Riven Rock

1. BENIGN STUPORS

O‘Kane was sprawled on a circular patch of lawn in the middle of the daphne garden, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, and all three of them were lathered in sweat and breathing hard. Mr. McCormick had been especially frisky on his walk that morning, leading them on a chase from one end of the grounds to the other, elbows pumping and nostrils flared, his eyes fixed on some invisible lure in the distance. Up they went, all the way to the top of the estate with its inhuman rise in elevation and vertiginous views of the Channel, and then they turned round and charged back down again, Mr. McCormick leading the way with his lunatic strides, feinting this way and that, till they’d circled the house three times and finally come to rest here, among the daphnes. Mart was lying prone on a stone bench near the fountain, inanimate but for his tortured breathing, and Mr. McCormick himself was stretched out on the lawn and staring up into the granular sky, his jacket balled up beneath his head to serve as a pillow. It was absolutely still, not a breeze, not a sound. The sun all but crushed them with its weight.

“A shame about Hoch,” O‘Kane said after a while, just to say something.

Mart grunted. Mr. McCormick stared up into the sky.

“I liked him, you know what I mean, Mart? He wasn’t so excitable as Hamilton or Brush, if that’s the word I’m looking for. And Mr. McCormick really came to like him too, didn’t you, Mr. McCormick?”

O‘Kane hadn’t expected a response — he and Mart spent half their lives talking right through their employer and benefactor — but Mr. McCormick surprised him. He shifted his head to get a closer look at O’Kane, his eyes shrinking into focus. “Dr. Hoch?” he echoed, his voice high-pitched and unstable. “Wh-what happened to him?”

“You remember, Mr. McCormick — it was just yesterday, yesterday morning. Dr. Brush gave us the news.”

There was a pause. A reflective look stole over Mr. McCormick’s features. After a while he said, “No, I don’t remember.”

“Sure you do. You were very upset at the time — and I don’t blame you. All of us were upset.”

Dr. Brush had returned from the War a month ago, in August, just in time to take the baton from Hoch, who was fading fast. If anything, the rigors of the Western Front had left the good doctor fatter and heartier than ever, and with a raft of platitudes and a whole shipload of for-the-main-and-simple-reasons he’d explained to Mr. McCormick that Dr. Hoch had passed on early that morning of congestive heart failure — a weakness that ran in his family. But Mr. McCormick shouldn’t feel too badly, he said, because Dr. Hoch was an elderly man who’d lived a full and rich life and made innumerable contributions to the field of psychiatry, including the manuscript of a new book—Benign Stupors—which he’d been able to complete before his heart gave out.

Mr. McCormick was sitting over his breakfast at the time, fastidiously dissecting two fried eggs and a thick pink slab of ham with a soup spoon, the only implement available to him. “How elderly?” he asked without looking up.

“Hm? What?” The question had caught Brush by surprise.

“Dr. Hoch,” Mr. McCormick said in the small probing voice of the rhetorician, “how-how elderly was he?”

Brush produced a stub of cigar from somewhere and jammed it in his mouth. “Hoch?” he repeated. “Oh, I don’t know — in his sixties, anyhow.”

“Fifty-one,” Mr. McCormick corrected, still without looking up. “And do you know how old I am, Dr. Brush?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be forty-five in November. Am I an elderly man too?”

“Why, of course not, Mr. McCormick — Stanley,” Brush boomed, all his flesh in motion as he shimmied round the room on his too-small feet, “you’re a young man still, in the flush of health and vigor, for the main and simple—”

Mr. McCormick had waited until the breakfast dishes had been cleared and he’d got dressed and made his way to the theater building before he gave vent to his feelings on the subject. In a roaring stentorian voice that drowned out the hypnotic tick-tick-tick of Roscoe’s projector and nullified the antics of Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler, he announced: “I don’t want to die!

Brush’s voice leapt out of the darkness: “You’re not going to die, Mr. McCormick.”

“I am!”

There was movement now, O‘Kane and Mart positioning themselves, Brush rising mountainously from his folding seat in a swirl of shadow. Up on the screen, Charlie Chaplin spun round and booted a policeman in the rear, and O’Kane laughed aloud despite himself. “Now, now,” Brush was saying, looming over the slouched form of their employer, “you’re a healthy mean, Mr. McCormick, in the peak of health, and you know it. Why, you’ve got the best of everything here, the most salubrious possible environment—

Mr. McCormick’s voice, pinched thin as wire: “He’s a stinking rotting corpse, with — with things coming out of his eyes, because that‘s — that’s the part they eat first, the eyes, and you know it!”

“I know no such thing, for the main and simple reason that that is just too morbid a thought for me to hold.” Brush was waving his arms now in the flickering light, the lower half of the Little Tramp’s face appearing fitfully on his shoulder as if in some ghostly manifestation. “Think of him in heaven, in the arms of God—”

“God’s a fraud,” Mr. McCormick spat, wrenching his neck angrily round. “And so are you.”

And then there was the inevitable roughhousing, the collapse of the chairs, the curses, shouts and whimpers, the fumbling for the light switch and Dr. Brush’s intimate presentation of his persuasive and salvatory flesh to the recumbent form of their employer and benefactor.

Understandably, O‘Kane didn’t want to push the subject now — he was burned right down to the wick after that footrace round the property and up that damned hill, and he’d had enough exercise for the day, thank you. “Well, anyway, at least we’ve got Dr. Brush back,” he said, lamely. “And he’s all right. I guess.”

Mr. McCormick didn’t seem to have an opinion on the subject. He just stared up into the sky as if he might find Dr. Hoch up there somewhere, seated on the edge of a cloud. And Mart — Mart was no help. His arms dangled over the sides of the bench and his breathing slowed till he began to snore. O‘Kane lay there a while, hands cradling his head, enjoying the silence and the glory of the day, until he began thinking about the one thing that sustained him lately — booze, or more specifically, the pint bottle of bourbon whiskey he’d sequestered in the reservoir of Mr. McCormick’s toilet. It was past noon and there was no reason they should be lying in the grass when they could be inside making themselves presentable for lunch — and other activities. He saw himself slipping into the bathroom as Mr. McCormick spooned up his meat loaf and gravy, saw the bottle all striped with water and felt the cork twist out of the neck of it and the swallowing reflex of his throat that was the nearest thing he had to an orgasm lately, since he’d sworn off women, anyway. “Well, and so,” he said with as much cheer as he could muster as he pushed his weary parched self up off the grass, “what do you say, gentlemen — time for lunch?”

And that would have been all right, because Mart woke with a start and Mr. McCormick found his legs and began mechanically brushing off his jacket preparatory to slipping it back on — if it weren’t for the gopher, that is. O‘Kane didn’t even know what it was at first. A little thing, like a rat, only pale and yellowish almost to the color of a butter-nut squash, and it suddenly popped its head out of a hole in the ground and tore twice round the patch of lawn before vanishing down a second hole like water down a drain. Mr. McCormick was dumbstruck. At first. And then he got excited. “Did you see that?” he said. “Did you? Did you see it?” And by now he was down on his hands and knees, probing into the thing’s lair with his right hand and forcing his arm in up to the elbow. “What is it?” he kept saying.

“Beats me,” O‘Kane said with a shrug. “A weasel?”

Mart came over and stood there looking at the hole and Mr. McCormick ruining his cuffs and the sleeve of his jacket. “That’s no weasel,” he said. “Are you nuts or something? A weasel’s long and skinny. ”

“So what is it then?” O‘Kane demanded. He didn’t really give a good goddamn one way or the other, but he hated for Mart to show him up.

Mart scratched his head. “A groundhog,” he said, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.

By this point, Mr. McCormick had got his whole arm in the burrow, right up to his shoulder and he was scooping out dirt with his bare hand. “It’s in there, I know it is,” he said, and then he got to his feet and collapsed that portion of the burrow he’d already excavated, falling once again to his knees and thrusting his arm into the new opening. He looked up, perplexed. “It‘s — It’s going for the daphnes,” he said.

“Nothing to worry about, Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane assured him, sensing an episode coming on, “I’ll get the head gardener to take care of it right after lunch. And say, speaking of lunch,” pulling his watch out with a flourish, “if we hurry we’ll be just in time.”

Mr. McCormick ignored him. He was digging furiously now, with both hands, crouched over the expanding burrow like a fox terrier. Already his nails were ruined and you could see the blood like a tattered ribbon moving beneath the scrim of filth on his right hand. Mr. McCormick was distracted. He was obsessed. He was being sick and pathological. O‘Kane didn’t want any violence, not now, not today — all he wanted to do was go back to the house for lunch and a drink sneaked in the toilet — but he would have to intervene, and soon, he could see that. He signaled to Mart, but Mart wasn’t paying any attention — Mart was standing over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder and peering down into the excavation, saying, “I think it goes this way, yeah, that’s right, through the flowerbed and then maybe under those bushes over there—”

O‘Kane took him by the arm. “Maybe Dr. Brush will know what it is,” he said in a falsely hearty voice. “Mart, why don’t you go get Dr. Brush?” And then he tightened his grip and dropped his voice, adding, for Mart’s benefit only, “Right now. Right this minute. You understand me?”

When Mart returned ten minutes later with a wheezing, puffing and blustering Dr. Brush in tow, Mr. McCormick had already excavated a looping twenty-foot furrow through the daphne bed and back into the lawn, where he was working furiously with a stick he’d found beneath the oleander bushes (the very bushes O‘Kane had been repeatedly warned to keep him away from, as their flowers, leaves and branches were all highly toxic). “Mr. McCormick,” Brush bellowed, even as he was fighting to catch his breath, “what is this? You’re ruining the flower beds! And the beautiful lawn Mr. Stribling has worked so hard on.”

Mr. McCormick never even glanced up. It was his estate and he could dig the whole place down to China if he wanted to. Its — its a — a — a groundhog,“ he said. ”It lives here. Under the grass.“

“Yes, yes,” Brush said, bending over him now, “I have no doubt of that, but what’s it to you, Mr. McCormick, really? I’m sure the creature isn’t doing any harm, and if it is, well, we have the excellent Mr. Stribling and his professional gardeners to see to it. Now come on, come out of there and let’s get cleaned up and have some lunch. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

“No,” Mr. McCormick said, digging, and the dirt was flying furiously in the direction of the doctor so that Brush had to back up to avoid having his cuffs filled with it. “No. I want this, this thing. I want to k-kill it. It’s destroying the, the flowers, don’t you see?”

There was no use arguing with him, not when he was like this, and nobody really wanted to get down there in the dirt and restrain him, not after the free-for-all in the theater house yesterday, so Dr. Brush did the politic thing and sent Mart to fetch Stribling.

Stribling was a standoffish sort of fellow for a gardener — or landscape architect, as he liked to call himself — and on the few occasions O‘Kane had run into him, usually while jogging from one end of the estate to the other behind Mr. McCormick’s bobbing and weaving form, the man had been brusque and uncommunicative. He was in touch with Katherine by post and while he did submit all major plans to her for approval, he pretty much had free rein to continue the work of his predecessor, a famous wop whose name O’Kane could never remember, and he always had his team of laborers, truck drivers and manure spreaders under the gun. If they weren’t shoveling silt out of the reservoir or constructing a water tower, they were building stone bridges over the creeks and repairing and extending the roads, not to mention clipping every leaf of every shrub like a horde of overzealous barbers. It took no more than five minutes and Stribling was there, another man in tow — a gaunt tall Irishman with a wandering eye — the kind of man O‘Kane’s mother would have called a long drink of water. If O’Kane recalled correctly the man’s name was O‘Hara, or maybe O’Mara — the day laborers came and went like the weather and there was no way to keep track of them, not unless they turned up at one of the saloons, that is. Both Stribling and the Irishman had shovels slung over their shoulders.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Stribling,” Brush hollered, “and I see you’ve brought one of your, uh, associates along too, and all the better. You see, we have a problem, for the main and simple reason that some sort of groundhog has got under the lawn here and Mr. McCormick is very concerned about it, isn’t that right, Mr. McCormick?”

The dirt flew. Mr. McCormick said nothing.

Stribling and his man stepped up to examine the trench through the flower bed, the ravaged lawn, the uprooted oleanders. “It’s a gopher,” Stribling said matter-of-factly, and he was so burned by the sun you would have thought he was a spaghetti twister himself. He laid a finger alongside his nose and gave Mr. McCormick a look. “We’ll get him, don’t you worry,” he said. “But here, Mr. McCormick, you don’t have to do that now — a trap’s the thing, that’s what we need.”

The Irishman, his nose peeling and his eye wandering, began to shove) dirt back into the hole, but Mr. McCormick would have none of it. “Step away from there,” he said, glaring up at the man, and dug all the more furiously, every stitch of clothing on him ruined beyond washing or repair. The knees of his trousers glistened with compacted mud, his collar was a sop, his tie a rag.

“It’s past one, Mr. McCormick,” Brush remonstrated, “—you know you’ll miss lunch now if you don’t hurry, and we’ve got to allow time to clean up.”

O‘Kane put in his two cents then: “That’s right, Mr. McCormick. Lunch.”

For the next hour, as the sun roved overhead and they shifted from one foot to another, the five of them stood there watching Mr. McCormick at his work. He’d made his way through the oleanders and across the gravel walkway beyond and into another flower bed, this one of impatiens, fragile gawky things that drooped and fell over if you looked at them twice, and all the while Stribling saying things like “It’s no use, Mr. McCormick, he’s got a burrow a hundred yards across at least” and “There’s literally scores of the things out there and even if you get this one another one’ll move right back in — trapping’s the thing, I tell you.”

Finally, and they were well into the third hour by now, Mr. McCormick got up from the convoluted trench he’d managed to gouge out of the earth with his two bare hands and a stick of oleander, and looked Stribling in the face, no more than two feet from him. Bleeding in half a dozen places, his hair hanging in his eyes, their employer was all but unrecognizable behind a film of sweat and filth. “And what am I paying you for?” he suddenly snapped, pushing up against Stribling with his chest thrust out and spitting the words in his face. And then, trembling and gritting his teeth, he jerked his head round on the Irishman. “And you?” he said. “What am I paying you for? To stand around and, and watch? Dig, I tell you!” he shouted, his voice rheumy and dangerous all of a sudden. “Dig! Dig or you‘ll — you’ll be looking for another j-job! Both of you!”

Stribling gave Brush a sour look, but turned away from Mr. McCormick without a word and leaned into his shovel, and so did the Irishman. Dr. Brush, who’d kept up a steady stream of bluster and remonstrance for the better part of this ongoing charade, suddenly started in on a new tack, assuring Mr. McCormick that the task was in good hands now and that that was all the more reason to head back to the house and clean up — yes, and see what Sam Wah could put together for a late lunch. Because Mr. McCormick must be hungry after all that prodigious exercise, just the sort of thing to build an appetite, for the main and simple reason that the body needed fuel, didn’t it?

But Mr. McCormick merely stood there, filthy and bleeding, watching the men dig. Stribling kept his head down, and he dug steadily, but O‘Kane could see that he was concentrating on the doomed flower bed, trying to cut his losses and confine the scope of the excavation. It was past three and both Stribling and his assistant were up to their hips in a trench you could have flooded and rowed a boat across when Mr. McCormick folded his arms and said, “That’s it. That’s enough.”

They all looked up hopefully, all five of them, Stribling and the Irishman in a sweat, Brush all blustered out, Mart half comatose and O‘Kane bored to tears and desperate for a drink.

“You can bury him now,” Mr. McCormick said.

They all looked at one another. It was O‘Kane who finally spoke up. “Who — the gopher?”

Mr. McCormick slowly shook his head and looked up at the sky. “Dr. H-Hoch, ”he said.

When the year turned—‘19 into ’20, that is — O‘Kane’s worst fears about the Katherines of the world were confirmed. Riding in on the skirts of Petticoat Rule, the Drys and the Bible-thumpers got the Volstead Act passed, prohibiting “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors,” and before women even got their vote (a proposition about which O’Kane was dubious to begin with) he was denied his God-given right to drink himself into a stupor — even in the privacy of his own antiseptic room. January 18, 1920: that was the day of infamy. The day of doom. The day every last shred of joy went out of his life. He watched in shock and disbelief as the saloons of Spanishtown boarded up their doors and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union paraded through the streets, pouring out good whiskey in the gutter. Menhoff’s was still open, but only as a restaurant, and Cody would serve you a beer with your steak if you were foolish enough to ask for one — near beer, 5 percent alcohol, less than you’d find in a can of sauerkraut.

Oh, O‘Kane had stocked up, of course, stashing six cases of beer and two of rye whiskey under his bed and secreting the odd bottle of bourbon in his wardrobe and ten pints of sloe gin in the steamer trunk he kept in Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s attic — he even buried half a dozen jugs of wine just inside the front gate at Riven Rock — but he was bereft without the conviviality of the saloons. So what if he’d spent half his adult life considering various positions on God, immortality and Ford transmissions as expressed by one drunken halfwit or another? What else was there to do? He tried reading. He bought himself a Victrola. Rain beat at the windows and every day brought news of some fool going blind and deaf drinking antifreeze or rubbing atcohot — and how about that fireman in Pennsylvania who bought up all the lilac hair tonic in town and drowned in a sea of his own vomit? O’Kane went steadily through his stock, mostly alone, but sometimes in the company of Mart or Pat or one of the lost souls who used to inhabit the front room at Menhoff‘s, and as the bottles turned up empty, he felt like a condemned man marking off the days until his execution.

Into this vale of tears stepped Jim Isringhausen.

Jim came out in February to open up his brother’s place and make his move on one thousand acres of prime flat well-watered citrus land in Goleta, four miles to the north of Santa Barbara. Demand was up since the War ended and people back East were just going crazy for oranges, lemons, tangerines, limes, grapefruits, kumquats, you name it, and what they were getting from Florida was a drop in the bucket compared to what California could produce. Now was the time to get in on it before every used car salesman and soda jerk with a hundred bucks in his pocket got wind of it, not to mention the big conglomerates. And he came to O‘Kane first, because O’Kane had been with him from the beginning on this, and he’d been patient, sitting on his hands for two years now while Jim consolidated his holdings and lined up investors, and Jim appreciated that, he did.

He told O‘Kane all this on their way out to inspect the property on a day of biblical splendor, the sea leaping, the mountains chiseled, the sun hanging in the blue-veined sky like a big Valencia orange. Jim was looking good. He was wearing a checked sport jacket and white duck trousers, spats over his shoes, and his hair was frozen to his head with French pomade and his mustache so neat and refined it was barely there. The car was new, a yellow Mercer roadster with blood-red wire wheels and a fold-down canvas top. The wind was in their faces. Everything flashed and winked in the brilliant California light. Jim Isringhausen passed O’Kane a silver flask and O‘Kane drank deep of ambrosia — Scotch whiskey, the real stuff, smoke and peat and the very baaing of the sheep all in one swallow, whiskey like you couldn’t find anymore and maybe never would again.

“So what did you say you’ve got to put up,” Jim said, gently disengaging the flask from O‘Kane’s reluctant fingers and putting it to his own lips, “—three thousand?”

The wind beat at O‘Kane’s hair, the sun warmed his face. He squinted his eyes and felt the hope come up in him again, a breath of it, anyway. “Just about. Twenty-nine and something.”

Jim turned to him with the flask. He had the look of a priest on his face, all sympathy and concern. “That’s not your whole life savings, is it? Because I wouldn’t want to put you under any strain here — I mean, this is as close to a sure thing as you’ll find on this green earth, but nothing’s a hundred percent, you know that, don’t you?”

O‘Kane shrugged. He lifted the flask to his lips, casual as a millionaire. “No,” he lied, “I’ve got some put away still.”

He was no idiot. He knew what Jim was saying: there was risk involved. But there was risk involved in anything, in walking across the street, gulping your food, looking into a woman’s eyes on a Saturday night. This was his chance, and he was going to take it — all he needed to see was a row of orange trees, and he was in.

“All right,” Jim said, “call it three then — if you can round it off between now and next Tuesday, which is when we close the deal. At two hundred an acre, we need to raise twenty thousand dollars down against the bank loan and another thousand in reserve to hire a bunch of wops to water the trees and pick the fruit. Three’ll get you thirty shares, at a hundred per. Sound good, pardner?”

“Sure,” O‘Kane said.

Jim put both hands on the wheel as they swept too fast into a turn banked the wrong way; the wind sheared at them, there was a delicious jolt and Jim downshifted and hit the gas on the straightaway that suddenly opened up before them. “By the way,” he said, “Dolores sends her love.”

O‘Kane chewed over this bit of information as the flask came back to his hand and they swung off the pavement and onto a snaking dirt road that bloomed with dust and insects and flying bits of chaff. Dolores sends her love. Well, fine — O’Kane hadn’t seen or heard from her in two years, not since her husband came back from the War. He’d asked Jim about that, trying to sound casual, and Jim had told him they were over in Europe, reconstructing a villa someplace in Italy — not that it mattered two figs to O‘Kane one way or the other. Women were a thing of the past for him. He’d given up. After Rosaleen and poor Eddie Jr. — and Giovannella.

He hadn’t seen her either, the widow Capolupo. He heard she’d moved back in with her parents, pregnant with a dead man’s baby — or so she claimed. And he hadn’t heard whether she’d given birth to a wop or half a wop, and he just didn’t care, not anymore. If he could make his fortune here, in oranges, and get out from under the McCormicks and set himself up someplace — in San Francisco maybe, or Los Angeles — well then he might just possibly think about finding some young girl of twenty with some grace and style about her and settle into his forties with something to show for his life. But right now he didn’t need the complications. Or the heartache either.

The car swung round a bend and all at once they were in the groves, running along between rows of orange trees, glossy copper-green leaves and the oranges hanging fat and sweet in every one, as if this were Christmas, endless Christmas, and every tree decorated just for them. Jim pulled over at the end of one of the long tapering rows, where the trees suddenly gave out and the open fields began, yellow mustard up to your armpits and some kind of hairy blue flowers struggling through the weeds and a riot of every possible thing reaching up out of the dirt — everything but oranges, that is. “Well,” Jim said, throwing out his arms, “what do you think?”

O‘Kane looked over his shoulder at the ranks of unassailable trees, and then out into the field. Jim’s white trousers were stained with flecks of yellowish mud. There were gopher mounds everywhere, and at least now O’Kane knew what they were. “I don’t know,” he said. “What am I supposed to think?”

“I guess it’s kind of hard to picture,” Jim said, wading out into the undergrowth, “but once we get this cleared out of here and give these trees some attention—”

“What trees? You mean”—a gesture for the grove behind them—“those aren’t the trees right there?”

Jim Isringhausen was bent over something in the deep grass. “Here, look,” he said.

O‘Kane saw a sapling no thicker than his finger, four feet tall maybe, with a puff of vegetation at the top of it. And then he saw the others, the smallest stunted flags of copper-green leaves poking out here and there from the morass of weeds. “That’s an orange tree?” he said, and even as he said it he understood how elusive a thing a man’s fortune could be.

Jim Isringhausen had straightened up, holding his hands out in front of him as he rubbed the dirt from them. “Yep,” he said, “that’s it. And before you know it these little beauties’ll be producing like their big sisters behind you.”

O‘Kane just stared at the place Jim had cleared in the weeds and the leafy stalk of nothing stuck in the middle of it like an arrow shot down out of the sky. Then he looked over his shoulder again, at the deep-green wash of leaves and the oranges hanging uncountable in the interlocking grid of branches that went on as far as he could see. “It’s going to take a while,” he said finally.

Jim didn’t deny it. “Yeah,” he said, working his heel against the running board to dislodge a clot of mud from his gleaming tan shoe. “But not as long as you think.”

After that, things began to go downhill, a long steady slide that was so gradual O‘Kane wasn’t even aware of it, not at first. It was as if everything in his ken — Mr. McCormick, Dr. Brush, Riven Rock, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, the hoarded whiskey and beer and Mart and Pat and the accrued weight of all those saved and salvaged dollars — was on an incline and the top end of it tipping up higher and higher every day. O’Kane gave Jim Isringhausen his life’s savings — and talked Mart into putting up a hundred and some odd dollars too, to round off the investment at an even three thousand. He’d stood in that overgrown field and looked at those sorry twigs and saw the whole thing unfold, the gophers ravaging the roots, the well run dry, Jim Isringhausen back in New York enthroned in some townhouse like J. Pierpont Morgan, the weeds dead and parched and fallen away to the faintest skeletons of what they were and the orange trees as barren and dead under the summer sun as the grainy yellow dirt itself. But he didn’t care. It was a chance, that was all. The worst chance, maybe, but he was tired of waiting, cored out with it, exhausted, worn down, reckless and mad and seething with self-hate and the blackest kind of fatalistic despair: throw a nickel in the ocean and see if it makes a splash.

He drank beer with the whiskey and when that ran out he drank the bourbon. He was sick in the mornings and his throat was dry through the afternoons, his sinuses clogged, his head throbbing. He drank the sloe gin and it tasted like some sort of liquefied tooth powder, and then he dug up the wine and drank that. There were bootleggers in town now, weasel-faced desperadoes who drove up from Mexico with tequila and mescal and Pedro Domecq brandy, but it was eight dollars a bottle, nine, ten, and what the local entrepreneurs were making out in the canyons was a quarter the price, even if it was just about undrinkable. What they called whiskey was grain alcohol diluted with tap water, colored with caramel and flavored with prune juice, and “Scotch” was all of the above with a dose of creosote added for taste and texture. It was like drinking strychnine, battery acid, toilet cleanser, but it did the trick, and O‘Kane resorted to it, a loyal customer, a daily customer, a customer whose hands shook as he tried to unfold the money and slip it into the palm of Bill McCandless from Lompoc or Charley Waterhouse from Carpinteria or Farmer Caty from God knew where. They ran the stills — they made the shit — and handsome Eddie O’Kane took it back to his room and drank it. Oh, once in a while he’d go up to Menhoff’s and order a hamburger sandwich and a ginger ale and sit there drinking ginger ale after ginger ale till the bottle in his back pocket was empty and somebody had to help him out the door, but mainly he just went to his room and stared at the walls.

And what walls they were. Mrs. Fitzmaurice had interred them beneath a thick fibrous covering of the cheapest grade of wallpaper applied with liberal quantities of glue over what must have been plaster, also liberally applied. These were not sheer walls, not by any means — they plunged, leapt, bulged, threw up a cordillera here, sank into the depths of a laguna there. The wallpaper pattern was meant to represent some sort of tubular flower, endlessly repeated in blue, violet and chartreuse, and if O‘Kane stared at it long enough, the flowers first became bells, then sausages, and finally, if he’d had enough Lompoc swill, severed heads, elongated in the most horrible and unnatural way. There wasn’t much furniture to obstruct his view — a washstand, bed, wardrobe, chair and table — but that was all right with O’Kane. He had the opportunity to contemplate furniture all day long at Riven Rock, room after room of it, the finest money could buy. He didn’t need to bring it home with him — and he didn’t need the encumbrance either. Possessions were for the rich, and he wasn’t rich and never would be — not unless Jim Isringhausen pulled off some sort of miracle.

Mrs. Fitzmaurice had graced his room with her chef d‘oeuvre, an ambitious four-foot-long-by-two-foot-high canvas that daringly intermixed puppies and kittens both in what seemed at first glance to be a demonic battle over the remains of a disemboweled kitten, but on closer inspection proved to be an innocent tug-of-war over a ball of yarn. This inspirational piece had pride of place on the wall over the bed, where O’Kane had to twist his neck to study it while lying there drinking and listening to the only record he had (a distant, hissingly ethereal rendition of “Semper Fidelis” that sounded as if it had been recorded in the locker room at Notre Dame). One wall was broken up by a window, another by the door; the third was an uninterrupted medley of bell-like and sausagelike flowers. His fellow boarders — there were eight of them, all in various stages of unhope and decay — strenuously avoided him, except at meals, when a certain degree of contact and even conversation was inevitable, but he began skipping meals and avoiding them in the hallways even before they had a chance to avoid him.

So it went, through the winter, into the spring and the parched, citrus-wilting summer. O‘Kane began to miss the odd day at work when the ersatz whiskey or Scotch or “Genuine Holland Genever” was especially bad and hit him so hard even the fillings of his teeth ached, and he didn’t like to do that, miss work, and he knew it was the beginning of the end of everything he’d ever struggled and hoped for, but he just couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care. And no one else seemed to care either. Brush was on the way out, even a blind man could see that. He’d stopped putting in regular hours altogether, and half the time when he did show up it was no more than a hello and good-bye for Mr. McCormick before he puffed and blustered his way out to the theater house and buried himself in his office. Mart was as thickheaded as ever, oblivious to everything, and Nick and Pat were putting on weight till they looked like twin bulldogs, asleep on their feet. And Katherine, the presiding genius of the place, was nowhere to be seen. She was a name in a newspaper clipping, Mrs. Stanley McCormick, running around the country with a bunch of birth control fanatics and blood-sucking feminists — now that women had got the vote and voted down drinking, they wanted to do away with babies too. And sure, why not — let the stork fly down out of heaven with them so women could spend all their free time smoking and griping and wearing pants.

There was a real decline in the upkeep of the place, too — so much so that even O‘Kane noticed it through the scrim of his alcoholic haze. Torkelson was gone, lured away by one of the nonschizophrenic local millionaires, and the new man, ponderous, slow-moving, with a phony English accent and the ridiculous name of Butters, let the household staff get away with murder. There was dust everywhere, great roiling clouds of it rising from every chair you sat in, Mr. McCormick’s shirts were haphazardly laundered and indifferently ironed, the male housemaids spent half the day lolling around the kitchen with their feet up and you never saw a broom or feather duster in action anymore, let alone a mop. Outside, it was even worse. Stribling had given notice the day after the gopher incident and for lack of a better alternative, Brush had put the skinny Irishman in charge (O’Mara his name was, not O‘Hara, he was from Poughkeepsie, New York, and he didn’t know a cactus from a coconut), and everything went to hell in a handbasket. There were Italians asleep under the bushes in broad daylight, gophers eating their way through the gardens and plowing up the lawns, whole flower beds gone dead for lack of care, and no one seemed to notice, least of all Mr. McCormick — he just went on talking to his judges, reading aloud in half a dozen voices and veering off across the estate at a mad canter every time somebody opened the door and let him out.

It was late that fall, on a day of slanting sun and scouring winds that tossed the trees and twisted themselves around puffs of yellow dust, that O‘Kane, drunk on the job, broached the subject of his orange-grove investment with his employer. Mart was asleep on the sofa. Dr. Brush was in his office. There wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house but for the gasp and sigh of the wind. “Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said, setting down the book he’d been staring at for the past half hour without effect, “I’d be curious to know your opinion on something — an investment I’ve made with Jim Isringhausen. In citrus.”

“Who?” Mr. McCormick was moving round the table, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, arranging the chairs and table settings for lunch, a thing he particularly liked to do. Some days he’d spend as much as an hour or more positioning and repositioning the chairs, shifting plates, spoons, cups and saucers a quarter inch to the left or right, worrying over the napkins in their rings, endlessly rearranging the cut flowers in the vase in the center of the table. It was one of his rituals, one of the more innocuous ones, and all the doctors had encouraged him in it, even Brush — at least he was doing something.

“Jim Isringhausen,” O‘Kane repeated. “He says he used to know you at Princeton.”

Mr. McCormick had the look of a wading bird standing there over the table, some lean beaky thing studying to spear a frog or a minnow and gulp it down whole. His eyes went briefly to O‘Kane’s and then fell away again. “Never heard of him,” he said, realigning spoon and plate on the doctor’s side of the table, and then he said something under his breath to one of his judges. This wasn’t unusual, particularly at meal-times, and O’Kane thought nothing of it. Often Mr. McCormick would set extra places at the table, and when Dr. Brush questioned him about it, he would explain that they were reserved for the judges. Today there were only four places — for Mart, O‘Kane, Dr. Brush and their host — so it was safe to assume that the judges had already eaten.

“Sure you have,” O‘Kane heard himself say, a faint tocsin ringing somewhere in the back of his fuddled brain, “—Princeton, ’96. He was your classmate.”

Mr. McCormick commenced hopping from foot to foot again; this was another of his rituals, and it meant that the floor was on fire. When the floor wasn’t on fire it was made of glue, a very efficacious and unyielding glue, and he had to strain to lift his feet. But now he was hopping, and because he was hopping, he was too absorbed to respond to O‘Kane’s assertions.

“He lives in New York, O‘Kane went on, and he was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit desperate now, marshaling his facts till the weight of them would give him the reassurance he was looking for. ”He has something to do with the stock exchange, I think. And his brother, you know his brother — or you know of him. He has that grand big place out on Sycamore Canyon Road, the one we pass by on our drives sometimes?“

When Mr. McCormick still didn’t answer, O‘Kane, who was feeling very strange and out of sorts, as if he had a fever coming on — or a hangover and fever combined — sat brooding a moment, trying to recollect just what he did know about Jim Isringhausen, aside from the fact that his sister-in-law was a terrific lay. Not much. Not much at all. He worried it over a bit, then tried a new tack. “Mr. McCormick, when you were… well, before you came to Riven Rock, before you were married, I mean, I was just wondering how you felt about investing in real estate — in general, I mean.”

Mr. McCormick had hopped himself across the room to the window, where he stood holding a spoon up to the light, periodically breathing on it and then buffing it on his shirttail. He gave O‘Kane a blank look.

“Your properties. Your ranch in New Mexico. All those buildings in Chicago. Your house in Massachusetts.”

This was a real stumper, and it seemed to take Mr. McCormick back a ways. O‘Kane wasn’t really expecting an answer at this point, and he didn’t know what he was after anyway — sure Mr. McCormick was rich and grand, but he’d inherited his money and he was mad as a loon, and what did that make O’Kane for seeking advice of him?

Mr. McCormick hopped back to the table, left foot, right foot, left, left, right, and replaced the spoon. He stood fretting over the arrangement a moment and then turned a bloodless face to O‘Kane. “My, my wife m-manages all my p-property. I don’t, I don‘t”—long pause—“I don’t concern myself with that anymore.”

What had he expected? The voice of the oracle? Sound financial advice? A loan? O‘Kane sank deeper into his chair. Everything in the room seemed to be in motion, every atom bucking up against the next till the furniture and walls were frantic with activity, and he knew he needed a drink. He lurched to his feet, shook Mart awake and ducked into the toilet, where he lifted the ceramic lid of the reservoir and fished out a pint bottle of whatever it was Charley Waterhouse had sold him a case of the night before. O’Kane had decanted a quart of the stuff into two pint bottles for ease of transport and concealment, and now, visions of orange groves dying in his head, he raised the cool glass aperture to his puckered lips and kissed it long and hard, letting the fever flare up again till he didn’t know whether he was going to vomit or pass out — or both.

When he came back into the room, Mr. McCormick was remonstrating with somebody in the high querulous tone that meant he was about to have an episode, but it wasn’t Mart he was addressing. Mart was out again, slumped in a chair and snoring softly. No, Mr. McCormick was pleading with his judges—“I didn’t mean It — I didn’t want to — I never — Im ashamed, I am!”—and O‘Kane prepared himself for the worst. But this time, the worst was far worse than he could ever have imagined, because just before the walls started moving and the ceiling came alive with flickering eyes and snouts and a scramble of fur, the judges appeared in stiff congress over their plates, bearded and stern, three of them, three bearded scowling merciless men, and all their six merciless eyes fastened on him, smiling Eddie O’Kane, only he didn’t have any smile for this occasion, because he was in uncharted waters now and going down fast.

All right. Sure. So he laid off for a while. He wouldn’t go near the stuff, not if you stabbed him with a sharp stick and drove him into a cage and forced it down his throat. Of course, it was just that swill, that was the problem, the impurities and such — he was lucky he wasn’t blinded or rendered impotent or insane. He hadn’t really seen the Judges — it was just the booze, the bad stuff, a bad batch. But he laid off all the same and he got to work every day, and though his guts were full of hot magma and he couldn’t shit to save his life and his head was like an eggshell in a vise and his legs so heavy he could hardly stand up, he began, very gradually, to experience the world as it really was, without a crutch, without a filter.

The first thing he noticed, shivering and sweating at the same time as he vomited in the toilet at the end of the hall and fucking Maloney who he was going to kill and dismember and maybe boil and eat banging on the door in his boorish inconsideration and impatience, was that he’d begun to get his sense of smell back. It was amazing: he lived in a world of odors. Piss suddenly reeked under his shoes. His socks were vaporous, his underwear yeasty. The hallway outside his door smelled as if somebody had died in it just prior to being immured in the walls. He could smell Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s facial unguent from where he lay in bed, all the way down the stairs and around the corner and through the door to her sad and solitary widow’s room. And he could smell her sadness too, the smell of disuse, old flesh, a body mewed up and wasted. There was a car parked out front and it had gasoline in the tank and he could smell the gasoline. And food: onions, lard, beef, canned beans, some sort of spice — what was it? Basil? Yes, basil. He hadn’t smelled basil in years — hadn’t smelled anything for that matter — and it brought tears to his eyes.

Next thing he knew, he had an appetite.

First the smell, and then the hunger. He started getting up for breakfast, sitting around the table at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s with his fellow boarders, flapjacks like stones, porridge like stones before they petrify, syrup like squeezed stones, but he ate it, ate it all and cleaned his plate with a sop of bread. At ten-thirty every morning, instead of taking a booze break, he ambled down to the kitchen and sweet-talked Sam Wah into frying him a beefsteak or a piece of liver with onions, and at lunchtime he sat there across from Mr. McCormick in the very lap of one of the judges and buttered up his bread and dug into his soup as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. He took dinner at Menhoff’s because he was too late getting home for Mrs. Fitzmaurice, and she’d never charged him, except for Saturdays and Sundays, and when he drank a bottle of ginger ale he studied the label with a wistful smile: “Reminding you of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the contents of this bottle is sold to you on the understanding that it will not be used or mixed with alcoholic liquor.”

His suits, which had hung slack on him, began to fit again. He took pains with his hair and his teeth and made sure he washed under the arms every morning, and a month later, after swearing off Charley Waterhouse, Bill McCandless, and even Cody Menhoff, who was now selling a finer class of homemade gin under the table and the county sheriff looking the other way, O‘Kane found he’d recovered something else too: his libido. He woke each morning with a tire iron between his legs, and when he strolled down the block to wait for Roscoe to pick him up he leered at every female between the ages of twelve and sixty and tipped his hat so many times he wore out the brim. He needed a woman. And he thought of little else through the rest of that week and into the next, the terrible quandary of where to find one burning in his brain every time he dropped the needle on his Sousa record, unlocked the barred door to the upstairs parlor or set off cross-country with Mart and Mr. McCormick on one of their mad runs. Listening to those faint trumpets, tubas and sousaphones, jogging along behind Mr. McCormick, he turned the problem over in his mind: women, the sort of women he was seeking, were gathered thick as pigeons over cocktails in the speakeasies that had sprung up around town, but to get to them he’d have to drink a cocktail too, and one cocktail would lead to another till he was past caring and lost his appetite and his sense of smell and began to see Mr. McCormick’s judges sitting there before him in all their undeniable corporeality.

It was in this state, goatish and disgruntled but alive to every sensory current of the world, that O‘Kane came up the stairs at Riven Rock one morning to find Mr. McCormick extended as far as he could reach through the bars of the upper parlor door with both his hands locked round the throat of Sam Wah, the cook. Sam’s face was an ugly color, bloated and dark as a bruise, and though his hands were in turn clamped to Mr. McCormick’s wrists, he was barely struggling, his feet half-lifted from the floor, his eyes beginning to film over. And Mart? Where was he? Unconscious on the floor behind Mr. McCormick, a glistening bright carnation of blood blooming out of the comer of his mouth.

O‘Kane lost no time — he was up the stairs in a trice, methodically attacking Mr. McCormick’s forearms, not a word exchanged between them, nothing but grunts and curses and the fierce hissing insuck of breath, until Mr. McCormick released the cook and the cook fell to the floor like a sack of old clothes. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t done yet, not by any means. As soon as O’Kane forced his hands away, Mr. McCormick seized O‘Kane by both arms and drew him violently up against the rack of the bars, and while that struggle went on, Sam Wah rose shakily to his feet, massaged his throat with an angry trembling hand and launched into a high-pitched litany of Chinese complaint. O’Kane finally got a purchase on Mr. McCormick and they paused, locked in a stalemate, each gripping the other’s arms through the inflexible iron bars.

“You no like, I no cook!” Sam Wah shouted, dancing round the landing and shaking his fist. “Mistah Cormah, you got no right!”

O‘Kane, casting a quick glance beyond his employer’s seething face, saw the breakfast things scattered across the room behind him, and gathered that Mr. McCormick had objected to the way the cook had prepared his eggs.

“You got no right take my neck like this, Mistah Cormah!” Sam Wah was livid. He stripped the apron from his chest, balled it up and flung it on the floor beside the toque that had fallen there at some earlier stage of the altercation. “Mistah Cormah, I got tell you, after fo‘teen year, I quit!”

His grip rigid in O‘Kane’s, Mr. McCormick just stood there on the other side of the bars, and he never even blinked, never said a word, but his jaw was set and there was something in his eyes that said he would never let go, the bruised defiance of a very spoiled little rich boy who would die before he would admit he was wrong.

The upshot of all this was a revolution in the culinary life of Riven Rock. Brush, who really didn’t want to be bothered, consulted with Butters and the nurses and whoever else would listen to him, and discovered that male cooks were few and far between — not to mention the male kitchen help Sam Wah took with him when he departed. As a stopgap, they promoted a Mexican gardener who claimed to have been a cook at a restaurant in Veracruz before the revolution. He lasted three days, during which the house was filled with strange and disquieting odors. Every meal he prepared seemed to consist of some sort of glutinous bean and rice paste wrapped in a thin bread-like substance no one could identify, and all of it so everlastingly and excoriatingly hot it was like pouring flaming kerosene down your throat. Mr. McCormick became very disturbed and spent the whole of every morning shut away in-his toilet, trousers down around his ankles, folding and refolding his toilet paper while he awaited the next intestinal emergency.

Next they tried a fleshless sun-blasted old man who used to run a chuckwagon for sheepherders in the Goleta foothills, but all he knew how to cook was mutton, and after a week of that — boiled, fried, fricasseed, roasted and baked in a clay pit till it was mummified — they took to calling in orders at Diehl’s Grocery, three meals a day. Finally, deeply frustrated and in high dudgeon, Dr. Brush took O‘Kane aside one afternoon and asked him what he thought of hiring a woman — just to do the cooking and the kitchen work.

“A woman?” O‘Kane repeated, as if they were speaking of some alien species, and he was thinking of Elsie Reardon and the other female maids they’d had in the early days. It seemed so long ago. So long it was as if the prohibition against women had been written in stone and brought down from the mountaintop.

“Yes,” Brush shouted, and he was impatient with all this, resentful of having to act as estate manager and majordomo of the house as well, when it was clearly his duty as a trained psychiatrist to devote himself to higher things, for the main and simple reason that that was what he’d been trained and hired to do. He gave O‘Kane an exasperated look. “Mr. McCormick has been, well, calmer lately,” he said, “aside of course from the unfortunate incident with the cook, that is, and if we give strict orders that the woman is not to leave the kitchen under any circumstances and keep a sharp and vigilant eye on the patient, well, I don’t see any reason why we can’t, well, employ a female here. It’s clear we can’t go on like this.”

O‘Kane watched him a moment, trying to gauge the extent of the doctor’s agitation, and then he shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

And so it was that he came into the house the next morning to a smell of sauces and spices and fresh baked bread so intoxicating he thought he would faint with the anticipation of it, real food — Italian, it smelled like — and not the unvarying and nameless crud Mrs. Fitzmaurice served up at the boardinghouse. He let himself in upstairs and carefully locked the door behind him, a woman in the house again and this no time to be lax or forgetful, and found Mart reading to Mr. McCormick out of a book of Shakespeare’s plays. They both looked tranquil and they both turned their heads to smile at him as he swung away from the door and came into the room. “Good morning, Mart, Mr. McCormick,” he said, and he could feel it himself, a change come over them, a charm, the benediction of food.

“M-morning, Eddie,” Mr. McCormick said in a high cheery voice. Mart, whose busted lip had healed nicely by this time, looked up from the book and grunted out a greeting.

“Smells good,” O‘Kane said, and the odor, redolent of sausage, garlic and pomodoros, had risen from the kitchen to invest the upper floor.

“Yeah,” Mart said, wagging his big head and grinning. They all three of them involuntarily swallowed.

“So who’s the new cook?” O‘Kane asked, sliding in beside Mart on the sofa.

Mart glanced at Mr. McCormick; Mr. McCormick’s eyes glistened. He had a look on his face, something new — nobody had to tell him there was a woman downstairs. “I don’t know,” Mart said. “Some widow, I think. A wop.

O‘Kane lifted his eyebrows. Something was wrong here, and he felt it all the way down in his gut where all of that spaghetti and ravioli and lasagna was destined to go. It couldn’t be. There were a thousand widows in the country, war widows, old ladies in black shuffling along the sidewalks, women whose husbands had died at sea, in auto wrecks and train derailments, of heart failure and cancer, and sure they had to support themselves, even if they were old and feeble. Still, he found himself getting to his feet and looking round the room in a daze. “Will you excuse me, Mr. McCormick?” he said. “I just need to go downstairs a minute — I forgot something.”

And then he was on the staircase, the sweet rising odor of marinara sauce and fresh-baked bread stronger and stronger as he made his way down the steps, into the servants’ hall and through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Steam rose round him, parting in wisps and wraiths with the stimulus of the fanning doors, all the burners of the stove were on high and the hot liquid bubbling and hissing in the big cast-iron pots, and there was a figure there, a familiar figure, a figure he knew as well as any on earth, a bit fuller maybe, a shade older, but it was her and no denying it: Giovannella.

“Hiya, Eddie,” she said, turning a cold unsmiling face to him, indifferent as the wind, “long time, no see.”

2. LA LUNE DE MIEL

The day after their wedding Stanley and Katherine went on to Paris along with their mothers and servants and six hundred pounds of luggage, and the honeymoon began in earnest. Unfortunately, Stanley seemed to experience some difficulty in putting his affairs in order and finding the ideal spot in his steamer trunk for his socks, handkerchiefs and underwear, and they missed their train and were late getting in. It was a disappointment for Katherine, who’d been looking forward to an evening on the town, not simply for her own sake, but for Stanley‘s — she was hoping the change of scene would distract him so he wouldn’t be so preoccupied when finally, inevitably, at the shining climax of the evening, they found themselves in bed together. But it wasn’t to be.

Everyone had been packed and waiting, the servants solicitous, the bags stowed away, the carriage out front in the circular drive, and Stanley nowhere to be found. It was raining still, and the raw wet earth of the flower beds gave off a dank odor of the sifting and winowing of the centuries. Earthworms—Lumbricus terretris—sprawled across the walk, and how many of those blind blameless creatures had Katherine dissected under the direction of one bearded professor or another? She’d been out to the carriage twice already to see to things, stepping carefully round the pale bleached corpses of the worms, and now she stood in the vestibule with her mother, adjusting her hat in a rising storm of excitement, eager to be on her way, to begin the adventure, to leave the stone towers and the placid lake behind and get on with her life as Mrs. Stanley McCormick. Nettie was already settled in the carriage and Jean Claude was stationed at the door with a black spreading umbrella, awaiting their pleasure. “Whatever can be keeping Stanley?” her mother wondered aloud, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the clock in the hall behind them.

Katherine smoothed her gloves, peered through the windows at the rain melting into the pavement and plucking relentlessly at the black canvas top of the carriage, and then laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “You go ahead, mother,” she said. “I’ll go up and see what’s keeping him — we won’t be a minute.”

She found Stanley in his room, pacing back and forth between an open trunk and two eviscerated suitcases. He had something bundled in his arms, some sort of garment — longjohns — and there were notebooks, pens, sketch pads, socks, ties and shaving things arranged on the bed in neat little piles, a novel he’d left out to read on the train, his tennis racket and bathing costume. “Stanley, darling,” she said, standing there at the door in her hat and coat, “what are you doing? Don’t you know everyone’s waiting? We’ll miss the train.”

His color was high and a lock of his hair had fallen loose. “I — well, it’s my underwear, you see, because I can’t just go off on a day with weather like this and not think about it, especially the temperature differential in Paris and what it’ll be like on the train, and so I just, well, I needed time to sort things out and decide—”

“Your underwear?” She was stunned. “Stanley, the train is leaving in forty-five minutes. If we don’t go right this instant we’re going to miss it. This is no time to worry about underwear.”

“No, no, no,” he said, gesturing, the limp garments draped over both arms, “you don’t understand. You see, I order my longjohns specially from Dunhill & Porter in London, and they come in eight gradations of weight so as to meet every possible contingency, from, from, well snow to the sunshiniest day in August, when, of course, one wouldn’t want to suffocate — and he let out a strange hollow yelp of a laugh. ”Don’t you see?“ he said, bending now to the steamer trunk and patiently folding the garments in his arms. She could see that he was laughing still, chuckling to himself and shaking his head. ”She wants me to freeze—“ he said, addressing the depths of the trunk, ”—my own w-wife.“

She crossed the room to him, murmuring, “Here, let me help,” but he stiffened and turned away from her. “Stanley,” she said, “please. It’s not cold at all — it must be fifty-five or sixty degrees out there — and they’re sure to be having Indian summer weather in Paris this time of year….”

He paid her no mind, but kept folding and unfolding his underwear and carrying it from one bag to another, and no sooner did he settle on a place for it than he pulled it back out and started the whole process all over again.

“We’re going to miss the train,” she said. “Stanley. Are you listening to me? We’re going to miss the train.”

His eyes went suddenly to hers and there was a pleading look in them, a look that both begged for help and rejected it at the same time. “I can‘t,” he said. “I’m, I’m not ready. I can’t.”

Her mother’s voice came up the stairwell then, tremulous and interrogatory: “Katherine?”

“Leave it,” Katherine urged. “Leave it for the servants to send on. We’ll buy you new things as soon as we get in, better things, Parisian things, and all this will be on the next train if you need it. Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm, “come on, Stanley, we’ve got to go.”

He wasn’t violent, he wasn’t rough, he wasn’t pettish or peevish, but he was immovable all the same. He looked down at her from his height, looked at her hand urgent on his arm, and said, simply, “No.” Then he pulled away from her and crossed the room to his suitcase, trailing the vacant legs of his longjohns behind him like pennants.

Suddenly she was angry. “Stanley!” she snapped, and she couldn’t help herself, honeymoon or no honeymoon. She stamped her foot; her voice shot up a register. “You stop this now!” she shouted, and here she was, shrill as a fishwife on the second day of her marriage, but her patience was at an end and the train was rolling into the station and she wanted to go, to go now, and no more frittering or vacillating or neurotic displays.

She was about to stalk across the room and take his arm again when she started at a sound behind her and turned around, expecting her mother. It wasn’t her mother. It was Stanley’s mother, Nettie, the ogre herself, the rain beaded on her hat and caught in a fine sparkling mist on the collar of her fur coat. Her jaw was wet and her mouth barely moved as she spoke. “I’ll handle this,” she said.

Nettie did finally get Stanley moving — how, Katherine would never know — and they both emerged from the room within half an hour, the suitcases and trunk neatly packed and secured and standing watch at the door, Nettie on Stanley’s left arm, his coat draped over his right, but still they missed the first train and the evening was ruined as far as Katherine was concerned. There was some satisfaction in finally getting under way, sitting there in the intimacy of their compartment with her erect and proper husband at her side, even if she did have to share him with his mother and hers, but it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. They made small talk, gazed out the window at the dark French countryside and the flitting lights, dined pleasantly enough, but all the while Stanley seemed tense and wooden, nodding his head automatically at any remark addressed to him, his hand — the hand she held in hers — as stiff as a marionette’s. And if he was wooden, if he was a puppet, then who was pulling the strings? Katherine gazed at Nettie’s tight self-satisfied smile as the train shot smoothly through the night and they talked in small voices of French painting, escargot, people they’d known in Chicago and the unsuitability of birds as pets, and she felt as depressed and deflated as she’d ever felt in her life.

When they finally arrived, Stanley was visibly drained. The whole business of the wedding and the move out of his hotel to Prangins for a night and then out of Prangins for Paris must have wrought havoc on his nerves. He was emotionally delicate, Katherine knew that, and she appreciated that in him — he was sensitive, artistic, retiring, as kind and thoughtful as any man in the world, the sort of husband women dream of. But the exhaustion was written on his face for anybody to see and when finally they were shown to their suite at the Elysée Palace, he merely wished her good night, ducked into his room and shut the door firmly behind him. She stood there a moment in the center of the salon, exhausted herself, thinking she should go to him, if only to pet and comfort him, but then she heard the sudden sharp rasp of the latch falling into place on the inside of the door and she sank into the nearest chair and cried till she was all cried out.

In the morning, Stanley was his old self, smiling and relaxed, and Katherine felt renewed too — they’d both been tired, that was all. They breakfasted in their room, treating each other with the exaggerated tenderness of a couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, and everything seemed right, the way she’d pictured it, gentle and soothing and intimate. Until Nettie showed up, that is. She burst in on them at nine, wanting to know if Stanley had taken his fish-oil capsule and if they were still planning to tour the Musée du Jeu-de-Paume or the Louvre. Immediately, Stanley’s mood changed. A moment before he’d been gay and communicative, slathering his toast with butter and reminiscing about how he and Harold used to play at Indians when they were boys and steal out into the yard to eat their toast dry beneath the shrubbery, and now suddenly the words died in his throat. No, he admitted, he hadn’t taken his fish-oil capsule, but he had it right here somewhere, and he would, and yes, they were planning on the Louvre, but he needed time to finish, well, his breakfast, and he hoped his mother wouldn’t be too disappointed if they left at ten?

If Stanley’s mother was going, then it was only right that Josephine should go too, and Katherine tried to make the best of it, chatting with her mother and snuggling beside Stanley in the carriage on the way over. But as they strolled through the galleries, Stanley quietly commenting on one painting or another, he unconsciously took his mother’s arm, and Katherine and Josephine were left to bring up the rear. Then there was lunch. Nettie had invited some horrid missionary’s wife who apparently ran a boardinghouse where Stanley had stayed while under the tutelage of Monsieur Julien. Her name was Mrs. van Pele, a dumpy, opinionated, undistinguished woman in her sixties, and Stanley nearly jumped out of his skin when she entered the room. He shot up from the table so precipitously he nearly knocked it over, his face flushing, and if it weren’t for the potted palm behind him he might have fled the restaurant altogether. “Adela,” Nettie chirped, trying to cover Stanley’s confusion while the waiter looked on suspiciously and Katherine and Josephine gaped in bewilderment, “how nice of you to come. You know Stanley, of course, and this is his wife, Katherine, and her mother, Mrs. Josephine Dexter.”

Stanley didn’t offer his hand, nor did he bend forward to accept Mrs. van Pele’s; he just stood there, his face crimson, staring down at his feet and clenching his fists. “So nice to see you again, Stanley,” Mrs. van Pele said, settling into a chair with the assistance of the maître d‘, “and congratulations. I wish you all the best.”

“I’m so ashamed,” Stanley murmured, raising his head to address the entire table, the maître d’ and the waiter as well. “I don‘t — I, well, I’ve never told anybody, I’m so ashamed, but I was impure and violated my mother’s wishes and your hospitality too—” “

“Nonsense,” Nettie said, and her voice cracked like a whip. “Sit down, Stanley. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

A silence fell over the table as Stanley slowly sank back into his seat. The tinkling of silverware and the buzz of voices became audible all of a sudden. Katherine was bewildered. She tried to take her husband’s hand, but he pulled away from her.

“Utter nonsense and rubbish,” Nettie said after a moment, as if for clarification. “You’ve just been married, Stanley. You have responsibilities now — you’re not a boy anymore.”

The waiter had retreated a few steps, wincing and sucking at his teeth, and Mrs. van Pele and Josephine began talking simultaneously, when Stanley stood again. “Excuse me,” he murmured, pushing back the chair, “I need to, well, freshen up — that is, I mean, I’ll be right back.”

“Sit down, Stanley,” Nettie said, peering up from beneath the armature of her hat.

Stanley didn’t listen. His face was heavy, his shoulders slumped. He looked round the table as if he didn’t recognize anyone there and then strode directly across the room, up the three steps to the entrace and out the door and into the street, and he never looked back.

Katherine didn’t know what to do. She looked at her mother, at the missionary’s wife, and then finally at Nettie: her husband, for some reason fathomable only to him, had just deserted her in a public place. On the third day of their honeymoon, no less. She was stunned. “Where could he possibly—?” she heard herself say.

Nettie said nothing.

“He’s probably just gone out for some air, dear,” Josephine said, and then she glanced over her shoulder and made a face. “It is a bit stuffy in here.”

Mrs. van Pele agreed. Wholeheartedly.

And now suddenly Nettie was on her feet, a short brisk square-shouldered woman of sixty-nine who looked several years younger, dressed in the latest fashions from the Parisian couturiers and as used to the prerogatives of command as any mere Napoleon or Kaiser. Her hat alone — a massive construction of felt, feathers and velvetta — could have inspired awe in any officer corps. “Adela, Josephine,” she said, “would you excuse me for just a moment — I’m sure Stanley’s quite all right; if anything it’s just the excitement of seeing you again, Adela, so soon after the drama of the wedding, and I see now that perhaps we shouldn’t have surprised him — but I do need a moment to speak privately with Katherine.” She gestured for Katherine to rise and follow her. “You’ll come with me into the next room, please? It’ll only take a minute.”

Puzzled, Katherine rose from the table and followed Nettie’s brisk martial form through the main dining area and into the ladies’ salon, where Nettie settled herself in a plush chair in front of an oval mirror in a gilt frame and directed Katherine to the chair beside her. There were two other women present, at the far end of the room, conversing in low tones. Katherine sank into the chair with an air of impatience — she was beginning to feel distinctly irritated, and who was this woman to think she could command her too?

“I’ll get right to the point,” Nettie said, drawing her mouth tight and staring into Katherine’s eyes. “I don’t pretend to know what’s upset Stanley this afternoon, but I will say this”—she paused—“change has been very difficult for him. He’s the best boy in the world, fine and bright and loving, but he suffers from a nervous condition. It’s his extreme sensitivity, that’s all, his artistic side coming out, but of course we’ve had him examined by a number of specialists because of his older sister, Mary Virginia. You see, Mary Virginia has been diagnosed as—”

Katherine cut her off. “Yes, I know. She suffers from dementia praecox. Stanley told me. Ages ago. But I really don’t see how that should affect him in any way.”

“Exactly. But he is delicate emotionally, and for some years now he’s had bouts of nervous prostration, and I thought I’d better just tell you what you’re in for, since you were so anxious to come between him and is family. He doesn’t need coddling, not at all, but he does need understanding, and he does have his moods.”

Katherine watched herself in the mirror, her face pale and eyes alert, the slightest movement of her hands and forearms duplicated as she smoothed the skirt over her knees. “I’m perfectly well aware of that,” she said, and her tone couldn’t have been colder or more final.

Nettie leaned forward, all the combative lines round her mouth and eyes drawn into fierce alignment. “I don’t know if you appreciate what I’m saying: we’re afraid his condition could worsen. We hope not — I pray every night for him — and the reports are encouraging, or at least most of them, but there is that possibility. Are you prepared for it?”

Katherine was already getting to her feet. “I don’t know what you think I am, but I’m no child and I resent being treated like one. I’m fully aware of Stanley’s neurasthenia and fully prepared to do anything I can to see him improve. It’s not as if he‘s—”

“Yes? Not as if he’s what? Crazy? Is that what you mean to say?”

“Of course not,” Katherine said, but even as she said it the idea was there in her head, ugly as a scab that refuses to heal. “I meant it’s not as if his behavior is cause for alarm, not to me, anyway, because I know him in a way you never will. He’s my husband, don’t you understand that? He’s not yours anymore — he’s mine.”

The old woman in the armorial hat just stared at her out of two eyes that were exactly like Stanley’s. It took her a moment, and then, in a voice so low it was barely audible, she said, “Yes. That’s right. He’s yours.”

They stayed a month in Paris, occasionally making overnight motor excursions in the Renault Stanley bought, and they switched hotels at Katherine’s whim — from the Elysée Palace to the Splendide to the Ritz. “I need a change,” she would tell Stanley as he staggered through the door with the bundle of string-bound parcels and hat boxes that represented the day’s removable offerings, but she never gave him a reason beyond that. The reason, of course, was Nettie. She was entrenched in her suite of rooms at the Elysée Palace like a fat swollen tick, sucking the blood out of everyone, and Katherine only wanted to get away from her — and to get Stanley away too. That was the important thing. That was essential. Because they’d be all right if she would just leave them alone, Katherine was sure of it.

But Nettie was tenacious. She insisted on lunching and dining with them daily and consulting on every purchase they made, from the andirons, vases and oil paintings that would grace their future home to the white fox tippet and muff and tourmaline bracelet Stanley picked out for his bride, and Katherine’s only recourse was to use her own mother as a buffer every step of the way. It was like a game of checkers: Nettie advanced a square and Katherine countered with Josephine. “Should we go to the theater this evening?” Nettie would propose at lunch, and Katherine, looking up languidly from a book or catalogue, would say, “Why don’t you and mother go? — Stanley and I are exhausted, aren’t we, Stanley?”

Stanley was a prince through it all, though he refused to hear any criticism of his mother — he wouldn’t even allow Katherine to mention her without bunching up the muscles of his jaw till they began to shift beneath the skin like some sort of abnormal growth. He was dutiful and patient, the soul of propriety, and never once did he let a thought of socialism or Eugene Debs come between him and the determined campaign of acquisition Katherine had embarked on: they did have a house to fill, after all. Or would have soon. There was only one thing in which he continued to fail her, the biggest thing, the ultimate thing, the thing all the creatures of the earth did as naturally and unconsciously as they drew breath and ate and gamboled in the fields, and there was no fulfillment without it, no security, no consummation, no hope.

Each night was a repetition of the first. He was busy. He was worried. The Harvester Company. Correspondence. Accounts. Bills. If she would just give him a minute, just a minute…. Alone, in their rooms, just before retiring, he would take her hand, bend to her with a formal kiss and excuse himself, and no matter how seductive she tried to be, how suggestive or shy or elaborately unconcerned, he sat at his desk in a sea of paper until she gave up and found her bleary way to bed. That was her hidden affliction, that was her sorrow, and she blamed Nettie for it — the proximity of Nettie, Nettie’s face and image and her fierce emasculating will: if she couldn’t have her son, then no one could.

Finally, in desperation, Katherine hit on the idea of a motor tour to the south of France, a tour that would be certain to deflect both mothers, what with the dust and mud and sheer barbarity of the lurching, fuming, backfiring monster of a contraption they would be expected to immure themselves in for days at a time, and hadn’t Nettie sworn she would never set foot in an automobile as long as she lived? Yes, of course: a motor tour. What could be better? Katherine woke with the inspiration one crisp morning in October and let it incubate while the maid laid out her clothes and she brushed her hair and studied her face in the mirror. She waited till the waiter had brought their breakfast and Stanley was poking idly through the newspaper, and then she let out a little gasp and clasped her hands together, as if the notion had just come to her. “Stanley,” she exclaimed, “I’ve just had the most wonderful idea!”

But yet again, Katherine had underestimated her adversary — and her own mother, for that matter. Both women greeted the plan enthusiastically, and when the morning of their departure arrived, Nettie and Josephine appeared at the Ritz in identical motoring costumes, a sort of pale dust-colored webbing that covered them from crown to heel and suggested nothing so much as beekeeping or an escape from the seraglio. Stanley climbed into the front seat beside the chauffeur and took the wheel himself, while Katherine and the cocooned mothers jostled for position on the narrow rear seat. They got no farther than Montrouge before the first tire blew, and after languishing beneath an unseasonably warm sun for an hour and a half while Stanley and the chauffeur patched it, they made two brisk miles to Bagneux before mechanical failure forced them to call it a day.

Naturally, the inn at Bagneux was considerably less than what they might have hoped for, and Stanley’s mother, crusty and outraged, was the principal soloist in a chorus of complaint. Katherine was testy herself, and at dinner that night, after they’d staggered up three narrow flights to rooms that were like pigeon coops, she found herself drawn into a ridiculous argument with her mother-in-law over the French pronunciation of “orange.” They’d all changed and freshened up and settled themselves in the dining room with a decent sparkling wine and a consommé madrilène that was really quite refreshing, and the waiter had just taken their orders, when Nettie, grimacing sourly under the baggage of a bad day, leaned toward Katherine and said, “You pronounce that like a foreigner.”

Katherine looked to Stanley, but he was studying the wine list so earnestly you would have thought he was going to be quizzed on it, and then looked to her mother, but Josephine could only shrug. “Pronounce what? ”

Nettie drew herself up, her tongue working behind her teeth to produce a nasty mincing parody of Katherine’s French: “Canard à low-ron-zheh.”

“And how, pray tell, am I supposed to say it?”

“Like an American. Because that’s what you are, despite all your Geneva airs, and you should be proud of it, like Stanley is — aren’t you, Stanley?”

Stanley gazed up from the wine list. He looked mystified and vaguely guilty, as if he were being punished for something he hadn’t done. “I — well — I, yes,” he said in a low voice.

“I’m sure it’s just a matter of—” Josephine began, but Nettie cut her off.

“Decent people,” Nettie hissed, “do not talk like”—and here she paused to glance round the table, stern, pampered, autocratic, an empress of money, McCormick money—“Frogs. ”

Katherine was so outraged she wanted to smash every bit of crockery on the table and walk out the door and never come back, but she restrained herself — for Stanley’s sake. “Yes,” she said, barely able to conceal the contempt in her voice, “and how do you pronounce it then?”

All eyes were on the old woman in the adamantine hat, and she savored the moment, held it just a beat, and said: “Awwrenge. ”

So it went for the three and a half weeks it took them to get to Nice. They were constantly thrust together, exposed to all sorts of weather and every conceivable type of roadway, from cobbled village streets to cartpaths that began in the middle of nowhere and wound up at the end of it. Everyone was irritable, even Katherine’s mother, who was the gentlest, most even-tempered woman alive, and by the end of the trip they were taking their meals in a brooding silence broken only by the occasional murmured request for salt. or vinegar to rub into their wounds. It was an unmitigated disaster. Hateful. Utterly hateful. And Katherine, the scientist, always alert for unusual specimens, was ready to write all the major journals and testify that she’d discovered the single most horrible and irritating member of the human species, and to name her too so there would be no mistake about it: Nettie Fowler McCormick.

And then, miraculously, Nettie threw in the towel. She’d had enough. Her kidneys were scrambled, her sinuses clogged with dust and dander and dried horse feces and all the rest, her feet were dead to all sensation and both her legs and the small of her back were separate crackling bonfires of unadulterated pain. At Nice she announced that she would be boarding a liner for London and thence for the United States of America and Chicago, Illinois. She made Stanley suffer for it, there was no question about that, and they were closeted for hours at her hotel before she decided to go, and on the day she left he was so consumed with guilt and fractured loyalty he could barely speak, but to Katherine’s mind it was worth it: she was gone. The ogre was gone. And now the rest of their lives could begin.

“Mother,” she said, sitting with Josephine in the hotel lobby the day Nettie left, “I don’t know how to say this — and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way — but I wonder if you might not be feeling a little home-sick yourself? For Prangins? Or Boston, maybe?

Josephine was in her late fifties then, a compact lively woman dressed in her eternal black, her hat mad with feathers, her eyes too small for her face. She cocked her head and smiled. “I understand you, dear: you need time alone with Stanley. I can take the train for Geneva tomorrow. ”

“You don’t mind?”

Josephine shook her head. “No, of course not. I remember how it was with your father”—and she looked down at her hands and then gave Katherine a guarded look—“on our honeymoon, I mean. You know, we had a big wedding — half of Chicago was there — and when we finally got off on our own, that first night in the hotel…”

Katherine had been leafing through a book of poems, but now she quietly closed it and gripped its leather covers as if it were alive and wriggling in her lap. Her heart was pounding. “Yes?” she said.

“Well, it was a real adventure for us both, because we’d never been alone together in that way, and your father was”—she looked down again—“he was very amorous.”

There was an awkward silence. After a moment, Katherine cleared her throat. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Mother, just that subject — about marital relations, that is — because Stanley, well, he—”

“Oh, dear,” her mother cried, “will you look at the time? It does fly, doesn’t it?” She looked as if she were about to leap from the chair, dash across the strand and plunge headfirst into the sea. “I did want to get up to my room for a nap before dinner — it’s all this sun, it’s positively draining.”

“Just give me a minute, Mother,” Katherine persisted, “that’s all I ask. Will you, please?”

Her mother’s head moved just perceptibly, the faintest nod of that feathered hat. Her eyes were pinpricks, her mouth a slash of distate and disapproval.

“Stanley doesn’t seem—” Katherine began, and then faltered. “He doesn’t act as if he—” She reddened. Her voice wadded up in her throat. “Intimacy, I mean.”

Josephine looked startled, and her face had colored now too. She made as if to get up, then thought better of it. “Katherine,” she said finally, in the tone of voice she might have used to scold the servants, “there are things one just doesn’t discuss — or one isn’t comfortable discussing.”

“But I need to discuss them, Mother,” Katherine said, and all the pain and confusion of the past weeks stabbed at her, goading her on, “because Stanley isn’t my husband, not, not the way I thought he would be, the way everyone…” She trailed off.

“Not your husband?” Josephine had put a hand to her mouth, and she shot a quick glance round the room. “What are you talking about?”

Katherine was miserable, she was abject, she was a little girl all over again, and all her scientific training, all her understanding of what men thought and knew about the systems of life and reproduction availed her nothing: her mother knew what she didn’t. “He won’t… perform.”

It took Josephine a moment. She sat there rigid in the chair while the Mediterranean moved luxuriously beyond the windows, and she had the look of a torture victim, a woman whose nails were being prised from the flesh, one after the other. “Get him out of doors,” she said finally. “Fresh air. Meat. That sort of thing.” Another pause. “Why not take him skiing?”

The place Katherine chose was St. Moritz, in the Rhaetian Alps, not far from the Italian border. They booked rooms at the Grand Engadiner Hotel Klum, an immense and charming old place with snow-sculpted roofs, great roaring fireplaces and a Viennese quartet playing at dinner and tea. In the mornings they went for long walks through the snow-bound village, all the houses and shops decorated for Christmas, the air fragrant with woodsmoke and the smell of roasting chestnuts, and after a leisurely lunch they took to the slopes. Katherine was an accomplished skier, but Stanley was nothing short of magnificent. Graceful and adept, he moved across the unblemished hills like a line drawn across a blank page, tackling even the most daunting trails with a confidence and elan that bordered on recklessness. She’d never seen him so exuberant. Or physical.

By the end of the first week he was a new person altogether, utterly reborn, and Katherine kicked herself for not having gotten him away sooner. He laughed at the slightest pretext — an open, cheerful sort of laughter and not the startled hyena’s cry that seemed to burst out of his mouth when his mother was around. He grew reminiscent over dinner. He was soft-spoken and confidential. He anticipated his wife’s every need. This was what Katherine had been waiting for, the slow sweet unfolding of the days, each one opening on the next like a vase of budding roses… and yet still the nights remained problematical. And chaste. Maddeningly, insufferably, heartrendingly chaste.

But what to do? She had plenty of time to turn it over in her mind — a surfeit of time, nothing but time — lying awake at all hours, sitting over breakfast, lunch and dinner with her grinning husband, schussing down the slopes while he cavorted round her, launching himself dizzily over every hummock and mogul as if his legs were coiled springs, the silence of the mountains absolute, the sky a vast empty ache. Her muscles firmed. Her appetite grew. She felt vigorous and young and so wrought up with frustrated desire she couldn’t have slept if she’d wanted to.

The solution came to her one afternoon just before Christmas — the day before, in fact — and it was so clear and self-evident she almost gasped aloud. They were skiing the runs at Pontresina at the time, high above the village, out of sight of their guide, the peaks rising up around them like the white walls of the earth, and she’d broken the heel binding of her left ski and Stanley had knelt before her in the snow to repair it. Even through the integument of his gloves and the insensible thickness of her boots, she could feel his touch. That was what set her off, that touch, that lingering humble subservient gesture of love, her husband there at her foot, and in that instant she knew what she had to do: she had to take charge.

It was so obvious it was ridiculous. Though it violated every notion of the woman’s role — the pure vessel, the passive partner, sex an onus — she had to take charge, seize the initiative, go where no wife had gone before her. Stanley was a special case, and no one would know what happened between them in the privacy of their bedroom — and there was no shame in that, none at all. She was determined. She would come to him in the night — that very night — and use her hands, her mouth, any means necessary to excite him to his duty. Of course. Of course she would. It was either that or die a virgin.

They dined that night in a restaurant not far from the hotel. Katherine had made herself up, a red-and-green bow in her hair, a new dress, the tourmaline bracelet Stanley had given her sparkling on her wrist. She encouraged him to drink — a Grignolino that smelled potently of the earth — and she drank two glasses herself, for courage. When they got back to their rooms, she submitted to his stiff nightly kiss and then told him she was worn out from skiing and thought she’d retire early — If he had no objections. “Oh, well, yes — sure,” he said, jerking each word out as if it was fastened to his teeth, his eyes running up and down the wall behind her. “Well,” he said again. “So. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

She waited till the light had gone out in his room — the very moment; she didn’t want him drifting off — and then she padded across the floor, perfumed and naked, and she could have been anybody, any wanton, any whore, and tried his door. It was unlatched. And she pushed it in with the breath caught in her throat and every nerve strung taut. “Who is it?” he said, and she could see the dark form of him sitting up in bed in the cool blue light the snow threw at the windows.

“Hush,” she whispered, “it’s just me. Katherine. Your wife.”

“What are you—?” he began, but then she was on the bed, naked in the frigid light, the springs jostling, the mattress giving, naked and on all fours, the chill sweeping over her breasts and her navel and groin till she was all gooseflesh.

“Don’t talk,” she said, “don’t say a word,” and she found his face and his lips and she kissed him, a wet kiss, a true kiss, the heat of their bodies conjoined, she poised there atop the covers and Stanley forced back into the headboard and no place for him to go. He fought away from her mouth and came up sputtering like a diver, his nightcap knocked askew, the blue light in the window as solid and tangible as a block of ice. “I’m not,” he said, “I–I—I—”

“Shhhh,” she hushed him again, and in the next moment she was beneath the covers with him, her toes seeking his, her breasts tender against the fabric of his nightshirt, her head cradled under his arm, and she just held him for a long while, an eternity, till she felt him relax — or begin to. She kept kissing him, kissing the side of his face, his throat, his fingers, and then, after another eternity, she worked an expeditionary hand up under his nightshirt till she found what she wanted.

His penis was limp. Or not limp, exactly, but by no means was it stiff either. It was the first penis she’d ever held in her hand and she was amazed at how small it was, at how she could cradle the full length of it in her palm, but she knew enough to rub it, stimulate it, make it swell, and all the while she was kissing his throat and breathing hot endearments into the collar of his nightshirt. At first he stiffened — in every place but one — and tried to move away from her touch, but after a time (five minutes? ten?) she began to feel something, a definite movement, a twitching, a palpable thickening. Encouraged, she brought her other hand into play, rubbing furiously now, rubbing Stanley’s awakening member between both palms with all the intensity of a red Indian rubbing two sticks together to produce fire.

And she did produce fire — of a sort. He was erect now — or nearly erect; she was no expert — and she lifted his nightshirt and rolled atop him, rubbing now not with her hands but with her own groin, and the sensation was intoxicating, like nothing she’d ever known, except maybe for Lisette and her precocious forefinger, and “Stanley,” she whispered, “Stanley, I’m ready. Make a baby for me, Stanley, make a baby. ”

But he didn’t make a baby. Didn’t even try. As soon as she spoke he shrank away to nothing, less than nothing, the softest, smallest, most irritating little thing in the world, all coiled up in its nest, and when she reached for him again he pushed her away — and with more force than was necessary.

There was a shock of cold air, a great flapping of the covers, and suddenly he was standing over her in the glacial light of the room, and she could just make out his face, the lips curled in a snarl, the wild glint of his eyes. He was trembling. “You whore!” he shouted. “You dirty whore! ”

3. ON SHAKY GROUND

Dr. Kempf’s time began in 1926, but the need for him — for direct action, for hope, for change — had been a long time coming, as O‘Kane would have been the first to admit. And it wasn’t just that everything fell to shit and ruin under Brush and the new estate manager (a grubbing incompetent multiple-chinned little fraud of a man by the name of Hull), it was Mr. McCormick himself. Very gradually, day by day, in a way you might not even notice, he began to withdraw into himself again, as if he were slipping back into the catatonia of the early days, and O’Kane was afraid they’d have to break out the sheet restraints and the feeding tube all over again. Mr. McCormick was torpid and morose, barely articulate, and there were days at a stretch when he didn’t want to get out of his pajamas — even the prospect of a drive in the country didn’t seem to get much of a rise out of him. And of course it was always unpleasant to have to force him to undress and get into the shower bath, much less try to get him to put his feet into the legs of his trousers if he was fundamentally opposed to it.

O‘Kane was no psychiatrist (even if he did have more experience in the field than half the headshrinkers running around the country with their dabbed-on beards and Krautish theories), but he was finely attuned to Mr. McCormick’s moods and he was worried. As far as he could see — and he’d discussed it with Mart time and again — Mr. McCormick’s present decline was traceable to a series of traumatic events over the course of the past few years, the first and most devastating of which was the loss of his mother. That was in 1922 or ’23, and it was followed by his brother Harold’s divorce and remarriage and the hullaballoo the papers made over it, which to Mr. McCormick’s mind was a shame and a blot on the whole family and the Harvester Company too. Then came the news that Dr. Brush finally had to commit his wife because she was parading naked through the streets and setting trashcans afire; this seemed to disturb Mr. McCormick on all sorts of counts, from his sheer horror at the notion of aggressive female nudity to the sad contemplation and reevaluation of his own hopes for cure and release into the world of men and women. And finally, just when it seemed as if he were coming out of it, making his little jokes and eating his meals calmly and nicely, there was the earthquake that knocked down half the city of Santa Barbara and gave Riven Rock such a rattling that all the windows broke out, the piano wound up on its back in the middle of the music room and the garage fell away into a random-looking heap of stones with a dozen cars crushed like salmon tins in the middle of it. Any man would have been hard-pressed to remain cheerful and forward-looking in the midst of all that, but for a man in Mr. McCormick’s state of mind it was like putting up walls on top of walls.

Indeed, when the old lady died, O‘Kane braced himself for a major outburst at least equal to the business with Dr. Hoch and the gopher, but if Mr. McCormick was anything, he was unpredictable. He barely blinked, and officially, for Dr. Brush’s records, he said all of seven words. He was playing a game of solitaire when O’Kane broke the news to him. (Brush had thought it would be best that way, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was more comfortable around his head nurse, who had, after all, known him longer, and the news was bound to be traumatic, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was so pathologically attached to his mother, though of course he hadn’t actually seen her since nineteen-ought-seven, and he was very likely to give vent to his grief in a volatile way and to resent the bringer of the news, which for obvious reasons shouldn’t if at all possible be his attending psychiatrist for the main and simple reason of the risk of alienation.)

“Mr. McCormick, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” O‘Kane had announced, Brush concealed behind a closet door on the landing, Mart looking on as placidly as if they were discussing a change in the luncheon menu.

Mr. McCormick glanced up quizzically from his cards. “B-bad n-news?” he echoed in a kind of bray.

O‘Kane steeled himself. “I’ll come right to the point, sir: your mother’s died. Last night. Peacefully. In her sleep.” He paused. “She was eighty-eight.”

For a long while Mr. McCormick merely sat there, looking up at him out of a neutral face, the last card arrested in his hand. He cleared his throat as if he were about to say something, then turned back to the table before him and laid the card at the head of one of the four neatly aligned rows. After a while he glanced up again, and he had a sly secretive look on his face, as if he’d just gotten away with something. “I won’t be going to the funeral,” he said.

Outwardly, he showed nothing, but you could see he was grieving, as he had for Dr. Hoch, and O‘Kane kept waiting for some sort of manic episode, especially when the news of Mr. Harold McCormick’s divorce broke. The first O’Kane heard of it was when he came into work one morning and all Mr. McCormick could talk about was the subject of divorce — divorce in all its legal, historical and anthropological ramifications, how so-and-so had divorced his wife of thirty years and what King Henry the Eighth had done and how the Trobriand Islanders would kill and eat their wives on divorcing them and offer the choicest morsels to their in-laws, if savages could be said to have in-laws, and how did he, Eddie, feel about the subject? He’d been divorced, hadn’t he? From what-was-her-name, Rosaleen?

O‘Kane had to admit that he hadn’t.

That stopped Mr. McCormick cold. They were outside at the time-they’d just come back from hurtling aimlessly round the property at a pace that varied from a jog to a sprint — and Mr. McCormick blinked at him in incredulity. “You mean you — all these years — and she, she — all by herself? Or maybe, maybe even with, with other men?”

Mart, still heaving for breath, was looking on. They were at the front door and Butters was there, his nose in the air, holding the door stiffly open for them. “I, uh, I guess I never told you — remember when she had to leave to go back and nurse her mother? And her brother, the one that had brain cancer?”

Mr. McCormick gave him a blank look. He probably didn’t recall much from those days. In fact, O‘Kane was amazed that he’d remembered Rosaleen’s name.

“Well,” O‘Kane said, painting the picture with his hands, “sad to say but she caught the brain cancer from him and died. So I’m a widower, really. A widower — that’s what I am.”

Mr. McCormick seemed satisfied with the explanation, but when they got back upstairs and settled into the parlor, he became agitated all over again. “Here,” he said, “here, look at this,” and he thrust a pile of newspaper clippings into O‘Kane’s lap, clippings that hadn’t actually been clipped, since he wasn’t allowed access to scissors, but which he’d painstakingly creased and torn out of the papers.

The first headline read HARVESTER PRES TO DIVORCE ROCKE- FELLERHEIR, and there were half a dozen more of that ilk. It seemed that Harold, who was now president of International Harvester since Cyrus Jr. had retired, was divorcing Edith, to whom he’d been married for twenty-six years. She’d spent the last eight years in Switzerland as a devotee and disciple of Karl Jung and his school of psychoanalysis, and Harold, who was the playboy of the family, fond of fancy clothes, expensive cars, airplanes and women, had fallen for the Polish diva, Ganna Walska. A dark and fleshy beauty, Madame Walska was once widowed and twice divorced at thirty, and she was twenty years Harold’s junior. And she couldn’t sing, not a note — or not enough to keep people from stampeding for the exits, anyway.

After O‘Kane had read through the articles and handed them to Mart for his perusal, he looked up into Mr. McCormick’s expectant face and shrugged. “It happens sometimes, Mr. McCormick,” he said, “you know that. It’s nothing to get excited about.”

“No, no,” he said, rapid-fire, and the floor turned to magma suddenly and he had to hop from foot to foot, “no, no, you don‘t, don’t understand. He’s the president, he’s the president, and he could, I could — Katherine. I could divorce Katherine.”

The idea remained fixed in Mr. McCormick’s brain for some time, and when he wasn’t debating its finer points in a high ragged voice, he was brooding over it in a chasm of silence. If Harold could divorce, then so could he. But if he got divorced, then he wouldn’t have Katherine, and if he didn’t have Katherine who would be his wife and run his affairs for him? And he loved Katherine, didn’t he? Even if she was running around with other men and that Mrs. Roessing? On and on it went, round and round, like a dog chasing its tail.

Meanwhile, Harold’s situation only got worse. Because after his divorce was granted and Edith got custody of the children and the better part of their joint property, including their Lake Forest mansion, the Villa Turicum, which she would convert into a “Mecca for devotees of psychoanalysis,” Ganna Walska turned around and married an American millionaire by the name of Alexander Smith Cochran. Harold was devastated and the press howled with delight. But then, a year later, Madame Walska jettisoned Alexander Smith Cochran and married Harold, but only on condition that he finance her operatic tour of America, replete with the finest choruses, orchestras, costumes and staging money could buy. Again the press howled in derision and howled so vociferously and at such length that Harold was forced to step down as president of the Harvester Company in the wake of the scandal.

All this Mr. McCormick seemed to absorb with a growing sense of despair and gloom till the day came when he wouldn’t get out of bed. O‘Kane arrived to find Dr. Brush and Mart trying to reason with him. Wouldn’t he like to get up now and have a nice shower bath? No, he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t he like breakfast? No. A drive? A movie? A concert with Mr. Eldred? No, no and no. Well, and what seemed to be the problem? He wouldn’t say. But after Dr. Brush and Mart had gone out in the hallway to consult, Mr. McCormick reached into the breast pocket of his blue silk pajamas and handed O’Kane a newspaper clipping folded so rigorously and so repeatedly it had been reduced to the size of a matchbook. “Go ahead,” he said. “G-go ahead, Eddie — read it. Out loud.”

O‘Kane unfolded the pellet of newsprint, smoothed out the wrinkles on the table, and began to read:

EX-HARVESTER PRES TO HAVE MONKEY GLAND TRANSPLANT

Mr. Harold McCormick, former president of International Harvester, whose sudden marriage last year to the Polish chanteuse, Madame Ganna Walska, rocked the company and scandalized the nation, has gone into hospital in Chicago for urologic surgery. His surgeon, Dr. V P. Lespinasse, known as “the dean of gland transplantation,” is said to be experimenting with the use of monkey glands to improve Mr. McCormick’s chances of fathering children with his young wife. Madame Walska had no comment, except to say that her husband was “insatiable in his search for the realization of the physical demands of marriage — insatiable because they were unattainable for him anymore.”

When he looked up, Mr. McCormick was wearing the strangest expression on his face, as if he’d just pulled himself up onto solid ice only to have it give way and plunge him back into the dark chilling waters all over again. “Monkeys,” he said bitterly, “why does it always have to be monkeys?”

And then there was the earthquake.

It struck just before seven on June 29, 1925, and it flipped O‘Kane up into the air above his bed, where he’d been sleeping off the effects of several boilermakers and a woman whose name he couldn’t remember, turned him over and dropped him back down again as neatly as an omelet flipped in a pan. Everything in his field of vision was alive, just like in his hallucinations the last time he’d given up drinking, but this was no hallucination. The painting over the bed came down on him, impaling one of the gamboling kittens on the bedpost, the wardrobe skittered across the room and toppled with a crash, plaster rained down, and still everything shook and danced and jittered as if the floor was electrified. It was exactly like being on a train coming into the station and the engineer hauling too hard on the brakes.

After pulling on his pants and shoes, O‘Kane rushed headlong into the hall, where dust infested the air and the banister on the landing had given way in a conspiracy of splintered wood. Below, in Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s immaculate parlor, a welter of bricks and lath lay scattered over the carpet, and he could see where the building next door had poked its elbow through the wall. Like the hero he was, O’Kane assisted all the ladies out into the street and then spent the next ten hours running from one place to another, rescuing a child here, battling flames there, mad with the adrenal rush of it, soot-blackened and bleeding and hatless and shirtless, galvanized in the moment.

When the dust cleared, it was found that most of the older buildings in town were destroyed or severely damaged — the Fithian Building, the Mortimer Cook Building, St. Francis Hospital, the Potter Theater, the Diblee Mansion on the mesa to the south of town, the old Spanish Mission itself — and that three people had been killed (two of them when a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank crashed through the roof of the Arlington Hotel) and more than fifty injured. President Coolidge ordered the USS Arkansas up from San Diego to give medical aid and detach a squadron of marines to patrol the streets against looters.

Telephone lines were down, of course, and it was past five before O‘Kane was able to get news of Riven Rock. He could picture the whole place in ruins — there was no way in the world that rigid rock structure could have survived such a shaking — and he thought about Mr. McCormick, sure, but it was Giovannella he was most worried for. Giovannella, who’d been in command of the kitchen four years now without incident, Giovannella, his sworn enemy who shrugged off his every advance and yet threw up the children to him constantly — yes, children: the infant girl she gave birth to in the summer of 1920 was named Edwina and had the same glaucous Dingle Bay eyes as little Guido. He loved her. He worshiped her. Mooned at her from the kitchen doorstep (he was forbidden to set foot inside), wrote her impassioned letters (which she never opened), begged her to — yes — marry him. That Giovannella. Giovannella Dimucci Capolupo, the most stubborn woman on God’s green earth, mother of his children, the love of his life—“You had your chance, Eddie,” she said, “and you wasted it”—he was worried for her.

He was battling a blaze in a lunchroom down near the foot of State Street with an army of boys and men and soot-blackened women in kerchiefs — the bucket brigade, up from the sea, hand over hand — when he saw O‘Mara limping up the street toward him. “O’Mara!” he shouted, dropping the bucket at his feet and rushing across the shattered pavement to grab the man by the narrow wedge of his shoulders. “What happened out there? Is anybody hurt?”

O‘Mara gave him a distant look, as if he didn’t recognize him, but that was because of his wandering eyes, which you never could pin down. “The garage collapsed,” he said, shaking out a cigarette and putting a match to it, “and all the cars got crushed. Fucking destroyed, every one of them.”

“And the house?”

“Still standing. There’s nobody hurt but Caesar Bisordi’s wife out in the cottages — the roof fell in on her — and I’m the one Hull sent into town to fetch a doctor, as if I could find one in all this mess.”

O‘Kane turned directly away from him and started out on foot, and all those paradisiacal hills and beaches were turned hellish, fires everywhere, cars wrapped around trees and standing up to their skirts in ditches, and everything so absolutely hushed and silent you would have thought the word had gone deaf. He reached Riven Rock by six-thirty and found Mr. McCormick, preternaturally excited, out on the lawn in the company of Mart and Dr. Brush and one of the huskier laborers, surveying the damage. “Eddie!” he cried out when he saw O’Kane coming up the drive, “we’ve had a terrible big pounding here, worse than anything you ever saw. It — it blew out all the windows and look there at where the stone facing came loose….” He paused to catch his breath. “But you — you’re naked, Eddie. And you’ve got no hat—”

“I’m all right, Mr. McCormick, don’t you worry about me — I’m just glad to see you’re safe and well. It was pretty bad down there,” addressing them all now. “You should see It — the city’s pretty well destroyed, streetcars lying on their sides, houses tumbled into the street, fires everywhere. And dust — Jesus, I had to clamp a rag over my mouth to keep from choking on it. I got here as soon as I could — and I had to walk the whole way.”

Brush began to bluster out some nonsense about the milk cows and roosters sounding the alarm just before the tremor hit, and everyone began talking at once. O‘Kane turned to Mart. “How’s Giovannella?” he asked, but before Mart could answer, Mr. McCormick came right up to them, looming and twitching. “And you’re, you’re bleeding — you know that, Eddie? You — you’re naked and you-you’re bleeding—”

“It’s nothing,” O‘Kane said, and he looked into his employer’s face and smelled the rankness of his breath and saw the frenzy building in his eyes and gave Mart a nod: this was when he was most likely to bolt.

“Eddie, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding—”

“She’s okay,” Mart said, stepping back a pace to avoid Mr. McCormick and giving O‘Kane a look that could have meant anything. “She’s in the kitchen.”

“Yes,” Brush boomed, closing in on them with his arms spread wide just as Mr. McCormick shied away, “the house stood up pretty nicely, considering the magnitude of this thing — they’re saying it’s the worst earthquake since the one that hit Tokyo two years back or even the ought-six quake in San Francisco, for the main and simple… but go ahead, Eddie, go on in there and get yourself cleaned up and see to the cook. We didn’t want to bring her out here, of course,” he said, lowering his voice, “because of Mr. McCormick — and don’t worry about him, we’ve got Mr. Vitalio here to see to his needs.” He glanced up to where Mr. McCormick was now pacing up and down the sward in front of the house, as agitated as he’d been over the gopher, and then he glanced at the laborer, a big black-haired wop with muscles you could see through his shirt. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Vitalio?”

The wop glanced uneasily at Mr. McCormick’s manic figure, as if he was expected to wrestle him to the ground at any moment — which he might well have to do before the day was out — and then he turned back to Dr. Brush and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s right,” he said.

“Okay, then”—O‘Kane was already turning away—“I’m going to go in and see about Giovannella.”

But before he could escape, Brush caught him by the arm. “Oh, Eddie, I almost forgot: we might have to move Mr. McCormick into the theater building — just till we have somebody come out to see whether the house is safe or not — and I’ll want you to stay here tonight, for the main and simple reason that it’ll help calm him and we can’t really expect to see Nick or Patrick anytime soon, can we?”

O‘Kane just nodded, and then he broke away, trotted up the drive and went round back of the house and into the kitchen. The place was shadowy and dark — the lights were out, of course — and there was litter everywhere. All the pots and pans had come down from their hooks, the cabinet drawers had disgorged their contents and jerked themselves out onto the floor, the stove was shoved out from the wall and the big meat locker in the back was tilted crazily against the doorframe. “Giovannella?” he called. “Giovannella? Are you there?”

At first there was no response, and he waded into the gloom, kicking aside saucepans, cheese graters and broken crockery, glass everywhere. “Giov? You here?”

Just then an aftershock hit the place with a sudden wallop, as if the earth were a long raveling whip and the house and kitchen riding on the business end of it. Things fell. Plaster sifted down. There was a clatter and a boom and then everything was still again. That was when Giovannella cried out — and it wasn’t a shriek of terror or a plea or a cry for help so much as a curse of frustration and rage.

He found her in the broom closet, trembling, her eyes climbing out of her head, and her clothes — apron, dress, stockings, shoes, all of it — steaming and wet with what he at first took to be blood. His heart froze. She looked up at him, her legs folded under her, her clothes saturated not with blood, he saw now — and smelled, smelled it too — but marinara sauce, and every emotion was concentrated in her eyes. “Eddie,” she said. Just that: “Eddie.”

He wasn’t wearing a shirt, his chest and arms filthy, a crust of blood like a badge over his right nipple; she was crumpled in the closet, as wet and redolent as a meatball. She’d cleaned up the kitchen three times already, working like a slave, like a maniac, and three times the after-shocks had brought everything down again, including the big pot of sauce she was making to feed everybody, because there was nothing, nothing to eat, and the poor people in the cottages with their stoves collapsed and their iceboxes smashed, what were they going to do? He saw it all in an instant, and if he needed the details to complete the picture, he would get them later, when night had fallen and there was no light but for the kerosene lanterns and Mr. McCormick was settled in the theater building and everybody on the estate had eaten sandwiches with fresh-squeezed orange juice and he took her deep into the big deserted stone house and found a bed and lay in it with her till the light came and he never wanted to get up again.

As for Mr. McCormick, he adapted readily enough to the theater building while repairs went on in the main house (after a short but violent period of adjustment, that is), but all the spirit seemed to have gone out of him when the earth stopped shaking. There was no novelty anymore, nothing new, and he sank back into the morass of his hopeless and stultified mind, so that by the time Dr. Kempf came to redeem him he’d regressed so far that O‘Kane and Mart had to drag him into the shower bath each morning, force the deadweight of his limbs into his clothes and spoon-feed him at the table. And that was no pleasure at all.

Dr. Kempf didn’t rush into things the way Brush had, and he didn’t bluster or boom or pin Mr. McCormick to the floor — better yet, he wasn’t a Kraut and he didn’t have a beard. He was forty-one years old when he took over for Dr. Brush in the autumn of 1926, the author of two books (The Autonomic Functions and the Personality, 1918, and Psychopathology, 1920) as well as innumerable learned papers, and he’d most recently been a clinical psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., before setting himself up in private practice in New York. He was of medium height and build, the hair on his crown was so sparse and so severely slicked and pomaded it looked painted on and he had a dazzling full-lipped smile that was the key to his success on the interpersonal level. That and his eyes, which were a sympathetic and liquid brown — and perfectly round, as round as twin monocles set in his head. The McCormicks wanted to make him rich — or so it seemed to the amazed nurses when they discovered how much he was making per month: a cool ten thousand dollars. Mart, who had no great head for sums, was nonetheless quick to point out that that added up to $120,000 a year, more even than the King of Abyssinia could expect to make. If there was a King of Abyssinia.

He settled himself, along with his wife, Dr. Helen Dorothy Clarke Kempf, at Meadow House, a princely stone-and-frame dwelling the McCormicks had erected on the southern verge of the estate for the comfort of the physicians, who could thus be near at hand in the event of an emergency. Dr. Brush had lived there for a time, and Dr. Hoch too, but Brush had opted eventually for town life and Hoch had moved on to less roomy accommodations, six feet underground. O‘Kane tried to get some sort of fix on the new doctor — he didn’t want to get his hopes up too high and yet he couldn’t help himself — and during Kempf’s first week he attempted to read one of the doctor’s learned articles in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It was called, promisingly enough, “A Study of the Anaesthesia, Convulsions, Vomiting, Visual Constriction, Erythemia and Itching of Mrs. V G.,” but it was dry as the stuffing of an old mattress and O’Kane nodded off twice just trying to get through it. In fact, in later years he kept a copy of it at his bedside as a soporific in case he couldn’t get to sleep.

The man himself was easier to read, thank God, and O‘Kane liked him right from the start, from the first minute he walked into the room with his uncomplicated smile and took O’Kane’s hand in a good dry firm honest grip. Brush was there at the time, hearty and big-bellied and roaring, but Kempf had been closeted with his predecessor all morning and made it clear that O‘Kane was the man he wanted to talk to. They were in the office in the theater building, three in the afternoon, day one of Dr. Kempf’s regime, Brush packing his books and effects in cardboard containers, Mr. McCormick napping quietly in the stone house under Mart’s semi-watchful eye. Kempf asked a few questions about Mr. McCormick’s present state, but Brush kept interfering, so finally he took O’Kane by the arm and steered him out into the theater itself, a cavernous high room with the chairs all set out in rows, acoustic panels on the walls and a deep mid-afternoon hush hanging in the air. They sat in two folding chairs under one of the big iron-girded windows, and Dr. Kempf leaned forward confidentially. “So tell me, Eddie,” he said, and his voice was like Dr. Hamilton‘s, smooth and hypnotic, “can it really be true that Mr. McCormick has had no contact whatever with a woman since, what was it, 1907? 1908?”

“Contact? He hasn’t even seena woman, not even on our drives, which we’ve been very careful about, back roads and all of that.”

“And why is that?”

“Too dangerous. In the old days, in the beginning, when we first came out here, that is—”

“Yes?” Kempf was intent and concentrated, the annular eyes, the shining smile, as fixed on Eddie O‘Kane as the needle of a compass.

“Well, he would attack them — women. Beat them. Maul them.” O‘Kane was remembering that girl on the train, the one going home to Cincinnati with her mother, and the way Mr. McCormick had pinned her down and forced his hand up her privates — and how he’d brought his tongue into play and licked her throat like a cow at a salt lick. Or a bull. A rutting bull.

“Did anyone ask him why he had all this hostility toward women? Dr. Hamilton? Dr. Meyer? Did you?”

O‘Kane shifted in the chair. The seat was narrow and hard. “It was a sexual thing,” he said, “very disturbing for all concerned. I was embarrassed, to tell you the truth. And besides which, he went catatonic about then, and nobody could ask him anything — or you could ask all you wanted, but he wouldn’t answer.”

“But that was a long time ago,” Kempf said.

“Eighteen years. Nineteen. Something like that.”

Kempf leaned back in the chair, the hinges creaking under his weight. He had his hands wrapped behind his neck as if he were basking in the sun and he closed his eyes a minute, deep in thought. “He hasn’t made much progress, has he?” he said finally, snapping open his eyes and bringing the chair back to level again.

O‘Kane could hardly deny it. He shrugged. “He has his periods.” “I’ve been studying this, Eddie,” the doctor said, handing him a manila folder with several sheets of bound typescript inside. It was a year-by-year account of Mr. McCormick’s condition, from the onset of his illness right on up to the present, and as O’Kane glanced over the entries he had the uneasy feeling that he was reading a shadow biography of himself — he was the one laboring just off the page here, he was the one living, breathing, drinking, shitting, sleeping and whoring through all those compressed and hopeless years:

In 1908, when the patient was seen by Drs. Kraepelin and Hoch, he was diagnosed as suffering from the catatonic form of dementia praecox. At that time he was tube-fed and refused to walk.

In 1909, there occurred some mental clearness, then delirous excitement, after which he became dull. He continued to be spoon-fed and refused to move his bowels, but began to walk with the aid of his nurses.

They were just words on a page, clinical shorthand, as cold and indifferent as a news report of carnage in China or the eruption of a Peruvian volcano, but O‘Kane felt himself oddly moved. The poor man, he was thinking, the poor man, and he wasn’t thinking only of Mr. McCormick. He skipped ahead and read on:

In 1916, music became a regular activity. He talked more coherently and had more purposeful activity. He continued to wet the bed, was restrained during certain hours, was mixed and incoherent in his ideas, impulsive, and at times drank his own urine. He was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox by Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, who now agreed with Drs. Hoch and Meyer.

And then again:

In 1924, he pursued endless corrections and endless substitutions for Christmas cards. He had impulsive outbursts, began to stammer. He slumped in his seat while riding. He fussed about a calendar, about his father having received undeserved credit for the invention of the reaper.

In 1925, he read infrequently, was less willing to discuss his impersonal problems. The oddities of gait persisted and for a period he had to be spoon-fed. Because of an earthquake he had been removed to the theater building, on which occasion he tried to batter down the door.

When O‘Kane handed the folder back to Kempf, there were tears in his eyes. He had to pause to dig out his handkerchief and dab at them, and then he blew his nose in a long lugubrious release of phlegm and emotion. “No, doctor,” he said finally, “there hasn’t been the kind of improvement I — we all — hoped for, not at all.”

Kempf was watching him closely, eyes glistening, the hair glued to his scalp. “You know what I find missing here, Eddie?” he said.

O‘Kane looked up, took a deep breath. He shook his head.

“Treatment. That’s what’s missing. The patient has had all the finest minds here to examine him and diagnose his condition, quite accurately I’m sure, but his treatment has been almost purely custodial to this point, am I right?”

O‘Kane could only blink. What was he suggesting — monkey glands? The talking cure?

“I think I can help him, Eddie — through intensive daily sessions, two hours at a sitting, seven days a week. I treated upward of three thousand cases at Saint Elizabeth‘s, applying Freud’s analytic methods to patients suffering from hysteria, neurasthenia and a whole range of other neuroses, and to cases of schizophrenia too, and Mr. McCormick’s guardians have brought me here at great expense to devote myself solely to him.”

“You don’t mean the talking cure, do you?” O‘Kane said, and he couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Because Dr. Brush tried that back in the teens, and let me tell you, it was a disaster.”

Kempf had begun to laugh — he didn’t want to, you could see that, but now he gave up all pretense of sobriety and threw back his head and howled. When he came back to himself in a flurry of breastbone pounding and head shaking, the room seemed much smaller to O‘Kane. He felt the blood come to his face. “I don’t see the joke,” he said.

“I don’t mean to—” the doctor began and then had to break off again and suppress a final chuckle. “Listen, Eddie, I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t mean to be critical, but psychoanalysis has come a long way since then — and it isn’t just a parlor trick or a kind of psychological compress you squeeze on one day and forget about the next. It’s an ongoing and dynamic process — it may take years. And it may seem as if the patient — Mr. McCormick, in this case — is becoming yet more disturbed before he begins to improve, because of the repressed material we need to bring to the surface, deep fears and anxieties, sexual matters, the whole construct of his personality. We’re going to open up all his old festering wounds and we’re going to sew them up and bandage them right. Do you understand me?”

“Sure,” O‘Kane said — what else could he say? — but he was doubtful. Doubtful in the extreme.

“His wife will be the first,” Kempf was saying, “that’s only right. Of course, that’s sometime in the future yet, but our goal is to normalize his relations across the board with—” “

“You don’t mean women, do you? ”

Kempf gave him a look. “Yes, of course. What could be more abnormal, for any man, than to be shut away from half the population of the world? Good God, he didn’t even get to see his mother before she died — how can you expect a man to improve in a situation like that?”

“You can‘t,” O’Kane heard himself say, and he’d known it all along, they all had, he and Nick and Pat and Mart: give him women. Women. Women would cure him, sure they would.

4. I ‘ V E SEEN YOUR FACE

While Dr. Kempf was at Riven Rock, quietly revolutionizing Stanley’s treatment, Katherine and Jane Roessing were in Europe, beating the drums for Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement. As 1926 passed into 1927 and she made her fruitless annual visit to Riven Rock and Stanley’s voice on the phone seemed weaker and less steady and ever more distant — the voice of a stranger, a phantom, someone she’d encountered in a reverie so long ago she couldn’t recall even the vaguest blurred outline of his face — Katherine was already planning for the Geneva Population Conference, to be held that August at Prangins. And why birth control? Because without it a woman was chattel and nothing more, a breeder, a prize mare or sow, and why educate a sow? Why hire one? Why teach her science and maths and the workings of the world? Pregnant and bloated every year of her life from sixteen to forty and beyond, every woman was handcuffed by her husband’s sexual urges, and where was the hope of advancement in that? Besides, as Jane was quick to point out, it seemed axiomatic that the more ignorant and degraded you were, the more you bred — the Irish, Italians, Swedes and Bohemians whelped ten babies for every one a woman of their class had. And where would that leave the race a generation hence if it kept on in that direction?

All right. So she stood in line at customs in Boston, her heart thundering in her ears, and smuggled in two steamer trunks and a handbag full of diaphragms for free distribution to women at Sanger’s clinics, and she petitioned congressmen and used her influence in Washington and spent Stanley’s money — and her own — on the clinics, the literature, the fight. It was all she had. Because she had no husband and no baby of her own and the Dexters would die with her — she would be the last of her line; she had no illusions about that.

She began to intuit as much all those years ago, after the headlong disaster of her honeymoon (it was like jumping off a bridge, over and over again, day after day, night after night), but she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself. She could have divorced. She could have accepted the McCormicks’ terms and had the marriage annulled. She could have faded away and emerged into another life altogether, her own life, remarried and secure, a life of babies and diapers and wet nurses, perambulators, primers and little lifeless porcelain dolls with little lifeless smiles frozen on their faces. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She’d made her choice and she would live with it.

She and Stanley had taken separate cabins on the Brittania on their return to the States in the spring of 1905, and she was as close then to giving up on him as she’d ever been. It was a rough crossing, the Atlantic black and jagged, the whole great shuddering steel liner thrust up out of the water like a feather in a fishpond and then shoved back down again till the steel decks were awash and the wind snatched the boiling spume into the air. She was sick the entire time. So sick she could barely crawl to the head and heave up a wad of nothing into the sea-stinking vacuum in front of her face. Stanley burst in on her at random — two in the morning or two in the afternoon, it was all the same to him — and he was white to the roots of his hair, his feet riding the deck beneath him as if he were a fly stuck to a windowpane. She smelled of herself. She was embarrassed. One minute he would be solicitous, helping her to her bunk, dabbing at her face with a warm washcloth, and the next he would be shouting “Whore! Whore of Babylon!” Screaming it, howling it, his whole face swollen and his fists beating at the air.

When they landed she went straight to her mother‘s — and there was no mention of the house they were planning in Marion, no mention of a life together at all — and Stanley went home to Chicago. To the Harvester Company. To his duties. To his mother. Katherine didn’t get out of bed for a week. She cried till there was no fluid left in her body, her mother and the housemaid plying her all the while with broth, tea and ginger ale. That was the worst. That was the low point — lower even than when she’d broken off the engagement. She was separated from her husband after only six months of marriage, no smiling tall handsome figure of a man to show off at the theater, parties and teas, Abigail Slaney with three adorable children already and Bessie Dietz with four, her schoolmates all grown matronly and plump in their adventitious fecundity and she a withered root, a failure. A failure, after all.

And then the telegrams started arriving. A blizzard of telegrams, a spring storm. So many that she got to know by face, name and footfall every Western Union delivery boy in the Back Bay, and when she fell off to sleep at night bicycle bells jingled through her dreams. Stanley missed her. He hated his job. He hated the whole enduring concept of reapers, tractors and harvesters. He hated his mother. He wasn’t feeling well. Cyrus was president and Harold was vice president, but Katherine was his wife, his only wife, and he loved her, wanted to fall at her feet and worship her, wanted to quit his job and come to her in Boston and build a house for her in Marion and fill it full of things and live happily. Ever after.

He came in on the train this time, less than two months after they’d parted, and this time it was she who met him at the station, flushed and expectant. And when she saw him there in the crowd, the face of him, the brooding masculine beauty and power, Stanley Robert McCormick, the genius, the artist, the millionaire, she fell in love all over again. He took her in his arms right there on the platform and they embraced for all the world to see, shoe-shine boys and porters and peanut vendors and silly little women in silly little hats, and she didn’t care a whit. She held him, just held him, for what seemed like hours.

Josephine couldn’t disguise her pleasure. And she couldn’t have been prouder and noisier and more excited if Stanley was Teddy Roosevelt himself, returned triumphant from Havana all over again and plopped down in her front parlor. The ensuing month was one fête after another, the Stanley McCormicks toasted and congratulated from one house to the next, bluestocking Boston getting a look at the groom at last. All seemed well, and Stanley seemed to be enjoying himself, his nervous twitches and irritable moods all but evaporated, until one night they attended a dinner party given for them by Hugh and Claudia Dumphries on Beacon Hill and Stanley got it into his head that Butler Ames was among the guests.

They were eighteen at dinner, and Hugh, an old friend of Katherine’s mother and a celebrated landscape artist, stood to propose a toast. He was a fatigued-looking man, skeletally thin, with a gray tonsure and rectangular spectacles that distorted his colorless eyes; his preferred topic of conversation — his sole topic — was art and art history, and Katherine had thought Stanley would find him amusing. “To Katherine and Stanley,” he proposed, lifting his glass at the head of the table.

Stanley was sitting to his immediate right. He’d been complaining all day about dogs and looking glasses, muttering under his breath in the cab on the way over, and Katherine should have seen it as a sign. “I won’t have it,” he said, bolting up from the table as sixteen guests froze in place with their wineglasses stalled in midair.

Hugh looked as puzzled as if the ceiling had cried out in pain or the walls begun to speak. He hunched his thin shoulders and gazed out myopically from the prison of his spectacles. “What?” he said. “What do you mean?”

“Stanley,” Katherine warned, her voice tight in her throat.

Stanley ignored her. He was transformed, huge and threatening, looming over the table like a tree cut and wedged and about to thunder down on them. He pointed a finger at an innocuous-looking young man at the far end of the table whose name Katherine hadn’t quite caught when he was introduced at the door. “Not while he’s here,” Stanley roared.

“Who?” half a dozen voices wondered.

Stanley trembled, tottered, swayed. His face was red. His finger shook as he pointed. “Him!”

The man he was indicating, ectomorphic and pale, with a fluff of apricot hair standing up straight from his head, looked over first one shoulder and then the other, utterly baffled. “Me?” he said.

“You!” Stanley bellowed, and Katherine got up from the table now to go to him, to calm him, to stop him. “You, friend. You! You‘re, you’re a wife-stealer, that’s what you are!”

Nothing was broken that night, not the innocent man’s head or their hosts’ Wedgwood plate, but the dinner was a fiasco; after Katherine had got Stanley into the other room and calmed him and explained separately to the guests that her husband was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork at the Harvester Company, dinner went on, but Stanley didn’t utter a word more all evening, eating with a silent furious rectitude that made them all — even his wife — cringe.

That was the end of the social whirl, and no matter how hard Katherine and her mother tried to put the best face on it, they had to admit that Stanley’s eccentricities had gone beyond the pale. Certainly everyone was eccentric to a degree, especially the most sensitive and artistic — Katherine’s Aunt Louisa never removed her boots, for instance, even to go to bed or to bathe, and Mrs. London, who lived two doors down from her mother, spoke of her aspidistras as if they were sentient beings with informed opinions on taxes and the municipal elections — but neither was a danger to herself or others. And then there was Stanley’s family history to take into account, his sister Mary Virginia and his mother, who if she wasn’t actually unbalanced, was as close to the edge as normalcy would allow. Katherine agonized for days before deciding to call in a doctor — a psychiatrist, and she could hardly bear to pronounce the term aloud — but she remembered the look on Stanley’s face the day he hurled the vase across the room, the same look that came over him when he denounced her on the boat or ruined Hugh and Claudia’s party, and she went ahead with it.

Discreet inquiries were made — no one in their set had ever needed a doctor of that sort, and if they had they would never have admitted it — and on a leafy bright day in early August a very young-looking man with galloping palomino mustaches and two dull brown lidless eyes came up the walk of the house they’d taken in Brookline while their permanent residence awaited construction. His name was Dr. Jorimund Trudeau, and he’d had eleven years’ experience at the Rockport Asylum for the Criminally Insane after taking his degree at Johns Hop-kins. The maid showed him into the room.

Stanley was seated at a table by the window, poring over the plans for the new house, and Katherine had been pretending to read a magazine while the carpet crawled across the floor and the minute hand of the clock on the mantel advanced with a mechanical unconcern that made her want to scream aloud. She rose to greet the doctor, and Stanley gave him a quick startled look, though she’d been preparing him for this visit for days and they’d both agreed that he needed to consult a physician about his nerves, which were still — they both agreed — a bit overtaxed from all the recent change and excitement in their lives.

Introductions were made, Stanley rising gravely to take the doctor’s hand, and after an exchange of pleasantries about the weather and the season and the amount of fur the woolly bear caterpillars were carrying into the fall, Dr. Trudeau said, “So tell me, Mr. McCormick, how you’re feeling today — any nervous agitation? Anything troubling you? Business worries, that sort of thing?”

Stanley kept his head down. He had a T square in his hand, and he was making penciled alterations to the architect’s plans. “I feel slippery,” he said.

The doctor exchanged a look with Katherine. “Slippery? How do you mean?”

Stanley turned his face to them, a pale hovering handsome face that hung like a moon over the world of the table and the ceaselessly altered plans. “Like a salamander,” he said. “Like an eel. And all this room — you see this room? It’s like a big sucking f-funnel and I’m too covered in, in, well, slime to get a grip, do you know what I mean?”

The doctor’s voice slid up the scale and he took on another tone altogether: “Do you happen to recall what day it is today, Mr. McCormick?”

Stanley shook his head. He grinned beautifully, heraldically. “Tuesday?”

“He’s been out of sorts lately,” Katherine put in. “Really quite flustered.”

“And what month?”

No response.

“Uh, could you tell me, generally, where we are at this moment — this house, I mean? The neighborhood? The state?”

Stanley looked down at the plans. It took him a moment, and when finally he spoke he addressed the table. “I — the Judges told me not to talk to you anymore.”

It was at this point that Dr. Trudeau turned to Katherine. “Mrs. McCormick, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room now, and I hope you won’t mind, but Mr. McCormick and I will need to consult in private from here on out — if you would, please?” And he rose to show her to the door of her own parlor.

Dazed, she left the room, the unread magazine rolled up like a wand in one hand, and dazed, she mounted the stairs, entered her bedroom, pulled back the covers and slid herself between them. It was the first time she’d been excluded, as if she could be of no help at all to her husband — as if, far from being a help, she might even be a hindrance — and it hurt her, hurt her all the way down to a place so deep inside even the biological sciences would have been hard-pressed to identify it. It was the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Three days later, after having examined her husband for several hours each afternoon, Dr. Trudeau asked to have a minute alone with Katherine. Since Stanley was in the sitting room, blackening both sides of the plans with a freshly sharpened pencil, she took the doctor into the library. She was impatient with the man, because he’d cut her out like that right from the start, and she was apprehensive too, because of Stanley’s extremely odd replies not only to the doctor’s preliminary questions but to the more intimate and domestic ones she put to him in the course of a day, and as soon as they were settled she crossed her legs and demanded, “Well?”

The doctor pulled at the long cascading mustaches that were meant to distract the eye from his receding chin and parsimonious little mouth. He looked directly at her. “About your husband,” he began, clearing his throat.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid it’s more than nerves.”

For Stanley’s part, he knew something was wrong, deeply wrong, dog-in-the-mirror wrong, Mary-Virginia wrong, and it so terrified him he felt the pain of it in every fiber and joint of his body, in the pulp of his teeth, singing out, pain, pain, pain, in his brain and his fingertips, cancerous pain, killing pain, and he wanted to cooperate with the doctor and find a way out of it, he really did. But the Judges were strict and implacable, they were captious and shrill, and they wouldn’t let him. He heard the doctor’s voice clearly enough, heard the questions addressed to him, but there was static all around him, a noise of grumbling and dissent, and it sometimes drowned out the thin piping psychological voice as if it were the dying gasp of those pinched and hairy lips. Still, Stanley was fighting it, a ritualistic fight no one would understand, two steps up and one step down, don’t step on the cracks, hold your breath for sixty seconds and the Judges will vanish with an obscene flap of their black robes, and when the doctor advised him to go off somewhere and live a simple stress-free rustic life for a while, a life of hiking (how they loved hiking, these doctors), wood chopping, long walks and meditation, he said yes, yes, of course, we’ll leave tomorrow.

Katherine found the place. It belonged to one of her mother’s bridge partners — or maybe it was her mother’s bridge partner’s mother — and they were able to lease it for two months without any fuss or trouble. It was in Maine, deep in the woods, a modest cabin of fourteen rooms and fourteen baths overlooking a lake, the leaves exploding all around them, simple tastes, simple fare, just Stanley and his wife, the chauffeur, the cook and two housemaids. Stanley chopped wood, and it was very therapeutic. He beat hell out of that wood, utterly destroyed it, and yet he was creating something too — the fuel for their fire. And every morning he built the fire, the Judges carping over his shoulder, no you idiot, that’s not how you do it, you don’t stack the logs like that, it’ll never catch, where’s your sense, more kindling, more kindling, and he took his time, sometimes hours, but then the moment would come, triumphant and complete, and he’d apply the match and watch the whole thing blaze up. And Katherine. She was there. White-faced. Sweet. His wife. He loved her, joked with her, cut the Judges right off — and so what if she was a slut, so what if she was all white underneath and her body a weapon of destruction and she as capable of that disappearing trick, that vaginal sleight-of-hand, as the whore in Paris? So what?

Some days he wouldn’t speak to her, not a word. He’d fling himself out of bed, dress in casual clothes (shirt, collar, tie, sweater and sport coat) because this was the wild rural backcountry woods of Maine, after all, and then come to breakfast and there she’d be, full of white smiling cheerfulness, and the Judges would be at him, a game really, could he, would he, did he have the resourcefulness today to ignore her every word and gesture and shut her out completely? Of course he did. He was a man of iron. A man of steel. Inflexible. Inexorable. A walking trap, serrated teeth, snap, shut, game over. On other days, the game reversed itself, and he couldn’t stop talking to her, all sorts of silly nonsense about love and holding hands and sweethearts and the poems of Robert Herrick. She was there, right there with him, his wife, his love, Katherine, and that made him feel better.

One afternoon — there was a nip in the air, every leaf singed with it — he went down to the lake to find an old man perched there on the end of the boat dock, fishing. He didn’t remind Stanley of his father, really, this old man, but he was about the age of his father when he died, and he did have his father’s bellicose beard and unforgiving eyes and the boxy giant’s build, but that wasn’t it, that didn’t affect him at all. “Good afternoon,” Stanley said, his feet leaping away from the cracks between the boards as he made his way up the dock. The water gleamed all around him in a sick watery way.

The old man — he wasn’t like Stanley’s father at all — glanced up from his pole and his bait and the float that bobbed in a liquid dream at the end of the line. “Afternoon,” he said.

Stanley had reached the end of the dock now, a boat tethered there, beardy reeds, a smell of muck and decay. He loomed over the man, who was dangling his heavily shod feet over the lip of the gently quaking wooden structure, his feet lolling there, just lolling there, inches from the water. Stanley was very erect, very proper, the tight clasp of the collar, his beautifully brushed hair, his shoes glowing at the nether end of him like toeless hairless impervious new and improved feet — or better yet, hoofs. Hoofs of iron, hoofs of lead, hoofs of indestructible horn. “What are you doing,” Stanley said, “fishing?”

“Ayeh,” the old man replied.

“I fished once,” Stanley said. “In the Adirondacks, when I was a boy. The guide said I should be proud.”

The old man said nothing. He spat in the water, a circle of concentrated spittle, minuscule bubbles, floating there on the unbroken surface like something else altogether, like jism, sperm, spunk. The float twitched at the end of the line, plunged suddenly, and the old man snatched it back with a whip of the rod, the line hissing through the sunlit air, but there was nothing there, not even a fish’s disappointed lips, no bait fish either, just a hook. “That one,” Stanley observed, “got away. ”

A look, that was all: the old man gave him a look. “Ayeh,” he said, fishing a minnow from the bucket beside him and impaling it on the wickedly curved device of the hook, where it wriggled in its pain, fishy pain, a pain not worth mentioning, dumb animals and dumber. And then the float shot through the air and slapped the water like the flat of a hand—thwap! — and in that moment Stanley’s mind failed him.

What happened next is entirely from the fisherman’s point of view because Stanley was no longer, in a sense, there. But the fisherman got wet, tattooed by those hard horny shoes and then lifted right out of his collar and flung into the cold clean enveloping water. And he damned near drowned too, what with the cold and the weight of his clothes and boots, but it was his own two arms and legs and the McCormick money that saved him and hushed him and made him comfortable in the declining years of his old man’s life.

Katherine was upset — no, distraught would be more accurate. For days on end she had no one to talk to but the servants, Stanley haunting the place like a revenant, as silent as if he’d had his tongue cut out. They were together, yes, and he seemed calmer (but for the single terrifying incident with the fisherman at the boat dock), and yet he was more remote than ever. There would be nothing from him, no spark, no animation at all, and for hours he’d be gone in the forest or obsessively chopping wood — wood enough for a village — and he’d pass right by her as if she didn’t exist. That was the hardest thing. That made the breath catch in her throat and it darkened the room and put out the sun in the sky.

And then the next day he’d walk into the room completely transformed. “Katherine,” he’d say, “do you remember that woman with the funny little dog in Nice?” and go off on a fascinating reminiscence of all the dogs in his life — and hers, because hadn’t she had dogs too? He would be attentive and affectionate, taking her arm when they went in to dine, rowing her round the lake for hours — no, no, she wasn’t to touch an oar — getting up from his reading to adjust the pillow behind her head. Sometimes this would go on for days and her hopes would leap up. The long face was gone, the muttering, the halting walk, the whinnying laugh: he was Stanley again, her Stanley, Stanley of the charm and sweetness and concern. She reveled in his smile, his dimples, the way his eyes seemed to reach out and hold her. He was hers. All hers.

“What do you think of Jack London?” he asked one morning when they were lying on a blanket in a meadow, the sun palely warming, the season crashing down all round them. He was lying on his side, his head propped up on one hand, a stalk of yellowed grass between his teeth.

Katherine had been reading desultorily in a book of Wallace‘s—The Malay Archipelago—that one of her professors had particularly recommended. She was planning to begin graduate research during the winter semester, once Stanley had recovered. Her hand was clasped in his. She looked up from her book and into the blue sheen of his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I certainly like him for his social consciousness, but as for his adventure stories… well, I guess I prefer stories about proper people, Edith Wharton, that sort of thing. You know I do.”

“He’s a real he-man,” Stanley said.

She looked at him, looked into his eyes, his grin. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose he is.”

“Chasing after gold, mushing dogs, risking everything.” He glanced away from her, at the line of trees at the edge of the meadow, one flame of motionless color. “I’m not like him at all,” he said, dropping his voice. “I‘m — I’m — I’ve been pampered and coddled all my life, up to my ears in my father’s m-money. I haven’t accomplished a thing, not the smallest thing, not even on my ranch. I’m not a he-man. I’m not even a man.”

“Oh, Stanley, you are, you are—”

He couldn’t look at her. “Not to you I’m not.”

She slid a hand up over his shoulder and gently, very gently — hold your breath, Katherine, hold your breath now — laid her cheek against his. “I love you, Stanley,” she whispered.

“I feel—” he began and trailed off.

“You will be a man to me, Stanley, I know you will. You just need to… relax.”

Cheek pressed to cheek, the sky all around them, the trees, the silence. “I feel better now,” he said.

She lifted her head so she could look into his eyes, the softest fragmentary wisp of a smile playing across her lips. “Do you think we could—?” she whispered.

A trace of panic. “Here? Out-outside?”

She held him to her.

“In the light?”

It wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t even natural. And it was a failure, absolute, unmitigated, beyond hope or repair. He managed, after an eon and a half of fumbling and apologizing and kissing her ear so assiduously it ached for days afterward, to pull her dress up and her bloomers down and to work himself out of his trousers, but when it came to the blind impulsive moment of insertion, of becoming one with her after all, he shrank back and she felt nothing but a premature wetness and a grasping yearning sucking drain of emptiness that would never, in all her natural life, be stopped or plugged or filled.

So the years went by, years of abstinence and denial, a withdrawal from the world of men so complete that Katherine became a kind of prisoner herself, Mrs. Stanley Robert McCormick, married and yet not widowed, attached to a man and yet detached from him too. Jane helped. Her mother helped. NAWSA and the American Birth Control League and the War Service Department, they all helped. But the fact was, she turned fifty-two years old in 1927, and as far as men were concerned she might as well have been a nun. Sexual love — heterosexual love, procreative love — was a thing she would never experience, she was resigned to that, but beyond sexual love there was dutiful love, a platonic and idealized love, and when her activism flagged, when the speeches became repetitive and the speakers crabbed and insipid, she thought of Stanley. Still. After all these years. Was it even love at this point, she wondered, or just curiosity? She managed his affairs with the fierce uncompromising zeal she’d brought to NAWSA and the birth control movement and saw that he was provided with the best of everything, and she wrote him and spoke with him on the phone, but it was all an abstraction. She wanted to see him, just see him, and that was what Kempf had promised her.

Dr. Kempf. The new man. The Freudian. The profligate who cost as much as any six doctors combined, and yet she’d gone along with the other guardians (Stanley’s brother Cyrus and his sister Anita, Favill having passed on and Bentley retired, thank God) and hired him. Anything was better than stasis and cynicism, even at ten thousand dollars a month.

It took him over a year, but finally, in the fall of 1927, after she’d sent all the delegates home, closed up Prangins for the winter and smuggled her trunks of diaphragms through customs, he wired her to say that the time had come. Stanley had undergone a radical transformation through analysis, his hatred of his tyrannical father and fear and mistrust of his emasculating mother out in the open, his misogyny examined from every perspective, his knowledge of himself and his phobias brought into line, and he was now ready, if not to take up ballroom dancing or reinvigorate the International Harvester Company, at least to entertain and comport himself as a gentleman with members of the opposite sex. He was ready. But Dr. Kempf—Edward, call me Edward—felt it only right that she, Katherine, should be the first woman in two decades her husband would lay eyes on — see, that is — and perhaps even, if conditions were right, touch.

When she received Kempf’s telegram and then spoke with him via long distance, she was in Boston, at her mother‘s, seeing to the affairs that had piled up in her absence, and Jane had gone on to Philadelphia to look after her own concerns. Katherine called her that night with the news, and they arranged to leave for Santa Barbara two weeks hence — just after the Thanksgiving holiday. Katherine engaged a private car for the two of them and when the train made its Philadelphia stop Jane was there with her hair all aflame and her face opening like the petals of a flower. “I don’t believe it,” she said, once they were settled and she had an illicit drink and a cigarette in her hand and the station had begun to move and the tracks took them in a rush through the artificial canyons of the city. “Do you?”

Katherine gave her a wry look, took the cigarette from the embrasure of her fingers and drew deeply on it. “What choice do I have?” she said, exhaling.

The servants were shuffling around, getting things settled, and the train, lurching around a long bellying curve, began to pick up speed. The lights flickered. Jane sipped her iced gin — good Bombay gin smuggled in amongst the prophylactic devices — stretched her legs and kicked off her heels. “Twenty years,” she murmured. “It’s going to be like seeing someone raised from the dead.”

Roscoe was waiting for them at the station in Los Angeles, and by the time they made the long drive up the coast to Santa Barbara it was dark and they were both exhausted, and so they decided to wait till morning before going out to Riven Rock. They dined quietly in their cottage at the El Mirasol, just across the street from the place where Katherine would eventually build a house for herself, replete with a gymnasium for Stanley, and then she telephoned the estate.

Butters answered, and she could hear him calling up the stairs to Nick so that Nick could have Stanley pick up the extension. She heard a click, and then Nick’s voice, saw-edged and abraded: “Mrs. McCormick, ma‘am? It’ll be just a minute. He’s been sitting up late tonight, waiting for you — he’s very excited — and he’s just been doing his, you know, his ablutions and his teeth… Oh, but wait, here he is—”

“Katherine?”

“Hello, Stanley: it’s good to hear your voice.”

“You too.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

“Me too.”

“It’s going to be such — it’s been such a long time. I feel like a girl on a first date. I’m so excited. And I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear of your progress with Dr. Kempf. He tells me you’re your old self again.”

A pause. “I have my slippers on.”

“Yes, so Nick told me — you’re getting ready for bed. I hope we didn’t keep you up, the train was late getting in and then with the long drive and whatnot we both just felt, Jane and I, that tomorrow, when everyone’s fresh, would be better for the big event.”

“One is you and one is me.”

“Hm? What do you mean?”

“The slippers. Two souls: Katherine and Stanley. Two soles, two souls — get it?”

She gave a laugh, not so much because she was amused but because she was bewildered and because this was Stanley, Stanley working through the convolutions of his mind. “Yes,” she said, “yes, yes, I do — that’s very good. Two souls.” A pause. The fraught silence of the wires. “Well,” she sighed, “I won’t keep you. Till tomorrow, then?”

A hiss, a sound as of two wooden blocks rhythmically pounded, and then Stanley’s voice, full of grain and sand and silt, so far from her he might have been on the moon: “Tomorrow.”

Katherine was a bundle of nerves as the car took her out to Montecito the next morning, her stomach sinking through the floor, her skin horripilated and her breathing shallow. It was the way she felt just before she had to give a speech, stretched taut as a rubber band and then snapped back into place again. She lit a cigarette, set it down in the ashtray, and then lit another. Palms flashed by the windows and she didn’t even see them, let alone attempt to categorize them. But Jane was there. And Jane took her hand and leaned across the seat to give her a kiss on the corner of the mouth. “It’ll be all right, Kat,” she breathed. “You’ll see.”

Then they were skirting the high stone wall that hemmed in the property, and Roscoe, gray-haired now but as jumpy and energetic as ever, turned the wheel sharply and let it slide back through his fingers again, and they swung into the familiar drive. That was when Katherine came to attention. She couldn’t help herself. She saw where Hull and his crew had been busy among the rhododendrons and saw that the ground cover needed cutting back at the edge of the drive. And there, the house, rising up out of the dense landscape like a stone monolith, like a fortress, like a prison.

“Well,” she said, turning her face to Jane, “wish me luck,” and while Jane waited in the car with a magazine and Roscoe stood motionless at the buffed and flashing door, she stepped out into the drive and went up the broad stone steps at the front of the house. The door opened as if by magic and there was Butters, rigid as a corpse, saying, “Morning, madame, and welcome back,” through the stiffest of formal grins. The entrance hall was the same, a severe high deep-ended room softened with tropical plants, tapestries and the statuary she’d bought in Italy for Stanley’s edification and enjoyment; on the wall of the staircase going up to her husband’s quarters hung the two Monets and the Manet they’d selected together, on their honeymoon. The door closed soundlessly behind her, and then Butters, his face like a shying horse‘s, all pinched in the nostril and wild in the eye, said, “I will inform Mr. McCormick that you’re here, madame.” She stood there, in her hat and gloves and furs, and watched the ghostly form of the butler recede up the stairway.

She found herself pacing: three steps this way, three steps that. Should she wait for him in the library? The drawing room? Or here, here where she could see him coming down the stairs — and more importantly, he could see her — and they could gain those extra seconds to prepare themselves separately for what was to come? She pulled off first one glove, then the other — Stanley would want to take her hand and draw her to him for a kiss, and it wouldn’t do to offer him a glove as if he were just anyone she’d happened to meet on the street. There. That was better. She held her hands out before her, fingers spread wide, to examine them, steady hands, attractive hands still, her nails done just that morning, the wedding ring in place, right where Stanley had put it twenty-three years ago. And there, glittering on her wrist, the tourmaline bracelet, for equally sentimental reasons.

Her heart raced. Would he find her attractive still? She was a girl the last time he’d seen her, or a young woman of thirty-two, nearly the age of Christ when they nailed him to the cross, and she wasn’t a young woman any longer. She was fifty-two years old. Fifty-two and still well-preserved for all the passage of the years. Jane thought so, and her mother too. She still had her skin and her eyes — and her hair was dark yet, for the most part. The hairdresser at the hotel had helped — she just hoped Stanley wouldn’t notice. Of course, he’d gone gray himself. At least he appeared to be gray the last time she’d seen him, but that was through the flat distorting lens of her binoculars.

There was a noise from the landing above, and her heart stopped. The clank of the iron door, a murmur of voices, male voices, deep and true. She moved toward the foot of the staircase to intercept him, to get the very first look at him at the top of the stairs… and there they were, three of them, three forms, and then the ghost that was the butler. Stanley was in the middle — ashen, towering, his hair streaked silver and white — and O‘Kane was on one side of him, tight to his shoulder, and Martin on the other. They came down the stairs that way, three abreast, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, as if this were some sort of military maneuver, each step a hurdle, halfway down now, O’Kane’s left arm locked against Stanley’s right, Martin’s right against his left, their hands clenching his sleeves in the long jacket of his cuffs.

Then he saw her, and the procession halted. Three right legs were bent at the knee, three right feet arrested in their polished shoes. Stanley stopped and his eyes seemed to rivet her, nail her, drive holes right through her flesh and out the other side. He stopped. O‘Kane and Martin stopped. The three men regarded her, Stanley with a panicky look now, a look she knew from the days that led up to his breakdown, and O’Kane and Martin drained and white, their eyes seeking anything but hers. And then, as if it were all just a momentary hitch, all three looked to their feet and came on down the stairs.

They halted at the bottom, not three paces from her, one step more and then out onto the marble floor. Stanley was staring down at his shoes. “Stanley,” she said, “Stanley, darling. It’s all right. It’s me, Katherine. Your wife. I’ve come to see you.”

He lifted his eyes then, but his head was cocked to one side, as if he didn’t have the strength to raise it. “They,” he said, his voice unnatural and high, “they wo-won’t let me go. Eddie and Mart. They think… They’ve got my sleeves. My sleeves!”

Katherine wanted to touch him, lay a hand on his cheek, hold him in her arms and comfort him, poor Stanley, poor, poor Stanley. “Let him go,” she said.

Immediately, O‘Kane and Martin released their grip and took a step back from him, and there he was, all alone before her, his shoulders slumped, his hair slicked, his head canted to one side — and who was that, up there at the top of the stairs, watching from the shadows? Kempf. Of course. Kempf. Well, it was quite an intimate little gathering, wasn’t it? The husband and wife reunited in the presence of one butler, one psychiatrist and two apelike nurses. She tried again. “Stanley, Stanley, look at me,” and she moved forward to touch his arm.

It was then that he broke. Straight for the door. A scramble of his feet, fifty-three years old and you would have thought he was eighteen, the door a quick slice of light, O‘Kane and Martin leaping forward, and he was gone. Katherine was suddenly in motion herself, no time to think, out the gaping door and onto the front steps, and there he was, Stanley, her husband, leading the nurses twice round the drive in a burst of speed before making for the car, Roscoe locking the doors against him, Jane’s startled face, and then O’Kane had him in a bear hug and Stanley was whinnying “No, no, no, you don’t understand, you don‘t—”

Katherine came forward as if in a trance, no thought for Jane or herself or anyone else but Stanley, and Martin had joined the fray now, all three men flailing on the ground in a confusion of limbs, gravel crunching, dust attacking the air. She came forward, bludgeoned by her emotions, and stood over them until her husband was subdued and panting and the nurses working to improve their grips, one pinioning his shoulders, the other clamped to his legs. “Stanley,” she begged, pleading now, her eyes wet, everything confused and hurting, “it’s only me.”

He flashed his eyes at her then and jerked his head as far as O‘Kane’s straining limbs would allow. “I’ve—” he began, and there was wonder on his face, the wonder of discovery, epiphany, eureka, eureka, “I’ve seen your face,” he said. “I’ve seen your face!”

5. IN THE PRESENCE OF LADIES

“No, you wouldn’t call it auspicious,” O‘Kane said. “Not exactly. But it’s a start, and I think Kempf deserves some credit.” He was in the upstairs parlor, the door secured, a fire snapping complacently in the marble fireplace, Mr. McCormick off in dreamland, and he was feeling expansive and generous, full of seasonal good cheer — not to mention rum — and as far as goggle-eyed Dr. Kempf was concerned, he’d been a skeptic and now he was a believer. Mr. McCormick had made enormous progress over the course of the past year and a half and what had happened out there in the drive this afternoon was nothing more than a minor setback, he was sure of it. The brothers Thompson, Nick and Pat, who’d come on duty an hour ago, were struggling with the concept. They weren’t convinced. Not at all.

“From what I hear, from Mart, anyway, the whole thing was a farce,” Nick rasped in his burnt-out voice that was like the last scrapings of the pot, irritating and metallic. “He just ran for the door, couldn’t even look her in the face. And Roscoe says he tried to get hold of the car, for Christ’s sake.”

Pat gave a low whistle. “Imagine him behind the wheel? What would it take to stop him — the whole Santa Barbara police force? The army? The navy? Hey, call out the marines!”

It was Christmas, or just about, and the place was bedecked, sprangled and festooned for the season, Mr. McCormick having been especially fixated on the decorations this year, and O‘Kane had lingered to have a cup or two of Christmas cheer with his colleagues (he was going to quit drinking, absolutely and finally, the day after New Year’s). He was also temporarily stranded, because Roscoe was out ferrying Mrs. McCormick and Mrs. Roessing around somewhere.

Nick was sunk into an overstuffed chair in front of the fire, his feet propped up on an ottoman, his hands nested over his stomach. Like Pat — and to a lesser extent, Mart — he’d accumulated flesh over the years, steadily and inexorably, but the funny thing was they’d all three finally achieved some sort of mysterious physical equilibrium, having grown into their heads like crocodiles. “I don’t know if auspicious or not auspicious is the word for it — to me it’s just more of the same, with or without Kempf.”

O‘Kane shrugged. He gazed round at the streamers and popcorn chains, the clumps of mistletoe and endlessly replicated effigies of Father Christmas and snowmen hanging like cobwebs from the ceiling. “At least he didn’t attack her.”

Pat snorted, burying his nose in his drink — a real drink, American style, mixed and heated in the kitchen by O‘Kane himself while Giovannella frowned over the dough for tomorrow’s bread and the scullery maid they’d hired to keep her company and deepen the presence of women in the house hummed a jazz tune and ran a wet cloth over the supper dishes. It was a toddy O’Kane was making, from a recipe his father had taught him — the only thing his father had taught him, besides a left jab maybe, followed by a swift right cross. Lemons, oranges, sugar, a stick of cinnamon, boiling water and what passed for rum these days. It had the right smell and it warmed you, though how much warming you needed when it was three hours past dark on the twelfth of December and still sixty-four degrees out was debatable.

O‘Kane could feel the rum like lead in his veins — he didn’t know how many he’d had thus far, but it was more than four, he was sure — and felt he’d better sit down. Nick and Pat seemed content to watch the fire, but the subject of Mr. McCormick’s initial meeting with his wife had been broached, and O’Kane wanted to chew it over a while. “It’ll get better,” he said. “Tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. No more talking on the phone — she’s due here tomorrow for lunch and she and Dr. Kempf both expect she’ll be eating it downstairs in the dining room with Mr. McCormick at her side.”

“I’d like to see it,” Nick said.

“Me too,” Pat put in.

“Kempf says she’s going to stay this time. Indefinitely.”

Nick sighed, bent to retrieve his cup from the floor and took a long ruminative sip. “She never gives up, that woman, does she? Twenty years she waits, and he bolts right by her like a runaway horse. Doesn’t she know it’s hopeless?”

“She’s looking old,” Pat said. “Like a little old lady. Like a widow. But that one with her, Mrs. Russ or whatever her name is, she’s a piece of something, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” O‘Kane said, “—you’ve got to have hope. Anything can happen. People like Mr. McCormick have just snapped out of it, miraculously — I’ve seen it myself. And look at what they’re doing with gland feeding and these hyperthyroid cases.”

No comment from either of the Thompson brothers. They pulled at their cups, their eyes sunk into their heads. They could figure the chances on their own.

“Look how far Mr. McCormick’s come already — he was right on the verge of going back under before Kempf came and you know it. He’s coming back to life with this talking cure, he is — I can see it in the way he holds himself and his walk is better and he’s hardly stuttering at all anymore.”

“Yeah,” Nick said, “and he still pisses his bed.”

“Kempf says he needs women around him, and maybe he’s right — it makes sense, doesn’t it? We’ve tried everything else, from apes to sheet restraints to Brush’s colossal fat arse — you remember how he pinned him to the floor that first day? ‘Compression is what they need,’ isn’t that what he said?” O‘Kane couldn’t help laughing at the memory of it. “Or maybe you guys weren’t there — you weren’t, were you?”

“Shit.” Nick sat straight up in the chair and cranked his head round to give O‘Kane an outraged look.

“What? He’s older now — he’s settled down. He can be with women — he should be. As long as he’s monitored.”

“Didn’t we — all of us — say that years ago? And we’re not getting paid half what the mint in Washington prints up each month either,” Nick growled, his voice scraping bottom. “I still say you go down to one of these hootch parlors on De la Guerra or Ortega Street and find him a willing little piece once a week and let him take out his urges like any other man. It’s all that spunk clogging his brain.” And he laughed, a fat rich braying laugh that made O‘Kane want to get up out of the chair and poke him in the face a few times, good cheer or no.

“Well, he jacks off enough, doesn’t he?” Pat said, rolling his cup between his hands; he was standing by the fire now, one elbow resting on the holly-strewn mantel, his face flushed with the drink. “I don’t look at you and Mart’s reports, but I’d say he’s going at it four or five times a week on our shift — and Lord help us if we don’t note down every little wad for Dr. Kempf, who in my opinion is half a pervert himself.”

O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He was thinking about that — Mr. McCormick with a woman — and whether they’d get to watch. He’d have to be restrained, of course, and the woman would have to know her business — and no syph or clap, thank you, or they’d all wind up losing their jobs.

“I think they’re lesbians,” Nick said.

“Who?”

“Your sweetheart Katherine and what’s her name, Mrs. Russ. You know, Eddie, cunt-lappers.”

Well, sure. He’d suspected as much himself, way out on the periphery of his mind, but he wouldn’t dignify Nick with a response. And so what if she was, which he doubted. It was better than going off and getting herself involved with a man — that was adultery — and she must still have had the itch, even if she was getting up in years, practically the prototypical old maid in her dowdy long skirts and outsized hats… but what he would have given just to touch her when she was younger, and he thought of that day in Hamilton’s office when she bowed her head and let the tears come. And why was she crying? Because she couldn’t see her husband. Well now she could, now that it was too late to matter.

He got up out of the chair, the fire jumping off Nick’s big face and hands and winking metallically from the strings of decorations. “Anybody for another?”

Downstairs, in the kitchen, Giovannella was still busy with the dough — enough to make Guinea loaves and hot muffins for the twenty-two regular staff who had to be fed twice a day and a little extra to sell on the side and maybe take home to her mother and father. And her children. Never forget the children. They were her shield and her badge and the whole reason she was alive on the earth and pounding away at a corpselike lump of dough in the grand environs of the McCormick kitchen. And she was pounding, hammering away at the dough with both fists as if it were something she’d just stunned and wanted to make sure of.

O‘Kane eased into the kitchen. Ever since their rapprochement during the earthquake two years back she’d tolerated his presence in the kitchen, but he could never tell when she’d lash out at him, not only verbally, but with any instrument, blunt or sharp, that came to hand, their entire history together bubbling and simmering in the stewpot of her eternally resentful peasant’s brain, from the time she was seventeen and a virgin and he’d seduced her, right on up to this morning, this afternoon and this evening. If Mr. McCormick had his problems with women, so did he, so did Eddie O’Kane, and they started and ended here, right here in this kitchen.

“You still at it?” she said, pounding the dough. The maid, a girl of twenty with no chin and an overripe nose but with a spread and bloom to her that more than made up for it, started slopping a mop around. It was quitting time. The kitchen was still redolent of dinner, a roast of pork with rosemary, brown gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans, with apple turnovers for dessert.

“It’s Christmas,” he said.

She looked up from the dough, just her eyes, and her eyes were little pre-prepared doses of poison. “With you, it’s always Christmas.”

He sidled up to the chopping board, where he’d left his cloven fruit and the bottle, keeping a wary eye out for any sudden movement. She wasn’t his wife, Giovannella, though he’d given in and in so many words asked her to be after the night of the marinara sauce and the big bed in the deserted and still subsiding house, but she carped and caviled at him as if she was. And that was strange too, utterly inexplicable, because that was what she’d wanted all along — for him to marry her — and then when he came for her and they were in bed and they’d had that sweetness and pleasure all over again, she’d refused him. “No, Eddie,” she’d said, the house crepitating round them, the dark an infestation, a dog howling in duress somewhere off in the shattered distance, “I can’t marry you — you’re already married, remember? Isn’t that what you told me? And besides, I couldn’t expect you, a man like you, to raise another man’s children, could I?”

“Just one more,” he said. “For good cheer. You want one?”

Nothing, not even a glance.

“How about you, Mary? You want one?”

“Get out of my kitchen,” Giovannella said. Her voice was low and dangerous and the blood had gone to her ears, her beautiful coffee-and-cream ears with the wisps of black hair tucked behind them and the puckered holes punched in the flesh for the gypsy earrings she sometimes wore. He loved those earrings. He loved those ears. And he was feeling sentimental and vague, full of affection for the world and everything in it, and for her, especially for her, for Giovannella.

She stepped away from the breadboard and picked up the first thing she saw — a flour sifter, peeling green paint over the naked tin, a sprinkling of white dust.

“What?” O‘Kane protested. “Come on, Giov. It’s only a little drink. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

“Get-out-of-my-kitchen,” she said, raising the sifter ominously.

“You’d think I was a criminal or something.”

“You are,” she said, and there it was, that edge in her voice, as if she were about to cry or scream. “You are a criminal. Worse — you selfish stinking big prick of a man!”

He ignored her, slicing lemons, squeezing oranges, his elbows busy, the knife moving in his hand. He was angry suddenly, the generous all-embracing mood boiling off into the air like vapor. Who did she think she was? He’d had the run of the house since she was a girl in her mother’s kitchen. “Besides,” he said over his shoulder, “Nick and Pat want one. They’re up there waiting for me — and lest you forget, I’m stranded here myself. You want me to look like an idiot and go back up there empty-handed?”

He would have said more, working himself into a state of real rhetorical fervor, but for the fact that the sifter suddenly ricocheted off the back of his head, and here she was, coming at him with a wooden spatula the size of a bricklayer’s tool, cursing in Italian.

The tin had gouged his head, and it was bleeding, he was sure of it, and though he had absolutely nothing to regret or retract and was just spreading a little Christmas cheer and not even drunk yet, he couldn’t help catching her by the wrist, the right wrist, just by way of defending himself. The left was another proposition all together. He’d caught the hand with the spatula, but she’d snaked away from him, as if they were doing a tarantella, everything a whirl, and snatched up a big wooden implement that looked like a mace, and already she’d managed to connect with two savage over-the-shoulder blows to his left forearm, and why, why was she doing this?

He always felt bad when he had to hit a woman — he felt like a dog, he did — but if she was going to get familiar with him (and over what?), then he was going to get familiar with her. A pot clattered to the floor. Mary, hand to mouth, vanished. They danced away from the stove, his fingers still hooked round her wrist, the mace flailing, the breath exploding from her clamped lips in short ugly bursts — uhh-uhh-uhh — and he just got tired of it, very tired, tired of the senselessness and her barometric moods and the way she went after him all the time, and he slapped her. Just once. But it had enough force behind it so that when he simultaneously released her arm she went hurtling back against the breadboard with a sharp annunciatory crack as of a stick being snapped in two, everything sailing out into the bright kitchen void and the pale laid-out corpse of the dough upended unceremoniously on the floor.

There was no sequel. Nothing at all. No apologies or recriminations, no battle rejoined or tears shed. Because at that moment — Giovannella slapped, the dough ruined, O‘Kane half-drunk and outraged and cursing and swollen up to the full height and breadth of him — there came a sudden single excoriating cry that froze them both in place: “Mama!” O’Kane looked to the door, the open door, and there stood little Guido, eleven years old and already thick in the shoulders, and what was in his eyes besides shock and terror and rage? Three o‘clock. Three o’clock in the afternoon.

Lunch was a success, everyone agreed. O‘Kane lingered in the dining room with Katherine, Dr. Kempf and Mrs. Roessing while Mart escorted Mr. McCormick up to bed for his postprandial nap, and the feeling of relief and self-congratulation was palpable. It was as if they’d all gone through a war together, or a battle at least, and now here they were, all intact and no casualties. “Well, Katherine, Jane, didn’t I tell you?” Kempf crowed, stirring a lump of sugar into the black pool of his coffee.

O‘Kane was stationed at the door, hands in pockets. He’d been about to retreat, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, when Kempf signaled him with his eyes. He knew what his role was. Moral support. The nurse in evidence.

Katherine was glowing. Her lips were pursed with pleasure and she sipped at her coffee as if it were an infusion of new blood and new life. “It was wonderful, it really was. Stanley was so… so much like his old self.”

And what was so wonderful? That she’d sat down to a meal with her husband for the first time since 1906 and he hadn’t attacked her, dumped the soup over his head or jumped out the window? Small victories, O‘Kane was thinking. But it was a start, one step at a time, just like when they’d had to teach him to walk all over again. It had happened. It was a fact.

“What did you think, Jane?”

Mrs. Roessing must have been in her mid-forties, by O‘Kane’s calculation, but she looked ten years younger, what with her makeup and her clothes and her bright red marcelled hair. She gave Katherine a look, all eyes and teeth. “Well, I can’t really say I’m an authority on the subject, since I never knew Stanley’s old self, but his new one, at least as I saw him here today, was absolutely charming, don’t you think, Dr. Kempf?”

The doctor drew himself up, the neat slightly puffed pale little hands, the painted hair and shimmering skull. He was a puppeteer, a ventriloquist, the mad scientist showing off his creature, Svengali with his Trilby. “My word for it exactly,” he said with a polished grin. “Charming.”

O‘Kane had been amazed himself, especially after the previous afternoon’s performance — Mr. McCormick had been a model of behavior, exactly like the man he’d golfed with at McLean, genial, courtly, haunted by neither demons nor judges. He’d been up and about when O’Kane arrived, full of smiles and little jokes, and he was very precise and efficient with his shower bath — he didn’t squat on the tiles to soap his toes or rub himself raw with the towel. And he whistled, actually whistled in the shower, like a man on his way to work, “Beautiful Dreamer” echoing off the walls, followed by a spirited rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” He breakfasted with perfect comportment and good humor, joking over the toughness of the ham (which wasn’t really tough at all, if you had a knife and fork to hand, which he didn‘t, and he was acknowledging the absurdity of his predicament in his own sly way) and teasing Mart over his expanding girth (“Excuse me, Mart, but is that a life preserver you’re wearing under your jacket?”).

After breakfast, he took a stroll to the theater building and back, and then twice round the house, and he walked very nicely, not bothering with the cracks between the flagstones and hardly dragging his leg at all. Then there was his daily two-hour session with Dr. Kempf, from which he often emerged very upset and confused, sometimes speechless, sometimes with tears in his eyes or in a rage, but not today. Today he was perfectly composed, smiling even.

She was seated in the grand entrance hall, dressed all in gray, and O‘Kane could see she’d put some time and thought into her outfit — she looked good, very good, better than she had yesterday or a year ago even. Mrs. Roessing was a middle-aged flapper in ultramarine and a silver wraparound hat, and those very fine and shapely legs exposed all the way up to her thighs in white silk stockings you could have licked right off her. O’Kane stood there like part of the decor.

“Katherine,” Mr. McCormick said in a pleasant, muted voice, coming right up to her and taking her hand, which he bent to kiss, glove and all. And then, grinning till you’d think his face would split open, he turned to Mrs. Roessing. “And this must be, must be”—and here he lost himself a moment, understandably, twenty years and all that leg, and O‘Kane braced himself for the worst—“Jane,” he said finally, all the air gone out of him. Amazingly, he took her hand too, and bent to kiss it as if he were playing a part in a movie.

Butters took the ladies’ wraps, Mart slunk out from behind the statue, and after a few inconsequential remarks about the weather — And how lucky you are, Stanley, to have this heavenly climate year-round and you should just see Philadelphia this time of year, snow up to, well, snow up to here — the whole party made its halting way into the dining room. The table could seat eighteen in comfort, but Butters had instructed Mary to set four places at the far end of it, Mr. McCormick to sit at the head of the table, as he was the host, his wife on his right-hand side, Dr. Kempf on his left, and Mrs. Roessing to the doctor’s left. Mart and O‘Kane were to stand guard and watch them eat.

Essential to all this was Giovannella, stalking round the kitchen with her left arm in a sling — no, it wasn’t broken, only sprained — her eyes breeding rage while Mary and one of the houseboys scuttered round like scared rabbits. O‘Kane had brought her flowers and a box of candy, and he’d actually crawled through the kitchen door on his hands and knees at eight-thirty A.M. to beg her forgiveness, but she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t even look at him, and that was the end of that, at least for now. Butters would be serving at table, and they would start with caviar, large gray grain caviar from Volga sturgeon, served on little glass plates set down airily between the big yellow Arezzo dinner plates, and wine, real wine, decanted from an enigmatic green bottle.

There was soup — minestrone, one of Giovannella’s specialities — followed by financières aux truffes from Diehl‘s, a salad and Italian food for the main course, very Continental. Mr. McCormick’s veal had been cut up for him in the kitchen, so as not to cause him any embarrassment vis-à-vis the six silver spoons of varying size laid out at his place, and O’Kane had been instructed to particularly watch that he didn’t snatch up a knife or fork from one of his fellow diners’ settings. They chatted. Ate. Sipped at their wine. O‘Kane watched, his back to the wall, and he felt the prickings of his salivary glands and the tumultuous rumblings of his stomach — this was when he hated his job most, this was when he felt his place, one more servant in a sea of them.

Mrs. Roessing praised the grounds — Had Stanley really had as much of a hand in laying them out as she’d heard?

Dr. Kempf: “Yes, Stanley, go ahead.”

Mr. McCormick: “I, well, I — yes.”

Mrs. Roessing (leaning in to show off the jewels at her throat): “It’s such a talent, landscaping, I mean — I just wish I had it. Really, my place in Philadelphia is going to the dogs, if you know what I mean.”

Katherine: “Stanley’s always been clever that way — with drawings and architecture too. Haven’t you, Stanley?”

Dr. Kempf: “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

Mr. McCormick: “My mother… she always said I was, but then she wouldn’t… And I stud-studied in Paris, sketching, I mean, with Monsieur Julien. At his studios.”

Dr. Kempf (by way of explanation): “Julien was very big at the turn of the century, practically doyen of the Paris art world — Stanley produced some very unique sketches under him, didn’t you, Stanley?”

Mr. McCormick: “I, well, yes. In pencil and charcoal too. I sketched the Pont-Neuf neuf times. But no nudes, never any nudes. And what do you think of that, Mrs., Mrs. Jane?”

Mrs. Roessing: “Marvelous. Simply marvelous.”

It went on like that for two hours, through the successive courses, the desserts, the fruits and now, finally, the coffee. “And what’s your assessment, Dr. Kempf,” Katherine asked all of a sudden, and a chill had come over her, the Ice Queen showing her face. “Can we expect more of this self-awareness and lucidity? Or is this a sort of act you’ve trained Stanley up to perform, like a dog jumping through a hoop?”

Kempf set down his cup, bowed his head, rubbed his eyes and shot a look at O‘Kane, all in the space of a second. “I did talk to him, yes. Yesterday he was afraid of you, afraid you wouldn’t recognize him — or love him still. We went over that this morning and we agreed that there was nothing to be afraid of, that you were his wife and would always love him. You see, the idea is to reeducate him, resocialize him, and introducing him into social situations, particularly in the company of women, is essential. In fact, I’m thinking of hiring on a female nurse.”

This took O‘Kane by surprise. Women, yes, but a female nurse? Upstairs? Locked in with him?

Katherine said nothing to this. The specter of the female nurse hung in the air a moment, just short of materializing, and then it dissolved. Mrs. Roessing asked for the cream. Kempf looked as if he were about to say something, but held his tongue.

“And what about his teeth?” Katherine suddenly demanded. She glanced at Mrs. Roessing. “And his body odor?”

“He bathed just this morning, didn’t he, Eddie?” Kempf said, swinging round in his seat to address O‘Kane.

“Yes, sir, he did, and very nicely too. He bathes every day, without fail.”

“His teeth are another matter,” Kempf said, “and we’re all very concerned about their condition, but as you know, your husband has an aversion to dentists and it’s been difficult—” ‘

“Body and mind,” Katherine said. “Mens sana in corpore sano.”

“All things in time,” the doctor said. “The mind and body are one, as you suggest, and by treating the mind I am treating the body. You wait and see. As his mind becomes free of its impediments, his teeth will improve spontaneously. And then, if we still feel we need to consult a dentist, we’ll bring one in — once he’s well enough — just as we’ve brought you ladies in today.” He paused a moment to brood over his cup. “You should be gratified, Katherine, after Stanley’s performance today — and I hope you’ll give me a little credit for it.”

“But that’s just it — it was a performance. I want my husband sane and sound, and I’m worn out with waiting. And I don’t see that psychoanalysis is the ne plus ultra — as you well know. I’ve been in contact with Dr. Roy Hoskins, of Harvard, and he’s had great success in cases like Stanley’s by correcting glandular irregularities and I see no reason why he shouldn’t be called in to examine my husband to see if there isn’t some somatic solution to all this. After all, you can’t deny that he shows certain features of hyperthyroidism — his height, the disproportionate length of his digits and other appendages, which on seeing him today seem to me to have grown, and quite noticeably, and I really feel—”

Kempf cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand. “I couldn’t disagree more. Psychoanalysis got him into this room to sit down at table and conduct himself as a gentleman in the presence of ladies, and psychoanalysis will provide his cure — if we can speak of a cure at all in these cases. He is not a hyperpituitary case, and gland feeding will accomplish absolutely nothing, I assure you.”

The Ice Queen wouldn’t let go of it. “It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it? I really wish you would at least consider—”

“I’m sorry, Katherine,” Kempf said, bringing the cup to his lips and giving her a long steady look. “Though I take note of what you’re saying and I’m willing to try anything short of witchcraft to improve your husband’s condition, believe me, the analytic approach is the best one, and as long as I’m in charge you’ll have to let me make those decisions. He’s improving. You’ve seen the result of it today.”

Katherine leaned into the table, both her elbows stabbing at the cloth so that it bunched up around them. “Yes,” she said acidly, “and I saw it yesterday.”

“At least you’re seeing him,” Kempf shot back. “Isn’t that something? ”

“Yes, yes it is, doctor — Edward,” she said. “But I expect more, much more. And I intend to stay right here in Santa Barbara for as long as it takes to see my husband’s health restored — both mental and physical. That’s my mission, that and nothing else.” She looked to Mrs. Roessing for approval, and Mrs. Roessing, smoke streaming from her nostrils over her pursed and pretty lips, gave her a wink.

“What’s more,” Katherine went on, the Ice Queen, all buoyed up now and never satisfied, never, “let me remind you that I am the one who will make the final decisions here. All of them.”

Katherine was true to her word. Every day at one, through Christmas and the New Year, on through the soft stirring close of winter and the advent of the spring that was just like the winter, fall and summer that had preceded it, she and Mrs. Roessing came to have lunch with Mr. McCormick and to sit with him as late as five or six some afternoons, playing at cards or reading aloud to one another or simply sitting there in a swollen bubble of silence. O‘Kane was present for all of it, and so was Mart. Mr. McCormick’s improvement had been dramatic and he was making new strides every day, but he was still dangerous and unpredictable, still a threat to his guests and himself, and when he’d made his good-byes — always bowing and scraping and kissing the women’s outstretched hands in a drama of self-effacement and servility that made O’Kane queasy to watch — his nurses escorted him back upstairs to the barred windows and the iron door.

He had his bad days still, days when he would stagger out of Kempf’s office in the theater house with his eyes streaming and his lips drawn tight, and then he’d try to run or take out his anger on some innocent shrub the gardeners had been attentively nurturing and shaping for years. Once, when O‘Kane gave him a gentle nudge toward the house after he’d begun to stray, he bent down, pried up one of the flagstones and chased both him and Mart all round the lawn with the thing held up over his head like a weapon. Another time, for no reason at all, he kneed Mart in the privates and boxed O’Kane’s right ear so savagely it buzzed and twittered for days, like a dead telephone connection. “What’d you do that for, Mr. McCormick?” O‘Kane protested, clutching the side of his head while Mart blanched to the roots of his hair and sat himself awkwardly down in the daphne bed, right atop a gopher’s mound. “Be-because,” Mr. McCormick stammered, his face clenched like a fist, “because I–I hate, I hate—” He never finished the phrase. Not that day, anyway.

Still, he was improved, vastly improved, and being with women — seeing them, smelling their perfume, touching their hands with the driest fleeting caress of his lips — seemed to be working wonders for him. Katherine began to bring Mr. McCormick’s twenty-year-old niece, Muriel, with her on occasion, and at Dr. Kempf’s suggestion, they began to take Mr. McCormick on outings. At first they confined themselves to the estate, picnicking amongst the Indian mounds or taking advantage of the views from the upper reaches of the property, but before long — under supervision of Kempf, O‘Kane and Martin, of course — they began having beach parties. Katherine rented a cabana on one of the splendid south-facing beaches in Carpinteria where the waves broke in gentle synchronization and you could ride them in like a dolphin, the water as warm as a bath. It was comical to see Mr. McCormick in his bathing costume, his limbs pale as a Swede’s, crab-walking up to the quavering line of foam and seawrack and then dashing back like a grade-school boy as the water washed over his toes. Comical, but healthy. It stunned O‘Kane to think of it as he sat there on his beach towel, eyes riveted on Mr. McCormick while two men hired for the day hovered just beyond the breakers in a rowboat against the darker potentialities, but in all his years living here in the paradise of the world, Mr. McCormick had never once touched the ocean nor had it touched him.

It was a good time. A happy time. A time of hope. Everyone, even Nick, began to feel that something extraordinary was happening, and they were all of them almost afraid of speaking of it for fear of jinxing it. Mr. McCormick was experiencing life again, out of his cage, reintegrating himself into the grander scheme of things, particle by particle, and for his nurses, that promised — maybe, possibly, eventually — an end to their labors, and a reward. And who knew? — perhaps it would be a substantial reward, a lump sum, every punch and kick and smear on the sheets accruing interest over the unwieldy course of the years.

But it wasn’t to be. If McCormick’s constricted life had miraculously dilated during that amazing summer, opening and opening again as if there were no longer any limits, any judges, any fear or despair or self-loathing or sheer immitigable craziness, there came a day in September — and O‘Kane could name it — when things began to close in again. It started with the beach. An ordinary day, the sun high and white, Mr. McCormick in good spirits, the ocean rolling and rolling all the way out to the islands that were wrapped in a band of silver fog. There was the picnic luncheon. The cabana. Young Muriel was there, daughter of a Rockefeller and a McCormick, her legs browned from the sun and her hair turned golden, and Katherine and Mrs. Roessing too, the latter daring in a skirtless bathing suit. Everything seemed fine, until Mr. McCormick, waist-deep in the surf with O’Kane to one side of him and Mart to the other, suddenly cried out shrieking in a way that made you think of men murdered in a dark alley, slit throats, the bayonet in the gut. He was shrieking suddenly and hopping on one foot till he lost his balance and plunged his face into the water and the wet sand beneath, the surf relentless and O‘Kane and Mart dragging him out of the water by his arms.

What was the matter? What had happened? Was he all right? Was he hurt? Kempf, Katherine, Muriel, Mrs. Roessing, Mart, O‘Kane and even the two men from the boat all crowding round, and Mr. McCormick just clutching his foot and screaming. “The Judges!” he bawled. “I knew they’d get me, I knew it!” His hair hung in his eyes and his face was twisted and wet, the black of his throat and the jagged craters of his rotten teeth, sand like a hairshirt all over his prickled body. Later they discovered the cause — it was legitimate and real: he’d been lacerated by a stingaree — but that was the end of ocean bathing, and of the beach.

It was also the end of Mr. McCormick’s positive phase, because overnight he became mistrustful and paranoic again, and no amount of reasoning — the stingaree lives in the sea, it meant you no harm, it was an accident, these things happen — would convince him that the whole episode hadn’t been planned as a punishment for him. And he seemed, finally, to blame the women, their presence, for what had happened. If it weren’t for them he wouldn’t have been at the beach — were they trying to kill him, was that it? Was Katherine after his money? Did she want to see him dead? The next day he wouldn’t come to lunch, though Katherine and Mrs. Roessing were waiting in the dining room for him; O‘Kane and Mart were prepared to drag him down the stairs, but Kempf said no. When he wanted to see women again, he would. On his own terms. Give him time, Kempf said.

Two days went by. Three. A week. And still Mr. McCormick refused to come down those stairs, and when the rumor reached him one afternoon that Katherine was coming up, he threw one of his fits, replete with the smashed furniture and the deranged raving and the foam on his lips. Katherine had become impatient and began to nag at Kempf, in O‘Kane’s presence, threatening and storming like a madwoman in her own right: she was used to seeing her husband again, seeing him daily, and now she’d been cut off from him once more. It was intolerable. She’d have Kempf’s head — or his job at least, all ten thousand dollars a month’s worth.

It was then, right at the end of September, that the nurses decided to take matters into their own hands. “It’s a dirty shame,” Nick said one night when both O‘Kane and Mart had stayed behind their time because Roscoe was otherwise occupied and wouldn’t be back till nine. They all agreed. Mr. McCormick had come so far and now he was spiraling back, two full turns a day, and no one to reverse his direction. “What about what we discussed, back around Christmas of last year, remember, Eddie?” Nick said. “Getting him a woman, I mean. If his wife can’t do it for him, some — what would you call her? — some consulting nurse could. Right?”

O‘Kane was elected, because of his reputation with women — a reputation long since obscured by Giovannella and little Guido and Edwina and the business end of the bottle, but never mind that. He went down to Spanishtown the next night — and it had changed, squeezed and reduced by the grand new buildings going up in the wake of the earthquake — and asked around a few of the joints he knew. It was all underground, speakeasies, triple knock and codeword—“Clara Bow”; “Big Bill”; “Dixieland”—but anybody who knew anybody or anything could get in and no questions asked. He found her at the third place he tried, a cramped downstairs space so full of people, noise and smoke there was no room to breathe, let alone enjoy a drink of whatever shit they were selling behind the bar. O’Kane sampled a few anyway, leaning into the bar as if it were a bed, a pillow, Giovannella with her dress up and a smile on her face, and when he turned his head, there she was.

She was sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room, people dancing and jostling all around her and nobody even giving her a second glance. She had a compressed, angry look about her, bad luck and worse news all the way round, and she was clutching a cigarette as if she were trying to strangle it. Smiling Eddie O‘Kane, pimp to the McCormicks, moved in. “Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

She glared at him.

He sat down.

“Buy you a drink?” he offered. The music was furious, clarinet, piano, drums, people doing the shimmy and the Charleston, the very table shaking with the thump and roar of it.

Her mouth softened. She’d been holding it very tightly, as if it might fall off her face and shatter if she wasn’t the carefulest girl in the world. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. “Sure,” she said, and her lips fell back in what she probably thought was a smile.

They agreed on a price — it was dicey, real dicey, because all the way up the stairs, out the door and into the big blue-black Pierce Arrow limousine she thought she was going to bed with him, Eddie O‘Kane — but when he explained the situation to her somewhere between the Salt Pond and Hot Springs Road, she began to balk, especially seeing the car and its appurtenances and Roscoe up front in his monkey cap, and he had to double the price to keep her quiet. Twelve-thirty in the morning, the night watchman, the iron gates, the house like a chunk of the night cut away with a serrated knife and blackened in India ink. Lights on upstairs, though, and Nick and Pat waiting on tenterhooks. “He won’t hurt me, will he?”

“No,” O‘Kane assured her, “no, he won’t hurt you. Besides, we’ve got him restrained.”

Her voice, so thin and frightened it sickened him and he almost backed out of the thing right there: “Restrained?”

O‘Kane didn’t know what to say. He led her up the big staircase and opened up the barred door himself, her thin cold elbow quailing under the grip of his hand, and she was trying to be brave, trying to get through with this, he could see that. “Jesus,” she whispered, turning her head to get a look at the bars as they passed through the doorway, and O’Kane held her there a minute while he turned the three separate keys in the three separate locks. And then, Nick and Pat gouging her with their eyes, she hesitated at the bedroom door and the thought of what lay behind it, the bed bolted to the floor and the barred windows and Mr. Stanley Robert McCormick, Reaper heir, lying there on his back, wrists and ankles bound up tight — double tight — to the bedposts. “You better give me the money,” she said, her eyes shrunk to pinpricks, the mouth a misshapen hole in the middle of her face. “Give it to me now.”

Nick and Pat both watched, silent presences in a darkened room, no light but what the stars gave and the moon — it was their duty, after all — but O‘Kane couldn’t do it. He should have been exhilarated, should have felt good, should have rejoiced in Mr. McCormick’s happiness, the need and thrill and privilege of every man — sex, just sex — but instead he went out onto the upper patio and hung his head over the drain in the corner and threw up everything he’d drunk that night, and the taste of it, full of bile, was bitter and lingering, a sharp unallayable sting of the lips and tongue that was like the very kiss of despair.

Kempf was perplexed. “I can’t understand it,” he said, getting up from behind his desk and pacing up and down while O‘Kane sat in a chair so comfortless and hard it might have been designed for the witness stand at the county courthouse. “We were making such progress, and now nothing: Pffft! I throw the usual bugbears up to him — his parents, his wife, the experience in Paris — and he won’t respond at all. Even free association’s a dud. I say ’boxer dog’ and he just stares at me. All he’ll say is ‘one slit, one slit,’ over and over again.” He knotted his hands behind his back, shaking his head, dapper and narrow-shouldered, with the bleeding eyes and precise hair of a screen idol. “I thought we were past all that.”

O‘Kane didn’t respond. The doctor was talking to himself, really, as he did nearly every afternoon in the wake of his session with Mr. McCormick; O’Kane was merely a sounding board. Holding himself very rigid, hardly breathing, he let his eyes crawl round the room. The decor wasn’t substantially different from that of the Hamilton and Brush eras, but for the fact that Hamilton’s neurological molds and Brush’s Hawaiian scenes were gone, replaced by a single massive reproduction of a painting that was affixed to the wall of Dr. Freud’s office in Vienna, or so Kempf claimed. “Le Leçon clinique du Dr. Charcot,” a plaque beside it read, and it showed a white-haired doctor — presumably Charcot — supporting a young hysteric by the waist while twenty bearded students looked on and her nurse stood ready to catch her should she fall. The woman was wearing a low-cut blouse that had slipped down over her shoulders, and though she was standing, she appeared to be unconscious — either that or faking it. The significance of it all escaped O‘Kane, except that the woman was a real looker and Charcot obviously had her in his power. So what was the attraction for Kempf — wish fulfillment?

“That stingaree was a damned unfortunate thing,” Kempf mused, still pacing, “rotten luck and no two ways about it. But I thought Stanley was getting over it, I really did, and now he’s blocked again, no more sensible or responsive than a stone. Something has set him off, no doubt about it — you don’t know anything that might be troubling him, do you, Eddie?”

O‘Kane, rigid, just his lips: “No, nothing at all.”

“It’s funny,” Kempf said, pausing now in front of O‘Kane’s chair. He was looking down at him, furrowing his brow, squinting those rounded eyes till they were no more than slits. “Really odd. Nothing happened last night, did it? While you were here — or after? That you might’ve gotten wind of, that is?”

“No, nothing.”

The doctor made a feint with his hand, as if he were trying to snatch something out of the air. “I just thought that Nick or Pat might‘ve—”

“No. Uh-uh. They didn’t say a word.”

“Well, something has happened. I’m sure of it. He won’t say, but I’ll get it out of him. You watch me. I just hope it won’t…”

“What?”

Kempf let out a sigh. “I just hope it won’t compromise the progress we’ve made with his wife and the others — and you know, I’ve already hired on the new nurse. Mrs. Gleason. She worked under me at Saint Elizabeth’s.”

And now O‘Kane was stammering, just like Mr. McCormick: “I don’t think — well, it’s not my place to say, but is it really advisable to bring a woman in — I mean, at this juncture? When he seems so disturbed? Over the stingaree, I mean.”

Kempf’s face fell open like a book, only it was an unreadable book — a psychology text, written in German. “Why, yes,” he said, “of course. That’s the whole idea. To show him that women are no different from you and me, from men, that is, and that they’re as natural a part of living in the world as trees, flowers, gophers and psychologists. The more women we introduce him to, the more—”

He was interrupted by a knock at the door. It pushed open partway and Butters’ face, flushed and startled-looking, appeared in the aperture. “Mrs. McCormick to see you, sir. And Mrs. Roessing.”

Katherine stalked into the room then, her heels punishing the floorboards, Mrs. Roessing following languidly behind. “I just can’t stand it,” she announced, addressing Kempf, who’d stopped his pacing and was posed in front of the painting in the exact attitude of Charcot. “And frankly, Dr. Kempf, I don’t care what your opinion or advice is on the subject, but Jane and I have come to take my husband out to luncheon — a proper luncheon — at our hotel.”

The doctor blanched. He looked like Valentino facing down a bull in Blood and Sand—sans the mustache and excess hair, of course. “I can’t allow it,” he said. “Not today, of all days.”

Katherine was in a state, all her Back Bay debutante’s ire aroused, the crater visible between her pinched brows, her eyes incinerating all before her. She wouldn’t be denied, not this time — O‘Kane could see that, and he began to feel very uncomfortable indeed. “What you will or will not allow is beside the point, Edward,” she said, “because I’ll have you out of here in two shakes if you continue in this obstinate—”

“Your fellow guardians may have something to say about that.”

“Well, do you hear that?” Katherine huffed, looking to Mrs. Roessing for support; to her credit, Mrs. Roessing merely seemed embarrassed. “The insolence of the man. I’ll see Cyrus and Anita in court — and you too. It’s high time I had the guardianship of my own husband, and we’ve come this far, with our lovely beach parties and, and”—here she faltered, the voice gone thick in her throat—“and Muriel and all the rest, and I won’t see it spoiled now, I simply won’t.” She shot a look at O‘Kane, as if to see if he was going to offer any protest, and he dropped his eyes.

“All right, Jane,” she said then, her voice brisk and businesslike, “let’s go fetch Stanley.”

There was a moment of hesitation, Kempf giving O‘Kane a sour look as the two women slammed out the door and down the steps to the path that led to the main house, their shoulders squared, hats marching in regimental display, and then he said, “Come on, Eddie, we’d better get over there and see that Martin doesn’t open that door — or if he does, well, I won’t answer for it.”

They weren’t more than two minutes behind the women, but by the time they reached the main house, with its door flung open wide and a faint cool breath of lemon oil and furniture wax emanating from somewhere deep inside, Katherine and Mrs. Roessing were already at the top of the stairs, on the landing, and Katherine was shrilly demanding that Martin open the door. Mr. McCormick was bent over the table in the upstairs parlor at the time, rocking back and forth and chanting his mantra—one slit—over and over, while he worked at drawing a continuous line down the center of a hundred or so sheets of the finest handmade cotton-rag sketching paper, front and back. He was still in his robe and pajamas, having refused to dress that morning, an act of insubordination Kempf overlooked because of Mr. McCormick’s highly discomposed state. O‘Kane was just coming up the stairs at this point, and all he was able to see at first was some sort of commotion, but Mart later filled him in on the details.

The moment the women had appeared on the landing, Mr. McCormick snapped to attention. He stopped rocking, stopped chanting, threw down his pencil. “Martin,” Katherine demanded, “open this door at once. Jane and I are taking Mr. McCormick out for a proper lunch.”

In the absence of Kempf and O‘Kane, Mart was slow to react, a farrago of conflicting loyalties — he knew perfectly well that Mr. McCormick wasn’t himself and he knew what had happened the night before and what it meant, and that opening the door would lead to trouble, he was sure of it. On the other hand, Mrs. McCormick was the ultimate authority here, the president, Congress and Supreme Court of Riven Rock all rolled in one. “I’m coming,” he said, though she could plainly see through the grid that he wasn’t, that he was delaying, pretending to fumble in his pockets for the keys, and she became impatient and began to rattle the bars. There she was, in her tailor-made clothes and half-a-melon hat, her slim gloved fingers wrapped round the impervious iron bars, tugging in impatience as if it were she who was locked in and her husband roaming free.

The bars rattling, his wife’s fingers and her white throat, the petulant crease over the bridge of her nose, the pique of her eyes and the set of her hat: suddenly Mr. McCormick came to life. In two bounds he was at the door, and though she drew back instinctively and Mrs. Roessing cried out and Mart rumbled up out of the chair, Katherine was caught. Mr. McCormick had her by both wrists, all the incensed, aroused, preternatural strength of him, his rotten teeth and his close and personal odor, and he drew her to him, Sam Wah all over again, and then snatched a hand to her throat, clamped it there like a staple, forcing her head back, and he was whinnying in his excitement: “A kiss! A kiss!”

O‘Kane was the one who broke his grip and then he was pinioned there in Katherine’s place, Mr. McCormick like the tar baby, stuck fast now to his wrists, Katherine staggering back from the door, the wreck of her bloodless face, Mrs. Roessing already wrapping her in her arms and Dr. Kempf’s voice gone high with agitation: “You see? You see what happens when you interfere?”

And all of them — O‘Kane and Mart, Mrs. Roessing, Kempf and even the furiously tugging and whimpering Mr. McCormick — looked to her for a response. She held tight to Jane Roessing, her hat askew, the red marks of her husband’s fingers melting into the chalk of her throat. “I blame you for this,” she said finally, all threat and defiance, glaring at Kempf as if to incinerate him on the spot. “You’re alienating my husband’s affections, that’s all you’re doing with your, your precious psychoanalysis — and that’s just what the McCormicks want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

Kempf held his peace. Mr. McCormick dropped O‘Kane’s wrists and worked his arms back through the bars — he looked dubious and bewildered, as if he’d just gotten off a streetcar at the wrong stop. Mrs. Roessing reached up to straighten Katherine’s hat and mumured something to her, and then the two of them were receding down the staircase, their hats in retreat.

“You know what’s wrong with that woman?” Kempf said as soon as she was out of hearing. Mr. McCormick stared wildly through the bars. Mart hovered helplessly in the background, undecided as to whether he should tackle their employer from behind and bind him up in the sheet restraints or just let it go and settle back into the personal hollow he’d eroded in the pillows of the couch over the course of the stultifying months and obliterative years.

“No,” O‘Kane said, and he was interested to know, vitally interested, “no, what’s wrong with her?”

“It’s a prescription I’d give her, really — one of Freud’s.” Kempf tugged at his sleeves and then brushed down his jacket with a flick of his fingers, as if to rid himself of the residue of what had just transpired. “Do you know Latin, Eddie?”

“I was an altar boy.”

“Good. Then you’ll appreciate this. Freud said it of a female hysteric whose husband”—he lowered his voice, out of Mrs. McCormick’s hearing—“was impotent. And I’d say it fits Mrs. McCormick to a T.”

“Yes?”

The doctor lowered his voice still further. “‘Penis normalis, dosim repetatur.’ ”

6. SICK, VERY SICK

stanley knew what was going on he might have been sick but he wasn’t retarded and he wasn’t blind or deaf either and it was the women the women yet again because they weren’t content to sit at lunch with him or make conversation over iced tea in the cabana don’t you think it’s just outrageous what the french have done to the hemline this year no they weren’t satisfied that he was a gentleman bred by his mother and held himself just so and made the smallest talk and didn’t punish them and give them what they needed and deserved and wanted no they had to come to him in the night ghostly and white in their skin with their wet tongueless mouths and the smell of their heat a bitch in heat like a bitch in heat and take hold of him down there where he was most vulnerable and how he hated that because there was nothing nothing nothing he hated more than that and the Judges had warned him and lashed him and beaten and pummeled him and yet here it was all over again and she didn’t even have a name but she wasn’t katherine oh no not katherine never katherine he was sure of that because she was some slut and whore and degraded filthy streetwalking prostitute who could have her way with him any way she liked and he’d almost felt it almost almost thrust back at her and showed her what it was to be a man a real man a he-man like his father the president and his brother the president and harold the vice president with his two wives like a pasha and his monkey glands and his beautiful little adorable little child woman daughter muriel… almost…

but almost wasn’t all the way home almost didn’t win the race or drive the ball over the fence or invent the reaper out of nothing or the stingaree either which was gods reaper lurking there in the water and who knew better that it was there and what it liked to do and was likely to do than katherine who was the scientist after all the biologist who would sing out the latin names of every animal and plant and bounding squirrel with the breeze of the car in her face her beautiful face katherine dexter and he thought about that and brooded and picked over it all through the day of the stingaree and the day it melted into because she’d done it because she wanted to see him dead and drowned because she wanted to be a widow like mrs.jane two of them widows because she wanted his money and he could see right through her because dr kempf the free associator and inkblot man—“Tell me, Stanley, when I say ‘boxer dog,’ what do you think of?” —had taught him to control himself just as if he were wearing the harness again an invisible harness no straps or wires or restraints but that was the end of katherine no more katherine no sir never again not after that stinking filthy animal of a whore and what was her scientific name he’d like to know she’d brought into his very bedroom to debase and humiliate him while nick and par breathed in the dark and yes he’d heard them there and felt them but no more no more and never again make me a baby stanley make me a baby…

Katherine couldn’t know what her husband was thinking — she never knew what he was thinking, even when he was sitting there on the carpet they brought to the beach discussing the Malemute Kid with Muriel and fastidiously nibbling round the edges of a smoked salmon sandwich Giovannella had prepared at first light. All she knew was that he’d come so far, come all the way back to who he was, her Stanley, Stanley of the retiring mien and shining eye, and now he’d fallen away from her again — and she would be damned twice over if she was going to be cut out of his life this time. That was why she’d hired Newton Baker, her old friend and colleague from the War days and the Women’s Committee of the National Defense Council, to petition the Santa Barbara Superior Court for sole guardianship of her husband:

IN THE MATTER OF THE GUARDIAN SHIP OF THE PERSON OF STANLEY MCCORMICK, AN INCOMPETENT PERSON:

No. 7146

PETITION FOR REMOVAL OF CERTAIN GUARDIANS

TO THE HONORABLE, THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF SANTA BARBARA:

COMES NOW KATHERINE DEXTER MCCORMICK, AND RESPECTFULLY SHOWS:

That Kempf was alienating the affections of her husband on behalf of Cyrus and Anita and refusing him the endocrine treatment that could well provide a cure for him, and that she, as Stanley’s wife, knew better than his brother and sister what was good and proper for him and was better able to provide it without their interference. That all they cared about was keeping the McCormick fortune intact. That she, Katherine, his wife, had through all these splayed and tottering years managed her husband’s estate despite their automatic two-to-one vote against her on any matter of real importance, as for example spending ten thousand dollars a month on a psychiatrist who believed that psychoanlysis could repair rotten teeth, and she wanted redress and wanted it now.

Jane backed her. And her mother too. And though she hated the publicity and dreaded the thought of what the papers would do with this, she could hardly wait to take the stand and give them all a piece of her mind. And why? Because of Stanley, nothing more. Stanley was all that mattered — and her guilt for having neglected him over the course of the years, all her loyalty notwithstanding, because she had neglected him and she’d allowed herself to be badgered and pigeonholed by the Favills and Bentleys and Hamiltons of the world and now by Anita and Cyrus. But she wouldn’t give in. Not anymore. Because she alone knew how wrenching and terrifying it was to lose Stanley the first time, the time he floundered and splashed and finally went down, and no one there to throw him a lifeline, no one but her….

It all came to a head after their return from Maine, the ongoing and unrelieved nightmare that was Maine, in the fall of 1905. Everything she’d tried — patience and understanding, firmness, reason, love — was a failure, that was clear, and Stanley was caught in a downward spiral that threatened to suck her under too. “Sexual hypochondriachal neurasthenia and incipient dementia praecox” was Dr. Trudeau’s chilling assessment, and all she could do was try to insulate Stanley against anything that might cause him undue stress — his mother, in particular, the Reaper Works, and, sad to say, marital relations. She’d pushed him too far, moved too quickly, and now she had to draw back and assuage and nurture him all over again.

On their first day back in Boston — the twenty-first of November — they went down to the harbor to meet her mother, who was just then returning from an extended stay at Prangins. The day was gloomy and cold, with a scent of rain on the air and a low scrolling sky stuffed full of gray clouds that unfurled in procession out over the sea. The liner was just docking as the driver let them down from the carriage and they hurried up to the gate that gave on to the pier, hardly noticing the others in the crowd or the man in a cap and loden jacket trimmed with gold piping standing to one side of the entrance. Katherine was intent on her mother and on Stanley, who’d been stiff and incommunicative all morning, and never gave the man a second glance, never dreaming that they needed passes to enter the dock area and that this man was stationed there in an official capacity to check those very passes.

There was a cry at their back, rude and insulting, and here came the man — an Italian, she believed, swarthy and black-eyed — rushing down the pier to intercept them. “Hey,” he shouted, addressing Stanley, “where the hell you think you’re going, mister?”

Katherine felt the blood rush to her face. She could scarcely believe her ears. At the same time, her arm was looped through Stanley‘s, and she could feel him stiffen. He gave the approaching guard a wild look, and then the man was there, out of breath, and he reached out to seize Stanley by the arm.

He couldn’t have known what he was doing. Because in that moment all Stanley’s frustrations came to the surface in a molten swelling rush — Maine, his mother, the farce of their honeymoon, his failure in bed — and he erupted. He shook the man off as if he were an insect, sending him careening across the planks in a clutch of spinning limbs and flailing hands. And when the man picked himself up with a curse and came at him again, Stanley brought his umbrella into play, slashing away at his adversary’s face and head until the umbrella was nothing but rag and splinter and the dazed guard, blood wadded in his hair and bright down the front of his jacket, staggered off in retreat.

They were both upset, both she and Stanley, and she held tight to his arm as they made their way through the awestruck crowd, which parted automatically at the sight of Stanley’s grim bloodless face and the shredded trophy that had been his umbrella. “The impudence of that man,” she said. “The first thing I’m going to do when we get home is write a letter to the steamer line — if they can’t hire a gentleman to accommodate the public then they shouldn’t hire anyone at all. You’re not hurt, are you?”

He shook his head, his lips pressed tight.

“Good,” she said, “thank heavens,” but she could feel him trembling and recoiling like a plucked string. They were almost at the boat now, the vast field of it blocking the horizon from view, the crowd closing ranks behind them. Was that her mother, up there, leaning over the rail and waving a handkerchief? No, no it wasn’t.

“I can‘t,” Stanley said suddenly, pulling up short. “I–I’ve got to go back. They’ll have the police.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The man attacked you — there were witnesses. If anyone need fear the police, it’s him.”

“No,” he said, trembling, and there was that look, the eyes sunk into his head and his lips jerking away from the skirts of his teeth and his teeth clamped and grinding. “They-they’ll put me in jail, I’ll be ruined. Bars,” he said, “iron bars,” and he pulled away from her in a single clonic spasm, turned his back on her and started up the pier in the direction of the gate.

“Stanley!” she called, but he was beyond hearing, already swallowed up in the milling crowd, already lost.

She didn’t see him again till late that night — past ten — and all through her reunion with her mother and dinner and the unwrapping of the little gifts Josephine had brought her back from Paris she was sick with worry. She was sure Stanley had gone off and got himself in some sort of trouble (she thought of the old man at the lake and what might have happened if he hadn’t been able to swim) — trouble no amount of money could get him out of. He was seething. Out of control. Ready to lash out at anyone who got in his way, however unknowingly or innocently. And while her mother nattered on about Prangins and Madame Fleury and how the wedding was still the talk of the village, all Katherine could think of was the police. Should she call them? But what would she say — that her husband was lost? That Stanley Robert McCormick, with all his savoir faire and talent and wealth, couldn’t be trusted on the public streets? That he was mad and disoriented and suffering from sexual hypochondriacal neurasthenia?

She broke down in the middle of one of her mother’s stories about Emily Esterbrook, of the Worcester Esterbrooks, who’d had the stateroom across from hers on the passage back and could whistle the second violin part to Beethoven’s Harp Quartet — all the way through — without missing a note. “Emily’s daughter is engaged to the nicest man,” her mother was saying, when suddenly Katherine began to sob and she couldn’t seem to stop, not even when Stanley finally came banging up the stairs.

“Stanley,” Josephine cried, rising from her chair to greet him, “how nice to see you again,” but then she faltered. Stanley stood there in the middle of her mother’s parlor with the strangest look on his face, as if he didn’t recognize the place at all — or the people in it. There was a smudge of oil or grease on his forehead and the flesh round his right eye was puffy and discolored, as if just that smallest part of him had begun to decay. His jacket had suffered too, the left sleeve hanging by a thread and the right gone altogether. What looked to be blood was crusted round the elbow of the exposed shirtsleeve.

“But Stanley, what’s happened?” Josephine exclaimed, crossing the room to take him by the hand, and she was thinking of her own son, her own dead son, all sympathy and maternal solace, and Katherine’s heart went out to her. As for Stanley — her own reaction to him, that is — she was paralyzed, utterly paralyzed. She couldn’t say What? or How? or even open her mouth. “Here,” Josephine was crooning, “let me see. Here, under the light.”

At first, in the first moment her mother touched him, Stanley seemed to acquiesce, bowing his head and relaxing his shoulders, but then all at once he jerked his hand away as if he’d been bitten. “You stupid old woman!” he shouted, every cord of his throat flexed and straining. “You stupid interfering old woman, don’t you touch me, don’t you dare touch me!”

“Stanley!” Katherine gasped, and suddenly she’d found her voice, angry now as she watched her mother’s face collapse — the kindest woman in the world and she meant nothing but kindness — sore and angry and ready to put an end to this… this insanity. “Stanley, you apologize this instant!”

But he turned on her now, out of control, out of anybody’s control, even his own, his face a whipping rag of rage. “Shut up, you bitch!”

In the morning, early, before anyone was stirring, they went out to Brookline in a private carriage, Stanley sunk so deep in the cushions he was all but invisible from the street, his long legs tented before him, his head and shoulders slouched at the uncomfortable level of Katherine’s buttocks. Both his cheekbones had swollen overnight — he’d been beaten, beaten savagely, she could see that now — and it gave him a look of squint-eyed inscrutability, as if he’d been transformed into a Tatar tribesman while he slept. He said nothing. Not a word. No explanations, no apologies. As soon as they got home, she put him to bed and he slept all through that day and the night and morning that followed.

Then came the procession of psychiatrists, neurologists and pathologists, an unending parade of them marching through the parlor of the Brookline house, tapping, probing and auscultating her shrinking husband, holding up pictures and geometric forms for his comment, questioning him closely about current events and throwing their arms over his shoulder and suggesting a nice walk around the garden. Katherine was frightened. Stanley seemed to be getting progressively worse, slipping away from her, and no one seemed capable of touching him — each physician who came to the door undermined the opinion of his predecessor, as if it were all some elaborate medical chess match. She needed a plan of action, a line of inquiry and therapy to pursue, but all she got was confusion. Outside, the trees stood in tatters, winter advancing, the light fading, the wind gathering, and nothing settled. She wasn’t sleeping well. Meals were a torment. She couldn’t exercise, couldn’t read, couldn’t think. In her desperation, she wired Nettie, hoping for some insight, some shred of wisdom, sympathy, anything. The reply was curt: YOU‘VE MADE YOUR BED STOP NOW LIE IN IT.

The last of the doctors, a leonine general practitioner with white hairs growing out of his nose and ears, was the only one able to reach Stanley — at least at first. Dr. Putnam had been recommended by a friend of Josephine, and though he didn’t know Charcot from Mesmer or Freud from Bloch, in his forty-seven years in the medical profession he’d encountered just about everything, including dementia in all its forms and the secret hysteria that made women hang themselves in closets. He came up the steps jauntily enough, considering he was in his seventies, and before he had his hat and gloves off he’d challenged Stanley to a game of checkers. The two of them played wordlessly through the afternoon and into the evening, and the next morning at eight the doctor appeared with two iron posts and a set of horseshoes under his arm. All morning the posts clanked as he and Stanley studied and released their shoes, and the only other sound was the low murmur of their voices totting up the score.

The next day, the old doctor didn’t appear till nearly three in the afternoon — he’d had to make the rounds of his other patients, he explained, and Mrs. Trusock had kept him with her shingles — but Stanley had been out all morning in a cold wind, flinging his horseshoes at the unyielding stake, over and over again. They played till dark, and then the doctor, warming himself by the fire with a cup of tea before heading home to his wife and supper, called Katherine into the room. She found the two of them drawn up to the hearth in a pair of straight-backed chairs, their knees practically touching. “Stanley,” the doctor said when Katherine had settled herself in the armchair across from them, “you’re as crafty a checkers player as I’ve seen and a deadeye shot at horseshoes. My advice to you, sir, is to find yourself a hobby and pursue it — does wonders for the nerves. Tell me, what do you like, in the way of hobbies, that is?”

Stanley made no reply.

“Nothing?” The old man canted his head, as if listening for a response from the next room. “Well,” he said, smacking his lips over the tea and giving Katherine a quick penetrating look, “I’d prescribe German and fencing lessons. Something you can sink your teeth into. And useful too. Nothing more useful than German in today’s world, and the fencing, well, it will give you some discipline and rigor, and that’s just what you need to take your mind off your troubles. Business troubles, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so.” He set down his teacup with elaborate care and rose from the chair. “I’ll stop in to see how you’re doing in a week or so — and I’ll bring my sabre along too…. Well,” he said, smacking his lips again and looking round the room as if he’d just healed all the lepers of Calcutta in one stroke, “what can I say but auf Wiedersehen!”

For the next several days Stanley was very quiet. Twice Katherine found him out in the yard, brooding over the extemporized horseshoe pit, but when she asked him about it — if he’d like her to play him a match — he wouldn’t give her the courtesy of a reply. One night, soon after, it snowed; Stanley hung the horseshoes on a nail in the basement and never mentioned them again. Christmas came and went — Stanley’s favorite season — and he hardly seemed to notice. He didn’t send out cards, he was so unenthusiastic about the decorations that Katherine and the maid wound up trimming the tree, and their exchange of presents was perfunctory to say the least. They spent a quiet New Year’s mewed up in the house, barely talking to one another, while everyone else was dancing and visiting. Stanley brooded. Katherine was miserable.

At the end of the first week of January they went into Boston, Katherine to see about her research work at the Institute and Stanley to locate and purchase the foils he would need for fencing. They had a late breakfast with her mother and Stanley didn’t have two words to say the whole time, but at least he was tractable and outwardly calm, and then they took a walk down Commonwealth Avenue, just as they had when they were lovers two years before.

Stanley was very solemn and he held himself with a kind of fanatic rigidity, his chest thrust out so far the buttons of his overcoat seemed ready to give way. She tried to make small talk, more as a way of reassuring herself than anything else, but after a while she gave it up and made do with the morning, the briskness of the air and the gentle pressure of her husband’s arm in her own. German and fencing, she was thinking. As ridiculous as the idea had first sounded to her, she’d now begun to warm to it — maybe it would help focus Stanley in the way the checkers and horseshoes had. Maybe the old ghost of a country G.P. knew more than the experts, maybe he was right, maybe he was. Just then, just as she began to feel that things might turn out right after all, Stanley began to drag his foot — his right foot — as if he’d been shot in the leg. She tried to ignore it at first — it was a passing quirk, she was sure of it — but after they’d gone a block, people staring, his foot scraping rhythmically at the concrete, the pressure ever greater on her arm till it felt as if she were supporting his entire weight, she had to say something.

“Stanley, dear, are you all right?” she asked, slowing her pace to accommodate him. “Are you feeling tired? Or cold? Would you like to go back now?”

He pulled up short then and looked at her in surprise, as if he didn’t know how she’d become attached to his arm. His face was working and she had the strangest fancy that he was drifting away from her like a helium-filled balloon and that if she let go, even for an instant, he’d recede into the clouds. “I can‘t,” he said. “You see, I’ve got — got to find a German teacher. That’s where I’m going.”

“But your leg—?”

“My leg?”

“Yes. You were limping. I thought you’d got a stone in your shoe,or—”

He gently disengaged himself from her arm and tipped his hat. “Auf Wiedersehen,” he said, and he went off down the street in a peculiar slouching hobble, dragging his right foot all the way.

It was a repetition of the scene at the pier and she was afraid for him — anything could happen — but she knew enough to understand that she couldn’t stop him now, short of putting a collar and leash on him, and she still fanned that dim little coal of a hope: the German teacher. Of course. Why not? She went on to MIT and at two she took a cab to the restaurant where they’d arranged to meet for lunch, but no Stanley. No Stanley at two or two-fifteen or two-thirty either. She waited until three and then she left a note with the maître d’ and went back to the Institute.

It was dark by the time she returned to her mother‘s, only to discover that Josephine was out, and she settled into a chair with Wallace and read about natural selection amongst the mammalian species of Borneo and watched the clock. Sometime later — at seven or thereabout — the bell rang downstairs and she heard the maid tripping through the hallway to answer it. This was succeeded by a confusion of voices — Stanley’s, she recognized Stanley‘s — and a thunder of footsteps coming up the stairs. She rose from her chair and her heart was flapping like a sheet in the wind: what now?

A moment later Stanley appeared at the parlor door, a slight embarrassed-looking man in a gray overcoat and gold-rimmed spectacles at his side. Stanley had his hand on the man’s upper arm and he wore a look of transport on his face, of rapture, as if he’d found the very key to existence. “My — my German teacher,” he announced.

The man in his grip seemed to shrink away from him. “I’m very sorry,” he said through the impediment of a heavy accent while lifting his eyes to Katherine‘s, “sorry to intrude on you this way.” He looked to Stanley, but Stanley was oblivious. “My name is Schneerman, and I teach at the Deutsche Schule, and, uh, this gentleman, your husband, I take it, well — he was very persuasive. I give him my card. I tell him that I am expected home to dinner with my wife — and here his voice cracked—”and, and my children, but he is very insistent.“

“Deutsche Schule,” Stanley repeated. “Das Bettchen. Der Tisch. Ich bin gut. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

Katherine moved across the room and tried to separate her husband from the German teacher, who’d gone white and begun to breathe rapidly and shallowly, as if he were having some sort of attack. She laid a hand on Stanley’s arm and said, as casually as she could, “You must be exhausted, both of you. Here, sit down, won’t you, Mr. Schneerman?”

Stanley was in a sweat; he neither moved nor relaxed his grip. The German teacher looked as if he were about to faint.

“How about a nice cup of tea, Stanley?” she said. “We can sit here with Mr. Schneerman and have a chat about your lessons — perhaps he’ll even give us some tips as to our pronunciation of some of the more difficult configurations, the umlauts and such. Would you like that, Stanley? Hm?” She turned to the German teacher. “Mr. Schneerman?”

“Yah,” the little man said. “Yah, sure. We have a lesson now.”

Still nothing. Stanley seemed to be in some sort of trance, his eyes fixed on the lamp across the room, his hand so tightly clamped to the German teacher’s arm she could see the tendons standing out like wires beneath his skin. She was afraid suddenly. Very afraid. What if he hurt the man? What if he had one of his tantrums? It was then that she hit on the expedient of asking Stanley’s help with the furniture — as a gentleman coming to the aid of a lady, and that was the true and invincible core of him, she knew it, civility, decency and goodness. “Stanley,” she said, “would you help me move this end table so we can settle Mr. Schneerman here by the fireplace?” And she bent to remove the lamp, doily and bric-a-brac from the table, then lifted it with some effort and held it out before him in two trembling hands.

Stanley’s eyes came back into focus. He gave her that searching, bewildered look and then automatically dropped the German teacher’s arm and took the table from her. Immediately, the little man backed away from him, ducked his head and shot out the door, Katherine on his heels. “Just a minute, Stanley,” she called over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back.”

She caught up with Mr. Schneerman at the front door. “Please,” she begged, and she thought she was going to cry, “please let me explain. It’s my husband, he—”

The little man spun round to finish the sentence for her: “—he should be locked up. The man is a menace. I have in my mind to sue, that is what!” If he’d been meek and cowed in the parlor, he was self-possessed now, storming at her, all the fear and embarrassment of the situation released in a rush of anger. “You, you people!” he cried, and he might have gone further but for the fact that Stanley appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs, the end table still cradled in his arms. “Where did you say you wanted this, Katherine?” Stanley called, and the man shrank into himself all over again, flung open the door and disappeared into the night.

Clearly the situation had become impossible. There was no fooling herself anymore — Stanley had become a danger to himself and to others and he needed to be watched around the clock, watched and protected. She wasn’t equal to it, she knew that, and the charade of domestic life had to end, at least for the present. Stanley needed help — professional help, institutional help — and he needed it now.

She was able to calm him that night by having him rearrange all the furniture in the parlor, even the heaviest pieces, which he was capable of handling without the slightest evidence of strain. He worked at it with the obsessive attention to detail he brought to any task, shifting a chair an inch here or an inch there, over and over, till he got it right, but after an hour or so he began to flag, moving automatically now, until finally, at her suggestion, he took a seat by the fire. The maid brought up a light supper and Katherine put him to bed. When she looked in on him an hour later, he was in a deep sleep, the covers pulled up to his chin, his face as relaxed and still and beautiful as if it had been carved of marble.

When her mother came home, they sat up over biscuits and hot chocolate and discussed the situation. “Oh, I liked him well enough before he changed,” Josephine said, pursing her lips as she dipped a biscuit into her chocolate. “That’s the way it is with marriage sometimes — once they’ve got you they lose all respect for you. The things he said to me in this house, well, I just hope I don’t have to hear anything like that again as long as I live. To think I’d be called a stupid old woman in my own parlor — and by my own son-in-law!”

“He’s sick, mother,” Katherine said. “Very sick. He needs help.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Look at his family. His sister. His mother. They’re all of them three steps from the madhouse, and if he keeps on like this, I must say I’m going to very much regret your having married him.”

The room was very still. But for the hiss of the coals in the fireplace and the low persistent ticking of the clock there wasn’t a sound. Katherine cradled the cup in her hands. She was thinking of her wedding night, of the scene on the boat, of Maine, of Doctors Putnam and Trudeau and the sick pale terrified face of that poor little German teacher. She looked up at her mother, at the paintings on the walls, the furniture, the draperies. There she was, her mother’s daughter, safe in the familiar room, surrounded by the shapes and colors of the life she’d led up till now, but it seemed different somehow, barren and cold as some Arctic landscape.,

“Mama,” she said, reverting to the diminutive she hadn’t used since she was a child. “Mama, I’m afraid of him.”

7. THREE O‘CLOCK

At first, when O‘Kane saw the four men standing there in the alley out back of Menhoff’s, he didn’t think anything of it — there were always men there, milling around in the shadows and perpetuating various half-truths and outright lies while passing one of the fifths of hooch Cody sold on the sly. He wasn’t even especially surprised when he recognized one of them as Giovannella’s father, Baldy Dimucci, and another as her brother Pietro, the runt he’d had that minor disagreement with a lifetime ago in the driveway at Riven Rock. Pietro was now in his forties, and there wasn’t much more to him than there’d been twenty years ago — he was scrawny as a chicken, not as dark as Giovannella, but with her shining hair and fathomless eyes. O‘Kane had run into him any number of times over the years — out on State Street, in Montecito Village, in the drive of the Dimucci house when it was raining and Roscoe gave Giovannella a ride home before taking him and Mart on into town — and though he couldn’t say he liked the man, there was no animosity between them, not that he knew of. They typically exchanged a few words, mainly of the hello-how-are-you-fine variety, and went on about their business. But here he was, out in the alley with his father and two other guys, big guys, O’Kane saw now, big guys with ax handles clutched in their big sweating fists.

O‘Kane had been drinking with the projectionist from the Granada, a whole long night of drinking, and it had been so long since his little altercation with Giovannella — a year or more now — that he’d forgotten all about it. Up until now, that is. “Hi, Baldy,” he said, but his feet couldn’t seem to work up the volition to usher him on past this little Dago confabulation. “Nice night,” he added uncertainly.

Baldy was an old man now, with a potbelly and a fringe of white hair that stood straight up off the crown of his head like a nimbus of feathers. “You’re the bad man, Eddie,” he said. “You’re the very bad man.”

O‘Kane wanted to deny it, wanted to hoot and caper and tease the old man’s hair right up off his head, but he was drunk and he knew what was coming. He knew it, but somehow he couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care.

“You hurt-a my daughter, Eddie, and now you gonna answer to me.”

That was when the two goons moved in close with the ax handles and started chopping away at the fragile tottering tree that was Eddie O‘Kane. He went down after the first couple of blows, and he stayed down, cradling his head, even as the tempered oak sought out his ribs and his knees and the tough little fist of bone at the base of his spine. The last thing he remembered was Pietro cursing him and the soft wet kiss of the spittle on his cheek.

He came out of it right at the end of his first day in the hospital, a smell of hot food, the rattle of a cart, a dapple of light on the ceiling as the sun sank out of sight. There were flowers on the table beside him — sent, he would later learn, by Katherine, the Ice Queen herself — and he was in a room that had two beds in it. He didn’t feel a whole lot of curiosity about who was occupying the other one — his head ached too much — but later, after the tide of nurses had ebbed, he saw that it was a child, a little boy, all wrapped up like King Tut and with his leg in a cast suspended from a hook over the bed. That was when O‘Kane began to wonder about the extent of the damage to his own bodily self, and he ran a reluctant hand — his left hand; the right was pinned fast to his chest — down one side of his rib cage and up the other. He felt pinched and constricted, as if he couldn’t fill his lungs and take a breath of air, and he knew that he was all wrapped up too, and he was wondering about that in a drifting remote sort of way — his ribs, they’d broken his ribs — and then he was running through the streets of the North End with some lady’s pocketbook in his hand and a whole horde of people chasing after him, and wasn’t Mr. McCormick one of them?

When he woke the next morning, there was a doctor standing over him, or at least he looked like a doctor, white jacket, clipboard and regulation smile. “How are you feeling?”

“Scrambled,” O‘Kane managed, and he tried to lift his head but couldn’t. “Three eggs in a pan.”

“It could be worse.” The doctor’s smile was eerily serene. “You’ll walk again — in three to six months — but you’ll very likely carry a limp the rest of your life. You’ve shattered your right patella and there’s a hairline fracture of the femur, just above it, in addition to a compound break of the tibia — the shinbone. You’ve got three broken ribs on the right side, a fractured wrist — also on that side — and oh yes, as you’ve no doubt noticed, your arm is in a cast too. The right ulna is fractured — your elbow, that is.” He paused. “Do you remember anything of the incident? The identity of your attackers, for instance? The police want to know if you can provide a description.”

O‘Kane looked into that fixed smile and tried on a smile of his own, albeit a weak and evanescent one. “No,” he said, “I don’t remember a thing.”

The next day they wheeled his bed out the door and all the way down the corridor to the admissions office: Mr. McCormick was on the line. “Hello? Ed-Eddie? Are you all — are you okay?”

“Sure,” O‘Kane said. “I’ll be up and about in no time.”

Mr. McCormick’s voice was high and excited, sticking on the consonants and ratcheting up over the vowels. “I w-wish I’d been there with you, to — to fight, I mean. I would have given them something to think about, you know I would—”

O‘Kane, miserable, broken in half, reaping his own sour harvest, tried nonetheless to placate him — it was his job, after all. “I know you would. But don’t worry, don’t worry about a thing.”

A pause. Mr. McCormick’s voice, pinched almost to nothing: “You-you‘ re coming back, Eddie, aren’t you? Back here with m-me and Mart? ”

What could he say? Of course he was coming back, coming back like a convict to his ball and chain every time he tries to lift his foot from the floor. It was sad to say, sadder even to admit, but Mr. McCormick was his life. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll be back.”

On the third day, Giovannella appeared. He was dozing at the time, drifting deliciously in and out of consciousness while the mother of the boy in the next bed read aloud from a book of children’s stories in a soothing soft mellifluous voice: “‘Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs…‘”

“Eddie?”

The story faltered, just the smallest pebble in the path of that smooth onrolling voice, and then it picked up again: “… and when Rabbit said, ”Honey or condensed milk with your bread?“ he was so excited that he said, ”Both“…‘ ”

“Eddie?”

He opened his eyes. The ceiling was there, right where he’d left it, and then a glint of the boy’s mother’s blondness combed out over her shoulders, and finally, Giovannella. Her face hovered over him, an anxious look, the ends of her hair so close he could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning. He smiled, one of the smiles his mother had no name for because it was spontaneous and true: how could he blame Giovannella? She’d provoked him, sure, but he had no right to touch her, never, and he’d had it coming to him for years now, a debt of violence accruing.

“I talked to my father,” she said, and he watched her eyes and her ringless fingers as she tucked the hair behind her ears. It was January of 1929 and she was thirty-eight years old, ripe in the bosom in a white blouse and yellow cardigan, her face getting rounder by the day and the flesh settling under her chin. “It’s going to be a small wedding, just the Dimuccis and the Fiocollas and maybe Mart, Pat and Nick, if you want — but in the church, with a white gown and rice and everything else.”

He didn’t know what to say, but he felt it, something stirring in the deep yearning root of him, inside, beneath the sixty yards of gauze and tape and the rock-hard plaster and the flesh that was as tender and yielding as a — as a bride’s. Or make that a groom’s. He was going to marry Giovannella, adulterously and bigamously, and legitimate his two surviving children, Guido of the heavy O‘Kane shoulders and Edwina with the green eyes in her sweet vanilla face, and this was it, this was what he’d been waiting for all his life: his three o’clock luck. It wasn’t money or orange groves or a fleet of cars, but this woman hanging over him in a moment of grace and poignancy and the children waiting in the wings. Okay. All right. He was ready. He tried to nod his head and winced.

Giovannella was smiling down on him, the strong white teeth, the everted lips, the faint hairs trailing all the way down her temple to the hollow at the base of her jaw. “As soon as you can walk, of course,” she said, and her voice was every bit as sweet and assured and anodynic as that mother’s in the next chair over. “We don’t do anything till you can walk. Okay, Eddie?” He felt the soft pressure of her hand on his.

“Okay,” he said.

The wedding was in April, on a fine blue-scraped day with every flower in creation bursting all around them, and after the ceremony at Our Lady of the Sorrows, O‘Kane and Giovannella and Guido and Edwina and all the Dimuccis and Fiocollas and half the Italians in Santa Barbara (Italians, not wops, most definitely not wops anymore) piled into the McCormick automobiles and had their reception on the front lawn at Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick looking on from the high barred windows of his room. They’d hoped to have him right down there amongst the guests, but Kempf vetoed it — after the incident with Katherine, not to mention the complication of the professional girl, which Kempf had never found out about, thank God in His Heaven, Mr. McCormick had to be isolated from women again. Except for Nurse Gleason, that is, and she gave him a wide-enough berth, at least at first.

But still, it was a real celebration, and with enough food prepared by the Dimucci girls and their mother and aunts to feed everybody twice and enough left over for all the millionaires and their starved-looking racehorses too, if they’d had the sense to show up and toast the true match of the year. O‘Kane got along pretty well on his crutches, and everybody said he looked as handsome as one of God’s angels, and Giovannella filled out her satin gown in a way no rumpless flapper could ever have. After the ceremony, after the toasts and the gnocchi and the intercostata di manzoand the palombacciaallo spiedo and the millifoglie and the wedding cake that was as tall as little Guido, Roscoe drove O’Kane and Giovannella up to San Luis Obispo and a three-day honeymoon in a blue-and-white clapboard inn by the sea. And then O‘Kane, moving well enough and with his seminal parts in an advanced state of relaxation, went back to work at Riven Rock.

Mr. McCormick was glad to see him. Very glad. Ecstatic even. The minute O‘Kane appeared on the landing outside the upper parlor door, his crutches extended like struts, Mr. McCormick sprang up off the sofa and rushed him. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” he cried, “I knew you’d be back, I knew it!” The keys turned in the locks, Mart hovering over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder, Nurse Gleason a frowning presence in the background. “Sure I’m back,” O’Kane said, and he was touched, genuinely touched, he was. “Just because I’m married you think I’d desert you? We’re in this together, aren’t we? Till you’re well again?”

Mr. McCormick didn’t say anything. He stood there inside the door and waited patiently as O‘Kane fumbled with his keys and the crutches and his arms that were stiff with the strain of doing two things at once; Mr. McCormick had something in his hand, a trophy of some sort, bronze, with an engraved inscription. It looked like a bugle with two bells.

“So what’s this?” O‘Kane asked, maneuvering through the door while Mart secured it.

Mr. McCormick gave him a big grin, rotten teeth, faraway eyes and all. “F-first prize in the orchid show. For — for our cymbidiums, the Riven Rock cymbidiums. Mr. Hull entered for me, and Kath-Katherine said it was a real coup. She, she—”

But that was it. The rest of the story, whatever it was, was locked up inside him and he couldn’t get it out. Normally O‘Kane would have coached him, the way Kempf did, but he’d just stepped through the door for the first time in three and a half months and Nurse Gleason was giving him a fishy eye and he didn’t know her from Adam yet and he just didn’t feel up to it. Instead, he stumped right by his employer, putting some good weight on the right leg now and walking through the crutches every other step, and settled himself at the table. Mr. McCormick was already at the bookshelf, making a place for the trophy amongst the eight others he’d won in previous years. He was a while at it, getting things just so, and from his posture and the attitude of his shoulders and the way he ducked his head and muttered to himself, O’Kane could see that his judges were very likely looking on and commenting on the arrangement.

Nurse Gleason, who’d nodded a curt hello at O‘Kane as he entered, passed between them now, making a show of straightening the cushions of the sofa and beating out and folding the pages of Mr. McCormick’s newspaper. She was a big-beamed, fish-faced pre-crone of a woman, fiftyish, and as close to being sexless as you could get — short of hermaphroditism, that is. Kempf’s thinking was that Mr. McCormick would be predisposed to accept her more readily than someone like poor what-was-her-name from McLean, the one with the locket between her breasts — or if not accept her, then at least refrain from any sort of sexual impropriety. O’Kane had heard she was a good clinical nurse who took no nonsense from anybody — she’d been at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for years, wielding nozzle and enema tube, before going on to Saint Elizabeths — and so far Mr. McCormick had tolerated her presence.

After twenty minutes or so, during which no one said a word, Mr. McCormick finally seemed satisfied with the relative positions of his trophies and came over to sit down across from O‘Kane at the table. O’Kane had a magazine spread out before him, but he wasn’t reading anything in particular, just leafing through the pages as if they were blank on both sides. He looked up and smiled. Mr. McCormick did not smile back. He seemed unusually tense and his face was running through a range of expressions, as if invisible fingers were tugging at the skin from every direction. “You’re looking well,” O‘Kane said automatically.

“I’m not.”

“Is something the matter? You want to tell me about it?”

Mr. McCormick looked away.

Nurse Gleason entered the dialogue then, her eyes very close-set and her lips puckered fishily. “He’s been out of sorts lately, because of the doctors.”

O‘Kane lifted his eyebrows.

“You know,” she said, “the trial and all. And I don’t blame the poor man, what with one after the other of them here poking and probing at him so he hasn’t had a minute’s peace these last two weeks.”

O‘Kane looked to Mart, but Mart, sunk into himself like some boneless thing washed up out of the sea, had nothing to add.

“They, they—” Mr. McCormick said suddenly, his face still going through its calisthenics, as if the muscles under the skin couldn’t decide on an appropriate response, “they want to take Riven Rock away from me, in the courts, Kath-Katherine and, and—”

“No, no, Mr. McCormick,” Nurse Gleason chided, interposing her bulk between them as she scurried over to lean into the table on one stumplike arm, “nobody’s going to take Riven Rock, that’s not it at all—”

Mr. McCormick never even glanced at her. “Shut up, cunt,” he snarled.

She flared then, Nurse Gleason, but only briefly, like a Fourth of July rocket sputtering on its pad. “I won’t have such language, I tell you,” she spat, leaning in closer, but then Mr. McCormick kicked back the chair and leapt to his feet and she faded back out of reach, her face flushed and crepuscular. O‘Kane, bad knee and all, came up out of his chair too and caught his employer by the wrist; for a moment both of them froze, looking first into each other’s eyes and then down at the intrusive hand on the trembling wrist. O’Kane let go. Mr. McCormick righted his chair, and after a moment’s fussing, sat back down. “It’s all right,” O‘Kane said, but clearly it wasn’t.

A trio of doctors appeared that afternoon, just after Mr. McCormick woke from his postluncheon nap. O‘Kane didn’t catch their names, not that it mattered — there was the lean one, the heavyset one and the one with the bandaged nose. Dr. Kempf wasn’t present, because they were examining Mr. McCormick with a view to supporting Katherine’s contention that psychoanalysis alone was not the proper treatment for her husband and was in fact having a deleterious effect on him. Other doctors would come on other days to examine him in support of Cyrus and Anita, who wanted to retain Kempf — look at the progress he’d made, women in the immediate environment and their brother as fit and rational as ever, or almost — and maintain their two-to-one advantage on the board of guardians. But these doctors were for Katherine, and they gathered solemnly in the upper parlor to await Mr. McCormick’s emergence from the bedroom.

Did they want anything? Nurse Gleason wanted to know, fishily solicitous. Tea? Coffee? A soft drink? She only had to ring for it, no trouble at all.

They didn’t think so.

When Mart led Mr. McCormick out into the main room, O‘Kane could see immediately that the meeting wasn’t going to be a propitious one. Mr. McCormick was actively engaged in a debate with his judges as he came through the door, and his face was still going through its permutations.

The Lean Doctor: “Good afternoon, Mr. McCormick. I’m Dr. Orbison, and this is Dr. Barker and Dr. Williams. We’ve come to chat a bit, if that’s convenient.

True to form, Mr. McCormick said nothing, but his face spoke volumes to O‘Kane. He positioned himself on the arm of the sofa, propped up on one crutch, ready to fling himself forward at the first sign of trouble.

The Lean Doctor (settling himself into one of the three folding chairs set up in anticipation of this visit, while his colleagues followed suit): “Well, pleasant day, isn’t it?”

Mr. McCormick: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”

The doctors exchanged a glance. The one with the bandaged nose craned his neck to look out the window, as if to be sure the sun was still there and shining.

Mr. McCormick: “Be-betrayed by his daughters.”

The Bandaged Doctor: “Who?”

Mr. McCormick: “Lear.”

The Heavyset Doctor: “Leer?”

Mr. McCormick: “First name of King.”

The Lean Doctor: “Oh, yes, I see. Of course. Lear. Do you, uh, think much about Shakespeare then, Mr. McCormick — I take it you’re an aficionado?”

Mr. McCormick (his face working): “Kath-Katherine…”

The Lean Doctor: “Katherine?”

The Bandaged Doctor: “His wife.”

The Lean Doctor (puzzled, drawing at his chin with two lean fingers): “Your wife reads Shakespeare?”

Mr. McCormick said nothing to this, and though he was alert and struggling with his facial muscles and rapping his long fingers on the twin pyramids of his knees, he had very little to say to their subsequent inquiries, which ranged from his knowledge of the Peloponnesian War to the Declaration of Independence, American banking customs, the mechanism of the reaper and his feelings about Dr. Kempf, women and dentists, to his recognition of various celebrated individuals in the public eye, both by name and likeness: Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Calvin Coolidge, Sacco and Vanzetti. If it was a test — and O‘Kane knew that it was — then Mr. McCormick had flunked it badly. There was only one point at which he rose to something like coherence, and that was right at the end, when the distinguished doctors had filled their notebooks and begun to shoot glances at one another out of the corners of their eyes. The Lean Doctor said “Riven Rock” and Mr. McCormick looked up alertly.

The Lean Doctor: “Tell us about your home, if you would, Mr. McCormick, about Riven Rock — how did it get its name?”

Mr. McCormick (sunshine at first, and then increasing clouds): “I — well — it’s because of a rock, you see, and I — well, my mother, she — and then I came and saw it and it was, well, it was—”

There was a long hiatus, all three doctors leaning forward, the day drawing down, Mart snoring lightly from the vicinity of the couch, Nurse Gleason silently dusting the plants, and then Mr. McCormick, his face finally settling on a broad winning ear-to-ear grin, at last spoke up. “It beats me,” he said.

As a family man, O‘Kane wasn’t exactly an overnight success. His experience of children was limited and sad, infinitely sad, and he was used to the peace and sterility of Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s rooming house (reconstructed after the quake to look exactly as it had before, or even more so). He was used to the speaks too and to eating at the drugstore or not eating at all if he didn’t feel like it and to doing any damn thing he pleased any time he pleased. And now, in the spring and early summer, he found himself living amongst the olive-pressing garlic-chewing Valpolicella-quaffing turmoil of the Dimucci household, a place rife with screaming barefooted children, dogs, pigs, chickens and Italians. Baldy had fixed up one of the outbuildings for Marta and her husband, and when they’d moved to their own place downtown on Milpas Street, he let the unsteady O’Kane and his new family move in temporarily—“Just,” he said, “till Eddie can get back on his feet.” and there wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice.

Edwina turned nine in June and Guido would be thirteen in October, too old to be fooled by anything O‘Kane tried to do to ingratiate himself, though they took the candy and games and dolls and penknives he pressed on them readily enough. He wasn’t their father, not in their eyes — their father was Guido Capolupo, and he was dead, like the saints in heaven. With Giovannella it was different. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice for her, giving up his body and soul both — not to mention committing bigamy — and she came each night to worship at his altar. In the beginning, before he could walk without the aid of crutches, she gave him sponge baths in bed, spoon-fed him to keep his strength up, every stray drop of soup or sauce lovingly blotted from his chin with a carefully folded napkin, and once he was getting around again, she spent hours massaging his cramped muscles or depressing the skin around the cast on his leg and gently blowing into the aperture to relieve his itching. She made love to him with all the fierceness of possession and when they were done and sweating and still breathing hard she would straddle him and run her hands through his hair again and again. “You’re mine now, Eddie,” she would say, her lips puffed and swollen with all they’d done, “all mine.”

He couldn’t say that he forgave the Dimuccis (not exactly — he was no pacifist and he would as soon crush Pietro as look at him), but he accepted the rightness of what had happened and he was content, or at least he thought he was. But once he was back at work and putting in his twelve hours a day at Riven Rock, free of the chaos of the Dimucci dominion and the incessant demands of the children—Read me a story; Fix this;You don’t like me, I know it; You’re not my father anyway — he knew the time had come to move on. The first order of business was a car. Baldy had been dropping him off at Riven Rock in the morning and Roscoe swinging by in the evening, and that was all right — or no, it was intolerable — and he scanned the want ads till he found a ten-year-old Maxwell just like the one Dolores Isringhausen used to drive, only older and slower and noisier, the spark of life in its greasy automotive heart all but extinguished. Roscoe helped him get it going, tuned it up for him and drove him down to State Street to invest in a new set of tires.

Two weeks later he and Giovannella found a place for rent in Summerland, just to the east of Montecito and an easy drive both to her parents’ house and Riven Rock. It was a bungalow, with a low creased roof that climbed way out over the front porch and two palm trees set into the ground on either side of it like flagpoles. You could see the ocean from the far right-hand corner of the porch, and best of all, there was a private citrus grove out in the backyard, three grapefruit trees, two oranges and a Meyer lemon. O‘Kane stood out in the street and took six snapshots of the house — dead-on and not a soul in the picture — to send home to his mother.

He was fit enough to carry Giovannella over the threshold and play husband and wife with her through one whole afternoon, evening and night while the kids made their grandparents’ lives miserable and the pelicans sailed across the patch of sky defined by the bedroom window and the sound of the old man next door watering his roses invited them to slide down into the dreamless embrace of sleep. Baldy dropped off the children late the next morning and Giovannella made bruschetta and spaghetti and the house grew smaller and noisier till O‘Kane felt he needed to get out for a drive—“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be back in a couple hours”—and he found himself at Riven Rock, Sunday afternoon, his day off, shooting the bull about one thing and another with Roscoe out in the reconstructed garage.

“How does he seem to you?” Roscoe said, leaning into the front fender of one of the new Pierce Arrows with a chamois cloth. “Because as far as I can see he’s getting more and more worked up about this trial business, which from what I hear isn’t even scheduled yet.”

“I’m not sure if it’s a trial, exactly. There’s no jury or anything like that, just a judge. From what Kempf says, anyway.”

“What’s the difference? The point is, Mr. McCormick thinks she wants to take everything away from him, and that’s why he’s been so jumpy lately, just like years ago when we first started to take him out for his drives and he’d think every other tree was going to fall on the car. You know what he did the other night? He came out here with Nick and Pat — and why they let him out is a mystery to me — and he spent I don’t how many hours rearranging the back seat because it wasn’t comfortable enough… here, take a look, see for yourself what he did.” The panels of the rear door grabbed the light and then released it and there was Mr. McCormick’s handiwork, the seat pried right out of its frame and meticulously customized with fifteen or twenty pillows appropriated from the couches in the main house.

“She already has,” O‘Kane said, leaning in for a closer look, “—he just doesn’t know it.”

“What?” What’re you talking about?“ Roscoe was wringing the wet cloth over a bucket, the sun painting two long white oblongs on the concrete floor where the bay doors stood open.

“Yeah, that’s a real mess,” O‘Kane said, straightening up, “but no real harm done — at least he didn’t carve up the upholstery like last time.” He paused to pinch the crown of his hat and run a spit-dampened finger over the crease of the brim. “I mean Katherine, Mrs. McCormick. She already has everything — she got that back in ought-nine when she had him declared incompetent.”

Roscoe turned back to the car, the pliant wet cloth swallowing up the beads of water as he flagged it across the fender. “Then what’s she want now? Aside from Kempf’s head on a platter, which I think’s a crying shame, I really do….”

O‘Kane gave it some thought, watching the chauffeur with his quick elbows and jerky movements, the little monkey cap and his flapping crimson ears, his body heaving out over the hood and the reflected glory of the deep-buffed blue-black steel. “Him,” he said after a while. “She wants him.”

One hand braced, the other moving in a clean, circular sweep, Roscoe glancing over his shoulder. “Kempf?”

“No, not Kempf — her husband.”

“Hmpf,” Roscoe grunted, rubbing now, really digging into the moving cloth. “Why doesn’t she get herself a lapdog instead?”

The year ticked by, the summer soft and compliant, and then came the fall, spread like margarine across the corrugated sea and all the way out to the soft and melting islands. On a rainy Thursday afternoon at the end of November, O‘Kane put on a clean shirt and his best suit and went down to the county courthouse to testify at the trial, Katherine’s lawyer — Mr. Baker — raking him over the coals of Mr. McCormick’s condition, one searing step at at time. Has there been any improvement, in your view, Mr. O’Kane, over the very lengthy course of your service — coming up on twenty-two years now, isn’t it? — and did Dr. Kempf do this and did he do that? The attorney for the McCormicks — Mr. Lawler — seemed to wrap himself over O‘Kane’s shoulders like a warm sweater on a cold evening. Wasn’t it a fact, Mr. O’Kane? and Isn’t it so? and Wouldn’t you say that Mr. McCormick was much improved as evidenced by his association with women — even to the extent of employing a female nurse? And hadn’t the previous physicians been merely custodial with regard to Mr. McCormick’s care — that is, all but useless?

Together, they called eighteen doctors to the stand, including Dr. Meyer, Dr. Brush, Dr. Hamilton (his hair gray now and his eyes spinning out of control) and most of the headshrinkers and pulse-takers who’d tramped through the house over the course of the past eighteen months, and they called Dr. Kempf and Mr. Cyrus McCormick, and Mr. Harold and Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, Nurse Gleason, Nick and Pat and Mart, and eventually even the Ice Queen and Mrs. Roessing. O‘Kane caught only two days of it, his testimony split between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and then he pushed through the crowd of reporters in the courthouse hallway and drove himself back to Riven Rock and Mr. McCormick.

The proceedings had been going on for a week and a half when O‘Kane arrived at the estate one morning to find a letter waiting for him on the table in the entrance hall. His name had been typed neatly across the front of the envelope — EDWARD JAMES O’KANE, RIVEN ROCK, MONTECITO, CALIFORNIA — and in the upper left-hand corner, in raised black letters, was Jim Isringhausen’s name, over the legend ISRING-HAUSEN & CLAUSEN, STOCKS, BONDS, REAL ESTATE. Mr. McCormick was sleeping still, but Nick and Pat would be anxious to leave — and today, since Mart was due to testify, it would be only O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason upstairs — so O’Kane brought the letter with him and waited till the Thompson brothers had departed and Mr. McCormick was up and preoccupied with folding and refolding his toilet paper before he slit open the envelope.

Inside was a check drawn on the Chase Bank in New York. It was made out to him, Edward James O‘Kane, and it was in the amount of $3,500. A note was attached to it with a paper clip, and O’Kane found that his hand was trembling as he shook out the single sheet of white bond and began to read:

November 24, 1929

Dear Eddie:

Enclosed please find my check in the amount of $3,500, your share in the proceeds of the sale of our Goleta property. The orange trees never prospered as we’d hoped, but I and my partners were able recently to sell the property to a housing contractor, at a small profit.

But Eddie, I want to tell you that this is nothing compared to what you can make in stocks and bonds. Don’t pay the slightest attention to all these scare stories in the newspapers, men jumping out windows and etc., because the big stocks, the Blue Chips, have never been a better bargain. American Can, Anaconda Copper, Montgomery Ward, United Carbide and Carbon, Westinghouse E. & M., these stocks are sure to rise through the roof on the next buying surge, and believe me, the Great Bull Market isn’t dead yet, not by a long shot.

Enclosed for your convenience is a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Just put that check inside and send it on back here, and I guarantee you I’ll triple that $500 profit of yours in six months’ time or my name isn’t

Jim Isringhausen

O‘Kane had to take a minute to catch his breath. Married and a father, with a bungalow and a car, and now this, smiling Eddie O’Kane’s three o‘clock luck come home to roost for good. And what Giovannella wouldn’t do to get her hands on that check—three thousand five hundred dollars, and the five hundred of it pure profit, for doing nothing more than sitting on his hands. And what was Mart’s share in that, for the hundred he’d invested? Something like what, seventeen dollars? And of course he’d give it to him, right out of his own pocket, unless… well, unless he reinvested it for him, and nobody the wiser. No one knew about this check but him and here was the envelope to seal it up and send it right back to make another thousand dollars profit by June. Sure. And hadn’t Jim Isringhausen steered him right the first time?

It was at that moment, O‘Kane contemplating his future as a Wall Street savant and the letter stretched taut in his amazed hands, that Mr. McCormick emerged from his bathroom and strode into the parlor, naked as the day he was born. But he wasn’t simply naked, he was naked and erect and advancing on Nurse Gleason, who despite her rigorous asexuality was nonetheless, technically, a woman. O’Kane had been expecting something like this ever since the day she walked through the door, and though she was tough, Nurse Gleason, hard as nails, he doubted she was anything like a match for Mr. McCormick, and so he hastily stuffed letter and check into his breast pocket and jumped up to intervene. “Mr. McCormick,” he called out to distract him, “you’ve forgotten your clothes.”

O‘Kane had long since recovered from his injuries, but the right knee was still a bit tricky and recalcitrant and he did walk with a pronounced limp, as the doctor had predicted, the right foot forever half a step behind the left. It ached when it rained, and sometimes when it wasn’t raining too, and he had a hell of a time keeping up with Mr. McCormick when their morning walk turned into a footrace. Still, he was reasonably fit for a forty-six-year-old former athlete, and he was able to intercept Mr. McCormick just as Mr. McCormick, his arms spread wide, had managed to back Nurse Gleason up against the barred window beside the sofa. O’Kane came in swiftly from the rear and got him in a headlock while Nurse Gleason shooed at his stiff red member as if it had a mind and life of its own, which apparently it did.

Immediately, the frenzy came into Mr. McCormick’s shoulders and he took O‘Kane for a wild ride round the room, a four-legged jig, furniture flying and Mr. McCormick pulling the air in through his nostrils in deep whinnying snorts. “No, no, no, no! ” he cried, his usual refrain, trying all the while to throw O’Kane off his back and work his jaws round to bite the inside of his arm. Two minutes, three, they kept whirling and grunting, both of them, O‘Kane gasping out truncated pleas and reproaches, Nurse Gleason maneuvering on the periphery, till finally they both tumbled onto the couch, O’Kane never relaxing his grip and Mr. McCormick’s erection pointing staight up in the air. It was then that Nurse Gleason moved in, her face like a big granite block crashing down on them both, and she performed an old nurse’s trick with a hard repeated fillip of thumb and index finger that wilted Mr. McCormick’s erection like a flower starved of water.

No one was hurt, nothing broken that couldn’t be fixed, and when Mr. McCormick, gone lax and sheepish, promised to behave himself, O‘Kane let him go. And that was it, that was the end of it. Bowing his head and mumbling an apology, he limped off into the bedroom, dragging his right foot, and a moment later O’Kane got up and went into the room to help him dress.

Nothing was said about the incident, and Mr. McCormick did a creditable job with the breakfast Giovannella sent up, but he was fretting over something, that much was evident. He kept repeating himself, something about Dr. Kempf, but wouldn’t respond when O‘Kane questioned him, and after breakfast he began to pace up and down the room, jerking his head and arms out to one side as if he were trying to pull an invisible garment over his head. This went on for an hour or so, and then he came over and sat beside O’Kane on the couch, a flux of emotions playing across his face. “Ed-Eddie,” he said, “I–I want to, because they’re taking Riven Rock and Doctor — Doctor Kempf too, I—” And he broke off, looked O‘Kane dead in the eye and lowered his voice. “Eddie,” he said, all trace of a stammer gone, “I want to get out of here. Let me out of here. Use your keys. Please. Use your keys.”

O‘Kane had been looking over his letter again, electrified with the idea of it — sure the market was going to go up, sure it would — and he’d just sealed the check in the envelope when his employer stopped pacing and sat down beside him. They were two millionaires sitting there — or one millionaire and a millionaire in potentio, because with Jim Isringhausen the sky was the limit. “You know I can’t do that, Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said.

“B-but Dr. Kempf’s not, not here, I mean — today. Be-because—”

“Because he’s on vacation. He explained that to you last week. You remember, don’t you?” In fact, Kempf was tied up at the trial, defending himself and Freud in front of a roomful of lawyers, reporters and McCormicks, but Mr. McCormick, on strictest orders, was to know nothing of that. Each morning Nick went through the newspapers with a pair of scissors and excised any reference to what was going on in the courtroom downtown.

“Don‘t — don’t you bullshit me, Eddie. I’m not crazy and I’m — I’m not stupid. I know what — I know what’s going on. Let me out. For a d-drive, I mean, just a drive. I‘m — I’m nervous, Eddie, and you know how a drive always calms me. Please?”

And here was where O‘Kane’s judgment let him down. They were shorthanded, and so a drive would involve just Roscoe up front and himself, Mr. McCormick and Nurse Gleason in back, and there was risk in that, especially given Mr. McCormick’s mood that morning. But it would be nice to get out, the day grainy and close and pregnant with something — rain, he supposed, more rain — and they could stop for sandwiches to go and maybe a little pull at a bottle of something to speed up the future of his thirty-five hundred bucks, which he could also slip into a postbox because it wasn’t doing one lick of good sitting in his pocket. Kempf wasn’t there. Mart wasn’t there. The Ice Queen wasn’t even close.

O‘Kane gave him his richest smile. “Sure, okay,” he said. “Why not? Let’s go for a drive.”

It was raining by the time they swung through the gate, the mountains just a rumor in a sky that started at the treetops, everything heroically glistening and the road a black wet tongue lapping at the next road and the next one beyond that. Mr. McCormick, his eyes bright and his lips tightly tethered, sat between O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason in a yellow rain slicker, the hood pulled up over his head. Nurse Gleason wasn’t saying anything — she didn’t like this, not one bit — but to Roscoe, exiled up front, it was business as usual. And here was the rain, fat wet pellets bursting on the hood of the car and trailing down the windows like the tears of heaven, as O’Kane’s mother would say, the very tears of heaven.

They got soft drinks and sandwiches at a drugstore downtown, Roscoe doing the honors while O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason sat stiffly in the car on either side of their employer, and what the hell, O’Kane was thinking, better to get him out than keep him cooped up in that parlor all day and him feeling the way he was, so agitated and disturbed — and it was Kempf who was nuts if he didn’t think Mr: McCormick knew exactly what was going on. They ate in the car, windows steamed, Mr. McCormick going through two tuna-salad-on-ryes and a bottle and a half of ginger ale, O‘Kane unwrapping his own sandwich — roast beef and horseradish sauce — with a maximum of show and crinkling of waxed paper to mask the fact that he was surreptitiously spiking his ginger ale with a good jolt from the pint bottle Roscoe had picked up for him.

Lunch seemed to improve everybody’s mood, and they drove east of town toward Ojai for a while and then swung back along the coast road, the rain slackening and then picking up again before falling off to an atomized drizzle. “Let-let’s drive by the B-Biltmore,” Mr. McCormick said, and then, “Turn left here, Roscoe,” and Roscoe obeyed because Mr. McCormick was the boss. In a sense.

The Biltmore was on Channel Drive, just off Olive Mill, and it had been erected two years earlier to cater to the tastes of the itinerant tycoons in the wake of the Potter’s incineration and the New Arlington’s destruction in the quake. It was quite the place, a hundred and seventy-five luxurious rooms, ballroom, dining room, tennis courts and all the rest — and right on the ocean too, for ocean bathing and lolling richly and idly on the confectionery beach. Mr. McCormick had never of course been inside nor had he even set foot on the grounds, but he often asked to drive slowly by it and get a look at who was passing through its portals, women included — especially women. And that was all right, as long as he didn’t try to get out of the car, but on this particular day they found their way blocked by the train heading south to Los Angeles, the crossguard down, the rain misting around them, the trees and succulents and sharp-leafed exotic shrubs all shining with it, eight cars in the line ahead of them. The train creaked and rattled, brakes whining, the slow backward illusion of the wheels caught in suspended time.

That was when O‘Kane saw the postbox, right there across the street, not twenty paces away. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, feeling for the envelope in his pocket, and then he was out on the glistening street and smelling the rank wet insistent odor of the eucalyptus buttons crushed into the pavement. He crossed the street and dropped the envelope in the box and had turned to hustle back to the car when he saw the dog, pale brown with a white star on its chest, trembling and wet, raising the black shining carbuncle of its nose to the slit of the window — and there was Mr. McCormick’s hand, extended, the last bits of tuna salad and rye descending toward the dog’s yearning pink mouth. And that was all right, no problem, no trouble, no hurry, even the thunder of the train something to hold and consider on a mild wet close-hung afternoon away from the cage of Riven Rock that made you wonder half the time who was the prisoner and who the keeper.

Sure. But then O‘Kane watched the dog jerk suddenly back and away as the door flung itself violently open and Mr. McCormick’s left shoe appeared beneath it on the pavement, and then the other shoe, the creased legs of his pants, the door gaping now and Mr. McCormick half-in and half-out, turning briefly to flail his fists at the shadow of Nurse Gleason’s desperately clinging form. O’Kane broke for the car, but it was too late, Mr. McCormick out in the street with a wild look in his eye and his hat on the ground like a dead thing and the yellow slicker already flapping behind him. He was gone, running in the spastic ducking canter O‘Kane knew so well, elbows flying, his head hanging there above his shoulders like an afterthought, but what did he want — the dog? Yes, the dog, skittering away from him suddenly in the direction of the train, the gleaming steel back-whirling wheels and manufactured thunder, and “Here, doggie, here, pooch, come here, come here.”

O‘Kane gave it everything he had, no time to think of the danger or the consequences, intent only on that loping mad twisted form he’d followed one place or another for the better part of his life, wedded to it, inured, stuck fast, but his knee wouldn’t cooperate. Mr. McCormick was running flat-out, dipping and feinting to grab at the dog, past the line of cars now, staring faces, a man with a cigar, lady in a hat, right up to the crossguard — and then, without hesitating, a simple compression of the spine, heartbeat and a half, he was under it.

It was almost inevitable that the dog would die. A brown streak shooting through the gap of the grinding wheels, the cars rocking, the slowest train in the world, and here was the dog’s last and final moment in this time, no sound at all but the screech of the wheels, and when O‘Kane reached Mr. McCormick, there was one long stripe of blood painted down the front of him, from his sorrowful stricken eyes to the yellow waist of the rain slicker.

“Eddie,” he said, but he jerked his arm away when O‘Kane tried to take it, and the train was right there, as loud as the very end of everything, “Eddie, I want to die,” he said. “Eddie, let me die.”

That was a moment O‘Kane would remember for the rest of his life, the life he would spend breathing air and eating food and sharing the sofa with Mr. Stanley Robert McCormick, a life he had no flake of choice in, because he didn’t let Mr. McCormick die under those ratcheting wheels, already blooded, already released, but seized him in his arms and hugged him to him with a fierceness no force on earth could ever hope to break.

8. COME ON IN JACK

Katherine McCormick sat stiffly on one of the high-backed wooden benches of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse and studied the muraled walls with a vehemence of concentration that obliterated everything around her. Her clothes were flawless, her face neutral, her hair pinned up tightly beneath the brim of her hat. Her mother, looking sweet and determined, perched protectively on one side of her, and Jane on the other. Above all, she kept telling herself, she mustn’t show any emotion. These people were like hounds, a whole yammering pack of them, the world of men arrayed against her yet again — the jostling rude loudmouthed reporters, the twanging hayseed of a judge, the McCormicks and their hired guns and even Bentley, her old nemesis, looking on from the wings with a mocking grin. But this time she had Newton Baker on her side, and if there was any man in America with more presence in a courtroom or a bigger reputation, short of Clarence Darrow himself, she’d like to know it. This was a fight she wasn’t going to lose.

So she studied the murals as if she were in the Prado or the Rijksmuseum, and tried to control her breathing and the wild fluttering surges of her heart. The courthouse was newly built, a replacement for the old structure that had fallen victim to the earthquake, and it was a grand high-crowned edifice in an ersatz Moorish-Iberian style, with hand-painted tiles from Algeria, half a mile of wrought iron, a flurry of arches and broad stone steps and a white watchtower that would have made Don Quixote feel right at home. The murals had been rendered by a Dutch set designer more usually employed by Cecil B. DeMille, and there was no danger of mistaking him for the reincarnation of Rembrandt. The one Katherine was fixed on at the moment depicted a group of noble savages and their dog looking suitably impressed as a group of halberd-wielding Spaniards descended on them from a galleon glimpsed mistily in the distance. The legend beneath it read: “1542. Fifty years after Columbus Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo lands at Las Canoas with the Flag of Spain. ”

Well, it was a distraction. And she needed a distraction, because Oscar Lawler, the McCormicks’ attorney, backed by his three assistants and the resources of two Los Angeles law firms, was leading some miseducated, misguided and thoroughly self-satisfied fool of a physician through his paces vis-à-vis the dangers of endocrine treatment. “Moreover, in the cases of quiescent catatonia,” the doctor droned, “it is now generally recognized that they do not depend on thyroid, pituitary or gonadal insufficiency…. In some instances the administration of thyroid substances has been followed by an exacerbation of the symptoms and in more than one instance an actual acute frenzy has developed….” And blah, blah, blah. Why didn’t Newt stand up and object? Why didn’t he slam his fist down on the table and put an end to this charade? When would they ever get to cross-examination?

After lunch, it seemed. The doctor, a true by-the-rote man who spewed up everything the McCormicks had crammed down him, came back to court with a smear of mustard on his collar, and Newton Baker stood up and went to work on him. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Orbison,” Newt wanted to know, “that to expect a cure for a man in Mr. McCormick’s condition through purely psychoanalytical means is an exercise in futility? Especially when, as a number of your distinguished colleagues in the medical profession have testified in this court, he is clearly dyspituitary and could be immeasurably helped, if not even cured, by feedings of the extract of the thyroid gland?”

Dr. Orbison, the smear of mustard in evidence, denied it. He felt that the patient had improved markedly under Dr. Kempf’s regime and he reiterated that gland feeding was dangerous and irresponsible in a case like Mr. McCormick’s.

“But isn’t it the case, doctor, that Dr. Kempf’s ‘treatment’ consists in nothing more than telling dirty stories for two hours each day, and this under the cover of medical authority, which makes it all the more detrimental, not to say reprehensible, and has had the effect of arousing in the patient an antipathy toward women — and toward his wife in particular? ”

Mr. Lawler objected. Mr. Baker was leading the witness. Judge Dehy sustained the objection and the question was stricken from the record, but not before the doctor denied it.

“All right then, sir,” Newt intoned, all solemnity and barely suppressed indignation, “deny me this: isn’t it a fact that Mr. McCormick is hopelessly insane and that his present physician’s treatment amounts to nothing more than so much hocus-pocus?”

Katherine gave a start, and all the courthouse saw her, the smug McCormicks, the scribbling reporters, and three assistants to Mr. Lawler and the stewing mass of whey-faced gawkers and hangers-on who only lusted after the most degrading details of her and her husband’s private life: Newt had gone too far. Yes, she understood he was trying to make a point, trying to suggest that psychoanalysis had its limits in cases like Stanley‘s, but hopelessly insane? He didn’t believe that, did he? The doctor, the McCormicks’ man, might have believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that God and his angels had set up a summer camp on Pluto, but he denied that her husband was hopelessly insane, and for a minute she forgot which side she was on.

There was more of the same the next day and the next and the day after that, doctors and more doctors, doctors for Lawler and the McCormicks, doctors for her and Newton Baker, and none of them had a thing to say you couldn’t have written on the back of a penny postcard. Then she had to endure the testimony of the nurses — Edward James O‘Kane, sinfully handsome even in his decline, taking the stand to say that yes, Dr. Kempf had done wonders, and how was that for gratitude? And worse: Lawler called witnesses to impugn her character, as if she were unfit to have the guardianship of her own husband. She was a radical, a feminist, a member of the American Birth Control League, and more than that they could only imply, because they wouldn’t dare, and it took everything she had in her to sit on that leather-upholstered bench and listen to them try to cast their filthy aspersions on Jane Roessing when there wasn’t a man or woman in that courtroom fit to wipe her feet….

Yes. And then they called her, Katherine Dexter McCormick, to the witness stand.

Did she swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and etcetera?

She did.

And she looked out over the courtroom with a calm and steady gaze, sweeping the tentative faces of Kempf and Cyrus and Harold and Anita, the twittering crush of reporters and curiosity seekers, the lawyers and expert witnesses huddled in their separate corners like teams out of uniform, before settling finally on Jane and her mother, drawn together now in the space she’d vacated. She gave them the briefest tight-lipped smile and then raised her eyes to Newt Baker’s. Now, she thought, now they would hear the truth, now they would hear how a greedy and vengeful family tried from the beginning to isolate her and cut her out and how their only intent was to separate her from her husband and preserve the McCormick fortune at all costs and how Kempf was simply the latest in a long line of quacks and charlatans hired to exclude her not only from her husband’s care but from his rooms and his house and the very sight of him. And who was the loser in all this? She was. And Stanley, never forget Stanley, deprived of her support and physical presence through all these cruel, inexorable, downwinding years. Oh, she had a story to tell.

Newt Baker led her through it step by step, as well as he could, but of course motive wasn’t admissible here except by implication and every time she began to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth Oscar Lawler popped up like a jack-in-the-box to object. Still, Newt was able to guide her toward a thorough airing of the central question at issue here: Kempf’s competence.

“When did you first suspect the efficacy — or lack thereof — of Dr. Kempf’s methods, Mrs. McCormick?” Newt asked in the gentlest wafting breeze of a voice.

“When he informed me, in all seriousness, that my husband’s teeth, which are in a deplorable state, would be somehow miraculously repaired through the effects of Freudian analysis.”

“His teeth?”

“Yes, you see my husband has an unreasoning fear of dentists because a dentist was involved in an altercation with him on the day of his breakdown, his final breakdown, that is. And this is quite clearly a case of the patient leading the physician, as if words alone could rectify a physical ailment — one that is well within our scope and means to repair through the expedient of dental surgery. This is a matter of tooth decay, not mental manipulation.”

Newt gazed at the judge a moment, then leaned in close to the witness stand. His hair was silver now, not a trace of the color she remembered from the War years, and he carried himself with the exaggerated care that hinted at fragility, the first ineluctable whisper of old age — though he couldn’t have been more than sixty, if that. “And that,” he was saying, “was when you first began to suspect that Dr. Kempf’s treatment, though we’ve heard it irresponsibly lauded here in this court, might be akin to mental healing or Christian Science even?”

“That’s correct.” Katherine drew herself up, sought out Kempf’s eyes, gave the judge a look as if to be sure he was listening, and then came back to Newt, who was waiting there like a catcher crouched behind the plate at Fenway Park, and she the pitcher all wound-up and ready to let fly. “I told him it was utter nonsense, unscientific and ineffective, and that there were physical treatments available to treat physical problems like my husband‘s — thyroid feeding, for instance. He proceeded to give me a long account of his new theory, which he’s embodied in a monograph called ’The Autonomic System’ or some such. He sees himself as very big in the field and explained to me how this new theory of his was being gradually accepted and how widely it would affect the position of psychoanalysis. But no amount of talk, whether it be therapeutic or merely harmful and alienating, is going to cure a physical ailment.”

“And Dr. Kempf persisted in applying this ‘theory’ to your husband, despite the fact that noted physicians like Dr. R. G. Hoskins of Harvard found your husband ’indubitably endocrinopathic,‘ I believe the term was?”

“Yes.”

Newt took a moment to stride from one end of the raised platform in front of the box to the other. This was his moment, and he seemed to swell himself in proportion to it. “And that was when Dr. Kempf, who had been engaged above your objections by your husband’s other two guardians — Cyrus and Anita McCormick — at the staggering sum of ten thousand dollars a month, turned on you and banished you altogether from your husband’s house?”

Mr. Lawler rose to object. Judge Dehy, who seemed either to be asleep or in a state of suspended animation, made a show of rustling about in his seat before murmuring, “Objection overruled.”

Katherine turned her face to the judge, all the hurt stabbing at her eyes, the crime of it, the abuse, the indecency and injustice. She felt her voice quaver. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

Then it was Lawler’s turn, and he couldn’t make her so much as flinch, though to a man like that no accusation was too scandalous or irresponsible, no scab too thin to pick, and he went after her with everything in his mercenary’s arsenal. He questioned her competency as a guardian, her scientific background, her attachment to “radical” causes, her friendship with Mrs. Roessing, but nothing, nothing could make her waver. It was “Yes, Mr. Lawler,” and “No, Mr. Lawler,” throughout the afternoon and into the next morning.

— And wasn’t it the case that her husband had improved dramatically and that it was Dr. Kempf who was responsible?

— No, she insisted, no it wasn’t. Her husband had simply settled down with age.

— But she wanted his money, didn’t she, to devote to her radical causes and Mrs. Margaret Sanger’s godless movement to prevent natural conception?

— No, she didn’t want money. She wanted control of her husband’s care because of the mess the McCormicks had made of it. She loved her husband. She wanted to see him well.

And then, eleven o‘clock in the morning and with Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his Indians and their fawning dog all lit with the glow of the day advancing beyond the windows, Oscar Lawler rested his arms on the rail of the witness box and drank her up with his hateful liver-complected eyes. There was dandruff on the shoulders of his brown suit, dandruff in his eyebrows; his nails were bitten to the quick. He was so close she could almost smell him. “Then you believe,” he said, his voice rich with irony, “in contradiction of your own attorney and his string of ’expert’ witnesses, that your husband is not hopelessly insane. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice nothing more than a whisper, “yes, I believe it,” but Newton Baker was rising to object or request an adjournment or dash outside to climb the flagpole and howl at the sky, but she wasn’t really there, not any longer. The phrase Lawler had used — the phrase Newt had used, just to make a point — came back at her, beating at her like a rising sea, hopelessly insane, hopelessly insane, till she felt herself letting go and she wasn’t in the courtroom anymore staring down at that chittering little rodent of a man in his litigious brown and his sleek lawyerly shoes… no, she was in Boston, twenty-three years ago, and it was the morning of the day Stanley went out of her orbit for good and ever.

The night had held, a dense fabric of the familiar and the usual, Stanley stretched out like a corpse across the bed in the guestroom, Katherine lying awake and staring into the darkness of her room down the hall. She awoke to the smell of bacon and came down to breakfast feeling as drained and exhausted as if she’d been up a hundred nights in a row: the German teacher had gotten away unharmed, but who was next and how would it end? Stanley was already up and dressed, seated at the table in the dining room with the newspaper folded neatly at his elbow and a pyramid of sausages, bacon, eggs and fried tomatoes all mounded up in the center of the plate before him. He looked, of all things, crisp—crisp and fresh in a new shirt, collar and cuffs, his face newly shaven, his hair still damp and fastidiously combed away from the sweep of his brow and the tight plumb-line of his parting. “Good morning, Stanley,” she murmured, and he glanced up quickly, frowned, and went back to his newspaper.

Josephine wasn’t down yet, and Katherine took the place across from her husband and rang for tea and a toasted muffin and jam. She didn’t have much of an appetite, not after what she’d been through the night before, but she’d always believed in exercise and vigor and the fuel to sustain it, and she felt she’d force herself to have something at least. The maid appeared, a little curtsy, face of stone, the door swinging once and then twice and here was sustenance set out before her. She buttered her muffin in silence, waiting for Stanley to take the lead, and then made a pass at the jam and poured a dollop of cream into her tea, stirring all the while. Her heart was pounding. She had to say something. “Looks to be a pleasant day,” she said, “for January, I mean. I just don’t think I can stand any more of this gloomy weather, and at least the sun’s shining for a change….” She trailed off.

Stanley looked up then, and his eyes seemed to be swollen, leaping right out of his head, as if there were a corpse nailed to the wall behind her. “I — Katherine,” he suddenly blurted, “about the, uh, the German teacher—”

“Yes?”

“I’ve decided not to study German, not — not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Maybe next month. Or the month after that. It — it’s my teeth, you see, I mean my tooth, you see, I — well, it aches and hurts me and I think, my mood yesterday—”

She softened. And she hoped, still and foolishly, because wouldn’t that be something if it was all just a kind of poisoning of the system and hadn’t she just yesterday remarked to her mother about his breath being tainted? “You poor thing,” she said. “Do you want me to have a look?”

“No.”

“Well, what about a dentist then? Shouldn’t you be seeing a dentist if it’s bothering you, especially in light of your nerves and the sort of thing that took place in this house last night?” And here she couldn’t stop herself. “Really, Stanley, I don’t mean to lecture but you can’t just go around brawling with people on the docks and, and kidnapping German teachers. It’s gone too far. It has. You need help, Stanley, professional help, and you’ve got to let me take you someplace where you can get the kind of care and rest you need… just till your nerves are settled.” She tried on a smile. “Wouldn’t that be the best thing to do?”

He stood abruptly, in the same motion snatching a fistful of food from his plate and forcing it into his mouth. He was shaking his head back and forth automatically, his cheeks bulging, his eyes sinking all the way back down to nothing, pitiful starved eyes that seemed to beg for help and intervention, and she got up too and reached out to him.

The table lay between them, the cold eggs, the sausage and bacon subsiding in a pool of congealed fat. His jaws were working and yet he winced with every downward thrust. “My, my tooth,” he said, spewing bits of partially masticated food, “I–I’ve got to f-find a dentist—”

“I’ll call mother’s dentist — he’s really quite good and I’m sure, if it’s an emergency, he’d be—”

“No, no,” Stanley cried, still chewing, food down the front of his shirt now, “I–I have to go,” and he shot out the door, through the hall and down the stairs, where he snatched up his hat and overcoat before plunging into the cube of light that stood there in place of the front door.

All right, fine, she was thinking, trying to calm herself, trying to stop quaking and fuming every time he entered or left the room. He’d gone to the dentist to have a bad tooth seen to. What could be more normal or prosaic? She shook her head as if to clear it, squashed all her worries and presentiments, and went back up to bed.

When she woke it was past ten and she saw that she was going to be late for her appointment with Professor Durward, who was in the process of setting up a very intriguing set of experiments into the nature of simian sexuality with a young Harvard psychiatrist by the name of Hamilton. She was hoping to get some direction from him regarding her own future at the Institute — she very much wanted to work with larger animals, rats, rabbits, apes and monkeys, rather than the microbes or fruit flies everyone seemed to prefer. But she’d have to call and rescheduie — if she could even get through on the phone — or maybe she could make it after all, if she hurried.

In the end, she chose to take a cab to the Institute and she did manage to catch Professor Durward, who seemed to have forgotten all about her, and she stayed on through the afternoon and examined some of his charges with him — a shipment of twelve rhesus monkeys from India. They stared out at her from their cages in a dull yellow bundle of limbs and parodic faces, their toes and fingers so human-like as they gripped the wire or groomed themselves and their babies. There were two babies among them, she remembered, sparse clinging things that had been born on shipboard, or so Professor Durward claimed.

It was late in the afternoon by the time she got home, and she found Stanley waiting for her on the front steps, highly agitated. His collar was torn, there was a gash over his left eye and his lower lip was yellow and crusted. He’d had a fight with the dentist or the dentist’s receptionist or a man in the waiting room or the taxi driver who brought him there, she could see that in a minute, one of a thousand fights, fights that would go on till he was stopped. Or killed. She took one look at him and wanted to walk right on by, sick to death of him, ready to call it quits, send him back to his mother, anything, but the choice wasn’t in her hands, not this time.

The minute he saw her he leapt to his feet and grabbed her arm. “You — you can’t leave me like that,” he said, breathless, the veins swollen in his neck above the slashed collar. “Who was it,” he demanded, forcing her up the steps and against the slab of the door, “one of your boyfriends? But-Butler Ames? Huh? Tell me!”

“I’ve been at the Institute,” she said.

“Lies!” he spat. “All lies!”

She told him he was hurting her — and he was, the strength of him, his hand like a ligature right there above her elbow — but he just kept repeating “Who was it?” over and over again. Then she took her key out and they were in the hallway, fighting away from one another, the maid’s stricken face lost somewhere behind the plants, and then she was free of him and dashing up the stairs, his feet thundering behind. Up and up, no time to stop or reason, down the hallway and into her room, the door shut and bolted and him out there on the runner pounding and pounding. “Let me in!” he cried, and he was furious, pounding, “let me in!”

After a minute he stopped, and the fury had gone out of his voice. “Please,” he begged, “please let me in. I–I’ll be good, I will.” He was sobbing now, hot and cold, and where was the tap to turn it off, where was it? “I–I love you, Katherine. Don’t leave me.”

She clung to the door, and she found that she was crying too, a dry rasp of the throat and the water stinging her eyes. This was it, this was her life, this was her marriage, a madman in the hall and an inch-and-a-half thickness of mahogany between her and harm, yes, harm, because all of a sudden he’d begun to rage again, hammering the door with his shoulder, the bolt shivering, the frame heaving and protesting. “Go away!” she screamed.

There was no answer, not for the longest time, and she held her breath and listened, listened so hard she could hear the thoughts colliding in his head and the blood bolting through his veins, and then there was a sudden crash and the wood gave way where it was thinnest, right in the middle of the center panel, and she could see his face through the snarling hole, nothing but eyes, all eyes, seeking her out. “I’ll k-kill you, you bitch!” he roared.

She backed away from the door, all the way across the room to the bed, and he began shouting out to someone only he could see. “Jack!” he cried. “Jack London! Come on in, Jack, and we’ll both have her!”

That was when she retreated to the closet, the last place she could go, the key on the inside of the door and the door shut tight, and nothing but darkness now and fear, fear and hate, because he was what she was afraid of and that made her hate him beyond all forgiveness or consolation. Stanley. Stanley Robert McCormick, the madman, the lunatic, the nut, the sexual hypochondriacal neurasthenic. And that was what she was left with when they came and got him and they put him in the straitjacket and the sheet restraints and used all their outraged male muscle to hold him down.

But that wasn’t how she wanted to remember him, not now in the stairwell of the courthouse with the reporters shoving their faces at her and Newt Baker guiding her by that same abused elbow with a grip as gentle and tactful as it was firm. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t Stanley. No, she remembered him the way he was that night in Chicago, the ground frozen hard and his mother looming beside them in the carriage like some excrescence and demanding that they take Miss Dexter directly home: “Rush Street? Have you lost your senses?”

He’d fought for her. Stood up to his mother and made his choice. And when he came back to the carriage he was ten feet tall, her Stanley, all hers. A hush, the door pulled to, that intimate space all ordained, hot bricks for their feet under the fur robe, the pale light fading, the horses moving now through the richest haze of possibility. He was shy and awkward and he wanted to talk about Debs, “About Debs and what he said in the paper the other — the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I‘ve—”

He never got to finish the thought, as if it would have mattered, because Debs could only take you so far, and Debs didn’t matter now and he never would again. She put her hand on his chest and felt his heart living there beneath his coat, his jacket, his shirt. “Hush, Stanley,” she said, and she felt her face move toward his through the heavy atmosphere and complex gravity of love. “You don’t need to talk now,” she whispered, “not anymore. Just kiss me, Stanley. Kiss me.”