or at least she thought she remembered him claiming he did, and she hoped there would be something there, some spark of recollection that would help bring him back to the world.

Outside the window, the palms rattled oppressively in a sudden breeze off the ocean, and the irritating bird, whatever it was, discovered an excruciating new pitch for its deathsquawk—raw, raw, raw—and when her mother stumped across the room for the hundredth time in her ridiculous hat, Katherine wanted to scream. She was a bundle of nerves, and why wouldn’t she be? Fighting off the McCormicks and their dogs, traveling better than three thousand miles over one set of jolting rails after another till every muscle in her body felt as if it had been beaten with a whisk, her whole life thrown into turmoil by Stanley’s wild-eyed tantrums and the catatonia that turned him into a living statue. She hadn’t seen him in over six months now, and she felt as tentative and expectant as she had on her wedding night.

She was still fussing in the mirror — her hair wasn’t right, and she wasn’t sure about the hat either — when the front desk rang a second time to remind them that their driver was in the lobby. “Come on, dear,” Josephine urged, suddenly looming in the mirror behind her, “we mustn’t keep poor Stanley waiting — that is, if we do actually get to see him this time.” Exasperated, Katherine rose from the stool and fumbled for her wrap and her purse and the chocolates and magazines she meant to bring for Stanley, and her mother, hovering at her elbow, began a soliloquy on the theme of disappointment and all the little false alarms they’d had in Waverley and how she couldn’t stand to see her daughter moping around and looking so absolutely heartbroken all the time and how they shouldn’t get their hopes up too high because there was no telling how poor Stanley was adjusting to his new surroundings, if one was able to speak of his adjusting at all.

Poor Stanley. That was how her mother had always referred to him, even before his breakdown, even when he was as handsome and fit and well-spoken as any man who’d ever stepped across the threshold of the high narrow-shouldered house on Commonwealth Avenue, as if she could detect the fragility at the core of him like a diviner descrying water in the bones of the earth. “I don’t know, mother,” Katherine said, turning to her as the maid held the door for them, “I really don’t know. But Dr. Hamilton promised in his last letter… that is, he didn’t actually promise, but he was optimistic that the change would do Stanley good, not to mention finally being settled in a healthful climate, and I really don’t see any reason—”

“Just as I suspected.” Josephine said, striding briskly through the door and out into the resplendent halls of the Potter Hotel, her skirts crepitating, the wings of her hat flapping in the breeze she generated. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And then they were in the car, arranging veils, leathers and various rugs to keep the dust off, while the chauffeur, a tense little man with a bristling sunburned neck and a pair of sunburned ears that stood straight out from his head, wrestled the steering wheel and fought the gear lever with brisk angry jerks of his shoulders. Katherine and her mother were perched in back of him on the leather banquette seat, as exposed to the elements as they would have been in a buggy, and after the first mile or so, when they turned from the wide boulevard that ran parallel to the beach in order to circumvent an inlet called “The Salt Pond,” Josephine began to complain. “I don’t see how anyone could ever get used to these rattling machines,” she shouted over the stuttering roar of the motor. “The smell of them — and the noise. Give me a nice quiet brougham and an even-tempered mare any day.”

“Yes, mother,” Katherine replied through her gauze veil, “and I suppose horses don’t smell at all — or scatter manure across every road from here to Maine and back.” She was beginning to enjoy herself for the first time since she’d arrived, her headache receding, her nose drying up, and the air new-made from the sea and pregnant with the scent of a million flowers, citrus blossoms, Pittosporum undulatum, jasmine. The place wasn’t really so bad at all — she’d pictured the Wild West, men in serapes and drooping mustaches, women in mantillas, an utter void — but the Potter had surprised her (it really was a first-class hotel, the equal of anything you’d find in the East), as had the charming adobes and grand Italian villas she glimpsed through the stands of eucalyptus. There was a surprising air of culture and civility about the place, and there was no denying its natural beauty, with its sea vistas and the dark stain of its mountains against an infinite cloudless sky. It was like a tropical Newport, a conflation of the Riviera and Palm Beach. Or better yet, the Land of the Lotos Eaters, “In which it seemed always afternoon.”

For once, she thought, the McCormicks had been right. (And oh, how they’d campaigned to bring Stanley west, Nettie crouching nightly over the idea like some beast with its kill, dragging it up and down the length of the drawing room in her clamped and unyielding jaws while Bentley and Favill beat the sacrificial drums and sister Anita wailed the ritual lament.) Now that she was here, now that she was actually in the car and on her way to Riven Rock, the sun leaping through the trees ahead of her and the scented breeze kissing the veil to her lips, Katherine could feel the rightness of it. This was what Stanley needed. This was it. This was the place that would make him well.

“I just don’t understand this craze for motoring,” her mother observed in a casual shriek. “It’s so — oh, I don’t know — debilitating. And I don’t doubt for a minute that all that driving contributed to poor Stanley’s decline.” The car lurched to the left to avoid a wagon rut, righted itself, and then immediately pounded over a section of road that was like a cheese grater. “I know I’ll be a nervous case myself if I have to do much more of this — and to think he did it willingly, as some sort of hobby—”

This was a rather galling reference to Stanley’s passion for motorcars — a passion Katherine had never shared, but which she felt compelled to defend out of wifely loyalty. “That’s perfectly absurd, mother, and you know it. If anything,” she shouted, “driving calmed him.”

Stanley had been one of the first in the country to have an automobile, as people were calling them now, and he always insisted on driving himself, the chauffeur accompanying him solely as a hedge against mechanical emergencies. In fact — and her mother knew it as well as she did — if it weren’t for motoring, she and Stanley might never have met. Almost five years ago now, in the summer of her final year at the Institute, she’d gone to a resort in Beverly with a group of mostly young people — Betty Johnston and her brother Morris, Pamela Huff, the Tretonnes — to sleep late, swim and ride and play tennis and forget all about the circulatory systems of reptiles and the thesis looming over her head. They were playing croquet on the main lawn one afternoon when Stanley suddenly appeared, striding over the hill and through the cluster of wickets in goggles and a greatcoat so thick with dust he looked as if he’d been dipped in flour preparatory to some cannibal feast. And what was he doing there to miraculously recognize her from the dancing class they’d attended together at the age of thirteen and twelve respectively all those years ago in Chicago and to charm her with that sweet recollection and a hundred other things? He was motoring. Across country. Or at least that part of it that lay between the Adirondacks and Boston.

Katherine couldn’t help but smile at the memory, but then, as the chauffeur guided them back along the route they’d taken to the hot springs and into the umbrageous environs of Montecito, she began to wonder why her mother had brought up Stanley’s driving — was it only to provoke her? To widen the gulf between her and her husband? To weigh in on the side of annulment, divorce, a settlement? She stole a glance at her mother’s flapping form, the mad hat, the streaming veil and the smug ghostly expression, and she knew.

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear?” her mother screamed.

“You haven’t been talking to Mr. Bentley, have you? Or Mr. Favill, maybe? ”

No response. The engine whined and chewed away at itself; a pair of ugly glittering birds heaved up and out of the roadway, leaving a long wet pounded strip of meat behind them. “Turkey vultures,” Katherine whispered to herself, “Cathartes aura,” and it was automatic with her to classify everything that moved. She peered at her mother’s face through the clinging wraith of the veil and felt her heart sink. The headache was back. Her sinuses were in flood. She felt betrayed. “Have you?” she cried into the wind.

“I’m sorry,” her mother shouted, leaning forward and cupping her hands to her mouth, “I didn’t hear you. Dear.”

“Yes, you did,” Katherine shouted back. “You met with them, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

But all her mother would say, as the chauffeur jerked his shoulders and the car twitched and shimmied and plunged into one pothole after another, was, “Very pleasant gentlemen, both of them.”

After that, they drove on in silence, the dusty roads of Santa Barbara giving way to the dusty cartpaths of Montecito, “the Millionaires’ Eden,” as the newspapers had it, the place where robber barons, industrialists and breakfast food magnates alike came to escape the snow and potter around their grandiose estates in a botanical delirium of banana trees, limes, kumquats and alligator pears. Katherine was predisposed to hate the place — Why did the McCormicks always have to pull the strings? What was so bad about Waverley and Massachusetts? Had no one ever gotten well there? — and now, her mood spoiled again, she settled in to loathe it in earnest. There was beauty everywhere she looked, intense, physical, immediate, but her eyes were veiled and it was a cloying beauty, destructive and hateful, the sort of beauty that masked the snake and the scorpion — and the McCormicks. Even when the chauffeur turned off Hot Springs and onto Riven Rock Road and they passed through the main gate and the big stone fairy castle of a house stood before her, the house of the Beast bristling with roses, Stanley’s house, she made herself feel nothing.

Then the engine coughed and died with a final tubercular wheeze, and the silence washed over them like a benediction. Josephine was the first to free herself of her veil, which she’d pinned jauntily to the towering precipice of her hat. Leaning over the side of the car to shake out the dust and kick the rug from her legs in the same motion, she observed drily that the house was a bit ostentatious, wasn’t it?

It was. Of course it was. What else would you expect of the McCormicks? Katherine unpinned her own veil and patted her hair back in place while the little chauffeur — Roscoe something-or-other — scrambled out to help her down. But she wasn’t ready yet — she would take her own good time — and she sat there a moment gazing up at the windows opaque with sun and wondering if Stanley were behind one of them, if he were gazing out at her even then. The thought made her self-conscious, and her hands fluttered involuntarily to her hair again.

The history of the house, as she knew it, was as sad as anything she could conceive of. Her mother-in-law had built it as a refuge for Mary Virginia in the late nineties, a private sanatorium with one patient — out of sight, out of mind — and they couldn’t have picked a spot farther from Chicago society unless they’d gone up to the Alaska Territory or put her on a boat for the Solomon Islands. It was a place where Mary Virginia could be alone with her doctor, her nurses, the scullery maids, cooks and washerwomen and the horde of Sicilian gardeners who’d transformed the property from a sleepy orange grove with a clapboard farm-house plunked down in the middle of it to a proper estate with proper grounds that wouldn’t have been out of place in Grosse Pointe or Scars-dale. Nettie had hired the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge to design the house — two stories, in the style of the Spanish missions, with rounded arches and a tower at one end — and she’d got a noted botanist, Dr. Francisco Franceschi, to oversee the landscaping, with its 150 specimens of daphnes imported from Japan, the nine-hole golf course and all the rest. And that was sad. Because the McCormicks felt if they sank enough money into the place they could salve their consciences, breathe easy, close the chapter on their sad mad daughter and sister.

But it got even sadder than that, because Stanley was here then, sweet-tempered, vigorous, witty, a twenty-one-year-old Princeton grad with a sweet shy smile and eyes that fastened on you till you felt there was no one else alive in the world. He’d come with his mother to give her support and help with the arrangements. But simply to help wasn’t enough for Stanley — he was a perfectionist, a zealot, mad for detail. He met daily with Dr. Franceschi, quizzed the stone masons and arborists, pored over the plans with the young architect Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge had hired to oversee construction, moving a wall here, adding a nook or courtyard there, and a window, always a window. He was the one who’d suggested moving the patient’s quarters from the ground floor to the second story — for the views — and he’d designed the rooms himself, right down to the molding of the windows and doorframes and the tiles in the bath.

That was what hit her now, the irony of it, and that was saddest of all: poor Stanley had been designing his own prison and he never knew it. No one did. He had all the promise in the world — member of half a dozen clubs at college, editor of the school paper, chairman of the Casino committee, tennis prodigy, scholar, painter, athlete, poet, the McCormick wealth at his fingertips and every possibility alive to him — and when Mary Virginia was moved to Arkansas to be with her new doctor, no one suspected that Riven Rock would be anything other than a happy place, a winter resort, one of half a dozen McCormick homes scattered round the country. But Stanley still had promise. He did. Bucketloads of it. He was a young man yet and he had plenty of time to get on with his life and do something in the world — if he could just get well again. That was the first step. That was what mattered, and all the lawyers and doctors and quibbling McCormicks in the world didn’t have a thing to do with it.

Katherine still hadn’t moved. The sun melted into the windows, the sky yawned, the stillness was absolute. Her mother was down on the pavement now, feathers everywhere, a whole aviary’s worth, gazing up at her with the clear-eyed, analytic look Katherine remembered from her girlhood and the odd case of tonsillitis or indigestion it was meant to ferret out. The chauffeur, so wiry and intense behind the wheel, seemed to have died on his feet as he stood there poised to help her down from the floating step of the Packard. “Katherine?” Josephine was saying. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she heard herself say.

“Because if you’re not,” Josephine went on, “we don’t have to do this at all, not today, not when you’re still so worn out and exhausted from your trip—”

Then she was on her feet, towering above them, moving forward to descend from the car while the windows exploded with light and the chauffeur’s clawlike hand suddenly appeared on the periphery to offer support, and she watched her own tight-laced foot as it hovered in the air over the terra incognita of her husband’s private asylum. “I told you I’m all right,” she said, and there it was again, that hint of asperity and exasperation, “—didn’t I?”

Her mother shut up then, clamping her lips together and setting her jaw in her best imitation of pique, too giddy with California and her mineral soak to harbor any real resentment and too concerned about the delicacy of “the Stanley situation,” as she’d begun to call it, to push any further. In silence, trailed by the chauffeur and walking as stiffly as two strangers looking for their seats at the opera, Katherine and her mother went up the walk, mounted the great stone slabs of the front steps and rang the bell. O‘Kane appeared at the door even before the tympanic echoes of the bell had died away in a series of dull reverberations that seemed to take refuge in the huge clay pots that stood on either side of the entrance. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d been expecting someone else altogether. Or no one at all. “Good evening,” he managed to sputter, holding the door for them and trying his best to compose his face around a smile.

“Good evening,” Katherine returned, but brusquely, in the way of getting it over with, and she didn’t acknowledge his smile with one of her own — she was too wrought up for smiling, too sad and angry and pessimistic, and O‘Kane’s awkwardness irritated her. What did it mean? That they hadn’t been expected? But that was absurd — someone had to have dispatched the car, and at breakfast her mother-in-law had gone on ad nauseam about the charms of Riven Rock and how much everyone was looking forward to her seeing and approving of it. Or was it Hamilton? Was he going to flip his eyes and tell her that Stanley had taken a turn for the worse and she couldn’t see him, her own husband, in his own house, after waiting day by miserable day through six night-marish months and traveling all this bone-rattling, sinus-pounding, headache-forging way?

“Oh, Mr. O‘Kane,” her mother shrieked behind her, “so nice to see you again — and how are you finding California? Missing your wife, I’ll bet? Hm? Yes?”

Katherine wanted to strangle her. She wanted to wheel round on her and shout, “Shut up, mother, just shut up!” and even before she had a chance to see what crimes against taste Stanley’s own small-town philistine of a mother had committed with regard to the furnishings, she found herself snapping at O‘Kane. “Where’s my husband?” she demanded, striding into the room with half a mind to begin trying doors at random.

O‘Kane slammed the front door on the chauffeur and sprinted to her even as Nick Thompson rose from a chair at the foot of the stairs to intercept her. “Is he upstairs, is that it?” she demanded of the blunted eyes and napiform head of the elder Thompson. There seemed to be pottery everywhere, shelves of it — urns, bowls, vases, cups — and all of it a dull earthen brown. The place was hideous — It looked like a Spanish bordello, like a bullring, and she had a sudden urge to smash every last clay pot and Andalusian gewgaw in a frenzy of noise and dust and shattering because she knew in that moment they were going to stop her from going up those stairs, saw it in their eyes and the way they slung their shoulders at her and braced themselves as if she were one of the madwomen they’d kept locked away at McLean in a shit-bespattered cell.

She had her foot on the first step when O‘Kane caught up with her — and he wouldn’t dare touch her, he wouldn’t dare — leaping three steps in a bound and turning to face her from the higher stair, his arms spread in expostulation, the big man, the cheat, the deceiver, disappointment made flesh. “Mrs. McCormick, no,” he said, “please. Dr. Hamilton said—”

“Step aside,” she said.

“Mrs. McCormick,” pleading, his stricken face and meaty hands, and now Nick was there beside him, her mother tugging at her arm from behind, “I’m sorry, very sorry, but Dr. Hamilton said your husband can’t have any visitors just now — yet, I mean — and especially not women, because of what happened on the train, that is, the incident—”

“What incident?” She felt her heart stop. “What are you talking about? ”

She saw O‘Kane exchange a glance with Nick Thompson, and then Nick, with his big head and bloat of muscle, said that she’d better talk to the doctor and O’Kane agreed, his head bobbing up and down on the fulcrum of his chin, and her mother said, Yes, that would be best, in the sort of voice she used on the cats when they scratched the furniture.

Katherine’s pulse was like a Chinese rocket. Drums were pounding in her head. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. “All right, then,” she said, shaking off her mother’s hand and struggling to keep her voice steady, “I’ll talk to the doctor. Where is he?”

Another look passed between the two men on the stairs. “He’s outside,” O‘Kane said after a moment.

“Outside?” Katherine was astonished. She’d come all this way and Hamilton wasn’t even here to greet her? “What’s he doing, taking the air?”

“No,” Nick began, tugging at the knot of his tie with one blocky forefinger and wincing under the constraint, “he’s out there with the—”

“The apes,” O‘Kane interjected. “Or monkeys. You see, this sea captain — from Mindanao — he was here no more than an hour ago with the first of the two monkeys — hominoids, that is — in a wicker cage. He heard Dr. Hamilton was looking for hominoids and he got a ride out here with Baldessare Dimucci, the manure man, and, uh, the monkeys — hominoids — were overheated or chilled or something and Dr. Hamilton had to see to them right away, because if he didn’t, well, he was afraid they‘d—”

Katherine raised her voice then — she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t right to show any emotion with the help — it just brought you down to their level, and she’d known that all her life — but she just couldn’t restrain herself, not here, not now. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t give two figs for the manure man and his monkeys — I want to see my husband. And if I can’t see him, I want to know why. Now, will you lead me to Dr. Hamilton this instant or am I going to have to terminate the employment of every last person on these grounds and start all over again?”

Sixty seconds later, after having determined that her mother would rather stay behind and “have a nice chat with Mr. Thompson,” Katherine was back outside, following O‘Kane through the garden at the rear of the house. If she weren’t in such a state she might have appreciated what Dr. Franceschi had accomplished with his bold arrangements of daphnes and rock roses, the flood of gazanias, long-necked birds of paradise, nasturtiums the size of saucers, but appreciation would have to wait. She saw nothing but an undifferentiated mass of vegetation and the back of O’Kane’s head, where the soft blond hair of his nape joined inaVand descended into the white band of his collar. The path took them through the garden and into an open field of golden, waist-high grass, from the depths of which two piebald cows looked up at them stupidly, and finally into the dense shade of a stand of live oak.

“Dr. Hamilton?” O‘Kane called, and there was an odd note to his voice, a note of warning, as if to intimate that he wasn’t alone. He slowed his pace, edging forward into the shadows, Katherine right behind him. It was warm. She could feel the perspiration on her brow, at the hairline, just under the brim of her hat.

“Edward?” The doctor’s voice came from somewhere off to the right, arising disembodied from the twisted maze of snaking limbs and overarching branches. “Are they here already?” the voice called. “Because if they are, you’re going to have to stall them a minute while I—”

“I’ve got Mrs. McCormick with me,” O‘Kane shouted, and in that instant the doctor appeared, materializing out of the gloom where two massive gray trunks intersected like crossed swords not thirty feet away. He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar was unfastened and there seemed to be something in his hair, some foreign matter, dander or fluff or something — or was it straw? “Katherine!” he cried, scurrying across the cracked yellow earth in dusty shoes and a pair of trousers that looked as if they’d been used to clean out the stables. “How good to see you!”

She allowed him to take her hand while he writhed and groveled and disparaged himself for the state of his clothes and hair and most of all for not having been there to greet her in person, but it was all the fault — a chuckle here, nervous and high-pitched — of the hominoids, the anthropoids, the monkeys, because didn’t she see that they’d gotten very lucky indeed with Captain Piroscz and she had to have a look at them, just a look, because they were so, so engaging—

At this juncture there was a long trailing inhuman shriek from the clump of vegetation just ahead, and the wizened frowning face of a little fur-covered homunculus peered out at them from a frame of cupped leaves. “Oh, there you are, you little devil,” Hamilton chided, and he inched forward with his left arm crooked at the elbow and held out stiffly before him, as if he were inviting the thing to dance. “Come on,” he crooned, “come to Papa.”

The monkey — Katherine recognized it from her lab work as a rhesus — merely stared at the doctor out of its saucer eyes. It was a spectacularly unattractive specimen, the color of mustard left out to dry overnight on the edge of a knife, its fur patchy and worn and its skin maculated with open sores and dark matted scabs. There seemed to be something wrong with one of its front paws and its eyes weren’t quite right — there was some sort of film or web over the cornea. When Hamilton got within five feet of it, coaxing and making kissing noises with his lips, it let out another howl and vanished into the canopy overhead.

The doctor dropped his arm to his side and let out a little laugh. “I’m sorry, Katherine,” he said, and she could see that he wasn’t sorry at all, “sorry to have to put you through this — they’re just feeling their oats, that’s all. And perhaps I shouldn’t have released them, but they were looking so pathetic in that cramped bamboo cage and you just knew they hadn’t so much as stretched their limbs the whole way across the Pacific, probably not since they’d been captured in the jungles of the Orient… besides which, this is where I’ve decided to construct the apery and I do intend to give them as much freedom as possible.” There was a pause, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, and then he clapped his hands suddenly and wrung them as if they were wet. “Well,” he said. “And so how are you?”

Katherine was about to say that she wasn’t feeling well at all, that she was worn out from worry and travel and not a little irritated and that she was stunned and disconcerted to find the doctor’s henchmen daring to interfere with her seeing her husband and that furthermore she demanded to know just where she stood, but she never got the chance. Because at that moment, as the doctor slouched there in disarray and O‘Kane shuffled his feet in the dirt and the declining sun coppered the branches of the trees, the monkey suddenly plopped down from above and landed squarely on Hamilton’s head, digging its fingers into his scalp and hissing like a cornered cat. But that wasn’t all: in the next instant it was joined by another, which came sailing out of thin air to adhere, caterpillar-like, to the doctor’s shoulder. “Screeee-screeee!” they jeered, boxing furiously at one another with leathery fists while the doctor’s pince-nez flew in one direction and his collar in the other. And then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone again, hurtling through the branches like phantoms.

Katherine couldn’t help herself. She was furious, maddened, out for blood, but at the sight of the punctilious little doctor’s utter helplessness in the face of such primitive energy, she had to laugh. To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O‘Kane, the bruiser, who’d gone absolutely pale at the sight of the tiny hominoids that couldn’t have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny.

“They just won’t listen to reason,” Hamilton snorted, facetious and gay, the pince-nez dangling jauntily from his throat, his collar crushed underfoot. The monkeys rode high in the treetops, chittering and screeching. O‘Kane shuffled his feet. Katherine pressed a handkerchief to her face, suppressed a sneeze. “Ha!” Hamilton exclaimed, “I know the type, don’t think I don’t,” and he let out an extraneous laugh. “The devils, the very devils — they’re even worse than my patients.”

That was when the gaiety went out of the air, as thoroughly as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. Katherine’s face was burning. Now, suddenly, she felt nothing but outrage. “I want to see my husband,” she said, and her voice was small and cold.

Hamilton frowned. He was hateful, ridiculous, a smear of monkey urine on his sleeve, lint in his hair — he was a man and he was going to deny her. “I’ve been meaning to write you,” he said.

5. GIOVANNELLA DIMUCCI

O‘Kane had been dreaming of Rosaleen — or someone like her, a silvery succubus of feathery lips and needful flesh hovering just out of reach — when he was awakened, as he was every morning, by the strangled croaking wheeze of Sal Oliveirio’s bedraggled rooster. This was succeeded by the lowing of cows and a garbled disquisition in Italian featuring three or four voices, and then, after a bit, by a smell of woodsmoke and the potent aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling in the pan. He didn’t get up right away — he wasn’t on duty till eight this morning — but lay there staring at the ceiling and the thin veneer of light on the windows, hoping to fall back into the dream. He had a hard-on — It seemed he always had a hard-on lately, day and night, and that was because he was living the life of a monk in his cell — and he stroked himself with a slow yearning rhythm, thinking of Rosaleen, the girl on the train, Katherine, until the moment of release came and he could lie still again.

But he couldn’t get back to sleep, and that was annoying because sleep was a refuge from boredom and he was bored, he had to admit it — itchy and restless and bored. It was the middle of July and he’d been in California for seven weeks now, living in a ground-floor room in the servants’ quarters of the big stone house, while the servants — wops, mostly, but there were a couple of Spaniards or Mexicans mixed in — crowded into the cottages out back. Mart was in the room next to him, but Nick and Pat had moved into town when their families came out to join them — and Rosaleen was supposed to have come with them, two weeks ago now, but O‘Kane had put her off. He told her it was because he hadn’t been able to find a decent place for her and the baby, and that was the truth — he hadn’t. Of course, he’d been into town exactly four times since he’d arrived, and when he was there — at night, in the company of Mart and Roscoe LaSource, the chauffeur — he wasn’t looking for apartments.

He felt bad about that, and he missed his son — and Rosaleen too, and maybe even his parents and Uncle Billy and his sisters into the bargain — but he wanted to experience California on his own, wanted to suck everything he could out of this otherworldly place where lizards licked over the rocks and the flowers were like trees and the ocean stretched all the way to China. It was just what he’d imagined, only so much richer and more complex, as if what he’d pictured California to be was just the first page in a whole encyclopedia of imaginings. There were ferns twenty feet tall, trees that shed bark instead of leaves, palms as thin as lampposts, and flowers, flowers everywhere — the whole world was flowers. It was drier than he would have guessed — it hadn’t rained a drop in the whole time he’d been here, if you discounted the mist that settled on everything and made a lingering dream of the mornings — and he’d never realized that Riven Rock and all these grand estates were going to be so far from town, five miles at least. Maybe he ought to buy a bicycle — or sprout a pair of wings. Christ, as it was he felt as much a prisoner as poor Mr. McCormick, and that was what he missed most — the saloons, the shops, the pavement, streetlights, civilization.

He’d never lived in the country before, never awakened to roosters and cows, never spent so much time with foreigners — Italians, that is. They were everywhere, shambling along the dirt lanes in baggy pants and sweat-stained shirts, hewing stones, trimming hedges, hoeing up weeds in the orchards, not to mention slapping the hind end of every cow and goat in the county six times a day and pounding the laundry in big tubs out in the courtyard or creeping through the house with mops and brooms and a look of greasy resignation. But they were all right, the Italians. Most of them spoke English, or at least a version of it he and Mart could untangle, and he sat most nights on a rock in the middle of the orange grove with Sal and Baldy and some of the others, passing a jug of red wine or a jar of that liquid fire they called grappa. And their women weren’t half bad, the young ones especially. They were more the bucolic type than Miss Ianucci maybe, but one or two of them really managed to get his attention.

And the oranges. They were right there hanging from the trees, no different from apples or peaches back East, and not a day passed when he didn’t get up in the morning and saunter out in the perfumed air and pick himself two or even three of them and shuck the peels while he walked, the sun in his face, hummingbirds hanging over the flowers like bits of colored foil suspended in the air and the mountains standing up in front of him all wrapped in mist like an oil painting.

But still, he couldn’t help thinking of Rosaleen as he heaved himself out of bed, slapped some water on his face and swept his hair back with the comb while he studied his chin in the mirror and debated whether he could get by without a shave. Maybe he should send for her — the McCormicks were paying for it. Then he could get a place downtown, on one of those streets up by the old Mission with all the shade trees, and he’d be close to the saloons and the lunch counters and the Chinese laundry, and he’d get it steady every night and never have to wake up to the damn chickens and feel so lonely and cored out. That’s what he was thinking as he stood at the mirror knotting his tie and beginning to entertain notions of breakfast, Sam Wah’s flapjacks and three eggs cooked in butter with a slab of fried ham and the fresh-baked bread he could already smell, when he happened to glance down at the letter on the bureau. It was from Rosaleen and it had come two days ago, and though he’d read it through six times already, in his present frame of mind he couldn’t resist idly picking it up. And once it was in his hand, he almost involuntarily unfolded it and smoothed it out on the cool marble surface:

Dear Eddie:

The son is shinning I bot a new pair of short pance for Eddie Juner thank you for the money. He is so cut & I want you every nite so much to stick your thing in me I’m like a starving woman with someboddy cooking bakon in the air so pleese Eddie send for the tikets becoz Mildred Thompson and Ernestine and the boys all left tow weeks ago & I miss you

Yours in Love & Lust, Rosaleen

He could hear her voice and see her in a jerky series of poses, mainly sexual, that was as flickery and fleeting as one of Edison’s motion pictures, and that softened him. But then he took another look at the looping backward scrawl of her cursive and the spelling that never got past the third-grade level and wondered what had ever possessed him to marry her. When she told him she was pregnant back in September, the two of them walking home hand-in-hand from Brophy’s Bar & Grill, the sky full of stars and her lips swollen like sponges and so sweet he might have been licking the lid of a jar of honey, he should have run and never looked back, should have bolted for Alaska, Siberia, anyplace. But he didn’t. He married her. Stood at the altar and swore before God and Father Daugherty to live with her for the rest of his life. Yes. But she was in Waverley, returned to the bosom of her family, back with her father and mother and her fat-faced semimoronic brothers, and he was here, in California, without a care in the world. And how could you argue with that?

Mart was in the dining room, hunched over his plate and chewing with a mindless stolidity, when O‘Kane came in for breakfast. The doctor and Mrs. Hamilton weren’t up yet. They were staying in one of the guest rooms in the east wing, with their squally little baby, until they could find a suitable house in the neighborhood. The servants were fed in the servants’ hall, to the rear of the house, and Mr. McCormick was fed by his nurses, through a tube, at nine o’clock on the dot. So on this particular morning, with the palest whitest ghostliest sun suspended in an ether of mist that washed away the background till the whole house might have been a ship at sea, it was just Mart and O‘Kane at breakfast. “Top of the morning to you, Mart,” O’Kane crowed, tipping back the cover of the serving tray while the housemaid, a sexless spinster in her forties by the name of Elsie Reardon, fluttered around him with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice in one hand and a gleaming silver coffee urn in the other.

Mart grunted a reply. He’d washed his hair, which he combed forward to soften the great gleaming lump of his forehead, and the hair, dangling wetly, had the effect of a bit of packing material pasted atop a lightbulb. There was egg on his chin.

“I don’t know how you stand it,” O‘Kane sighed, sinking into the chair across from him. “I mean, being a bachelor out here in the middle of nowhere when your brothers are at home getting theirs every night and even Dr. Hamilton’s got his wife with him… and the wops, they’re out there in those cottages screwing like dogs. I can’t stand it. I’m going crazy here.”

Mart looked interested. He set down his fork, dabbed at his chin with the napkin. Elsie poured coffee with a scandalized face, then stumped out of the room. “What about Rose?”

O‘Kane shrugged. “I’m talking about now, today, tonight. I’m used to having it, you know? Of course, look who I’m talking to — you probably never had a good screw in your life, am I right?”

Mart protested, but weakly, and O‘Kane saw the truth hit home.

“It’s like this ham”—and he held up the pink slab of it on the tines of his fork, crisp from the pan and iridescent with smoke-cured grease. “If Elsie didn’t give you any tomorrow, you wouldn’t think much of it. But if two days went by, three, a week — you know what I mean? And sex — well, that’s a real bodily necessity, just like food and water and moving your bowels—”

“And whiskey,” Mart put in with a sly smile. “Don’t forget whiskey.”

O‘Kane grinned back. “What do you say we talk Roscoe into going into town tonight?”

And then it was the morning routine. Say goodnight to Nick and Pat, who were just coming off their shift, and hello to Mr. McCormick, bent up double like a pretzel in his bed; then it was strip off Mr. McCormick’s nightgown and swab up the mess he’d left on the sheets, pack the whole business up for the laundress and give Mr. McCormick his shower bath, and all the while O‘Kane thinking about Robert Ogilvie, director of the Peachtree Asylum in Stone Mountain, Georgia, who suspended all his catatonics on a rack in a big metal tub, day and night, and just changed the water when it got mucked up. No stains, no smells, no laundry — just a plug and a faucet. Now that was progress.

“He’s not looking real good this morning,” O‘Kane observed when they first walked into the room and stood over the fouled bed and saw the position Mr. McCormick had got himself into.

Mart was oblivious. He merely bobbed his big head with the hair dried round it in a fringe and stared down at their employer as if he were a piece of furniture. “I’ve seen him worse.”

Sometime during the night Mr. McCormick had hunched himself up like a fetus in the womb, and he’d managed to lock one foot behind the other in a way that looked uncomfortable, painful even — the sort of thing you’d expect from a swami or contortionist. He was breathing hard, his ribs heaving as if he’d just come back from a ten-mile run, and his eyes were open and staring and his hands locked together in an unbreakable clasp, but he didn’t respond to them at all. They had no choice but to lift him out of bed as he was, a hand each under his armpit and buttock, and haul him over to the shower bath where the water would take some of the crust off him and they could get at the rest of it with a bar of Palm Olive soap and the scrub brushes, and it wasn’t any different from any other day, but for the pose he was in. Still and all, it was a strange sensation to have to drag a man around like that, a grown naked man worth nobody knew how many millions and as lifeless as a side of beef hanging from a meathook. Only his eyes were alive, and they didn’t register much — the quickest jump to the needles of water in the shower bath or the light bulging at the windows and then back to nothing.

It was eerie. Unsettling. No matter how often O‘Kane experienced it or how many patients he’d seen like this — and he’d bathed them one after another at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, twenty at a time, hosing them down afterward like hogs in a pen — it still affected him. How could anybody live like that? Be like that? And what did it take for the mechanism to break down, for the normal to become abnormal, for a man like Mr. McCormick, who had everything and more, to lose even the faculty of knowing it?

“I wish he’d come out of it, Mart,” he said after they’d set him down on his side under the spray of the shower bath. “Even if he got violent again — anything.”

“Are you kidding?” Mart rubbed the spot over his left eye where their employer had slugged him on the train. Steam rose from the floor. Water hissed against the tiles. Mr. McCormick, his skin glistening and the hair a dark skullcap pressed to his temples and creeping up the back of his neck, began to grunt softly.

“Think about it, Mart — he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it. I mean, I’ve been so blind drunk I didn’t know where I was and I’ve slept in an alley once and one time I woke up on the beach with a bunch of crabs scuttling all over me, but I knew right away I was Eddie O‘Kane.”

Mart didn’t seem to grasp the point. He just stared down at the hunched-up shape on the naked tiles and began to shake his head. “I wish he’d stay like this forever, nice and quiet.” And then he lowered his voice, because you could never tell what Mr. McCormick was thinking or what he might retain. “If he gets well he won’t need us anymore, that’s for sure — and then where would we be?”

At nine, after they’d massaged Mr. McCormick’s muscles to loosen him up a bit and got his feet untangled, Mart pried open the patient’s jaws with a wooden dowel and O‘Kane jammed the feeding tube between his teeth. (And Mr. McCormick had good strong teeth, but they’d gone yellow because he wasn’t able to keep them up.) The tube consisted of a hollowed-out piece of bamboo a headhunter might have used to blow darts through and an ordinary kitchen funnel, and for breakfast Mr. McCormick was having the same thing they’d had — ham, eggs, toast and coffee — but it had been painstakingly reduced to a thick black gruel by Sam Wah, the Chinese cook. While O’Kane was thus employed, hovering over the gaping mouth of his patient like some flightless bird with its unfathomable chick, waiting out the tedious drip of the mash, repetitively wiping the patient’s mouth and chin and pinching his nostrils to encourage the swallowing reflex, he couldn’t help reflecting on the lack of progress Mr. McCormick had made over the course of the past two months.

He hadn’t always been like this. When he first came to McLean two years back, he’d just broken down and the prognosis was good. He was very disturbed, of course, particularly the first couple of days, lashing out at anybody who came within three feet of him and raving to beat the band about all sorts of things — Jack London, his father, dentists, the Reaper Company and women, especially women, shouting out “cunt” and “slit” and “whore” till the walls rang and his face was as bleached out as a ream of white bond paper scattered in the snow — but after a week in the sheet restraints he came around. He was calm suddenly, reasonable, a dignified gentleman who dressed himself in the morning without any tics or other nonsense and went around chatting and joking with the other patients and their relatives till people began to take him for one of the doctors. And Mr. McCormick, loving a joke, played along, dispensing advice, walking down the corridors arm-in-arm with the disappointed parent, the cousin from Bayonne, the somber sibling and the grim-faced husband, and he was fine with the women too, the soul of courtesy and with the softest, most genteel and solicitous voice O‘Kane had ever heard.

Within a week he’d singled out O‘Kane — called him “Eddie” and asked for him especially — and together they took long walks on the sanatorium grounds, played golf, croquet, shuffleboard and chess. He insisted there was nothing wrong with him — just nerves and overwork, that was all — and he spoke and dressed so beautifully and had such a smile on his face for everybody, O’Kane almost came to believe him. In the evenings he would hold the ward spellbound with tales of his travels — and he’d been everywhere, all the capitals of Europe, Egypt, way out to Albuquerque, Carson City and San Francisco — and he charmed everybody, doctors, nurses and patients, with his jokes. He was forever joking — not practical jokes, nothing malicious or unbalanced, as you found with so many of the other patients, nothing like that at all. Nothing off-color either. And while the jokes themselves might have been old in his mother’s time (“What did the breeze say to the windowscreen? ”; ‘ ’Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through’ “), he took such obvious delight in them, his face opening up with that gift of a smile he had and his eyes crinkled to slits, they were irresistible, even when you’d heard them ten times already.

Everyone was optimistic. Everyone was pleased. Nerves, that’s all it was. But then one morning, after an extended visit from his wife, he wouldn’t get out of bed. The smile was gone, the jokes dead and buried. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t use the toilet or clean himself. Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Cowles and Dr. Meyer all tried to reason with him, talking till their throats went dry, pleading, remonstrating, cajoling and threatening — they even brought the august Dr. Emil Kraepelin all the way from Munich to try his hand-but Mr. McCormick just seemed to sink deeper into himself, like a man mired to his chin in quicksand and not a thing in the world anybody could do about it. It wasn’t long after that that he attacked Nurse Doane — Arabella — and had to go back to the sheet restraints.

The hope was that California would bring him around, but as far as O‘Kane could see it was an exercise in futility. At least so far. Mr. McCormick was as blocked now as he’d ever been, so deeply buried beneath his layers of phobias and hallucinations he didn’t even recognize his nurses. And no one seemed to care — he’d been delivered to Riven Rock trussed up like a prize turkey and with no more consciousness than a fat feathered bird and that was the end of it, out of sight, out of mind. No one except Mrs. McCormick, that is. Katherine. She’d stayed on the whole, time, long after Mr. McCormick’s mother and sister and Mr. Harold McCormick had left, coming out to the estate every morning without fail, probing Hamilton and the nurses, quizzing the maids, the butler and even the cook with his deracinated English. What did my husband have for breakfast? Is he eating? How’s his color? O’Kane had twice seen her creeping round the shrubbery with a pair of opera glasses in the hope of catching a glimpse of her husband when he was wheeled out on the sunporch. But Nick and Pat had lost all interest, treating their employer as if he were just another drooler on the violent ward, Mart didn’t seem to trouble himself much one way or the other, and Hamilton was so busy with his apes and finding a house and mollifying his wife over the move from Massachusetts, he’d barely had time to stick his head in the door lately.

And where did that leave O‘Kane? Out here in the wings of Paradise with a bunch of wops and an ache in his groin that was like a fever, waiting for the day when Mr. McCormick would get well again and reward his diligence and loyalty, the day when his own oranges would hang heavy on the limbs and he could finally, at long last, take center stage and let the drama of his own life begin.

In the afternoon he was sitting at the desk in the upper hallway, just inside the barred door to Mr. McCormick’s quarters, playing solitaire and flipping open his watch every thirty seconds to personally record the testudineous advance of time, when Dr. Hamilton came stutter-stepping up the stairs, all out of breath. “Edward,” he cried, “Edward, you’ve got to see this!”

O‘Kane looked up from the cards, glad of the distraction. He gave a glance to Mart and the bundled form of Mr. McCormick in the center of the bed behind him and then got up to unlock the door, ever mindful of the three p’s. “What is it?” he asked, turning the keys in their locks. “Another hominoid?”

In the light of the hallway, illumined by the tireless California sun streaming in through the upper windows, the doctor’s head seemed to glow. He was showing a lot of scalp lately, pale striations against the dun slick of his hair, and O‘Kane saw with a shock that his hairline had begun to recede — and when had that started? His face too — the lines seemed to have deepened and there was something else, something altogether queer about him… but of course, he’d shaved his beard. “You shaved your beard,” O’Kane heard himself saying.

The doctor waved him off, as if it wasn’t worth mentioning — but it was, because that beard was his psychiatric badge, the very twin of the beard that sprouted from the face of Dr. Freud. How could he practice psychiatry without a beard? It was unthinkable. “The wife never cared for it,” Hamilton explained, breathing hard from his exertion, “and besides, with the hominoids it was becoming a liability — Mary was afraid it would attract fleas. Or worse. But enough of the beard — I’ve got something to show you, Edward, something truly astounding, the best find yet. Come on, come on: what are you waiting for?”

And then they were down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door, heading toward the hominoid laboratory, the doctor so worked up it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a trot. O‘Kane could hear the screeching and caterwauling of the monkeys long before they hit the path that wound in under the oaks, and he could smell them too — a ripe festering flyblown reek of hominoid sweat and vomit and the killing stench of monkey fur clotted with excrement. And he could call them monkeys now, outside Hamilton’s hearing anyway, because that’s what they were: nine rhesus monkeys and a pair of olive baboons. Apes, as it turned out, weren’t so easy to come by. The doctor had made application to every exotic animal dealer, circus and zoo up and down the coast, hoping for chimps, but there were none to be had.

He found monkeys, though, and there were more coming. After the first two ratlike little things died with blood leaching out their ears and anuses, the doctor got lucky and was able to purchase nine more at a single stroke from one of the local millionaires, an eccentric who had a whole menagerie running wild on his property, ostriches, kangaroos, boa constrictors, impala and dik-dik, and he’d tracked down the baboons in a decrepit zoo in Muchas Vacas, Mexico, where a few pesos went a long way. O‘Kane was just happy he didn’t have to look after the things — and they hadn’t been there two weeks when Hamilton began hinting around, but in the end he wound up hiring two scrawny little brown men, one wop and one Mexican, to construct the cages and hose the reeking piles of crap out of them every morning.

Monkeys didn’t have a whole lot of appeal for O‘Kane — they reminded him too much of the droolers and shit-flingers he’d been wedded to for the past seven years, and that was an era he wanted to put behind him, permanently. He was head nurse to Stanley McCormick now, and before long he’d be an orange rancher or an oil man, strutting around the lobby of the Potter Hotel in a Panama hat while his own motorcar stood out front at the curb. Of course, as long as he was under the thumb of Hamilton he’d at least have to feign interest in hominoids, but he really didn’t see the point — a whole wagonload of monkeys wouldn’t cure what ailed Mr. McCormick. And as far as he could tell, Katherine wasn’t much for hominoids either, though she was willing to go along in the hope that Hamilton’s experiments would lead to a cure for her husband, and she spent a good part of each visit out there under the trees listening to Hamilton go on about hominoid micturition, auto-eroticism and frequency of copulation. The doctor had given the monkeys names like Maud, Gertie and Jocko, and the way he talked about them you’d have thought he’d personally fathered them all. (“Jocko achieved coitus with Bridget six times yesterday, and twice with Gertie,” he would say, or, “The minute I let Jimmy into Maud’s cage she assumed the sexually submissive posture and exposed her genitalia.”) To O’Kane’s way of thinking, the whole business was a bit, well, excessive. Not to mention dirty-minded.

But there was Hamilton, standing between the grinning wop and the grinning spic, ready to flick a filthy checkered tablecloth off what looked to be a cage behind him. He was beaming like a magician. The monkeys screeched and stank. Sunlight filtered softly through the trees. “Ready, Edward? Voilà!”

The tablecloth fluttered to the ground and the cage stood revealed. Inside was a pale orange aggregation of limbs and hair that looked like nothing so much as a heap of palm husks until it began to stir. O‘Kane saw two liquid eyes, nostrils like gouges in a rubber tire, the naked simian face. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, “what is it?”

“Orang-utan,” the doctor pronounced. “Literally, ‘man of the forest.’ His name is Julius, and he comes to us all the way from Borneo, courtesy of one of Captain Piroscz’s colleagues, Benjamin Butler, of the Siam.” The doctor’s grin ate up his face. “Our first ape.”

O‘Kane took a step back when Hamilton reached down to unlatch the mesh door of the cage. He was thinking of the one-eyed chimp in Donnelly’s and the way it had taken hold of Frank Leary’s hand — and wasn’t that a fine thing for an ape to do?

“It’s all right,” the doctor reassured him, “he’s quite tame. A former pet. Come on, Julius,” he cooed, his voice sweetened to the hypnotic whisper he used on his ravers and lunatics, “come on out now.” A pair of oranges, held seductively aloft, was the inducement.

“Are you sure—?” O‘Kane began.

“Oh, yes, there’s nothing to worry about,” Hamilton said over his shoulder. “They’ve had him on shipboard since he was a baby and they all loved him, the whole crew, and they hated to give him up, but of course now that he’s full-grown it became too dangerous, what with the rigging and pots of hot tar and whatnot…. Come on, that’s a boy.”

Soundlessly, the shabby orange creature unfolded itself from the cage, crouching over its bristling arms like a giant spider. O‘Kane took another step back and the two keepers exchanged a nervous glance — the thing was nearly as big as they were, and it certainly outweighed them. And, of course, like all the rest of the hominoids, it stank like a boatload of drowned men.

Julius didn’t seem much interested in the oranges, but he folded them into the slot in the middle of his plastic face as if they were horse pills and shambled through the dust to where the monkeys and baboons were affixed to the doors of the cages and shrieking themselves breathless. He exchanged various fluids with them, his face drooping and impassive even as they clawed at the mesh and bared their teeth, then sat in the dirt sniffing luxuriously at his fingers and toes before lazily hoisting himself into the nearest tree like a big dangling bug, where he promptly fell asleep. Or died. It was hard to tell which — he was so utterly inanimate and featureless, it was as if someone had tossed a wad of wet carpeting up into the crotch of the tree.

O‘Kane could feel Hamilton’s eyes on him. “Well?” the doctor demanded. “What do you think? Magnificent, isn’t he?”

The two keepers had moved off into the big central enclosure Hamilton had designed as a communal area where his hominoids could “interact,” as he called it, busying themselves with setting up the apparatus for one or another of the doctor’s arcane experiments. The monkeys, locked up in their individual cages, watched them with shining eyes. They knew what the doctor’s experiments meant: eating, fighting and fucking, and not necessarily in that order. O‘Kane was at a loss for words.

“You don’t look terribly enthusiastic, Edward,” Hamilton observed, the beardless jaw paler than the rest of his face, like the etiolated flesh beneath a bandage. His eyes did a quick flip.

“No, it’s not that — I was wondering if you can get more, uh, hominoids like this orange one. It must be pretty rare. I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh, it is, it is. But apes are what we want, Edward. The Macacus rhesus is a splendid experimental subject, and we’re fortunate to have them, the baboons too, but the apes are our nearest cousins and the more of them we can get, the more thorough — and relevant — my studies will be. Don’t you see that?”

O‘Kane was working the toe of his shoe in the friable yellow dirt, creating a pattern of concentric circles, each one swallowing up the next. He wanted a drink. He wanted a woman. He wanted to be downtown, with Mart and Roscoe LaSource, his elbows propped up on a polished mahogany bar and a dish of salt peanuts within easy reach. “Listen, Dr. Hamilton,” head down, still working his shoe in the dirt, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or to question your methods in any way, but I can’t really see how all this is supposed to help Mr. McCormick. What I mean is, the monkeys are out here going through their paces and he’s in there twisted up like a strand of wire, and I may be wrong, but I don’t see him getting any better.”

The doctor let his eyes flip once, twice, and O‘Kane was reminded of a bullfrog trying to swallow something stuck in its craw. There was a long silence, the monkeys chittering softly in anticipation of their release into the larger pen, the breeze shifting ever so subtly to concentrate their odor. O’Kane wondered if he’d gone too far.

“First of all, Edward.” Hamilton said finally, his eyes looming up amphibiously from beneath the gleaming surface of his spectacles, “I want to say how pleased I am to see that you’re taking an active interest in Mr. McCormick’s condition. As I’ve said, he is the key to everything we do here, and we can never lose sight of that fact. Dr. Kraepelin may have pronounced him incurable, but both Dr. Meyer and I disagree with that diagnosis — there’s no reason why he shouldn’t experience if not a complete cure then at least an amelioration of his symptoms and a gradual reintegration into society.”

There was a sudden crash from the direction of the big cage, followed by a duet of Mexican and Italian curses—puta/ puttana, puta/ puttana—and O‘Kane glanced up to see the keepers fumbling with a gaily painted wooden structure the size of a piano. He recognized it as the clapboard chute the doctor had designed to test his monkeys’ mental adroitness: there were four exit panels, and the monkeys had to remember which one was unlocked and led to the reward of a banana. In the same instant Hamilton jerked his head angrily round, his voice igniting with fury: “Be careful with that, you incompetent idiots! If you so much as chip the paint I’ll dock your wages, believe me, I will!” and then he broke into Italian — or maybe it was Mexican. The veins stood out in his throat and his face took on the color of the plum tomatoes the wops were growing out back of the cottages. O’Kane was impressed.

He must have raved at them in their own language for a good minute or more, and then he turned back to O‘Kane as if nothing had happened, the coolest man in the world, his voice reduced to its habitual mesmeric whisper. “Certainly Mr. McCormick’s case is a difficult one, Edward, and I can assure you it disturbs me no end to see him as thoroughly blocked as he is now, but that’s all the more reason to take extraordinary measures, to go where no man has gone before in an attempt to uncover the psychological underpinnings of infrahuman behavior — sexual behavior, that is — so that we can apply them to our own species, and, specifically, to Mr. McCormick, whose generosity has made all this possible to begin with.”

But how long was it going to take? That’s what O‘Kane wanted to know. Six months? A year? Two years? Three? “But just last fall I was playing golf with him,” he heard himself saying, “and now he can’t even talk. And you’re telling me a bunch of monkeys or hominoids or whatever you want to call them mounting each other six times a day is going to get him up out of that bed?”

Again, a silence. The doctor patted down his pockets till he produced his pipe, tobacco and a match. He took his time lighting the pipe, watching O‘Kane all the while. He was in control here and he wouldn’t be rushed. Or provoked. “I’m telling you, Edward,” he said, emphasizing the name in that irritating way he had, “that as Charcot, Breuer and Chrobak all observed, and Dr. Freud’s brilliant Drei Abhandlungen sur Sexualtheorie reaffirms, all nervous disorders have a genital component at root. Do you doubt for a moment that Mr. McCormick’s problem is sexual? You saw how he attacked that woman on the train and that female nurse at McLean, what was her name?”

“Arabella Doane,” O‘Kane said mechanically.

“Sex is the root and cause of every human activity, Edward, from getting up in the morning and going to work to conquering nations, inventing the lightbulb, buying a new coat, putting meat on the table and looking at every woman that passes by as a potential mate. Sex is the be-all and end-all, our raison d‘être, the life force that will not be denied.” The doctor had moved a step closer. O’Kane could see the dark bristles like flecks of pepper on his chin. “We are animals, Edward, never forget it — and animals, these hominoids that don’t seem to impress you all that much, will one day reveal our deepest secrets to us.” As if on cue, one of the monkeys began to howl in orgasmic ecstasy. The doctor’s eyes were blazing. “Our sexual secrets,” he added with a failing hiss of breath.

It was just then, just as the very words passed the doctor’s lips, that O‘Kane happened to glance up and see Giovannella Dimucci crossing the path behind them in a brilliant swath of sunlight. She was wearing a pair of clogs and he could see her bare ankles thrusting out from beneath the hem of her skirt, the bright trailing flag of her hair, her breasts shuddering against the fabric of her blouse and her hands moving at her sides with rhythmic grace as she disappeared round the bend. O’Kane looked back at the doctor, at the monkeys clinging to their cages in lust and hope and at the big orange lump in the crotch of the tree. He wiped a hand across his face, as if to erase it all. He was sweating, and he was conscious of a corresponding dryness in his throat, the parched ache of the saint in the desert.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, as if he could barely tear himself away, “it’s a fine ape you’ve got there, doctor, and I thank you for taking the time to show it to me and explain everything — I feel better now, I do — but I’ve got to be getting back… Mart’ll be wondering where I am. So. Well. Good-bye.”

Giovannella Dimucci was the daughter of Baldessare Dimucci, who hauled manure from Crawford’s Dairy Farm in a creaking horse cart for sale to orange growers and wealthy widows with flower beds and half-acre lawns. She was seventeen, strong in the shoulders, eager and quick to please, and she’d been working in the kitchen for the past week while the regular maid, a hunched little wart of a woman by the name of Mrs. Fioccola, recuperated from the birth of the latest of twelve children, all of them girls. O‘Kane caught up to her as she was ascending the back steps, an empty slops bucket in her hand. “Giovannella,” he called, and he watched her turn and recognize him with a smile that spread from her lips to her eyes.

“Eddie,” she said, and it was his turn to smile now. “What a surprise to see you this time of day.” She set down the bucket and let her smile bloom. There was movement behind the screen door — Sam Wah at the stove, his back to them, and one of the other maids, O‘Kane couldn’t tell which, at the sink with a pile of dishes. From around the corner, by the garage, came the sounds of Roscoe tinkering with the cars, an engine alternately roaring and wheezing, and the faint, sweet smell of gasoline. Still smiling, a busy finger between her lips, Giovannella let her voice drop: “Aren’t you supposed to be with Mr. McCormick now? Or did you change shifts?”

O‘Kane moved toward her, as if in a trance, and sat right down at her feet on the lower step. He could smell the perfume of her body, soap on her hands, the sour vinegary odor of the slops bucket. “Yes, yes, I am — a wink, squinting up the length of her and into the sun framing her head and shoulders and the dark cameo of her face—”you really know my schedule, don’t you?“

No blush, but the smile faltering for just an instant before it came back again. She glanced over her shoulder at the silhouette of Sam Wah, then tugged at her skirts and sat lightly beside him. “Sure I do. I know everybody’s schedule — even Mr. McCormick’s.”

“Smart girl,” he said.

“Yes, I’m a smart girl.” The trace of an accent. She was nine years old when her father emigrated from Marsala and she was as American as anybody, as Rosaleen even, but darker, a whole lot darker, darker than any Irishman ever dreamed possible. Rosaleen’s skin was china-white, chalky, lunar, so pale the blue veins stood out in her ankles and wrists and between her breasts; Giovannella’s was like Darjeeling tea steeped in the pot and dipped into a cup of scalded milk, one drop at a time. He was in love with that skin. He wanted to lick her fingers, her hands, her feet.

“He’s a very dangerous man,” O‘Kane said to distract himself.

“Who?”

“Mr. McCormick.”

The sun, the flowers, the soft gabble of the chickens, the roar of the motor. Giovannella lifted her eyebrows.

“He’s what they call a sex maniac — you know what that is?”

She didn’t. Or at least she pretended she didn’t.

“He needs — well, he has physical needs all the time, for women, you understand? He gets violent. And if he’s not satisfied, he’ll lash out if he has the opportunity and attack a woman, any woman — even his wife.”

Her face had turned somber and he wondered if he’d gone too far, if he’d shocked her, but then the mask dissolved and she leaned in close, her hand on his elbow. “Sounds like the average man to me.”

Suddenly O‘Kane was on fire. It was as if an incendiary bomb had gone off inside him, three alarms and call out the village companies too. “Listen,” he said, “you know I really like you, you’re a real kidder, but it’s such a grinding bore here, isn’t it? What I mean is, I think I can get Roscoe to take us into town tonight in one of the Packards, that is, if you want to come… with me, I mean… together.”

She looked over her shoulder again, as if someone might be listening. Her head bobbed low and her eyes took on a sly secretive look. Her father would never let her go, O‘Kane knew that, though Baldy never suspected O’Kane was a married man. It was just the way the Italians were when it came to their women — especially their daughters. They were wary of every male between the ages of eleven and eighty, unless he was a priest, and no matter how drunk they were on their Bardolino and grappa they always had one eye open, watching, waiting, ready to pounce. He was sure she was going to say no, sure she was going to plead her father’s prohibition and her mother’s lumbago and the crying need to look after her ragged shoeless little brothers and sisters and keep the fire going under the big pot of pasta e fagioli, but she surprised him. Compressing her lips and sucking in her breath, her eyes leaping round the yard to fasten finally on his, she whispered, “What time?”

O‘Kane was drunk when he got in the car, drunk when he instructed Roscoe to pull over on a dark lane by the olive mill while Mart fidgeted in the front seat and Giovannella, dressed all in white, darted barefoot out of a gap in the oleanders and climbed into the leather seat beside him with her shoes in her hand and smelling of garlic and basil and melted butter till it made his mouth water, and he was drunk as Roscoe fought the gears and Mart looked straight ahead and Giovannella fit herself in under his arm and nuzzled the side of his face.

They had a high time of it in town, all four of them going into a lunchroom and having fried potatoes and egg sandwiches with ketchup, which sobered O‘Kane enough to allow him to concentrate on the way Giovannella sipped sarsaparilla from a straw, and then they went on to Cody Menhoff’s restaurant and saloon, where O’Kane restoked his fires with whiskey and beer till he practically attacked her on a bench out front of the Potter Hotel. And the thing was, she didn’t seem to mind, giving as good as she got, and by the time she hopped down from the car again and disappeared in the gap in the oleanders like a sweet apparition, it was past midnight and O‘Kane was in love.

By the end of the week she’d let him do everything, out under the stars by Hot Springs Creek where they lay naked for hours on a quilt his grandmother had pieced together by candlelight back in Killarney. He was careful to withdraw before he came, but she was reckless and passionate, thrashing beneath him and clinging to his shoulders and groin with a ferocity that made it almost impossible to tear himself away, and in that moment when he felt the uncontainable rush coming up in him it was like a wrestling match, like war, like the birth and death and resurrection of something as terrible as it was beautiful. But he was stronger, and he prevailed. He’d got one girl knocked up already and he was damned if he was going to knock up another one.

Giovannella sat up quaking in the rinsed-out light of the moon and sobbed over his spilled seed, touching her fingers to the glistening puddle on the taut brown drum of her abdomen and then sucking the tips of them till her lips glistened too. “Eddie,” she sobbed, over and over, “don’t you love me? Don’t you want to give me a baby? Eddie, it’s a sin, a mortal sin, and you don’t love me, I know it, you don’t.” He’d whisper nonsense to her, promise her anything, then she’d quiet down for a minute and he’d take a long drink from the jug of wine and hand the jug to her and she’d take a drink, her breasts trembling and swinging free with the movement of her arms and he’d put his hands out to steady them and press his mouth to hers to kiss away the sobs and before long they were at it again, locked together like adversaries, like lovers.

He couldn’t get enough of her. All day, every day, he felt her touch, the whole world gone tactile, electricity surging through him, his clothes chafing, the blankets on his bed itching and binding like so many hair shirts. He wanted to be naked. He wanted to be with her, wanted to touch her, taste her, run his fingers through her hair, over her breasts, into the wet silk of her cleft. He didn’t write to Rosaleen. He didn’t open her letters. She was dead and buried and so was Eddie Junior, a mistake, a mysterious excrescence that had grown up out of nothing, a mound of yeast, a toadstool, a cancer, this thing that emerged from a quick hot struggle with heavy clothes on a cold night in a cold barn. “Giovannella,” he said to himself, whispering her name even as he lowered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath or listened to the doctor go on about his monkeys or sat at breakfast with poor simple Mart and discussed the weather. “Giovannella,” he breathed, “Giovanella Dimucci. ”

A month went by. And then there came a night when he went into town with Mart and Roscoe and no thought for her. He was drunk, very drunk, and he went swimming off West Beach in his clothes and ruined his shoes and a good pair of trousers. He woke at four A.M. with a spike driven through his head, as parched as a desert nomad, and somehow she was there, in his room, perched atop him with her legs splayed and her hands balled up, muttering to herself. “You son of a bitch!” she cried the minute he opened his eyes in the gloom, the hard little nuggets of her fists raining down on his chin, his ears, his mouth, in a buffeting fury that was like a storm at sea. He tried to shush her, afraid Mart would hear from the adjoining room, or worse, Hamilton from the far side of the house, and he held up his forearms to deflect her blows, but he was too weak and too sick and her fists hit home again and again. He writhed, bucked his hips, tried to roll out from under her, cursing now, outraged and violated, the taste of his own blood on his lips, but she made a vise of her thighs and the drink sapped him until finally he could only cradle his head in his arms and wait her out.

How long it went on he couldn’t tell, but when she was done sobbing and punching and flaying his forearms with her teeth and nails, she leaned forward till her face was in his and he could feel the harsh fury of her breathing on the naked surface of his eyes, his lips, his cheekbones. Her breath was metallic. Acidic. It wilted him where he lay. “I would kill myself for you,” she hissed, “kill my parents, my sisters and brothers, kill the whole world.” And then she was gone. Through the window, out into the night, and back to the shuck mattress she shared with her sisters Marta and Marietta in the dark seething fastness of the Dimucci household.

They made it up the next day and he loved her over and over again, in every way he could dream or devise, and she clawed at his back and begged him to be a man, a husband, and stay inside her till he gave her a baby, but he wouldn’t and they fought over that. Sated, panting, slick with sweat, they lay side by side on the quilt beneath the trees, silent as enemies, until she sat up and dressed herself and left without a word. Then he made himself scarce for a couple of days and he didn’t see her. He took the precaution of putting a lock on the window, and he felt bad about it, but he couldn’t have Dr. Hamilton catch her climbing into his room. Or Katherine — what if she found out? He went into town to Nick’s place to celebrate Ernestine’s birthday and drank enough beer to float a ship and never once whispered Giovannella’s name to himself. She wasn’t around in the daytime anymore — Mrs. Fioccola was back in the kitchen now and Giovannella had no business at Riven Rock — and her only recourse was to come lurking round at night and throw pebbles at the windowpanes. The pebbles came like hail. The window rattled furiously in its iron frame. Dogs barked in the night, and twice the servants came frothing out of their cottages and chased phantoms round the courtyard. And how did O‘Kane feel? He felt irritated. He didn’t need this. She was like a madwoman, like a harpy, and all he’d wanted was a girl, all he’d wanted was innocence, softness, the gentle yielding of love.

A week went by, and O‘Kane took to walking into town at night, five miles there and five miles back, avoiding the Italians who gathered after supper on the big rock in the orchard with their checkers and squeezebox and grappa; he sat up till one and two in the morning with Nick and Pat and the softly snoring husk of their employer, shunning his room till he was so shot through with exhaustion he could shun it no longer. To his relief, there were no more pebbles, no more alarums in the night. Giovannella was gone. It was over. And he was just trying to adjust to the sad reality of that fact, feeling a little wistful and blue, when on a clear flower-spangled Saturday morning, Baldessare Dimucci and his eldest son, Pietro, trundled up the long stone drive in their manure cart and parked in front of the garage. Elsie Reardon came to get him. “There’s two men want to see you, Eddie,” she said, peering in through the bars to Mr. McCormick’s quarters. “Two wops.”

When Hamilton summoned him to the library that evening after his shift, O‘Kane didn’t think anything of it — usually the doctor wanted to compare notes on Mr. McCormick’s progress, or lack of it, either that or talk his ear off about Julius’s bowel movements or Gertie and how many times she’d been mounted by Jocko while Mutt looked on. But as soon as he stepped into the room and saw Mrs. McCormick and her mother sitting there like hanging judges and the doctor drawing a face about half a mile long, he knew he was in for it. Even before Katherine said, “Good evening, Mr. O’Kane, please take a seat,” in her iciest voice and the mother flashed him a quick fading smile out of habit and the doctor cleared his throat ostentatiously and let the light glare off his spectacles so you couldn’t see his eyes flipping, O‘Kane was thinking of how to explain away the little contretemps in the courtyard, dredging up mitigating circumstances and constructing an unassailable wall of half-truths, plausible fictions and unvarnished lies.

Over the years, in his relations with women — and those relations had been extensive, prodigious even — he’d learned that it was always best to deny everything. And so he’d attempted to do with Dimucci père and fils, but the Dimuccis, choleric and quick to act, the end product of centuries of blood feuds and immutable codes of peasant honor, would have none of it. “Eddie,” the old man cried out so that every blessed soul within a thousand yards could hear him, “you ruin-a my daughter Giovannella and now you got marry,” while the son, five-foot-nothing and with a face like a fox caught in a leg snare, glared violence and hate. They wouldn’t listen to reason. O‘Kane tried to tell them they weren’t in Sicily anymore, that this was a free country and that Giovannella was a grown woman and as guilty as he — guiltier, for the way she strutted around the kitchen and pouted her lips over every little thing and let her breasts hang loose like ripe fruit in a sack — but when he got to the part about ripe fruit Pietro came for him and, regrettably, he had to pin him to the wall of the house like a butterfly on a mounting board.

He felt bad about that. He was no monster. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. In all the time he’d been with Rosaleen he’d only slipped from the straight and narrow two times, not counting Giovannella, and then only when she was so big with the baby she couldn’t satisfy him — or wouldn’t. She refused to use her mouth or even her hand, and she was downright peevish about it, as if he’d asked her to shoot the pope or sell her soul to the devil or something. And both times, sure enough, some Judas betrayed him — he suspected it was her oldest brother, Liam, who always had his nose in somebody’s business, or her schoolfriend, Irene Norman, who worked at Bisby’s Lunchroom and chewed over every piece of gossip in town three times a day — and Rosaleen had raised holy hell, as if she needed anything to set her off. He denied everything. Told her whoever was filling her head with all that crap was a small, mean-spirited person who wasn’t worth giving a thought to, but Rosaleen screeched her lungs raw all the same and dented every pot and pan in the house. “Admit it!” she demanded, screaming. “Admit it,” she whispered after a night of lying awake beside him and sobbing, “admit it and I’ll forgive you,” but he knew better than that, knew he’d hear about Eulalie Tucker and Bartholemew Pierson’s wife Lizzie every minute of every hour of every day of his life if he breathed a word.

But now, in the library, surrounded by the rich and many-hued spines of the hundreds of beautiful leatherbound books Katherine had stocked on the teakwood shelves in the past weeks against the day of her husband’s recovery, he felt at a loss. How much did they know? How much did it matter? Was he their nigger slave, to be whipped and reprimanded and hounded over every little detail of his private life? That was what he was thinking as he took his seat and tried to look at Katherine without blinking or staring down at his shoes. There was a moment of excruciating silence, during which he heard the call of a monkey echoing forlornly over the grounds. “Yes?” he said finally, taking the initiative. “Can I be of help?”

Katherine stiffened. She was dressed in velvet, in the royal shade of maroon Monsignor O‘Rourke used to don for Lent and Advent, with a matching hat and plume of aigrettes. Her posture, as always, was flawless, knees and feet pressed together and neatly aligned, her back held so rigidly it was concave, her chin thrust forward and her lips clamped tight. “You certainly can,” she said, and her eyes gave him no respite. “Perhaps, Mr. O’Kane, you could offer an explanation of this incident — or rather, this affair — with the peasant girl.”

He tried to hold her eyes, tried to project innocence, humility, a ready willingness to do all he could to clear up what was at worst a simple misunderstanding, but he couldn’t. Her eyes were like whistling bullets, explosions in the dark. He looked to the mother, but she was off in a dream of her own, and then to Hamilton, but he was mimicking Katherine. “Well,” he said, trying on his winningest smile, the one his mother claimed could restart the hearts of the dead, raising his eyes to meet hers and grinning, grinning, “it’s all innocence is what it is, a school-girl crush, that’s all. You see, the girl in question was filling in here temporarily in the kitchen while Mrs.—”

Katherine cut him off. She took that rigid coatrack of her perfect back and perfect shoulders and leaned so far forward he thought she was going to splinter and crack. “You do understand, Mr. O‘Kane, that I am in charge here now?” she said, and he was quick to note the edge of impatience in her voice.

This was no time for improvisation — she was the conductor and he was the orchestra. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, and meant it. In the past months she’d redecorated the house, removing the gloomy Spanish paintings, heavy black furniture and pottery to the attic above the garage and replacing it with seascapes and western scenes, modern chairs and sofas with square edges and low backs, draperies that gave back the light and made the place look less like a West Coast version of McLean and more like the home of an important and consummately sane man with just the slightest, most temporary indisposition. She’d hired a new head gardener, a landscape architect and half a dozen new wops and Mexicans. And though the McCormicks still owned the house and Mr. McCormick paid a monthly rental back to his mother, all decisions, no matter how trivial, went through Katherine. She was in charge. There was no doubt about it.

“Good,” she said, “because I want you to keep that in mind when you hear what I’m about to say.”

O‘Kane glanced round the room. The doctor shifted uneasily in his chair; the old lady smiled faintly.

“I’ve spoken with the parties involved, Mr. O‘Kane — in Italian, so as to be absolutely certain of the facts — and I find your behavior reprehensible. You’ve trifled with this young girl’s affections, Mr. O’Kane, and worse, you’ve taken advantage of her. Ruined her, as they say. Do you think a female is just an object, Mr. O‘Kane, a bit of flesh put on this earth to satisfy your lusts? Is that what you think?”

O‘Kane’s head was bowed, but he was fuming. He didn’t give a damn who she was, she had no right — he was no stave — he was free to—“No,” he said.

There was a pause. The lights glinted on the spines of the books, the crystal on the sideboard. The old lady, Katherine’s mother, seemed to be humming to herself.

“Now Dr. Hamilton tells me you’re an excellent nurse,” Katherine went on, her voice strung tight, “and I know personally how devoted you are to my husband, but believe me, if it weren’t for that I’d dismiss you on the spot. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said, and he was croaking, croaking like a frog, like something you’d step on and squash.

“Because as long as you work for Mr. McCormick you are his representative in the community and you will conduct yourself as befits his unimpeachable moral standards or you will find yourself looking for employment elsewhere. Not to mention the fact, which is perhaps the saddest feature of this whole affair, that you are a married man. You’ve taken holy vows, Mr. O‘Kane, before God and man, and there is no earthly excuse for abjuring them. You disappoint me, you really do.”

O‘Kane had nothing to say. The bitch. The meddling snooty Back Bay bitch. How dare she dress him down like some schoolboy? How dare she? But he kept quiet because of the orange trees and Mr. McCormick and the best chance he had. He’d show her. Someday. Someday he would.

“There’s one more thing,” she said, relaxing finally into the embrace of the chair, though her feet remained nailed to the floor. “I’ve purchased two second-class tickets in your wife’s name. I will expect her here by the end of next week.”

6. THE HARNESS

The second woman Stanley McCormick ever saw in a natural state was a French streetwalker by the name of Mireille Sancerre who wore undergarments of such an intense shade of red she was like a field of poppies suddenly revealed beneath the muted lights of her room. “Do you like maybe to watch?” she asked coyly as he lay paralyzed on her patchouli-scented sheets and saw the flaccid silky things fall from her to expose the whiteness at the center of her, the whiteness he expected and dreaded and lusted for. He was twenty years old, four months out of Princeton and a neophyte in the art studios of Monsieur Julien on the rue de Clichy in Montmartre. His brother Harold, who’d graduated with him in June, had just married Edith Rockefeller, and his mother, feeling Stanley’s loss, had taken him on a tour of Italy and the antiquities of Europe as a way of distracting him. They got along beautifully, Stanley and his mother, savoring the chance to be alone together after the separation of college, but they quarreled over Stanley’s plan to stay on in Paris for a few months and study sketching. To Nettie’s mind, the most corrupt and iniquitous city in Europe was hardly the place for her youngest child to take up residence on his own for the first time in his life, while Stanley argued that Paris was the cynosure and sine qua non of the art world and protested that he might never have such an opportunity again.

“Mother,” he cried, his face working and his eyes like mad hornets buzzing round his head as he stalked back and forth across the gilded expanse of their suite at the Elysée Palace Hotel, “it’s the chance of a lifetime, my one opportunity to study with a French master before I go home to Chicago and step back into the harness. I’m only twenty. I’ll be at the Reaper Works until I die.”

Nettie, enthroned in her chair, lips drawn tight: “No.”

“But mother, why? Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I done well at college and made you proud? Better than Harold — a hundred times better. I’m just asking for this one little thing.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No. And that’s final. You know perfectly well the temptations a young man of high character would be assaulted with daily in a city like this, a place I’ve always felt was full of foreigners of the very lowest repute, what with their obscene and sacrilegious views and their mocking attitude toward the moral and reflective life, and don’t you think for a minute I haven’t seen these pig-eyed Frenchmen smirking at us behind our backs…. And what of your health? Have you thought about that? Who’s going to nurse you if that Egyptian fever comes back again — you’re still frail from that, you know, and your color is nothing short of ghastly. Hm? I don’t hear you, Stanley.”

He had no answer to that, though he felt his color was fine, a little blanched and pallid, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. He’d been pacing and now he stopped in front of the sitting room mirror and saw a face he barely recognized, staring eyes and collapsed cheeks, a gauntness that frightened him — he did need to gain back some of the weight he’d lost in his bout with typhus, he admitted it, but where better to do it than in the gustatory capital of the world?

“And your nervous condition — what about that?” his mother persisted. “No, I couldn’t leave you here, never — Id be prostrate with worry the whole way back. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

No, Stanley wouldn’t want that, and he knew all about the severity of her heart condition and how much she needed him and how it would absolutely rend her to be without him even for a day, let alone two months or more, especially now, of all times, when Harold and Anita were gone and she had to go back to that big empty house all by herself and be alone with the servants, but for the first time in his life he stood up to her. For two weeks he gave her no peace, not a minute’s worth, imploring, importuning, beating his breast, brooding and glowering and slamming doors till even the servants were in a state, and finally, against her better judgment, she relented. She found him a suite of very suitable rooms with a Mrs. Adela van Pele, a pious Presbyterian lady in her late middle age from Muncie, Indiana, who ran an irreproachable establishment in Buttes-Chaumont while her husband, the celebrated evangelist Mies van Pele, converted headhunters along the Rajang River in Borneo, and she had a long talk with Monsieur Julien, who assured her that her son would sketch only the most suitable subjects — that is, still lifes and landscapes, as opposed to anything even remotely corporeal. Satisfied, but weeping and tearing at her hair nonetheless, Nettie took passage home — alone. And it was on the very night of his mother’s departure — on the way back from seeing her off, in fact — that Stanley, the blood singing in his ears, encountered Mireille Sancerre.

Or rather, she encountered him. He was walking down an unfamiliar street near the Gare du Nord at the time, wondering what to do first, and not paying a bit of attention to his surroundings. Should he go out for a meal at any restaurant that struck his fancy, and no one there to debate or belittle his choice? Or have a drink at a café and watch the people stroll by? Or he could go to a show, one of the titillating ones he’d heard so much about at college, or even, if he could work up the nerve, find a little shop where he could purchase a deck of those playing cards with the pictures on the reverse and steal silently back to his rooms to examine them at his leisure before Mrs. van Pele could get hold of him and coax him into singing hymns till bedtime.

Of course, just as keenly as he was tempted, he was struggling with his impure desires, thinking of how pious Mrs. van Pele really was, and what good company, and how generous it was of her to praise his voice, when Mireille Sancerre bumped into him. But this was no ordinary bump, the sort of casual contact one might encounter between acts at the opera or at a gallery or museum — it was a head-on collision, with plenty of meat and bone behind it. One minute Stanley was loping down the street in a daze, and in the next he was entangled, arm-in-arm and breast-to-breast, with a young woman, a female, whose entire repertoire of scents exploded in his nostrils while her huge quivering eyes seemed to burst up out of the depths of her face like buoys pinned beneath the waves and suddenly released. “Oh, monsieur, pardon!” she gasped. “Des milliers de pardons!”

And then, he never understood how, she convinced him in a matter of seconds to throw over every principle he’d ever held sacred and every last drop of the ethical and religious training he’d imbibed since birth, and come with her to her apartment. There were no introductions through mutual acquaintances, no recitations of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or exchanging of coats of arms, no preliminaries of any kind. Within a hundred and eighty seconds of their encounter, Stanley found himself walking off down the street with this magnificent glossy thing on his arm, this little painted poupée, going he knew not where but prepared to kill anyone who might stand in his way.

“And so,” she said again as the red sheaves fell away from her like the petals of a stripped flower to show all that chilling nullity beneath and the severed breasts and the black bull‘s-eye of hair right in the middle of the canvas, “do you like maybe to watch?” and in that moment her index and middle fingers disappeared inside of her like a magician’s trick, right there in the center of that black bull’s-eye, and he said no, the voice caught like a burr in his throat, no, he didn’t want to watch, he couldn’t watch, he was feeling faint and his blood was rushing like the famous cataract where all the brides and grooms of America went to celebrate their honeymoon and would she please, could she please, turn out the light….

In the morning, he didn’t know where he was — or at first, even who he was. He was a creature of nature, that was all, a pulsating nexus of undifferentiated sensations, and he had eyes, apparently, that opened and saw, and ears that registered the sounds filtering up from the street, and a groin that lived entirely on its own. He saw that he was in a cheap room, cheaply decorated, empty wine bottles on the dresser, discolored plates soaking in a tub on the floor, eggs in a basket, apples, a border of faded crepe tracing the perimeter of the ceiling, female clothes in a heap. For a long while he just lay there staring, and he was outside himself, he was, because there was some dark place inside him that knew what he had done and reveled in it and wanted to snuff it up and snuff up more of it, and he refused to let that dark place see the light.

Finally, after the sun had invaded the curtains to illuminate the foot of the bed and trace a series of parallelograms across the floor, he sat up. He was alone. He’d known he was alone from the moment he’d opened his eyes and begun to absorb sensation like a sponge, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it because to admit it would be the first step in recalling the name Mireille Sancerre. But now he was up and now he recalled that name — it was on his lips like a fatal kiss — and everything he’d done came hurtling at him in a shriek of accusation. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. He was naked. He was naked in a strange woman’s bed — Mireille Sancerre’s bed. Slowly, with the dread and reluctance of the fear that verges on hysteria, he let his fingers creep across his abdomen and touch the hair between his legs, caked and crusted hair, laminated with the juices of Venus, and then, in a panic of hate and renunciation, to his penis.

His penis. It was there, whole and alive, and it began to grow in his hand until he pictured it like some terrible uncontainable thing out of a fairy tale, the beanstalk that would sprout right up through the roof and up into the reaches of the sky, and he snatched his hand away. Oh, what had he done, what had he done? He was venal. Doomed. Condemned to hell and perdition. He wished he was back in college again, back safe in his rooms with his books and pennants and his leather harness — the one he’d fashioned for himself when he first discovered the sin of self-pollution. He was only a sophomore then, but that was the start of it — and this, this was the end, all of life dirtier and progressively dirtier and every one of us an animal rooting in it. The first time he’d ever awakened with the wet evidence of his depravity on the sheets he’d gone right out to the nearest saddlery and brought himself a bridle and a set of leather-working tools. Ignoring his classes, he worked furiously at the thing, working through trial and error and with every particle of his perfectionist’s zeal, until, by suppertime, it was done. Two cuffs for his hands and two for his ankles, joined by the knotted strips of the shortened reins, and he wore it every night, his harness, so that he would never — could never — touch himself while he slept and dreamed or woke in the groggy sensual limbo of dawn. And how he wished he had that harness now….

But it was too late. Of course it was. The damage was done, he’d given way to his bestial instincts and he’d ruined a woman, ruined Mireille Sancerre, and there was only one thing to do: marry her. For the sake of his soul and hers. Yes, of course. The only thing to do. The realization gave him new life, and all at once he was up out of the bed and fumbling for his clothes — but what time was it? He couldn’t seem to find his watch or his stickpin, the one his mother had given him on graduating Princeton, the one with the three winking sapphires she said were no match for his eyes… and then, as he pulled on his trousers and his jacket and felt through all his pockets, he was amazed, in the way of a man staggering out of a train wreck, to find that his wallet was gone too. But of course, he understood in an instant that Mireille Sancerre had taken his things, as a down payment on the mortgage of her ruination, and she had every right to them, every right to everything he owned…. After all, she was the one, the only one: she was his wife.

Stanley stayed on in her room through the hobbled morning and the decrepit afternoon, afraid to show his face on the street, the corruption festering in his flagitious eyes and sensual mouth, and though he was so thirsty he could have crawled a mile for a single drop of water and so gutted with hunger he was like a mad howling carnivore in the jungle, he never moved from the bed. Sometime in the late afternoon he found himself back in the wardrobe in the linen closet on the day before his father’s funeral and there was a rasping harsh voice excoriating him there, a disembodied voice that raked the flesh from his bones, and he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. The sun shifted, paled, died. At long last, when it was dark, fully dark, he came back to that bed in Mireille Sancerre’s cheap room that smelled of fermenting vegetables and scraps of rotting meat, and he saw his chance. In an instant he was on his feet and leaping at the door he’d been staring at all day, the door that gave onto a gloomy sweat-stinking stairwell, and before he could think he was charging down the stairs, oblivious to the startled faces on the landings and the cries at his back, down the stairs and into the street. He stumbled then and fell, a searing nugget of pain in his left palm and his knee too, but he picked himself up, found his legs and ran, ran till he could run no more.

Two weeks later, Harold stopped by Mrs. van Pele’s to look him up. He brought Edith with him — they were honeymooning in Europe and had just arrived on the Continent after a week’s stay in London — and Edith balanced herself like a buttercup on the cushions of Mrs. van Pele’s best chair with a glass of Mrs. van Pele’s best sherry on her knee while Harold went up to fetch Stanley down from his rooms. Unfortunately, Stanley wasn’t fetchable — at least not at first. Harold found him in bed, lying atop the bedclothes on his side with his wrists and ankles drawn up awkwardly behind him; his face was turned to the wall and he didn’t look up when his brother entered the room.

“Stanley!” Harold boomed, and he was an effervescing bubble of enthusiasm, filled to bursting, a twenty-two-year-old millionaire intoxicated with his new bride and his travels and his unshakeable alliance with the Rockefellers. “Wake up,” he cried, “Harold’s here! Come on, little brother, get up out of that bed and let’s drink some champagne and celebrate!” “

But Stanley didn’t get up out of bed — he barely lifted his eyes. As Harold looked on, stupefied, Stanley’s shoulders began to heave, his visible eye clouded over and he began weeping, his breath coming in a series of harsh protracted gasps that seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

“What is it, Stanley?” Harold said, the enthusiasm erased from his voice. “Are you still sick? Is it that Egyptian thing?”

A long moment, the gasps fighting for control. “Worse,” Stanley croaked, “a thousand times worse. I’ve lost my immortal soul.”

It took nearly an hour to extract the story from him, Stanley hesitant and euphemistic, his shame burning in his eyes as he talked on and on about repentance, atonement and eternal damnation, and twice during that time Harold descended to the parlor to commiserate with his bride, whom he would divorce twenty-six years later for the ambitious operatic fleshpot, Ganna Walska, and twice sent down for scalding cups of tea. Stanley told him how he’d been searching for the unfortunate girl for two weeks now and had even gone to the trouble of hiring a private detective to track her down, but with no success. He’d been in too much of a state over the enormity of his crime to have paid any attention to the street or even the neighborhood where he’d awakened on that fateful morning, and though he’d haunted the alleys and byways around the Gare du Nord every night since, he’d been unable to locate her. He didn’t know her address, her place of business, her connections, and yet he was determined to do the right thing by her — determined, in short, to marry her.

When Harold had heard him out, the room stifling, his wife impatient and petulant and the landlady wearing the mask of a tragedian as she tiptoed through the door with the tea things, he felt nothing but relief. Only Stanley could be so hopelessly naive, he thought, Stanley the holy, Stanley the sheltered, and he didn’t want to laugh at that naïvete — this was a delicate situation, he knew that — but in the end he couldn’t help himself. “Is that it?” he said. “Is that all of it?” And then he laughed. Guffawed. Let out with a howl his wife could hear downstairs as she fretted and grimaced and swore she’d get him back for this.

“Stanley, Stanley, Stanley,” he said finally, and the laughter rolled off him in sheets, like a disturbance of the weather, and there was no stopping it. “Don’t you see? She’s a prostitute, a putain, a whore. She’s had you and a thousand other men. She’s no purer than Beelzebub — and she’s gone and fleeced you on top of it. Why do you think she disappeared? Because your sapphire stickpin and your gold watch and the hundred-franc notes in your wallet bought her a six months’ holiday in a very comfortable hotel in Marseille or Saint-Tropez or some such place.”

Stanley was sitting up now, staring into the dark waters of his teacup like a suicide brooding over the Seine. His voice was dead in his throat. “I’ve got to marry her.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

Those swollen suffering eyes, the eyes of the anchorite and the mad suffering saint: Stanley was staring at him now. Fixedly. “Easy for you to say — you’re a respectable man. You’re married. You’re clean.”

Harold was on his feet, all patience lost, striding to and fro with the shell of an empty teacup in his hand. It was getting late, Edith was furious and Stanley, gloomy deluded Stanley, was spoiling his good time. He gave it one more try, pulling up short right in front of him, right at his very feet. “She’s a slut, Stanley, a professional. You don’t owe her anything, not money or redemption — if I were you, I’d be worrying about disease, not marriage. It’s crazy. Mad. Irresponsible.” Suddenly he was shouting. “You don’t marry a whore!”

“She’s not a whore.”

“She is.”

“She’s not. You don’t even know her.”

“Why did she let you have her then? Why did she take you home? Huh? Why do think she makes her offices in the street?”

Stanley was silent a long while, and they looked at each other in mutual disgust, each wondering how he could possibly be related to the other. From below came the faint unremitting buzz of Mrs. van Pele’s banalities as she bored Edith into an upright grave. Finally, just as Harold felt he could take it no longer, on the very brink of slamming his way out of the room and to hell with his little brother and his saintly scruples, Stanley spoke up. “What am I going to tell Mother?” he said.

After that, Stanley never strayed from the straight and narrow. He came home directly after his lessons with Monsieur Julien, and to help fill his evenings when he wasn’t praying with Mrs. van Pele or entertaining her with his clarion renditions of “Macedonia” and “Surely Goodness and Mercy Will Follow Me All the Days of My Life,” he took vocal lessons with the renowned tenor, Antonio Sbriglia. There was no thought of playing cards, obscene or otherwise, no desire to frequent cafés or even restaurants, no further mention of marriage to Mireille Sancerre or anyone else. He polished his modest skills under Monsieur Julien’s tutelage, producing a series of charcoal studies of the Pont-Neuf at every hour of the day, from the savage tranquillity of dawn to the miasmic melancholy of the swallow-hung evening, and he became expert at reproducing Cézanne’s apples. He was genuinely offended by the excesses of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, and though Monsieur Julien urged him to begin a study of the human form, he steadfastly refused. Two months to the day after his mother departed for the United States, he was on the boat home.

For the next six years, Stanley lived with his mother in the family fortress at 675 Rush Street, fixed in the mise-en-scène of his childhood like a stamp in a philatelist’s album. He had his own room now, of course, with a view of the gardens and a private bath, but the nursery where he’d spent the better part of his life remained unchanged and the halls were a stew of recollected odors, from the sharp stab of the camphor ointment his father used to rub on his ankles and knees to assuage the ravages of his rheumatism to the ghostly echo of Mary Virginia’s French perfume and the lingering dark must of a long-dead beagle by the name of Digger. He worked full-time at the Reaper Works, of which Cyrus Jr. was president and Harold vice president, juggling his schedule to accommodate his course load at Northwestern, where he was studying contract law. Officially, he was comptroller of the company, but Nettie was grooming him to oversee the legal department as well, thus consolidating all the McCormicks’ vital interests in the hands of her sons, after the model of the Medicis.

As for social life, Stanley was limited to two friends from Princeton — one of whom lived in New York and made infrequent trips to the Midwest — and the companions his mother chose for him from among the duller and more complacent scions of Chicago’s most rigorous and devout mercantile families. After a few failed experiments, she decided against including young ladies in her dinner and card parties, concluding that Stanley, whose health was still delicate, wasn’t at all ready for the emotional strains of courtship and marriage, just as she herself wasn’t ready to give him up, not yet anyway. Certainly he would be married one day, that was an absolute, but he was too young yet, too shy, too much in need of his mother’s guidance.

In the spring of his second year at home, when the Parisian debacle had begun to fade from his memory (though the face of Mireille Sancerre would flower in his mind at the most inconvenient times, as when he was taking his final exam in Contracts or ordering half a dozen shirts from the wilting young brunette at Twombley’s), he agreed to accompany his mother to Santa Barbara, to see to the arrangements for Mary Virginia’s house there. The spring semester had just ended, and with his brother’s collusion he was able to take a six-week leave from the Reaper Works. It was decided that somebody had to see mother through the ordeal of getting Mary Virginia settled once and for all, and since Anita had her young son to look after, and Cyrus Jr. and Harold were both too wrapped up in the business to take off just then (a very difficult time, what with the cutthroat competition from Deering, Warder, Bushnell and Glessner and a battle raging over entry into the markets in India and French Indochina), Stanley was elected.

He didn’t mind. Not at all. Though he took pains to conceal it, he wasn’t really feeling himself — hadn’t been for some time. It was his nerves, that and a certain intensification of his little compulsive habits, like washing his hands over and over till the skin was raw, or adding a column of figures fifteen or twenty times because each time he was afraid he’d made a mistake and each time confirmed that he hadn’t but might have if he weren’t so vigilant, or avoiding the letter R in his files because it was an evil letter, one that growled in his ears with unintelligible accusations and fierce trilling criticisms. He’d been working too hard. Putting too much pressure on himself to perform at the top of his law school class and do the sort of job his mother expected of him at the Reaper Works. Let Cyrus and Harold stay behind — he was glad of the change. So glad he found himself whistling as he packed his bags, the very ones he’d brought back from France, and though he did get a bit bogged down over the question of what to bring and what to leave behind — he drew up long tapering lists on scraps of paper, bits of cardboard, anything that came to hand, and then promptly lost them — he did finally manage to get everything he needed into three steamer trunks and an array of suitcases and handbags so overstuffed they nearly prostrated a team of porters at the station. And on the morning they left, the sun so brilliant everything seemed lit from within, he felt like a subterranean released from the deepest pit.

The first day out, he did nothing but sit at the window with an unopened book in his lap. The country soothed his eyes and he watched the Chicago sun draw away west into Missouri and go to war with the clouds. He slept well and ate well (his mother had brought along a skeleton crew of servants, including the Norwegian cook), and by the third day he was so relaxed he began to feel restive. That was when Nettie suggested he take a look at the plans for Mary Virginia’s house, to see what he thought, because she was wondering herself about the music room, whether it should be in the east or west wing, depending on the sunlight and Mary Virginia’s inclination to play piano in the morning or evening, and if it would really matter all that much because of the plethora of sunshine in California anyway. What did he think?

Stanley took up the blueprints like a man snatching a life jacket off the rail of a sinking ship. He spread them out on the table and studied them for hours, oblivious to everything, his mother, the servants, the yellow plains of Texas and the distant dusty cowboys on their distant dusty mounts. With a T square and a handful of freshly sharpened pencils, he began a detailed series of modifications, moving walls, drawing elevations where none had been provided, even sketching in shrubbery and the odd shadowy figure of Mary Virginia seated at the piano or strolling across the patio.

What did he think of the plans? That they were all wrong, that they were an insult, a product of nescient minds and ill-conceived notions. What did he think? That Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge should be dismissed for incompetence, that any fool off the street could have come up with a more practical and pleasing design and that the architects’ man in Santa Barbara had damned well better bring his drawing board along. But all he said to his mother was, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to suggest some changes….”

They wound up staying nearly four months, taking rooms at the Arlington (the Potter, with its sea views, six hundred rooms and twenty-one thousand dollars’ worth of custom-made china plate, wouldn’t be completed until 1903), and in that time Stanley altered every least detail of the original plans, from the height of the doorways to the type of molding to be used in the servants’ quarters. And he altered them daily, sometimes hourly, obsessed, fixated, stuck in a perfect groove of concentration. Inevitably, this caused some friction with the people who’d been engaged to do the actual building — Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge’s architect quit within the month, as did the builder, and the architect’s replacement, sent all the way from Boston, didn’t last out the week. Stanley wasn’t fazed. Nor was Nettie. She had faith in her son, and she was heartened to see him so concerned for his poor sister’s welfare, pouring all his Fowler intensity into his blueprints and his beautiful orthogonal drawings and the elevations with their darling little puffs of shrubbery and people moving about the rooms — and it was the Fowler coming out in him, the perfect image of her own father, which wasn’t to deny the McCormicks anything, not at all, but she knew her boy. And the way he went after those architects and builders and even the Sicilian stonemasons — nothing escaped him. And if he was indecisive, well, that was a Fowler trait too, and it only meant that he was passionately involved, putting himself to the test over and over again, questioning everything.

In the way of these things, construction didn’t begin in earnest until Nettie and Stanley returned to Chicago, when the most equanimous of the architects was able to move forward expeditiously and no questions asked. Stanley fell back into his former way of life — the courses in Torts and Accounting, the big open office high above the floor of the Reaper Works where the tyrannical R lurked amongst the files, dinner with his mother and whatever Chester, Grover or Cornelius she deemed suitable for him that evening — and he forgot all about Mary Virginia, the house of her confinement, California. But he did leave his mark on the place, not only in the elaborate schema of alterations that became the house itself, but in the most essential way of all: he named it.

When Nettie acquired the property it was known simply as “the Stafford place,” after the man from whom she’d purchased it, O. A. Stafford, who’d had it from Colonel Greenberry W Williams, who had in turn purchased it from José Lugo and Antonio Gonzales, dueños of the original Mexican land grant. People had begun referring to the property, which still featured Stafford’s two-story frame house, his orange and olive groves and his succulent garden, as “the McCormick place.” To Stanley’s mind, this clearly wouldn’t do. I. G. Waterman, who owned the adjoining estate, called his place “Mira Vista,” and the Goulds, out on Olive Mill Road, had “La Favorita.” Then there was “Piranhurst,” “Riso Rivo,” “The Terraces,” “Cuesta Linda,” “Arcady.” If Mary Virginia’s house and grounds were going to be in any way reflective of her class and status, someone would have to come up with a suitable name, and while Cyrus, Harold and Anita went unwittingly about their business in Chicago and his mother spent more and more time sitting in the hotel gardens, Stanley began to fret over it. In fact, during the last month of his stay, the innominacy of the place became as much an obsession to him as the shoddy plans, and he stayed up late into the night sifting through Spanish and Italian dictionaries and poring over maps of Tuscany, Estremadura and Andalusia for inspiration.

And then, one afternoon in the final week of their California sojourn, it came to him. He was walking over the grounds with his mother and Dr. Franceschi, the landscape expert, elaborating his feelings regarding caryatids, statuary in general and the function of fountains in a coordinated environment of the artificial and the natural, when they emerged from a rough path into a meadow strewn with oaks all canted in one direction. The trees stood silhouetted against the mountains, heavy with sun, their branches thrust out like the arms of a party of skaters simultaneously losing their balance. It was October, the season of evaporative clarity, the sky receding all the way back to the hinges of the darkness beyond. Butterflies hung palely over the tall yellow grass. Birds called from the branches.

“What curious trees, Dr. Franceschi,” Nettie said, shielding her eyes from the sun, “all leaning like that, as if someone had come along and tipped them.”

Dr. Franceschi was a thin wisp of a man in his fifties, vegetally bearded, with quick hands and the dry darting eyes of the lizards that scurried underfoot and licked over the rocks. “It’s the prevailing winds that do it,” he said in a voice as breathy as a solo flute, “shearing down from the mountains. They call them sundowners — the winds, that is.”

“What about that one over there?” Stanley said, pointing to a tree that defied the pattern, its trunk vertical and its branches as evenly spaced as the tines of a fork. It was a hundred yards off, but he could see that there was a band of rock round the base of it, a petrified collar that seemed to hold it rigid.

“Oh, that, yes: I’d been meaning to show you that particular tree. It’s quite a local curiosity.”

And then they were crossing the open field, Nettie compact and busty, the jaunty horticulturist bouncing up off his toes like a balletomane, Stanley loping easily along with the great sweeping strides that made locomotion seem a form of gliding. As they drew closer, Stanley saw that the massive slab of sandstone girding the tree was split in two, and that the tree seemed to be growing up out of the cleft. “Very curious,” Dr. Franceschi was saying, “one of those anomalies of nature — you see, there was a time some years ago when an acorn fell from that tree there”—pointing—“or that one maybe, who knows, and found a pocket of sustenance atop this blasted lump of stone, and you couldn’t find a less promising environment, believe me—”

But they were there now and Stanley had his amazed hands on the rock itself, a massive thing, chest-high, big as a hearse, rough to the touch and lingeringly warm with the radiation of the sun. It was the very stuff of the earth’s bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn….

riven rock…

that was the place where he was now and no one had to tell him that or whisper over him like he was a corpse already and with the reek of illicit sex on their fingers like eddie had on his because eddie was down among the women he could hear and smell and feel in their tight-legged female immanence out in the yard and giggling in the cottages tiptoeing through the kitchen and oh mr. mccormick can never should never and will never know a thing about it a man like him that can’t control his unnatural urges and i heard about a man like that once from my cousin nancy cooper in sacramento hung like a barnyard animal and he had a woman a negress that would come to him on foot six miles one way just so she couldfeelhim in her and if you believe nancy and i do it was just too much for her and she died underneath him of an excess of pleasure and apoplexy and he went right out and got himself another negress just like her only bigger…

but let them whisper let them stand over him and say their prayers for the dead—“Think about it, Mart, he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it”—and violate his every orifice with their tubes and their hoses and lay him on his side inthe shower bath that was like the chinese water torture and what did they think he was eddie and mart and dr. gilbert van tassel monkeyman hamilton that they could rape him like that no covering no place to hide naked as a rat and why didn’t they just leave him alone all of them his mother and katherine andcyrus the president and harold the vice president and anita too with her big swollen suety tits and her insinuatinghands like he was some sort ofpet or something some sort of baby…

but it was his nerves and he wasblocked that wasall just a temporary condition not a thing like mary virginia his crazy bughouse sister with her white nightmare of a naked body and he would be up and about and better anyday now just like at mcleanthe first time but no he wouldn’t no he wouldn’t because what they didn’t understand and appreciate not a one of them especially katherine who only wanted to climb atop him and make his penis disappear inside her like mireille sancerre’s fingers and wouldn’t give him any peace not a second not a minute not an hour and she waslurking around somewhere even now he knew all about it with her binocularsand her sorrowful pitying face all drawn-up like a lemon-squeezer’s poor stanley poor poor stanley what they didn’t understand was that he couldn’t move a muscle to save his life because the Judges wouldn’t allow it they howled and shrieked in execration if he so much as shifted his tongue when sex-stinking eddie forced that tube down his throat the Judges who wouldn’t let him move and cried out his sins from every corner of the room sloth and depravity and sexual deviation and comptrollership not the presidency or even the vice presidency and corruption in his heart and impotence with his wife and deceit of his mother the Judges shouting him down with their lips writhing like a spadeful of earthworms through the black gnarled ape’s beards that covered their mouths and their screaming wet cunts…

but all night he lay there and all day it was tuesday wasn’t it always tuesday and tuesday again and tuesday till all the months fell away like leaves from the trees and the years too and he prayed to the Judges to release him to commute his sentence time off for good behavior if only he could keep himself from sinning if only he could get back in the harness just once more just one more time…

7. STANLEY OF THE APES

When Rosaleen stepped down off the train, thinner and paler than he’d remembered, with the Irish bloom caught in her cheeks and her eyes like tidal pools filling and draining and filling again and little Eddie all grown up in her arms, O‘Kane was helpless: he felt the surging oceanic tug of her — he couldn’t resist it, didn’t want to — and plunged in like a deep-sea diver. “Rose!” he called, spreading his arms for her, and he wanted to kiss her right there in public, wanted to have her on the platform, in the ferns, and how could he possibly wait till he got her back to the fresh-painted apartment on Micheltorena Street with the garden and birdbath out back and the big high-gunwaled boat of a bed Ernestine Thompson had helped him pick out? He was trembling. He was in love.

She didn’t say a word. Just held him, the surprising strength of her arms, the baby alive between them like a living sacrament, golden hair and a navy blue sailor’s suit, cooing and burbling and giving out a smell of new-made flesh, his flesh, Eddie O‘Kane’s.

“You look beautiful, Rose,” he murmured, still attached to her but drawing back now for a quick glance of appraisal, “never more beautiful, even on the night I met you at Alice Dundee’s.” He was feeling sentimental, filled to the eyes with soggy emotion, like when they sang the old songs at Donnelly‘s, and he wanted to say more, wanted to whisper intimacies into the soft white shell of her ear and smell the shampoo in the curling wisps of hair that had fallen loose there, but he caught the eye of a sour-looking man in evening clothes and bit his tongue. This wasn’t the place.

People were moving past them on the platform, society types, the rich come to soak themselves in the hot springs and suck up all the fat rich things the hotels had to offer, and all at once he felt self-conscious. An old lady with a matching pair of spoiled little apricot-colored dogs stopped to gape at them as if they were a couple of spaghetti twisters just off the boat and he was embarrassed, he was, and he just wanted to get this over with, get past the awkwardness and take her home.

And then, without warning, she began to cry and he felt his teeth clench. She gasped out his name—“Eddie! Oh, Eddies‘—and it was a war cry, an accusation, a spear thrust right through him and pulled out again. He let go of her and she looked off into the distance, biting her lip, before wearily lifting her free arm to dab at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, a new dress, pale ocher, the color of the last leaf left on the elm tree at the very end of the fall, blanched and twisting in the wind.

“Four months, Eddie,” she said, trailing off in a series of truncated sobs that were like hiccoughs, erp, erp, erp. Her eyes incinerated him. She snatched in a breath. “My father cursed you every day, but I knew you wouldn’t desert me, Eddie, I knew it.” And all at once she was thrusting the baby at him like a hastily wrapped gift, the child that used to be a baby, with his forcemeat legs and the look caught between fright and wonder as if he didn’t recognize his own father even and where was the reward in that? O‘Kane couldn’t take him, not yet, and held up his hands to show how inadequate they were.

“Look how big he’s gotten,” she demanded in a high strained chirp of a voice, “did you ever think he’d be so big?” This was succeeded by a whole lexicon of baby talk as she bobbed her tearful angry hopeful face up and down like a toy on a string and touched her nose to Eddie Jr.’s and let him dangle finally from one gloved hand until his feet touched the pavement in his scuffed white doll’s shoes and he stood there grinning and triumphant.

“ ‘Oose ’ittle man is he, huh? Huh?” Rosaleen cooed and the people flitted by and the cars pulled up at the curb and O‘Kane stood erect in the glow of the late afternoon sun, at a loss, his hands hanging limp at his sides, half a wondering smile on his face.

Roscoe was waiting for them at the far end of the platform, the car at their disposal, courtesy of Katherine and Dr. Hamilton, who’d given O‘Kane the afternoon off. Roscoe squared his chauffeur’s cap on his head, very formal, very impressive, and gave O’Kane a hand with the luggage while Rosaleen and the baby settled themselves in the rear seat, and then they were off, up the gradual incline that was State Street and into the trembling blue lap of the mountains that hung over the town like a pall of smoke. “Such a grand car,” Rosaleen purred, but she wasn’t smiling, not yet, “and you know it’s my first ride ever, don’t you?” He stole a peek at her under the inflexible arch of her hat, his brown colleen, his wife, and kissed the corner of her mouth as tenderly as he knew how until she turned to him and kissed him back, just a peck, with lips as cold as the stones of the sea.

She was pleased with the apartment, he could see that, though she fussed around the place for half an hour, saying things like “Oh, Eddie, you call this a sofa, and those curtains, and what an unusual bed — is that lacquer on it or what?” and quietly disparaging the view, as if there were another ocean and another set of islands he could have presented her with, but it was for form’s sake, for the sake of establishing their roles, or reestablishing them, she in the house and he at Riven Rock earning a handsome wage as an essential cog in the McCormick machine. Through it all, the baby was a saint, nothing less. He crawled around the front room a bit, putting things in his mouth and pulling them out again all glistening with drool, and then he fell into a sleep that was like a coma, not so much as a snort or whimper out of him. By then the sun was almost gone, the sitting room walls lit like the inside of a peach, everything rosy, everything fine — but for the one thing, the most important thing.

Rosaleen was in the kitchen, poking her head in the cabinets, inspecting the icebox. She’d seen everything twice already and O‘Kane was beginning to think she was avoiding him. It had been four months. She was hurt and angry, and she had a right to be. He stood at the window, awkward in the silence, handsome Eddie O’Kane with the three o‘clock luck in his eye and never at a loss for words, and here he didn’t know what to say, how to begin it — with an apology, an excuse, a plea? Or maybe he should just move into her and touch her, this exciting stranger hovering over the kitchen sink. “Are you hungry?” he finally asked.

She drifted into the room then, slow and insouciant, and gave him the full benefit of her eyes. “I’m famished, Eddie,” she said, and her voice had the same effect on him as that first sure sip of whiskey on a night when the barroom is lit like the reaches of heaven and nothing is impossible, “famished,” she said. “For you.”

And so it went, Eddie O‘Kane and the bliss of domesticity. Elsie Reardon moved into the room he vacated in the servants’ quarters and Roscoe came for him every morning at 7:30 after dropping off Nick and Pat. Mart wasn’t too pleased, having to spend the first hour of his day sitting alone with Mr. McCormick in that interval when the shifts changed, and maybe he was a little jealous too, used to having O’Kane to himself and hungering after his own bride and his own life but so shy and tongue-tied he’d die in his tracks if a girl so much as looked at him. Katherine and her mother packed up and went back east at the end of October, Dr. Hamilton procured another dozen monkeys from God knew where, and Julius, the big orange ape, lacking any other apes to mount, sniff and soak with urine at the doctor’s pleasure, was given the run of the place, appearing as if by legerdemain on the roof of the garage one minute and in the kitchen the next, his feet drawn up under him on a three-legged stool and a perspiring glass of milk clamped firmly in his spidery hand. And at home, in the three-room apartment they rented from a retired munitions salesman by the name of Rowlings who lived upstairs and watched every move they made, Rosaleen, who was no housekeeper at all, tried her best to move the piles of rubbish from one corner of the place to another and spent a good hour every evening immolating a piece of meat on the new Acme Sterling Steel Range in the kitchen.

Before long it was winter, iceless and snowless, sunshine pouring down like liquid gold, hissing rains that stood the earth on its head and rattled the boulders in Hot Springs Creek like the teeth of a boxer’s jaw and every leaf of every tree green as the Garden of Eden. O‘Kane sent his mother pictures of the palms and the winter flowers and she wrote him that nobody in the neighborhood could believe it, weather like that, and what a bitter winter it was at home, his cousin Kevin down with a lung disorder and the doctors baffled and Uncle Billy suffering with the ague, but she was fine, if you discounted the sciatica that was like the devil’s own pitchfork thrust into her every fifteen seconds, night and day, and his father, knock on wood, was as strong as the day he retired from the ring, preserved as he was in alcohol like a fish in a jar, and not so much as a sniffle. O’Kane had no complaints about the weather — he didn’t miss the snow a bit, not even at Christmas — but as the days wore on, Rosaleen began to get under his skin.

The apartment was too small, for one thing, though it had seemed plenty big enough the day he’d rented it, and the baby was always underfoot, walking now, into everything, howling all night like a cat skinned alive and filling his diapers like the very genius of shit. His favorite trick was picking through the trash, which Rose never emptied, and whenever he was quiet for more than five minutes at a time you’d be sure to find him crouching behind the sofa with a half-gnawed bone or an orange gone white with mold. And that was a funny thing, the oranges. When O‘Kane was a boy, they were five cents each, the price of a beer, and he saw them at Christmas only, and only then if he was lucky. And now he was drowning in them, oranges like an avalanche, a nickel a basket, and he didn’t even like the flavor of them anymore, too cloying, almost poisonously sweet, and with all that juice running down your chin and gumming up your fingers.

But Rosaleen. She was so insipid, stupid as a clam, nattering on about sewing and patterns and what was prettier the blue or the yellow till sometimes he wanted to jump up from the table and choke the breath out of her. And her housekeeping — or lack of it. She was as filthy and disorganized as her whey-faced mother and her tuberous brothers, dirty Irish, shanty Irish, not fit to kiss the hem of his mother’s dress and you never saw so much as a speck of dust in the O‘Kane household, no matter how poor they might have been. She was putting on weight again too, and that drove him to distraction, because every time he looked at her, the fat settling into her hips and thighs and ballooning her breasts till she could barely straighten up, he was sure she’d gone and got pregnant again. And that he couldn’t abide. Not at his age, not when he had his whole life ahead of him still. Maybe it wasn’t right, but the way he felt, the burden of just one kid more would put him in the asylum himself — they’d have to chain him to Mr. McCormick and they could rave at each other and piss their pants side by side. Well, and not to put too fine a point on it, as his father would say, it was inevitable that he began to stray, just a bit, from the nest.

First it was two nights a week, Friday and Saturday, and who could blame him for that? And he did take Rose with him now and again, when they could get the girl from down the street to mind little Eddie, and he had to spoil his own evening and watch her get drunk as a sow and listen to the incessant nagging whine of her voice every time he lifted a glass to his lips—“Eddie, don’t you think that’s enough now,” and “Let’s go home, Eddie, I’m bored,” and “How can you stand this place?” The two nights stretched to three and then four and he began to run with some of the boys at Cody Menhoff’s. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, they’d have a shot and a beer at every place in town and then all pile into a car and drive up over San Marcos Pass and all the way out to Mattei’s Tavern in Los Olivos and he wouldn’t come home till three in the morning, stinking, absolutely stinking. That took the smile off Rose’s face, all right. She’d pounce on him like a harpy and their wars would rage all over the apartment and out onto the front porch, furniture flying, the baby squalling, Old Man Rowlings punctuating every shout and cry with an outraged thump from above.

Spring began in February and lasted through the end of May and it was a glorious time, the vegetable world in riot, every breeze a barge-load of spices. Saturday afternoons he’d take Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. to the park or hop the streetcar down to the beach, where he’d lie flat on the sand with a beer propped on his chest and stare up into the sky while his face and limbs turned brown as a wop’s. The Ice Queen — Katherine — returned in May and she never said a word to him about Rosaleen or Eddie Jr., just hello and good-bye and how did my husband look and what did he eat today, stiff as ever, winter on two feet, and she took her lawyers with her down to the Santa Barbara Municipal Courthouse and had her husband declared incompetent.

O‘Kane first heard about it one night when he couldn’t get home after work — Roscoe was running Mrs. McCormick across town to some fancy-dress party and wouldn’t be back till late. The last thing he wanted was to stick around the place, and Rosaleen was sure to give him hell over it, the meal ruined and she slaving over the stove since three and all the rest of it, but he had no choice unless he wanted to walk — and he didn’t. He was able to cajole a plate of home fries and ham out of the Chink cook — and he would have killed for a beer or even a glass of wine, but there was nothing in the house and Sal and the rest of the McCormick wops had been pretty cool to him ever since the Dimucci business — so he took the plate and a glass of buttermilk upstairs to see if maybe Nick wanted to play a couple of hands of poker to while away the time.

Nick was sitting behind the barred door to the upstairs parlor with a newspaper spread out on the footstool before him, and Pat was leaning back in a chair just outside the open door to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom. “Can’t get home to the hearth,” O‘Kane said, setting down his plate so he could dig out his keys and swing open the heavy iron door, “so I figured I’d stop round and see what the night nurses are up to. Anybody for a hand of poker?”

Nick didn’t think so. Not right then, anyway. Pat stirred himself, glanced over his shoulder at Mr. McCormick, who was apparently asleep, though you could hardly tell because he’d been so blocked and lifeless lately, and said that yeah, he might play a hand or two.

“By the way,” Nick said in a casual rumble, “did you see this in the paper?”

O‘Kane had started across the room, thinking to set plate and glass down on the sideboard while he pulled out the card table, and he stopped now, arrested in mid-stride. “What?”

“This. Right here.”

O‘Kane stood there like an altar boy with the collection plate held out stiffly before him, except it was ham and potatoes on the plate and not a heap of pocket-worried coins, and he was no altar boy, not anymore. He looked over Nick’s shoulder to where Nick’s thick stump of a finger was pointing, and there it was, the cold truth about the Ice Queen, in 6-point type:

M‘CORMICK GUARDIANSHIP TO WIFE

Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, wife of Stanley Robert McCormick of Riven Rock in Montecito, petitioned today in Superior Court to have her husband declared an incompetent person. Mr. McCormick, youngest son of the late Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, has suffered from mental illness since shortly after his marriage to Mrs. McCormick in 1904. The Honorable Baily M. Melchior, Superior Court Judge, appointed Mrs. McCormick, along with Henry B. Favill and Cyrus Bentley, both of Chicago, as joint guardians.

“So what do you think of your poor heartbroken wife now, Eddie—‘She loves him and she wants to be with him,’ isn’t that what you said?” Nick was squinting up at him from eyes set deep in the big calabash of his head. He was running a finger along the lapel of his jacket and smirking as if he’d just won a bet at long odds. From across the room, Pat let out with a strangled little bark of a laugh.

O‘Kane shrugged. “There’s no love lost between her and me,” he said, and he was thinking of the lecture her Imperial Highness had given him on trifling with a girl’s affections, as if she would have the vaguest notion of what went on between a man and a woman, and that still rankled, because no woman was going to tell him what to do, especially when it came to his own private affairs. “I’m in this for Mr. McCormick’s sake, and I wouldn’t walk across the street for her, if you want to know the truth.”

“That comes as a surprise to me,” Nick rumbled, still with that mocking tone, his eyes glistening, cat and mouse. “You were the one had the crush on her — and not so long ago at that. Am I right, Pat?”

The plate was going cold in his hand. Outside, beyond the windows, the sky was darkening. It was getting late, and he knew Rosaleen would be working herself up, pans burning on the stove, garbage up to her ankles, the baby squatting behind the couch with some scrap of offal in his mouth and she taking a hard angry pull at the bottle she kept hidden away in back of the icebox where nobody would think to look. He thought of ringing up Old Man Rowlings and having him give her a message, but then why bother? She’d be riding her broom by now anyway. He gave Pat a look and then turned back to Nick with another shrug. “Let’s just say my eyes have been opened.”

Nick was turned halfway round in his chair, neckless and massive, his shoulders looking as if they’d been inflated with a pneumatic pump. “Right from the start I told you she was a gold digger, didn’t I?”

“I’m not going to defend her, not anymore, but I still think you’re wrong. If I’m not mistaken, she’s got her own millions that her father left her — and that château in Switzerland and all the rest of it. So what does she need with his money?”

“Hah. You hear that, Pat? ‘What does she need with his money?’ Come on, Eddie, wake up. Did you ever in your life meet anybody thought they had enough money? You get that rich, you only want to get richer.”

O‘Kane still hadn’t set the plate down — or the buttermilk either. He was beginning to feel like a waiter. And he was hungry too, but there was something here that needed to be settled — or at least thrashed out.

“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Nick said, and he dug a pre-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket and stuck it between his lips, “this right here”—tapping the newspaper—“really opens things up for your Mrs. Katherine McCormick.”

“What do you mean?”

The flare of the match, a whiff of sulphur. “Don’t you get it? He’s incompetent and she’s got hold of the will she had him make out the day after they got married — the one that leaves everything to her? — and now she can traipse all over the country and do whatever she damn well pleases in any kind of society, because when they ask her ‘So where’s your husband?’ she just dabs at her eyes and says, ‘The poor man’s locked away at Riven Rock with his nurses — and he’s mad as a loon.’ ”

Pat let out another laugh. He’d come awake now, setting all four legs of the chair down on the floor and hunching forward, elbows propped up on the buttress of his thighs. “So you think she’d be seeing other men then? Secretly, I mean?”

“Call a spade a spade, why don’t you, Patrick.” Nick let the smoke spew out of his nostrils, a blue haze settling in his lap and then rising, deflected, to irradiate his blunt features and the vast shining dome of his forehead. “You mean whoring around, don’t you?”

“It’s not right to talk about her like that and you know it,” O‘Kane heard himself say, and immediately regretted it. Here he was, defending her again.

“Not right?” Nick echoed. “Why not? You think just because she’s a millionaire’s wife she’s any better than you? You think she doesn’t itch between her legs like any other woman?”

It was a stimulating proposition, the Ice Queen in heat, but O‘Kane never had the opportunity to pursue it. Because just then there was a movement in the room behind Pat, and when he looked up Mr. McCormick was standing in the doorway.

At first no one moved, and they might have been at the very last scene of a play, just before the lights go down. A long slow moment breathed by, the smallest sounds of the house magnified till every creak and rustle was like a scream. And then, very slowly and deliberately, O‘Kane crossed to the sideboard and set down the plate and beside it the glass, freeing up his hands — just in case. “Mr. McCormick!” he cried, his voice animated with pleasure and surprise, as if he were greeting an old friend on the street, and he exchanged a glance with Pat, careful to make no sudden moves. “Good evening, sir. How are you feeling?”

Nick had folded up the newspaper, and though he hadn’t got to his feet, you could see he was ready to spring if need be; Pat, inches from Mr. McCormick and all but impotent in the grip of the chair, looked up with quickened eyes. This was the first time Mr. McCormick had been out of bed in two weeks or more, and the first time in memory he’d got up without any prompting. He’d been violent on the last occasion, veering from a state of utter immobility to the frenzy of released energy that was like a balloon puffed and puffed till it exploded, and it had taken both O‘Kane and Mart to subdue him. But now he merely stood there in his crisp blue pajamas, stooped and hunched over to the right where the muscles of his leg had gone slack from disuse. He didn’t seem to have registered the question.

“You must be feeling better,” O‘Kane prompted. It was vital to engage him in conversation, the first step — he was waking up, coming out of it, coming back to the real world after his long sojourn in the other one.

Mr. McCormick looked right at him, no bugs, no demons, no eyes crawling up the walls. “I… I… is it lunchtime yet? I was wondering about lunch….” And then: “I’ve been sleeping, haven’t I?”

For all his experience and all the cynicism it bred, O‘Kane was exhilarated, on fire: Mr. McCormick was talking! Not only talking, but making sense-or nearly — and he wasn’t lashing out, wasn’t cursing and spitting and attacking his nurses as if they were the devil’s minions. He was hungry, that was all, just like anybody else. In a flash O’Kane saw ahead to the weeks and months to come, the feeding tube discarded, Mr. McCormick dressing himself, using the toilet, joking again, Mr. McCormick reaching into his breast pocket, pulling out his checkbook, Let’s see about that acreage you were interested in, Eddie…

“Hello, Mr. McCormick,” Nick offered from his chair in the corner of the room, and Pat, his face hung like a painting at the level of Mr. McCormick’s waist, echoed the greeting.

“My wife,” Mr. McCormick said, and it was as if they didn’t exist, his eyes focused on some point in the distance, through the walls and across the grounds and all the way out to that fancy-dress party on Arrellaga Street. He shuffled into the room, unsteady on his feet, skating on gravel, his arms leaping to steady himself. “Katherine,” he said, and the name seemed to surprise him, as if he hadn’t spoken it, as if the syllables had somehow separated themselves from the air and spontaneously combined. He shuffled his feet. Started forward. Thought better of it. Stopped. Finally, moving with the wincing deliberation of a man walking across a bed of hot coals, he made the center of the room, his shoulders violently quaking. “Mother,” he said, and he was looking straight into O‘Kane’s eyes now, “I must have fallen asleep….”

“Mr. McCormick!” O‘Kane had no choice but to raise his voice, calling out to someone drowning at sea, the waves crashing, the rocks drawing nearer, and he couldn’t let him go under again, he couldn’t. “Mr. McCormick, sir. Good evening! Don’t you want something to eat? Look, look here,” gesturing to the plate on the sideboard and waving him on like a traffic cop, “don’t you see what we’ve fixed you for dinner? Good ham, it’s delicious. Here, try a bite — you like ham, you know you do.”

And there he was, pale as water, standing suddenly at the sideboard in his pajamas, barefooted, long-armed, slumped to one side like a poorly staked sapling, and he was eating, forcing the congealed lumps of potato into his mouth, his jaws working, eyes lit with accomplishment, normalcy, the first step….

But it wasn’t to be.

The three of them watched in silence as he ate, jamming the food into his mouth with both hands, gulping and gnashing, licking his fingers and wiping his palms on the breast of his pajamas, and that was fine, a small miracle, until the demons took him and he swung violently round on them with O‘Kane’s fork clutched in his hand. Now he was hunted, brought to bay like an animal, the old fever in his eyes. “My wife!” he shouted, “I want my wife! Do you hear me?! Do you?!”

O‘Kane’s voice was a long swallow of syrup, the most reasonable and soothing voice in the world. “Mr. McCormick, it’s me, Eddie O’Kane. And look, your friends Nick and Pat too. Your wife isn’t here — you know that. You’ve been asleep, that’s all. Dreaming. And here’s your luncheon, nice, just the way you like it.”

Mr. McCormick took a spastic slice at the air, wielding the fork like a dagger. His bare toes gripped the floor. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “You,” he sputtered. “They, they — Katherine. I want to fu-fuck her, I do, and you bring her here right now. D-do you hear me? Do you?”

How much of the conversation had he overheard? O‘Kane was thinking about that as he signaled Pat with his eyes and began to inch forward, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet. You think she doesn’t itch betweenherlegs like any other woman?

And then, just before he hurled the fork at O‘Kane’s face, smashed the plate and glass and tore the sideboard out from the wall preparatory to upending it on Pat’s shins, Mr. McCormick dropped his voice and lulled them for just the fleetingest instant. “I want to fu-fuck her,” he breathed, bowing his head, and he might have been a boy telling his mother what he wanted for his birthday — then, only then, did he explode.

The fork took a divot out of O‘Kane’s cheek, just below his right eye, and he could hear it rattling across the floor behind him as Pat sprang forward and Mr. McC-ormick, shaky on his feet but with the astonishing dexterity of the deranged and otherworldly, upended the sideboard and danced clear. There was a keening in the air now, a razor-edged hysterical singsong chant, “No, no, stay away, stay away,” Mr. McCormick backing into the corner in a wrestler’s crouch, O’Kane and Nick going in low to pull his legs out from under him.

It was a brief but savage struggle that twice saw Mr. McCormick break free and rush the barred door as if he could dart right on through it, but there was no key in the lock this time and they finally ran him to the ground in his bathroom, where he tried to hold the door against the combined weight of the three of them. The shame of it all was Nick. Nick lost his temper. Cursing, his eyes dark streaks in the livid pulp of his face, he was the first through the bathroom door, and he ignored all the rules — open hands only, no blows, use your legs and shoulders and try only to restrain the patient, not subdue him — standing back from Mr. McCormick and letting his fists fall like mallets, the thump of flesh on flesh, not the face, never the face, hitting their employer and benefactor repeatedly in the chest and abdomen until he went down on the tile floor. But that wasn’t enough for Nick — he was possessed, mindless, as crazed as Katzakis or the Apron Man or Gunderson, the big Swede with the rolled dough for arms who killed and decapitated his wife and daughter and held six men at bay for over three hours till finally they had to chloroform him. Nick wouldn’t stop. He kept pounding Mr. McCormick over and over again, though Mr. McCormick was bundled up on the floor with his hands over his head, crying “No, no, no!”

“Nick!” O‘Kane roared, snatching at the heavy arms as they rose and fell, and he felt it coming up in him himself, the uncontainable hormonal rush that makes every one of us a potential maniac. Before he knew what was happening he’d jerked Nick to his feet, spun him around and driven his fist into the soft dollop of flesh in the center of that shining sphere of an overcooked face.

“Eddie!” Pat was shouting, “Nick!” bodies everywhere, the footing treacherous, Mr. McCormick hunched up in the fetal position on the cold hard tiles but with one eye open, one glistening mad eye on the madness churning above him, Nick coming back at him now, at O‘Kane, squaring off, shouting, “You son of a bitch I’ll kill you!” and the fury of their voice magnified in that confined space till the bathroom echoed like some private chamber of hell.

All that was bad enough — the abuse of Mr. McCormick when he was defenseless and just coming out of his haze; the fight with Nick that dredged up all the mistrust and rancor that must have lain brooding between them like a copperhead with somebody’s foot on its tail, though he never suspected and never would have admitted it if he had; the grim prospect of the championship bout awaiting him when he finally did get home to Rosaleen — but for O‘Kane, on that unlucky night, it was just the beginning.

No sooner had Pat separated him and Nick than he turned and stalked out of the apartment, his knuckles raw, Nick raving at his back, Mr. McCormick all but comatose on the floor. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking son of a bitch!” Nick bellowed. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here anyhow — you’re on the day shift, jackass!” He went right on down the stairs and out the front door without a word to anybody, and then he was walking up the drive, engulfed by the night. The lights faded at his back and the darkness closed in on him, a smell of tidal flats on the air, the cold underbelly of the fog catching and tearing and spilling its guts in the treetops. He didn’t think about it twice: he just started walking.

Five miles. His feet were blistered — he wasn’t used to this anymore — he was bleeding from the cut under his eye where the fork had gouged him, and his upper lip was split and swollen. He raged against Nick the whole way, Nick who was thirty-four years old and resented O‘Kane because O’Kane was younger, smarter, better looking, because O‘Kane was head nurse and he wasn’t. Well, fuck him. O’Kane had blackened one of his eyes for him and done some damage that wasn’t so obvious maybe, but he would feel it tomorrow, that was for sure. He walked on, the anger tapering off inside him as the fog came down and the chill of the night took hold of him — and he was getting soft, as addicted to the sun as a lizard on a rock, and what would Boston be like now? Two cars went by, but they were going in the wrong direction. And then, to cap things off, he got to the foot of State Street five minutes after the last streetcar had left.

What he needed was a drink. Or two. But for some unfathomable reason — birth, death, the end of the universe and all things available to man — Cody Menhoff’s was closed at 9:45 P.M. on a Thursday night in the middle of May with grown men expiring for the want of a drink, and he stood there dumbfounded at the locked door, licking the crusted-over scab on his lip, till he heard a shout from across the street. “Hey, partner,” someone called to him, “you looking for a drink?”

He wound up in a saloon in Spanishtown, the seething hovel of mud-brick houses and ramshackle chicken coops where all the Mexicans and Chinks who worked the hotels lived and where you could always find a drink and a whore — not that he was looking for the latter, not especially. What he found himself doing was drinking dirty brown liquid out of a dirty brown cup with a character in a peaked cap and military mustaches who could have been Porfirio Díaz himself for all O‘Kane knew. But he didn’t care. He had no prejudices — spics, wops, Chinks, Krauts, Micks, it was all the same to him. Set up another round and let’s chase it with a couple of those Mexican beers that smell like wet pussy and taste like they were strained through the crotch of somebody’s union suit. Yeah, that’s right, that’s the one. Slainte! How you say it? Salud. Okay, salud!

He was there an hour maybe, long enough to forget his split lip and the pain radiating from a place just above his left temple where Nick had twice caught him with a right hand that felt as if it had been launched from a cannon, and then he thought he might want to see some American faces for a while and wandered up the street to a place he’d been to once or twice before. It was festive inside. Full of life. He saw a raft of women’s hats, pinned-up hair, men in shirtsleeves. The player piano was going and some drunk, a guy he thought he might have recognized from Menhoff‘s, was singing along and running his hands over the keys in pantomime:

They heeded not his dying prayer

They buried him there on the lone prairie

In a little box just six by three

And his bones now rot on the lone prairie

He had a terrific voice, the drunk, very plaintive and evocative, and O‘Kane asked him if he knew “Carrick Fergus” and he did but there was no roll for it so they had to settle for “The Streets of New York,” which they ran through twice, O’Kane harmonizing, and then “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” That made them thirsty, so they sat at a table and O‘Kane ordered whiskey for them both and never mind the chaser, and he was just settling in and feeling expansive, telling the drunk — whose name was Joe something — about Mr. McCormick and how he’d finally woken up like Sleeping Beauty and how he, O’Kane, came to have this gash in his cheek and the split lip and aggravated temple, when he looked up and saw Giovannella Dimucci sitting across the room in the dining area with a man who had his arm around her shoulder and was leaning in to whisper something in her ear. But Giovannella wasn’t looking at the man she was with. She was staring across the room. At O‘Kane.

Who can say what a man feels at a time like that? What miswired connections suddenly fuse, what deadened paths and arterial causeways come roaring to life all in an instant? O‘Kane pushed himself up from the chair without so much as a word to Joe something, who was in the middle of a disconnected monologue revolving around the loss of his hat, his wallet and his left shoe, and propelled himself across the crowded room in a kind of trance. His hips were tight, as compact as pistons, he could feel the heavy musculature of his legs grip and relax and grip again with each stride as he swung his shoulders out and back in a rhythmic autonomous strut, his heart beating strong and sure, everything in the sharpest focus. He wasn’t looking at Giovannella or the man with her, or not at his face anyway — his eyes were locked on the arm that insinuated so many things, the arm he wanted to break in six places. It would have been no use pointing out to him that it was Giovannella’s absolute and unfettered right to go where and with whom she pleased and that it was nobody’s business but her own as to when and how that unwitting arm had come to drape itself so casually across her shoulder, no use at all. The die was cast. Words were useless.

O‘Kane walked right up to the table and tore the arm off Giovannella’s shoulder as he might have stripped a dead limb from a tree and found to his consternation that the arm was attached elsewhere. There was a question of sinew, bone, cartilage, and the initially startled and then outraged flaxen-haired and beefy farmboy in a pair of pale blue washed-out overalls who formed the trunk of this particular tree. “You can’t do that,” O’Kane said, meaning a whole range of things, and when the arm spontaneously tried to reassert itself he slapped it away and showed the farmboy the bloody divot under his eye and the aggravated temple and the lip that had gone yellow with pus, and the farmboy desisted. And still without looking at her, without so much as giving her a glance, O‘Kane reached out unerringly and hoisted Giovannella to her feet. “We’re getting out of here,” he said, and he was fixing his lunatic glare on the farmboy’s evil-eyed companion in the event he wanted his arm wrenched out of the socket too. And then, as if Giovannella might have harbored any doubt as to his meaning or intentions, he lowered his voice to a primal growl and gave the statement a sense of urgency: “Right now.”

She wasn’t happy. She fought him every step of the way, through the maze of tables, into the foyer and out the door into the deserted street. No one challenged him — they barely looked up from their beers — and just let the farmboy and his evil-eyed companion come after him, just let them. He dragged her half a block before she broke away from him, shifted her weight like a professional boxer and hit him with everything she had, and right where it was tenderest, right where Mr. McCormick’s fork had opened up his flesh, so that it felt now, for the briefest sharpest instant, as if his whole face were slipping off the bone like a rubber mask. “You bastard!” she screamed.

“Me?” He was outraged, stung to bitterness and enmity at the sheer unreasonableness of her response. Was she crazy? Was that it? “You were the one sitting in a dive like that with some jerk’s arm around you like some common—”

She hit him again and was rearing back to unleash a complementary blow with the sharp little bundle of knuckles that was her left fist, when he caught her arm at the wrist. Quick as a bolt, she came back at him with the other hand, but he caught that one too. And he wasn’t thinking, not at all, but somewhere inside him he registered the sensation of holding fast to those two frail and quick-blooded wrists that were like birds, sparrows snatched out of the air and imprisoned in the grip of his unconquerable hands, and it was electric. It surged through him, and there was no power on earth that could stop him now. “Like some common whore,” he said.

She spat at him. Kicked out with jackknifing knees. Cursed him in Italian first and then in English. It didn’t matter. Not at all. Because he was supreme and he had hold of her wrists and he wasn’t letting go, not right then, maybe not ever.

He led her down the street in an awkward dance, both of them shuffling sideways, till he found a place thick with trees at the far northern verge of the Potter Hotel grounds, and there was never any question of the outcome. For all the power of her charm and her black persuasive eyes and her body that was flawless and young and without stint of constraint, he was more charming and more persuasive — and more powerful. She had to understand that, and finally, after he’d been rough with her, maybe too rough with her, she did. She clung to him beneath the night-blooming bushes in the dark of the starless night, her skin naked to his, and sobbed for him, sobbed so hard he thought she would break in half, and then, only then, did he let go and feel the warmth infuse him as if his blood had been drained, and whiskey, hot burning Irish from the sainted shores, substituted in its place. They lay there through the slow-rolling hours and they talked in low voices and kissed and let the fog come down like the breath of something so big and overwhelming they could never have conceived of it, and this time, when he pulled her to him, he didn’t have to force her.

Ah, yes. Yes. But all idylls have to end, as well he knew, and all too often they end with clamminess and insect bites and an ache in the head. They end with the break of day, a prick of the fog turned to drizzle, the painful rasping of some misplaced bird. Giovannella looked at him out of the eyes of a bride and he knew he was in way over his head. “I promise,” he told her, “I swear,” and he bundled her in his arms, turned inside out with guilt and regret and fear and self-loathing — and yet, at the same time, he was swelling to the point of bursting with something else altogether, something that felt dangerously like… well, love.

Head throbbing, his suit a mess, his face worse, he went into the hotel, while Giovannella waited shivering in the woods, and telephoned Roscoe. Roscoe was just getting up, just getting ready to have his breakfast in the kitchen of the big house while Sam Wah jabbered at him in Chink-English and Nick and Pat drank black coffee and prepared for the end of their shift and the ride home, after which he planned to pick up O‘Kane in front of the apartment on Micheltorena. O’Kane talked him out of that. O‘Kane called in his markers, reminding Roscoe of all he’d done for him over the course of the past months and of the brotherhood of their barroom binges in the days before Rosaleen arrived, and Roscoe agreed to forego breakfast and slip down to the Potter Hotel to take Giovannella out Olive Mill Road to the place where the gap showed in the oleanders — and take O’Kane to work.

How he made it through that day O‘Kane would never know.

He cleaned himself up as best he could in the bathroom he’d formerly shared with Mart and that Mart now shared with Elsie Reardon, avoiding Pat — and Nick — altogether. Roscoe was mum. They didn’t even know O‘Kane was there, had no reason to suspect he wasn’t at home awaiting his morning ride and his daily regimen of laving and force-feeding Mr. McCormick (daily, that is, but for Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when Dr. Hamilton sat with their employer and benefactor and the door remained shut except to admit a pair of wops with mops). Mart had heard his brothers’ version of the previous night’s events, but he didn’t seem eager to leap to judgment — as ready, in his bigheaded, dilatory way, to lay blame at Nick’s door as at O’Kane’s. And O‘Kane spent most of the day reprising his own version aloud, hoping to get Mart in his camp, water thicker than blood and all that, and trying to erase the memory of Giovannella and how unutterably stupid he’d been to stir that kettle up again, love or no love. What he refused to think of or even admit to the murky periphery of his consciousness for the smallest splinter of a second, was the problem that made all others seem as insignificant as the exact phrasing of the legend that would one day appear on his tombstone: Rosaleen.

He telephoned her at eight that morning and poured a heavy gelatin of lies into the mouthpiece, telling her of the way the car had broken down so completely they couldn’t even get it to roll if they pushed it and how Mr. McCormick had come to life in a sudden frenzy and beaten him about the head and face and she should see his lip and how finally he was forced to spend a forlorn and monastic night sharing a bed with Mart who of course snored the whole time. Rosaleen was silent on the other end of the line and he could picture her in Old Man Rowlings’s cramped parlor, Old Man Rowlings fuming somewhere in the background, Rosaleen chewing her lip in that way she had, her eyes teeming in her head, one slow foot perched on the bridge of the other. “I’ll be home tonight after work,” he said. “Okay?”

Her voice rolled back to him like the big black ball in the bowling alley, uncertain, untrue, and yet clattering all the same: “Yeah, Eddie. Okay.”

And then it was evening. And then he went home.

She was waiting for him at the front door, Eddie Jr. propped up on her hip like a shield, and he thought of the heavy leathern shield Cuchulain used to wield and all the fierce blood of their warrior ancestors seething in Rosaleen’s veins, and she was holding a broom too — a broom she didn’t even know the proper use of — to complete the picture. He opened the gate and came up the walk and though his head ached still and his lip stung and the side of his face throbbed and he was as beaten-down and exhausted as he’d ever been in his life, he knew there was something wrong with that picture, something radically wrong, and he was immediately on his guard. “Hello, honey,” he called, and the greeting had a hollow ring to it, desperate and false. She said nothing in response, but her lip curled back from her teeth and he saw that she was making an effort to restrain it, whatever it was, till he was in the house and the door was shut behind him.

“Liar,” she snarled as he brushed past her and into the ashpit of the parlor.

How did she know?

What did she know?

His brain, dormant with exhaustion, churned to sudden life — there was nothing for him now but to face his accuser and parry every fresh accusation with a fresh lie. “What?” he said, all innocence. “What are you talking about?”

Her face was twisted, the face of one of the doctor’s hominoids suffering through an experiment, all hate and murder and bloodlust. “You were downtown at Huff’s last night, drunk as a pig. Zinnia Linnear saw you.”

“She needs glasses.”

“Don’t lie to me, you son of a fucking bitch.”

“I swear it, I spent the night at Riven Rock. Look. Look at my face, why don’t you? Huh? You see that? Mr. McCormick did that to me and I spent the night like a choirboy in Mart’s bed with Mart snoring like a sawmill, I swear to God—”

She wasn’t mollified, not in the least — she had something else, he knew it, something she was holding in reserve, roll out the caissons and let it fly. The baby, riding her hip, reached out to him. “Da-da,” he said. “Da-da.”

“You were with a woman,” she said, and her voice was pitched low, the first premonitory rumble of the inchoate storm. “A dago.”

He tried to avoid her, duck away, hide, tried to change the subject, clear the air, give her a chance to calm herself and absorb the thick palliative of his lies, but she wouldn’t have it. Everywhere he turned, she was there, the baby her shield, her voice the high agitated hoot of a seabird: “Who was she? Huh? Some whore you found under a rock? Did you lay her? Did you?” He went into the bedroom to change his shirt, a man who’d been at work for two solid days and sweating under the arms with the strain of providing for his family and could he expect a moment’s peace in his own home, the home he worked twelve hours a day to pay for? No. No, he couldn’t. She was there in the bedroom, hooting, and when he pushed himself up to escape to the kitchen and reach behind the icebox for the solace of the all-but-empty bottle she kept sequestered there and he was never to know of in all its shame and hypocrisy, he lifted it to his lips to a barrage of hoots—“Who was she? Who?”—until finally he could take it no more, and no man could, not if he was blind, deaf and paralyzed.

He didn’t mean to get violent. He didn’t want to. He hadn’t planned on it. It made him feel bad. But it was just like the time in Waverley, her face a puffed-up ball presenting itself to him over and over again, and he a spiker at the net, and yet it was different too, radically different, because the baby was there, attached to her hip and yowling as if he’d been orphaned already. He loved that baby and he didn’t want to hurt it—him, Eddie Jr., his son — and he loved Rosaleen too, he did, but she kept coming at him, the white moon of her face, the big stitched ball, and when finally he did hit it, that surging swollen sphere of a hateful twisted little interrogatory wife’s face, when his patience was exhausted, when Job’s patience would have been exhausted, when all the popes and martyrs would have rattled their holy desiccated bones and screamed for murder, it was more a matter of reflex than anything else. Once, he hit her once, once only. And he made sure, in the way of a thoughtful man putting down a horse or a favorite dog, to hit her hard enough and squarely enough to prevent even the remotest possibility of a rebound.

That was in May, when Mr. McCormick was declared incompetent and Giovannella began showing up at Riven Rock again at all hours of the day and night, and Rosaleen, the smallest crook stamped into the bridge of her nose like a question mark turned back on itself and her eyes rimmed in black like a night raider‘s, packed her bags and took the baby with his bruised thigh and walked out the door to the streetcar and took the streetcar to the train, but for O’Kane the events came so fast and furious he could hardly be sure of the year, let alone the month. And how was Rosaleen? everyone wanted to know, especially people like Elsie Reardon. And the baby? They were fine, O‘Kane insisted, and he relied on memory to supply the fresh details about little Eddie’s puerile raptures and adorable doings, but he ached inside, ached till he had to get drunk most nights of the week and cry himself to sleep in the calmed waters of the big wooden ark of a bed he’d bought to float and sustain his bliss, and for a month he was bereft, and for a month he fabricated and prevaricated and spun his complex weave of wishful thinking and feathery invention before admitting to all and sundry that Rosaleen had gone home to Massachusetts to nurse her ailing mother. And father. And her brother with the bone cancer and the sixteen children.

All that hurt. And it should never have happened. He knew who to blame — himself, of course, a man who just wasn’t ready yet for the yoke of marriage and family. And Katherine. Mrs. McCormick. The Ice Queen. If she hadn’t stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong none of this would have happened. He could have gotten Giovannella — or whoever — out of his system and waited till the time was right, until he was ready, really ready, and then maybe things would have been different.

Once the month was out, he settled up with Old Man Rowlings and took a room in a boardinghouse not far from the train station and within easy walking distance of Menhoff‘s, O’Reilly’s and the hole-in-,the-wall bars of Spanishtown. The furniture he sold off to whoever wanted it, and wouldn’t you know that Zinnia Linnear, like some sort of veiny blue vulture, was first in line for the oversized bed, the bureau and the set of mostly chipped secondhand china. There were fireworks off Stearns Wharf that Fourth of July and what must have been three hundred boats, each with a kerosene lantern, spread across the glowing water like the stars come down from the sky. O‘Kane remembered that Fourth of July in particular, not simply for the concatenation of unlucky events leading up to it, but because Giovannella was there with him at the end of the wharf, her wide glowing uncandled face lit again and again by the trailing streamers of red, white and blue.

It was sometime around then — July, maybe August — that Mr. McCormick came back to life again. He got up out of bed one morning and stepped into the shower bath like any other man, ordered up his breakfast and asked for the newspaper. O‘Kane was stunned, and even Mart, who was slow to register surprise (or any other emotion, for that matter), seemed impressed. In fact, the two of them just stood there speechless as Mr. McCormick, dressed in his pajamas and robe, seated himself at the table in the upper parlor and buttered his toast with the brisk assiduous movements of a man sitting down to breakfast before leaving for the office. It was an entirely normal scene, prosaic even, if you discount the fact that he had to use a spoon to butter his toast, Dr. Hamilton having proscribed all sharp-edged implements in the aftermath of the fork incident. When Mr. McCormick finished spooning up his eggs, nice as you please, patted his lips delicately with the napkin, stretched and took the newspaper, O’Kane sent Mart for Dr. Hamilton — the doctor had to see this.

Hamilton came on the run, dashing through the entrance hall and taking the steps two at a time, and he was still breathing in short muted gasps as he smoothed back his hair and straightened his tie on the landing outside the barred door to the upper parlor. He tried his best to achieve a casual saunter, as if he’d just happened by, but he couldn’t seem to control his feet, skipping through every third step or so as he crossed the room. O‘Kane watched him slowly circle the patient, eyes flipping behind the lenses of his pince-nez, lips silently moving as if rehearsing a speech; Mr. McCormick, absorbed in the paper, which he held up rigidly only inches from his face, didn’t seem to notice him. And then, very tentatively, as if afraid of breaking the spell, Hamilton tried to draw Mr. McCormick into conversation. “Good morning, Mr. McCormick,” he said in his customary whisper, “you’re looking well.”

There was no response.

“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands together in a brisk, businesslike way and moving into the periphery of Mr. McCormick’s vision, quite close to him now, “it certainly is a glorious sunshiny day, isn’t it?”

Still no response.

“And to see you looking so well on such a glorious day — that gives us all pleasure, doesn’t it, Edward? Martin? And sir, Mr. McCormick, I can only presume you’re feeling better? A pause. ”Am I right?“

Very slowly, as if he were an actor in a farce parting the curtains to reveal the painted smile on his face, Mr. McCormick lowered the newspaper to uncover first his hairline, then his brow, his eyes, his nose, and finally, with a flourish, the broad radiant beaming dimple-cheeked grin spread wide across the lower part of his face. Mr. McCormick was grinning, grinning to beat the band, and you could see the light in his eyes as they came into focus and settled warmly on the reciprocally grinning visage of Dr. Hamilton. “And who might you be?” he asked in the most gratuitous and amenable tones.

The doctor couldn’t help himself. He let his eyes have their way three times in rapid succession — blip, blip, blip — worked his shoulders as if to shrug off some invisible beast clinging to his jacket and hissing in his ear, and said, “Why, Mr. McCormick, it’s me, Dr. Hamilton, Gilbert — your physician.” He spread his arms. “And look, your old friends, Edward O‘Kane and Martin Thompson. But how are you feeling?”

The grin held. O‘Kane was grinning too now — and so was Mart. All four of them were stretching their facial muscles to the limit, goodwill abounding, and you would have thought they’d just heard the best joke in the world. “What is this place?” Mr. McCormick asked then, and no trace of hesitation in his voice, no stuttering or verbigeration at all.

Dr. Hamilton turned to O‘Kane and Mart as if this were the drollest thing he’d ever heard, then came back to Mr. McCormick, all the while rubbing his hands and flipping his eyes in a paroxysm of nervous energy — and grinning, grinning as if it were the conventional way of wearing a face. “Why, it’s Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick — in California. The place you designed for your sister, Mary Virginia — surely you remember that. Such a beautiful place. And so comfortable. Did you encounter any particular difficulties in the design?”

“I–I—” and now the old hesitation, the scattered eyes, at once lost and receding, but still the grin held. “I–I don’t recall… but I–I must have been ill, isn’t that, that right?”

Hamilton, trying for gravity, the grin banished: “Yes, that’s right, Mr. McCormick, you’ve been ill. But look at you now, alert and aglow with health and happiness…. Do you recall your illness, its nature, anything at all about it?”

Mr. McCormick turned to O‘Kane then and winked an eye — actually winked, like an old crony in a bar. “Yes,” he said, and the grin widened still further. “A c-cold, wasn’t it?”

The change lasted three days. Mr. McCormick got himself up each morning, shower-bathed (and sometimes for as long as two hours at a time), took his breakfast, read the paper. He conversed, joked even. And though he was very tired, exhausted from his long travail, he was able to move about without too much difficulty, favoring the right leg and walking with a tottering deliberation, as if he were on a tightrope over a howling precipice. He needed help in dressing still, easily frustrated — baffled, even — over the proper way to slip into a shirt or jacket and repeatedly trying to slide both feet into a single pantleg. But still, everyone was heartened, O‘Kane especially. Mr. McCormick was coming out of it. Finally. At long last.

As it turned out, though — and this was sad, hopes raised and hopes dashed — O‘Kane was merely indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Those three days of lucidity, those three days of dramatic and visible improvement, of the lifting of the veil, of release, only adumbrated Mr. McCormick’s worst crisis since his breakdown. No one could have foreseen it. Not even Dr. Hamilton, who fired off a telegram to Katherine, now back in Boston, trumpeting the news of the change in her husband’s condition. Or she, who wired him back the minute she received it: HE WAS EATING? STOP DRESSING HIMSELF? STOP READING THE NEWSPAPER? STOP COULD SHE SEE HIM? STOP NOW? Optimistic, all his diagnostic sails flapping in a fresh breeze of hope and speculation — but cautious, ever cautious — the doctor wired her back to say: NOT YET STOP.

And a good thing too. Because what happened during O‘Kane’s shift on the fourth day after Mr. McCormick awakened from the dead came as a shock, to put it mildly. O’Kane had never seen anything like it, and he thought he’d seen everything. No one was to blame, at least, and that came as a relief to all concerned, but if he were to scratch deep enough in the sediment of culpability, O‘Kane could have named a candidate — Katherine, Katherine yet again. She meant well, he would never deny that, but because she meant well — and because she was a snooping imperious castrating bitch of a woman the likes of which he could never have imagined even in his worst nightmare — she couldn’t help sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

The problem this time was with the window in Mr. McCormick’s bathroom. Katherine couldn’t leave it alone. After she’d finished with the first floor of the house, consigning the McCormick furniture, pictures and pottery to the garage and remaking the place in her own image — when it was all done, from paint to draperies to rugs — she began to fixate on the second floor, the floor she’d never seen, the floor from which she was interdicted on Dr. Hamilton’s strictest orders. She studied it constantly — or at least the outer walls and windows and the tiled expanse of the sunporch — watching for a glimpse of her husband through a pair of opera glasses. Inevitably she found something to displease her, and in this case it was the bathroom window.

The bars disturbed her. They made the place look too much like a fortress — or an asylum. She consulted with Hamilton and then brought in a young architect and a crew of Italians who removed the perfectly serviceable standard one-inch-thick iron bars while Mr. McCormick lay tranced in his bedroom and replaced them with steel louvers. The louvers had been designed to ensure that a fully grown man of Mr. McCormick’s height and weight couldn’t work his arm through any of the apertures and make contact with the glass beyond it — and of course, they’d been constructed to a standard of strength and durability that would prevent their being bent or mutilated in any way that might afford Mr. McCormick an avenue of escape. What the architect hadn’t taken into account was the ingenuity of Mr. McCormick — or his strength. Especially when the fit was on him.

It was late on that fourth day, toward the end of O‘Kane and Martin’s shift, and the evening was settling in round the house, birds calling, the sun hanging on a string, the islands in bold relief against the twin mirrors of sea and sky. Mart was in the parlor, working on a crossword puzzle by way of improving his vocabulary, and Mr. McCormick had retired for a nap before dinner. O’Kane was seated in a chair across the room from Mart, his feet propped up on the windowsill, gazing into space. He was thinking about his room and the bland indigestible cud of grease and overcooked vegetable matter his landlady was likely to serve up for dinner — and his first drink, and Giovannella — when he heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering and falling like heavy rain to the pavement below.

He didn’t stop to wonder or think, vaulting out of the chair like a high-jumper and hurtling across the floor to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom, which he found empty, and then to the bathroom, which he found locked. Or not locked, exactly — there was no lock — but obstructed. Mr. McCormick seemed to have jammed something — something substantial — up under the doorknob. O‘Kane twisted the knob and applied his shoulder to the unyielding slab of the door, all the while tasting panic in the back of his throat, a harsh taste, precipitate and unforgiving. Mart was right behind him, thank God, and in the next instant there were two of them battering at the door, Mart standing back five paces and then flinging himself at the insensate oak with the singlemindedness of a steer in a chute. Once, twice, three times, and finally the door gave, splintering off its hinges and lurching forward into a barricade of furniture with a dull echoing thump. And where had the furniture come from? From the stripped and ransacked bedroom behind them. While they were lulled to distraction in the soothing plenitude of the late afternoon, decoding their crossword puzzles and gazing idly out the window, Mr. McCormick had silently dismantled his room and built a bulwark against the door to cover his escape.

Oh, yes: his escape. That was what this was all about — the barricaded door, the shattered glass, the imploded peace of the lazy languorous late afternoon in Paradise — as O‘Kane was to discover in the next moment. He scrambled up over the plane of the door, which was canted now at a forty-five-degree angle, just in time to see Mr. McCormick vanish through a ragged gap in the louvers that looked as if an artillery shell had passed through it but was in fact created by Mr. McCormick himself, using main strength, ingenuity, and a four-inch-thick length of cherrywood that had formerly served as a table leg. O’Kane cried out, his mind a seething stew of featureless thoughts, the three p’s tumbled together with Dr. Hamilton’s lectures on the train, Katherine’s denunciatory fury and the stark crazed pulse-pounding phrase “suicidal tendencies,” and he rushed to the window and thrust his head through the gap in horror, expecting anything, expecting the worst. What he saw was Mr. McCormick, eyes sunk deep in the mask of his face, fierce with concentration, clambering down the drainpipe with all the agility of a, well, of a hominoid.

By the time O‘Kane reached the ground floor, burst through the front door and tore round the corner of the house, Mr. McCormick had vanished. Why, he was thinking, why does this always have to happen on my shift? and then he was in motion, frantic, irrepressible, charging round the courtyard and shouting out for Roscoe, the gardeners, the household help and any stray Italians who might have been dicing garlic or nodding over a glass of wine in their tumbledown cottages, dogs barking, chickens flying, the whole place a hurricane of fear and alarm. “Mr. McCormick’s loose!” he bellowed, and here came Mart and Roscoe and a host of sweating dark men gripping hoes and hedge clippers. “Lock your women indoors,” he cried, “and all of you men fan out over the property — and if you find him, don’t try to approach him, just stand clear and send for me or Dr. Hamilton.”

They were systematically beating the bushes, describing an ever-widening circle around the house under O‘Kane’s command, when Dr. Hamilton appeared on the run, flashing through the trees from the direction of the apery in a white lab coat stippled with the various leavings of his monkeys and baboons, not to mention Julius the orangutan. He slashed through the kitchen garden, across the courtyard and right on up to O’Kane, who was searching the bushes around the daphne bed to the west of the house. “My God,” the doctor gasped, out of breath, his eyes whirling, and he repeated it over and over again, wheezing for breath, “my God, my God, my God.”

“He can’t have gone far,” O‘Kane said, “his legs won’t carry him. He’s not in condition.”

The doctor just stood there, a sharp wedge of the declining sun isolating the right side of his face, the tic replicating itself in his cheek now and at the corner of his mouth. “How?” he sputtered. “Who was—? When did-?”

“No more than ten minutes. We almost had him — he pried open the new louvers with a stick of wood.”

“Shit.” The doctor let out a string of curses, every trace of the therapeutic whisper gone out of his voice. “What’s the nearest estate — Mira Vista, isn’t it? Who’s there now — are there any women?” His face was a small thing, flushed and bloated beneath the tan he’d acquired in the company of his hominoids, his hair wet through with sweat, and sweat descending in a probing and tentative way from his temples to trace the clenched lines of his jaw. “We’ve got to warn them. Notify the police. Call out the bloodhounds.”

“But he can’t have gone far — and he’s got almost ninety acres of his own to run around on… but I was just concerned, if, well, there’s any possibility of what we discussed before, if he might try to—”

“You idiot,” the doctor shouted, and there was no vestige of control left in him, “you unutterable moron. What do you think? Why do you suppose we keep him locked up? He could be lying dead under any one of these damned bushes even now, and here we are standing around jawing about it. Action, that’s what we need, not a bunch of lame-brained questions and what-ifs. We’ve got to. got to—” and then he broke off abruptly and darted away in the direction of the garage.

Night fell, and still no sign of Mr. McCormick. On regaining his senses, Hamilton decided against involving the police for fear of possible repercussions, but all the neighbors within a one-mile radius were warned and all available men, including the Dimuccis, were called out to help with the search. The number of flashlights was limited — two from the house and one from Roscoe’s trove in the garage — and the laborers went poking through the brush with lanterns and torches held aloft, despite the risk of fire. Roscoe had gone for Nick and Pat and they joined the search too, but O‘Kane, smarting from the way Hamilton had assailed him and still carrying a lingering grudge against Nick, went off on his own with one of the flashlights.

It was the dry season, the tall grass of the fields parched till it turned from gold to white, the frogs thick along the two creeks that merged on the property, clamorous in their numbers, filling the darkness with the liquid pulse of their froggy loves and wars. O‘Kane followed Hot Springs Creek south to where it joined with Cold Stream and then traced that back north along the Indian ceremonial grounds the estate had swallowed up, thinking that Mr. McCormick might have been attracted to the water or the thick growth of reeds and scrub oak that shadowed the banks — he could have crouched there for a week and no one would have found him, and certainly not in the dark. The beam of the flashlight — a gadget O’Kane had never even seen till he came to Riven Rock — picked out the odd branch or boulder, flattening it to two-dimensionality as though it were pasted to the wall of darkness, and O‘Kane stumbled among the rocks of the streambed, blinded by the light. He kept his balance the first few times, but then a rock skittered out from under his feet and he pitched forward into the waterborne rubble, cradling the flashlight to his chest and skinning both knees in the process. He lay there recumbent a moment, thinking of rattlesnakes, evil-eyed and explosive, and gave up the streambed for the cultivated paths.

He saw the flickering lights in the distance, heard the occasional shout — in English and Italian both — but he ignored them. Searching alone, weary now, tired of the whole business, he made his way back toward the main house, skirting the lawns and plodding mechanically through the Clover Garden, past the hothouses and the looming blocky rear wall of the garage till he was close enough to the apes to smell them. The hominoids, that is — the monkeys and baboons that were unlucky enough to provide the grist for Hamilton’s theoretical mill. O‘Kane had observed enough of the doctor’s experiments by now to form an opinion, and his opinion was that they were bunk. Aside from running the monkeys through the big wooden box with the gates in it, all Hamilton and his seedy-looking assistants seemed to do was make the monkeys fuck one another — or anything else that came to hand. Once, O’Kane had seen the wop lead a stray dog into the communal cage, and sure enough, the monkeys came chittering down from their perches and one after another fucked the dog. They threw a coyote into the cage. The monkeys fucked that. They tossed an eight-foot-long bull-snake into the cage. The monkeys fucked it and then killed it and ate it. As far as O‘Kane could see, the only thing Hamilton had established was that a monkey will fuck anything, and how that was supposed to be applied to Mr. McCormick and all the rest of the suffering schizophrenics of the world, he couldn’t even pretend to guess.

But he was drawn toward them now, almost irresistibly, the potent reek of the close air beneath the trees, the susurrus of their nocturnal movements, a sound like a distant breeze combing through a glade lush with ferns. The sound calmed him, and for a minute he forgot about Mr. McCormick and forgave the monkeys their stink. And then, all in an instant, he came fully alert.

The monkeys had begun to hiss and chitter the way they did in daylight, the noise sailing out to him and rushing back to roost again in the darkness ahead. He quickened his pace, shining the beam off the great twisted branches of the oaks and then catching the wire mesh of the big central cage that rose up into the crown of the trees. There was movement at the top of the cage, and there shouldn’t have been, all the monkeys put to rest in their individual cages at nightfall, but they were noisier now, much noisier — the gentle rustling of a moment ago become the jangling rattle of steel padlocks and cage doors straining against their latches — and he could see the tiny bodies flailing themselves to and fro behind the mesh. The light shot round in his unsteady hand, a root grabbed for his foot, and he was trying to understand, to fathom what was happening, when suddenly every hominoid in the place was screeching loud enough to raise the holy dead.

What was it? There, high in the branches of the central cage, the movement again. He stepped closer, the screeching, the stench, struggling to steady the light, and then, as if in a sudden vision, it became clear to him. These were no monkeys in the branches — they were too big, much too big. These were no monkeys, but apes, the rutilant naked one, white as any ghost, and the shaggy hunkering split-faced one, and their hands moving each at the place where the other’s legs intersected, two hands flashing in that obscene light until O‘Kane, who now truly had seen everything, flicked it off.

Mercifully.