Riven Rock Part 6

Ah, yes. Yes. But all idylls have to end, as well he knew, and all too often they end with clamminess and insect bites and an ache in the head. They end with the break of day, a p.r.i.c.k of the fog turned to drizzle, the painful rasping of some misplaced bird. Giovannella looked at him out of the eyes of a bride and he knew he was in way over his head. "I promise," he told her, "I swear," and he bundled her in his arms, turned inside out with guilt and regret and fear and self-loathing-and yet, at the same time, he was swelling to the point of bursting with something else altogether, something that felt dangerously like ... well, love. love.

Head throbbing, his suit a mess, his face worse, he went into the hotel, while Giovannella waited shivering in the woods, and telephoned Roscoe. Roscoe was just getting up, just getting ready to have his breakfast in the kitchen of the big house while Sam Wah jabbered at him in c.h.i.n.k-English and Nick and Pat drank black coffee and prepared for the end of their shift and the ride home, after which he planned to pick up O'Kane in front of the apartment on Micheltorena. O'Kane talked him out of that. O'Kane called in his markers, reminding Roscoe of all he'd done for him over the course of the past months and of the brotherhood of their barroom binges in the days before Rosaleen arrived, and Roscoe agreed to forego breakfast and slip down to the Potter Hotel to take Giovannella out Olive Mill Road to the place where the gap showed in the oleanders-and take O'Kane to work.

How he made it through that day O'Kane would never know.

He cleaned himself up as best he could in the bathroom he'd formerly shared with Mart and that Mart now shared with Elsie Reardon, avoiding Pat-and Nick-altogether. Roscoe was mum. They didn't even know O'Kane was there, had no reason to suspect he wasn't at home awaiting his morning ride and his daily regimen of laving and force-feeding Mr. McCormick (daily, that is, but for Sat.u.r.day afternoons and Sundays, when Dr. Hamilton sat with their employer and benefactor and the door remained shut except to admit a pair of wops with mops). Mart had heard his brothers' version of the previous night's events, but he didn't seem eager to leap to judgment-as ready, in his bigheaded, dilatory way, to lay blame at Nick's door as at O'Kane's. And O'Kane spent most of the day reprising his own version aloud, hoping to get Mart in his camp, water thicker than blood and all that, and trying to erase the memory of Giovannella and how unutterably stupid he'd been to stir that kettle up again, love or no love. What he refused to think of or even admit to the murky periphery of his consciousness for the smallest splinter of a second, was the problem that made all others seem as insignificant as the exact phrasing of the legend that would one day appear on his tombstone: Rosaleen.

He telephoned her at eight that morning and poured a heavy gelatin of lies into the mouthpiece, telling her of the way the car had broken down so completely they couldn't even get it to roll if they pushed it and how Mr. McCormick had come to life in a sudden frenzy and beaten him about the head and face and she should see his lip and how finally he was forced to spend a forlorn and monastic night sharing a bed with Mart who of course snored the whole time. Rosaleen was silent on the other end of the line and he could picture her in Old Man Rowlings's cramped parlor, Old Man Rowlings fuming somewhere in the background, Rosaleen chewing her lip in that way she had, her eyes teeming in her head, one slow foot perched on the bridge of the other. "I'll be home tonight after work," he said. "Okay?"

Her voice rolled back to him like the big black ball in the bowling alley, uncertain, untrue, and yet clattering all the same: "Yeah, Eddie. Okay."

And then it was evening. And then he went home.

She was waiting for him at the front door, Eddie Jr. propped up on her hip like a shield, and he thought of the heavy leathern shield Cuchulain used to wield and all the fierce blood of their warrior ancestors seething in Rosaleen's veins, and she was holding a broom too-a broom she didn't even know the proper use of-to complete the picture. He opened the gate and came up the walk and though his head ached still and his lip stung and the side of his face throbbed and he was as beaten-down and exhausted as he'd ever been in his life, he knew there was something wrong with that picture, something radically wrong, and he was immediately on his guard. "h.e.l.lo, honey," he called, and the greeting had a hollow ring to it, desperate and false. She said nothing in response, but her lip curled back from her teeth and he saw that she was making an effort to restrain it, whatever it was, till he was in the house and the door was shut behind him.

"Liar," she snarled as he brushed past her and into the ashpit of the parlor.

How did she know?

What did she know?

His brain, dormant with exhaustion, churned to sudden life-there was nothing for him now but to face his accuser and parry every fresh accusation with a fresh lie. "What?" he said, all innocence. "What are you talking about?"

Her face was twisted, the face of one of the doctor's hominoids suffering through an experiment, all hate and murder and bloodl.u.s.t. "You were downtown at Huff's last night, drunk as a pig. Zinnia Linnear saw you."

"She needs gla.s.ses."

"Don't lie to me, you son of a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h."

"I swear it, I spent the night at Riven Rock. Look. Look at my face, why don't you? Huh? You see that? Mr. McCormick did that to me and I spent the night like a choirboy in Mart's bed with Mart snoring like a sawmill, I swear to G.o.d-"

She wasn't mollified, not in the least-she had something else, he knew it, something she was holding in reserve, roll out the caissons and let it fly. The baby, riding her hip, reached out to him. "Da-da," he said. "Da-da."

"You were with a woman," she said, and her voice was pitched low, the first premonitory rumble of the inchoate storm. "A dago."

He tried to avoid her, duck away, hide, tried to change the subject, clear the air, give her a chance to calm herself and absorb the thick palliative of his lies, but she wouldn't have it. Everywhere he turned, she was there, the baby her shield, her voice the high agitated hoot of a seabird: "Who was she? Huh? Some wh.o.r.e you found under a rock? Did you lay her? Did you?" He went into the bedroom to change his shirt, a man who'd been at work for two solid days and sweating under the arms with the strain of providing for his family and could he expect a moment's peace in his own home, the home he worked twelve hours a day to pay for? No. No, he couldn't. She was there in the bedroom, hooting, and when he pushed himself up to escape to the kitchen and reach behind the icebox for the solace of the all-but-empty bottle she kept sequestered there and he was never to know of in all its shame and hypocrisy, he lifted it to his lips to a barrage of hoots-"Who was she? Who?"-until finally he could take it no more, and no man could, not if he was blind, deaf and paralyzed.

He didn't mean to get violent. He didn't want to. He hadn't planned on it. It made him feel bad. But it was just like the time in Waverley, her face a puffed-up ball presenting itself to him over and over again, and he a spiker at the net, and yet it was different too, radically different, because the baby was there, attached to her hip and yowling as if he'd been orphaned already. He loved that baby and he didn't want to hurt it-him, Eddie Jr., his son-and he loved Rosaleen too, he did, but she kept coming at him, the white moon of her face, the big st.i.tched ball, and when finally he did hit it, that surging swollen sphere of a hateful twisted little interrogatory wife's face, when his patience was exhausted, when Job's patience would have been exhausted, when all the popes and martyrs would have rattled their holy desiccated bones and screamed for murder, it was more a matter of reflex than anything else. Once, he hit her once, once only. And he made sure, in the way of a thoughtful man putting down a horse or a favorite dog, to hit her hard enough and squarely enough to prevent even the remotest possibility of a rebound. Eddie Jr., his son-and he loved Rosaleen too, he did, but she kept coming at him, the white moon of her face, the big st.i.tched ball, and when finally he did hit it, that surging swollen sphere of a hateful twisted little interrogatory wife's face, when his patience was exhausted, when Job's patience would have been exhausted, when all the popes and martyrs would have rattled their holy desiccated bones and screamed for murder, it was more a matter of reflex than anything else. Once, he hit her once, once only. And he made sure, in the way of a thoughtful man putting down a horse or a favorite dog, to hit her hard enough and squarely enough to prevent even the remotest possibility of a rebound.

That was in May, when Mr. McCormick was declared incompetent and Giovannella began showing up at Riven Rock again at all hours of the day and night, and Rosaleen, the smallest crook stamped into the bridge of her nose like a question mark turned back on itself and her eyes rimmed in black like a night raider's, packed her bags and took the baby with his bruised thigh and walked out the door to the streetcar and took the streetcar to the train, but for O'Kane the events came so fast and furious he could hardly be sure of the year, let alone the month. And how was Rosaleen? everyone wanted to know, especially people like Elsie Reardon. And the baby? They were fine, O'Kane insisted, and he relied on memory to supply the fresh details about little Eddie's puerile raptures and adorable doings, but he ached inside, ached till he had to get drunk most nights of the week and cry himself to sleep in the calmed waters of the big wooden ark of a bed he'd bought to float and sustain his bliss, and for a month he was bereft, and for a month he fabricated and prevaricated and spun his complex weave of wishful thinking and feathery invention before admitting to all and sundry that Rosaleen had gone home to Ma.s.sachusetts to nurse her ailing mother. And father. And her brother with the bone cancer and the sixteen children.

All that hurt. And it should never have happened. He knew who to blame-himself, of course, a man who just wasn't ready yet for the yoke of marriage and family. And Katherine. Mrs. McCormick. The Ice Queen. If she hadn't stuck her nose in where it didn't belong none of this would have happened. He could have gotten Giovannella-or whoever-out of his system and waited till the time was right, until he was ready, really ready, and then maybe things would have been different.

Once the month was out, he settled up with Old Man Rowlings and took a room in a boardinghouse not far from the train station and within easy walking distance of Menhoff's, O'Reilly's and the hole-in- ,the-wall bars of Spanishtown. The furniture he sold off to whoever wanted it, and wouldn't you know that Zinnia Linnear, like some sort of veiny blue vulture, was first in line for the oversized bed, the bureau and the set of mostly chipped secondhand china. There were fireworks off Stearns Wharf that Fourth of July and what must have been three hundred boats, each with a kerosene lantern, spread across the glowing water like the stars come down from the sky. O'Kane remembered that Fourth of July in particular, not simply for the concatenation of unlucky events leading up to it, but because Giovannella was there with him at the end of the wharf, her wide glowing uncandled face lit again and again by the trailing streamers of red, white and blue.

It was sometime around then-July, maybe August-that Mr. McCormick came back to life again. He got up out of bed one morning and stepped into the shower bath like any other man, ordered up his breakfast and asked for the newspaper. O'Kane was stunned, and even Mart, who was slow to register surprise (or any other emotion, for that matter), seemed impressed. In fact, the two of them just stood there speechless as Mr. McCormick, dressed in his pajamas and robe, seated himself at the table in the upper parlor and b.u.t.tered his toast with the brisk a.s.siduous movements of a man sitting down to breakfast before leaving for the office. It was an entirely normal scene, prosaic even, if you discount the fact that he had to use a spoon to b.u.t.ter his toast, Dr. Hamilton having proscribed all sharp-edged implements in the aftermath of the fork incident. When Mr. McCormick finished spooning up his eggs, nice as you please, patted his lips delicately with the napkin, stretched and took the newspaper, O'Kane sent Mart for Dr. Hamilton-the doctor had to see this.

Hamilton came on the run, dashing through the entrance hall and taking the steps two at a time, and he was still breathing in short muted gasps as he smoothed back his hair and straightened his tie on the landing outside the barred door to the upper parlor. He tried his best to achieve a casual saunter, as if he'd just happened by, but he couldn't seem to control his feet, skipping through every third step or so as he crossed the room. O'Kane watched him slowly circle the patient, eyes flipping behind the lenses of his pince-nez, lips silently moving as if rehearsing a speech; Mr. McCormick, absorbed in the paper, which he held up rigidly only inches from his face, didn't seem to notice him. And then, very tentatively, as if afraid of breaking the spell, Hamilton tried to draw Mr. McCormick into conversation. "Good morning, Mr. McCormick," he said in his customary whisper, "you're looking well."

There was no response.

"Well," the doctor said, rubbing his hands together in a brisk, businesslike way and moving into the periphery of Mr. McCormick's vision, quite close to him now, "it certainly is a glorious sunshiny day, isn't it?"

Still no response.

"And to see you looking so well on such a glorious day-that gives us all pleasure, doesn't it, Edward? Martin? And sir, Mr. McCormick, I can only presume you're feeling better? A pause. "Am I right?"

Very slowly, as if he were an actor in a farce parting the curtains to reveal the painted smile on his face, Mr. McCormick lowered the newspaper to uncover first his hairline, then his brow, his eyes, his nose, and finally, with a flourish, the broad radiant beaming dimple-cheeked grin spread wide across the lower part of his face. Mr. McCormick was grinning, grinning to beat the band, and you could see the light in his eyes as they came into focus and settled warmly on the reciprocally grinning visage of Dr. Hamilton. "And who might you be?" he asked in the most gratuitous and amenable tones.

The doctor couldn't help himself. He let his eyes have their way three times in rapid succession-blip, blip, blip-worked his shoulders as if to shrug off some invisible beast clinging to his jacket and hissing in his ear, and said, "Why, Mr. McCormick, it's me, Dr. Hamilton, Gilbert-your physician." He spread his arms. "And look, your old friends, Edward O'Kane and Martin Thompson. But how are you feeling?"

The grin held. O'Kane was grinning too now-and so was Mart. All four of them were stretching their facial muscles to the limit, goodwill abounding, and you would have thought they'd just heard the best joke in the world. "What is this place?" Mr. McCormick asked then, and no trace of hesitation in his voice, no stuttering or verbigeration at all.

Dr. Hamilton turned to O'Kane and Mart as if this were the drollest thing he'd ever heard, then came back to Mr. McCormick, all the while rubbing his hands and flipping his eyes in a paroxysm of nervous energy-and grinning, grinning as if it were the conventional way of wearing a face. "Why, it's Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick-in California. The place you designed for your sister, Mary Virginia-surely you remember that. Such a beautiful place. And so comfortable. Did you encounter any particular difficulties in the design?"

"I-I-" and now the old hesitation, the scattered eyes, at once lost and receding, but still the grin held. "I-I don't recall... but I-I must have been ill, isn't that, that right?"

Hamilton, trying for gravity, the grin banished: "Yes, that's right, Mr. McCormick, you've been ill. But look at you now, alert and aglow with health and happiness.... Do you recall your illness, its nature, anything at all about it?"

Mr. McCormick turned to O'Kane then and winked an eye-actually winked, like an old crony in a bar. "Yes," he said, and the grin widened still further. "A c-cold, wasn't it?"

The change lasted three days. Mr. McCormick got himself up each morning, shower-bathed (and sometimes for as long as two hours at a time), took his breakfast, read the paper. He conversed, joked even. And though he was very tired, exhausted from his long travail, he was able to move about without too much difficulty, favoring the right leg and walking with a tottering deliberation, as if he were on a tightrope over a howling precipice. He needed help in dressing still, easily frustrated-baffled, even-over the proper way to slip into a shirt or jacket and repeatedly trying to slide both feet into a single pantleg. But still, everyone was heartened, O'Kane especially. Mr. McCormick was coming out of it. Finally. At long last.

As it turned out, though-and this was sad, hopes raised and hopes dashed-O'Kane was merely indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Those three days of lucidity, those three days of dramatic and visible improvement, of the lifting of the veil, of release, only adumbrated Mr. McCormick's worst crisis since his breakdown. No one could have foreseen it. Not even Dr. Hamilton, who fired off a telegram to Katherine, now back in Boston, trumpeting the news of the change in her husband's condition. Or she, who wired him back the minute she received it: HE WAS EATING? STOP DRESSING HIMSELF? STOP READING THE NEWSPAPER? STOP COULD SHE SEE HIM? STOP NOW? Optimistic, all his diagnostic sails flapping in a fresh breeze of hope and speculation-but cautious, ever cautious-the doctor wired her back to say: NOT YET STOP.

And a good thing too. Because what happened during O'Kane's shift on the fourth day after Mr. McCormick awakened from the dead came as a shock, to put it mildly. O'Kane had never seen anything like it, and he thought he'd seen everything. No one was to blame, at least, and that came as a relief to all concerned, but if he were to scratch deep enough in the sediment of culpability, O'Kane could have named a candidate-Katherine, Katherine yet again. She meant well, he would never deny that, but because she meant well-and because she was a snooping imperious castrating b.i.t.c.h of a woman the likes of which he could never have imagined even in his worst nightmare-she couldn't help sticking her nose in where it didn't belong.

The problem this time was with the window in Mr. McCormick's bathroom. Katherine couldn't leave it alone. After she'd finished with the first floor of the house, consigning the McCormick furniture, pictures and pottery to the garage and remaking the place in her own image-when it was all done, from paint to draperies to rugs-she began to fixate on the second floor, the floor she'd never seen, the floor from which she was interdicted on Dr. Hamilton's strictest orders. She studied it constantly-or at least the outer walls and windows and the tiled expanse of the sunporch-watching for a glimpse of her husband through a pair of opera gla.s.ses. Inevitably she found something to displease her, and in this case it was the bathroom window.

The bars disturbed her. They made the place look too much like a fortress-or an asylum. She consulted with Hamilton and then brought in a young architect and a crew of Italians who removed the perfectly serviceable standard one-inch-thick iron bars while Mr. McCormick lay tranced in his bedroom and replaced them with steel louvers. The louvers had been designed to ensure that a fully grown man of Mr. McCormick's height and weight couldn't work his arm through any of the apertures and make contact with the gla.s.s beyond it-and of course, they'd been constructed to a standard of strength and durability that would prevent their being bent or mutilated in any way that might afford Mr. McCormick an avenue of escape. What the architect hadn't taken into account was the ingenuity of Mr. McCormick-or his strength. Especially when the fit was on him.

It was late on that fourth day, toward the end of O'Kane and Martin's shift, and the evening was settling in round the house, birds calling, the sun hanging on a string, the islands in bold relief against the twin mirrors of sea and sky. Mart was in the parlor, working on a crossword puzzle by way of improving his vocabulary, and Mr. McCormick had retired for a nap before dinner. O'Kane was seated in a chair across the room from Mart, his feet propped up on the windowsill, gazing into s.p.a.ce. He was thinking about his room and the bland indigestible cud of grease and overcooked vegetable matter his landlady was likely to serve up for dinner-and his first drink, and Giovannella-when he heard the unmistakable sound of gla.s.s shattering and falling like heavy rain to the pavement below.

He didn't stop to wonder or think, vaulting out of the chair like a high-jumper and hurtling across the floor to Mr. McCormick's bedroom, which he found empty, and then to the bathroom, which he found locked. Or not locked, exactly-there was no lock-but obstructed. Mr. McCormick seemed to have jammed something-something substantial-up under the doork.n.o.b. O'Kane twisted the k.n.o.b and applied his shoulder to the unyielding slab of the door, all the while tasting panic in the back of his throat, a harsh taste, precipitate and unforgiving. Mart was right behind him, thank G.o.d, and in the next instant there were two of them battering at the door, Mart standing back five paces and then flinging himself at the insensate oak with the singlemindedness of a steer in a chute. Once, twice, three times, and finally the door gave, splintering off its hinges and lurching forward into a barricade of furniture with a dull echoing thump. And where had the furniture come from? From the stripped and ransacked bedroom behind them. While they were lulled to distraction in the soothing plenitude of the late afternoon, decoding their crossword puzzles and gazing idly out the window, Mr. McCormick had silently dismantled his room and built a bulwark against the door to cover his escape.

Oh, yes: his escape. That was what this was all about-the barricaded door, the shattered gla.s.s, the imploded peace of the lazy languorous late afternoon in Paradise-as O'Kane was to discover in the next moment. He scrambled up over the plane of the door, which was canted now at a forty-five-degree angle, just in time to see Mr. McCormick vanish through a ragged gap in the louvers that looked as if an artillery sh.e.l.l had pa.s.sed through it but was in fact created by Mr. McCormick himself, using main strength, ingenuity, and a four-inch-thick length of cherrywood that had formerly served as a table leg. O'Kane cried out, his mind a seething stew of featureless thoughts, the three p's tumbled together with Dr. Hamilton's lectures on the train, Katherine's denunciatory fury and the stark crazed pulse-pounding phrase "suicidal tendencies," and he rushed to the window and thrust his head through the gap in horror, expecting anything, expecting the worst. What he saw was Mr. McCormick, eyes sunk deep in the mask of his face, fierce with concentration, clambering down the drainpipe with all the agility of a, well, of a hominoid. hominoid.

By the time O'Kane reached the ground floor, burst through the front door and tore round the corner of the house, Mr. McCormick had vanished. Why, Why, he was thinking, he was thinking, why does this always have to happen on my shift? why does this always have to happen on my shift? and then he was in motion, frantic, irrepressible, charging round the courtyard and shouting out for Roscoe, the gardeners, the household help and any stray Italians who might have been dicing garlic or nodding over a gla.s.s of wine in their tumbledown cottages, dogs barking, chickens flying, the whole place a hurricane of fear and alarm. "Mr. McCormick's loose!" he bellowed, and here came Mart and Roscoe and a host of sweating dark men gripping hoes and hedge clippers. "Lock your women indoors," he cried, "and all of you men fan out over the property-and if you find him, don't try to approach him, just stand clear and send for me or Dr. Hamilton." and then he was in motion, frantic, irrepressible, charging round the courtyard and shouting out for Roscoe, the gardeners, the household help and any stray Italians who might have been dicing garlic or nodding over a gla.s.s of wine in their tumbledown cottages, dogs barking, chickens flying, the whole place a hurricane of fear and alarm. "Mr. McCormick's loose!" he bellowed, and here came Mart and Roscoe and a host of sweating dark men gripping hoes and hedge clippers. "Lock your women indoors," he cried, "and all of you men fan out over the property-and if you find him, don't try to approach him, just stand clear and send for me or Dr. Hamilton."

They were systematically beating the bushes, describing an ever-widening circle around the house under O'Kane's command, when Dr. Hamilton appeared on the run, flashing through the trees from the direction of the apery in a white lab coat stippled with the various leavings of his monkeys and baboons, not to mention Julius the orangutan. He slashed through the kitchen garden, across the courtyard and right on up to O'Kane, who was searching the bushes around the daphne bed to the west of the house. "My G.o.d," the doctor gasped, out of breath, his eyes whirling, and he repeated it over and over again, wheezing for breath, "my G.o.d, my G.o.d, my G.o.d."

"He can't have gone far," O'Kane said, "his legs won't carry him. He's not in condition."

The doctor just stood there, a sharp wedge of the declining sun isolating the right side of his face, the tic replicating itself in his cheek now and at the corner of his mouth. "How?" he sputtered. "Who was-? When did-?"

"No more than ten minutes. We almost had him-he pried open the new louvers with a stick of wood."

"s.h.i.t." The doctor let out a string of curses, every trace of the therapeutic whisper gone out of his voice. "What's the nearest estate-Mira Vista, isn't it? Who's there now-are there any women?" His face was a small thing, flushed and bloated beneath the tan he'd acquired in the company of his hominoids, his hair wet through with sweat, and sweat descending in a probing and tentative way from his temples to trace the clenched lines of his jaw. "We've got to warn them. Notify the police. Call out the bloodhounds."

"But he can't have gone far-and he's got almost ninety acres of his own to run around on ... but I was just concerned, if, well, there's any possibility of what we discussed before, if he might try to-"

"You idiot," the doctor shouted, and there was no vestige of control left in him, "you unutterable moron. What do you think? Why do you suppose we keep him locked up? He could be lying dead under any one of these d.a.m.ned bushes even now, and here we are standing around jawing about it. Action, that's what we need, not a bunch of lame-brained questions and what-ifs. We've got to. got to-" and then he broke off abruptly and darted away in the direction of the garage.

Night fell, and still no sign of Mr. McCormick. On regaining his senses, Hamilton decided against involving the police for fear of possible repercussions, but all the neighbors within a one-mile radius were warned and all available men, including the Dimuccis, were called out to help with the search. The number of flashlights was limited-two from the house and one from Roscoe's trove in the garage-and the laborers went poking through the brush with lanterns and torches held aloft, despite the risk of fire. Roscoe had gone for Nick and Pat and they joined the search too, but O'Kane, smarting from the way Hamilton had a.s.sailed him and still carrying a lingering grudge against Nick, went off on his own with one of the flashlights.

It was the dry season, the tall gra.s.s of the fields parched till it turned from gold to white, the frogs thick along the two creeks that merged on the property, clamorous in their numbers, filling the darkness with the liquid pulse of their froggy loves and wars. O'Kane followed Hot Springs Creek south to where it joined with Cold Stream and then traced that back north along the Indian ceremonial grounds the estate had swallowed up, thinking that Mr. McCormick might have been attracted to the water or the thick growth of reeds and scrub oak that shadowed the banks-he could have crouched there for a week and no one would have found him, and certainly not in the dark. The beam of the flashlight-a gadget O'Kane had never even seen till he came to Riven Rock-picked out the odd branch or boulder, flattening it to two-dimensionality as though it were pasted to the wall of darkness, and O'Kane stumbled among the rocks of the streambed, blinded by the light. He kept his balance the first few times, but then a rock skittered out from under his feet and he pitched forward into the waterborne rubble, cradling the flashlight to his chest and skinning both knees in the process. He lay there rec.u.mbent a moment, thinking of rattlesnakes, evil-eyed and explosive, and gave up the streambed for the cultivated paths.

He saw the flickering lights in the distance, heard the occasional shout-in English and Italian both-but he ignored them. Searching alone, weary now, tired of the whole business, he made his way back toward the main house, skirting the lawns and plodding mechanically through the Clover Garden, past the hothouses and the looming blocky rear wall of the garage till he was close enough to the apes to smell them. The hominoids, that is-the monkeys and baboons that were unlucky enough to provide the grist for Hamilton's theoretical mill. O'Kane had observed enough of the doctor's experiments by now to form an opinion, and his opinion was that they were bunk. Aside from running the monkeys through the big wooden box with the gates in it, all Hamilton and his seedy-looking a.s.sistants seemed to do was make the monkeys f.u.c.k one another-or anything else that came to hand. Once, O'Kane had seen the wop lead a stray dog into the communal cage, and sure enough, the monkeys came chittering down from their perches and one after another f.u.c.ked the dog. They threw a coyote into the cage. The monkeys f.u.c.ked that. They tossed an eight-foot-long bull-snake into the cage. The monkeys f.u.c.ked it and then killed it and ate it. As far as O'Kane could see, the only thing Hamilton had established was that a monkey will f.u.c.k anything, and how that was supposed to be applied to Mr. McCormick and all the rest of the suffering schizophrenics of the world, he couldn't even pretend to guess.

But he was drawn toward them now, almost irresistibly, the potent reek of the close air beneath the trees, the susurrus of their nocturnal movements, a sound like a distant breeze combing through a glade lush with ferns. The sound calmed him, and for a minute he forgot about Mr. McCormick and forgave the monkeys their stink. And then, all in an instant, he came fully alert.

The monkeys had begun to hiss and chitter the way they did in daylight, the noise sailing out to him and rushing back to roost again in the darkness ahead. He quickened his pace, shining the beam off the great twisted branches of the oaks and then catching the wire mesh of the big central cage that rose up into the crown of the trees. There was movement at the top of the cage, and there shouldn't have been, all the monkeys put to rest in their individual cages at nightfall, but they were noisier now, much noisier-the gentle rustling of a moment ago become the jangling rattle of steel padlocks and cage doors straining against their latches-and he could see the tiny bodies flailing themselves to and fro behind the mesh. The light shot round in his unsteady hand, a root grabbed for his foot, and he was trying to understand, to fathom what was happening, when suddenly every hominoid in the place was screeching loud enough to raise the holy dead.

What was it? There, high in the branches of the central cage, the movement again. He stepped closer, the screeching, the stench, struggling to steady the light, and then, as if in a sudden vision, it became clear to him. These were no monkeys in the branches-they were too big, much too big. These were no monkeys, but apes, the rutilant naked one, white as any ghost, and the s.h.a.ggy hunkering split-faced one, and their hands moving each at the place where the other's legs intersected, two hands flashing in that obscene light until O'Kane, who now truly had seen everything, flicked it off.

Mercifully.

PART II.

Dr. Brush ' s Time.

LOVE IS LOYAL, HOPE IS GONE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The house was near Hull and it looked out on Hingham Bay, the bay that gave onto the serious ocean, the true ocean, the cold somber Atlantic, and there were no palms here, no zephyrs, no parrots or monkeys or orange trees or anything else that smacked of frivolity or sensuality. Katherine settled into an armchair by the window and read through the article as if she were gulping water after three sets of tennis: It is not a case of lovers separated in death, but rather a separation in life, to overcome which if it were possible millions would be no barrier. In this case it is not a hero but a heroine who furnishes the lesson in constancy, and her most intimate acquaintances, those of the smartest set in New York, in Boston and Chicago, bow to her with admiration that is born of respect.

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

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

The letters fled like ants across the page, acc.u.mulated into big black staring words with heads and pincers and then sentences that bit and stung and made her flesh crawl, beautiful, intellectual, highly-accomplished, insane: beautiful, intellectual, highly-accomplished, insane: how dare they? How dare they? And then, farther on down the page, all wounds became one wound: how dare they? How dare they? And then, farther on down the page, all wounds became one wound: Dr. Hamilton does not allow her to see her husband, much less converse with him. And yet, nothing daunted, Mrs. McCormick goes to Montecito in December of each year and spends the Yule-tide season near the man she loves.

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

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

She wanted to tear the paper to pieces and fling it from her, but she didn't, she couldn't, and though she tried not to think of Stanley-her Stanley, n.o.body's but hers, not his mother's or his sisters' or his brothers', not anymore-though she'd thrown herself body and soul into the suffrage movement as a way of forgetting, here it was all over again, all her private pain, and served up to t.i.tillate the great unwashed in their linoleum kitchens. What would her mother think? And her father-he must be turning over in his grave.

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

She'd been sitting there for some minutes, the paper in her lap, the bay beyond the windows scoured by tight bands of cloud that were like steel springs coiling and uncoiling over the steely plane of the water, the voices of the women in the parlor below drifting up to her in s.n.a.t.c.hes. And then she looked down at the story again, the story about her, the beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, and settled on the last paragraph, the one that canonized her: One of Mrs. McCormick's friends the other day said: "Such a character as that woman possesses is an object lesson for the world. It would seem to me that she is living over a volcano and would be the most unhappy woman in the world. I know of her unstinted popularity in the leading social sets of the East, how easy it would be for her to forsake her afflicted husband and live the natural life, but she consecrated herself to Mr. McCormick and if she does not get her reward in this life, she surely will in the next."

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

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

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

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

"So what will we do?"

"What else? Defy them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My G.o.d, yes!"