Riven Rock

1. LOVE IS LOYAL, HOPE IS GONE

The headline, set there for all the world to see in bold 30-point type, hit Katherine like a slap in the face. Her cheeks reddened. She felt the water come to her eyes, and her heart was suddenly beating at her ribs like a caged bird: LOVE Is LOYAL, HOPE Is GONE. And it got worse, much worse: SOCIETY FAVORITE CLINGS TO DEMENTED HUSBAND: HE’S ENSCONCED IN MANSION AT MONTECITO; WIFE COMES TO VISIT BUT CANNOT SEE HIM. She looked up at Carrie, whose face showed nothing, and then at her maid, Louisa, who looked as if she’d swallowed a live rat, and then finally at her hostess, Mrs. Lavinia Littlejohn, who’d just handed her the paper, already folded back to page 19. Mrs. Littlejohn was wearing that vacant smile Katherine’s mother seemed to be afflicted with more and more these days, as if smiling for a woman of her generation were some sort of twitch or tic. “I, um, thought you’d want to see it, dear,” Mrs. Littlejohn said, and the smile wavered a moment, uncertain of itself, and then came back stronger than ever.

Katherine held herself absolutely rigid, staring down at the newsprint in her lap until the letters began to shift and meld, and then, in her embarrassment, she looked up to survey the room again. Louisa was just vanishing through the door to the front parlor, where a dozen women were striding energetically to and fro, putting the finishing touches to banners and placards and chatting softly among themselves in the way of troops going into battle. Mrs. Littlejohn was still watching her, still smiling her autonomous maternal smile, and Carrie — Carrie Chapman Catt, Katherine’s special friend and comrade-in-arms — was studiously looking out the window. “I don’t know what to say,” Katherine murmured, “it’s so… humiliating to have my privacy violated like this. I feel like I’ve been raped.”

Carrie looked her full in the face. She pursed her lips and made a tsking sound. “After two years in the Movement, I should think you’d be used to it — you’ve seen what they’ve written about me. But take the paper in the other room and find yourself a quiet nook — read it. All the way through. Really, there’s nothing but praise for you in there. And don’t let the headlines upset you — they’re made to be intentionally insipid and tasteless. That’s how they sell newspapers.”

Yes, but she’d wanted to keep the Dexter name out of it — and Stanley’s too. And her own deepest hopes and pains, her marriage, her suffering — how dare they? How dare they print a word about her private life? They could howl “No to Petticoat Rule” all they wanted — that was part of the privilege of living in a democracy, no matter how wrongheaded it was — but there were certain things that had to be held sacrosanct.

“Go on,” Carrie urged, maternal herself now, Mrs. Littlejohn clucking away in harmony, every doily on every table aglow with solicitude, “read it. It makes you out to be a saint, Kat, it does — and it’s publicity, good publicity that people can’t help linking with our cause.”

Katherine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Carrie Chapman Catt, the woman she admired above all others, admired to the point of worship even, she who had founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and demanded of her amenable second husband (now amenably deceased) four months of absolute freedom a year and the money to campaign for the vote in the manner to which she was accustomed, was willing to offer her up to the canaille for mere publicity. Katherine was stung. And in that moment she didn’t know what was worse, her dirty laundry aired in public by a bunch of ink-stained hacks or her idol’s cold streak of realpolitik. She set her jaw. Stood. And without a word to either woman stalked out of the room and up the stairs to the bedroom Mrs. Littlejohn had provided for her and Carrie during their campaign amongst the Fourth of July revelers on Nantasket Beach.

The house was near Hull and it looked out on Hingham Bay, the bay that gave onto the serious ocean, the true ocean, the cold somber Atlantic, and there were no palms here, no zephyrs, no parrots or monkeys or orange trees or anything else that smacked of frivolity or sensuality. Katherine settled into an armchair by the window and read through the article as if she were gulping water after three sets of tennis:

It is not a case of lovers separated in death, but rather a separation in life, to overcome which if it were possible millions would be no barrier. In this case it is not a hero but a heroine who furnishes the lesson in constancy, and her most intimate acquaintances, those of the smartest set in New York, in Boston and Chicago, bow to her with admiration that is born of respect.

The heroine is the beautiful, intellectual and highly-accomplished Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, the young wife of Stanley McCormick, whose father was the brains behind the gigantic harvester corporation, an institution whose wealth no one could accurately estimate.

Stanley McCormick is insane, suffering from a form of dementia. He lives in California, where a mansion in the exclusive city of Montecito, which is populated by a colony of retired millionaires, is maintained for him.

The letters fled like ants across the page, accumulated into big black staring words with heads and pincers and then sentences that bit and stung and made her flesh crawl, beautiful, intellectual, highly-accomplished, insane: how dare they? How dare they? And then, farther on down the page, all wounds became one wound:

Dr. Hamilton does not allow her to see her husband, much less converse with him. And yet, nothing daunted, Mrs. McCormick goes to Montecito in December of each year and spends the Yule-tide season near the man she loves.

Stanley McCormick does not know that his wife visits in the vicinity. This his wife knows and though she would give her life to be of benefit to him she sadly turns from the sanatorium and soothes herself with solitary walks on the grounds.

The mansion is surrounded by a garden that is beautiful to behold. It has been referred to as a veritable Garden of Eden with its tropical foliage, palms, long winding driveways and miniature forests. In this garden Mrs. McCormick forgets as she roams, listening to the song birds, viewing with keen interest a small menagerie maintained by Dr. Hamilton in which many specimens of the monkey tribe predominate. There is a scientific reason for this menagerie, but this is known only to scientists.

She wanted to tear the paper to pieces and fling it from her, but she didn‘t, she couldn’t, and though she tried not to think of Stanley — her Stanley, nobody’s but hers, not his mother’s or his sisters’ or his brothers‘, not anymore — though she’d thrown herself body and soul into the suffrage movement as a way of forgetting, here it was all over again, all her private pain, and served up to titillate the great unwashed in their linoleum kitchens. What would her mother think? And her father — he must be turning over in his grave.

Hope is gone, indeed. How would they know? They’d snooped and prodded and poked around enough to hear word of the hominoid colony, and yet they couldn’t begin to fathom its purpose or the hope it represented. This was obscene. Irresponsible. Yellow journalism at its worst. And whom had they been talking to? Hamilton, certainly. Some of the staff — O‘Kane? Nick? She remembered giving an interview herself, one of dozens connected with her work for Carrie and NAWSA, but she never dreamed they’d pry into her personal life as if she were an Evelyn Nesbit or Sarah Bernhardt or some such person. And they were wrong — hope was very much alive, even if it was dampened by the steady drizzle of the years. She hadn’t seen Stanley face to face in more than five years now, since he was at McLean, and he’d gotten so much worse before his recent improvement, what with his escape through the louvers and his descent all the way back into the darkness, so far back it was as if he’d been entombed all this time, but there was hope, there was. His nurses had taught him to walk again and to eat and he was lucid sometimes now, or so they told her… and science, science was making leaps all the time, what with glandular research and psychotherapy, with Freud, Jung, Adler. There was hope, abundant hope, and she would never give way to despair — and why didn’t they print that?

She’d been sitting there for some minutes, the paper in her lap, the bay beyond the windows scoured by tight bands of cloud that were like steel springs coiling and uncoiling over the steely plane of the water, the voices of the women in the parlor below drifting up to her in snatches. And then she looked down at the story again, the story about her, the beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, and settled on the last paragraph, the one that canonized her:

One of Mrs. McCormick’s friends the other day said:

“Such a character as that woman possesses is an object lesson for the world. It would seem to me that she is living over a volcano and would be the most unhappy woman in the world. I know of her unstinted popularity in the leading social sets of the East, how easy it would be for her to forsake her afflicted husband and live the natural life, but she consecrated herself to Mr. McCormick and if she does not get her reward in this life, she surely will in the next.”

Despite herself, despite the demon of publicity and her anger and disappointment and the silent vow she was even now making never to speak with the press again, she couldn’t help feeling a flush of gratification over those lines set in print so cheap it came off on your gloves — because, after all, they were true.

It was quarter to four when Carrie and Mrs. Littlejohn came for her, and neither of them made reference to the newspaper articte — that was in the past, already forgotten, the smallest pebble in the road to equality. “Everyone’s ready,” Carrie said, striding briskly across the room to snatch her hat from the bureau in a flurry of animated elbows and flashing hatpins, “though the day is rotten in the extreme, could even rain, and I wonder just how many bathers will be out there on the strand and if the whole thing isn’t just going to be another grand waste of time.”

Katherine was already on her feet, grabbing up her purse and parasol and smoothing down her dress as if girding for battle — and it was a kind of battle, the antisuffragists as nasty as any mob, and they were sure to be there, jeering and catcalling, their faces twisted and ugly and shot through with hate. They were drunk too, half of them, tobacco stains on their shirts and their fingers smeared with grease and nicotine and every sort of filth, yammering like animals, big testosterone-addled beasts out of some Darwinian nightmare. They were afraid of the vote. Afraid of Temperance. Afraid, incredibly, of women. “And the local authorities?” she asked, slipping in beside Carrie to arrange her hat in the mirror. “The sheriff or whoever? Are they still threatening to deny us our right to speak?”

Carrie turned away from the mirror to give her a look. “What do you think?”

“So what will we do?”

“What else? Defy them.”

They were met on the boardwalk by the Norfolk County sheriff and two of his deputies. The sheriff was ancient, just barely alive from the look of him, and the deputies were huge with an excess of feeding, twin butterballs squeezed into the iron maidens of their distended duff-colored uniforms. “You’ll need a permit to hold a rally here,” the sheriff wheezed, wearily lifting his watery old turtle’s gaze from the stony impediment of Carrie’s face and easing it down on the minefield of Katherine’s. Behind Katherine were fourteen women waving the purple, white and gold banners of the Movement and brandishing placards that read HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY? NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and, the stiffest goad of all, DON’T TREAD ON US!

“We have no such permit,” Carrie responded, her voice ringing out as if she were shouting through a megaphone, heads turning, a crowd already gathering, children on the run, “as you well know, since your cronies at the courthouse have denied us one, but we have certain inalienable rights guaranteed us under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution — the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly — and we intend to exercise them.”

“Not in Norfolk County, you won‘t,” the old sheriff rasped, clamping his jaws shut like a trap.

“Go back to your kitchen, grandmaw!” a voice jeered, and there they were, the unshaven potbellied Fourth of July patriots gathered round their beery smirks, but there were women in the swelling crowd too, women with uplifted eyes and proud faces, women who needed to hear the news. All of a sudden Katherine felt as if she were going to explode, and she couldn’t keep it in, not here, not now, not in the face of this mindless barbarism, this naysaying and mockery. She whirled round to face the hecklers, and they were thirty or forty strong already, as if they’d been waiting all morning for this, for a little blood sport to ease the tedium of sucking on the bottle between shoving matches and filling each other’s ears with their filthy stories and crude jokes, and how could they dare presume to address Carrie Chapman Catt like that, grandmaindeed. Suddenly she was shouting at the biggest and stupidest-looking behemoth in the crowd, and no matter if he’d opened his mouth or not. “And you go back to the saloon where you belong, you common drunkard,” she cried, feeling the blood rise in her like a geyser. “It’s tosspots like you who ought to be banned from voting, not good decent sober women! ”

That brought the storm down, all right — not the literal one, the one festering in the clouds and rumbling offshore in a tightly woven reticle of lightning — but the hurricane of testicular howls that was only awaiting an excuse to explode in all its wrath. Curses — the very vilest — rained down on them, faces nagged, an overripe tomato appeared out of nowhere to spread its reeking pulp all over the front of Katherine’s dress. Through it all, Carrie’s voice rang out: “To the water, ladies! If they won’t let us speak on the soil of Norfolk County, then we’ll bring our message home from the sea!”

Someone started the chant—“Forward, out of error,/Leave behind the night,/Forward through the darkness,/Forward into light!”—and then they were marching, down the length of the boardwalk and out onto the sand, their heels sinking away from them, shouts, jeers and laughter in their ears, and they didn’t stop marching until they were in the surf, sixteen strong and now seventeen and eighteen, the waves beating at them like some hostile force, their dresses ruined, shoes destroyed, and still they chanted while the sheriff blustered and wheezed and tried to head them off and the bullies pelted them with rotten vegetables, scraps of flotsam and seawrack, anything that came to hand.

The wind picked up and the waves pounded at them. Carrie spoke, and she was as full of fire as Katherine had ever seen her, and no, the women of America were not waiting, they were not asking, they were demanding their rights and they were demanding them now. And then Katherine spoke, the clean salt smell of the spume driving down the sour reek of the tomato pinned to her breast like a scarlet letter, and she wouldn’t wipe it away, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She spoke extempore and afterward she couldn’t remember what she’d said, but she remembered the feeling of it, the intensity and exhilaration of doing battle, of thrusting her words like bayonets into the very heart of the crowd that gathered on the shore to hear them.

“Go back to your husband!” some idiot shouted just before the storm broke — the literal one, with all its fierce lashing of wind and rain and even hail, the one that emptied the beach till she was preaching to the dumb sand and the oblivious gulls and the sisters who’d linked hands with her. My husband, she thought, and they were singing the “Marseillaise” there in the wind and the rain and the surf, singing “For All the Saints,” my husband might as well not even exist.

Afterward, when they’d staggered out of the surf and darted barefoot up the beach like so many schoolgirls at a picnic interrupted by a shower, they were giddy and heedless, the laughter running through them like a spark firing the engine of their exhilaration over and over again, and the pulse of it kept them giggling and grinning and thrusting their ecstatic faces at one another as the chauffeurs squeezed them dripping and shivering into Mrs. Littlejohn’s twin Pierce Arrow sedans, a Cadillac touring car and a Chalmers Six loaned for the day by an invalid neighbor of Mrs. Littlejohn who was highly sympathetic to the cause. And of the two women who’d spontaneously joined them in the surf, one — Delia Bumpus, proprietress of a rooming house in Quincy — came along for the celebratory ride back to Mrs. Littlejohn‘s, a bona fide convert. She was a robust woman, huge above her stockings, and her laugh was contagious as they piled out of the cars and gathered round the fire in the drawing room in a flurry of tea things, blankets, towels and warm terry robes provided by a whole army of servants. “I thought you were all crazy,” she roared, lifting her skirts to the fire, “and I was right!”

Everyone laughed at that and ten voices flew into the breach, shrill with excitement. “Did you see the look on that sheriff’s face when Carrie read him the riot act?”

“My God, yes!”

“I thought he was going to die of a stroke right there—”

“He must have been seventy.”

“Seventy? He was a hundred if he was a day—”

“What? You didn’t recognize him? Methuselah’s grandfather?”

Laughter and applause.

“Let me tell you, if he was the only unregenerate male standing between us and the vote I would blow him over myself, just like this—poof!”

More laughter, percolating round the delicate china cups of beef tea and orange pekoe blend. The fire leapt and snapped, women sank into armchairs in a sisterhood of splayed limbs and neatly balanced cups and saucers, a faint scent of woodsmoke charged the air and everything seemed laminated with the intensity of a waking dream, the cut flowers glowing with an aniline light, the oil paintings hanging above their heads like halos, and as the kitchen staff piled a table high with cold cuts, toast points and caviar, plums and raspberries from the orchard, the storm beat deliciously at the windows and shook the floorboards beneath their feet. Katherine, the hair hanging wet in her face as she rubbed at it with a towel that smelled like sunshine on the grass, felt like a girl again — she might have been in the gymnasium at Miss Hershey’s School after calisthenics, the sweet aching odor of girls’ sweat in the air, hard-earned sweat, sweat that was the equal of any boy’s or man’s. She was glowing, melting. She was made of india rubber, molasses, pure maple syrup settling into a mold.

“Yes, yes, yes!” came a shriek from Maybelle Harrison, wife of the textile manufacturer, caught with a piece of toast arrested halfway to her parted lips. She was standing in front of the fire, tall as any Amazon, her hair wrapped in a great white terrycloth turban. “The crowning moment for me was during Katherine’s speech, and a stirring speech it was, Katherine, really first-rate ”—cheers and applause—“because that was when Maude Park suddenly disappeared beneath one of these enormous breakers and came up spouting like a porpoise—”

They were sisters, all of them, Maybelle Harrison cheek by jowl with Lettie Strang, governess to Mrs. Littlejohn’s granddaughters, Jane Roessing exchanging pleasantries with Delia Bumpus, late of the boardinghouse, and not a thought of class or social position. This was the spirit of the Movement, the spirit of women without men, the spirit of Lysistrata and Sappho, the very scene Katherine had dreamed of when she’d joined the nascent women’s club at MIT, striding through the door and into the embrace of three trembling doelike creatures as bewildered and uncertain as she and yet no less determined. She stretched luxuriously and cradled the hot cup in her hands, rain tapping at the windows, the flow of laughter and conversation ebbing and flooding round her, and thought, This is the way the world should be.

But it wasn‘t, and no one knew that better than she.

There was no sanctuary, no enchanted castle, no safe haven full of fine things and exulting women, not unless you built it yourself. And you didn’t build it yourself, you couldn‘t, not when you were fourteen and as dependent on your father as he was on his capricious God in His capricious heavens. Because that was how old she was, fourteen, when the world of men came crashing down on her, pillars, buttresses, scaffolding and all.

It was in the spring, a month or so after the chess club fiasco, and the carriage had just brought her home from school (there was no reason to stay late anymore, and Mr. Gregson couldn’t seem to look her in the face no matter what she did to please him, as if she were the one in the wrong). Her mother was out — at a tea someplace, or maybe it was a charity function — and her brother Samuel was away at Harvard. The house was unnaturally quiet, the servants in the kitchen, the cats asleep in the window. She was reading—Middlemarch, and she remembered the book to this day — puzzling over Dorothea Brooke and her thirst for learning that was so all-consuming as to allow her to throw herself away on a crabbed sexless old mummy like Casaubon, when there was a thump in the front hallway, as if someone had thrown open the door and tossed a sack of meal on the carpet. The cats raised their heads. Katherine set down her book. And there is was again, louder now, more distinct, as if a second sack had been flung against the wall and then rebounded off the first. Curious more than anything — all she could think of was her mother and a pair of shopboys with a new purchase that was too bulky to bring up the back stairway — she eased into her slippers and went to the door to investigate.

It wasn’t her mother. There were no shopboys, no sacks of meal, no china cabinets or ottomans wrapped in brown paper. When she pulled open the door to the hallway she saw her father there, leaning into the wall and clenching his teeth in a grimace of almost maniacal concentration, as if he were trying to push his way through the wainscoting; behind him, the outer door stood open to the soft haze of the sun and the branches of the budding trees along the street. “Father?” she said, more puzzled than alarmed — she’d never in her life known him to come home from the office before six. “Are you all right?”

He turned his face from the wall then and fastened his eyes on her, and it was the strangest thing but she couldn’t hear anything in that moment, not the noise of the traffic in the street or the shouts of the children on the lawn next door — it was as if she’d gone deaf. But then a single noise began to intrude on her consciousness, the harsh abrasive grinding of his teeth, bone on bone, as loud suddenly as the rumble of a gristmill. She started toward him, no time for thought or wonder or even fear, her arms outstretched to receive him, bundle him, protect him, and all at once the wall heaved and threw him out into the center of the hallway on legs that had gone dead, and he was lurching past her in a blind stagger, already reaching out with his useless hands for the door to the library.

This was her father, Wirt Dexter, one of the great jurisprudential minds of his time, son of the founder of Dexter, Michigan, grandson of John Adams’s secretary of the treasury, fifty-nine years old and never sick a day in his life, Daddy, Papa, Pater, the man around whom Katherine had molded her existence like a barnacle attached to a piling sunk deep in the seabed. He was fearless, unwavering, a defender of unpopular causes, the wide-shouldered softly smiling man who would tenderly cut up her meat with a few magical strokes when she was too little to chew and who sat up with her and a storybook when she couldn’t sleep. And now, drained of color, unable to speak, his teeth grinding like two stones and his legs locked at the knee, he staggered right past her as if she’d never existed.

How he managed to twist that door handle and slip inside the door and lock it against her, she would never know, but it was one of the bravest things she’d ever seen, an act of will so monumental it awed her to this day even as the hurt of it rose like bile in her throat. The door slammed. She found her voice. “Father!” she cried, pounding at the door. “Daddy, Daddy!”

“Go away! ” he growled, “damn you, get away! ” And then she heard him on the carpet, thrashing across the floor like a dog shot between the shoulders, the lamp crashing over and the servants there in the hallway with their frightened faces, Mrs. Muldoon and Nora and Olga, and no hope in all the world because he was dying, dying behind that locked door so as to spare her, his daughter, his Katherine.

They buried him, and a month later her mother informed her they’d be leaving Chicago as soon as she could make the arrangements. And where were they going? To Boston, to be near Samuel, who was the hope of the family now. And he was, Samuel, a great hope, a great man ab ovo, his father in miniature, hard-working, right-thinking, serious, magnetic, older and wiser at twenty-one than most men at thirty or even forty, as sure of his career in the public weal as any Dexter before him. Katherine was bereft. She didn’t know what to do. She was fourteen years old. She went to Boston with her mother — a provincial place, pinched and fastidious, choked in the stranglehold of society — and clung to the pillar of her handsome and accomplished older brother while the tide rose and the sea rushed in. And that was all right, the best she could do, until one afternoon four years later Samuel developed a sudden fever, broke out in a purple rash that made him look as if he’d been pounded all over with a hammer, and died before morning.

“Katherine? Are you with us?”

She looked up from her tea and the room was there in all its solidity and permanence, the smell of wet hair, women’s hair, and of cake and woodsmoke and beef broth, and she was back in the present and flashing Jane Roessing a triumphal smile. “Just tired,” she said. “Or not tired exactly — more the way I feel after a long walk in the woods. Relaxed. Calm. And yet exhilarated too.”

“Wordsworthian?”

Katherine laughed. “Sure, emotion recollected in tranquility and all that. But I feel more like Lucy Stone or Alice Paul at the moment.” She slid over on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her.

Jane folded her skirts under her and sat lightly in the spot indicated. She was from Philadelphia, about Katherine’s age, and had married a man considerably older, a manufacturer of some sort who’d been a champion of women’s rights — when he died, eight years ago, he left her everything. Ever since, she’d put all her energy and resources into the Movement, traveling around the country and helping to organize local chapters, and in the spring she’d been in Washington with Inez Milholland for the great protest march. They had dozens of friends in common, but for one reason or another Katherine had never met her till the previous evening at Mrs. Littlejohn’s dinner reception. She’d liked her right away. Jane was a dynamo, one of those bustling energetic women who seem to be so much taller than they actually are, always alert, always amused, bobbing and weaving through Mrs. Littlejohn’s parlor under a mass of rust-colored hair that stood up buoyantly from her scalp no matter the pressure of hat, comb or pin. Her eyes were the faintest palest most delicate shade of green, like a Song dynasty vase, and she always managed to look self-possessed and wise — not in the way of accumulated wisdom, not necessarily, but in the way of the prankster, the class clown, the girl with the sharpest tongue in school.

“Carrie showed me the newspaper piece,” she said, reaching for her hair with both hands as if to gather it all in, section by section, as if she were winnowing a bush for berries. “It was really quite touching, I thought — the parts about you, I mean.” She paused. Let her green gaze sweep the room and then come back again. “You must have suffered.”

Katherine bowed her head. It was the first expression of sympathy she’d heard in years and it made her want to weep aloud, beat her breast, lay her head in the lap of the woman beside her and sob till all the hurt and antipathy of the McCormicks and their minions was drained from her, all the fierceness of the struggle with Stanley and his keepers and the burden of Riven Rock, the desolation of being a wife without a husband, forever the odd one out at this gathering or that. (Mrs. McCormick, they called her, Mrs. McCormick, shall I haila cab for you? and what a joke that was.) She couldn’t respond. She tried, but nothing came out.

Jane was sitting right beside her now and she could smell the exotic rich dampness of the roots of her hair and feel the warmth of the thigh pressed to hers and somehow Jane’s arm was resting on her shoulder and Jane was rocking her, ever so gently, till all she could think of was the skiff she’d had as a girl on Lake Michigan and the softest of breezes that would come all the way from Minnesota or Canada just to set it atremble, just to rock her.

“Listen,” Jane murmured, turning her face to her, and all the other women in that room might as well have been on another planet for all Katherine was aware of them, “I know what you’re going through, I do. When Fred died I was only twenty-five, with no children and both my parents gone, and his family treated me like some sort of criminal, like I was the one who’d given him heart disease and no matter that he was nearly sixty and had had two heart attacks already. To them I was an outsider and nothing more, and when the will was read that room was like a pot boiling over, and if looks could kill—”

Jane gave her a final pat, shifted away from her and bent forward to dig through her purse. Katherine was stunned. It was as if this woman beside her had read her deepest thoughts, as if they’d inherited the same set of unfeeling moneygrubbing in-laws, as if… but that was enough. Her husband was alive still, and there would come a day when he recovered and they were perfectly happy, like any other couple.

“Sorry to get so maudlin.” Jane had straightened up and eased back into the chair and she held something now in her hand, something that glittered in the light of the fire. It was a cigarette case, Katherine saw, silver, with Jane’s initials — J.B.R. — inlaid in gold across the facing. “Do you smoke?” Jane asked in the most casual voice in the world.

“Smoke?” Katherine had barely recovered herself. “You must be joking.”

“No, not at all,” and Katherine watched the unfolding ritual with fascination, the neatly sprung case, the tamped cigarette, the flare of the match and finally the long slow inhalation that drew tight the flesh of Jane’s throat as if she were taking in the very breath of life itself. “How is it,” Jane began, the blue vapor escaping her lips and nostrils in pale wisps, its odor sweet and harsh at the same time, like the smell of leaves burning in the gutter, “how is it that men can smoke in public and women can’t?”

“Well,” and Katherine looked round to see that every woman in the room was making an effort not to stare, “it’s just not done, not in our set anyway. Maybe among seamstresses and such—”

Jane lifted her eyebrows. “And in Paris?”

“That’s entirely different.”

“Oh?” And there was that sly look, the look of the girl who circumvented all the rules and sent clever notes up and down the aisles when the teacher’s back was turned. “You know”—exhaling again—“I think the thing that most irritates me about the whole little dominion of men and their precious vote and their property rights and all the rest is how illogical it is, how smug and self-serving, using our sex against us—‘Oh, it’s not ladylike to smoke.’ Well, is it ladylike to vote, wear trousers, mount a bicycle? Is it ladylike to pay property taxes like any other citizen and stand by at election time and watch some illiterate from Ballyshannon step up to the ballot box — or worse, sell his vote for two shots of rye whiskey? Hm?”

The buzz of conversation had died momentarily in the wake of Jane’s putting fire to that little tube of compacted leaves and bringing it to her lips, but now it started up again, a whole clamor of voices.

“Look, it’s clearing,” someone observed.

“Oh, is it?”

“Yes, look over there, out over the water.”

“Just in time for fireworks — we will have fireworks, won’t we, Lavinia?”

Katherine tried to compose herself. Why was she so upset? She’d been in the presence of woman smokers more times than she could count — in Paris, Geneva, Vienna. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said finally, focusing on those mocking green eyes, “but the vote is one thing — even the issue of trousers or bicycles or the ridiculous practice of riding sidesaddle — and yet a personal habit that many, male and female, might find objectionable—”

“Have you ever tried one?”

Was she blushing? Thirty-eight years old and blushing like a schoolgirl? She was remembering those summers in Switzerland, at Prangins, and Lisette. “Well, to tell the truth,” and suddenly she was giggling, “yes, yes I have.”

Without a word, Jane snapped open the silver case and held it out to her, and Katherine accepted it, chose a cigarette and leaned forward for the flare of the match and the first harsh-sweet insuck of smoke. She inhaled. Looked into Jane’s eyes. And almost immediately she coughed, smoke everywhere, spewing from her like a chimney, and she coughed and coughed again. And then they were both giggling and fanning and ducking their heads against a roil of smoke, Jane adding hers to the mix, a whole tornado of smoke, a Vesuvius, and some of the others were crowding round the sofa, their eyes bright with the triumph of the day and the sense of recklessness that came with it, of knocking down the barriers, throwing open the floodgates and no turning back. “May I have one?” Carrie asked, and they all laughed at that, but then Carrie did take one, the ritual reenacted, the silver case and the white orderly row of cigarettes, the two women’s heads coming together as one over the gift of the sacramental fire, and Maybelle Harrison had one and pretty soon everybody in the room was coughing and laughing and laughing and coughing.

It was then that the first rocket went off at the end of the Littlejohn pier, a flash of light against the silhouette of a quick hunched-over skeleton of a man who might have been the gardener or the chauffeur or the rumored Mr. Littlejohn himself. Up it went, trailing sparks, to burst in a bloom of fire over the churning somber waters as everyone rushed to the window and applauded. “You know,” Jane said, catching Katherine by the elbow as the next rocket hurtled straight up into the air with a crash of artificial thunder, “it’s really not as bad as you might think.”

Katherine was puzzled. “What?”

The smirk, the eyes, the beautiful unconquerable snaking tendrils of hair. “Being widowed so young.”

And then another rocket went up, and another.

In December, Katherine returned to California. It had been a busy year — hectic — what with the women’s parade in March, the summer’s rallies, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Budapest (which Carrie had asked her to chair), and she hadn’t been to Riven Rock since last year at this time, for Christmas. She felt bad about that, awful really, and there were nights when she awoke in her anonymous hotel room in Washington or Cleveland or San Francisco, not even sure of what city she was in, and she could have sworn she heard Stanley’s voice calling out to her. She wasn’t one to neglect her duties. And as long as Stanley was alive, he was her duty, her first duty, in sickness and in health.

And he’d improved, he had, in this year of 1913, in a way the annual reports Hamilton prepared for the guardians and the court couldn’t begin to do justice to. The reports were always so terse—“There occurred some mental clearness, then delirious excitement, after which he became dull”—no more than a line or two to justify a whole year in a man’s life. But she wrote Stanley once a week, unfailingly, no matter where she was or how pressing the demands on her time, and he’d been able to write back on several occasions — and that alone told her more than any sterile report. Of course, his penmanship was still a bit convoluted, little curlicues and all sorts of baroque decorations adorning his consonants and what appeared to be miniature faces peering out from the confines of his vowels, and his subjects — the weather, the garden, the food — were rather more limited than she’d care to see, but at least he was writing. He was taking his meals at table now too, and though he was restricted to a single spoon, he was eating with some sense of decorum, or so Hamilton had informed her in his most recent letter, and he was taking an interest in the newspaper, sometimes even reading it aloud to his nurses. The sinking of the Titanic the previous year had especially excited his imagination and for some months after the tragedy all he could apparently talk of was the death of John Jacob Astor after he’d so gallantly secured his young wife in the last remaining lifeboat.

On her first day back, she took the car out to Riven Rock as soon as she’d breakfasted. She was alone this time, her mother unable to join her for another two weeks yet (“I’ve got a hundred loose ends to tie up here, Katherine, for heaven’s sake, presents to buy yet for your uncle, the servants, all the Moores and Mrs. Belknap too, and I just don’t know when I’ll ever get my head above water even for a minute—”). She tried to keep her feelings under control as the car came up the long winding drive under the canopy of overarching branches, thinking of Stanley, poor sweet misunderstood Stanley, and knowing there was still no chance at all of getting to see him, even for a minute — it was too disturbing for him, Hamilton said. Far too disturbing. After Stanley’s near-disastrous escape, all women had been banished from the house, even the maids, who’d been replaced by a rotating team of local men, including two Chinese Sam Wah had recruited as sous-chef and dishwasher respectively. Dr. Hamilton felt it too dangerous to have any woman in the house, both for them and Stanley, even if he never saw them. The knowledge that they were there was enough to set him off, the faintest echo of a feminine voice, even a scent — and yes, victims of mental disorders did have extraordinary sensory perceptions, keen as an animal’s in some cases. Or so the doctor claimed.

In any case, Katherine entered that womanless fortress at nine A.M. on a day as soft as a hand on your cheek, the third of December and it might as well have been June. She was met at the door by Torkelson, the new butler, a man who seemed utterly undistinguished, as bland and unprepossessing as a sentient doormat, and then she was in the library with Mr. O‘Kane, the first woman to enter that room since she’d left it a year ago. Dr. Hamilton, she was promised, would arrive shortly from his house on lower Hot Springs Road — she hadn’t been expected quite so early.

“So, Mr. O‘Kane,” she said, glancing round to take inventory of the room with an eye to further improvements, and already she was shuffling through a stack of papers left out on the secretary for her. “And how have you been?”

“Oh, I’ve been well, ma‘am,” he replied, “very well indeed,” and when she glanced up he looked down at his shoes. He was certainly a good-looking man, what with his rugged build and fair hair, the way he held himself, and now that he was into his thirties — or was he twenty-nine? — he had a finish about him that was very pleasing. And he was bright too, for a nurse, but of course that was part of the problem with this whole unfortunate situation — bright and presentable as he might have been, he was no sort of companion for her husband, who was a gentleman and used to the company and stimulus of other gentlemen. Dr. Hamilton was acceptable, to a degree — at least he was educated — but the Thompsons, good-hearted and well-meaning through they were, couldn’t have been Stanley’s mental equals when he was six. And how could he hope to improve if this was the only company he kept?

“I’m very gratified to hear that,” she said, leaning into the corner of the desk now and working through the papers a second time — bills, receipts, a report from Mr. Stribling on the various improvement projects going forward on the grounds. “And how’s your wife?”

A silence. She looked up.

“Still back in Massachusetts, ma‘am — nursing her sick mother. And father. And her brother, poor man, who’s got cancer of the brain.”

Katherine pursed her lips and then couldn’t suppress a cold little smile. “That’s a lot of nursing.”

“It is, yes.”

“Four years’ worth, by my count.”

O‘Kane said nothing. Outside the sun was brightening in gradual increments, like a gas lamp slowly screwed up till the room was filled with light.

“And your son?” Katherine asked.

“I haven’t seen him, devoting all my time to Mr. McCormick, as I’m sure you’re aware, but I’m told he’s doing well, a regular little tiger, he is.”

“Oh?” Katherine was irritated. The man was a womanizer, a Lothario, as insensitive to a woman’s thoughts and feelings as he might have been to a trained seal‘s, thinking of one thing only, as if sexual attraction were the end rather than the beginning of a relationship, and it was shameful the way he’d deserted his wife and child and then had the gall to lie about it. Nursing her mother, indeed.

O‘Kane was standing at the door, waiting to be dismissed. He hadn’t moved an inch since she’d entered the room. “Well, Mrs. McCormick, I’ll tell you,” he said, looking up now to engage her eyes, bold as brass, “to be truthful, sometimes you enter a matrimonial state with the best of intentions all round, and things just don’t seem to work out.” He paused. “You know what I mean?”

That stung — and she was in no mood — and she might have said something she would later regret, was right on the verge of it, when there was a rap at the door and they both turned, expecting Hamilton. The door pushed slowly open, and it wasn’t the doctor standing there in the doorway, not at all — it was Julius, the big orange ape. Katherine was so surprised she let out a gasp, and in the next moment she was laughing, as much at herself as at this gangling pouchy hunched-over thing shuffling into the room like an animated bedspread. Julius. She’d forgotten all about him.

He crossed the room on his knuckles, skittering lightly over the carpet without seeming to touch it, using his feet less for locomotion than as a sort of rudder. Ignoring O‘Kane, he came straight to Katherine, gazing up at her out of eyes the color of sunlit mud and tugging gently at her skirts with one long leathery hand. He made a soft cooing or grunting sound and announced his presence olfactorily as well, bringing with him his own little pocket of redolence. He stood nearly five feet tall, weighed one hundred eighty pounds and had an armspan of seven and a half feet, and if he’d wanted to he could have traversed Montecito without ever touching ground, relying on brachiation alone. And right now he had hold of her hand and was sniffing it as if it were the rarest of treasures, a look of simian transport on his face.

“He’s a nasty stinking smelly beast,” O‘Kane observed, “and I for one wouldn’t be giving him the run of the place, that’s for sure — but then it’s not for me to say, is it?”

Katherine paid him no mind. Julius was amusing, he was delightful, and now he was kissing her hand like some country swain, a tickle of whiskers, the warmth of his lips, and she was thinking how much she liked animals, dogs, cats, horses, apes, even snakes and bats and such, the whole reason she’d gone into biology in the first place. And when was the last time she’d had a pet?

“Julius!” she cried, utterly charmed, “you’re tickling me!” And then she looked at O‘Kane, trying to keep a straight face. “Dr. Hamilton writes that my husband and Julius are quite inseparable—”

O‘Kane winced as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. He shuffled his feet and addressed a point just over her left shoulder. “That’s Dr. Hamilton’s doing, not mine, and as I say, I don’t think it’s a healthy or even a decent thing—”

“But why? He seems quite tame. And if he helps my husband show an interest in things, if he stimulates him in any way, that’s got to be positive. Surely you wouldn’t object to a dog or a cat or some more conventional pet, would you, Mr. O‘Kane? And an ape is so much more intelligent—”

Julius dropped her hand and mounted the swivel chair in a single fluid motion, spinning once, all the way round, and then, as if resisting the temptation to twirl himself as a child would, he tucked his legs under the desk and made a pretense of looking through the papers, for all the world like some jowly potbellied old banker at his desk.

O‘Kane seemed on edge, and she remembered the day Hamilton had got his first two rhesus monkeys from the ship’s captain and the look on O’Kane’s face when they came flying out of the trees. He was afraid, that was all, frightened of a creature as placid and harmless as poor Julius — but of course, being typically male, he would never admit it. Even now, she noticed, he kept his distance — and you didn’t see Julius going up to kiss his hand. “No,” he said, “it’s not that,” and he was fumbling for his words. “A pet would be fine, and I’ve seen improvement in patients of all types with a little dog, for instance, but… Julius is… he seems to be a bad influence on Mr. McCormick—”

“A bad influence?”

“He — well, Mr. McCormick sometimes apes Julius’s behavior, if you’ll forgive the expression, and not the other way round.”

Katherine lifted her eyebrows. Julius was playing with the paper-weight, a glass ball the size of a fist, balancing it on the tip of his flattened nose and then inserting it in his mouth like some petrified fruit.

“I mean, for instance, when we take Mr. McCormick for a drive in one of the cars, to calm him, you know, and provide the stimulus of a change of scene, Julius always comes along, and if Julius, say, presses his face to the glass, well then so does Mr. McCormick, and it’s just not—”

“Dignified?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean — it’s not dignified.”

Julius had cocked his head and begun to make a series of muted lip-smacking noises and soft disembodied cooings that sounded like a ventriloquist’s rendition of a flock of doves taking sudden flight, and he fixed his eyes apprehensively on the door, which stood open still. Katherine turned to look, and so did O‘Kane. She heard footsteps in the hall then and in the next moment Dr. Hamilton appeared in the doorway, spectacles flashing and a wide welcoming grin on his face, but when she turned round again, Julius had vanished.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Katherine made the trip out to the estate every day, seeing to the multifarious issues, large and small, that had accumulated in her absence, and every day, at three, she secreted herself in the bushes on the knoll to the west of the house and watched as O‘Kane and Mart led Stanley out onto the sunporch for a bit of air and exercise. She felt faintly ridiculous about the whole business — a woman of her age and position crouching in the shrubbery like a bird-watcher or a Peeping Susan — and depressed too, the misery of her situation brought home to her every time a wasp settled on her hat or the voices of the gardeners rose from below. What was she doing? What was wrong with her? Other women went to the theater on their husband’s arm, chatted with him over meals, felt his solid presence in bed beside them, had children and grandchildren and a house full of warmth, and the closest she could get to Stanley was through a pair of ground lenses magnified to a power of 460 feet at 1,000 yards.

But there he was now, wandering round the sunporch like a refugee, dragging his right leg behind him and hunching his shoulders as if carrying some great weight there. She twisted the focus on the binoculars and was struck anew by how old Stanley looked — he would be forty next year, and you wouldn’t have guessed he was a day under fifty. And how thin. Certainly some of that was attributable to the long period during which he’d had to be tube-fed and the tasteless mush he’d been forced to consume, but now that he was eating on his own she would have thought he’d put some weight back on. Of course, it was difficult to tell at this distance, but it seemed he’d got some of his color back, and that was something anyway. And the look in his eyes — it was so much more like the old Stanley, the Stanley she’d fallen in love with, the man who had such an irresistible presence, so forceful and passionate, and yet shy and vulnerable too.

There — that look — that was how she remembered him, that was it exactly. He was saying something to O‘Kane, waving his arms in his excitement, his eyes tightly focused, marshaling arguments, making his point. All in an instant he’d come to life, as if some hidden key had been turned inside him. That was how he was that first year, the year when he’d swept her off her feet, the year when she went to bed each night whispering “Stanley Robert McCormick” over and over, like a prayer, until she fell into the chasm of sleep.

He’d come to Beverly like an apparition, like a winged god sent to combat the twin forces of boredom and Butler Ames, who’d been pursuing her so singlemindedly over the course of the past month you would have thought he’d forfeit his inheritance if he wasn’t married by the fifteenth of September. It was a gay party, and she welcomed that because it was the antithesis of her life at the Institute and the senior paper (“Fatigue of the Cardiac Muscles in Reptiles”) she’d be returning to in all too short a time, but it was frivolous too, and after the first week, deadly dull. Every day was a lithograph of the one before. There was tennis in the morning, swimming and rowing in the afternoon, déjeuner sur l‘herbe, croquet, word games, dancing and music in the evening, and Butler Ames straining to be witty the whole time, quoting the same tired lines from Swinburne or Wilde night after night while Pamela Huff and Betty Johnston and Ambler and Patricia Tretonne sat there and grinned as if they’d never heard them before. It was a rest, yes, but there was a whole seething world out there, a world of child labor, disenfranchised women, tenements and factories, and there wasn’t a person in that whole resort, from the overfed guests to the women who scrubbed the floors and the men who boiled up the lobsters, who’d ever even heard of Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis or Frank Norris. Except Stanley. And when he glided across that sunlit lawn with his great loping strides, leather helmet and goggles dangling from one bright scissoring hand, she was ready for him.

They were out in front of the hotel, the whole party, drinking champagne from an iced bucket and playing an endlessly dilatory game of croquet, and they looked up as one at the solemn figure cutting across the lawn on his way from the stable where he’d garaged his motorcar.

“Good God, what was that?” Ambler Tretonne cried after Stanley had passed from hearing. Ambler was thirty-two, with a broad bland face and puckered lips that gave him the look of one of those fishes that puffs itself up when it’s hauled from the water, and he stood a full three inches shorter than Katherine. When he’d married Patricia five years earlier, his father’s paper mills came into happy conjunction with her father’s chain of daily newspapers.

“An intrepid motorist, no doubt,” Butler Ames returned, hanging over a bright varnished ball and lifting his witty face to the group. “Back from a hard day of scaring cows out of their hoofs.”

And Katherine? She didn’t recognize him, not then, not at first, but how could she? She was twelve when she’d seen Stanley last, a child, and now she was twenty-eight years old, fully grown and mature, the only graduate of Miss Hershey’s School who wasn’t married, widowed or dead.

But Stanley recognized her. He entered the dining room at 7:00 P.M. sharp, dressed in evening clothes, his face tanned and teeth flashing, a head taller than anyone in the room, and when he looked up from the menu he caught her eye where she was sitting in the far corner with Butler Ames and the rest, and every time she glanced up after that his pale blue eyes were fixed on her. After dinner, when everyone under the age of seventy had retired to the ballroom for ices, dessert, drinks and dancing, he tracked her down with the aid of Morris Johnston, Betty’s brother. She’d just danced a rag with Bulter Ames and was catching her breath, a little giddy with the glass of wine he’d persuaded her to take, when something in Butler’s face made her look up.

Morris was standing there with this hulking tall man, a man matched to her own height, which Butler Ames, at five foot six, most emphatically was not, and the man — Stanley — was smiling a secret, mysterious sort of smile, as if he’d just solved an intricate puzzle. “I know you,” he said, even before Morris made the introductions. “Didn’t you used to live in Chicago?”

Stanley joined their party, and though Butler Ames blustered, cajoled and wisecracked without pause as the band played on, took a breather and played on again, it was as if he didn’t exist except as a minor irritation on the periphery of her consciousness, like an insect, Culex pipiens pipiens. She was lost in reminiscence, transported all the way back to her girlhood in Chicago, when her father was alive, and her brother, and there was nothing at all the matter with the world that a good grade on an exam or a few dancing lessons wouldn’t cure. Stanley’s mind was astonishing. He remembered every detail of those lessons, right down to the names and addresses of nearly all the boys and half the girls, and he remembered the day Monsieur LaBonte had paired them all off according to height, the day they’d first met.

“My God,” she said, “that was sixteen years ago. Can you believe it?”

“It snowed that afternoon,” he said. “Six inches.”

“I’m amazed at your memory, I really am.”

He smiled, that was all, and here was the shy Stanley revealed, self-deprecating, self-effacing, never one to advertise himself. He might have said, “Yes, and I graduated with honors from Princeton and now I run the Reaper Works along with my brothers,” or “I have every reason to remember — how could I forget you?” That was the line Butler Ames would have taken. Or any of the other heavy-breathing young bachelors who seemed to close in on her like a swarm of gnats whenever she left her books and went out into society. But Stanley was different. With Stanley there was no pretense, no pressure, no aggression. And he listened, he listened to her rather than himself, and the more they talked the more she felt the tug of memory pulling her down link by link into a shifting pool of nostalgia, her father’s face there before her, the lake at twilight, Prairie Avenue piled high with drifts, a big gray carthorse collapsing in its traces while her father tried to hurry her past.

Before long, she and Stanley were huddled by themselves, the width of the table between them and the rest of the party, all of whom, excluded from reminiscences of the LaBonte Dancing Academy, Bumpy Swift and George Pullman, picked up the general conversation and carried it elsewhere. “And what do you make of the Beaneaters this season?” she heard Morris ask at one point, and Butler’s answer, “Give me the American League any day.” And then, out of nowhere, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism and Socialism?” Stanley asked, and the rest of the night fell away into some hidden crevice in the smooth continuum of time. When she looked up again, the band had vanished, the ballroom was empty and all the others had gone off to bed.

That was how Stanley courted her — with socialism, unionism, progressivism, reform — instead of flowers and banter and meaningful glances. He sought her out first thing in the morning, even before she’d had a chance to come down to breakfast, and he launched into a polemic against inherited wealth, greedy capitalists like his father who took the means of production to themselves and robbed the workers of their labor, spoke of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and Marx as if he’d known them personally, and yes, he’d broken down in tears over How the Other Half Lives and hoped one day to convert the new International Harvester Company to a fully cooperative enterprise, as he’d done with his ranch in New Mexico. They played tennis together, swam, he took her boating, and all the while they debated the issues of the day until she felt as if some great shining light were opening up inside her.

By the third day, she couldn’t help telegraphing her mother to tell her about him, about Stanley Robert McCormick, heir to the McCormick fortune, a tall physical man from Chicago who wasn’t afraid of the intellectual side of things, right-thinking, sweetly shy, worth all the Butler Ameses of the world put together. And her mother, who’d been nagging her for the past six months to think of what she was going to do when she graduated MIT next year at the age of twenty-nine, already old for marriage and the very last hope of the Dexter line, telegraphed back within the hour: MAKE ME A HAPPY WOMAN.

But that was all a long time ago, an Ice Age ago, and now the best she could do was watch her handsome husband through a pair of binoculars like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare creature in the wild — that, and make sure he had every comfort, every material thing money could buy to ease his trials, and the best treatment available to bring about his cure. And even if she couldn’t be with him for Christmas, she was determined to scour every shop and every catalogue and bury him in an avalanche of presents so that his doctor, handing each one over, would announce, like a benediction, This one’s from Katherine.

And she was doing just that one morning after her mother arrived, directing O‘Kane and LaSource to carry in great towering armloads of foil-wrapped gifts and arrange them under the tree in Stanley’s quarters, when Julius suddenly appeared out of nowhere to clamber through the open door and into the back seat of the car. Her first thought was to shoo him away — it was two days before Christmas and she was anxious to get back to the hotel and relax with her mother over a cup of eggnog and a concert of Christmas carols in the courtyard where poinsettias grew up out of the ground in a red blaze that mocked the pitiful hothouse plants they had to make do with in Boston — but then she looked at him there, one leg folded over the other, his eyes lit with expectation, and changed her mind. Suddenly she was whimsical. The beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, hard-nosed suffragist, brilliant organizer, manager of all Stanley’s properties and her own too, the woman who never let herself go, looked at that strange pleading hunched-up figure of male dejection sunk into the leather seat and felt silly, lighthearted, girlish. It was Christmas. Julius was in the car. What a lark it would be to show him off to everyone in the hotel. After all, if you could have tropical palms, birds of paradise and poinsettias in December, you could have a tropical ape too. Maybe she’d even see if she could find him a Father Christmas outfit — and a fluffy white beard.

She had to open the windows, not so much as to allow Julius to snake out a long-fingered hand and snatch at the roadside vegetation or the odd bicyclist, but enough to dissipate the very intense and peculiar odor he carried with him. For the most part he behaved himself, cooing softly, licking the windows with a dark spatulate tongue, surprising her fingers with his own — he liked to hold hands, like a child — and she fell into a reverie as the trees slid by and the sun spread a blanket of warmth over the interior of the car. She was thinking about Hamilton and the hope he’d held out to her — Stanley had improved, he’d definitely turned the corner, and he, the doctor, was full of optimism for the future, perhaps even to the extent of allowing her a Christmas visit next year, if not sooner — but she was puzzling too over something he’d said just yesterday.

It was the middle of the afternoon and she’d just started up the hill with her binoculars when he scurried out the back door of the house and fell into step with her. “About this new man coming in after the New Year,” he began, “I just wanted to say—”

“What new man?”

“Do you mean to say Dr. Meyer hasn’t apprised you of the situation?”

“Why no — he hasn’t said a word.”

“Oh, well, in that case, well, you know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me here and I’ll always be grateful for it — in terms of the hominoid colony, I mean — but my researches have gone about as far as they can, I think, and they’ve been enormously successful and enlightening and I really do feel I can write them up and make a significant contribution to our knowledge of human sexuality… Well, what I’m trying to say is that the new man is a fellow who’s been working quite closely with Dr. Meyer at the Pathological Institute, an excellent man by the name of Brush, Dr. Nathaniel Brush—”

“But Gilbert, you’re not thinking of leaving us, are you? With my husband improving so? It would, it would be a blow to him, to us all—”

But Hamilton, turning away so she couldn’t see the telltale quirk of his eyes, evaded the question. “He’ll be working with me for a while, to get him acquainted with Mr. McCormick and our day-to-day operations here, all under the direction of Dr. Meyer, of course, and really, I have the utmost confidence in Nat Brush, I do—”

She came out of her reverie when Julius suddenly presented her with a hat, a lady’s hat, replete with pins and feathers and a small but unmistakable quantity of well-tended brunette hair, torn out by the roots. One minute she was gazing out the window, brooding over Hamilton’s evasiveness, and the next she was staring down at the unfamiliar hat in her lap. It took her a moment, and then suddenly she was craning her neck to peer out the back window and pounding on the glass partition all in the same motion. Roscoe brought the car smartly around — it was new, one of the matching pair of Pierce Arrow sedans she’d ordered for Stanley in the wake of her weekend at Lavinia Littlejohn‘s — and they backtracked to where they found a hatless and irate young woman stopped astride her bicycle in front of a clump of cabbage palm. Katherine got out of the car, the hat held out before her in offering, mortified, absolutely mortified, and she was apologizing even before she’d crossed the road.

The young woman, a pale welt of anger stamped between her eyes, began cursing her in Italian, and she was pretty, very pretty and young, a girl really, and where had she seen her before?

“Scusi, scusi,” Katherine was saying in a hush, spreading her hands wide in extenuation. “I’m so sorry, I feel terrible. You see, it was”—and she gestured at the car—“it was our pet, Julius. He’s an ape, you see, and I know I shouldn’t have had the window open, but—”

“I don’t want nothing from you,” the girl spat, glaring, and she snatched her hat back and furiously jammed it down over her ears, the bicycle all the while clutched between her legs.

“I — realty, can I offer you something, for the inconvenience? The price of a new hat? A lift to town, perhaps?”

The girl made a rude gesture, thumb under chin, and brushed at the air with flapping hands, as if scattering insects. “Get away from me, lady,” she snarled, and then repeated herself: “I don’t want nothing from you.” She shoved forward in an angry, unsteady glide, her feet pounding at the pedals, and then she was gone.

That should have been Katherine’s warning right there, and if she’d been thinking she would have turned round and gone straight back to the house to divest herself of one very importunate ape, but she wasn’t thinking, and she didn’t go back. “You naughty boy,” she scolded, shaking a finger at him as she climbed back into the car, and he looked so contrite, burying his face in his hands and hunching his shoulders in submission, that she hesitated. He cowered there in the corner of the seat, emitting a series of soft high-pitched sounds that might have been the whimpers of a baby fussing in a distant room, and Katherine marveled at how human and tractable he really was: he’d been naughty, and he was sorry for it. She leaned forward and tapped on the glass to get Roscoe’s attention. “Drive on,” she commanded.

It was a mistake. Oh, Julius was a model ape for the rest of the drive, holding hands with her and peering out the window with a docile, almost studious look, but when the car pulled up in front of the Potter, with its promenading guests, snapping pennants and all-around bustle of activity, he began to show signs of excitement. In particular, he kept swelling and deflating the naked leathery sacks of his jowls as if they were bellows or a set of bagpipes, and his eyes began to race round in their sockets. As the doorman approached, he was banging the crown of his bald head against the window, over and over, till the car had begun to rock with the motion.

“Now, Julius, take my hand and behave yourself,” Katherine said, as the door pulled back and Roscoe helped her down onto the pavement. Uncoiled, Julius sprang down in a sudden flash of bright orange fur, and all eyes were on them. People stopped in mid-stride. A pair of bicyclists skidded to a halt. The doorman gaped. But Katherine, smiling serenely, held tight to Julius’s hand and ambled up the walk as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary, and that was part of the joke, of course it was, to stroll right on into the hotel lobby as if she were on the arm of her husband. And it was all right, faces breaking out in surprise and delight after the initial shock, Katherine soaring, humming a Christmas tune to herself—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”—until they reached the revolving glass doors.

She was able to lead Julius in, breaking her grip on his hand just as the transparent compartments separated them, but then Julius balked. Perhaps it was the novelty of the situation, the oddness of inhabiting that little glassed-in wedge of space, or maybe it was fear and bewilderment, but Julius suddenly put on the brakes and stopped the door fast. Katherine was trapped, as were an elderly woman she recognized from the breakfast room and a man in a bowler hat and corkscrew mustache who seemed to have skinned his nose on the panel in front of him. They looked first to her, and then to Julius, who stood there resolute, his massive arms locked against the glass on either side in all their rippling splendor. “Julius!” she cried, her voice magnified in that vitreous cubicle till it screamed in her own ears, “now you stop that this instant!” And she leaned forward with all her weight, the old lady and the bowler-hatted gentleman taking her cue and simultaneously flinging themselves against the glass walls in front of them.

The door wouldn’t budge, not a fraction of an inch. But the fifth partition was open to the lobby, and one of the bellhops, a powerfully built young man, stepped into the breach, and with a mighty effort, coordinated with the renewed impetus of Katherine and her fellow hostages, succeeded in moving the doors just enough to trap himself as well. Julius lifted his upper lip and grinned at her like a horse. He licked the glass. Cooed. But nothing would move him. And no matter how furiously the young bellhop and the man with the skinned nose exerted themselves, the door remained fixed in position, as immovable as if it had been welded to the floor.

A crowd gathered. Someone called the fire department. Katherine had never been more embarrassed in her life, both men and the old lady looking daggers at her, the rest of the pullulating world, from floor-sweeps to jeunesse dorée, studying her as if she were a sideshow attraction, elbows nudging ribs, smirks spreading across faces, silent quips exchanged by bug-eyed strangers in the walled-off vacuum of the lobby. She took it for half an hour — half an hour at least — the firemen there with their useless pry bars, Julius the equal of all comers, and then she broke down, and she didn’t care who was watching or where her dignity had fled.

“Julius!” she screamed, pounding at the glass like a madwoman, “you stop this now! You stop it!” She sobbed. She raged. She backed up and kicked savagely at that grinning intransigent unreasoning glassed-in hominoidal face till she broke a heel and fell reeling to the little wedge of tiled floor beneath her. ‘

Julius did a strange thing then. He dropped his arms, just for an instant, just long enough to part the fringe of orange hair concealing his genitalia and expose himself, right there, inches from her face, the long dark organ in its nest, the meaty bald testicles, the maleness at the center of his being, and then, before anyone could act, he shot out both hands again to catch the glass on either side of him and hold it fast in his indomitable grip.

2. FOR THE MAIN AND SIMPLE REASON

It was in 1916, in the spring, that Dr. Brush took over for Dr. Hamilton. O‘Kane remembered the day not only for what it represented to Mr. McCormick and the whole enterprise of Riven Rock — a changing of the guard, no less, and this far along — but for the heavy fog that lay over the place late into the day, and no chance of clearing. It was a transformative fog, thick and surreal, and it closed everything in like the backdrop to a bad dream so that he half expected to see ghosts and goblins materializing from the gloom along with Rosaleen and his father and the walleyed kid who’d rubbed his nose in the dirt when he was six and afraid of everything.

He was sitting with Mart and Mr. McCormick in the upper parlor, just after lunch — and Mr. McCormick had eaten very nicely, thank you, allowing the napkin to be tucked into his collar without a fuss and using his spoon with a wonderful adroitness on the peas, potatoes and meat loaf — when there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs and they all three glanced up in unison to see a huge puffing seabeast of a man laboring up the steps under the weight of the cigar clenched between his teeth. O‘Kane’s first impulse was to laugh out loud, but he restrained himself. It was too much, it really was — the man was a dead ringer for William Howard Taft, right down to the pinniped mustache and the fifty-six-inch waistline. And after Hamilton, with his Rooseveltian spectacles, O’Kane was beginning to see a pattern developing here — he supposed the next one, if there was a next one, would look like Wilson, all joint and bone and sour schoolmastery lips. Was this some sort of private joke Dr. Meyer was pulling on them — Dr. Adolph Meyer, that is, who looked just exactly like what he was, a Kraut headshrinker with a gray-streaked headshrinker’s beard and a sense of humor buried so deep not even the Second Coming could have exhumed it?

“Mr. McCormick, I presume?” the fat man called when he’d reached the landing and stood poised outside the barred door like a traveling salesman unsure of the neighborhood. He was trying for a genial smile, but the cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth distended it into a sort of flesh-straining grimace. “And Mr. O‘Kane? And that would be Mr. Tompkins, yes?”

“Thompson,” Mart returned in a voice dead and buried while Mr. McCormick blinked in bewilderment from his place at the table — he wasn’t used to new people, not at all — and O‘Kane got up from his chair to unlock the door and admit the new psychiatrist. Rising from the chair, moving through the desolate space of that penitentiary of a room, the most familiar room in the world, a place he knew as well as any prisoner knew his cell, he couldn’t help feeling something like hope surging through him — or maybe it was only caffeine, from Sam Wah’s black and potent Chinese tea. But who was to say that this man standing so mountainously at the door wasn’t the miracle worker who would transform Mr. McCormick from a disturbed schizophrenic sex maniac incapable of tying his own shoes into a kindhearted and grateful millionaire ready to reward those who’d stood by him in his time of need?

“We were expecting you earlier,” O‘Kane said, by way of making conversation until he could insert the three separate keys into the three separate locks and let the swollen savior in so they could shake hands and get off to a proper start.

“Yes,” Dr. Brush rasped, chewing around his cigar, “and I expect Gilbert’ll be up in arms over it, but I’m late, you see, for the main and simple reason that this damnable fog made it damned near impossible to find the door of the hotel, let alone give the damned driver a chance of finding the damned road out here — and where in hell are we, anyway? Good God, talk about the hinterlands—”

Actually, he’d been scheduled to take over more than two years earlier, and Hamilton had prepared O‘Kane and the Thompsons and everybody else for the passing of the baton, but word had it that Katherine had opened her checkbook and said, “How can I persuade you to stay on, Dr. Hamilton?” And Hamilton, who’d already written up his monkey experiments for some high-flown scientific journal and was anxious to get back and circulating in the world of sexual psychopathology, where new advances were being made almost daily, had, so Nick said, demanded on the spot that she double his salary and provide him with the use of a new car. “Done,” Katherine said, and wrote out a check. And so, Dr. Brush was late. Not just by a couple of hours, but by two years and more.

There was an awkward moment after the door had been shut and treble-locked behind him, when Brush began advancing hugely on Mr. McCormick and throwing out a grab bag of hearty greetings and mindless pleasantries, wholly unconscious of the telltale signs that Mr. McCormick was feeling threatened and on the verge of erupting into some sort of violent episode, but O‘Kane caught the big man by the elbow and steered him toward an armchair on the far side of the room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here, doctor?” he said so that everyone could hear him. And then, sotto voce, “You’ve got to give Mr. McCormick his space, at least until the two of you are better acquainted — he’s very particular about that. You see, he’s not sitting there alone — his judges are there with him, wigs, robes, gavels and all, though you and I can’t see them.”

The big man looked perplexed. He must have been forty or so, though it was hard to tell considering the amount of flesh he carried, especially in the face — every line and wrinkle was erased in the general swell of fatty tissue, giving him the look of a very well fed and pampered baby. “Well, I just—” he began, looking down at O‘Kane’s hand clamped round his arm and then allowing himself to be led, like some great floating zeppelin, to the chair. “I just felt ”—and now he looked again to Mr. McCormick, who was doing his shrinking man routine, hunching his shoulders and declining into the chair so that soon only his head would be visible above the tablecloth—“that we should meet, and as soon as possible, Mr. McCormick, sir, for the main and simple reason that we’ll be spending so much valuable time together in the coming weeks and months, and while I, er, should really have waited for a proper introduction from that good friend of yours, Dr. Hamilton, I just thought, er, for the main and simple reason—”

Mr. McCormick spoke then, and with no impediment. “Dr. Hamilton is no friend of mine.”

Brush was on it like a hound. “Oh? And why do you say that, sir? I’m told he’s been your very good friend over the course of many years now and that he’s very much concerned for your welfare, as indeed Mr. O‘Kane and Mr. Tompkins are, and I myself.”

No reply from Mr. McCormick, whose chin now rested at the level of the table. O‘Kane could read the look in Mr. McCormick’s eyes, and it wasn’t auspicious, not at all. “Well, then, Dr. Brush,” he interjected, clapping his hands and rubbing them together vigorously, “why don’t you let me show you around a bit, at least until Dr. Hamilton arrives?”

While Mart entertained Mr. McCormick with some hoary card tricks Mr. McCormick had already seen half a million times, O‘Kane led the psychiatrist into the bedroom. “There isn’t much to see here, really,” he apologized, indicating the brass bed bolted to the floor in the center of the room. Everything else, right down to the pictures on the walls and the nails that held them, had been removed. There were no curtains, no lights. Here and there along the walls you could make out a faded patch where a piece of furniture had once stood.

“Rather spartan, isn’t it?” the doctor observed, swinging his tempestuous frame to the left and poking his head into the bathroom, which contained only toilet, sink and shower bath, and the infamous window, of course, now louverless and with the neat grid of iron bars neatly restored.

“We did have a rug,” O‘Kane said, “a Persian carpet, really quite the thing. But we found that Mr. McCormick was eating it.”

“Eating it?”

“At night, when no one was watching. Somehow he managed to get a section of it unraveled with just his fingers alone, and then he’d pull out strands of it and swallow them. We found the evidence in his stools. Of course, the rest of the stuff, the furniture and pictures and all that, well, he destroyed most of it himself the last time he escaped.”

And then they were back in the upper parlor, standing around awkwardly, awaiting Dr. Hamilton, who’d spent two hours that morning awaiting the fog-delayed Dr. Brush. By this time, Mr. McCormick had retreated to the sofa, where he was reading aloud to himself in a cacophonic clash of words and syllables: “ ‘TARzan is NOT an APE. He is NOT LIKE his peoPLE. HIS WAYS are NOT their ways, and SO TARzan is going BACK to the LAIR of his OWN KIND….’ ”

O‘Kane was just about to suggest that they take a tour of the lower floor and then perhaps look round for Dr. Hamilton, who was most likely out in the oak forest overseeing the dismantling of his hominoid colony, when Dr. Brush abruptly swerved away from him and loomed up on Mr. McCormick, cigar smoke trailing behind him as if it were the exhaust of his internal engine. “How marvelous, Mr. McCormick,” he boomed, “you read so beautifully, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic I find it myself to read good literature aloud, for the main and simple—”

But Dr. Brush never had a chance to round off his homily, because at that moment Mr. McCormick slammed the book shut and hurled it at him end over end, prefatory to leaping out of the sofa and tackling the doctor round the knees. The flying book glanced off the side of Brush’s head and he was able to take a single hasty step back before Mr. McCormick hit him and he found himself swimming through the air with an improvised backstroke before crashing down on one of the end tables, which he unfortunately obliterated. O‘Kane was there in an instant, and the usual madness ensued, he tugging at one end of Mr. McCormick’s wire-taut body and Mart at the other, but Brush, for all his size, proved remarkably agile. Without ever losing his masticular grip on the big tan perfecto, he was able to fling Mr. McCormick off, squirm round and pin him massively to the floor beneath all three hundred twenty-seven pounds.

Mr. McCormick writhed. He cursed, scratched, bit, but Dr. Brush simply shifted his weight as the crisis demanded, not even breathing hard, until finally Mr. McCormick was subdued. “Ha!” Brush laughed after a bit, O‘Kane and Mart standing there stupefied, their hands hanging uselessly at their sides. “Trick I learned at the Eastern Lunatic Hospital. Always works. The patient, you see, after a while he feels like he’s a little bird nestled inside the egg, not even a hatchling yet, and calm, so calm, for the main and simple reason that I represent the mother bird, a nurturing force that cannot be denied, for the main and simple—”

“Just a minute, Dr. Brush — I don’t mean to interrupt, but I think, well, I’m afraid you’re hurting Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane put in, alarmed by the coloration of his employer’s face, which had gone from a deep Guinea-wine red to the palest blood-drained shade of white.

The big doctor was unconcerned. He squared the cigar in his mouth, shifted his haunches. “Oh, no, no, that’s just the thing, don’t you see — a little compression. It’s what they all need.”

Afterward, when apologies had been made all around and Mr. McCormick, very contrite, was put to bed for his afternoon nap, O‘Kane felt it politic to escort Dr. Brush out onto the fog-shrouded grounds in search of Dr. Hamilton. “Can’t see a damned thing,” Brush complained, moving cautiously forward as O’Kane, familiar with the terrain, led the way. “Afraid of barking a damned shin. Or worse. You sure he’s out here?” And then, in a stentorian voice: “Gilbert? Gilbert Hamilton! Are you there?”

The trees stood ghostly, ribbed in white like so many masts hung with tattered sails. The leaves were damp underfoot. Nothing moved, and there was no sound, not even of birds. O‘Kane felt his way, and he didn’t even have the stench of the hominoids to guide him. All but two of the baboons and monkeys had been sold off to private collectors or donated to zoos, and Hamilton was packing up his notes and equipment and shipping it back east to his mentor, a small monkey-obsessed scholar by the name of Yerkes who’d spent some time at Riven Rock a year ago. As for Julius, he’d been removed from the premises after the Potter Hotel incident and sold for a song to a traveling circus — on Katherine’s orders.

There was a smell of burning in the air, and of something else too, something rank, and before long they could hear the crackling of a fire, and then they saw the flames, a moiling interwoven ball of them, up ahead at the edge of the oak grove. Two figures, in silhouette, slipped back and forth in front of the fire, feeding the flames with scraps of timber. As they drew closer, the big doctor tramping heavily behind him and cursing steadily under his breath, O‘Kane recognized Hamilton’s gnomelike assistants, and he called out to the shorter of them, the Mexican. “Hey, Isidro, you seen Dr. Hamilton?” And then, showing off one of the handy phrases he’d picked up amongst the denizens of Spanishtown: “ El Doctor Hamilton, dondy estis?”

They were at the edge of the fire now and O‘Kane saw that the two men were burning up the dismantled cages, wire and all. Paint sizzled and peeled. Wood split. Fingers of flame poked up through the mesh, weaving an intricate pattern, leaping high to drive back the fog even as the smoke settled in to replace it. The heat was intense, a hundred stoves stoked to capacity, and they had to step back away from it; O’Kane looked at the two scurrying men and hoped they knew what they were doing — a blaze like this could get out of hand and bring the whole place down, orchards, cottages, Pierce Arrows and Mr. McCormick too. Isidro, the Mexican, paused with an armload of rubbish to consider the question of Hamilton’s whereabouts, then nodded his head toward the place beneath the trees where the cages had stood even this morning.

They found Dr. Hamilton fussing around a pile of odds and ends he meant to keep, the chute with the doors at the end of it, a couple of the smaller cages, a pegboard he’d used to gauge the monkeys’ intelligence. “Gil!” Dr. Brush boomed, bobbing through the fog to seize Hamilton’s hand. “I’m late, I know it, but it was for the main and simple reason of this damned fog, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m here now and I’ve met everybody and I’m raring to go.”

“Nat,” Hamilton said, shaking with one hand and adjusting his spectacles with the other. “Yes, well, the weather’s been unusual. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Pah!” Brush returned, waving a big flipperlike hand. “No inconvenience to me, for the main and simple reason that I’m here to stay. California. God bless it. But what’s this — leftover monkeys?”

He was pointing to a small cage set atop the psychological chute. In it, O‘Kane saw, were the two remaining hominoids, a pair of rhesus monkeys the doctor called Jack and Jill. They were runts, even for monkeys, and though they’d been displaced and seen all their companions exiled and their home of the last several years demolished, they still had the spirit to fuck — which is what they were doing at the moment, black lips drawn back in erotic transport, the cage swaying rhythmically to the persistent in-and-out motion of the monkey on top, presumably Jack, but you never could tell. That much O’Kane had learned about hominoids.

Hamilton seemed a bit fuzzy. “Yes,” he said, gazing down on them, “the last two. Jack and Jill. I’d had half a mind to take them with me, but now I’m not so sure. The zoo down in Los Angeles is filled up with them — rhesus, that is — and I can’t seem to get rid of them in any case.”

The big doctor huffed a few times. His cigar had gone out, but he still clutched it with his teeth as if it were the last link of a breathing tube and he a sponge diver wending his way along the bottom of the sea. “Why not set ‘em free? Let ’em go. Liberate ‘em. For the main and simple reason that they’re sentient creatures, just like you and me, and it’s a cruelty to keep them caged up like that, and the climate here’ll support ’em, I don’t doubt that, for the main and simple—”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Hamilton said. “Haven’t I, Edward?”

O‘Kane hadn’t the faintest idea what Hamilton had or hadn’t thought of, but he nodded his head anyway.

“Well?” Brush demanded. “And so?”

Hamilton took his time, the fog settling in, the fire of demolition snapping and roaring off in the distance. He looked down at the copulating monkeys. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of study,” he sighed, “it’s that they’re nothing but dirty stinking little uncontrollable beasts. Set them free?” He looked up. “They don’t deserve it.”

It was about that time that Giovannella came to O‘Kane with the news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore, but Giovannella Capolupo, married, at her father’s insistence, to a little hunched-over wop with a single black eyebrow drawn like a visor across the top third of his head. Guido, his name was, Guido Capolupo. He had a shoemaker’s shop in a back alley in Spanishtown, with a cramped little cell of an apartment above it, which was convenient for O’Kane, who was then living at a boardinghouse not five minutes away.

Giovannella, sleek and beautiful, with her eyes like chocolate candies and her feet primly crossed at the ankles, sat waiting for him in the parlor under the watchful eye of the landlady, Mrs. Fitzmaurice. It was a Saturday afternoon, 2:00 P.M., and he’d just come back from his half-day shift at Riven Rock and collapsed into his bed like a jellyfish, utterly drained after a long night of celebrating somebody’s birthday at Menhoff‘s, he couldn’t remember whose. He closed his eyes. And in the very next instant there was an impatient rapping at the door and who was it? Mrs. Fitzmaurice. And what did she want? There was a young lady downstairs for him.

“Giov,” he crooned, crossing the carpet and taking her hand, feeling better already, and he couldn’t kiss her there in public, though he wanted to, and he couldn’t read her chocolate-candy eyes either. “What do you say?”

“I’m pregnant.”

At first it didn’t register on him. The sun was fat in the windows and outside the streets were placid and inviting, all the long Saturday afternoon stretching languidly before him. Since he was up, he was thinking of maybe suggesting a stroll up to Menhoff‘s, for a little hair of the dog. He blinked. Tried on a smile.

Giovannella was beaming suddenly. “I thought you’d be mad, Eddie, but I’m so happy.” She gave his hand a squeeze, though Mrs. Fitzmaurice, studiously watering her geraniums at the far window, was watching like a moral executioner, ready to pounce at any hint of impropriety.

O‘Kane wasn’t following. “Mad? About what?”

“You’re the father, Eddie,” her voice soft as a heartbeat. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m pregnant.”

In the next moment he had her out the door and they were stalking up the street, pedestrians trying not to stare, the streetcar clanking by, a roadster parked at the curb, a sedan beyond, an old Reo beyond that. His blood was surging, and it wasn’t all bad. He was angry, of course he was angry, but there was a crazy exhilaration to it too. Sure the kid would be his — her husband, Guido, looked to be about a hundred and twelve years old though she insisted he was only thirty-six, and how could she have relations with a guy who looked like that, even if he was her husband? Of course the kid was his — unless she’d been fooling around with somebody else, and if she fooled around with him why wouldn’t she fool around with somebody else? But no, it had to be his, and it would come out with fair hair and sea-green eyes, he just knew it, and Baldy Dimucci and this Guido would hit the roof. There’d be a vendetta. Sicilian assassins. They’d crawl through the ground-floor window at night, brutally dispatching Mrs. Fitzmaurice and old Walter Hogan, who spent half his life snoring in a chair by the front door, and then come up the stairs and cut his own miserable throat.

Someone honked a bicycle horn. The greengrocer — Wilson — came out from behind a display of muskmelons and threw a pan of water in the gutter. “You’ll have to get rid of it,” O‘Kane said.

Giovannella stopped dead in her tracks, Giovannella the fury, Giovannella the lunatic. The candy melted out of her eyes. “What did you say?” she demanded. “I think my hearing must not be so good.”

The fat-ankled woman from the Goux Winery waddled past them with three kids in tow. A man with a panting dog almost ran into them. People were everywhere, swells ambling up the street from the Potter, women shopping for groceries, kids darting in and out of alleyways with balls and hoops. “Not here, Giov,” he said, and he wanted to take her by the arm and steer her someplace, someplace quiet and out of the way, but he couldn’t do that, because she wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore — she was Giovannella Capolupo and he had no right to touch her. In public, anyway.

Suddenly she lurched away from him, her face twisted and ugly, and broke into a clumsy trot, fighting the weight of her skirts. He gave it a minute, inconspicuous Eddie O‘Kane, just another guy out for a Saturday-afternoon stroll, and then made his way up the street after her. By the time he got going, she was already a block ahead of him, still kicking out her skirts in an awkward trot, her head bobbing like a toy on a spring, people stopping to turn and stare after her. O’Kane quickened his pace, but not so much as to attract attention.

He caught up with her in front of Diehl’s Grocery, a place that catered to the carriage trade of Montecito — O‘Mara smoked hams from Ireland in the window, jars of curry and chutney from India, pears in crème de menthe, the sort of place that had no business with O’Kane or he with it. But there was a line of limousines parked out front, one of them Mr. McCormick‘s, which meant that Roscoe was around somewhere, and Sam Wah stalking the aisles inside, inspecting ginger root from Canton and curls of candied melon from Cambodia. Giovannella was standing at the window, her back to the street, staring at a perfectly stacked pyramid of tangerines. He saw her face reflected in the glass, her lips puffed with emotion, eyes like open wounds, and felt something give inside him. “Giovannella,” he said, “listen to me — can’t we talk?”

In the smallest voice: “I don’t want to talk to you, Eddie.”

Sam Wah’s face suddenly loomed up in the window, caught between two pink-and-brown hams, and Sam smiled a gap-toothed smile and O‘Kane waved, and then, whether the whole world was watching or not, he took Giovannella by the elbow and led her down the alley and into the next street over. They walked in silence, out of the commercial district and into a residential area, neat houses with deep-set porches and roses climbing up trellises. They found a place to sit on the knee-high roots of a big Moreton Bay fig tree that spread out over an empty lot like ten trees all grafted together. There was no one around. He took her hand and she gave him a sidelong look that seemed to have some conciliation in it, but with Giovannella you never could tell. Sometimes when she looked her softest she was about to explode, and when she exploded she could do anything, throw herself in front of a streetcar, jump off a building, rake your eyes out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that, what I said back there on the street.”

“Eddie,” she said, surrender, forgiveness and reproach all in two syllables and one tone, and she took hold of him with a strength and intensity that was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time and kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth, again and again, crushing him, tearing at him, till finally he had to put his hands on her shoulders and come up for air.

“I’m not going to have my son raised by some wop shoemaker, that’s all,” he said.

That only made her hold on tighter. She was a woman drowning in the surf and he the lifeguard sent to rescue her, her nails like claws, every muscle straining to drag him down, and she wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him get his face clear, no neutral zone here, no calling for time out, her lips his lips, her nose his, her eyes and her breath. “Oh, yeah?” she said, and her voice was dangerous. “And what about the son you already have — whos raising him? Huh? You tell me. Who’s raising him, Eddie?”

Rosaleen was raising him, and if she had some man in her life, he didn’t know about it. He sent her money, when he remembered, and she sent him silence in return. No letters, no photographs, no nothing. But if he pictured her, and he did once in awhile, lingering over a beer when nobody was around, a mournful tune playing on the victrola, he pictured her alone and waiting, a photo of handsome Eddie O‘Kane on the wall above her bed.

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

A breeze came up and scoured the ground, scraps of paper suddenly pasted to the roots of the tree, branches groaning overhead. Still she clung to him, her breath hot in his face, the smell of her skin, soap, perfume. “You’re my husband, Eddie,” she whispered, “you’re the one. Be a man. Take me away someplace, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Or back home to Boston, I don’t care, I’ll go anywhere with you.”

“This is my home. Mr. McCormick—”

“Mr. McCormick. Don’t tell me about Mr. McCormick.” She pushed away from him, her eyes dilated and huge, hair falling loose at her nape and whipping round her shoulders. “It’s only a job, Eddie — you can get a job anywhere, a big strong man like you, an American born here and with an education too. Where’s your three o‘clock luck you’re always telling me about? Trust it. Trust me.”

But the curtain had fallen in his mind. The play was over. “You’ll have to get rid of it.”

“Never.”

“I’ll arrange it. I’ll ask around. He — whatever his name is — he’ll never have to know. Nobody will.”

Suddenly, and he didn’t know quite how it happened, they were boxing. Or she was boxing and he was just trying to fend off her blows. They struggled to their knees, then their feet. She swung at him, just like Rosaleen. “I hate you,” she sputtered, gasping, swinging, her voice dead calm between one ratcheting breath and the next. “It’s murder you’re talking about, you son… of a bitch, murder of an… innocent soul… How can you even… think of it, and you a… Catholic?”

She stopped swinging then and stood there rigid, but he kept his hands up, just in case. He glanced round to see if anybody was watching, but the lot was deserted. Her eyes were wet. She made a noise deep in her throat and he thought she was going to start crying on him, but she snapped back her head in a sudden fierce motion and spat down the front of his shirt, a glistening ball of Italian sputum that hung there like a jewel on a string. “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” she demanded, and still she wasn’t shouting. “You stinker,” she hissed. “You pig. Don’t you have a heart?”

Well, he did. He did have a heart, but he wasn’t going to start a war with all of Sicily and he sure as hell wasn’t going to have somebody named Guido Capolupo raising his own flesh and blood, and so as soon as Giovannella had turned her back on him and fled across the lot in her stiff-legged skirt-hampered trot, he went up to Menhoff’s to see what he could do about it. He figured he would have a beer and a whiskey to ease the throbbing in his head and the sourness of his gut — though he didn’t need the stuff, not really, not like his old man — and maybe make some discreet inquiries, that was all.

Menhoff’s was pretty lively that afternoon, and that helped him get over his initial shock, glad-handing people, putting on a face — he even shot a couple games of pool. But for all that he was in another world, aching all the way down from his grinding molars to the marrow of his bones, and why use chalk on the cue when he could powder it with the dust of his own teeth? He’d been planning a picnic at the beach with a girl he’d met at a party the week before, but he knew he couldn’t go through with it now, and he rang her up and begged off in a blizzard of promises and lies. Giovannella was right — abortion was a dirty business, as foul a sin as there was. And he was a Catholic still, though he didn’t go to Mass anymore, except for Christmas and Easter, and he believed God was watching him and judging him and holding him in contempt even as he sat there at the bar and lifted a beer to his lips. But what was the alternative? He tried to picture himself in San Francisco, a place he knew only from postcards, Giovannella swelling up till her navel was extruded and her tits were like balloons and her legs lost their shape, and what then? Living in sin. A baby that was a bastard in the eyes of the church and society too. And then another baby. And another.

He’d been with Mr. McCormick eight years now, longer than he’d been at the Boston Asylum and McLean put together, and he was making good money, and putting some of it in the bank against the day he struck out on his own, and whether it was in oranges or oil or even one of these new service businesses sprung up in the wake of the automobile, he didn’t know anymore. But he wasn’t about to leave Mr. McCormick. It was a question of loyalty — he wanted to see him improve, he did; in a way he’d staked his life on it — and even with Hamilton leaving and this new man, Brush, coming in, he knew he was going to be at Riven Rock for a good long while yet. But Giovannella. Giovannella, Giovannella, Giovannella. He could just let it go, turn his back on her and let the shoemaker raise a little O‘Kane like one of those hapless sparrows the cowbird preys on, shoving its egg right in on top of the nest and nobody the wiser. He could. But it would hurt, and he’d already had enough hurt from Rosaleen and Eddie Jr.

He was on his second round — or was it his third? — when Dolores Isringhausen walked in. She was with another woman, both of them in furs, cloche hats, bobbed hair and skirts crawling up their calves, and a whole noisy mob of people shouldering in behind them. She was from New York, Dolores, married to a rich man off playing boy scout on the Italian front, and she ran with a fast crowd. Nobody in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like her. She smoked, drank Jack Rose cocktails and drove her own car, a little Maxwell runabout with all-white tires she’d had shipped out from the East. O‘Kane was fascinated by her. He’d sat with her a couple of times with one group or another and he loved the knowing look on her face and her glassy cold eyes and the way the dress clung to her hips, always something silky and tactile and never the stiff penitential weeds half the women in town dragged themselves around in, as if they were traipsing from one funeral to another. And she didn’t seem to have any objection to saloons, either.

“Hello, Eddie,” she said, coming right up to him at the end of the bar, the other woman trailing behind her with a pasted-on smile and an empty greeting for this one or that. “You’re looking glum. What’s the matter? It’s Saturday. The night beckons.”

As if to prove her wrong — about the glumness, that is — he flashed her a smile, all teeth, the smile of a caveman just back from clubbing a mastodon and laying it at the feet of his cavewoman inamorata, and he shifted his shoulders inside his jacket to show her what he had there. His eyes fastened on hers. “I was just waiting for you to come in and brighten the day.”

Her eyes were the strangest color — purple, he guessed you’d call them — and he saw that she was wearing some sort of theatrical makeup on her upper lids to bring them out. She didn’t respond to his overture, not directly. Ducking her head, she fished a cigarette holder out of a black bead reticule and gave him a look. “Why don’t you come sit with us,” she said, nodding toward the restaurant in back, where Cody Menhoff himself was scurrying around setting up a table for her. “You can light my cigarette for me.” And then she was sweeping across the room, the other woman right behind her and the rest of the group converging on the table with its clean white cloth and a platter of sandwiches and a Jack Rose cocktail in a tall-stemmed glass set right in the center of it like a tribute.

There were four men in her party (all jerks, and O‘Kane could have whipped any two of them with one hand tied behind his back) and three women made up to look like Parisian streetwalkers, or what O’Kane supposed Parisian streetwalkers would look like. He wouldn’t know. Not actually. Unlike these swells, with their thin-lipped smiles and their cigarette holders and racquet club drawl, he’d never been to Paris. Or to New York, for that matter.

Dolores and her friend of the vapid smile made the party nine, and O‘Kane brought it to ten. She made a place for him right beside her and as the conversation veered from the War to skirt lengths to gossip about people O’Kane didn’t know, she leaned in close and gave him the full benefit of her eyes and her husky timbreless voice: “How about that light you promised me?”

O‘Kane put a match to her cigarette and the whole table lit up, smoke everywhere, glasses already empty and the waiter bringing another round, and every one of them drinking a Jack Rose cocktail (1½ oz. apple brandy, juice of ½ lime, 1 tsp. grenadine; shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass).

“What’s the matter, Eddie,” Dolores purred, lifting her chin to exhale, her lips contracted in a little pout, “don’t you smoke?”

He shrugged. Smiled. Let his eyes climb right out of his head and into hers. “Once in a while I like a cigar with a glass of whiskey, usually late at night. I’m not one for cigarettes, though, not generally.”

“Oh, you’ll like these. Here, try one.”

And then she was touching the glowing tip of her cigarette to the one he’d plucked from her monogrammed case and he was as close to her as he’d been to Giovannella an hour ago, only this was different, this was nice, the beginning of the dance instead of the end. “Swell,” he said, exhaling. “Very smooth.”

She looked at him. “They ought to be. They came all the way from Turkey.”

They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, and she drank Jack Rose cocktails as if they were no more potent than lamb’s milk and smoked up all the cigarettes in her case. And what did they talk about? Life. Santa Barbara. Mr. McCormick. Her husband. Italy. The War. Music. Did he like music? He did, and when they went out front arm-in-arm to climb into her car and drive out to Mattei’s for supper and the rest of the party be damned, he pressed her up against the hood and sang to her in the soft lilting tenor that was another legacy of his father:

You shall have rings on your fingers

And bells on your toes,

Elephants to ride upon

My little Irish rose.

She let him kiss her then, a lingering oneiric kiss that gave him time to adjust to her — she was taller than Giovannella, leaner, her lips taut as rope — and then they were in the car and breathing hard, both of them. “That was beautiful, Eddie — the song, I mean,” she murmured, her voice husky and low, “and the kiss too, that was nice,” and then she put the car in gear and it was the first time in his life he’d been in an automobile and a woman driving, and he told her his ma had taught him the song, back East, back in Boston, where he was born.

“And the kiss?”

He took hold of her hand. She was playing a game he liked better than any he could of. “It was a hundred girls taught me that, but none as pretty as you.”

It was still light out, and as the car climbed smoothly up through the San Marcos Pass and snaked down into the farmland of the Santa Ynez Valley, O‘Kane gazed out on the world and saw it in all its lambent immanence, caught there for him as if on a motion picture screen, only in color, living color. Every bush along the roadway was on fire with blossoms, the trees arching up and away from the windscreen of the car in a wash of leaves and each a different shade of green, the mountains cut into sections like towering blocks of maple sugar pressed in a mold, enough maple sugar to sweeten all the tea in China. He was glowing with the whiskey and the anticipation of what was coming, a sure thing, the deserted wife and the husband off sitting around a campfire in one of those places you read about in the newspaper, and he sank back in the seat and listened to the engine, gazing out into all that spread of the natural earth, and didn’t he see the face of God there, God the all-forgiving, and His Son the redeemer?

Sure he did. And this wasn’t a fierce and recriminating God who would rear back and hurl bolts of lightning and cause the earth to erupt and point the infinite finger of damnation at a child-murdering adulterer hurrying on his way to indulge yet another sin of the flesh… no, no, not at all. The Lord was smiling, a smile broad as a river, tall as any tree, and that smile made O‘Kane feel as if a lamp had been lit inside him. Everything would work out, he was sure of it. Of course, he was stewed to the gills, and that might have had something to do with this sudden manifestation of the Deity and the feeling of benevolence and well-being that had stolen over him in the space of a breath… but still, there it was, and as he sat there molded into the seat beside Dolores Isringhausen with the whiskey in his veins and the slanting sun warm against the swell of his jaw, he thought maybe he’d died and gone on to his reward after all.

It was early the next morning, after they’d made love twice on the satin sheets in her bedroom, and the slow quiet cigarette-punctuated murmur of their conversation had fallen away to nothing, that he thought of Giovannella again. Dolores lay on her back beside him, sprawled like a doll thrown from a cliff, her breasts fanned out on the fulcrum of her rib cage, her legs splayed. She was smoking, the cigarette standing erect between her lips, jetting a stream of smoke straight up into the air, and he was idly stroking the hair between her legs, as relaxed as a dead man except for the accelerating spark of Giovannella in his head.

“Dolores?” he said into the silence of the room.

“Hm?”

“Do you know any doctors? Personally, I mean.”

And though when the sun came up it was Sunday, the Lord’s day, and all the faithful were trotting in and out of the churches whether they were Catholics or Protestants or Egyptian dog worshipers, O‘Kane was on his way to Giovannella’s with the stiff white slip of paper on which Dolores Isringhausen had written a name and address in her looping graceful boarding-school hand, and when he got there he waited round the corner till the shoemaker went out to do whatever it is shoemakers do on Sundays. Then he looked over his shoulder, swallowed his pounding heart, and mounted the swaybacked stairs on the outside of the building.

Giovannella looked startled. Not hopeful, not angry, just startled. “You can’t come here today, Eddie. Guido, he only went out for a walk — he could be back any minute.”

“To hell with Guido,” he said, and he was in the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. And what was the first thing he saw, nailed to the wall in the vestibule in all His crucified agony? Sure: Christ, staring him in the face.

“Eddie. You got to go. You can‘t—”

“I brought you this,” he said, holding the slip of paper out to her.

There was nothing in her face. He watched her eyes drop, her lips part, and there, just the tip of her tongue. She was no reader. “Cy… rose?… Brown,” piecing it out, “one-two, one-two Cha… pala. M, period, D, period.” She looked up. “M.D.? What does that mean?”

“Doctor,” he said, and he shifted on the balls of his feet, feeling sick and evil, “M.D. means doctor. Don’t you know anything?”

Comprehension started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up through the clamped muscles of her jaw to her eyes, and they weren’t loving and kind eyes, not this morning, not any more. She let out a curse, something in Italian, and though he couldn’t appreciate the nuances, he got the gist of it. “You son of a bitch.” she said. “You big cocky son of a bitch. What makes you sure it’s your baby, huh?”

“Because you told me. Because you came to me. Guido can’t make you feel a thing, isn’t that what you told me? That he’s only this big?”

“He’s a better man than you.”

“The hell he is.”

“He is. And didn’t you ever think I might have just said that for you, to make you feel like a big man, huh? Because I did, I did, you son of a bitch. I lied. I lied to you, Eddie. Guido’s hung like a horse — how do you like that? And you’ll never hurt my baby—my baby, not yours. Never!” “

It was Rosaleen all over again, and he had half a moment to wonder about the shifting magnetic poles of love, from Venus to Mars and no middle ground, no place to regroup and sound the retreat, and when she came at him with the ice pick that had been lying so quietly atop the icebox all this time he was only trying to protect himself, and both of them watched with the kind of astonishment reserved for the magician in the cape as the shining steel rivet passed right on through his open palm and out the other side as if there was no such thing as flesh and no such thing as blood.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t shake,” O‘Kane said, nodding a greeting to Dr. Brush at the door and holding up his bandaged right hand in extenuation, Mart right behind him, the string orchestra already playing something light as air and the big new room beyond all lit up and festive. “Ah, and this must be Mrs. Brush,” he said, feeling convivial, ready to break into song, tell jokes, quaff a beer or a cup or two of punch laced with gin. He was about to say he’d heard a lot about her, but then he realized he’d heard nothing, not a word. She could have been a Fiji Island cannibal with a bone through her nose for all he’d heard about her, but here she was, standing right beside her husband at the door, a pinched, rawboned woman with a squared-off beak of a nose and two staring black eyes no bigger than a crow’s.

She reached for his bandaged hand and then drew back as if she’d burned herself on a hot stove, but immediately reached for it again, and then once more, before O‘Kane finally offered his left hand and tucked the bandaged one discreetly behind his back. But the sequel was even stranger, because she went through the same routine all over again, reaching out for his good hand and then drawing back once, twice, three times, and when he looked into her face for an answer she greeted him with a whole battery of facial tics and distortions — enough to make the gone-but-not-forgotten Hamilton look like an amateur. She said something in a loud squawk of a voice, twitching and shaking and jerking her head up and down all the while, before Dr. Brush intervened.

“Gladys, yes,” he boomed, swinging tumultuously round in the entrance hall and slamming the door behind them. “These are the two men I told you about, Edward O‘Kane — we call him Eddie — and Martin Tompkins, er, Thompson. That’s it, dear, yes, go ahead and say hello—”

Mart, thick-headed and slow to grapple toward judgment or even awareness, gave Mrs. Brush a bewildered look and reached for her hand, which she immediately snatched away and hid behind her back. Mart looked to O‘Kane, and O’Kane’s eyes told him everything he needed to know: the psychiatrist’s wife was a nutcase.

And what was she wearing? Something plain and old-fashioned, drab as a horse blanket, and hanging right down to the floor, as if this were the nineteen-oughts still. But she was smiling, or at least that seemed to be a smile flashing through the frenetic semaphore of tics, twitches and grimaces, and that was enough for O‘Kane. He smiled back, offered her his arm, which she took after another whole rigama-role of back and forth and back and forth again, and led her up the six steps and into the big room full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces.

The celebration was both in honor of Dr. Brush’s taking over the reins and to christen the new theater building, built so that Mr. McCormick could have a comfortable place in which to view moving pictures, concerts and plays. It was a grand building, the size of any three houses a normal family would occupy, dominated by the vast two-story-high theater, with offices for Dr. Brush and the estate manager to either side and a bedroom for Mr. McCormick tucked in back in the event he should tire while watching a picture. Everyone felt he needed more stimulation — Drs. Meyer, Hamilton and Brush, Katherine, even the Chicago McCormicks — and the theater house was designed to serve the purpose. It was a short walk from the main house — no more than four or five hundred feet — and the landscape architects had put sprinklers high up in the trees along the path so that Mr. McCormick could hear the soothing murmur of a gentle rainfall as he strolled to and from the building in fair weather, and there was stimulation for you: rain on command. Nor had they overlooked security: all the windows were protected, inside the double panes of glass, with a graceful cast-iron filigree in a handsome diamond pattern, and the doors to each of the rooms were fitted with triple locks, and for each lock a separate key.

It was amazing, it really was, and yet O‘Kane couldn’t help thinking of the poor simple lunatics at the Boston Asylum, all herded into a cage to have the crusted shit blasted off them with high-pressure hoses. But then they weren’t Mr. McCormick, were they? And Mr. McCormick, being a gentleman, was used to gentle things, and O’Kane, being his nurse, applauded anything they could do for him, especially when money was no object. Stimulation? Give him all the stimulation he could stand, just so long as it didn’t overexcite him and push him all the way back down the long tunnel of tube-feeding and diapers.

But everybody in the neighborhood was gathered here now, for drinks and frivolity and the showing of a new Bronco Billy picture from Santa Barbara’s own Flying A Studios, and as O‘Kane stepped into the room with the frantically grinning Mrs. Brush beside him, he felt as pleased as he had on Christmas Day as a boy. Nick’s wife had put up decorations, streamers and such, there was a big spread on a table in the corner and a bar set up and a guy in a tuxedo standing behind it. And balloons, balloons all over the place. The orchestra had been playing an air when he first came to the door, cheerful and fluty, but now they shifted into something you could feel in the soles of your feet and a couple of people got up to dance. He handed Mrs. Brush over to a big glowing bald man who suddenly loomed up on his right — Dr. Ogilvie, Mr. McCormick’s nominal dentist — and headed for the bar.

He ordered a highball and while the bartender was fixing it he glanced over his shoulder to see Katherine standing there not ten feet away, and she laughing at something the woman next to her was saying. She looked good, damned good, all in green and with a little green hat perched up on top of her hair like a bird’s nest. He wasn’t going to talk to her, of course, unless it was strictly necessary, and he turned back to the bar before she could catch him looking. That was when Dr. Brush and Mart elbowed their way in, the doctor flushed and hearty and lecturing Mart about the main and simple reason of something or other. “Eddie!” he cried, and a big arm looped itself over O‘Kane’s shoulder, an arm heavy as a python, and O’Kane could smell liquor on the doctor’s breath. “They treating you all right?”

“Sure. Yeah.” O‘Kane lifted the glass to his lips, whiskey fumes probing at his nostrils, and made believe he was diving for pearls.

“You fellows are all right,” Brush boomed, and he was squeezing Mart under his other arm, squeezing the two of them as if they were prize hams. “But listen. Eddie. I really want to tell you, for the main and simple reason, well, Gladys thinks you’re a prince. And so do I.”

O‘Kane looked at Mart. Mart was clutching a drink, looking big-headed and dazed. It must have been something for him, going from his monk’s cell in the back of the big house to all this.

“Listen. Between us. Because we’re friends and, er, fellow employees of Mr. McCormick, you may have noticed that my wife’s a little, what should we say — excitable? Not to worry. She was a patient once. Of mine, that is. Brilliant woman, one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known—”

O‘Kane, uncomfortable under the doctor’s grip, gazed out across the room to where Mrs. Brush stood with the dentist, putting her face through all its permutations and showing her teeth like a rabbit at the end of every sequence. She didn’t look all that brilliant. In fact, she looked suspiciously like some of the loonies he’d known at McLean.

“Tourette’s syndrome,” the doctor was saying. “It’s not a form of insanity, not at all, just a weakness. A moral weakness, really. And we’re working on it, we are. You see, her mind races ahead of her body just like an automobile stuck in neutral and the accelerator to the floor, causes her all sorts of embarrassment for the main and simple reason that she refuses to control it… but really, she’s no crazier than you or I, not underneath, and I, er, I appreciate the way you gave her your arm there, Eddie, it was white of you,”

It was then that Dolores Isringhausen walked in with her friend of the vacuous smile and two men with penciled-in mustaches and their hair all slicked down with grease. Or she didn’t walk exactly — she sashayed, rolling her corsetless hips from side to side like a belly dancer, and she managed to make every woman in the place, even Katherine, look like yesterday’s news. In three years, every woman in America would look like her — or try to — all natural lines, legs and boyish figure, with the peeled-acorn hat and eye makeup, but for now she had the stage all to herself, she and her friend, that is. O‘Kane was electrified — he hadn’t expected this — and two emotions simultaneously flooded his system with glandular secretions that made him feel as twitchy as Mrs. Brush: lust and jealousy. Who were those men, and one of them with his hand on her elbow?

In the next moment he was crossing the crowded room, all of Montecito there in their jewels and furs and cravats and nobody worried about the presumptive host of the party locked away in his room in the big house with the iron bars on the windows, not in the least, and it was no small wonder that he himself had been invited. Of course, he’d already seen the picture that afternoon with Mart and Mr. McCormick, but still he had to admit it was decent of Katherine — and Brush, he supposed — to include the nurses in a gathering like this. There were millionaires and tycoons here tonight and he was brushing shoulders with them, and not as somebody’s bootlick or bottle washer either — he was off-duty, a guest like anybody else. That was something, and he knew it and savored it, and he promised himself he’d be on his best behavior, smiling Eddie O‘Kane, quick with a handshake and a witty aside.

He caught up to Dolores at the buffet table, which was all piled up with good things from Diehl’s Grocery and two of Diehl’s best men in monkey suits back there to serve it up. She already had a Jack Rose cocktail in her hand with the long black velvet glove clinging to it like a second skin, and she was laughing at something one of the mustachioed little weasels was saying, her head thrown back, her pulsing white kiss-able throat exposed for anyone to see. It had been three days since he’d gotten to know her in the way that counted most, the way you could keep score by, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since — he didn’t know her phone number and he didn’t have a car to drive out to her place and nose around. But that was all right. It wasn’t love or anything like that he was feeling, but just a good healthy appetite for second helpings, and he didn’t want to seem overeager. Casual, that was the way he was, smooth as silk.

Still, when he saw the way she was laughing and the guy’s hand touching hers to drive home the joke — and what was so funny? — he couldn’t help bristling, though he knew he shouldn’t and that this wasn’t the place for it and that he had no more right to her than any half-dozen other men, and her husband not the least of them. “Dolores,” he said, in a throat-clearing sort of way, “I see you made it to our little gathering.”

She turned a face to him that was like a mask. His hand was throbbing. Was she going to cut him, was that it? The company too rich for him? Good enough for her in bed but not here amongst all these swells and capitalists? “Eddie,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, no inflection at all, “how nice to see you again.”

He started in on a little speech about Mr. McCormick, how he was indisposed and what a shame it was he couldn’t attend his own party, playing off the status of being Mr. McCormick’s intimate and puffing himself up as if he were the host and all this his, when the mustachioed character cut him off. “You’re a friend of Stanley’s?” the man said. “I knew him at Princeton,”

“Well, I—” O‘Kane stammered, and he felt himself sinking fast, over his head, out of his depth, and what was he thinking?

Dolores saved him. “My God, Eddie,” she gasped into the breach, “what did you do to your hand?”

He held it up gratefully, a white swath of bandage that was the sudden cynosure of the whole party, and invented an elaborate story about protecting Mr. McCormick from a deranged avocado rancher who objected to their crossing his property on one of their drives, brandishing it in the other man’s face as if challenging him to offer the slightest contradiction. And he felt good all of a sudden, not giving half a damn what the other guy thought or who he was or how much money he had: Dolores was on his side, which meant that she wanted her second helpings too. And from him, handsome Eddie O‘Kane, and not this penciled-in little twerp in the fancy-dress suit.

“What a shame,” she said, “about your hand, I mean.” And then she introduced the man in the mustache: “This is my brother-in-law, Jim — Tom’s brother. He’s visiting at the house for the week, and he’s just back from Italy, where he saw Tom—”

And then the talk veered off into news of the War in Europe and all the American volunteers over there and how the U.S. was sure to be drawn into it before long, and O‘Kane, bored with the whole subject, excused himself and went back to refresh his drink, figuring Dolores could come to him when she was ready. He found Mart still there, dissecting the Red Sox with an older gentleman whose jowls hung down on either side of his nose like hot water bags. “That Ruth’s a hell of a pitcher,” the old man was saying, lifting a glass to his lips, “and if Leonard and Mays hold up I don’t doubt for a minute we’ll be back in the World Series again this year.”

“But we’ve got no hitting,” Mart said. “It’s like a bunch of women out there, what I read anyway.”

“Well, you’re a bit off the beaten path out here, son, but you’re right there. We’ve got enough, though — and this fellow Gardner at third’s a good man, really capital….”

O‘Kane, fresh drink in hand, drifted away again, not even deigning to glance at Dolores now — he was as sure of her as he’d ever been of any girl or woman in his life — and hoping Katherine would leave early so he could loosen up a bit. But just a bit, he reminded himself, and he could hear his mother’s voice in his head: Use your manners, Eddie, and your nice smile, and that head God put on your shoulders, and you’ll go as far in life as you want to. He thought maybe he’d circulate a little, meet some people. Who knows — maybe he could pick up some tips on growing oranges or finding a piece of property with one of these oil wells on it or oil under the ground anyway, and how did anybody know it was there in the first place?

That was when the orchestra went Hawaiian, stiff old Mr. Eldred putting down his violin and picking up a ukulele that was like a toy and strumming away as if he were born in Honolulu. It was a surprise, and everybody cried out and clapped their hands as “Song of the Islands” somehow arose from his rhythmically thrashing right hand and the rest of the orchestra came tiptoeing in behind him. O‘Kane had been standing amid a group of regular-looking fellows who were heatedly debating the merits of a business that dealt in millimeters and centimeters of something or other, thinking he would wait for the appropriate moment to butt in and ask their opinion of the land offerings in Goleta, but as one they turned to the orchestra and began clapping in time to the ukulele.

He couldn’t really understand this Hawaiian craze — the music, to his ears, was as bland as boiled rice, nothing like the syncopated jolt of ragtime or jazz, which is what they ought to have had here and why couldn’t Eldred pick up a trumpet if he was going to pick up anything? No, the only good thing about Hawaii was the hula as danced by a half-naked brown-skinned girl in a grass skirt, and he’d seen a pretty stimulating exhibition of that one night at a sideshow in Los Angeles with Mart and Roscoe, who’d happened to borrow one of the Pierce automobiles for the evening and no one the wiser. “See the gen-u-wine article straight from the Islands! the barker had shouted. ”The gen-u-wine Hawaiian hula danced without the aid of human feet!“ That had been something and well worth the dime it had cost him.

But this, this was a farce. Inevitably, a whole chain of half-stewed men and big-bottomed women would get up and start swaying obscenely across the floor, making fools of themselves and stopping the conversation — the useful and potentially useful conversation — dead in its tracks. And sure enough, there they were already, and Eldred launching into “On the Beach at Waikiki” now, O‘Kane ordering another drink and looking on skeptically from behind the screen of Mart’s head, the old Red Sox fan right up there in front of the orchestra wagging his jowls like one of those big-humped cows from India. O’Kane didn’t care. He was enjoying himself anyway, a break from the routine, and the Ice Queen would tire of all this and go on back to her hotel soon, he was sure of it, and then he could fend off the little guys in the mustaches and let Dolores Isringhausen take him home in her car and do anything she wanted with him.

That was an inviting prospect, and he leaned back on the bar and let the booze settle into his veins, his eyes drifting languidly over the crowd, and no, he wasn’t going to look at Dolores, not yet, or Katherine either. His bones were melting, his legs were dead and he was feeling all right and better than all right, when suddenly a massive shimmering sphere of flesh welled up in his peripheral vision and a big adhesive hand took hold of his wrist and was jerking him in the direction of the band. It was Brush. Dr. Brush. He was wearing a grass skirt and one of those flower necklaces over a bare blubbery chest and he had Mrs. Brush trailing from one hand and O‘Kane from the other and there was no yielding to the onward rush of that tumultuous moving mountain of flesh. “Kamehameha!” Brush shouted, wriggling his hips. “Yakahula, hickydula!”

O‘Kane felt his face go red. He was fighting like a fish at the end of a line and he saw Dolores’s face haunting the crowd and her sudden satiric smile and he was bumping into somebody — the dentist, wasn’t it? — and a drink spilled and then another. He finally broke the doctor’s grip and pulled up short in the middle of the whirling mob, everyone laughing, screaming with hilarity, and Brush hurtling onward in all his volatile-bosomed glory till he was right in front of the orchestra and every eye in the house was on him.

Eldred strummed till his hand looked as if it was going to fall off, the orchestra caught fire and Dr. Brush shook and shimmied and drove all his floating appendages in every conceivable direction while his poor oscillating wife tried to keep up with him through the whole panoply of her jerks and twitches. And that was the moment of revelation for O‘Kane, his hopes as feeble suddenly as a dying man’s: Brush was no savior or miracle worker and there was no way in the world he would ever even scratch the surface of Mr. McCormick’s illness — for the main and simple reason that he was a congenital idiot himself.

3. THE ART OF WOOING

When Stanley McCormick strode across the croquet lawn at the Beverly Farms Resort Hotel in Beverly, Massachusetts, on that still, sun-struck afternoon in the summer of 1903 and Katherine Dexter glanced up and saw him for the first time in her adult life, he really wasn’t himself. He’d been driving all day, driving hard, driving as if a whole gibbering horde of demons was on his tail with their talons drawn and their black leathery wings beating him about the head and shrieking doom in his ears. Something had seized him at breakfast that morning, an agitation, a jolt of the nerves that was like a switch thrown inside him, his whole being and private interior self taking off in a sudden frenzy like a spooked horse or a runaway automobile. That was why he’d had to leave his chauffeur behind when they stopped for gasoline at a feed store in Medford and the man never knew it till he came out from behind the shed where he was relieving himself to see the car hurtling up the road (nothing personal and Stanley wished him well, he did, but when the switch was thrown there was nothing he could do about it), Stanley driving on himself in the Mercedes roadster that was exactly like the one John Jacob Astor had entered in the New York-to-Buffalo endurance run two years earlier, ramming along down roads that were no better than cartpaths in a tornado of dust, flying chickens and furiously yapping dogs. He didn’t stop at all till he got to Danvers, the throttle open wide all the way, the engine screaming, and he breathless with the adrenaline rush of beating along at speeds in excess of twenty miles an hour.

At Danvers he got down, shaking so hard he was afraid his legs wouldn’t hold him upright, and already there was a crowd gathering, farmers in overalls and their red-faced wives, children on whirling legs, the man who sold insurance and the bank clerk just released to his lunch hour. Stanley tried to manage a smile, and he knew he must have been a sight, six foot four and looking like a man from Mars in his goggles and leather cap and the sweat-drenched greatcoat all furred with dust, feathers and moribund insects, but his facial muscles didn’t seem to want to cooperate. He lifted a feeble hand in greeting or warning or capitulation, he didn’t know what or which, and staggered into the restaurant next to the barber shop with the sign in the window that said HAIRCUT & SHAVE Two BITS.

Inside it was cool and dark, walls paneled in pine, a scent of sweet pine sap at war with the cooking smells, boiled wienerwurst, fried onions, beef gravy, lard vaporizing in the pan. Stanley couldn’t see a thing at first, dazed from the drive and the sun and the flywheel spinning round unchecked somewhere in the middle of his chest, under his sternum, and it wasn’t his heart, it was something else, the switch thrown, the throttle on full, everything rushing, rushing. And what did he want? A sandwich, that was all. And something to drink. Soda water. A Coca-Cola. Root beer. But why was it so dark in here? It took him a moment, racing and whirling, though he was standing stock-still two feet inside the door, every face turned to him, to realize he was still wearing his goggles. And further, that his goggles were encrusted with a filthy opaque scrim of road dirt and insect parts, making night of day and sorrow of joy and creating fear where there was nothing to fear. He lifted the goggles and pushed them back up atop his head.

And saw… a waitress. Standing right there in front of him with her womanly shape and her fine and interesting closely gathered womanly features — and her eyes, her eyes with a question in them. “Will you be having luncheon today, sir?” she was saying, and everybody in the place, at the counter and seated at the dark-wood tables, was hanging on the answer.

Stanley: “Yes. Yes, I’d like that. Luncheon, yes.”

The Waitress: “Can I show you to a table?”

Stanley: “Yes. Certainly. Of course. That’s just what I need. A table.” But he didn’t move.

The Waitress: “Maybe you’d like to clean up first, in the lavatory?”

Stanley: “Excuse me?”

The Waitress (movement at the door now, the crowd drawn to the roadster beginning to disperse and filter into the restaurant for a glass of water and some soda crackers and a good long look at this dusty apparition in the long trailing coat): “I said, maybe you’d like to clean up? The lavatory’s in back there, down the hall, first door to your left.”

And then Stanley was moving again, the flywheel spinning, down the hall, through the door and into the lavatory, sink and toilet and last year’s calendar on the wall. He stripped off the leather cap and goggles all in one motion, shrugged off the coat and found a hook for it on the back of the door. He stood over the toilet and relieved himself, throwing back his head to look up into the pigeon-haunted opacity of the skylight, chicken wire set in the glass for reinforcement. The noise of his urine against the porcelain was the most mundane sound in the world, a trickle and splash that took him back to the camp in the Adirondacks, he and Harold making water against the rocks like Iroquois raiders and Mama never knowing a thing about it. He saw the granite promontories, slabs of gray weathered rock layered like the skin of an onion, the fir trees stark against the iron water, and his fish, the gleaming iridescent thing he’d pulled from the secret depths and the guide saying it was the biggest lake trout he’d ever seen and Stanley should be proud — and he was proud.

He was winding down. The switch clicked off. It was all right, just nerves, that was all. He ran the water in the sink and that was good too, the sound of it, the smell of that lavatory, and then he looked into the mirror and there was nothing there. No one. No person. No Stanley Robert McCormick, son of Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper. Just the wall behind him and the stall with the toilet. It was a trick, that was it, a trick mirror, the back wall painted there to scale and sealed behind a pane of translucent glass. He lifted his hand to the glass and touched it, and that was strange and frightening, because he could feel it, hard and real, but he couldn’t see his hand reflected there.

The switch. It was off still, shut firmly and decisively off somewhere back there in the Adirondacks and the belly of that fish, that trout, but there was a finger on it now and the finger was itching to flick it on again, to start the cycle all over and the racing and the fear that was nameless and formless but no less terrifying for all that. He turned abruptly from the mirror and forced his head down till he could take in one thing at a time and build the world back to normalcy like a child with a set of wooden blocks, one block atop the other till a castle fortress rose from the center of the rug in the ballroom, towers, battlements and all. His shoes, he was staring at his shoes. They were not black. They were brown, but the brown was dust, road dust, and the road dust was there because he’d been motoring across country — and he’d been motoring for his nerves, to settle them, to relax and massage them like overused muscles. What had Dr. Favill advised? A break from the Harvester Company, a vacation. “Why not something bracing? ” he’d asked in all his rhetorical fervor. “A walking tour of the Hebrides? The Swiss Alps?” All right. And there were the cuffs of his trousers, sure, and the skirts of his jacket, his shirt front, and this, this was his tie, dangling loose.

He was ready. Ready for anything. And he swung back precipitately on the mirror, steeled and ready, and it was the biggest mistake he’d ever made, the switch thrown right back on again and no stopping it now: he was there, he was there in the mirror, all right, his hands and his class ring and his suit and the shoulders it concealed, but instead of his head, Stanley Robert McCormick son of Cyrus Hall McCormick inventor of the mechanical reaper’s head, there was the head of a dog. His eyes were the dog’s eyes and the dog was him. That shrank him. That sent him down. A dog? Why a dog? He’d always liked dogs — he thought of Digger the beagle while looking at the dog in the mirror — but this was an ugly dog, a rutting stinking lusting un-Christian unredeemed whoremongering woman-ruining boxer dog, with a staved-in face and a tongue that hung down like a limp red phallus all smeared with the jism that was its drool….

He was out again in the hallway, the lavatory door sighing closed behind him, a murmur of voices and the sounds and smells of cooking out there before him, and his feet carried him there, wanting something — a sandwich and a root beer — but did they serve dogs? There, out of the hallway now and standing rigid by the coatrack and every shining face and every furtive eye turned to him, and…

The Waitress (again): “Are you ready for your table now, sir? Sir?”

Stanley: “I’m… I don’t think I’m… I can’t… I–I don’t think I’m hungry anymore—”

The Waitress (blanching, pinching, shrinking): “That’s fine, absolutely. It happens to me all the time, one minute I’m wanting a slice of pie just as if I could die for it — lemon meringue’s my favorite — and the next minute I feel like I just got done eating a cow and I couldn’t hold another bite…. Well. You take care now.”

The switch was on and it got him back through the door and into the street and past the crowd of gapers and auto fanciers and barefoot kids out of school for the summer, and then he was on the road again, driving fast, hell-bent for leather, boxer dogs, winged things and womanly waitresses all left panting in his wake.

What helped him that day, as paradoxical as it may seem, was a flat tire. Flats were as common as rain in those days, when roads were unpaved, tires scarce and garages, mechanics and gasoline stations nonexistent, and every motorist routinely carried a jack and tire iron, an air pump, tire patches and spare inner tubes, in addition to as much surplus fuel and oil as he could find room for. So too Stanley. Usually he would get out and stretch his legs while the chauffeur repaired the tire and remounted the wheel, but on this occasion the chauffeur was back in Medford and the road, as far as he could see in either direction, was empty. And clearly, the car just wasn’t going to go much farther with a punctured tire and blown inner tube.

Stanley climbed down from the car. It was the last day of August, lazy, hot and still, not a breath of breeze, solid white clouds bunched like fists along the horizon. He could smell the grass, acres of it, an infinity of grass, grass and weeds and rank shoddy stands of sumac against a complex of trees so thick and variegated he might have been in the Amazon instead of Massachusetts. Tiger moths floated up out of the roadside weeds, grasshoppers impaled themselves on spears of light, cows looked on stupidly from the fields. Without thinking twice he sloughed off his coat and jacket, peeled back his goggles, and bent to the cool substantial handle of the car jack, and the switch had already shut off, so dead and null and detached from the place inside him where it had been wired it was as if it had never existed, as if he hadn’t raced and trembled and seen a dog staring back at him in the lavatory mirror at the restaurant where he’d tried to eat and couldn’t. All memory of it was gone, vanished, erased. He was a man at the side of a country road, stopped somewhere between a town and a village, changing a tire.

He got his hands black, and the grit of the road worked itself into the knees of his trousers. There were grease smears on his shirt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and puddled in the dust. And he burned, his face reddened till it looked as if he’d been slapped to consciousness, faded, and been slapped again. But he did it. He changed the tire, without help, thanks or advice from anybody, and as he mounted the running board and slipped back behind the wheel, he felt as if he could do anything, brave any danger, as tough and intrepid as Sitka Charley, the Malemute Kid, Jack London himself.

The mood carried him to Beverly, got him down out of the car to ask about local accommodations and purchase fuel at the general store, and it swept him right across that vibrant glowing greensward of a croquet lawn and into the field of Katherine Dexter’s keen sciential vision. He bathed, changed, combed his hair and trimmed his mustache in the mirror, and there he was, reproduced just like anybody else, and he even went so far as to wink at his own image in the glass. And then he went down to dinner, and he’d never been so hungry in his life.

The dining room was lively, full of vacationers bending to their soup and chops amid a subdued clatter of silverware and a crepitating hum of conversation that was soothing and reassuring at the same time, and after standing in the vestibule a moment, Stanley allowed the maître d’ to show him to a table. When the waiter appeared, Stanley thought he might have a glass of wine for the stimulus — he was feeling exhilarated from his feat of driving and the adventure of the tire, and he wanted to prolong the sensation. He gazed out idly over the crowd of diners, the animated faces, the busy elbows, the pleasure everyone seemed to be taking in the smallest things, and he didn’t notice Katherine, not at first, and he was thinking how pleasant it was to be sitting in that dining room way up north of Boston, roving free and with no one to account to, like a knight errant, if knights had automobiles. Then the wine arrived, chilled, in a bucket of ice, and the waiter presented him with the menu.

He began with the ox joints consommé, followed by cucumber spears, olives and the boiled halibut with egg sauce and Parisienne potatoes. He chose the boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce for his meat course, with apple fritters, boiled onions, new green peas and the tomato salad au mayonnaise. For dessert, he began with the bread pudding in cognac sauce, then sampled the Roquefort and Edam cheeses with fruit and biscuit, and he was lingering over his café noir when he happened to glance up and catch the eye of a young woman seated all the way across the room from him in the midst of a gay-looking young group.

Or he didn’t catch her eye, not exactly — she seemed to have caught his. She was staring at him, and she never flinched or turned away when he looked up and saw that she was staring. Normally he wouldn’t have made a thing of it — if anything, he would have shied away and pretended to study the configuration of his cuticles for the next half hour — but he’d never felt so good and the wine was sparkling in his veins and invading his eyes and inhabiting his smile, and there was something about her that was maddeningly familiar, almost as if he knew her…. And after all he’d been through that day, well, he couldn’t help himself. When one of the men in her party got up from the table and crossed the room to the lavatory, Stanley rose inconspicuously and made his way to the lavatory too. Avoiding the mirrors, he watched as the man emerged from one of the stalls and washed up at the sink, and then he cleared his throat, introduced himself and asked if he might not have an introduction to the young lady in blue?

The man was Morris Johnston. He was of average height and build, he dressed in an average way, and his hair and eye color were resolutely average as well — that is, he was neither stout nor thin, not showy but no stick-in-the-mud either, and his coloring was mouse brown. “Oh, you mean Katherine?” he said, not at all taken aback.

“Yes,” Stanley managed, tugging at his collar, which suddenly felt like a garrote round his throat, “Katherine,” and he was trying out the name. “I think I know her. What’s her family name?”

Morris flashed a smile. “Dexter,” he said. “Katherine Dexter. But you’re not from Boston, are you?”

It all came back to him then, from the look of Monsieur LaBonte’s tortured mustaches to the smell of the wax on the polished floorboards of his studio and the feel of that twelve-year-old girl in his arms, all wing and bone and tentative shuffling feet, the girl who was Katherine Dexter, now grown and mature and sitting in the next room, dressed in blue. “No,” he said, remembering the moistness of her palms in that overheated room, the proximity of their bodies, the quality of her laugh on a certain winter day when the temperature plummeted and the snow dropped softly from the sky like the plucked feathers of some rare celestial creature, “I used to know her in Chicago.”

He was shy, Stanley, furtive still, the boy who burrowed, but there was something about Katherine that made him want to open up, turn himself inside out like a glove or a sock, to hide nothing, to spill it all, fears, dreams, hopes, predilections, theories, fixations. They reminisced about Chicago, and when they’d gone round for the second time and remembered everything twice and exhausted the roster of mutual acquaintances and experiences, he saw the light fading in her eyes — she was tired? bored? sated with Monsieur LaBonte and Prairie Avenue and Bumpy Swift? — and he felt a terrible tension rising in him. He had to hold her there, he had to, even if it meant reaching out to touch her wrist where it lay so casually, so nakedly perfect on the table before him, touch it and seize it and pull her to him, though he knew he could never do that, even if he’d sat beside her every night for a thousand years. But if she left him, if she got up from the table, if she danced with Morris Johnston or yawned and put a hand to her mouth and excused herself to turn in for the night or even to use the ladies’ room, he would die. His mouth was full of ashes, his heart was pounding, and even as she leaned toward this other one, this Butler Ames, a whisper on her lips, he felt the voice tighten in his throat and heard himself blurting, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism andSocialism?”

It was the key, the first principle, the beginning. And so much was engendered there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, because the key fit and the key turned, and from that moment on he wooed her with the sweetest phrases from the driest texts, with reform, the uplifting of the poor, the redistribution of wealth and the seizing of the means of production for the good and glory of the common man.

In the morning, at first light, he was outside her door, rapping. He needed to talk to her, but he didn’t want to disturb her, didn’t want to spoil her sleep or upset her schedule — they’d been up past one, after all — and so he rapped gently. Very gently. So gently he could barely detect the sound himself. There was no response and he knew he should leave it at that, but he needed to talk to her — he’d been up all night with the need of it — and he rapped harder. And when that got no reaction he began to thump the door with the heel of his hand, louder and progressively louder, until finally he forgot himself altogether and he was boxing with that mute stubborn unreasoning slab of wood, left/right, left/right, and he set up such a racket that the janitor came running with his mop and an old woman in a cap poked her head out of the next door up the hall and chastised him with a look that wilted him on the spot. “Shhhhh!” she hissed. “Get away from there now. Are you crazy?”

He ducked away, shamefaced, and let his shoulders sag beneath the weight of his criminality, but ten minutes later he was back at Katherine’s door again, rapping. This time, the instant his knuckles made contact with the wood, her muffled voice rose wearily from some buried niche of her room: “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Stanley. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Stanley. From last night?”

A pause. “Oh, Stanley.” Another pause. “Yes. All right. Just let me get dressed.”

“That’s fine,” he said, raising his voice so she could hear him through all that rigid cellulose and the vacant space of her sitting room, “because I wanted to tell you what I’ve done with my ranch in New Mexico — that’s where I’ve spent the better part of the past two years, you know, roughing it like a cowboy in all that fine air and dramatic scenery, you should see it, you really should — but what I wanted to tell you is that I’ve organized the ranch as a cooperative concern where we all share equally in the profits, from the meanest hand to the one-legged Mexican cook, every one of us equal under the western sun, and you might not know that I’m the one who instituted the profit-sharing scheme at the Harvester Company, against my brothers’ objections, and I set aside the money for the McCormick Factory Workers’ Club too—”

And then the door opened and there she was, Katherine, the sweetest compression of a smile, her eyes searching his, and she was dressed in her tennis whites, a racquet dangling casually from her hand. “Do you play?” she asked.

“I — well — yes — I — well, in college, at Princeton, that is—”

“Singles?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t mind playing before breakfast, now? Because if you do, don’t be afraid to tell me.” She was smiling up at him as if he’d just bought her all of Asia and laid the deed at her feet. “You’ll play then?”

“Sure.”

But this was a conundrum, a real conundrum. It weighed on him as he hurried back to his room to change into his tennis things while she waited just outside the door, and he was still worrying it as he won service on a spin of the racquet and took his position behind the baseline. He’d never played tennis with a woman before and he didn’t know the etiquette involved: he didn’t want to overpower her — that wouldn’t be gentlemanly, not at all — and yet he didn’t want her to think he was playing down to her either. And so he tried to moderate his serve accordingly, putting the first one right in the center of the box at what must have been half the usual velocity, and with a very nice straightforward bounce to it. She surprised him by driving it directly back at him, and the surprise showed: his return was a bit tardy and he slapped the ball impotently into the net. She was glowing, beautiful, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon beneath the straw boater that was cinched under her chin with a strip of white muslin. “Love-fifteen,” she chirped.

“I’m sorry,” he called, “I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty, I’ve been so busy lately with the Harvester business and the ranch and a thousand and one other things I just haven’t had time to, to—”

The ball was in the air, rising above the arc of his racquet as if it had a life of its own, and he served again, this time with a bit more muscle, and again she drove it right back, a wicked slashing shot into the far corner he just managed to return with a flailing backhand, and he felt a momentary thrill of satisfaction over that effort until she caught the ball at the net and put it away with a stroke as efficient as it was elegant. He admired that, he really did, a woman so athletic and fit, so nimble — she was like an Olympian, like Diana the huntress with her bow, only in this case the bow was a tennis racquet, and as he bent to retrieve the ball he congratulated himself on his evenhandedness and restraint, though of course he would have to assert himself before long, etiquette or no. “Love-thirty,” she called.

By the fourth game he was down three games to one and sweating so copiously you would have thought he’d been in for a swim with his clothes on. Katherine, on the other hand, was barely ruffled, as neat and composed as she’d been when she emerged from her room an hour ago. She was a master, it seemed, at putting the ball just out of his reach and whipping him from one end of the court to the other with a whole grab bag of trick shots, lobs, aggressive net play and stinging ground strokes. He began to strain, hammering his serves as if the object of the game was to put the ball right through the turf and bury it three feet deep in the ground, and of course, the harder he tried the wilder his shots became. He double-faulted, then double-faulted again. By the end of the first set, which she won, six games to one, he was panting just like a — well, a dog.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She was standing at the net, preparing to switch sides. There wasn’t a mark on her, not so much as a single bead of sweat, though it was a muggy morning, the temperature eighty already — at least.

“Oh, no, no — I — its just — well, I do admire the way you play. You’re really quite good.”

She gave him a mysterious smile, but she didn’t say a word.

Later, over breakfast on the patio, he sank into his chair and swatted gnats while she told him all about her career at the Institute, the circulatory systems of snakes and toads and her hopes for the emancipation of women. And how did he feel about it? Did he believe women should have the vote?

Well of course he did — he was right-thinking and progressive, wasn’t he? And he told her so, but he didn’t really elaborate, because he was exhausted, for one thing — all that motor travel, his frayed nerves, up all night, three sets of tennis — and because he was fixated at that moment on the way Katherine’s lips parted and closed and parted again to reveal her even white teeth and the animated pink tip of her tongue as she spoke, her eyes flashing, her knuckles drilling the table in declamatory fervor. He realized then, in that gnat-haunted moment with the sugary scent of new-mown grass on the air and his melon getting warm and his eggs cold, that he wanted to kiss those lips, touch that tongue with his own, and more, much more: he wanted her, all of‘her, right down to and including the problematic whiteness at the center of her. Katherine, he wanted Katherine. He wanted to marry her, that’s what he wanted, and the knowledge of it came to him in a moment of epiphany that made him shudder with the intensity of his longing and the nakedness of his need.

“Are you catching a chill?” she asked, scrutinizing him with her ice-blue gaze.

“No,” he said.

“And you’re not eating — don’t tell me you’re not hungry after all that exercise?”

This was the time to tell her how he felt, this was the time for sweet talk, for lovers’ banter, the time to say, How can mere food hope to sustain me when I have the vision of you to feast on? but he didn’t tell her that, he couldn‘t, and he fiddled with his fork a minute before lifting his eyes to hers. “When the masses have enough on their plates,” he said, “when the tenements have been torn down and good decent housing erected in their stead and on every table a leg of lamb and mint jelly, then I’ll eat.”

Two days later, Katherine was gone. Her vacation was over, the new semester beginning, her thesis beckoning. Before she left, she gave him a blue bow tie and a box of maple sugar candy molded in the shapes of squirrels, rabbits and Scotch terriers, and he gave her a copy of the Debs pamphlet and a first edition of Frank Norris’s The Pit. He’d begged her to stay, prostrating himself at her feet, all wrought-up with speeches about conditions in the textile mills, settlement houses and the immigrant poor, but he never mentioned love — it wasn’t in his power — and she had to go, he understood that. Still, he was devastated, and no sooner had she boarded the train than he was off for Boston in the Mercedes. He packed hurriedly, with none of the indecision that had plagued him in recent years, and he brought Morris Johnston along with him, both as a sympathetic ear he could fill with praises of Katherine and as a buffer against any subversive lavatory mirrors that might spring up like windmills in his path.

On arriving, he took rooms at a hotel near Katherine’s mother’s place on Commonwealth Avenue and began his siege. He sent flowers daily, whole greenhouses full, and he called each evening on the stroke of seven, his palms sweating, heart thumping, eyes crawling in his head. The maid greeted him with a sentimental smile, and Mrs. Dexter, Katherine’s mother, beamed and prattled and plied him with an endless array of sweetmeats, sandwiches, fruits, nuts and beverages, while he sat awkwardly in the parlor and thought of Katherine dressing in the empyreal realms above him. And did Mr. McCormick appreciate how clever her daughter was? Mrs. Dexter wanted to know. She’d tried to discourage her with this scientific business from the beginning, heaven knew, because science just wasn’t a lady’s provenance, or hadn’t been, until Katherine came along to tackle it with her keen intellect and persevering nature, but now she had to admit that her daughter couldn’t have made her prouder, and would he like another chocolate?

And Katherine. She was receptive, very sweet and encouraging, a paragon, especially during his first few visits, and that made him soar with a kind of elation he’d never known, but by the end of the week she’d begun to beg off on account of her studies and he found himself spending more and more time with Mrs. Dexter, a teacup balanced on one knee and a plate of sandwiches on the other. She had to study, of course she did — she was a brainy intellectual young woman and she’d been working eight years for this — but still it threw him into a panic. What if she were using her studies as an excuse, a way to get rid of him early so she could slip out at nine or ten and flit around with Butler Ames, whom he’d already encountered twice on her very doorstep? He was beside himself. He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. And he didn’t dare look in the mirror.

But on Friday she consented to go to dinner and the theater with him, and he took her and her mother to dine at his hotel and then to a very amusing production of The Importance of Being Earnest. At least Stanley found it amusing, and Katherine seemed to enjoy herself too, laughing in all the right places, but he worried that it might be too frivolous for her, not enough concerned with the pressing issues of the day, and when they got back to her place he started in on Debs again, by way of compensation. “Do you know what Debs says?” he began as Mrs. Dexter made a discreet exit and the maid set down a plate of poppy seed cakes and vanished.

Katherine sat across from him, in an armchair. Outside, it was raining, the streets shining with it, the sound of the horses’ hoofs magnified in the steadily leaking night air. You could hear them — clop, clop, clop — and that was all, but for the hiss of the rain and the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. “No,” she sighed, tucking her feet up under her skirts and settling into the chair. “I don’t really know.”

“ ‘The few who own the machines do not use them,’ ” Stanley quoted, leaning forward with a sage look. “ ‘The many who use them do not own them. ’ You see? Simple, direct, brilliant. And of course the result is the sort of inequity you and I see and abhor every day but that the rest of the world seems to turn its back on. He wants national laws to protect workers against accidents on the job, unemployment and old age insurance programs, public works for the unemployed — and until workers take over the means of production, a decrease in the work hours as production increases—”

She didn’t seem to be listening. She was stirring a cup of tea with a demitasse spoon, her eyes unfocused and vague.

“He says,” Stanley went on, “he says—”

“Stanley?”

“I — um — yes?”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but while I admire your commitment to the progressive causes, I really do, don’t you ever stop to wonder why you seem, well, so obsessed with them?”

“Me? Obsessed?”

She laughed then, and he didn’t know whether to laugh with her or to bristle because she might have meant it as a barb, the tiniest dart that would tear his flesh open, a wound that would grow wider and wider till there was room enough for all the Butler Ameses of the world to march right on through him. His face was blank. He reached for a poppy seed cake and got it halfway to his mouth before he thought better of it and set it back carefully on the plate.

“Could it be a defensive reaction, do you think? I mean, because you and I have so much in contrast to the poor?”

“Well — I — yes. Yes, of course. My father, you see, he’s the one. He wouldn’t allow a union in his shop, the Haymarket Riots, all that, and it’s not right, it’s not. My father—” he said, and he found he couldn’t quite organize his thoughts beyond that, because his head was suddenly filled with the image of that cranky imperious old man with his jabbing rapier of a beard, filling the halls of the house with his roars and his bile and his unloving fierce stifling presence. “My father—” he repeated.

Katherine’s voice was very soft, so soft he had to. strain to hear it over the noise of the rain, the plodding horses, the ticking of the clock that rose suddenly in volume till it was like a whole symphony of clocks all beating time in unison, tearing away at the hours, the minutes, the seconds he had left before she got up and dismissed him. “I know it must be hard,” she said, “but you have to put it behind you. And as admirable as progressive reform may be, there are other things in life — music, painting, all the arts — and when a man and woman are alone together, when they’re as intimate as you and I are now, don’t you think there are more appropriate things to talk about?”

“Well, yes,” he said, but he didn’t have a clue.

Another sigh. “Oh, Stanley, I don’t know about you. You’re very sweet, but really, you do have a lot to learn about the art of wooing.” And then she stood and the maid was there and the evening was over.

He was back the next day, undeterred, ready to hire Cyrano to rehearse his speeches for him, anything, but he couldn’t seem to get socialism out of his head. In the afternoon, he took Katherine and Mrs. Dexter to the art museum, and he was able to talk knowledgeably about Titian, Tintoretto and the Dutch masters and fill them in on his experiences as a pupil of Monsieur Julien in Paris, but inevitably he found the conversation veering back toward social welfare and reform, because what was art after all but a plaything of the rich? Katherine couldn’t dine with him that evening — she was busy preparing for the following day’s classes — and he brooded over a long tasteless repast, which he interrupted three times to wire his mother on the subject of Katherine and her perfection, her intellect, her beauty, and his mother wired back almost immediately: WORRIED SICK STOP HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WEEK STOP VERY INCONSIDERATE STOP KATHERINE WHO? STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

Then — and he couldn’t help himself; he felt he’d explode like an overbaked potato if he had to look at those pallid hotel-room walls another second — he took a stroll past Katherine’s house. A stroll, that was all. A constitutional. For his health. He had no thought of snooping, no thought of encountering Butler Ames or his ilk on the doorstep or catching Katherine slipping into a coach in her dinner clothes, nothing of the kind. It was raining again. He’d forgotten his umbrella and his silk hat was like a lead weight bearing down on the crown of his head and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through by the time he’d made his eighth circuit of Katherine’s block. And when he became conscious of that, the wetness beginning to seep through now, he just happened, by the purest coincidence, to be passing by the front entrance of Mrs. Dexter’s neat and prim narrow-shouldered stone house at 393 Commonwealth Avenue.

Katherine had made it very clear that she couldn’t see him, and he respected that, he did, but he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from mounting the steps and pressing the buzzer anyway. All sorts of things went through his head in the interval between pressing the buzzer and the maid’s appearance — visions of Butler Ames, with his blowfish eyes and prissy little hands, making love to Katherine over a box of chocolates, Katherine husbanded with nineteen faceless suitors, Katherine out dancing at that very moment and not lucubrating over a stack of scientific texts shot through with diagrams of the internal anatomy of lizards, turtles and snakes — but there was the maid with her mawkish smile, and the entrance hall, and Mrs. Dexter rushing to greet him as if she hadn’t seen him in six months rather than six hours.

His reward for braving the elements was a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Dexter that stretched past eleven o‘clock (and wasn’t it just five after eight when he arrived?), a gallon and a half of scalding tea and the ever-present platter of poppy seed cakes and sandwiches, which were soggy now and looking a bit frayed around the edges. Mrs. Dexter said things like, “You know, I’m afraid Katherine’s had so many gentlemen calling on her lately that she’s going to have to hold a lottery if she ever wants to get married”; and, “That Butler Ames is a darling, a perfect darling, don’t you think so? ”; and, “Did I ever tell you the time Katherine saw her first Angora goat — she was three at the time, or was it four?” Ever polite, Stanley sat there stiff as a post and made the occasional supportive noise in the back of his throat, but otherwise he didn’t have much to say — about progressivism, Butler Ames or anything else.

Finally, at half-past eleven, Katherine crept into the room in a pair of carpet slippers and her mother jumped up as if she’d been bitten and promptly disappeared. “Stanley,” Katherine said, extending her hand, which he rose to take in his, and then she clucked at him as if he were a naughty child or a puppy that’s just peed on the carpet. “Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t see you tonight?” she scolded, wagging a finger at him, and he would have felt miserable, abject, run through with a rusty sword of rejection and humiliation, but for the fact that she was smiling.

Now. Now’s the time, he told himself. “I — well — I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought—”

They were still standing, hovering awkwardly over the tea table and the platter of soggy sandwiches. She arched her eyebrows. “Just happened?”

He laughed — a braying nervous peal of a laugh — and she joined him, her whole face lit up, and then somehow they were both seated on the sofa, side by side. “All right,” he said, “I admit it, I just couldn‘t — well — you know what I mean, I couldn’t stay away — from you, that is.”

And what did she say? “Oh, Stanley”—or something like that. But she was smiling still, showing her teeth and her gums, and there was no mistaking the light in her eyes: she was glad he’d come. That made him bold, reckless, made him stew in the moment till he was a pot boiling over and there was no need for Debs now, his eyes on hers, hands clenching and unclenching in his lap as if they were feeling for a grip on a slick precipice, the taste of stale tea coming up in his throat. “Listen, Katherine,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to, to say something to you, I mean, I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I–I—”

That smile. She leaned forward to toy with one of the sandwiches, then lifted it to her lips and took a bite, carving a neat semicircle out of the center of it. “Yes?”

“Well, let me, let me put it this way. What if there was a man, a young man, of good family and with good intentions, but not worthy of consideration in the eyes of a woman, well, a hypothetical woman sort of, well, like yourself… and he really, but he hadn’t done anything in his life, he was nothing, a worthless shell of a hypothetical man not fit to kiss the hem of this hypothetical woman’s skirt, but he, he—”

She’d begun to see what he was driving at, or fumbling toward, and she tried to compose her face, but it wasn’t working — she looked like nothing so much as a woman hurtling toward a crash in a runaway carriage, the smile gone, the sandwich arrested in mid-air, something like shock and fright in her eyes, but Stanley was committed, he was driving forward and there was no stopping him. “Stanley,” she said, her voice lost somewhere deep in her throat, “Stanley, it’s late—”

He wouldn’t listen, didn’t hear her. “You see, this man, this hypothetical man, is so far beneath her he would never presume to even entertain the faintest hope in the world that she would, she might, well… marry him, I suppose, but if he asked her, this hypothetical but utterly worthless man who hasn’t accomplished a thing in his whole life, would she — would you — I mean, knowing the circumstances—”

There was a furrow between her eyebrows, and why had he never noticed that before? She didn’t look apprehensive now so much as puzzled — or pained. “Stanley, are you asking me what I think you are?”

He took a deep breath. His heart was thumping like a drum. “I just, well, I wanted your opinion, because I value it, 1 really do—”

“Are you asking me—?”

He couldn’t look her in the eye. All the drums of the Mohawks were pounding in his ears. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump. “Yes.”

“But we’ve just met — you don’t know anything about me. You’re joking, aren’t you? Tell me this is a joke, Stanley, tell me—”

The rain, the clock, the hoofs, the drums. He looked up, as sorrowful as any whipped dog. “No,” he said, “it’s no joke.”

4. ONE SLIT’S ENOUGH

As it turned out, Dr. Brush wasn’t a man to rock the boat, even if it was in his power to do so, which it wasn’t. O‘Kane liked him well enough — he was hearty, quick with a laugh, a big physical man who relished his food and drink and didn’t go around acting as if he was better than everybody else in the world who didn’t happen to be a millionaire or a psychiatrist — but he didn’t respect him in the way he’d respected Dr. Hamilton. For all his dallying with his monkeys and all his airs and the stiff formality of him, at least Hamilton was a first-rate psychiatrist, one of the best men in the country, and Mr. McCormick had improved under his care, even if it was by fits and starts. Not that Brush didn’t have top-notch credentials, in addition to being handpicked by Dr. Meyer, but he was just too, well, clownish to make anything of himself in the long run, and that boded ill for Mr. McCormick. Hamilton had gotten what he wanted out of Riven Rock and then made himself scarce; Brush seemed content to bob like a great quivering buoy on the ebbing tide of that particular psychological backwater.

Oh, he started out energetically enough, eager to make a good impression like any other man in a new position, especially one who knows he’s going to be held accountable to the Ice Queen on the one hand and to Dr. Meyer, the world’s most humorless man, on the other. Basically, he adhered to Dr. Hamilton’s regimen, which accorded strict hours for Mr. McCormick’s activities, from the time he woke to the length of his shower bath and the hour he retired in the evening, but, being the new man in charge, he couldn’t help tinkering with one or two small things here and there. In the beginning, that is. Only in the beginning.

The first thing he did, and to O‘Kane’s mind this was a mistake, most definitely a mistake, was to attempt to apply the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. In those days — and this was in the summer and fall of 1916—the talking cure was considered little more than a novelty, a sort of glorified parlor game for the rich and idle, like dream analysis or hypnosis, and few psychiatrists had taken the lead of Dr. Freud in applying it to their severely disturbed patients. Like most people, O’Kane was deeply skeptical — how could you talk a raving lunatic out of drinking his own urine or stabbing his invalid grandmother a hundred times with a cocktail fork? — and Dr. Hamilton, though he subscribed to Freud’s theories and was ready to lecture O‘Kane and the Thompsons at the drop of a hat on such absurdities as infantile sexuality and mother lust, never applied the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. Better he felt, to keep the patient to a strict regimen, with a good healthy diet and sufficient exercise and intellectual stimulation, and let nature take its course. But Brush was new to the job, and he wanted to assert himself.

Both O‘Kane and Martin were present for the first session. It was a sunny morning, glorious really, the early fog dissipated, the summer at its height, and Mr. McCormick was taking the air on the sunporch after breakfast. The porch — or patio, actually — adjoined the upper parlor and was walled around to a height of eight feet, with barred windows at eye level and wicker furniture bolted to the concrete beneath the Italian tiles and arranged in a little cluster in the middle of the floor. The door to the sun porch was always kept locked when not in use and the furniture had been situated with an eye to preventing Mr. McCormick’s getting close enough to one of the walls to be able to boost himself over. It was a two-story drop to the shrubbery below, and even for a man of Mr. McCormick’s agility, that could well prove fatal.

Mr. McCormick had eaten well that morning — two eggs with several strips of bacon, an English muffin and a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and cream — and he seemed to be in an especially good mood, anticipating a new moving picture Roscoe had brought up from Hollywood the previous evening. It was a Lillian Gish picture, and Mr. McCormick, who wasn’t allowed to see women in the flesh, really savored the opportunity to see them come to life on the flat shining screen in the theater house. More than once he’d had to be restrained from exposing his sex organ at the sight of Pearl White hanging from a cliff or Mary Pickford lifting her skirt to step down from the running board of an automobile, but the doctors felt nonetheless that the mental stimulation provided by the movies far outweighed any small unpleasantness that might arise from their depiction of females — in distress or otherwise. O‘Kane wasn’t so sure. He was the one who had to get up in the middle of the film with the light flickering and Mr. McCormick breathing spasmodically and force Mr. McCormick’s member back into his pants, and that had to be humiliating for Mr. McCormick — and it certainly was no joy for O’Kane either. No, seeing women like that, all made-up and batting their eyes at the camera and showing off their cleavage and the rest of it, must have just frustrated the poor man all the more. Anybody would go crazy in his situation, and half the time O‘Kane wondered if they shouldn’t just go out and hire a prostitute once a month and let Mr. McCormick — properly restrained, of course — release his natural urges like any other man, but then that wasn’t being psychological, was it?

At any rate, Dr. Brush showed up that morning just after O‘Kane and Mart had taken Mr. McCormick out onto the sunporch, and he was determined to give the talking cure a try. “Mr. McCormick,” he cried, lumbering through the door and booming a greeting in his lusty big hail-fellow voice, “and how are you this fine morning?”

Mr. McCormick was seated in one of the wicker chairs, his feet up on the wicker settee, hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into the cloudless sky. He was dressed, as usual, as if he were on his way to his office at the Reaper Works, in a gray summer suit, vest, formal collar and tie. He didn’t respond to the greeting, nor acknowledge the doctor’s presence in any way.

Undeterred, Dr. Brush strode hugely across the tiles and stationed himself just behind Mr. McCormick, leaning forward to maneuver his great sweating dirigible of a face into Mr. McCormick’s line of sight. “And so,” Dr. Brush boomed, “aren’t you the lucky one to have such fine weather here all the year round? It must be especially gratifying in the winter, for the main and simple reason of defeating the ice and snow, but can you imagine how they’re all sweltering in that humidity back East… and here, it’s as pleasant as can be. What do you think it is, Mr. McCormick — seventy? Seventy-two, maybe? Huh?”

No response.

“Yes, sir,” the doctor concluded with a stagey sigh, “you’re a lucky man.”

Mr. McCormick spoke then for the first time since he’d been led out onto the porch. He still had his head thrust back and he was viewing Dr. Brush upside down, which must have been a bit peculiar, though it didn’t seem to faze him much. “Lucky?” he said, and his voice was barely a croak. “I‘m-I’m no luckier than a dog.”

“A dog?” And now the doctor was in a state of high excitement, dodging round the patio with little feints of his too-small feet and finally squeezing himself into the chair opposite Mr. McCormick. “And why do you say that, sir? A dog? Really. How extraordinary.”

Mart, who was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door, cracked his knuckles audibly. O‘Kane had been pacing back and forth in the shade at the far end of the patio, and he stopped now and found himself a good spot at the intersection of two walls and leaned back to listen. Mr. McCormick, still staring up into the sky, said nothing.

“A dog?” Brush repeated. “Did I hear you correctly, Mr. McCormick? You did say ‘a dog,’ didn’t you?”

Still nothing.

“Well, if you did, and I’m quite sure there’s nothing wrong with my hearing — or maybe there is, ha! and I’d better have it tested — well, and if you did say ‘a dog’ I’d be very interested to hear just why you should feel that way, for the main and simple reason that it’s such an extraordinary position to take, and I’m sure both Mr. Thompson and Mr. O’Kane would like to hear your reasoning too. Wouldn’t you, fellows?”

Mart grunted, and it was hard to say whether it was an affirmative or negative grunt.

O‘Kane ducked his head. “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

“Do you hear that, Mr. McCormick? All your friends would like to know just how you feel on the subject. Yes? Mr. McCormick?”

And yet still nothing. O‘Kane wondered if Mr. McCormick had even heard the question, or if he’d already shut his mind down, as impervious as a rodent buried deep in its burrow. At least he wasn’t violent. Or not yet, anyway.

The doctor pulled a cigar from his inside pocket and took a moment in lighting it. He drew on it, expelled a plume of smoke and gave the patient a canny look, which was unfortunately lost on Mr. McCormick, who continued to gaze into the sky as if he were Percival Lowell looking for signs of life on Mars. “Perhaps you feel caged-in here, is that it, Mr. McCormick?” the doctor began. “Is that what you’re saying — that you’d like more liberty? Because we can arrange that — more drives, more walks outside the estate, if that’s what you want. Is that it? Is that what you mean?”

After a silence that must have lasted five or six minutes, Dr. Brush changed his tack. “Tell me about your father, Mr. McCormick,” he said, leaning forward now and addressing Mr. McCormick’s long pale throat and the underside of his chin. “He was a great man, I’m told…. Did you love him very much?”

A gull coasted overhead. It was very still. Somewhere down below, off in the direction of the cottages, someone was singing in Italian, a monotonous drone that swung back and forth on itself like a pendulum.

“Did you… did you ever feel that you disliked him? Or harbored any resentment toward him? Perhaps he disciplined you as a boy or even spanked you — did that ever occur?”

O‘Kane became conscious of the movement of the sun, the sharp angle of the shadow beside him creeping inexorably nearer. He tried to make out the words to the song, though he couldn’t understand them anyway, and he tried not to think of Giovannella. Mr. McCormick, who had a genius for rigidity — he would have made the ideal sculptor’s model — never moved a hair. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

“Well,” the doctor said after a bit, and he got massively to his feet, puffing at the cigar, and began to pace back and forth, counting off the tiles, “well and so.” He stalked round back of Mr. McCormick again and again forced his face into Mr. McCormick’s line of vision. “And your mother,” he said, “what is she like?”

The second thing the doctor tried was by way of effecting certain small refinements in the daily schedule, for the sake of efficiency. He started with Mr. McCormick’s shower bath. “Eddie,” he said, taking O‘Kane aside just after his shift had ended one evening, “you know, I’ve been thinking about Mr. McCormick’s day and how he goes about using his resources, for the main and simple reason that I think we could inject a bit more efficiency into the scheme of things. Shake him up, you know? It’s the same old thing, day in and day out. You’d think the man’d be bored to death by now.”

O‘Kane, who had remained head nurse despite the change of regime and had seen his salary increased by five dollars a week since Brush took over, felt it prudent to act concerned, though he saw nothing at all wrong with the schedule as it stood. It wasn’t the schedule that was holding Mr. McCormick back, and it wasn’t the lack of intellectual stimulation either — it was the lack of women. Get him laid a few times and see what happened — he couldn’t be any worse for it than he was now. He gave Brush a saintly look. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I was looking at this item here, the shower bath,” the doctor said. They were standing at the doorway to the upper parlor; Mr. McCormick had been put to bed and Nick and Pat had just begun their shift. “ ‘Seven to eight A.M.: shower bath.’ Now doesn’t that seem a bit excessive? Even in the interest of proper hygiene? Why, I spend no more than five minutes under the shower myself, and ha! you’ll have to admit there’s a good deal more of me to wash than there is of Mr. McCormick. What I’m thinking is, couldn’t we cut that time back — gradually, I mean — till he takes a normal shower bath of five or ten minutes, and then we can apply the savings in time to his improvement and cure—”

O‘Kane shrugged. “Well, sure, I suppose. But Mr. McCormick is very adamant about his shower bath, it’s one of his pet obsessions, and it may be very difficult to—”

“Ach,” the doctor waved a hand in his face, “leave that to me — obsessions are my stock in trade.”

And so, the following morning, once O‘Kane and Mart had ushered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath, Dr. Brush appeared, barefooted and mountainous in a long trailing rain slicker the size of a two-man tent. “Good morning, good morning!” he boomed, the raw shout of his voice reverberating in the small cubicle of the shower bath till it was like a hundred voices. “Don’t mind me, Mr. McCormick,” he called, his pale fleshy toes gripping the wet tiles, water already streaming from the hem of the rain slicker, “I’m just here to observe your bathing in the interest of efficiency, for the main and simple — but just think of me as one of your efficiency experts you manufacturing men are forever introducing into your operations to cut corners and increase production…. Go ahead, now, don’t let me interfere—”

Mr. McCormick was seated naked on the floor beneath one of the three showerheads, rubbing furiously at his chest with a fresh bar of Palm Olive soap. He looked alarmed at first, and even made as if to cover his privates, but then seemed to think better of it, and turning away from the doctor, he continued lathering his chest.

“Now I thought,” the doctor went on, steam rising, the water splashing against the walls and leaping up to spatter his legs, “that we might begin today by limiting our bathing to perhaps, oh, how does fifteen minutes sound to you, Mr. McCormick? You see, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a more than reasonable length of time to thoroughly cleanse ourselves, for the main and simple reason that the human body can only hold so much dirt, especially when one bathes daily, don’t you think?”

O‘Kane stood in the bathroom doorway, his usual station, where he could observe Mr. McCormick at his bath and yet not intrude too much on him, and Mart was in the parlor, preparing the table for Mr. McCormick’s breakfast. While the shower stall was quite large — there was room enough for three people at least — O’Kane couldn’t help feeling the doctor was taking an unnecessary risk. There was no telling how Mr. McCormick might construe this invasion of his privacy, efficiency or no, and if he were to get violent, there was always the possibility of a nasty fall, what with the slick tiles and steady flow of water. He didn’t like the situation, not one bit, and he gloomily envisioned himself charging into the fray and ruining yet another suit.

But Mr. McCormick surprised him. He didn’t seem particularly agitated — or not that O‘Kane could see. He merely kept the white slope of his back to the intruder and soaped himself all the more vigorously as the doctor went on jabbering away and the water fell in a cascade of steely bright pins. This went on for some time, until at a signal from Brush, O’Kane called to Mart and Mart went below to cut off the water supply.

A moment later, the shower ran dry. Mr. McCormick darted a wild glance over his shoulder at the doctor and then at O‘Kane — Here it comes, O’Kane thought, tensing himself — but Mr. McCormick did nothing more than shift his haunches on the wet tiles so that he could reach up and try the controls. He twisted the knobs several times and then, in a sort of crabwalk, moved first to his left and then to his right to try the controls of the other two spigots. He was a long time about it, and when he was finally satisfied that the water had been cut off, he found the exact spot where he’d been situated before the interruption and continued soaping himself as if nothing were the matter.

Dr. Brush, for his part, was saying things like “All right, now, Mr. McCormick, very good, and I suppose we’ll just have to move on, won’t we?” and “Now, isn’t that an improvement? Honestly now?” He stood there optimistically over the slumped form of their employer, his toes grasping the floor like fingers, the yellow slicker dripping, the short hairs at his nape curling up like duck’s feathers with the moisture. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t heeding him. In fact, Mr. McCormick was expressing his displeasure with the whole business by applying the dwindling bar of Palm Olive as if it were a cat o’ nine tails, and when it was gone, he reached for another.

“Well, then,” Dr. Brush confided to O‘Kane later that day, “it’s a contest of wills, and we’ll just see how far the patient is prepared to go before he sees the wisdom of employing himself more efficiently.”

The next morning, the doctor was back, only this time there was but one bar of soap in the dish and the shower was curtailed after ten minutes. Again, Dr. Brush made all sorts of optimistic assertions about time and energy saving and the value of discipline, but Mr. McCormick never wavered from his routine. He soaped himself for a full hour after the shower was stopped and appeared for breakfast with greenish white streaks of Palm Olive decorating his cheeks and brow, as if he were an Indian chieftain painted for war. And then the next day after that, the shower was cut to five minutes and only powdered soap was provided, but still Mr. McCormick persisted, as O‘Kane knew he would. When the water was stopped, Mr. McCormick rubbed himself all over with the powdered soap till it dissolved in a yellowish scum and hardened like varnish all over his body.

The climax came on the fourth day.

Dr. Brush ordered that no soap be provided, and he appeared as usual, jocular and energetic, reasoning with Mr. McCormick as if he were a child — or at the very least one of the aments at the Lunatic Hospital. “Now can’t you see,” he said, his voice flattened and distorted by the pounding of the water till the water was cut off by signal five minutes later, “that you’re being unreasonable, Mr. McCormick — or no, not unreasonable, but inefficient? Think if we were running the Reaper Works on this sort of schedule, eh? Now, of course, your soap will be restored to you as soon as you, well, begin to, that is, for the main and simple—”

Mr. McCormick bathed without soap and he didn’t seem to miss it, not on the surface anyway, but he sat there under the dry shower for a good hour and a half, and when he got up he reached for his towel, though he was long since dry himself. No matter. He took up that towel like a penitent’s scourge and whipped it back and forth across his body till the skin was so chafed it began to bleed and he had to be dissuaded by force. The next morning he never even bothered to turn the shower on, but simply took up the towel as if he were already wet and rubbed himself furiously in all the chafed places till they began to bleed again, and it was only after a struggle that took the combined force of O‘Kane, Mart and Dr. Brush to overcome him, that he desisted.

And so it went for a week, till Mr. McCormick was a walking scab from head to toe and Dr. Brush finally gave up his vision of efficiency. In fact, he gave up any notion of interfering with Mr. McCormick at all, either through adjusting his schedule or drawing him into therapeutic conversation, and after that, for the year or so before he was called away to military duty among the shell-shocked veterans of the Western Front, he really seemed content to just — float along.

Well, that was all right with O‘Kane: he had his own problems. As the fall of 1916 bled into the winter of 1917 and the War drew closer, his skirmishes with Rosaleen and Giovannella seemed to intensify till he was in full retreat, capable of nothing more than a feeble rearguard action. At least with Rosaleen the battles were fought through the U.S. Postal Service and at a distance of three thousand and some-odd miles. He hadn’t heard from her in two years, and then suddenly she was dunning him for money, letters raining down on him in a windswept storm of demands, complaints and threats. And what did she want? She wanted shoes for Eddie Jr., who was the “spiting immidge of his father” and going to be nine soon, and a new Sunday suit for him too, so he’d look his best for her wedding to Homer Quammen, and did he remember Homer? And by the way, she was filing papers for divorce and she felt he owed her something for that too, and he shouldn’t think for a minute that her remarrying would in any way lift his obligation to support Eddie Jr., especially since Homer was as “pore as a church moose.

He sent her the money, forty dollars in all, though he resented it because he was putting away every spare nickel against a land deal Dolores Isringhausen’s brother-in-law was letting him in on, and he never heard a word of thanks or good-bye or anything else. The letters stopped coming though, so he assumed she’d got the money, and by the time he did finally hear from her he’d forgotten all about it. It was in December, sometime around Christmas — he remembered it was the holiday season because Katherine was back in town, piling the upper parlor hip-deep in presents and wreaths and strings of popcorn and such and generally raising hell with Brush and Stribling, the estate manager — and he’d just got back from his shift with a thought to wheedling a sandwich out of Mrs. Fitzmaurice and then going out for a drink at Menhoff‘s, when he noticed a smudged white envelope laid out on the table in the entry hall for him. He recognized Rosaleen’s cramped subhuman scrawl across the face of it — Edw. O’Kane, Esq., C/O Mrs. Morris Fitzmaurice, 196 State Street, Santa Barbara, California — and tucked it in his breast pocket.

Later, sitting at a table at Menhoff‘s, he was searching his pockets for a light to offer the girl from the Five & Dime when he discovered it there. He lit the girl’s cigarette — her name was Daisy and she had a pair of breasts on her that made him want to faint away and die for the love of them — and then he excused himself to go to the men’s, where he stood over the urinal and tore the letter open, killing two birds with one stone. Inside, there was a photograph and nothing more, not even a line. He held it up to the light with his free hand. The photo was blurred and obscure, as if the whole world had shifted in the interval between the click of the shutter and the fixing of the image, and it showed a wisp of a kid in short pants, new shoes and a jacket and tie, smiling bravely against a backdrop of naked trees and a hedge all stripped of its leaves. O‘Kane looked closer. Squinted. Maneuvered the slick surface to catch the light. And saw the face of his son there shining out of the gloom, Eddie Jr., his own flesh and blood, and he would have known that face anywhere.

Sure. Sure he would.

He stood at the urinal till he lost track of time, just staring into the shining face of that picture, and he felt as bad as he’d ever felt, bad and worthless and of no more account than a vagrant bum in an alley. His son was growing up without him. His mother and father didn’t even know their own grandson, his sisters didn’t know their nephew. Nobody knew him, nobody but Rosaleen — and Homer Quammen. God, how that hurt. She might as well have sent him a bomb in the mail, raked him with shrapnel, flayed his flesh. He thought he was going to cry, he really thought he was going to break down and cry for the first time since he was a kid himself, the sour smell of piss in his nostrils, mold in the drains, the air so heavy and brown it was like mustard gas rolling in over the trenches, but then he heard the ripple and thump of the piano from the front room and came back to himself. Daisy was out there waiting for him, Daisy with all her petals on display and ripe for the picking.

All right. So. He shook himself, buttoned up, flushed. And then, and it was almost as if he were suffering from some sort of tic himself like poor Mrs. Brush, he felt his right hand contract and the picture was crumpled and lying there in the urinal alongside the scrawled-over envelope. He never got another one. And he never heard another word about divorce either.

With Giovannella it was different. And worse. A whole lot worse. She’d defied him, of course, and after she pulled the slick red spike out of his palm and they stopped right there to consider the phenomenon of his blood sprouting and flowering in that white pocket where just an instant before there’d been no blood at all, she never said a word, not I’m sorry or Forgive me or Did I hurt you? No, she just tore up the slip of paper with Dolores Isringhausen’s doctor’s name on it and threw it in his face, and he was clutching his hand and cursing by then, cursing her with every bit of filth he could think of, and Jesus in Heaven his hand hurt. “Whore!” he shouted. “Bitch!” You fucking Guinea bitch!“ But her body was rigid and her face was iron and she clutched that gleaming spike of steel in her white-knuckled fist till he was sure she meant to drive it right on through his heart, and he backed out the door and went on down the rickety stairs, cursing in a steady automatic way and wondering where he could find a doctor himself — and on Sunday no less.

She wouldn’t see him after that. And he wanted her, wanted her as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life, and not to wrangle and fight over husbands or babies or San Francisco or anything else, but to love her, strip her naked, splay her out on the bed and crush her in his arms and love her till there was no breath left in her. But she spurned him. He crept up to the apartment above the shoe repair shop and she shut the door in his face; he waylaid her in the street when she went out to the market and she walked right by him as if she’d never laid eyes on him before in her life. When he grabbed for her elbow—“Please, Giovannella,” and he was begging, “just listen to me, just for a minute”—she snatched it away, stalking up the street with her quick chopping strides and her shoulders so stiff and compacted they might have been bound up with wire.

But what really tortured him was watching her grow bigger, day by day, week by week. Every Sunday afternoon she strolled up and down the street on the arm of Guido, the amazing Italian dwarf who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds with his boots on, and she made sure to pass right by the front window of the rooming house and all the saloons of Spanishtown — and Cody Menhoff’s too, just for good measure. At first you couldn’t tell, nobody could, because the baby was the size of a skinned rat and it wasn’t a baby at all, it wasn’t even human, but by the end of June she was showing and by mid-July she looked as if she were smuggling melons under her skirt. He would follow her sometimes, half-drunk and feuding with himself, and he would watch as people stopped to congratulate her, the men smiling paternally, the women reaching out to pat the swollen talisman of her belly, and all the while Guido the shoemaker grinning and flushed with his simpleminded pride. O‘Kane felt left out. He felt evil. He felt angry.

The baby was born at the end of October. O‘Kane heard of it through Baldy Dimucci, who was passing around cigars as if he were the proud father himself, and no hard feelings over what had happened eight years ago — and more recently too. Or were there? The old man had sought him out as he came down to lunch in the kitchen of the big house one sun-kissed afternoon just before Halloween. O’Kane had seen the truck in the drive that morning (no more donkey carts for Baldy: he’d prospered, owner of a thriving nursery business now and a new Ford truck too) and had wondered about it, but he didn’t make the connection with Giovannella and the baby till Baldy came through the kitchen door, unsteady on his feet and reeking of red wine and cigar smoke. “Hey, Eddie,” he said, while Sam Wah scowled over the stove and O‘Kane spooned up soup, “you hear the good-a news?”

“Good news? No, what is it?”

Baldy advanced on him, his face crazy with furrows, eyes lit with wine, a big garlic-eating grin. “Giovannella,” he said, and he wasn’t as drunk as he let on, “Giovannella and-a my son the law, they have their baby.”

O‘Kane just blinked. He didn’t ask what sex it was or if its hair was blond and one of its green Irish eyes imprinted with a lucky hazel clock, because he already knew, and the knowledge made him feel sick and dizzy, as if the ground had dipped beneath him. So he didn’t say anything, didn’t offer congratulations or best wishes to the new mother-he just blinked.

“Here,” Baldy said, standing over him in his best suit of clothes and the wine stains on his shirt, “have a cigar.”

O‘Kane went straight to her apartment after work, but he didn’t dare go up because there was a whole red-wine-spilling, accordion-playing, pasta-boiling wop hullabaloo going on up there and people all over the stairs, boisterous and laughing out loud. And when he did manage to sneak up two days later, the door was answered not by Giovannella but by a big square monument of a woman who shared a nose and eyes with her and nothing more. This was the mother, and no mistaking it. She said something in Italian and he tried to see past her into the familiar room, but she filled the whole picture all by herself and she knitted her black eyebrows and repeated whatever it was she’d said on pulling open the door and finding him there on the landing with his mouth hanging open. “Giovannella,” he said, the only word of Italian he knew, but the woman didn’t look to be all that impressed. One trembling blue-veined maternal hand went to the cross at her throat, as if to ward off some creeping evil, while the other gripped the edge of the door to bar his way, and in the instant before she slammed the door in his face with a violence that rocked the whole rotten stairway right down to its rotten supports, he heard the baby cry out, a single searing screech that resounded in his ears like an indictment.

The day he finally did get a look at Giovannella’s baby — his son, another son, and he a stranger to both of them — was the day Dolores Isringhausen came back from New York to open up her villa for the winter. It was a Saturday, and when he got off his shift there was a note waiting for him in the front hall at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The envelope was a pale violet color, scented with her perfume, and all it said on the front was “Eddie.” He tore it open right there, standing in the hallway and old Walter Hogan watching him out of bloodshot eyes. “Got in last night,” he read, “and I’m already bored. Call me.” She hadn’t even bothered to sign her name.

He called her and her voice purred inside him till it felt as if all his nerve endings had sprouted fine little hairs, and he pictured her as he’d last seen her, in a Japanese robe with nothing underneath. “It’s Eddie,” he’d said, and she came right back at him with that cat-clawing whisper: “What took you so long?” They made a date for supper, and he kicked himself for not having a car to squire her around in. He didn’t like her driving — it was wrong somehow. It made him feel funny, as if he was half a man or a cripple or something, and he didn’t want anyone to see him sitting there like a dope in the passenger’s seat and a woman behind the wheel. The thing was, he didn’t need a car, not with Roscoe ferrying him to and from Riven Rock six days a week and everything in downtown Santa Barbara an easy walk or a seven-cent streetcar ride. He was saving his money, because he didn’t intend to be a nurse forever, and a car was just a drain, when you figured up the cost of gasoline, tires, repairs, and how many times had he seen Roscoe up to his ears in grease? But tonight he could sure use one — anything, even a Tin Lizzie that’d crank your arm off — just to pull up in Dolores’s drive and toot the horn a couple of times, and he felt cheap and low and thought he ought to stroll up to Menhoff’s to raise his spirits a bit.

That was when he spotted Giovannella. She was across the street in front of the greengrocer‘s, bending over to inspect the tomatoes, and beside her, in a perambulator the color of a bat’s wing, was the baby. Guido was nowhere in sight. O’Kane looked both ways and back over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, then crossed the street and slipped up behind her, just another face in the crowd, and he was actually squeezing the fruit like a discerning housewife when he peered into the perambulator and saw the miniature features puckered like a sinkhole in the ground, eyes shut fast, a frilly blue bonnet pulled down over invisible eyebrows. But the skin — the fat clenched hands, the sinking face — was the color of Giovannella‘s, Giovannella’s purely, without adulteration, cinnamon on toast, Sicilian clay. Or dirt. Sicilian dirt.

Giovannella was aware of him now, looking up from her tomatoes while Wilson, the big-armed greengrocer, weighed them for her in a silver shovel-scoop of a scale, staring at him out of her stygian eyes. Her lips curled ever so slightly at the corners. “He’s beautiful, my baby, isn’t he, Eddie?”

O‘Kane looked to Wilson, and Wilson knew, everybody knew. Except maybe Guido. “Yeah,” he said, “sure,” and he felt numb all over, as if he’d been to the dentist and breathed deep of the gas till his mind fled away.

Oh, and her smile was rich now, her lips spread wide, teeth gleaming white in the sun. “You know what we decided to name him, Eddie? Huh?”

He didn’t have a clue. He looked to Wilson again and Wilson looked away.

“ ‘Guido,’ Eddie. We named him ‘Guido.’ After his father.”

And what did he feel then? Relieved? Thankful? Glad he hadn’t fathered another child to be raised a stranger to him? No. He felt betrayed. He felt rage. He felt jealousy, hot and electric, like a wire run right on up through him from his cock to his brain and the current on full. Wilson disappeared behind his melons and Guinea squash. A woman in a felt hat faded from black to gray bent over the radishes and then moved away down the aisle and into the cool depths of the shop. He looked hard at Giovannella. “What are you saying?”

The baby might as well have been carved of wood — it was there, in the carriage, sunk into itself. Giovannella tucked the brown paper sack of tomatoes under one arm and gave him a savage look. “You’re a big man, huh, Eddie? Always so cocksure — isn’t that right? The ladies’ man. The big stud.” She bit her lip, shot a glance around to see if anybody was watching. He was confused, adrift on a heavy sea, the sun throwing shadows across the street and the pavement glowing as if it was wet with rain. What did she want from him? What was the problem?

And then, as if he’d been awaiting his moment in the center of the stage, the baby woke up and flashed open his eyes — and there it was, for all the world to see, the green of Dingle Bay and three o‘clock in the afternoon.

Well, and that ruined the day for him, put a real kibosh on it, sent him into a funk that only whiskey could hope to salve. Of course, the moment the kid opened his eyes she whisked him away, the wheels of the perambulator spinning like a locomotive’s and the first feeble waking cry magnified into an infantile squall of rage, but by then she was at the corner and hustling down De la Guerra Street until the stony white columns of the First Security Bank swallowed her up. He didn’t follow her. Let her go, he thought, let her play her games, and wouldn’t she have made a sterling assistant to Savonarola, the hot iron glowing in her hand? The bitch. Oh, the bitch.

His hand shook under the weight of the first whiskey, and he sat at a table in the corner, stared out the window and watched the pigeons rise up from the street and settle back down again till he knew every one of them as an individual, knew its strut and color, knew the cocks from the hens and the old from the young. There they were, fecund and flapping, like some mindless feathered symbol of his own feckless life, leaping up instinctively as each car passed and then pouring back down again in its wake, oblivious, strutting, pecking, fucking. He was thinking about Giovannella and Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. and little Guide—Guido, for Christ’s sake — and wondering where he’d gone wrong. Or how. He was no biologist, like Katherine, but he knew that if the male of the species — namely, Eddie O‘Kane — sticks his thing in the female enough times, no matter the time of month or the precautions taken, eventually she’s going to swell up and keep on swelling till there’s another yabbering little brat in the world.

But he caught himself right there. This was no ordinary brat, this was no black-eyed little shoemaker’s son, this was Guido O‘Kane, his son, and he had to take responsibility for him. But how? Slip Giovannella money each month and play the Dutch uncle? Catch the shoemaker in an alley some night and make her a widow and then go ahead and marry her, which is what he should have done in the first place? But then — and there was an icy nagging voice in the back of his mind, the voice of the Ice Queen reading him the riot act in the downstairs parlor — he was already married, wasn’t he?

All this was going through his head when the little two-seat Maxwell with its trim white tires and expressive brakes pulled up to the curb and sent the pigeons into a paroxysm of flight. He could see Dolores Isringhausen sitting at the wheel, her pearl gloves, the way she cocked her head back and the glassy cold look of her eyes. She didn’t get out of the car. She didn’t come in. Just tapped the horn as if she were summoning some lackey, some black buck to slip into the manor house and service her while the master’s away, and what did she think he was? He didn’t move a muscle. Raising the glass to his lips, he took a long slow sip, as if he had all the time in the world, eyes locked on hers all the while. He wanted to gesture to her to come in, but he didn‘t, and when she tapped the horn again, her features drawn in irritation, he got up, crossed the barroom and went to her.

“What was that about?” she said, glancing up as he climbed in beside her. “Didn’t you see me? You were looking right at me.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, the car lurching forward with a crunch of the tires, and by the time he got settled they were charging down State toward the ocean, the blue skin of the sky joined to the blue skin of the sea by a thin gray seam of mist that blotted the islands from view. She had the top up, for discretion’s sake, and she drove too fast, dodging round a market wagon and a double-parked car, nipping in behind the trolley and shooting through the intersections as if there was no other car on the road. “I saw you,” he said, and he could feel the weight lifting off him, just a hair, “and it was good to see you, damn good…. I just needed a minute to feast my eyes on you and think how lucky I am. Or how lucky I’m going to be.”

“What’s the matter,” she said, bunching her lips in a moue, “all your girlfriends on strike?” She leaned into him for a kiss, but she never took her eyes off the road. They rattled over the streetcar tracks and in and out of a pair of potholes that nearly put his skull through the canvas roof, and then she swung left on Cabrillo, heading away from town. “You still seeing the little Italian slut, the one with the dirty eyes? You know, the breeder?”

“Nah,” he lied, “there’s nobody right now.” And he gave her his smile, their faces so close, the car jolting, the smell of her. “I’ve been saving myself for you.”

By way of response, she produced a flask from beneath the seat, took a drink and handed it to him. “Then I guess I can expect a pretty hot time,” she said finally, giving him a sidelong glance, her smile tight around lips wet with gin, and like any other actor taking his cue, he reached out and laid a hand on her thigh.

They didn’t stop at a roadhouse, lunchroom or restaurant, but went straight up Hot Springs Road and into the hills of Montecito in a hurricane of dust and flying leaves that didn’t abate till she swung into the tree-lined drive of the villa and glided up to the garage. She killed the engine and he wondered if he should go round and open the door for her, but she didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and in the next moment they climbed separately out of the car and headed up the walk in front of the house. The place was deserted, no servants or gardeners or washerwomen, no eyes to see or ears to hear, and she took him by the hand and led him straight up to the bedroom. He knew what to do then, and as the afternoon stretched into the evening and the sun crept across the floor through the French doors flung open wide on a garden of ten-foot ferns, he used his tongue and his fingers and his hard Irish prick to extract all the pleasure from her he could, and it was like breaking for the goal with the ball tucked under his arm, like swinging for the fence, one more empty feat and nothing more. He didn’t love her. He loved Giovannella. And he thought about that and how odd it was as he thrust himself into Dolores Isringhausen with a kind of desperation he couldn’t admit and the sun moved and the woman beneath him locked her hips to his and he felt the weight slip back down again, hopeless and immovable, till it all but crushed him.

He must have fallen asleep, because when the phone rang in the next room it jolted him up off the sheets and she had to put a hand on his chest to calm him. He watched as she got up to answer it, her legs and buttocks snatching at the light, and not a sag or ripple anywhere on her. How old was she, anyway — thirty-five? Forty? He’d never asked. But he could see she’d never had any children — or if she had, it was a long time ago. He took a drink from the flask and watched a humming-bird hovering over the trumpet vine with its pink cunt-shaped flowers and listened to her whispering into the receiver. And who was that she was talking to — tomorrow’s lay?

She came back into the room in a susurrus of motion, hips rolling in an easy glide, and straddled the white hill of his knee. He waited till she’d reached over to the night table for a cigarette and held a match to it, and then he said, “So your husband — he isn’t back from the War yet, is he?”

“Who, Tom?” She twitched her hips and rubbed herself there, on his knee, and he could feel the warmth and wetness of her. “He’s never coming back — he’s having too much fun pulling the trigger on all the whores of Asiago.”

“Does he know about you? I mean, that you‘re—”

“What? Unfaithful? Is that the word you’re looking for?”

He watched her eyes for a signal, but they were as glassy and distant as ever. She merely shrugged and shifted her thighs to accommodate the angle of his knee. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”

“What do you think?”

What did he think? He was a little shocked, that was all, to think how loose her morals were — and her husband’s too. He wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing, not if he were over in Italy fighting the Huns or the Austrians or whoever they were. He didn’t say anything, but she was watching him, working herself against his shin now, the tight little smile, the bobbed hair, the gently swaying breasts.

“Better I should lock myself in a nunnery till the great warrior comes home?”

No. Or yes. But he’d leapt ahead of her already, and he realized he didn’t give a damn for her or her husband or what they did with their respective groins — he was thinking about that half-Italian baby in the perambulator and the pale wondering face in the crumpled-up photograph. “You mind if I ask you something?”

She gave him a look he couldn’t gauge and he felt her body tense, though she shrugged and said, “Sure, go ahead,” and let the smoke seep out of her nostrils in two ascending coils.

“I was wondering — you never had any kids, did you? Children, I mean?”

“Me?” She laughed. “Can you picture me as a mother? Come on, Eddie.”

“But how—?”

“Ah,” she said, twisting round to snub out the cigarette in the hammered brass ashtray on the night table, “I see where this is going. She had the baby, didn’t she, your little peasant girl?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes.”

“And it’s yours?”

“Yes.”

And then she laughed again, and the laugh irritated him, made him feel that spark of anger that always seemed to go straight to his hands. “You think it’s funny?”

In answer, she collapsed on him, pinning his face to the pillow and forcing a kiss that was like a bite, and then she rolled off him and lay sprawled on her back beside him. “I do,” she said. “And it is funny, because you’re like a baby yourself, like you were just born and still kicking. Sure, give me that look, go ahead, but to answer your question, I use a Mensigna pessary, Eddie,” and she reached between her legs to show him.

And now he was shocked, and maybe a little frightened too. She held the thing up where he could see it, a black rubber tube all slick with her juices — and his. It was unholy, that’s what it was, a murder weapon, a mortal sin you could see and feel and hold in your own two hands.

“It comes in fourteen sizes,” she said, enjoying the moment and the look on his face. “The only problem is,” and she was coy now, coy and already moving into him, “you have to go to Holland to get one.”

The rains that winter seemed unusually heavy, one February storm alone dropping eight inches in a single day over the sodden town and its sandbagged saloons, lunchrooms, barbershops, corner groceries and cigar stores and converting lower State Street into a chute full of roiling mud that inundated all the first-floor shops and dwellings. The dark sucking river that rode atop the mud washed a whole flotilla of cars out to sea while the incoming waves cannonaded the harbor and drove half the boats moored there up against the shore until there was nothing left but splinters. The sky was a torn sheet, gone gray with use and flapping on the line.

O‘Kane enjoyed it, at least at first. He missed weather, real weather, the nor’easters that roared in off Boston Harbor on a blast of wind, the thunderstorms that ignited the summer sky and dropped the temperature twenty degrees in the snap of two fingers, but after he ruined a new pair of boots beyond repairing and had to drink at a Chink place in Spanishtown for a week because Menhoff’s had six inches of mud all over the floor and creeping up the legs of the chairs, he began to feel afflicted. The rain kept coming, and everyone felt the burden of it, even Mr. McCormick, who announced he’d go mad if he didn’t see some sunshine soon. It was a trial, a real trial, but the rains made the spring all the sweeter, and by March you’d never think a drop had ever fallen or would ever again.

Dolores Isringhausen went back to New York the morning after. St. Patrick’s Day (which she didn’t spend with O‘Kane), Giovannella began to soften toward him and even let him in once or twice when Guido wasn’t looking to admire the baby up close, but no kissing and no touching, and Mr. McCormick improved to the point where he was more or less rational at least fifty percent of the time — and this despite Dr. Brush’s retreat from active intervention to a strictly custodial role. Or maybe because of it. Just leave the man alone, that was O’Kane’s philosophy, and if he wanted a two-hour shower bath, let him have it. Why not? It wasn’t as if he had a train to catch.

And then it was June, and Dr. Brush, all three hundred and twenty-seven pounds of him, was called up to serve his country behind the lines with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He left his wife with a cousin (hers) on Anapamu Street, had a long talk with Mr. McCormick about duty and patriotism and the conduct of the War, and headed out on the train, the only member of the McCormick medical team to be called to active duty. They stationed him in England, and O‘Kane pictured him tucking away an English breakfast with two pots of tea ard then sitting around under the elms with a bunch of spooked one-legged vets and asking if their fathers had spanked them.

As it turned out, Brush would be gone just over two years, and though he wasn’t accomplishing a damn thing as far as O‘Kane could see, except maybe by accident, the McCormicks — and Katherine — insisted on a replacement, the best money could buy. Or rent. Dr. Meyer came all the way out himself and brought the interim man with him, a Dr. August Hoch, who’d succeeded him as head of the Pathological Institute in New York. Dr. Hoch was a Kraut — all the headshrinkers were Krauts, it seemed, except Hamilton and Brush, and that was all right with O’Kane, since they’d invented headshrinking in the first place. It was just that there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in the country around that time, and understandably so, and it didn’t make it any easier bellying up to the bar at Menhoff’s when everybody in town knew you had a Kraut over you. In fact, he’d had to wipe the floor one night with a guy in a lunchroom who called Dolores Isringhausen a Hun to her face, and the irony of it was she wasn’t even German — her maiden name was Mayhew.

But Dr. Hoch was all right. He was a keen-eyed old duffer with gray chin whiskers and a thin white scar that carved a wicked arc from just beneath his left eye to the back hinge of his jaw. O‘Kane was there the day Meyer and Hoch walked in on Mr. McCormick, who’d just returned from his morning exercise — a tortuous and many-branching stroll to the Indian grounds and back. Mr. McCormick was off in the corner, holding a private conference with his judges, and Dr. Meyer, whom Mr. McCormick knew well from his semiannual visits, went right up to him and said he had somebody he’d like him to meet. “Or perhaps,” he added, his accent thick as sludge, “you will already know him, yes?”

Mr. McCormick left off with his judges and turned slowly round, his eyes passing mechanically from Dr. Meyer’s black-bearded face to Dr. Hoch’s gray-bearded one. He seemed to recognize Dr. Meyer, and that was all well and good, but Hoch was obviously a puzzle. There was something in his eyes — a spark of recognition? fear? bewilderment? — but O‘Kane couldn’t read it.

“To refresh your memory, maybe,” Dr. Meyer went on, rocking back on his heels as if he were about to perform some acrobatic feat, “you will recall that Dr. Hoch examined you in nineteen hundred and seven, when you were a guest at McLean, but perhaps you forget because then you are not so well as you are now?”

Dr. Hoch came forward, a shambling sort of man in a shapeless gray suit who’d let his mustache and chin whiskers go so long without trimming that they hung down to his collar and completely obscured his throat. The scar shone in the morning light like a trail of dried spittle or the glistening track a slug leaves on the pavement, silvery and ever so faintly luminescent. “How do you do, Mr. McCormick,” he said with a little bow, and he didn’t extend his hand until Mr. McCormick automatically reached out his own. “It is a great pleasure to see you once again, yes?” and his accent was thicker than Meyer’s.

Mr. McCormick held onto Dr. Hoch’s hand a long while — so long, in fact, O‘Kane began to think he’d have to move in and break the grip — and twice he raised his free hand as if to touch the doctor’s scar, but then dropped it again to his side. “Yes,” Dr. Hoch said finally, “and I see perhaps that you are interested in my scar?”

Mr. McCormick let go of the doctor’s hand then, and he fluttered round a bit, stamping his feet and wringing his hands as if they were wet before stuffing them awkwardly into his trouser pockets. He loomed over the doctor, who couldn’t have been more than five-four or five-five. It seemed as if he were about to say something, but he bit his tongue and just stared at the side of the doctor’s face, watching in fascination as Hoch traced the line of his scar with a blunt fingertip.

“This,” Hoch said, “this is what we call in Germany a dueling scar. From my student days. You see, it was thought to be a cosmetic attraction to the ladies, a sign of virility or a badge of honor perhaps, but of course that was all foolishness then, the vanity of the young, and I do not know if students of today in the university they still have this — what do you say, ‘rite’?—anymore.” And then he said something in rapid-fire German to Meyer, who rattled something back.

“Ah. So. Herr Doktor Meyer informs me that this habit is no longer so much practiced as formerly.” He gazed up at Mr. McCormick, like some wood gnome confronting a giant — and Mr. McCormick was a giant, despite the stoop that rounded his shoulders and at times bent him over double, depending on the degree of punishment his imaginary judges were inflicting on him. “Would you like to touch it?” the doctor said, his eyes glinting.

And Mr. McCormick, who didn’t favor physical intimacy and had never touched anyone except in anger in all the time O‘Kane had known him, reached up tentatively to explore the side of Dr. Hoch’s face with two tremulous fingers. He traced the crescent of the scar over and over, very gently, so gently he might have been petting a cat. It was all very strange, Mr. McCormick stroking, the doctor submitting, the room so silent you would have thought they were all locked away in an Egyptian tomb, and then Mr. McCormick looked as if he wanted to say something, his lips moving before any sound came out. “So, it — it,” he stammered, withdrawing his hand and tucking it away in his pocket, “it is possible after all.”

“Possible?” Dr. Hoch just stood there, inches from their stooped-over and trembling employer, looking up steadily into his eyes. Dr. Meyer shot a glance at O‘Kane, but O’Kane was dumbfounded. This was something new, this touching, and it would have to play itself out.

“To-to be a man,” Mr. McCormick said, and then sang out one of his nonsense phrases, “one slit, one slit, one slit.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Dr. Hoch said, his face a web of lines that bunched and gathered around that one terrific silvery slash, and he didn’t ask about mothers or fathers or boom out platitudes — he just waited.

“With a razor, I mean.” Mr. McCormick had straightened up now and he looked round the room as if seeing it in a new light. “When, when Eddie and Mart shave me, it’s a, it’s a dangerous thing, to be cut like that, but it can, you can—”

The little doctor was nodding. “That’s right,” he said.

“I mean, what I mean is… if I was cut there”—and he reached out to touch the scar again—“it would, just, heal, and then I w-would have a scar too.” He rocked back on his feet. “But here,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat, “here it’s very… dangerous. And here,” pointing down, “you’re not, not a man anymore.”

“But Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane broke in, “you know we always use a safety razor, you know that—”

Hoch looked at Meyer. Meyer looked at Hoch. Mr. McCormick drew himself up till his shoulders were squared and he was the very model of proper posture. He waited till he was sure he had O‘Kane’s attention, and the doctors’ too, and then spoke in a clear strong uninflected voice, “Yes, Eddie, I know.”

Well. O‘Kane was impressed — all that over a scar — but he thought nothing more of it as the summer faded into autumn and the War news dominated every conversation and Giovannella warmed and melted and gave way to him again, stealing out on Saturday afternoons to linger with him on a mattress in the garage out back of Pat’s house while the baby shook his rattle and pumped his legs and arms in the air. Meanwhile, the bearer of the scar, Dr. Hoch, was very patient with Mr. McCormick — none of this talking cure business — sitting with him throughout the day and into the night, putting in longer hours than O’Kane or Mart or anybody on the estate. Mostly he would just sit there with him, rumpled and avuncular, reading out an interesting bit from a book or magazine now and again, walking Mr. McCormick. to and from the theater building and accompanying him on his walks. Sometimes the two of them would sit for hours and not say a word, and other times Mr. McCormick would be positively verbose, going on and on about the reaper—“the Wonder of the Reaper,” he called it, after some book about his father — and his two brothers and the crying need for social welfare and reform in this cold unforgiving world.

They talked of the War too, and that was a bit odd, from O‘Kane’s point of view anyway, because here were the American millionaire and the prototypical Hun sitting cheek by jowl, but they never came to blows over it or even raised their voices, not that O’Kane could recall. War news trickled through to them all winter, often several days late, through the Los Angeles, Chicago and Santa Barbara papers, and the papers brought news of Katherine too. She was in Washington throughout that year—1918—and the next, where she’d been handpicked by the president himself to sit on the National Defense Women’s Committee, doing all sorts of things to prosecute the War, from putting women to work to selling Liberty Bonds and dreaming up those patriotic posters you saw everywhere. Every month or so she’d send Mr. McCormick detailed maps of the Western Front, showing the battle lines and trenches. He would pore over them for hours, commenting on places he’d visited on his honeymoon and sketching in all sorts of antic figures to represent armies, gun emplacements, and naval, horse and even air squadrons.

For a while there, especially through the summer and fall of 1918, the War became one of his pet obsessions, and he drew not only Dr. Hoch into it, but O‘Kane himself. When the armies advanced or retreated he painstakingly erased his figures and symbols and moved the lines forward and backward and drew them in all over again. He analyzed the offensive at Amiens over and over, and he’d never been more lucid or articulate, not since his golfing days at McLean, and when the papers announced the American victory at St. Mihiel in September, he paraded around the upper parlor for hours, shaking his fists and uncannily imitating the whistle and crash of a bombardment while the rumpled little doctor sat on and watched with his scarred impassive face.

Katherine returned in December for the holidays, and that was when the business of the scar came up again. She was late in getting to California because of her duties with the Defense Committee, arriving just two days before Christmas. She seemed tired, worn about the edges, and as she stood in the theater building under a monumental wreath of holly and mistletoe handing out Christmas bonuses to the employees, she looked old. Or older. O‘Kane watched her, always the lady, always perfect, always carved of the clearest coldest ice, and tried to tot up her age — she would have been, what, forty-one? Or forty-two? Well, for the first time it had begun to show — nothing extreme; she was hardly a hag yet — but there it was. Her clothes were as rich as ever, but they were yesterday’s fashions, the heavy drapery of the suffragette and the matron, nothing at all like the skimpy satiny look of Dolores Isringhausen or the walking light that was Giovannella. She was getting old, but so was everybody else, even lucky Eddie O’Kane, who was going to be thirty-six come March. And he felt it most keenly when he came up to her and she took his hand and gave him his envelope and a smile that didn’t mean a thing, not yea or nay, and he almost wished she’d come round cracking the whip again so they could all go back and start over, drenched in hope.

Anyway, the next day, the day before Christmas, she came to the house early in a flurry of presents and fruitcakes and rang up her husband from downstairs, to chat with him and extend her Christmas greetings. O‘Kane was playing dominoes with Mart when the phone rang and the doctor got up to answer it. “It’s for you, Mr. McCormick,” he said, and his eyes were moist and wide. “It’s your wife.”

It took Mr. McCormick a minute to get up the steam and cross the room to where the doctor stood holding the telephone out to him, and when he did start across the floor he regressed into his two-steps-forward-one-step-back mode, hunching his shoulders and dragging down his face, his right leg suddenly dead and trailing behind him in a kind of wounded tango. When he finally did get to the phone, lift the receiver to his ear and bend to the mouthpiece, he didn’t seem to have much to say other than a moist gulping swallow of a hello. She seemed to be doing all the talking. At least at first.

Dr. Hoch settled into an armchair at a discreet distance, and O0‘Kane and Mart went on with their game, but all three were listening, of course they were — if not for therapeutic reasons, then for curiosity’s sake; that, and to poke a hole, however small, in the tight fabric of their boredom.

Five minutes into the conversation, Mr. McCormick’s voice suddenly came up in a froglike croak. “Did you see Dr. Hoch’s scar?”

There was a silence while she responded, and if O‘Kane strained to hear over the crackle of the fire and the ambient sounds of the house, he could just make out the faintest whisper on the other end of the line, and it was funny — she could have been halfway around the world for all the faintness of her voice, but here she was right downstairs. That must have been odd for Mr. McCormick, because he knew where she was as well as anybody. But then he was used to it, O’Kane figured. Sure. And what a thing to get used to — to have to get used to — tike the prisoner in solitary who falls in love with the mouse that shares his cell or the galley slave who comes to like the feel of the oar in his hand.

But now Mr. McCormick was saying something about cuts — his singsong chant, “one slit, one slit, one slit” creeping into it. “I can be cut too,” he said. “Sh-shaving. In my throat. Ever think of that?”

She was saying something, the tiniest whisper of a mechanical squawk. The fire snapped. Mart stretched and something popped in his shoulders.

“You’re in Washington!” Mr. McCormick suddenly shouted. “With me-men! You’re in Washington all alone, ar-aren’t you? I know you are, I know, and do you kn-know what Sc-Scobble did to his wife, or — or almost did, because she was, was UNFAITHFUL?” And he roared out this last so that the doctor jumped and O‘Kane had to fight himself to keep from getting up and pacing round the room.

She said something back, trying to calm him, Now, Stanley, you know better—

“Do you know?” he roared.

Silence on the other end. Apparently she didn’t.

And then, in a voice as calm as it was clear and unobstructed, he was quoting, quoting a poem:

Scobble for whoredom whips his wife and cries

He’ll slit her nose; but blubbering she replies,

“Good sir, make no more cuts i’ th’ outward skin,

One slit’s enough to let adultery in.”

He stood there poised over the phone a long moment, and whether Katherine was making any reply to this or not, O‘Kane never knew, but he felt his heart turn over and his eyes were burning as if he’d got caustic soda in them. He hadn’t given it much thought, Mr. McCormick locked away here in his tower and she out there in the world, but of course she was unfaithful to him, how could she not be, Ice Queen or no? It had been twelve years at least. And how could any woman go without it as long as that?

5. THE MATCH OF THE YEAR

When Katherine refused him, all but laughing in his face on that rainy thick-bodied September night with the horses clopping stupidly through the streets and the clock thundering doom in his ears, Stanley got to his feet, made a curt bow and bolted for the door, deaf to her calls and pleas. “Stanley, what are you doing?” she cried, springing up in alarm. “I was just… I thought we were — she protested, hurrying after him, but he never hesitated, not even to retrieve his hat and coat, flinging himself down the stairs and out into the rain. ”Stanley!“ she called, her voice echoing down the stairway and out the open door. ”Be reasonable! You’ve got to give me time!“

He never even heard her. He was running, the hair hanging wet in his face, his collar askew and his shirtfront soaked through to the skin, and he ran all the way back to the hotel, arms pumping, elbows flailing, eyes flashing white. Pedestrians fell away from him beneath the bonnets of their umbrellas like so many wilted toadstools, carriages swerved to avoid him as he slashed across the street, dogs barked at his heels. “Watch where you’re going,” someone growled and a police officer shouted out to him, but he paid no heed. He never felt the cobblestones beneath his feet or the raindrops on his face, didn’t smell the wet richness of the old stones or the barnyard ferment of the horse dung in the gutters, didn’t notice the way the night gathered around the streetlights as if to smother them.

She’d laughed at him. Refused even to take him seriously. Made a joke of the whole thing. But then why wouldn’t she? He was a fool, ungainly, stupid, the least likely suitor in the world, not half the man Butler Ames was. What had he been thinking? A woman like Katherine could have her pick of all the men in the world, and why would he ever think she’d stoop to consider someone like him?

The clerk at the front desk gave him a startled look when he burst through the door in his wild-eyed, rain-soaked, hatless frenzy. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked, practically shouting, and the bellhop rounded the corner at a dead run. “Have you been injured? Should I call a doctor?”

“The bill,” Stanley wheezed, and what had become of his voice? He pounded his breastbone with an urgent fist. “I want to, to settle up.”

“Sir?” the clerk said, making a question of it, and then he took a closer look at Stanley’s eyes and collar and the water dripping from his nose and chin, and changed his tone. “Yes, sir,” he said, all servility and unctuous concern. “I have it right here. Mr. McCormick, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be wanting my motorcar brought round.”

Again the clerk lapsed into amazement. He flashed a nervous look at the bellhop. “Sir?”

“My automobile. From the stables out back. I’ll need it brought round, at, at once.”

“But sir, it’s nearly midnight and our motor man has gone off duty — I’m afraid no one here can operate the machine, sir, and besides, don’t you know it’s raining?”

Stanley was extracting bills from his wallet and laying them out in a neat row on the marble countertop. “Never mind,” he said, “I’ll fetch it myself. And please, just put this toward the bill, and, and keep the change.”

“What about your luggage, sir?” The clerk was shouting at his retreating form, but Stanley never looked back.

The Mercedes wasn’t equipped with a top, but that didn’t faze Stanley. He draped a rug over his knees, wrapped himself in a tan duster, settled his saturated scalp beneath a wide-crowned felt hat and started off down the dark street in a roar of backfiring cylinders and ratcheting gears. The rain drove down in silver sheets and beat off the dash and the seats till there was a regular stream flowing between his feet and out over the running board. His hat collapsed and his goggles steamed up. The wind cut through him. And once he left the city, heading for the Adirondacks and his mother, the blackness closed over him and the thin stream of illumination from the headlamps was all but swallowed up in it. He couldn’t see a thing.

Still, he kept going. He was in shock, so hurt and mortified he felt like a burnt-out cinder, immolated in shame, and he had no other thought than to make it home as quickly as he could. He hurtled through the night, spooking foxes, skunks and opossums and striking terror in the breast of every slumbering horse and stertorous cow within earshot, and through it all he was picturing the yellow pine camp on Saranac Lake with its six-foot-high fireplace and overstuffed couches and a hundred rustic nooks and niches where he could burrow deep and lick his festering wounds.

Katherine had rejected him. That was the fact of his life. It was his sorrow and his burden and it wet him through and hurled wind in his teeth and basted him in mud. Inevitably, though, as the night wore on and the car rocked and lurched its way through the storm, the thunder of the elements and the even, unbroken whine of the engine began to soothe him. Sure. He was making good time, conquering the night, alone and adventuring, and he got as far as Westborough before he took a wrong turn, blew out both front tires simultaneously and sank to the axles in an evil-smelling plastic mud that sucked the boots from his feet the minute he abandoned the car.

There were no lights anywhere. But he labored on, barefooted, and the night was hallucination enough for him. He followed one road to another and on to the next till it was dawn and still raining and a farm-house loomed up out of the gloom like an island at sea. The farmer obliged him by taking him back into town — which he’d somehow managed to circumvent by a good five miles during his nocturnal ramblings — and then wishing him the very best of everything as he stood shivering and shoeless on the platform at the Westborough train station. He caught the first train to Albany and hired a man and a coach to take him up to Saranac as he huddled sleepless on the cold leather seat, Katherine’s face slipping in and out of his consciousness and a whole host of unattributed voices chanting in his ears till he had to put his hands up and force them shut.

Naturally, he caught cold.

And his mother, brisk and censorious, orbited his bed day and night as if all the doctors and serving girls on earth had been carried off by the plague. She forced beef broth on him every fifteen minutes, deluged him with syrups and tonics, scalded him with mentholated vapors and hot water bottles. “It all comes of womanizing,” she scolded, wiping his nose with a camphor-scented handkerchief.

“Womanizing? I wasn‘t—”

“Well, what do you call it then? Certainly not courting in any sense of the word as I know it, not with a young woman your own mother has never laid eyes on in her life.”

“But I just met her—”

“And another thing — I’ve been asking around this past week and I’m told that your Miss Katherine Dexter is a cold fish if there ever was one, the sort of spoiled young woman who wouldn’t even give a proper tip to her own mother’s maid. She’s entirely scientific, is what I hear, practically an atheist, like this odious Englishman with his descent of man and his monkeys and all the rest of it, and she had no more idea of worshiping the Lord than a naked aborigine.”

Stanley breathed vapors and swallowed broth, watching the leaves shrivel and fall outside his window and listening to the lake slap mournfully at the shingle, and every day he wrote Katherine a letter, sometimes as long as twenty or thirty pages, and every day he had one of the servants take it down to the post office. He didn’t have an opportunity to gaze in the mirror much — his mother insisted he stay in bed — but as he lay there brooding he began to see how ridiculous he must look in Katherine’s eyes. He felt he had to explain himself to her, and the beginning of any credible explanation had to take into account his shortcomings — if he wanted to be honest with her. And he did want to be honest. He had to be. Because this was no mere flirtation or passing fancy — this was the whole world and everything in it.

One of his shorter letters, which ran to fifteen pages, painstakingly indited in an unrestrained flood tide of tottering consonants and tail-lashing vowels, began like this, without date or salutation:

I know you know I am as useless as a stone in your path, and no one is more conscious of that than I, a man who has never accomplished a thing in all his twenty-nine years, a blot on society, a parasite who never earns a cent by the sweat of his brow but feeds off the poor and oppressed in the name of “Capitalism.” I have no talent for anything, I’ve never cultivated my mind, I’m consumed by degrading thoughts all the day long and half the nights, too, and live in a putrid scum of sin. I cannot blame you for refusing me. In fact, I applaud you and urge you to prefer Butler Ames or any other man over me, because I esteem you above all women and want only the best for you. Life to me is as dull as the grave and I live only to beg and pray for your happiness. You are all and everything to me and I hope you will believe me when I tell you I am not fit to lick the dirt from your shoes, if any dirt would ever adhere to them, which I doubt…

He realized he’d gone a bit overboard, but then once he fixated on something he just couldn’t seem to let it go, and his letters became more and more slavish and self-denigrating until even Fu Manchu would have seemed wholesome compared to the Stanley Stanley exposed.

Katherine’s replies were brief and never alluded to his letters, not in the slightest. She wrote of the weather, her mother’s latest contretemps with a milliner or maître d‘, the gustatory habits of the checkered garter snake. She didn’t specifically prohibit him from visiting (though she reminded him of how deeply absorbed she was in her studies), and so he saw his opportunity and took the train for Boston as soon as his mother let him out of bed. The first time — in early October — he stayed on for a week, and then, at the end of November, for two weeks more. He was rewarded for his perseverance by Mrs. Dexter—“Please, Stanley, call me Josephine”—who sat with him in the parlor every night through both of his visits, regaling him with reminiscences of her youth as he worked his way dutifully through the soggy fish-paste sandwiches and poppy seed cakes and pot after pot of undrinkable tea. But it was worth it, because Katherine seemed genuinely pleased to see him, shining like a seal and flush with her accumulation of knowledge, and when she could squeeze a social hour or two into her schedule, she permitted him to take her out to the theater or a concert.

At Christmas, she came to Chicago to stay with a girlfriend while her mother was in Europe, and Stanley was elated. He and Nettie had retreated to Rush Street when the weather turned bitter in the Adirondacks, and though he hadn’t felt up to going back to work yet he’d begun sketching again and had done half a dozen portraits of Katherine in a brown wash over chalk and brown ink — all from a single photograph she’d given him. Of course, he was no good as an artist and had no right to attempt a portrait of her — it would take a Pintoricchio or a Cellini to do justice to her — but still he thought he’d managed to capture something she might find interesting and he’d been wrestling with the idea of another visit to Boston to present her with one of the sketches. Or maybe two of them. Or all six. He could barely restrain himself, bombarding her with flowers and telegrams, sick with the thought that Butler Ames or some other oily competitor was getting the jump on him and yet not wanting to seem overeager, when he got her letter informing him that she was coming to Chicago on the nineteenth to visit Nona Martin, of the upholstering Martins, and he melted away in a sizzle of anticipation like a pat of butter in a hot pan.

When the train arrived, Stanley was waiting at the station with his chauffeur and his new car, a Packard equipped with a tonneau cover for the passenger seat. He was standing there like a sentinel when she stepped down from the train, his arms laden with flowers, three boxes of candy and the most recent of the portraits, wrapped in brown paper. The train was fifteen minutes late and he’d been practicing his smile so long his gums had dried out and somehow managed to stick to the inner lining of his mouth, so he had a bit of trouble with the speech he’d rehearsed. “Katherine,” he cried, taking her hand in an awkward fumble of flowers and candy while the chauffeur negotiated the transfer of her luggage from the porter, “I can’t begin to tell you how much this means to me, your coming here to Chicago — your visit, I mean — because this is the high point of my miserable, foul, utterly worthless existence, and I. I—”

She was wearing a fur coat and the smell of the body-heated air caught in its grip was intoxicating. She lifted the veil of her hat to reveal a smile and two glad and glowing eyes. “Stanley!” she exclaimed. “What a surprise! It’s so thoughtful of you to come meet me, but you didn’t have to go out of your way, really you didn’t.” And then she let out a kind of squeal and fell into the arms of a girl in a fox coat with hair the color of old rope and Stanley felt as if he’d been rejected all over again. But no, this was Nona Martin and she was pleased to meet him — Katherine had told her so much about him — and pleased too to accept a ride in his motorcar.

Stanley was lit up like a bonfire, electrified—Katherine has told me so much about you — ashe squeezed in beside the girls, struggling all the while with the framed sketch in its heavy brown wrapping. Katherine was right there, right there beside him, and he could smell her perfume and the sweet mint of her breath. “For you,” he said, handing her the portrait in a confusion of wrists and elbows and the constricting bulk of coats and mufflers and gloves, “I–I hope you won’t be, well, I hope you — I mean, I, uh, I took the liberty of drawing, uh, you—”

She smiled her secret thin-lipped smile, tore away the paper and held the portrait high up to the light as the car banged away over the streets like a roller coaster and all three of them had to hold onto their hats. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and she turned the smile on him now and showed him her teeth, the teeth he loved, and the other girl came into the picture suddenly, her wide grinning seraphic face looming over Katherine’s shoulder, and she was cooing praise too. And Stanley? Well, it was winter in Chicago, the sun weak as milk, the wind howling, ice everywhere, but it was high summer inside of him and all the boats beating across the lake in full sail.

Even then, though, even as he sailed through the streets on the fresh breeze that was Katherine, the heavy seas were building. His mother wasn’t going to let him go without a fight, and when Katherine and Miss Martin came to dinner two nights later, the storm broke in all its fury. Nettie had insisted on a formal eight-course dinner and a guest list of eighteen, including Favill and Bentley and their wives, Cyrus Jr. and his wife, Missy Hammond, Anita (who’d been a widow going on eight years now) and an assortment of dried-up female religious fanatics in their sixties and seventies who hadn’t found anything pleasant to say to anyone since the Battle of Bull Run. She sat at the head of the table, while Cyrus took up the honorary position at the far end, and she seated Katherine across from Stanley and as close to herself as she could bear — that is, with a buffer of one crabbed Presbyterian mummy on her immediate right and another on her left.

The soup had barely touched the table when she cleared her throat to get Katherine’s attention and said, in a voice that was meant to carry all the way down to Cyrus’s end of the table, “And so, Miss Dexter, perhaps, as a scientist, you’d like to give us your opinion of Mr. Charles Darwin and his perversion of everything God tells us in the Bible?”

Katherine looked into Stanley’s eyes a moment and he could see the steel there, case-hardened and inflexible, before she turned to his mother, looking past Mrs. Tuggle, the mummy on her right. “My training has been in the sciences, yes, Mrs. McCormick, and I do tend to take a scientific view of phenomena beyond our ken, but I must remind you that Darwin’s theories are only that: theories.”

There was a silence. Every conversation had died. Anita was staring, Cyrus Jr. fussing with his shirt studs. Favill smirked. The mummies faintly nodded their wizened heads.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Nettie had knitted her hands in front of her, as if she were praying for strength. “Do you believe in all this sacrilegious bunk or don’t you?”

Katherine sighed. Lifted the water glass to her lips, took a sip and then set it down again, in perfect control. “Since you ask, Mrs. McCormick, I have to say that I do believe in Darwin’s theories as to the origin of our species through evolution. I find his arguments utterly convincing.”

Stanley was about to say something, anything, a comment on the weather or the soup or the way the electric lights were holding up, just to throw his mother off the scent, but she was too quick for him.

“And this Negro music the young seem so eager to dance to, this ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and all the rest of it, I suppose you find this sort of thing proper, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have much time for dancing, Mrs. McCormick,” Katherine said, and she glanced up and down the length of the table before coming back to her again. “I’m very busy with my studies.”

“Yes,” Nettie said, all but spitting it out, “so I’m told. Snakes, isn’t it?”

The following afternoon, in a bleak cold rinsed-out light that made the whole city look as if it had been sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan, Stanley and his mother escorted Katherine to Harold’s place in the landau — Nettie wouldn’t dream of setting foot in a motorcar — and had a tense lunch with Harold and Edith. The verbal sparring resumed over fricasseed chicken, boiled onions, beef tongue and ice cream, and continued through the farewells and out into the carriage. Stanley was at a loss. He should have been ebullient, irrepressible, kicking up his heels and shouting hosannas, because here were the two people he cared most about in the world, together at last, but instead he felt as if he’d gone into battle, a bewildered infantryman caught between opposing generals. “And your family, Katherine? I hear your father has passed on,” Nettie said, “and your mother never entertains,” and Katherine came back with, “Tell me about your other daughter, the older one — Mary Virginia?”

They’d just turned into Rush Street when Nettie suddenly rapped at the window and ordered the carriage to a stop. Perplexed, the driver climbed down and came to the window. “Ma‘am?” he said, showing his teeth in a nervous little grin.

“Where are you taking us?”

“Home, ma‘am. Six-seventy-five Rush Street.”

“Rush Street? Have you lost you senses? We have a guest with us, and she needs to be transported all the way back out to Astor Street, to the Martin residence.”

“But Mother,” Stanley was saying, “I told Stevens to drop you first, since we’re so close — I mean, there’s no need for you to—”

“Drop me? Whatever are you talking about? We’ve invited Miss Dexter, and we shall see her home. Really, Stanley, I’m surprised at you — where are your manners?”

“No, I, well — I was going to, well, see Miss Dexter home myself, after I, after we—”

“Nonsense.”

Katherine held her peace. Stevens stood there in the cold, the horses stamping and shuddering, the wind sending a fusillade of leaves and papers down the street in a sudden blast. Stanley was seated between the two women, and he didn’t dare look at Katherine, not on this battleground, not now. “I was only thinking of you, Mother, what with your heart condition and knowing how hard it is on your legs and the circulation to your, well, your feet, to, to sit cooped up like this, and I just, well, I just thought you’d be more comfortable at home.”

He watched his mother’s face tighten a notch and then suddenly let go, like an overwound spring. “All right,” she sighed, and now she was the invalid, the dying matriarch (who would, paradoxically, live another eighteen years in perfect health), too sick and enervated to fight. “It’s very thoughtful of you, Stanley. Drive on, Stevens,” she ordered in a diminished voice. And she was patient, biting her tongue until they’d arrived and Stanley was helping her up the walk and into the vestibule of the house while Katherine sat wrapped in her furs in the coach and watched her own breath crystallize in the stinging air. Then, just as the door shut behind them and Stanley was helping her off with her coat, his mother murmured, “Yes, Stanley, you’re right — and you’re such a dear to think of your poor old mother. Obviously, Stevens can see Miss Dexter home on his own and there’s no need at all for us to bother, with the weather so bitter — and that wind. It could even snow, that’s what they’re saying.”

“But, but”—Stanley was holding his mother’s coat out away from him as if it were the pelt of some animal he’d just bludgeoned and skinned—“I wanted to, that is I intended to take Katherine, I mean, Miss Dexter — to see her, I mean, home, that is—”

His mother turned a trembling face to him and took hold of his arm. “I won’t hear of it.”

“But no, no, you don’t understand. Katherine’s waiting for me.”

“Nonsense. You’re staying right here. You’ll catch your death out in that wind, and besides, it’s not proper you being all alone with her like that without a chaperone. Oh, maybe these modern girls think nothing of it, but believe you me, I, for one, won’t stand for it.”

Before he could think, Stanley had jerked his arm away. The blood was in his face, and he could hear the tick of the steam radiators and the faint sound of carolers off down the street somewhere. “I’m going,” he said, “and don’t try to stop me.”

His mother’s eyes boiled. Her face was like the third act of a tragedy. She swung an imaginary sword and cleaved the head from his body. “What,” she said, “you defy me?”

Stanley clenched his jaw. “Yes.”

And then they were struggling, actually wrestling at the doorway in plain sight of Katherine, his mother clutching at his arm as if she were drowning amid the crashing waves she herself had summoned up, and Stanley tore his arm away again, and he didn’t want to hurt her, not physically or emotionally, but when he broke loose she collapsed to the floor with a sob that sucked all the air out of him. It was the moment of truth. The moment he’d been awaiting for thirty years. He drew himself up, squared his shoulders and cinched the muffler tight against his throat. “I’m going now,” he said.

Katherine was waiting for him. Her eyes never left him as he emerged from the house, strode up the walk and climbed back into the carriage. He felt heroic, felt he could do anything — climb the Himalayas, beat back invading hordes, mush dogs across the frozen tundra. “Katherine,” he said, and she rustled beside him, her face turned to his, the carriage moving now and the rest of the afternoon and the city and everything in it left to them and them alone, “Katherine, I just wanted to, to—”

“Yes?” Her voice was lush and murmurous, floating up to meet his out of the depths of the gently swaying compartment. A fading watery light flickered at the windows. Stanley dreamed he was in a submarine, rising up and up, insulated from everything.

“Well, to tell you—”

“Yes?”

“About Debs, Debs and what he said in the paper the other — the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I‘ve—” but he couldn’t go on. Not really. Not anymore.

In February, in Boston, they became secretly engaged. Stanley had come down by train and set himself up with rooms at the Copley Plaza just after Groundhog Day. After a week of hemming and hawing and discoursing on Jack London’s childhood, labor unions, black lung disease and the will he’d executed leaving all his moneys and possessions to be divided equally among the 14,000 McCormick workers, he put another hypothetical proposal to her and she amazed and exalted him by accepting. But only on the condition that they keep the engagement confidential till the end of the term, because the papers were sure to take it up — BOSTON SOCIALITE TO WED M‘CORMICK HEIR — and it would just be too much of a distraction in light of her thesis and exams. They had a celebratory dinner with Josephine, who swore to keep their secret and delivered a breathless monologue on the cruciality—Was that a word? of preserving the Dexter line, not to mention the Moores and McCormicks—And who were his mother’s people? — and how she hoped Katherine wouldn’t stop at four or five children, what with the threat of disease in the world today, and did Stanley know how they’d lost Katherine’s brother, the sweetest boy there ever was?

He did. And he hung his head and pulled mournfully at his cuffs and offered Josephine his handkerchief, but he was soaring, absolutely, no dogs in the mirror now. Katherine loved him. Incredibly. Improbably. Beyond all doubt or reason. He mooned at her across the table through the soup and fish courses and kept on mooning and beaming and winking till the dessert was in crumbs and the coffee cups drained, and after she’d pecked a goodnight kiss to the hollow of his right cheek, he phoned up an old friend from Princeton and went out to drink champagne into the small hours of the morning.

The next afternoon he was back at Katherine’s door, pale and shaking, his head stuffed full of gauze and his eyes aching in their sockets. No one was home and the maid wouldn’t let him in, so he sat on the stoop in a daze and watched a skin of ice thicken over a puddle in the street until Katherine came home and found him there. “I can’t let you do this,” he said, rising from the cold stone in a delirium of shame and self-abnegation.

She was in her furs and a scarf, the brim of her hat faintly rustling in a wind that came up the street from the Bay. “Do what?” she said. “What are you talking about? Her smile faded. ”And what are you doing out here in this weather — do you want to catch your death?“

Slouching, miserable, crapulous, chilled to the bone, his veins plugged with suet and his fingertips dead to all sensation, he could only croak out the words: “Marry me.”

She puzzled a minute, her bag and books clutched tight in her arms, her eyes working, her hat brim fluttering, and then she decided he was joking. “Marry you?” she echoed, talking through a grin. “Are you asking me again? Or is that the imperative form of the verb?”

“No, I… I didn’t mean that. I mean, I can’t let you do this to yourself, throw your life away, on, on someone like me.”

She tried to make light of it, tried to slip her arm through his and lead him up the stairs, but he broke away, his face working. “Stanley?” she said. And then: “It’s all right now. Calm down. Come on, let’s discuss it inside where it’s warm.”

“No.” He stood there shivering, fitfully clenching and unclenching his hands. There was ice in his mustache where his breath had condensed and frozen. “I don’t deserve you. I’m no good. I’ve never — I won’t ever… Didn’t you read my letters?”

The wind picked up. Two men in overcoats with bowlers clamped manually to their heads went by on the opposite side of the street. Katherine looked uncertain all of a sudden. “I have a confession to make,” she said, ducking her head and pulling at the fingers of her gloves. “I’m afraid I didn’t read them, not all of them. They were beautifully written, I don’t mean that… it’s just that they were so, I don’t know, depressing. Can you forgive me?”

Stanley was thunderstruck. He forgot everything, forgot where he was and what he was doing and why he’d come. “You didn’t read them?”

In the smallest voice: “No.”

A long moment passed, both of them shivering, a couple in a silver-gray victoria giving them a queer look as they trundled past in a clatter of wheels, hoofs and bells. From down the street came the voices of children at play, shrill with excitement. “Well, you should read them,” Stanley said, his face drawn and white. “Maybe then you’d… you’d change your mind.”

She was firm, Katherine, unshakable and tough, and now she did loop her arm through his. “I’ll never change my mind,” she said. “Here”—all business now—“help me with my things, will you, please?” She handed him her books before he could protest and tugged him toward the door.

He tucked the books firmly under his arm and allowed himself to be led up the steps, where Katherine let her handbag dangle from her wrist and rang the bell rather than fumble for her key. “The letters,” he said, and they weren’t finished with the subject yet. “They — they’re nothing, they barely scratch the surface. You don’t know. You can’t know. You see, I‘m”—he turned his head sharply away from her—“I’m a sexual degenerate.”

“Stanley, really,” she said, and the maid’s footsteps were audible now, echoing down the hallway like gunshots. “You have to calm yourself — it can’t be as bad as all that.”

He tried to pull away, but she held fast to him. “It is,” he cried in a kind of whinny, his frozen breath spilling from him like some vital essence. “And I have to tell you this, I have to,” the maid at the door now, the tumbler clicking in the lock. “In all honesty, I can‘t — what I mean is, Katherine, you don’t understand. I’m, I‘m”—and he dropped his voice to a ragged chuffing whisper—“I’m a masturbator.”

“Good afternoon, madame,” the maid said, pulling back the door. “And sir.”

Katherine’s face showed nothing. “Good afternoon, Bridget,” she said, ducking out from under the woolen scarf with a graceful flick of her neck and reaching up to unpin her hat in the vestibule with its mahogany-framed mirror, Tiffany lamp and Nottingham curtains. Stanley was staring down at the rug. “Bring us some tea in the parlor, would you?” she said, addressing the maid. “And some biscuits.”

“Oh, I can‘t—” Stanley said, still studying the pattern of the rug, “I really, I have to go, I—”

“We need to talk, Stanley.” There was no arguing with the the tone of Katherine’s voice. She made an impatient gesture. “Come, give Bridget your coat and we’ll sit by the fire — you must be chilled through.”

Again he let himself be led, slumped over and shuffling, a man of sixty, eighty, a hundred, his face transfigured with pain and mortification. She helped him to the couch and sat beside him. They listened in silence as the clock chimed the half hour — four-thirty, and starting to get dark. Stanley shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’m so dirty,” he groaned.

“You’re not. Not at all.”

“I’m not suited for marriage. I’ve done filthy things.”

She seized his hand, and she was as wrought-up as he was, but it wasn’t his revelation that disturbed her — certainly masturbation wasn’t a nice habit, not the sort of thing you’d discuss over dinner or cards, but she was a biologist, after all, and she took it in stride — no, it was the idea of it that got to her, the mechanics of the act itself. She kept picturing Stanley, alone in his room and touching himself and maybe even thinking of her while he was doing it, and that sent a thrill through her. She could see him, stripped to his socks, his long strong legs, the pale hair of his thighs and chest and abdomen, Stanley, her fiance, her man. She loved him. She wanted him. She wanted to be there in that bedroom with him.

He was inexperienced, like her, she was sure of it. And that was the beauty of the whole thing. Here he was, a big towering physical specimen of a male, and yet so docile and sweet, hers to lead and shape and build into something extraordinary, a father like her father. And there was no chance of that with Butler Ames and the rest — they were smirking and wise, overgrown fraternity boys who tried women on for size, like hats, and went to prostitutes with no more thought or concern than they went to the barber or the tailor. But Stanley, Stanley was malleable, unformed, innocent still — and that was why everything depended on getting him away from his mother, that crippling combative stultifying monster of a woman who’d made him into a pet and all but emasculated him in the process. He needed to get free, that was all, and then he could grow.

Katherine squeezed his hand as the maid clattered into the room with the tea things. “It’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Really. It’s your nerves, that’s all.”

The room was warm, secure, wrapped up in its particularity, suspended in time. Katherine waited till the maid had set down the things and left. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,” she whispered, and she wanted to kiss the side of his face, the bulge of his jaw, the place at the corner of his right eye where a lock of hair dangled like a thread of the richest tapestry, “because you have me now.”

In June, their engagement was officially announced, and the papers in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago all ran stories trumpeting their wealth, family connections and accomplishments, and a dozen smaller papers, including the Princeton Tiger, printed prominent notices. Stanley was described as “the Harvester Heir” in most of these accounts, a “motoring enthusiast” and “amateur artist,” and Katherine was, simply, “the Boston socialite and scientific graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The Boston Post decreed their engagement “a betrothal of the highest expectation and promise” and the Transcript was moved to pronounce it “the match of the year.”

Josephine was in her glory, fielding telegrams, canvassing caterers, bakers and florists and prattling her way across the Back Bay through one parlor after another. Nettie was less pleased. Her letters — separate letters — to Stanley and Katherine seemed to accept the betrothal as a fait accompli, but she made no bones about her disapproval of the match, especially in her letter to Katherine, in which she questioned her future daughter-in-law’s morals, education (there was too much of it), taste in millinery and footwear, dietary habits, religiosity and commitment to her last and most precious child. The word “love” never came up. As for Stanley, he seemed to be in permanent transit between Chicago and Boston, his nerves on edge, obsessing over the smallest details—“What sort of rice should we provide for the guests to shower us with, arborio or Texas long-grain?”—and every once in a while, dashing into the men’s room at the station or coming through the doors at the Copley Plaza, he began to think he was seeing that dog again in the glass. But he tried to brush it off — not to worry, the smallest of things — and instead concentrated on collecting all the announcements from the various newspapers and mounting them on red construction paper as a memento for Katherine. They set a date in the fall, the bride’s favorite season.

It was then, just when everything seemed to be going forward and all the major hurdles had been leapt, that things began to break down. Suddenly Stanley was having palpitations — he couldn’t seem to stop jittering, bouncing up off his feet, shaking out his fingers till they rattled like castanets, twisting his neck and gyrating his head in response to some frenetic inner rhythm — and all he could talk about was Mary Virginia. Mary Virginia and his genitals, that is.

He came bobbing and jittering into the house on Commonwealth Avenue early one morning two weeks or so after the engagement had been announced, his eyes fluttering, his face in flux, talking so fast no one could understand him. He frightened the maid, upset the cook and chased Josephine’s cat all the way up into the rafters of the attic in an excess of zeal. Katherine, who’d been dressing in her room, came out into the hall to see what the commotion was, and she watched Stanley dart past her up the stairs in pursuit of the cat, never even giving her a glance. When she caught up with him on the steps to the attic, he couldn’t seem to explain himself — he was afflicted with logorrhea, the words tripping over one another and piling up end to end, and he was going on and on about something she couldn’t quite catch, aside from the frequent repetition of his sister’s name. She’d never seen him like this — his eyes bugging out, his hair a mess, every cell and fiber of him rushing hell-bent down the tracks like a runaway freight train — and she was frightened. She managed to get him outside, out in the sunshine and fresh air, to try to walk it out of him, whatever it was.

They walked the length of Commonwealth Avenue, from the Public Garden to Hereford Square and back — or actually, it was more of a jog than a walk, Stanley setting an accelerated, stiff-kneed pace and Katherine clinging to his arm and struggling to keep up. The whole while Stanley kept shaking and trembling and running on about Mary Virginia and her illness and some sort of mysterious “whiteness,” as if she were lost in a blizzard somewhere instead of quietly ensconced with her nurse and doctor on a grand and faultless estate in Arkansas. It wasn’t till they’d passed the house for the second time, Stanley wet through with perspiration and the neighbors giving them looks that ranged from shock to alarm to amusement, that Katherine began to discern what he was driving at.

Leaping along, straining to look up into his face, her breathing labored and her mood beginning to fray, she managed to gasp out a little speech. “There’s no mental illness in my family, Stanley,” she wheezed on an insuck of breath. “On my mother’s or my father’s side, so the chances are very remote that our children will suffer, if that’s what’s worrying you, and it is, isn’t it?”

“She’s sick,” he said, never breaking stride. “Very sick.”

“Yes,” she gasped, “I know, and it’s right of you to bring it up now that we’re going to be married, but I really don‘t — can’t we stop here, just for a minute?”

It was as if she’d waved a flag in front of him or given a sudden jerk at a leash — he stopped as abruptly as he’d started, his feet jammed together, one arm clasped in hers, sweat standing out on his brow and his hat soaked under the brim in a dark expanding crescent. “It’s not just that,” he said, and he was talking not to her but to the ground beneath their feet. “It’s my genitals.”

“Your what?” They were stopped on the walk in front of a yard full of roses. Bees dug into the blossoms. The perfume of the flowers wafted out into the street. Everything had such an air of calm and normalcy — except Stanley. Stanley was making faces and staring down at his shoes. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except that two smart young women suddenly emerged from the yard under a trellis of white and yellow roses and gave them a long look before brusquely stepping around them.

“My genitals,” Stanley repeated.

Katherine studied him a moment, his nostrils like two holes drilled in his head, his eyes locked on the ground and every other part of him jerking into motion and relaxing again in a long continuous shudder. She waited till the women were out of earshot. “Yes,” she said. “All right. What about them?”

“I — well — I — what I mean is, maybe they’ve been… damaged.”

“Damaged? ”

“From, you know, from my habits—”

She was a patient woman. And she loved him. But this wasn’t the sort of romance she’d dreamed about, this wasn’t being swept off her feet and wooed with tender intimacies and anticipatory pleasures — this was psychodrama, this was crazy. It was hot and she was perspiring and she’d meant to go out with her mother and look at some lace for her trousseau, and now here she was making a spectacle of herself in the middle of the street and Stanley carrying on over nothing — yet again. She was fed up. The furrow she was unaware of crept into the gap between her eyebrows. “If you’re so worried,” she said, “then why don’t you go see a doctor,” and she turned and stalked off down the street without him.

He called her from his hotel later in the day to tell her he was taking her advice and catching the next train to Chicago to see a specialist and that he’d return at the end of the week and she shouldn’t worry. But by nightfall he was back on her doorstep, Bridget in hysterics, her mother’s face drawn up tight in a knot, and Stanley acting as oddly as he had that morning — or even more oddly. He’d boarded the train and gone as far as New London, he said, still talking as if a howling mob were at his heels and this was the last speech of his life, but then he’d got to thinking about their situation and had changed trains and come back because there were a few things that just couldn’t wait a week — or even another day.

She looked at him a long moment. “What things?” she asked, ushering him into the parlor and closing the door behind them.

He seemed confused, agitated, his movements jerky and clonic. He knocked over a vase of gladioli, water spreading a dark stain across the tabletop, and didn’t even seem to notice. “Things,” he said darkly. “Vital things. ”

She watched the water fan out, seeking the lowest point, and begin a slow, steady drip onto the carpet. She’d made a date with Betty Johnston to go visiting that evening and she was already impatient and exasperated. “You’ll have to be more specific, I’m afraid,” she said. “If I don’t know what these vague ‘things’ are, how can you expect me to discuss them with you?”

He kept shuddering and twitching, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a tightrope walker. “About us,” he said. “About our, about my—”

“Genitals?” she offered.

He averted his face. “You shouldn’t say that.”

“Say what? Isn’t that what this is all about? Your genitals? Not to mention hypochondria. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t that the subject under discussion? Didn’t you just leave this morning to go to a specialist and clear up the suspense?” Suddenly she felt very tired. The whole thing seemed hopeless, as if she’d been wrapped up in a blanket and pitched headfirst into the dark river that was Stanley, and no coming up for air. “Listen, Stanley,” she said, and she could hear the rustle of skirts in the hallway, her mother and Bridget listening at the door and fidgeting with their sleeves and buttons, “you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You’re acting crazy, don’t you realize that?”

He stopped his quivering then, automatically and without hesitation, and for the first time he seemed to notice the overturned vase and the dripping water, and when he bent for it she assumed he was going to set it upright, to rectify the problem and make amends. But when he lifted it from the table — heavy leaded crystal with a sharp crenellated edge — and kept lifting it till it was cocked behind his ear like a football, she couldn’t help opening her mouth and letting out a tightly wound shriek of fear and outrage even as the mirror behind her dissolved in a flood of silvered glass.

Her mother, the claws of disappointment raking her face, agreed that yes, it might be for the better if she were to go to Europe for a while to think things over. But it wasn’t the end of the world — everyone had second thoughts, “even your own mother, and look what a saint your father turned out to be.” It was normal — entirely normal — and nothing to cry over. So she should dry up her tears and pack her things and think of it as the vacation she so rightfully deserved after all those grinding hours she’d put in at the Institute. That’s right. Go ahead now. And hush.

The next morning, while Stanley was on his way to Chicago to consult his specialist about the arcana of his body and mind, Katherine directed Bridget and the two younger maids to begin packing her things for an indefinite stay at Prangins. She’d made up her mind — it was the only thing to do — and yet why did she feel so sick and miserable? She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat breakfast or lunch. She ached and creaked like a ship at sea, converting dry handkerchiefs to wet ones, her eyes and nose running in spate, and she spent the afternoon in bed with a headache. The maids tiptoed by the door and the clothing whispered in the hallway, the hatboxes, the steamer trunks, all these particles of her life in sudden motion. She lay there through the long afternoon, watching the curtains trace the sun, and she’d never felt so desolated in her life, not since her father and brother left this earth.

But there was no sense in crying — Stanley was too much for her, too big a reclamation project, she could see that now, and everything he was, the vision she had of him, lay shattered on the parlor floor. She had to get away, she knew that, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Because even while she grieved and fought to steel herself against him and the kind of life she’d hoped for, she kept thinking of him in the grip of his mother, of Nettie, the vampire who would drain him till he was a withered doddering white-haired husk of himself sitting at the foot of her deathbed and the dust gathering like snow. Katherine couldn’t let her do that to Stanley — no man deserved such a fate — and what’s more, she couldn’t just walk off and leave the playing field to Nettie. She was a Dexter, and the Dexters never quit on anything.

Suddenly she was up and scattering the maids, bending over the trunks and suitcases and unpacking in a raw fury of motion, each dress and skirt and shirtwaist returned to its hanger a lightening of the load, but that was no good either, and before long she found herself slowing and slowing until the process began to reverse itself and she was packing all over again. And why? Because she was going to Switzerland, to Geneva, to Prangins, and she was going to stay there until all this was sorted out and she could look at herself in the mirror and say that nothing in the world could compare to being Mrs. Stanley Robert McCormick. And if she couldn’t? If she honestly couldn’t? Well, there was always Butler Ames — or the Butler Ames who would come after him.

The shadows were lengthening on the wall and the house had fallen into a bottomless well of silence when Bridget stuck her head in the door. Did madame need assistance? Katherine looked up. There were dresses everywhere, an avalanche of them, hats, coats, scarves, shoes. “Yes,” she said, “yes,” and by nightfall order reigned, everything packed, filed and arranged and her passage booked on a steamer leaving for Cherbourg three days hence.

How Stanley got wind of it, she would never know. But as the gangplank was drawn up and the anchor weighed and her mother and the servants standing solemnly amongst the crowd and waving handkerchiefs in a slow sad sweep, he suddenly appeared, a foot taller than anyone on the quay, a giant among men, hurtling through the crowd on the full tilt of his manic energy. She was hanging over the rail with a thousand other passengers, a handkerchief pressed tragically to her face and one white-gloved hand waving, waving, already bound over to the smell of the sea, coal smoke, dead fish and third-class cookery. And there he was, Stanley, Stanley Robert McCormick, standing tall in the June sun, shouting up to her amidst the pandemonium of voices and engines and the two irrevocable blasts of the ship’s horn.

“Katherine!” he was shouting, and she could see his face and its diminished features as if from a cliff or the edge of a cloud, and somehow, even from that height, she could hear his voice piercing through the din as clearly as if he were standing beside her. “It’s all right,” he cried, waving something above his head, a sheet of paper, some sort of certificate, the boat drawing massively back now till it seemed as if it was the dock that was moving and she was stuck fast. “I can have”—and here the ship’s horn intervened, the rumbling metallic basso obliterating all thought and comprehension and Stanley’s voice trailing off into the faintest persistent whine of desperation and hope—“I can have children!”

6. OF DEATH AND BEGONIAS

O‘Kane was eating a steak at Menhoff’s on a wind-scoured November night when news of the Armistice came over the telegraph — belatedty, because the wires had been down since morning. The wind had kept people in, but there were a few couples having dinner under the aegis of Cody’s chaste white candles and the usual crowd out in the barroom swallowing pickled eggs and gnawing pretzels while their beers sizzled yellow and their shots of whiskey and bourbon stood erect beside them like good soldiers. Nothing short of the apocalypse would have kept that crowd from exercising their elbows, and O’Kane meant to join them after a while, but for the moment he was enjoying his steak and his French-cut potatoes and his first piquant glass of beer while the wind buffeted the windows and made the place feel snug as a ship’s cabin.

He was reading a bit in the paper about the completion of Las Tejas, a new Montecito palace modeled after the Casino of the sixteenth-century Villa Farnese in Viterbo, Italy, when Cody Menhoff himself came bursting out of the kitchen in a white apron singing, “The War’s over! The War’s over!” Actually, the dishwasher was the first to hear of it, beating a procession of shopowners, drummers and tomato-faced drunks by a matter of minutes. He’d been out back dumping a load of trash when he heard a hoot and looked up to see a pack of boys hurtling down the alley in a scramble of legs and white-capped knees, a flag flapping behind them like wash on a line. “What’s the news?” he shouted, though he’d already guessed, and one of the boys stopped banging two trashcan lids together long enough to tell him that the Huns had made it official. He’d relayed the news to Cody, and Cody, a big Dutchman with a face like a butterchurn, roared through the place and set up drinks on the house for all comers.

Before long there was a string of cars going up and down the street honking their horns, and the front room began to fill up, wind or no wind — and this wasn’t just a capricious breeze, this was a sundowner, the dried-out breath of the season that came tearing down out of the mountains in a regular cyclone, bane to all hats and shake roofs and the brittle rasping fronds of the palm trees. But there was no wind inside Menhoff‘s, except what the crowd was generating itself. People were cheering and making toasts and speeches and then somebody sat down at the piano and struck up the National Anthem and everybody sang along in a bibulous roar, and when they’d gone through it three times they sang “God Bless America,” “Yankee Doodle” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It was heady and glorious, and though O’Kane had planned on limiting himself to two shots only (things had been slipping away from him lately and he was trying to curb himself) there was no stopping him after that. He got into the spirit of things, slapping backs, crowing out jokes and limericks, dancing an improvised jig with Mart, who’d turned up just past nine with Roscoe and a glowing high-crowned face of victory. By ten O‘Kane was off in a corner, singing the old sad songs in a fractured moan of a voice, and when Roscoe came for him the next morning he had to vomit twice before he could get his suit on and go out to see how Mr. McCormick was receiving the news.

The celebration lasted a good six weeks, right on through Christmas. You could step into any place in town, from the lowest saloon with the pitted brass rail and the sawdust on the floor to Menhoff ’s and the dining room at the Potter, and there’d always be somebody there to raise a glass to the Armistice. And then it was Christmas, and you had to have a nip of the holiday cheer or you weren’t properly alive, and a week after that the New Year floated in on a sea of dago wine and a raft of nasty rumors about the Drys and Prohibition and the women’s vote, not to mention the influenza epidemic, and O‘Kane told himself he’d taper off as soon as the deal went through with Jim Isringhausen for the orange grove he’d been saving for all his adult life — or most of it, anyway — because he’d have to celebrate that and no two ways about it.

He never missed a single day’s work — only a drunk and an alcoholic boozer would fall down on his responsibilities like that — but he would go out to Riven Rock at eight A.M. with the fumes of his morning booster on his breath and practically beg Sam Wah to scramble him up a couple of eggs to settle his stomach. It was a bad time, his head always aching, the colors rinsed out of everything so that all the stage props of the paradise outside the door seemed faded and shabby, and he began to worry about winding up like his father, that flaming, bellicose, hamfisted lump of humanity sunk permanently into the daybed and unable to keep a job for more than two weeks at a time. He had to cut back, he really did. And throughout the winter he promised himself he would. Soon.

Mr. McCormick seemed to continue his gradual improvement during this period, though the news of the Armistice hit him hard on two accounts. For one, he could no longer follow the offensives and mark up his maps and bury his nose in five or six different newspapers each day, and that left a widening gap in his life, though Dr. Hoch tried to interest him in any number of things, from growing orchids and learning the clarinet to lawn bowling and crossword puzzles. The second thing was his wife. Now that the War was over and women on their way to getting the vote, there was no excuse for Katherine to be away from him for so long a time. She hadn’t been to Riven Rock since the previous Christmas, when he’d accused her in so many words of adultery, though she sent him weekly letters and packages of books, clothes, candies and new recordings for his Victrola. That was all right as far as it went. And Mr. McCormick appreciated it, but his wife was out there in the world and he wasn‘t, and the idea of it was a source of constant agitation, a low flame flickering under a pot and the water inside simmering to a boil.

O‘Kane was in the upper parlor with Mr. McCormick, Mart and Dr. Hoch one day three weeks after the Armistice, when a letter from Katherine arrived with the morning mail. It had been a dull morning, Hoch unusually silent and Mr. McCormick fretting round and haunting the rooms like a caged animal, and even the movie had failed to materialize because Roscoe had a touch of the grippe and hadn’t been able to make the trip into Hollywood the previous evening, and there was nothing new from Flying A, just four years ago the biggest studio in the world and now about to fold up its wings and die. The winds were still blowing, tumbleweeds rocketing down out of nowhere and accumulating against the back door and every windowsill decorated with a ruler-perfect line of pale tan dust, and that made the atmosphere all the more oppressive. O’Kane’s head was throbbing and his throat so dry it felt like a hole gouged out of the floor of Death Valley, but still he made an effort to engage Mr. McCormick in conversation and even began a much-interrupted game of chess with him. And Dr. Hoch, recognizing Mr. McCormick’s restlessness as a symptom of something worse to come, ordered the sprinklers in the trees to be turned on, but instead of the usual anodynic whisper of falling water there was nothing but a kind of distant blast as of a firehose hitting a wall and the occasional tremor of the windowpanes as the wind attempted to make the glass permeable.

All three of them — O‘Kane, Mart and Dr. Hoch — watched as Mr. McCormick accepted the mail from the butler through the iron grid of the door and dropped into an easy chair to read through it. The first two letters apparently didn’t interest him, and after examining the return addresses and sniffing at the place where the envelopes had been sealed, he let them fall carelessly to the floor. But the third one was the charm, and after examining the writing on the face of the envelope for a long moment, he slit it open with a forefinger and settled down to read in a voice that was meant to be private but which kept breaking loose in various growls and squeals and a high scolding falsetto that seemed like another person’s voice altogether. Mr. McCormick was some time over the letter, bits and pieces emerging into intelligibility now and then as his voice rose from a whisper to a shout and fell off again: Jane Roessing’s house — seven degrees above zero — you remember Milbourne — dog died — new hat — Mother down with influenza.

There was a silence when he’d finished, and into the silence Dr. Hoch projected a question: “Any news?”

Mr. McCormick looked up blankly. “It’s from K-Katherine.”

The doctor, owlish and quizzical: “Oh?”

‘She — she won’t be coming till the night before, or the day, that is, the day before Christmas. Too busy, she says. War business, you know, mopping up. The — the suffrage movement. She’s in Washington.“

“Ah, what a shame,” Dr. Hoch said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He hadn’t been feeling well himself lately, and he looked it, pale and shrunk into his collar, his face wrinkled and sectioned like a piece of fruit left out to dry in the sun. There was pain in his eyes, a cloudy scrim of it, and the dullness of resignation. He’d confided to O‘Kane that he’d taken the job at Riven Rock for health reasons — the Pathological Institute had become too much for him, and the climate here, amongst the celebrated Santa Barbara spas, was bound to do him good. But it wasn’t doing him much good as far as O’Kane could see — his beard had gone from gray to white inside of a year and the only thing you saw in his face was the scar, which seemed to grow more intense and luminous as the rest of his flesh shrank away from it. Amazingly, he was two years younger than Meyer, but anyone would have taken him for Meyer’s father. Or grandfather even. And another thing — he wasn’t a Kraut, but a Swiss, and so was Meyer, though they both talked Kraut, and he’d explained to O‘Kane that German was the language of his part of Switzerland, near Basel, and that some Swiss spoke French and others Italian. O’Kane had just shaken his head: every day you learn something new.

Mr. McCormick was still sunk into the easy chair, Katherine’s letter draped across his chest, his legs splayed and his eyes sucked back into his head. He’d been agitated all morning, and now he was looking unhinged, every sort of disturbing emotion playing across his face. O‘Kane braced himself.

“A shame,” Hoch repeated, “but at least you can look forward maybe to speak with her on the phone just at Christmas and then you will share the intimacy of her voice, no?”

“She’s a bitch!” Mr. McCormick snapped, leaping out of the chair with a wild recoil of legs and arms, and he rushed up to the doctor and stood trembling over him as he tore the letter to pieces and let the pieces rain down on the doctor’s white, bowed head. “I hate her!” he raged. “I want to kill her!”

“Yes, yes, well,” Dr. Hoch murmured, never moving a muscle, “we all have our disappointments, but I’m sure you will feel very much different when she is here in this house and you are speaking with her on the telephone apparatus. But now, well”—and he clapped his hands together feebly—“I’m not feeling so very good as I might and I was thinking maybe we all go for a ride, what do you think, Mr. McCormick? All of us together — Mr. O‘Kane, Mr. Thompson, you and me? For the change of scenery, yes? What do you say?”

Mr. McCormick’s face changed in that instant. He looked to O‘Kane and Mart and then back to the doctor with an enthusiast’s grin. He liked his ride, but in Dr. Brush’s time — and now Hochs — the rides were few and far between, because they were dangerous and a whole lot of bother for everyone concerned. Mr. McCormick, of course, had to be watched every second, wedged between O’Kane on the one side and Mart on the other, while the doctor, be it Hamilton, Brush or Hoch, was obliged to sit up front with Roscoe.

“Yes,” Mr. McCormick said, grinning wide round his decaying teeth — he hated dentists with an unreasoning passion and put up such a fight the doctors had all but given up on having his teeth treated — yes, I think I’d like that. I’d like that very much. For a, a change, sure. I’ll order Roscoe to bring one of the cars round. And we can take a lunch in paper sacks — can’t we?“

Mr. McCormick always took a while getting himself from one place to another — it was one of his quirks — and both O‘Kane and Mart had to help him choose the proper hat, gloves and overcoat and reassure him that he looked fine, absolutely fine and splendid, and that the weather outside wasn’t really anything to concern himself over. “It’s not like we’re in Waverley anymore,” O’Kane joked, and then he and Mart had him at the barred door to his quarters, and the keys turning in the locks.

There was no trouble, not on the stairs anyway, and Mr. McCormick, who’d just last month turned forty-four in a big fraternal celebration in the theater building, was looking every bit the lord of the manor with the hair silvering at his temples and a slate-colored felt hat that brought out the keenness of his eyes. He stood up straight for a change, with his shoulders squared and his head held high, and he didn’t drag his right foot or stop in the middle of the stairway and back up two steps for every one he went down — one of his favorite tricks. No, he was the soul of propriety until Torkelson, the butler, opened the front door for him, and then he was off, slipping out of O‘Kane’s grip like a Houdini and darting right past Roscoe and the waiting car.

This was nothing new. Probably half the time he got out of the house for his walks or the trip over to the theater building for a concert or movie, he’d break into a run and O‘Kane and Mart would have to run along with him, as if they all three were training for the marathon. Dr. Hamilton had felt that the running would do Mr. McCormick “a world of good” and that the staff should give him his head, so long as he didn’t break for the bushes or attempt to leave the property. Brush didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, and Hoch, in his Kraut — or Swiss — enthusiasm for physical suffering, concurred with Hamilton’s feelings on the subject. And so Mr. McCormick ran, and O’Kane ran with him — which at least had the unforeseen benefit of burning the whiskey out of his pores.

On this morning, though, Mr. McCormick got the jump on both him and Mart, and by the time they got around the car he was streaking up the drive, at least fifty yards ahead of them. “Wait up, Mr. McCormick! O‘Kane shouted, his temples already feeling as if they were about to explode. ”What about our drive?“

If Mr. McCormick heard him, he gave no sign. He just kept on, running in a flat-out sprint, running as if all his judges and demons were flocking after him, and he didn’t head for the main gate but instead surprised O‘Kane by lurching to his left, plunging deeper into the property. The road that way led to the stone garage that was set back away from the house in a grove of trees, and then it branched off to the west toward Ashley Road and the far side of the property. O’Kane chugged along, Mart at his side. “The son of a bitch,” he cursed. “Why today of all days? My head feels as big as a balloon.”

Mart, whose head wasas big as a balloon, just grunted, trotting along in his dogged, top-heavy way. “He’s heading toward the Ashley gate,” he observed in a wheezing pant, and O‘Kane looked up to see their employer wheeling again to his left and disappearing up the long snaking drive that bisected the estate. And that got his heart pounding, because that was where the nearest house was, Mira Vista, and there were women there now, imperious pampered overfed society women — women like Katherine.

O‘Kane gave it all he had, but he wasn’t worth much that morning, and he would have been the first to admit it. Sam Wah’s salvatory eggs were coming up in his throat like a plug, like something evil he was giving birth to, and his legs had begun to go numb from the hip sockets down when he became aware of a rumble and squeal at his back and turned to watch Roscoe motor on by in a farting blast of fumes, Dr. Hoch wired into the seat beside him with his beard flapping in the breeze through the open window. O’Kane kept going, though Mart had fallen by the wayside. He followed the dwindling rear panel of the big Pierce car until the gate appeared down a stretch of concrete road all hemmed in by trees and the car began to get larger again. A moment later he was there, choking for breath, feeling just exactly like the victim of an Indian uprising with six or seven arrows neatly stitched into his lungs, his groin and his liver.

Roscoe was still at the wheel, pale and washed out from his bout of the grippe, but Dr. Hoch was standing there at the open gate with Mr. McCormick, and Mr. McCormick didn’t even seem to be sweating. “What the—” O‘Kane panted, Ringing himself against the hood of the car for support. “What—?”

“Oh, Eddie,” Mr. McCormick said, his eyes gone away to hide in his head again. “Hi. I was just — I thought — well, we should go out this gate today, so I–I came to open it, because we should see the begonias, the new begonias—”

O‘Kane was stunned. He was obliterated. He had maybe nine breaths more to draw on this earth and then it was over. “Begonias’?” he wheezed.

Mr. McCormick gestured for him to turn round and look behind him. Bewildered, O‘Kane slowly pivoted and gazed back down the road that fled away into the distance and to the moving stain that was Martin Thompson limping there at the far end of it. And sure enough, there they were, a whole fresh-planted double row of them on either side of the pavement and stretching all the way back to Mart and beyond: begonias.

And then Christmas fell on them from the realms of space, the earth twisting round the sky and Aldebaran bright and persistent in the eastern sky, the season festive, the stuffed goose, the songs and drinks. Marshall Fields’ in Chicago sent out a decorated Christmas tree and foil-wrapped presents for the whole staff (which now numbered fourteen in the household and forty-seven on the grounds), along with the usual baubles and candies and tan-shelled Georgia pecans, and baskets of prime California navels that had traveled from the San Fernando Valley to Chicago and back to California again. Outside, on the front lawn, the big Monterey pine, as wide around at the base as two men fully outstretched till their fingertips met on either side, was festooned with multicolored lights and set ablaze in the night. O‘Kane sent his mother a sweater of virgin wool and a porcelain reproduction of the State of California flag for his father, and he sent Eddie, Jr. a jackknife care of his mother and not Rosaleen, who couldn’t be trusted with anything you didn’t tie round her neck with a note attached to it. And he found a filigreed bracelet in fourteen-carat white gold for Giovannella, who refused it on the grounds that Guido would want to know where it came from. “I’ll wear it only for you, Eddie,” she said. “When we’re alone. In bed.”

Katherine came and went in her customary storm of gifts, complaints and commands, but not before O‘Kane had the opportunity to listen in on her annual conversation with her husband — this time from her end of the line. It was the day before Christmas and she’d just arrived, late as usual, and that hurt Mr. McCormick to the quick and she didn’t even seem to notice. The windows were smeared with rain, it had been dark for an hour or so, and O’Kane was drunk, drunk on the job, and God help him if the Ice Queen were to pin him down with one of her endless interrogations and catch a whiff of it on his breath. He shouldn’t have been drinking, and he knew it, but it was Christmas and Sam Wah was brewing a wicked pungent rum punch with raisins and slivers of orange peel floating round the top of it and half the people on the estate were slipping in and out the back door stewed to the gills. And besides, he was depressed. It was his tenth Christmas in California, ten years of nursing and drinking and getting nowhere. He wasn’t rich yet or even close to it, he didn’t own an orange grove or an avocado ranch, his one son was an alien to him all the way across the country in Boston and the other one was named Guido — and why not get drunk?

Anyway, he was sneaking out of the kitchen and through the back hall to the central stairway after quaffing his sixth murderous cup of hot Chinese Christmas punch, when he heard Katherine’s voice and froze. It wasn’t as if he was surprised to see her — they’d all been tiptoeing around and looking over their shoulders since early that morning, even Hoch — but he was half hoping she wouldn’t come at all. She didn’t bring anybody a lick of happiness — just the opposite — and it was his opinion, shared by Nick, Pat and Mart, that Mr. McCormick would have been better off without her. The way he’d paced and fretted and worked away at himself with the soap that morning was just pathetic, as if he was afraid she could smell him over the line. He was so excited he hadn’t been able to eat his breakfast and pushed everything but the soup away at lunch, and he barely noticed the little gifts the employees had given him — Ernestine Thompson had knitted him a scarf from her and Nick, Mart gave him a pencil sharpener, and O‘Kane, in a symbolic gesture, presented him with a keychain inscribed with the legend WHEN ALL THE DOORS OPEN TO YOU. They were nothing more than tokens really, but in past years Mr. McCormick had made a big deal over them.

“What do you mean by that?” Katherine’s voice rose in anger. Edging out into the entrance hall, O‘Kane could see movement in the library beyond. It was Katherine, and her back was to him. She held the telephone in one stiff ice-sculpted hand, tilting her head forward to speak into the mouthpiece. Torkelson was stationed just outside the door like a cigar-store Indian, his face wiped clean of all interest or emotion, a butler to the core. He was staring right at O’Kane, but he never even blinked.

“I will not be talked to in that tone of voice, Stanley, I just won’t…. What did you say? Do you want me to hang this phone up right now? Do you?… All right, now that’s better. Yes, I do love you, you know that—”

O‘Kane watched her shoulders, the movement of her wrist as she manipulated the receiver, the light gathered in her hair. He knew he should hightail it up the stairs before she turned and spotted him, but he didn’t. He was caught there, fascinated, like a boy in the woods watching the processes of nature unfold around him. There were birds in the trees, toads at his feet, snakes in the grass.

“Now Stanley — no, absolutely not. How many times do we have to go through this? I haven’t seen or heard of Butler Ames in God, ten years and more, and no, I haven’t been to dinner with Secretary Baker…. I resent the implication, Stanley, and if you’re going to — no, absolutely not. Newton Baker is a friend, an old friend of the family, and as Secretary of War under President Wilson he naturally came to instruct us from time to time, and we—”

There was a silence and Katherine shifted her weight from one foot to the other and turned her profile to the open door. Her face was pale and blanched, but she was wearing makeup and red lipstick and she looked dramatic in the lamplight, like a stage actress awaiting her cue. She was listening, and O‘Kane could imagine the sort of disjointed and accusatory speech Mr. McCormick must have been delivering on the other end of the line, and he watched as she held the receiver out away from her ear and tried to compose herself.

“Don’t you say a word abut Jane Roessing — she’s a saint, do you hear me?… That’s absolutely disgusting, Stanley, and I’m warning you, I am — really, I just don’t believe what I’m hearing. Everything is me, me, me — but did you ever stop to think what I’m going through?

“No, I’m not trying to upset you, I just want you to understand my position, to think for one minute what it must be like for me to have to go out in society without you on my arm, with no man at all, always the odd one out—

“Yes, I know you’re trying to get well. No. No, now I won’t listen to this, and you leave Jane out of it, she’s been a — I have nothing to hide. Yes, she is here. She’s come to keep me company at the hotel, and I promise you I won’t neglect you. I’ll be here every day for the next two weeks, and you just tell me what you need and I’ll—”

O‘Kane made his move then, trying to slip up the stairs while she was distracted, but even as he took the first tentative step he watched her face change—“No, she thundered, ”damn you, no; I’ve never… Jane is just a friend“—as she swung round to slam the receiver down on its hook and let the full furious weight of her gaze settle on him. He snapped his head round — he hadn’t seen her, didn’t even know she was back, he was just a nurse doing his duty — and he felt his legs attack the stairs in a series of quick powerful thrusts. And it almost worked, almost, because he was halfway up the staircase and the iron grid of the upper parlor door in sight when her voice, strained and distinctly unladylike, caught up with him. ”Mr. O’Kane,“ she called. ”Mr. O‘Kane, will you come here a minute, please?“

Slouching, hands thrust deep in his pockets, O‘Kane descended the stairs, crossed the entrance hall and passed within six inches of Torkelson where he stood pasted to the wall outside the library door (he could see the pores in the man’s face opening up like the craters of the moon and the fleshless nub of his butler’s nose, and he swore to himself if Torkelson so much as lifted his lip in anything even vaguely resembling a smirk he was going to slug him, if not now, then later). Torkelson never moved. He drifted away on O’Kane’s periphery and then O‘Kane was in the library, conscious of the peculiar odor of the books — calfskin and dust, the astringent ink and neutral paper — and of something else too, something unexpected: cigarette smoke. Katherine was brilliant, glaring, incinerated in light. She gave him a curt nod, stepped round him and called out, “You can go now, Torkelson,” before pulling the door shut.

O‘Kane’s senses were dulled. He felt as if he were wading through hip-deep water. He stood there stupidly, all the saturated neurons of his brain shutting down one by one, until he finally noticed that he and Katherine weren’t alone. There was another woman present, a redhead in a holly-green dress short enough to show off her legs from the knees down — very good legs, in fact, and O’Kane couldn’t help noticing. She was sitting in a wing chair against a wall of books and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder.

“It’s good to see you again, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, turning back to him, but she didn’t smile and she didn’t hold out her hand. She nodded brusquely to her companion. “Mr. O’Kane, Mrs. Roessing. Jane, Mr. O‘Kane.”

O‘Kane gave them each a tight little grin, the sort of grin the hyena might give the lion while backing away from a carcass on the ancestral plains. He was feeling woozy. Sam Wah must have poured half a gallon of rum into that punch — and God knew what else.

“Have a seat, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, and she was pacing back and forth now.

He did as he was told, lowering himself gingerly to the very edge of the wing chair opposite Mrs. Roessing.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m back,” Katherine said, “and that I plan to be here for the next two weeks, seeing to estate matters, and that Jane — Mrs. Roessing — will be assisting me. Then I’ve got to get back to Washington and don’t know when I’ll return. Now: how is my husband — in your opinion? Any change?”

“He’s more or less the same.”

“And what does that mean? No improvement at all?”

O‘Kane was ready to tell her what she wanted to hear, that her husband was advancing like a star pupil, making a nimble run at sanity, needing only time and money and the ministrations of girls, women and bearded hags to make him whole again, but the alcohol tripped him up. “A little,” he shrugged. “We’ve let him have a carpet in the upper parlor again, and he’s been very good about it. And he’s been running quite a bit — for his exercise.”

“Running?” She paused in mid-step, her eyes slicing into him.

“Yes. He seems to want to run lately — when we accompany him on his daily walk, Mart and me, that is. And we took him for a drive a few weeks back, and he seemed to enjoy it.”

“And that’s it? That’s the extent of his improvement as you see it — running? Well let me tell you, I’ve just got off the phone with him and he seems as confused as ever — or more so. And irritating”—this for the redhead, with a nod and a martyred look. “Stanley can be irritating.”

“With all due respect, Mrs.”—he almost slipped and called her Katherine—“Mrs. McCormick, and I’m no doctor, but I do feel your presence excites him and he’s not himself, not at all—”

Another look for Mrs. Roessing. “Yes, that’s what every male doctor and every male nurse has been telling me for twelve years and more now. ”

Katherine surprised him then — shocked him, actually. Suddenly she had a cigarette in her hand, as if she’d conjured it out of thin air, and she crossed the room to Mrs. Roessing and asked her for a light in a low hum that said all sorts of things to him. He watched in silence as the two women bent their heads together and Katherine lit her cigarette from the smoldering tip of Mrs. Roessing’s.

“And Dr. Hoch,” Katherine said, exhaling. “His health, I mean — he’s holding up? Spending time each day with my husband?”

O‘Kane looked from one woman to the other. He hadn’t even heard the question. Katherine was smoking. He’d never dreamed — not her. She might have been Queen of the Ice Queens, but she was a lady, a lady above all — and ladies didn’t smoke. But then he’d suspected all along that this sort of thing went hand-in-hand with marching in the streets and emancipation and all the rest of it. Radicals, that’s what they were. Pants wearers. She-men.

“Mr. O‘Kane?”

“Hm?”

Katherine’s face was like an ax. It chopped at him in the screaming light. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

He tried to put on one of his faces, Eddie O‘Kane of the silver tongue, one of the world’s great liars. “Noooo,” he protested. “I, just — I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all.”

That brought the redhead to her feet, those fine legs flexing, the holly-green dress in a frenzy of motion. The two exchanged a look. “You haven’t been running a fever, have you?” It was Mrs. Roessing talking now, and she had one of those elemental voices that gets inside you to the point where you want to confess to anything. “A kind of grippe of the lower stomach? Runs?”

O‘Kane was confused. His face was hot. Both women loomed over him. “I — no. No, it’s not that, it’s, uh — my head. My head aches, that’s all. Just a bit, the tiniest bit.”

“The chauffeur — Roscoe — he was ill, wasn’t he?

O‘Kane nodded.

“The grippe?”

“That’s right.”

Katherine spoke up again now, and her face was so pale you would have thought she’d been embalmed. “And my husband? He, he hasn’t been sick—?”

And that was how O‘Kane, drunk on Chinese Christmas punch and caught between two fraught and ashen women, learned that the Spanish influenza, which was to kill twice as many people worldwide as the War itself, had arrived in Santa Barbara.

One of the first to go was Mrs. Goux, the thick-ankled woman from the winery who trundled up and down the street each morning with an air of invincibility, trailing children and parcels and one very dirty white dog. She left behind a distraught husband and a grief-addled brood of seven, all of them howling from the upstairs windows that gave onto State Street across from Mrs. Fitzmaurice‘s, and that was depressing enough, but before anybody could catch their breath the husband and four of the children died writhing in their blankets with temperatures of a hundred and a six. Then it was Wilson, the greengrocer, a man in his thirties with the shoulders of a fullback and great meaty biceps who’d never been sick a day in his life. He told his wife he was feeling a little dyspeptic the day after Christmas and she chalked it up to overindulgence, plain and simple, and wouldn’t hear a word of the hysteria boiling up around her — not until he died two days later, that is. Their eldest son came down with it next — he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen — and Wilson’s brother Chas, who ran the ice company, and Chas’s wife, and they were all three of them dead and laid out by the New Year.

O‘Kane was spooked. He walked by Wilson’s and the shutters were down and a black wreath hanging on the door, and from the front door at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s he could see the sheet of paper taped to the window of the winery: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The streets were deserted. Menhoff’s was like a tomb. And Fetzer’s Drugstore sold out of gauze masks in fifteen minutes. But how did you catch the ’flu in the first place? From other people. And how did they catch it? From other people. And the first one, the very first case — how did he catch it? Mart was of the opinion that it was a judgment of God, “because of the War and all,” and Nick said it was demobilization that was spreading it. Mrs. Fitzmaurice put it down to uncleanliness, and no use discussing it further — you didn’t see anybody in her house coming down with it, did you? O‘Kane took a pint of whiskey up to his room each night and lay on the bed and brooded, and when New Year’s Eve rolled around he went out and celebrated with a crowd that was so scared they had to drain every bottle in sight just to reassure themselves.

At Riven Rock, they were relatively lucky. Only Mart and one of Sam Wah’s kitchen boys — a moonfaced kid known only as Wing — came down sick. Mart was laid up for a week and a half in the back room at his brother Pat’s house, and Pat’s wife Mildred wrapped him in cold towels to bring down the fever and poured hot chicken broth down his throat when he broke out in shivers. Wing died. That was a terrible thing — he was just a boy, Wing, with a quick smile, a thin trailing braid of hair like Paul Revere’s in the old lithographs and not a word of English — and it hit everybody hard, but none harder than Katherine. Not on Wing’s account — she didn’t even know him except as a name in the accounts-payable column in the weekly pay ledger — but on Mr. McCormick’s. The infection was in the house, not out in the fields or festering in the gutters and saloons, but right here at Riven Rock. It had struck Mart and Wing. It could strike her husband.

The thought seemed to galvanize her. She postponed her return to Washington for the duration of the epidemic, and for the first week, when the fear was fresh and new, she burst through the doors at Riven Rock each morning at eight, Mrs. Roessing, two maids and Dr. Urvater, one of the local sawbones, in tow. All of them were wearing gauze masks—“The ‘flu is spread pneumonically,” she kept saying, “as much or more than by direct contact”—and she insisted that the whole staff, including a champing and furious Sam Wah, wear masks as well. And while Dr. Urvater depressed Mr. McCormick’s tongue and looked into his ears and chatted amicably with Dr. Hoch about cheeses and leder-hosen and such, Katherine swept through the lower rooms in a flurry of servants and a powerfully salubrious odor of disinfectant. Every surface was wiped down with a solution of bleach or carbolic acid, and the doorknobs, bannisters, telephones and light switches were swabbed hourly. She was a scientist. She was an Ice Queen. And the ’flu had better take notice.

For his part, O‘Kane did as he was told. He wore a gauze mask, looked suitably grave and made a show of turning doorknobs with a bleach-soaked cloth in hand, but the minute Katherine left for the day or he ascended the stairs and entered Mr. McCormick’s sanctum, he peeled off the mask and tucked it in his pocket. He’d never seen anything like this epidemic — every time you turned around you heard about somebody else dropping down dead — and it scared him, it did, but to his mind Katherine was taking things a bit far. He had no fears for himself — he had his father’s constitution and nothing could touch him, unless it came out of a bottle, and there was no degree of luck in the world that could save you from that — but he was afraid for Mr. McCormick, even if he did think the masks and disinfectant were just a lot of female hysteria. The rest of the staff shared his fears, though nobody wanted to talk about it. Mr. McCormick might have been crazy as a bedbug, but he was the rock and foundation of the place, and if he fell, how many would fall with him?

Their employer and benefactor seemed fine, though — hale and hearty and in the peak of health. On doctor’s orders (and Katherine‘s, working behind the scenes) he wasn’t allowed out for his walks or even to go to the theater building until all this blew over, and that made him a touch irritable. He took to wearing his gauze mask atop his head, like a child’s party hat, and he toyed with Dr. Urvater over the tongue depressor and the thermometer, clamping down like a bulldog and refusing to let go until Dr. Hoch pushed himself up from the couch and intervened. Every day he talked with Katherine on the phone, she in the downstairs parlor with her carbolic acid and he a floor above her, and that seemed to have an exciting effect on him, but as far as O’Kane could see he didn’t develop so much as a sniffle, let alone the ‘flu.

“I think she’s going way overboard,” Nick said one morning as he and O‘Kane were waiting for Mr. McCormick to finish up his shower bath. He was filling in for Mart on the day shift, while Pat sat alone with Mr. McCormick through the nights. “Rubbing down the god-damned doorknobs, for Christ’s sake. But better too much too soon than too little too late, that’s my motto.”

“I know what you mean,” O‘Kane said, standing at the door to the shower room, just out of reach of the spray. Mr. McCormick was crouched naked over the wet tiles, meticulously soaping his toes, and O’Kane was reflecting on how he’d spent more of his adult life looking at Mr. McCormick in the nude than at any woman, and that included Giovannella and his long-lost wife. “We’d be in hot water if anything happened to him. I’ll be all right once I get in on this citrus ranch I was telling you about — Jim Isringhausen’s only looking to line up a couple more investors — but if I wasn’t working here, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d hate to have to go back to mopping up shit and blood on the violent ward.”

“Amen.” Nick let out a sigh. He was leaning back against the tile wall, droplets of condensation forming on his eyebrows and the fine pickets of hair that stood guard above the dome of his forehead. He was blocky and big, still muscular but running to fat in his haunches and around the middle because all he and Pat ever did was sit by Mr. McCormick’s bed all through the night and then sleep when everybody else was up and about. And he wasn’t getting any younger. “Yeah, I’d be in a fix if anything happened to Mr. McCormick, and so would Pat and Mart. Of course, not everybody would be so bad off if he went and kicked the bucket.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, a sly look creeping across his face, “her, for instance. You know: your sweetheart.”

“Katherine?”

He nodded, watching for a reaction. “Makes you wonder why she’s playing Florence Nightingale around here, doesn’t it? If he was to go, she’d be the one to get everything, the houses and the cars and more millions than you could count. And no more crazy husband.”

Nick had a point, but it only confirmed what O‘Kane had maintained all along — Katherine really cared about her husband’s welfare, and it wasn’t just an act, say what you would about her. And he wondered about that and what it meant, especially when he thought about Dolores Isringhausen and how she treated her husband — or Rosaleen, or even Glovannella and her little shoemaker. Women were conniving and false, and he’d always believed that — all of them, except his mother, that is, and maybe the Virgin Mary. And every marriage was a war for dominance — who loved who and who loved who the most — a war in which women always had the upper hand, always scheming, always waiting for the chance to stab you in the back. But not Katherine. Not the Ice Queen. She had her husband right where she wanted him — in a gilded cage — and no sick canary ever got better care.

“By the way,” Nick said, and Mr. McCormick had begun to sing to himself now, a tuneless low-pitched moan that could have been anything from a highbrow symphony to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “did you hear about the wop shoemaker? You know, the one with the little wife, you, uh—” and he let his hands round out the phrase.

“What about him?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“No, what?”

“He’s dead. Two, three days ago. Ernestine told me because she went to get her boots resoled and there’s a wreath on the door of the place and all these Guineas beating their breasts and hollering in the street. It’s a shame, it really is, and I don’t think any of us are safe anymore — not till this thing burns itself out or it gets all of us, every last one, and then we won’t have nothing to worry about, will we?”

O‘Kane had Roscoe drop him off in front of Capolupo’s Shoe Repair as soon as he got off his shift, but the place was closed and shuttered and there was no answer at the door to the apartment above. He rattled the doorknob a few times, pounded halfheartedly at the windowframe, and then, for lack of a better plan, sat down to wait. He’d worked overtime to help cover for Mart, and it was late — quarter past nine — and he couldn’t imagine where Giovannella would be, unless they hadn’t buried the shoemaker yet and there was some sort of Guinea wake going on someplace. He leaned back, wishing he’d thought to pick up a pint of something or even a bottle of wine, and pulled the collar of his jacket round his throat. It was cold, cold for Santa Barbara anyway, probably down in the mid-forties. He listened to the night, the sick bleat of a boat horn carrying across the water from the harbor, the ticking rattle of a car’s exhaust, a cat or maybe a rat discovering something of interest in the alley below, and all the while he thought about Giovannella and what he would say to her. And just thinking about her and how she’d be free now to come to him anytime, day or night, and no excuses or explanations for anybody, was enough to spark all sorts of erotic scenarios in his head, and he saw her climbing atop him, her lips puffed with pleasure, nipples hard and dark against her dark skin, it’s like riding a horse, Eddie, come on, horsie, come on—

He couldn’t marry her, of course, and she knew that — it would be bigamy, even though she was trotting around town with his green-eyed son in a pair of kneepants and you’d have to be blind not to know it was his son and nobody else‘s — but for half an hour or so he thought how it might be to take up housekeeping with her somewhere far enough away so nobody would know the difference. They could get a place in Carpenteria, seven miles to the south and right on the ocean, with that sweet breeze fanning the palms and everything so small and quiet, and just claim they were man and wife, and who was going to dispute it? But then he’d have to get a car, and renting a house — that would be something, like moving in with Rosaleen and Old Man Rowlings all over again, the baby squalling, shit strewn from one end of the place to the other…

At ten-thirty, chilled through and thoroughly disgusted with himself — and with Giovannella and even Guido for having the bad grace to die off and stir the pot like this — O‘Kane pushed himself up and went back along the hushed and empty streets to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The place was dark, but for the light in the entrance hall, and he let himself in with exaggerated caution, wondering vaguely if there was anything left in the emergency bottle he kept on the floor behind the bureau — and he was picturing it, actualizing that amber bottle in his mind — when he saw that there was a package for him on the table in the hall.

It was small, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and with a slight heft to it, more than paper would carry anyway. Dirty white tape was double- and triple-wrapped around the outside of it and he could see the imprint of a thumb under a loop of tape and a few stray hairs trapped beside it in the film of glue. He recognized the handwriting immediately: Rosaleen’s. For a moment he hesitated, turning the thing over in his hand. This couldn’t be what it felt like — a gift, a belated Christmas gift, maybe from Eddie Jr. — no, it couldn’t be. If Rosaleen had anything to do with it, it was going to be the sort of thing he’d be better off looking at tomorrow, in the light of day, when Giovannella wasn’t so much in his mind.

He shifted the package from one hand to the other, looking off down the length of the dark parlor with its spidery plants and dim furniture and the rugs that had been beaten to within an inch of their lives. What the hell, he thought, and he sat in the stiff chair in the hallway and tore the thing open. The tape slipped away from his fingers, the paper fell to the floor. And now he was even more bewildered than he’d been a moment ago: here was the jackknife he’d sent to Eddie Jr., come right back to his hand like a boomerang. But wait, there was more, a message, a note curled up like a dead leaf inside the husk of tape and wrapping paper and inscribed in the smudged semiliterate scrawl that spoke so eloquently of Rosaleen’s innermost being:

Deere Eddie:

I cannot live a lie anymore. I never wrote you in sept. but the spannish flue hit here and our son died of it. He was burried in the St. Columbanus cemetary and I never told your mother or anybody heres the Jack nife back he would of loved it.

Yours, etc Rosaleen

He didn’t have a chance to react, because at that moment somebody began tapping insistently at the window set in the front door. (And how was he supposed to react anyway — fall to his knees, tear his hair out, bemoan his fate to the heavens? The sad truth was that he’d never known his son. A stranger had died someplace, that was all, and so what if he had Eddie O‘Kane’s eyes and his walk and the look of him when he smiled or brooded or skinned his knee and came running to his mother with the tears wet on his face? So what?)

The tapping grew louder—chink-chink-chink-chink—and he dropped the letter and drifted stupidly toward the door. There was a face pressed to the glass in the dark of the night, the image of his own wondering face superimposed over it. It took him a minute, because he was thinking of ghosts, of the disinterred spirits of little deserted bare-legged boys dead of the epidemic ‘flu and come back to haunt him, and then he realized who it was tapping with a coin at the brittle glass and not a thought to Mrs. Fitzmaurice sleeping the wakeful sleep of the eternally vigilant at the end of the hall: it was Giovannella.

She was saying something, mouthing the words behind the glass to the accompaniment of a series of frantic gestures. She had to see him — she wanted to — did he know?

He opened the door and there she was, brushing past him and into the hallway with her broad beautiful face and her eyes that knew everything about him, and Guido, little Guido, his only surviving son, thrown over her shoulder like something she’d picked up at the market, like so many pounds of pork roast or beef brisket. As soon as he’d closed the door she whirled round on him and clutched at his neck with her free hand, crushing her mouth to his, and it was theatrical and wild and it brought his attention into the sharpest of focus. “He’s dead,” she hissed, throwing back her head to look him in the eye. “He’s dead of the ‘flu.”

He put a finger to his lips. Mrs. Fitzmaurice would be pricking up her ears, past ten o‘clock at night and a strange woman in the house, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, who was raging and furious and sexless as a boot. “Shhhh!” he warned, half-expecting to see the landlady stationed behind him in her declamatory nightgown that fell to the floor and beyond. “I know.”

She pressed into him again, held him tight, little Guido sandwiched between them, the heat of her and her odor like no other woman‘s, cloves, garlic, vanilla, onions frying to sweetness in the pan. “I’m scared, Eddie,” she whispered. “Guido… I… I nursed him, and he died burning up with the fever and so sad and pathetic he couldn’t open his mouth to say a word to me or even the priest, no last words, no nothing… and the smell of him — it was horrible, like he was all eaten up inside and nothing left of him but shit.” She was trembling, a vein pulsing at the base of her throat, the hair fallen loose under the brim of her hat and slicing into her eyes. “I’m afraid I might’ve… or little Guido, Eddie, our son. They say you can catch it just by walking past somebody on the street, and you have to understand, Eddie, I nursed him, I nursed Guido.”

Her eyes were two revolving pits, two trenches draining everything out of her face, and she wouldn’t let go of him. He was scared too. First Eddie Jr. and now this — what if she did catch it? What if she died, like Wilson and Mrs. Goux and Wing? What then? He looked over his shoulder, down the hallway to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s door, everything soft and indistinct in the dim light of the lamp. “You’re young and strong,” he heard himself saying. “If you get it, you’ll shake it off. Like Mart. Did I tell you about Mart?”

“I’m a widow, Eddie,” she said.

He nodded. She was a widow. Widowhood. Viduity. That was the state she was in, a sorry state, twenty-eight years old and bereft, and with a son to raise.

“We can be together now.”

He nodded again, but he didn’t know why. He wanted to tell her about Eddie Jr., about the regret that was ripening inside him till it was about to turn black and become something else, something rotten and despairing, something cold, something hard. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. And he tried to pull away from her — just to breathe — but she wouldn’t let go.

“Did you hear what I said?”

Looking down, looking at her feet in a pair of dusty old high-buttoned shoes some customer must have left behind at the shop: “I heard. But listen, let’s go outside and talk so Mrs. Fitzmaurice—”

“I don’t want to go outside. I want to be here. With you. Look,” she said, backing off a step and stripping the child away from her shoulder so he could see the fat infantile face staring sleepily into his own, “your son, Eddie. He’s your son and you’re my husband. Don’t you understand? I’m a widow. Don’t you know what that means?”

“I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”

He watched the lines gather in her forehead while her eyes narrowed and her mouth drew itself tight. “I spit on your marriage,” she said, swinging wildly away from him, and he was afraid she was going to knock over one of the darkened lamps, afraid she was going to wake the house, stir up Mrs. Fitzmaurice, turn everything in his life upside down.

He told her to shut up, to shut the fuck up.

She told him to go to hell.

And who was that now? Somebody at the head of the stairs — was it Maloney? — and an angry voice looping down at them like a lariat. “Keep it down, will ya? People are tryin’ to sleep up here.”

“Come on,” he whispered, “let’s talk about it outside.”

“No. Right here. Right now.”

He rolled his eyes. He was tired. He was angry. He was disappointed. “What do you want from me? You want me to move you into a new brick house tonight, with new curtains and furniture brand-new from the store with the paper wrapping still on it? Is that what you want?”

She stood there immovable, black widow’s weeds, the black veil caught like drift on the crown of her hat, the child fat and imperturbable and staring at him out of his own eyes.

“Come on,” he coaxed, “let’s go over to Pat’s and talk things out where we can be comfortable, and we can, you know…. I want you,” he said.

“I want you too, Eddie.” And she moved into him and pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, a fierce furious sting of a kiss, all the madness and irrationality of her concentrated in the wet heat of her mouth and lips and tongue, and he knew it would be all right, all right for both of them, if he could just take her up to his room and make love to her, ravish her, fuck her.

She pulled away and gave him a long analytic look, as if she were seeing him from a new perspective, all distance and shadow. The muscles at the corners of her mouth flexed in the faintest of smiles.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“I’m pregnant.

Well, and it was déjà vu, wasn’t it? Simple arithmetic: one child subtracted, one child added. All he could say was, “Not again?”

She nodded. Saturated him with her eyes. Behind her, blighting both walls of the narrow hallway, were the dim greasy slabs of the oil paintings Mrs. Fitzmaurice had rendered herself, kittens and puppies frolicking in an unrecognizable world of bludgeoning brushstrokes and colliding colors. She shifted the child from one shoulder to the other.

“Jesus,” he said, and it was a curse, harsh and harshly aspirated.

Her voice fell off the edge and disappeared: “I want you to take care of me.”

This was his moment, this was the hour of his redemption, the time to cash in his three o‘clock luck though it was past eleven at night, and he could have taken her in his arms and whispered, Yes, yes, of course I will, but instead he gave her a sick smile and said, “Whose baby is it?”

“Whose—?” The question seemed to stagger her, and suddenly the weight of the child on her shoulder, little Guido Capolupo O‘Kane, seemed insupportable, and she began fumbling behind her as if for some place to set him down. It took her a minute, but then she came back to herself, straightening up, arching her back so that her breasts thrust out and her chin lifted six inches out of her collar. “Guido’s,” she said, “it’s Guido‘s,” and then she found the doorknob and let in the night for just an instant before the door clicked shut behind her.

And handsome Eddie O‘Kane, who’d failed every test put to him, and wasn’t rich and wasn’t free and had to bow and scrape to Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick and her demented husband and chase after every skirt that came down the street? What did he need? That was easy. Simple. Simplest thing in the world.

He needed a drink.

7. PRANGINS

The Dexter château stood on a hill just outside Geneva, at Prangins, in the village of Nyon. It was a turreted stone structure of some twenty rooms surrounded by orchards and formal gardens and with a great lolling tongue of lawn that stretched all the way down to the shore of the lake, where Josephine kept a pair of rowboats and a forty-foot ketch. No one knew exactly how old the place was, but portions of it were said to date from the time of the Crusades, after which it was built up and fortified by successive generations of noble and not so noble men. Voltaire had once lived there, and in 1815 it was acquired by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who made use of a secret tunnel in the cellar to slip off into the night when his existence became a liability to too many people. The property was surrounded by a formidable wall and high, arching iron gates, and when Katherine broke off her engagement to Stanley, she fled across the Atlantic and closed the gates behind her.

She needed time to think. Time to settle her own nerves, and never mind Stanleys — he’d meant to hit her with that vase, he had, right up until the last minute. He could have scarred her for life, killed her — and for what? What had she done to deserve it? She’d lost her patience maybe and she’d been short with him, but only because he was so obsessive and gloomy, making mountains of molehills all the time, afraid of her touch, afraid of what was happening between them, afraid of love. All that she could understand and forgive, but violence was inexcusable, unthinkable, and the truly awful thing was what it said about Stanley in his darkest soul.

The first day at Prangins all she did was sleep, and when Madame Fleury, the housekeeper, poked her stricken face in the door inquiring if madame wanted anything to eat, Katherine told her to go away. At dusk, she thought she ought to get up, but she didn‘t — she just lay there, sunk into the pillows, holding herself very still. She watched the darkness congeal in the corners and fan out over the floor, and then she was asleep again, the night a void, black and silent, no wind, not a murmur from the lake. In the morning, she woke to the sound of birds and the shifting light playing off the water, the floating aqueous light of her girlhood when she would spend half the day rowing out into the lake till she was beyond the sight of shore, and for the first thirty seconds she didn’t think of Stanley. She was at Prangins, behind the walls, behind the gate, secure and safe and with nothing to do but read and walk and row and all the time in the world to do it, and what was so bad about that? Suddenly she was hungry, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since she’d got off the train from Paris, her stomach in turmoil, in revolt, but growling now in the most placable and ordinary way. She rang for the housekeeper and had breakfast sent up, a good Swiss breakfast of fresh eggs and cheeses and wafer-thin slices of Black Forest ham with rolls hot from the oven and fresh cream for her coffee, and she ate it all in a kind of dream, sitting at the window and gazing out over the lake.

She forced herself to get dressed and to greet the servants, most of whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a year, and then she went down to the lake and took one of the rowboats out. There was a breeze with a scent of snow blowing off the mountains, but the sun was warm and she relished the feel of the oars in her hands, the spume, the rocking of the boat, each stroke taking her farther from all the complexities of her life, from Stanley and wedding gowns and arborio rice by the bushel — and the specter of babies, that too. What had he shouted over the clamor of the crowd and the mindless blast of the ship’s horn? I can have children!

That was sweet. It was. And she did want a baby, not only for Stanley’s sake and her mother’s and to honor the memory of her father and all the Dexters before him, but for the most personal and selfish of reasons: it was her privilege and her will. As a woman. As an independent woman of independent means. For twenty-nine years she’d developed her mind and body, and to what end? To make her choice, her own free choice, without regard to convention or expectation or the demands of the world of men, to be married or not to be married, to have a child or not, to study the biological sciences at the Institute or scale Mount Everest, and she’d chosen Stanley, nobody else. Strapping, shy, artistic Stanley, athletic Stanley, manly Stanley. He was her biological destiny, her husband, her mate, and they would come together in the dark and he would impregnate her — that was the way it was supposed to be, that was what she’d wanted. She thought about that, tugging at the oars and feeling her blood quicken, savoring the flex and release of the muscles in her shoulders and back, and pictured herself in a white nightdress in a field of white flowers, pregnant and glowing like the Madonna of the Rose Bush. It was frightening, beyond her control — beautiful and heady and frightening.

But Stanley was in Chicago, where he belonged and where he had to stay until he got a grip on himself. She’d been gentle with him — he had to understand that she needed to get away by herself, and though the engagement was officially broken, the ring returned and the caterers and the florists and their minions called off, there was hope still, if he would only give her time. Gentle, but firm. She didn’t tell him when she was leaving or where she meant to go, but only that he shouldn’t attempt to follow her, no matter what. He had to respect that. And if he did, and if he improved his outlook and settled his nerves and she had a chance to calm herself too, then maybe, just maybe, there was hope for them yet.

By noon — or what she took to be noon from the position of the sun stuck in the clouds overhead — she was hungry again, and that was a good sign. She didn’t have anything with her, not so much as an apple or pear, and she let herself drift a while, cradled by the waves, the smell of the wind and the water playing on her senses till the hunger was a physical ache, and then she made for an inn on the Geneva shore and sat in a vast dining room and had lunch over a newspaper and a pot of tea while a punctilious waiter with drooping mustaches fussed over her. She had the soup, a salad, roast duck with potatoes and vegetable, and she lingered over dessert, reading a paragraph at a time from the paper spread out before her and then lifting her head to gaze out on the lake in reverie. When finally she climbed back into the rowboat with the aid of an overly solicitous concierge and the frowning waiter (Wouldn’t madame prefer a taxi? One of the boys could return the boat in the morning—“Cela ne pose pas de problème”), the sky had closed up like a fist and a light drizzle hung suspended in the air. She thanked them for their concern, but really, she said, she’d prefer the exercise. Clucking and protesting, the concierge held an umbrella out over her head as she settled herself on the thwart, and then watched in disbelief as she shoved off nimbly and swung the bow around into the vague drifting belly of the mist. The visibility was poor, and she might have been in real danger, but she stuck close to shore and rowed until she was no longer aware she was rowing, until there was nothing left in the universe but her arms and the boat and the lake.

Two weeks passed. She saw no one. She swam, walked, rowed, read French novels, helped the cook plan the menu and even took up the needlepoint her mother had abandoned the previous fall, and she wasn’t bored, not yet, but getting healthier and steadier and calmer as each day fell into the next. She was sitting at breakfast one morning, absorbed in a Maupassant tale — the one about the plump little courtesan and the coach full of hypocrites-when Madame Fleury informed her that there was a man at the gate inquiring after her.

“A man?”

“Oui, Madame. He says he knows you. He won’t go away.”

And what was this, a little spark? Hope, fear, anger: it couldn’t be. “Did he give you his card? A name?”

The housekeeper was a plain, angular woman in her forties, an adept at driving all expression from her face and suppressing any hint of emotion in her voice; the house could be in flames and she would knock quietly at the door to ask if madame would be needing anything. Her mouth tightened just perceptibly round her words: “He refused, madame. But we haven’t opened the gate, and Jean Claude is keeping an eye on him.”

Katherine set down her teacup. Her heart was pounding. “Well, is he from the village then? Is he a tradesman, a gentleman, a goatherd?”

The housekeeper gave a shrug, and it was a Gallic shrug, respectful only to the degree that was necessary, while managing at the same time to convey not only impatience but a deep disillusionment with the question. She pursed her lips. “Jean Claude says he has a motorcar.”

And then she was up from the table, no time to think, no time to manage her hair or grab a hat or worry about what she was wearing, and down the stone steps and out into the circular drive, the gravel skewing awkwardly beneath her feet, all the way to the gate, breathless, sure it was a false alarm, some Oxford boy on his Grand Tour come to inquire about the history and architecture of the place, a motoring enthusiast experiencing mechanical difficulties, a friend of her mother‘s, some busybody from the village… but she was wrong. Because it was Stanley, Stanley standing there at the gate like some apparition exhaled from the earth and given form in that instant. His hands were gripping the bars on either side of him as if to hold him upright, his shoulders were slumped, his head bowed penitentially.

“Stanley!” she called, trying not to run, aiming for poise and composure, but after a moment she couldn’t feel her feet at all and she was running despite herself. He was frozen, welded to the bars — he didn’t move, wouldn’t lift his head or raise his eyes. Jean Claude, the gatekeeper, gave her an odd look, and he seemed ready to rush forward and prevent whatever it was that was about to happen.

She was there, at the gate, her hands clutching his, and she was looking up into his flat suffering face through the iron grid. She uttered his name again, “Stanley,” and then she didn’t know what to say and still he wouldn’t look at her, his head hanging, shoulders bunched, the hair in his eyes, utterly abject, the whipping boy come back for his punishment. Everything stopped then, the earth impaled on its axis, the sun caught in its track, the breezes stilled, Jean Claude’s face the face of a photograph, until finally it came to her and she knew what to say, and it was almost as if she were speaking with her mother’s voice or Miss Hershey’s from all those years ago when she sat in the schoolroom and learned French, deportment and the finer points of etiquette with the other wide-eyed and nubile Back Bay girls: “How nice of you to come.”

The wedding was in September, and because it took place in Europe and because it was cursorily announced and precipitately arranged, the American newspapers had a field day with it: SECRET M‘CORMICK NUPTIALS; SOCIALITE WEDS M’CORMICK HEIR IN SWISS RETREAT; M‘CORMICK-DEXTER WEDDING SHROUDED IN SECRECY. Actually, there were two ceremonies — a civil ceremony before a magistrate in Geneva and a private celebration at Prangins presided over by a French cleric of indeterminate affiliation whom Nettie suspected of being a Unitarian or even a Universalist. She’d booked passage as soon as Stanley had wired her that a date had been set, and she campaigned from the beginning for a church wedding there in the very birthplace of Presbyterianism — anything else would have been sacrilege, anything else would have cut her to the quick, torn her heart out and trampled on it — but it was Katherine’s wedding, Katherine’s château, and Katherine had hegemony over Stanley now, and no matter how fiercely Nettie fought, right up until the nasal clod of a Frenchman pronounced them man and wife, she was doomed to failure. Stanley had made his choice, his leap, and it was like leaping from one forbidding precipice to another, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She made an uneasy peace with Josephine, who at least conducted herself like a lady and showed a remarkable degree of taste in the charm of the statuary and gardens at Prangins, but Nettie would never forgive her daughter, the scientist, the unholy little snit who’d stolen away her last and youngest, and even as the Frenchman was intoning, “Je vous declare maintenant mari et femme,” she stood behind Stanley hissing, “Godless, Godless.” And thank the Lord she’d brought Cyrus Jr. along to sustain her or she might have fainted dead away right there (neither Anita nor Harold would dignify the proceedings with their presence, and that was what it amounted to, though Anita had her child to look after and in Harold’s case, well, someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on the business). She did cry though, as mothers are wont to do on such occasions, but her tears were of an entirely different order from Josephine‘s, who whimpered like a deprived three-year-old throughout the course of both ceremonies, if you could call them that — no, her tears were tears of rage and hate. If she could have struck Katherine dead right where she stood in her Gaston gown with its pearls and lace and the ridiculous puffed pancake of a hat she wore high up off the crown of her head so that she was nearly as tall as Stanley when you added it all up, heels, hat, chignon and veil, she would have, so help her God, she would have.

And how did the bride feel? For her part, Katherine was satisfied. Or more than satisfied — she was ebullient, triumphant, the battle over and the citadel taken, and she was gracious in victory. And in love too, having leapt the same chasm as Stanley, and there was no more anxiety, no more fear of the free fall and crash: he was her husband and she was his wife. She was content. Without reservations. As sure as she’d ever been of anything in her life. And what had made it all right and chased away her last remaining doubts was Stanley himself, prostrate before her on that early summer morning outside the château gates.

He was so contrite and pitiable, pale as a corpse, two weeks’ worth of sleepless nights staring out of his eyes, every fiber of him yearning for her. He couldn’t defend himself or explain how he’d gotten there or why or what his presence portended for them both — he was overwhelmed by his feelings, that was it, as simple as that. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. And she didn’t have to hear him say it or read it in a perfumed letter because she could see it in his eyes and his face and the way he held himself in a kind of hopeless and penitential despair: she’d warned him not to come and he’d disobeyed her. That melted her, that melted her right there, and she brought him in and fed him bonbons and madeleines and she showed him round the place, all twenty rooms, riding up off the balls of her feet as if she were lighter than air and barely able to keep herself tethered, and then they were out on the lake and rowing, and she knew there was nothing more she needed in all the world than to have Stanley at her side.

Yes, and now they were married, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, not Nettie or her odious little rat of a lawyer — Foville or Favril or whatever his name was — or the walking broomstick that was Cyrus, so stiff and formal and tripping over his boarding school manners, as tactless as a shoe-shine boy. But what did that matter to her? She hadn’t married the McCormick family, she’d married Stanley, and now the rest of her life was about to begin. She waited, breathless, a little flushed with the champagne she’d drunk, while the party broke up and her mother ushered the guests out into the reception hall and Stanley stood grinning and pale beside her. All the guests were going into Geneva for the night, and Josephine too—“I want you to have the place to yourself, sweet,” she’d said, “just you and Stanley and the servants”—and in the morning they’d embark on their honeymoon, first to Paris for a month, to shop and stroll through the galleries, to visit Cartier & Fils and Tervisier & Dautant, and it would be one grand party, even if Nettie insisted on coming along — and Josephine. And she laughed to herself, a private trilling little chime of a bride’s laugh, wondering if two mothers on one honeymoon would somehow manage to cancel each other out.

She took Stanley’s hand in hers as the guests — there were only fifty or so, the most intimate group — began to make their exit. It was eight-thirty P.M. on September 15, 1904, and the day hung in tatters over the lake while the hall rang with laughter and good wishes and the intoxication of all that had happened and all that was to come. Stanley’s fingers were entwined in hers. Her peignoir — ivory silk with a border of Belgian lace the color of vanilla ice cream, Stanley’s favorite — was laid out on the big canopied bed in the Bonaparte suite upstairs. “Good night,” she said to one guest after another, “good night, and thank you so much,” while Stanley stood erect beside her, his right arm extended, shaking hands, grinning like a child, a lover, a Hindu ecstatic, his every word measured and apportioned and the current of anticipation almost sizzling in his fingertips. She could feel it. She could.

And then there was the whole adventure of going to bed, the dismissal of the servants, the separate dressing rooms and baths, the shy smiles, the endearments, the bed itself. Katherine took her time, brushing out her hair, sick with joy, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin at the moment of release. She rubbed lotion into her face and hands, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and when she laid her dressing gown beside the wedding dress on the loveseat and stepped out of her undergarments, she felt a thrill go through her that was like nothing she’d ever experienced, a chill and a fever at the same time, the blood exploding in her veins like gunpowder. And then the nightgown. She lifted her arms, short of breath all of a sudden, and let the silk run down her like water. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d squeezed Stanley’s arm and pecked a kiss to his cheek at the door to his dressing room. The hour was at hand.

She slipped into the bedroom on naked feet, the warm sheath of silk gathering at her breasts and hips and flowing gently across her abdomen. Two candles were burning ceremonially on either side of the bed — her mother’s idea — and there were flowers everywhere, a whole jungle of them, the air thick as wax with their scent. She could hardly breathe for excitement, and was that Stanley? There, beneath the covers — that shadow on the bed? No, it wasn‘t, and her fingers told her what her eyes hadn’t been able to: the bed was empty. The room was empty. And Stanley’s door was shut. “Stanley?” she called, and when she got no answer she tried again, a little louder this time, and she realized she could scream at the top of her lungs if she wanted to and there was nobody to hear her, not even the servants. That made her feel strange. It made her feel bold, randy, made her feel like a wife. “Stanley?

Not a sound.

She tried the handle of his door: it was locked. She tapped at the door and called again. “Stanley?”

This time, from deep in the room beyond, there came a muffled reply, a grunt of acknowledgment so strained and distant it might have been coming from Bonaparte’s secret tunnel in the bowels of the house. “I’m ready,” she said, her lips pressed to the door. “I’m ready foryou.”

Another grunt, nearer this time, and the sounds of movement, followed by a profound and brooding silence. And what was the matter? It took her a moment, and then a smile came to her lips. He was shy, that was all, shy as a maiden, and wasn’t that sweet? She didn’t want a Butler Ames or a Casaubon to initiate her into the pleasures of married life, she wanted this, she wanted Stanley, a neophyte like herself who would go slowly and allow her to discover the delights of Eros in mutual exploration, in partnership, in marriage, and no cast of lovers and whores and lusty widows looking over her shoulder. All right. She would give him time. “I’ll be waiting for you in bed,” she whispered. “Should I put out the candles‘?”

And now his voice, right there, on the other side of the door: “No, it‘s — yes, yes, do that and I’ll be — I’ll be just a minute, some things I have to, yes, of course—”

She drifted back to the bed, her respiration easing from a gallop to a canter, and leaned forward to cup her hand behind first one candle and then the other, puffing darkness into the room. The sheets welcomed her, the night gentle, stars framed in the window that looked out over the lake, and she’d pulled open the curtains for that at least, sidereal light, compass points to steer by. She fanned out her hair on the pillow and lay there on her back, waiting. What did she think of? Everything. Everything that had happened to her in her entire life, and she saw every face, every incident, heard every word replayed, and the stars shifted, and still Stanley’s door remained closed. How much time had passed? Had she fallen asleep? She got out of bed, the carpet a continent beneath her feet and now the cold stone sea of the floor, and she was at the door again and no whisper from her lips this time, nothing, not a word. The handle turned with a click under the pressure of her fingers and she swung open the door.

Stanley’s face, pale as the moon, stared up at her in alarm from the secretary in the far corner of the room. He was seated before it in a stiff-backed chair, hunched over the leaf on his elbows amid a confusion of papers, envelopes, pens and pencils. He didn’t attempt a smile.

“Stanley, what in the world are you doing?” she said in a kind of amazement that verged on stupefaction, and why did she feel so naked and vulnerable suddenly, the negligee clinging to her in all the wrong places and her husband’s startled eyes just beginning to grapple with the image of her? She noticed the clock then, up on the mantelpiece, an ancient block of carved wood and Swiss works that marked the hour with a dull rasp instead of a chime. She was further amazed. “It’s nearly four in the morning,” she said, and there was exasperation in her tone, wifely impatience, disbelief, shock even.

“I, well,” he began, and she saw that he was still in his tuxedo and tails, the top hat sprawled casually on the desk beside him, “—you know, work, correspondence, that sort of thing. I am still, well, comptroller of the Harvester Company, though you’d never think it, and I — well, and there’re the thank-you notes, because so many people have — and Harold, I needed to write Harold and tell him about the day, about us, I mean.”

She was dumbstruck. “But Stanley, darling, this is our wedding night….”

The light of the lamp, which he’d propped up on the near corner of the desk, split his face in two. He turned away from her to scribble something on the sheet of paper before him and he was stiff and bristling, the pen gouging at the paper till the nib gave way and he reached irritably for another. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t going to respond.

“Darling, Stanley,” she said, “can’t it wait? At least till morning?” And she crossed the room to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He made no movement, not even a twitch, but kept on writing till he thought to shield the paper with his hand. “Stanley, come on now, be reasonable,” she said, her voice soft and murmurous, and she ruffled the hair at the back of his neck.

He turned his face to her now, both hands nested over the paper on the desk so that she couldn’t see what he was writing, and what was this — secrets? Secrets on their wedding night? “I, I—” he began and trailed off. He seemed half asleep, drugged, mesmerized.

She let her hand roam over his shoulders. “Come on,” she murmured, “it’s time to come to bed. With me. With me, Stanley.”

“Yes,” he said, staring up at her out of a fixed and wary eye, “yes — I–I know that, and I want to, I do, but you see, if you just give me a minute, that’s all I need, a minute more, just to finish up, I‘ll, well, that is—”

What could she say? She was stunned and hurt. This was her wedding night, this was what she’d been looking forward to all her life, wasn’t it? What was wrong? Was it her? Was he rejecting her? Having second thoughts? She’d known he was shy, certainly, and that was one of the traits that endeared him to her, but this went beyond the bounds of any modesty or reticence she could possibly conceive of — he hadn’t even undressed yet. It was as if he had no intention of it, as if this night, of all nights in their lives, wasn’t consecrated, as if she hadn’t been waiting for him in the next room through all the lingering unfathomable hours. And then it came to her in a slow seep of understanding as she stood there rubbing his clenched shoulders and he averted his face and screened the letter from her: he was afraid of her. Afraid of his own wife. Afraid of the sheets, the bed, the complicated mechanics of love. He was suffering, she could see that, suffering for love of her, and it softened her.

“All right,” she said finally, bending forward to brush the crown of his head with a kiss, wondering what to say, how to phrase it, how far she dared go, “but I don’t see how you can be thinking of business and correspondence at a time like this.”

He wouldn’t look at her. She felt him stiffen under the touch of her hand where it lingered on his shoulder.

“All right,” she sighed, “if you must, if your business means that much to you, but promise me you’ll come to bed in a minute, won’t you? Just a minute?” She brought her face close to his, the light of the lamp harsh and radiant, but he turned his head away and delivered his extorted promise to the tabletop.

“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

In the morning she changed the bed herself, before the chambermaid had a chance to poke her nose in the door — no bloody sheets to display here, no flag of virginity, not even the good clean wholesome impress of two bodies lying entwined as one. She bundled up the sheets and stuffed them into the fireplace atop a pyre of pine kindling and split oak, where they made a quick and furious blaze before settling into ropy clots of ash. Stanley had fallen asleep at the desk and he was sleeping still when she awoke at eight to a heavy fuliginous light that spread like a stain over the lake until the sky was as dark as it had been just before dawn, when she’d first awakened. By nine, it was raining.

Katherine lay there prostrate on the stripped mattress, gazing out through the bed curtains at the water lashing the windows, afraid to move. She was hungry, famished — she’d hardly eaten a thing the day before for sheer excitement — but she was also afraid to ring for breakfast because then everybody would know, all servants notorious for their gossip and none more so than the frenchified Swiss, who always moved about the place as if they were on loan from an empress and missed absolutely nothing. But what to do? Her mother would arrive soon enough, every possible question in her eyes, and then Stanley’s mother would follow, just in time for a light luncheon before the whole rampant entourage entrained for Paris and the Elysée Palace Hotel.

Finally, as the clock in the next room struck ten with the faintest repeated rasp, she tiptoed to the door and peered in. Stanley was asleep still, head down, elbows splayed, a basket full of crumpled paper at his feet. He was snoring, a wheeze and stertor that animated the papers scattered round him, and she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a man snoring since her father died — he used to fall asleep in the library after dinner, the newspaper slipping from his lap, a cup of hot malted milk cooling on the table beside him. She found the scene oddly touching, Stanley snoring there at the open secretary, his cheek pressed to the leaf while his lips fluttered and the long lashes of his eyelids meshed like a doll‘s, but she had to wake him all the same — it wouldn’t do for the servants to find him like this.

She thought of shaking him and calling his name in a protracted whisper—“Stanley, Stanley, wake up”—as she expected she would on ten thousand mornings to come, but when she was actually in the room, actually approaching his splayed and sleeping form, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. And why not? Because he would be embarrassed, mortified, caught in a lie, and she didn’t want to see the look on his face, the pain and bewilderment in his eyes and the shame — she didn’t want to be the one to remind him of the futile negligee and the lonely bed. So she took the easy way out — she retreated to the door and slammed it three times in succession before darting out of the bedroom, into the hall, and down the stairs to breakfast.

Eyebrows were raised. The servants crept around the halls like undertakers, Madame Fleury choking on her own suspended breath, her eyes oozing and doleful. And where, they wondered, was the master of the house, the king and patriarch and deflowerer of virgins? Sleeping late. He wasn’t to be disturbed. And of course this revelation was in itself cause for eyebrows to be raised still further. Katherine ignored them. She ordered breakfast, watched the rain, and ate, one small bite at a time.

Stanley appeared at noon, looking confused. He’d bathed and changed into a charcoal gray suit with a stiff formal collar and tie. Katherine, already dressed in the outfit she would wear to Paris on the train, was in the parlor, seated at the window with a book she was pretending to read. “Ah, well,” Stanley said, poking his head in the door like a child playing a prank, “so there you, well, are. I just, well—”and then he was in the room, tall and solemn, his shoulders thrown back and something — a neatly folded slip of paper — making its way from one hand to the other and back again. He rocked on his heels. Smacked his lips. Opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t quite seem to close it around the words he wanted.

“Good morning,” Katherine said. “Or should I say, ‘Good afternoon’?”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond. He merely stood there, just inside the door, watching her out of hooded eyes.

“Did you sleep well?” She didn’t want to be acerbic, didn’t want to provoke him, but she couldn’t seen to help herself. She was angry. She was. And humiliated too.

“I — well — I, I’m sorry, I, you know-work… and then, before I knew it—”and he threw his hands in the air in a gesture of helplessness, the neatly folded slip of paper going along for the ride.

Katherine felt the blood rush to her face. He was just standing there like a block of wood, like an oaf, his hands dangling, a fleck of shaving cream stuck to the underside of his chin. “Well?” she demanded. “Don’t I deserve a kiss?”—and she wanted to add, “at least,” but held back.

Suddenly he was in motion, striding across the great cavernous stone room with its faded tapestries and the wall of long narrow windows giving onto the gray void of the lake, and he didn’t look tender, not at all — he looked determined, dutiful, martial almost. He bent to her stiffly as she raised her chin and compressed her lips, and stiffly, he kissed her — on the cheek, no less. She rose from the chair to take him in her arms, but he backed off a step, every mortal ounce of him working and twitching, and what was this? He was thrusting the paper at her, a crisply folded sheet of stationery with the McCormick monogram embossed in the corner.

“Katherine,” he said, “I wanted — last night, I — here, forcing the paper into her hand, his smile high and tight, feasting on her with his eyes. ”Go ahead,“ he said. ”Open it. Read it.“

She unfolded the paper and held it up to the light, standing there beside him on the morning after her wedding night with the rain beating at the windows and the servants lurking in the halls. It was a will. Four lines, signed and dated, and nothing more.

I, Stanley Robert McCormick, being of sound mind and body, do hereby consign all my monies, assets and real property, in toto, to my wife, Katherine Dexter McCormick, in the event of my death.

She didn’t know what to say. It was so unexpected, so odd — and so morbid too. Was this what he’d been writing? Was this what he’d hidden from her the night before? “Stanley,” she murmured, and she couldn’t seem to find her voice, “you didn’t have to do this — there’s plenty of time to think of such things, years and years…”

He was beaming, all his teeth on display and his eyes lit like hundred-watt bulbs. “It’s a surprise,” he said. “That’s what I — last night — it wasn’t business, not all of it, you see, because — because I was, well, I was thinking of you—”

And now she didn’t have to say anything, and neither did he. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself to him, one flesh, and lifted her face to his and found his lips. And they were like that, in that very pose, the first real kiss of their married life and every sentimental emotion charging through them, through them both, when Katherine’s mother swept in the door, all feathers and perfume and brisk commanding energy, and Stanley’s mother right behind her. “And will you look at this,” Josephine crowed, “look at the lovebirds!”