Riven Rock Part 11

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

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

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

O'Kane shrugged. "Well, sure, I suppose. But Mr. McCormick is very adamant about his shower bath, it's one of his pet obsessions, and it may be very difficult to-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The climax came on the fourth day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure. Sure he would.

He stood at the urinal till he lost track of time, just staring into the shining face of that picture, and he felt as bad as he'd ever felt, bad and worthless and of no more account than a vagrant b.u.m in an alley. His son was growing up without him. His mother and father didn't even know their own grandson, his sisters didn't know their nephew. n.o.body knew him, n.o.body but Rosaleen-and Homer Quammen. G.o.d, how that hurt. She might as well have sent him a bomb in the mail, raked him with shrapnel, flayed his flesh. He thought he was going to cry, he really thought he was going to break down and cry for the first time since he was a kid himself, the sour smell of p.i.s.s in his nostrils, mold in the drains, the air so heavy and brown it was like mustard gas rolling in over the trenches, but then he heard the ripple and thump of the piano from the front room and came back to himself. Daisy was out there waiting for him, Daisy with all her petals on display and ripe for the picking.

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

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

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

But what really tortured him was watching her grow bigger, day by day, week by week. Every Sunday afternoon she strolled up and down the street on the arm of Guido, the amazing Italian dwarf who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds with his boots on, and she made sure to pa.s.s right by the front window of the rooming house and all the saloons of Spanishtown-and Cody Menhoff's too, just for good measure. At first you couldn't tell, n.o.body could, because the baby was the size of a skinned rat and it wasn't a baby at all, it wasn't even human, but by the end of June she was showing and by mid-July she looked as if she were smuggling melons under her skirt. He would follow her sometimes, half-drunk and feuding with himself, and he would watch as people stopped to congratulate her, the men smiling paternally, the women reaching out to pat the swollen talisman of her belly, and all the while Guido the shoemaker grinning and flushed with his simpleminded pride. O'Kane felt left out. He felt evil. He felt angry.

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

"Good news? No, what is it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 'Guido,' Eddie. We named him 'Guido.' After his father."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the matter," she said, bunching her lips in a moue, "all your girlfriends on strike?" She leaned into him for a kiss, but she never took her eyes off the road. They rattled over the streetcar tracks and in and out of a pair of potholes that nearly put his skull through the canvas roof, and then she swung left on Cabrillo, heading away from town. "You still seeing the little Italian s.l.u.t, the one with the dirty eyes? You know, the breeder?"

"Nah," he lied, "there's n.o.body right now." And he gave her his smile, their faces so close, the car jolting, the smell of her. "I've been saving myself for you."

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

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

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

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

"Who, Tom?" She twitched her hips and rubbed herself there, on his knee, and he could feel the warmth and wetness of her. "He's never coming back-he's having too much fun pulling the trigger on all the wh.o.r.es of Asiago."

"Does he know about you? I mean, that you're-"

"What? Unfaithful? Is that the word you're looking for?"

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

"What do you think?"

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

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

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

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

"I was wondering-you never had any kids, did you? Children, I mean?"

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

"But how-?"

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

He couldn't meet her eyes. "Yes."

"And it's yours?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, yes it is," Dr. Hoch said, his face a web of lines that bunched and gathered around that one terrific silvery slash, and he didn't ask about mothers or fathers or boom out plat.i.tudes-he just waited.

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

The little doctor was nodding. "That's right," he said.

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

"But Mr. McCormick," O'Kane broke in, "you know we always use a safety razor, you know that-"

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