Riven Rock Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Arabella Doane," O'Kane said mechanically.

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

It was just then, just as the very words pa.s.sed the doctor's lips, that O'Kane happened to glance up and see Giovannella Dimucci crossing the path behind them in a brilliant swath of sunlight. She was wearing a pair of clogs and he could see her bare ankles thrusting out from beneath the hem of her skirt, the bright trailing flag of her hair, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s shuddering against the fabric of her blouse and her hands moving at her sides with rhythmic grace as she disappeared round the bend. O'Kane looked back at the doctor, at the monkeys clinging to their cages in l.u.s.t and hope and at the big orange lump in the crotch of the tree. He wiped a hand across his face, as if to erase it all. He was sweating, and he was conscious of a corresponding dryness in his throat, the parched ache of the saint in the desert.

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

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

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

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

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

"Smart girl," he said.

"Yes, I'm a smart girl." The trace of an accent. She was nine years old when her father emigrated from Marsala and she was as American as anybody, as Rosaleen even, but darker, a whole lot darker, darker than any Irishman ever dreamed possible. Rosaleen's skin was china-white, chalky, lunar, so pale the blue veins stood out in her ankles and wrists and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; Giovannella's was like Darjeeling tea steeped in the pot and dipped into a cup of scalded milk, one drop at a time. He was in love with that skin. He wanted to lick her fingers, her hands, her feet.

"He's a very dangerous man," O'Kane said to distract himself.

"Who?"

"Mr. McCormick."

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

"He's what they call a s.e.x maniac-you know what that is?"

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

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

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

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

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

O'Kane was drunk when he got in the car, drunk when he instructed Roscoe to pull over on a dark lane by the olive mill while Mart fidgeted in the front seat and Giovannella, dressed all in white, darted barefoot out of a gap in the oleanders and climbed into the leather seat beside him with her shoes in her hand and smelling of garlic and basil and melted b.u.t.ter till it made his mouth water, and he was drunk as Roscoe fought the gears and Mart looked straight ahead and Giovannella fit herself in under his arm and nuzzled the side of his face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O'Kane's head was bowed, but he was fuming. He didn't give a d.a.m.n who she was, she had no right-he was no stave-he was free to-"No," he said.

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

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

"Yes," he said, and he was croaking, croaking like a frog, like something you'd step on and squash.

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

O'Kane had nothing to say. The b.i.t.c.h. The meddling snooty Back Bay b.i.t.c.h. How dare she dress him down like some schoolboy? How dare she? But he kept quiet because of the orange trees and Mr. McCormick and the best chance he had. He'd show her. Someday. Someday he would.

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

THE HARNESS.

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

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

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

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

"No."

"Please?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His p.e.n.i.s. It was there, whole and alive, and it began to grow in his hand until he pictured it like some terrible uncontainable thing out of a fairy tale, the beanstalk that would sprout right up through the roof and up into the reaches of the sky, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away. Oh, what had he done, what had he done? He was venal. Doomed. Condemned to h.e.l.l and perdition. He wished he was back in college again, back safe in his rooms with his books and pennants and his leather harness-the one he'd fashioned for himself when he first discovered the sin of self-pollution. He was only a soph.o.m.ore then, but that was the start of it-and this, this was the end, all of life dirtier and progressively dirtier and every one of us an animal rooting in it. The first time he'd ever awakened with the wet evidence of his depravity on the sheets he'd gone right out to the nearest saddlery and brought himself a bridle and a set of leather-working tools. Ignoring his cla.s.ses, he worked furiously at the thing, working through trial and error and with every particle of his perfectionist's zeal, until, by suppertime, it was done. Two cuffs for his hands and two for his ankles, joined by the knotted strips of the shortened reins, and he wore it every night, his harness, so that he would never-could never-touch himself while he slept and dreamed or woke in the groggy sensual limbo of dawn. And how he wished he had that harness now....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't be absurd."

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

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

"She's not a wh.o.r.e."

"She is."

"She's not. You don't even know her."

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

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

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

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

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