Riven Rock Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Stop him!" Nick roared. "He's got a key!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lose him? You don't think he's suicidal, do you?"

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

O'Kane was irritated. "I may not have the clinical experience you do, or the education either, but believe me I've seen more cases of dementia praec.o.x than you could-"

"Schizophrenia," the doctor corrected. "Kraepelin's configuration-literally, 'early insanity-isn't half so useful as Dr. Jung's."

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

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

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

"Who?"

"The young woman-what was her name?"

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

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

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

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

"You really think she looks like Mrs. McCormick?" O'Kane said after a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

Hamilton sighed. He rocked on the edge of his bed, spewing smoke and wearing a faint thin-lipped smile. "Psychopathia s.e.xualis," "Psychopathia s.e.xualis," he said. he said.

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

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

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

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

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

He'd been deep into a section called "l.u.s.t Murder (l.u.s.t Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous l.u.s.t Extending to Anthropophagy)," the alcohol working in his brain like a chemical ma.s.sage, totally unconscious of where he was or what he was doing, when Mr. McCormick suddenly made a noise deep in his throat. It was a croak or groan, the sort of deep regurgitant sound a dog makes when it's working up a puddle of vomit. But then, just as abruptly as it arose, the noise ceased, and Mr. McCormick never moved a muscle the whole time, his eyes still fixed and his head frozen over the pillow like the high dive at the city pool that never got any closer to the water.

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

"Mr. McCormick? Are you all right?" O'Kane reached out a hand to touch his shoulder and rea.s.sure him.

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

"It's all right. I'm here with you. It's me, O'Kane. Lie still now-you need your rest."

"Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh."

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

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

FALSE, PETTY, CHILDISH AND SMUG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that was what this was all about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girl looked up and away again. "Ma'am?"

"You don't have to be shy with me. Surely you've seen a woman's body before-or maybe you haven't. Louisa?"

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

"Nothing," Katherine said, "it's nothing. That'll be all."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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