Riven Rock Part 9

Menhoff's was pretty lively that afternoon, and that helped him get over his initial shock, glad-handing people, putting on a face-he even shot a couple games of pool. But for all that he was in another world, aching all the way down from his grinding molars to the marrow of his bones, and why use chalk on the cue when he could powder it with the dust of his own teeth? He'd been planning a picnic at the beach with a girl he'd met at a party the week before, but he knew he couldn't go through with it now, and he rang her up and begged off in a blizzard of promises and lies. Giovannella was right-abortion was a dirty business, as foul a sin as there was. And he was a Catholic still, though he didn't go to Ma.s.s anymore, except for Christmas and Easter, and he believed G.o.d was watching him and judging him and holding him in contempt even as he sat there at the bar and lifted a beer to his lips. But what was the alternative? He tried to picture himself in San Francisco, a place he knew only from postcards, Giovannella swelling up till her navel was extruded and her t.i.ts were like balloons and her legs lost their shape, and what then? Living in sin. A baby that was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the eyes of the church and society too. And then another baby. And another.

He'd been with Mr. McCormick eight years now, longer than he'd been at the Boston Asylum and McLean put together, and he was making good money, and putting some of it in the bank against the day he struck out on his own, and whether it was in oranges or oil or even one of these new service businesses sprung up in the wake of the automobile, he didn't know anymore. But he wasn't about to leave Mr. McCormick. It was a question of loyalty-he wanted to see him improve, he did; in a way he'd staked his life on it-and even with Hamilton leaving and this new man, Brush, coming in, he knew he was going to be at Riven Rock for a good long while yet. But Giovannella. Giovannella, Giovannella, Giovannella. He could just let it go, turn his back on her and let the shoemaker raise a little O'Kane like one of those hapless sparrows the cowbird preys on, shoving its egg right in on top of the nest and n.o.body the wiser. He could. But it would hurt, and he'd already had enough hurt from Rosaleen and Eddie Jr.

He was on his second round-or was it his third?-when Dolores Isringhausen walked in. She was with another woman, both of them in furs, cloche hats, bobbed hair and skirts crawling up their calves, and a whole noisy mob of people shouldering in behind them. She was from New York, Dolores, married to a rich man off playing boy scout on the Italian front, and she ran with a fast crowd. n.o.body in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like her. She smoked, drank Jack Rose c.o.c.ktails and drove her own car, a little Maxwell runabout with all-white tires she'd had shipped out from the East. O'Kane was fascinated by her. He'd sat with her a couple of times with one group or another and he loved the knowing look on her face and her gla.s.sy cold eyes and the way the dress clung to her hips, always something silky and tactile and never the stiff penitential weeds half the women in town dragged themselves around in, as if they were traipsing from one funeral to another. And she didn't seem to have any objection to saloons, either.

"h.e.l.lo, Eddie," she said, coming right up to him at the end of the bar, the other woman trailing behind her with a pasted-on smile and an empty greeting for this one or that. "You're looking glum. What's the matter? It's Sat.u.r.day. The night beckons."

As if to prove her wrong-about the glumness, that is-he flashed her a smile, all teeth, the smile of a caveman just back from clubbing a mastodon and laying it at the feet of his cavewoman inamorata, and he shifted his shoulders inside his jacket to show her what he had there. His eyes fastened on hers. "I was just waiting for you to come in and brighten the day."

Her eyes were the strangest color-purple, he guessed you'd call them-and he saw that she was wearing some sort of theatrical makeup on her upper lids to bring them out. She didn't respond to his overture, not directly. Ducking her head, she fished a cigarette holder out of a black bead reticule and gave him a look. "Why don't you come sit with us," she said, nodding toward the restaurant in back, where Cody Menhoff himself was scurrying around setting up a table for her. "You can light my cigarette for me." And then she was sweeping across the room, the other woman right behind her and the rest of the group converging on the table with its clean white cloth and a platter of sandwiches and a Jack Rose c.o.c.ktail in a tall-stemmed gla.s.s set right in the center of it like a tribute.

There were four men in her party (all jerks, and O'Kane could have whipped any two of them with one hand tied behind his back) and three women made up to look like Parisian streetwalkers, or what O'Kane supposed Parisian streetwalkers would look like. He wouldn't know. Not actually. Unlike these swells, with their thin-lipped smiles and their cigarette holders and racquet club drawl, he'd never been to Paris. Or to New York, for that matter.

Dolores and her friend of the vapid smile made the party nine, and O'Kane brought it to ten. She made a place for him right beside her and as the conversation veered from the War to skirt lengths to gossip about people O'Kane didn't know, she leaned in close and gave him the full benefit of her eyes and her husky timbreless voice: "How about that light you promised me?"

O'Kane put a match to her cigarette and the whole table lit up, smoke everywhere, gla.s.ses already empty and the waiter bringing another round, and every one of them drinking a Jack Rose c.o.c.ktail (1 oz. apple brandy, juice of lime, 1 tsp. grenadine; shake with ice and strain into a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s).

"What's the matter, Eddie," Dolores purred, lifting her chin to exhale, her lips contracted in a little pout, "don't you smoke?"

He shrugged. Smiled. Let his eyes climb right out of his head and into hers. "Once in a while I like a cigar with a gla.s.s of whiskey, usually late at night. I'm not one for cigarettes, though, not generally."

"Oh, you'll like these. Here, try one."

And then she was touching the glowing tip of her cigarette to the one he'd plucked from her monogrammed case and he was as close to her as he'd been to Giovannella an hour ago, only this was different, this was nice, the beginning of the dance instead of the end. "Swell," he said, exhaling. "Very smooth."

She looked at him. "They ought to be. They came all the way from Turkey."

They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, and she drank Jack Rose c.o.c.ktails as if they were no more potent than lamb's milk and smoked up all the cigarettes in her case. And what did they talk about? Life. Santa Barbara. Mr. McCormick. Her husband. Italy. The War. Music. Did he like music? He did, and when they went out front arm-in-arm to climb into her car and drive out to Mattei's for supper and the rest of the party be d.a.m.ned, he pressed her up against the hood and sang to her in the soft lilting tenor that was another legacy of his father: You shall have rings on your fingers And bells on your toes, Elephants to ride upon My little Irish rose.

She let him kiss her then, a lingering oneiric kiss that gave him time to adjust to her-she was taller than Giovannella, leaner, her lips taut as rope-and then they were in the car and breathing hard, both of them. "That was beautiful, Eddie-the song, I mean," she murmured, her voice husky and low, "and the kiss too, that was nice," and then she put the car in gear and it was the first time in his life he'd been in an automobile and a woman driving, and he told her his ma had taught him the song, back East, back in Boston, where he was born.

"And the kiss?"

He took hold of her hand. She was playing a game he liked better than any he could of. "It was a hundred girls taught me that, but none as pretty as you."

It was still light out, and as the car climbed smoothly up through the San Marcos Pa.s.s and snaked down into the farmland of the Santa Ynez Valley, O'Kane gazed out on the world and saw it in all its lambent immanence, caught there for him as if on a motion picture screen, only in color, living color. Every bush along the roadway was on fire with blossoms, the trees arching up and away from the windscreen of the car in a wash of leaves and each a different shade of green, the mountains cut into sections like towering blocks of maple sugar pressed in a mold, enough maple sugar to sweeten all the tea in China. He was glowing with the whiskey and the antic.i.p.ation of what was coming, a sure thing, the deserted wife and the husband off sitting around a campfire in one of those places you read about in the newspaper, and he sank back in the seat and listened to the engine, gazing out into all that spread of the natural earth, and didn't he see the face of G.o.d there, G.o.d the all-forgiving, and His Son the redeemer?

Sure he did. And this wasn't a fierce and recriminating G.o.d who would rear back and hurl bolts of lightning and cause the earth to erupt and point the infinite finger of d.a.m.nation at a child-murdering adulterer hurrying on his way to indulge yet another sin of the flesh ... no, no, not at all. The Lord was smiling, a smile broad as a river, tall as any tree, and that smile made O'Kane feel as if a lamp had been lit inside him. Everything would work out, he was sure of it. Of course, he was stewed to the gills, and that might have had something to do with this sudden manifestation of the Deity and the feeling of benevolence and well-being that had stolen over him in the s.p.a.ce of a breath ... but still, there it was, and as he sat there molded into the seat beside Dolores Isringhausen with the whiskey in his veins and the slanting sun warm against the swell of his jaw, he thought maybe he'd died and gone on to his reward after all.

It was early the next morning, after they'd made love twice on the satin sheets in her bedroom, and the slow quiet cigarette-punctuated murmur of their conversation had fallen away to nothing, that he thought of Giovannella again. Dolores lay on her back beside him, sprawled like a doll thrown from a cliff, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s fanned out on the fulcrum of her rib cage, her legs splayed. She was smoking, the cigarette standing erect between her lips, jetting a stream of smoke straight up into the air, and he was idly stroking the hair between her legs, as relaxed as a dead man except for the accelerating spark of Giovannella in his head.

"Dolores?" he said into the silence of the room.

"Hm?"

"Do you know any doctors? Personally, I mean."

And though when the sun came up it was Sunday, the Lord's day, and all the faithful were trotting in and out of the churches whether they were Catholics or Protestants or Egyptian dog worshipers, O'Kane was on his way to Giovannella's with the stiff white slip of paper on which Dolores Isringhausen had written a name and address in her looping graceful boarding-school hand, and when he got there he waited round the corner till the shoemaker went out to do whatever it is shoemakers do on Sundays. Then he looked over his shoulder, swallowed his pounding heart, and mounted the swaybacked stairs on the outside of the building.

Giovannella looked startled. Not hopeful, not angry, just startled. "You can't come here today, Eddie. Guido, he only went out for a walk-he could be back any minute."

"To h.e.l.l with Guido," he said, and he was in the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. And what was the first thing he saw, nailed to the wall in the vestibule in all His crucified agony? Sure: Christ, staring him in the face.

"Eddie. You got to go. You can't-"

"I brought you this," he said, holding the slip of paper out to her.

There was nothing in her face. He watched her eyes drop, her lips part, and there, just the tip of her tongue. She was no reader. "Cy ... rose? ... Brown," piecing it out, "one-two, one-two Cha ... pala. M, period, D, period." She looked up. "M.D.? What does that mean?"

"Doctor," he said, and he shifted on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, feeling sick and evil, "M.D. means doctor. Don't you know anything?"

Comprehension started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up through the clamped muscles of her jaw to her eyes, and they weren't loving and kind eyes, not this morning, not any more. She let out a curse, something in Italian, and though he couldn't appreciate the nuances, he got the gist of it. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h." she said. "You big c.o.c.ky son of a b.i.t.c.h. What makes you sure it's your baby, huh?"

"Because you told me. Because you came to me. Guido can't make you feel a thing, isn't that what you told me? That he's only this big?"

"He's a better man than you."

"The h.e.l.l he is."

"He is. And didn't you ever think I might have just said that for you, to make you feel like a big man, huh? Because I did, I did, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. I lied. I lied to you, Eddie. Guido's hung like a horse-how do you like that? And you'll never hurt my baby-my baby, not yours. Never!" " baby, not yours. Never!" "

It was Rosaleen all over again, and he had half a moment to wonder about the shifting magnetic poles of love, from Venus to Mars and no middle ground, no place to regroup and sound the retreat, and when she came at him with the ice pick that had been lying so quietly atop the icebox all this time he was only trying to protect himself, and both of them watched with the kind of astonishment reserved for the magician in the cape as the shining steel rivet pa.s.sed right on through his open palm and out the other side as if there was no such thing as flesh and no such thing as blood.

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"You'll have to forgive me if I don't shake," O'Kane said, nodding a greeting to Dr. Brush at the door and holding up his bandaged right hand in extenuation, Mart right behind him, the string orchestra already playing something light as air and the big new room beyond all lit up and festive. "Ah, and this must be Mrs. Brush," he said, feeling convivial, ready to break into song, tell jokes, quaff a beer or a cup or two of punch laced with gin. He was about to say he'd heard a lot about her, but then he realized he'd heard nothing, not a word. She could have been a Fiji Island cannibal with a bone through her nose for all he'd heard about her, but here she was, standing right beside her husband at the door, a pinched, rawboned woman with a squared-off beak of a nose and two staring black eyes no bigger than a crow's.

She reached for his bandaged hand and then drew back as if she'd burned herself on a hot stove, but immediately reached for it again, and then once more, before O'Kane finally offered his left hand and tucked the bandaged one discreetly behind his back. But the sequel was even stranger, because she went through the same routine all over again, reaching out for his good hand and then drawing back once, twice, three times, and when he looked into her face for an answer she greeted him with a whole battery of facial tics and distortions-enough to make the gone-but-not-forgotten Hamilton look like an amateur. She said something in a loud squawk of a voice, twitching and shaking and jerking her head up and down all the while, before Dr. Brush intervened.

"Gladys, yes," he boomed, swinging tumultuously round in the entrance hall and slamming the door behind them. "These are the two men I told you about, Edward O'Kane-we call him Eddie-and Martin Tompkins, er, Thompson. That's it, dear, yes, go ahead and say h.e.l.lo-"

Mart, thick-headed and slow to grapple toward judgment or even awareness, gave Mrs. Brush a bewildered look and reached for her hand, which she immediately s.n.a.t.c.hed away and hid behind her back. Mart looked to O'Kane, and O'Kane's eyes told him everything he needed to know: the psychiatrist's wife was a nutcase.

And what was she wearing? Something plain and old-fashioned, drab as a horse blanket, and hanging right down to the floor, as if this were the nineteen-oughts still. But she was smiling, or at least that seemed to be a smile flashing through the frenetic semaph.o.r.e of tics, twitches and grimaces, and that was enough for O'Kane. He smiled back, offered her his arm, which she took after another whole rigama-role of back and forth and back and forth again, and led her up the six steps and into the big room full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces.

The celebration was both in honor of Dr. Brush's taking over the reins and to christen the new theater building, built so that Mr. McCormick could have a comfortable place in which to view moving pictures, concerts and plays. It was a grand building, the size of any three houses a normal family would occupy, dominated by the vast two-story-high theater, with offices for Dr. Brush and the estate manager to either side and a bedroom for Mr. McCormick tucked in back in the event he should tire while watching a picture. Everyone felt he needed more stimulation-Drs. Meyer, Hamilton and Brush, Katherine, even the Chicago McCormicks-and the theater house was designed to serve the purpose. It was a short walk from the main house-no more than four or five hundred feet-and the landscape architects had put sprinklers high up in the trees along the path so that Mr. McCormick could hear the soothing murmur of a gentle rainfall as he strolled to and from the building in fair weather, and there was stimulation for you: rain on command. Nor had they overlooked security: all the windows were protected, inside the double panes of gla.s.s, with a graceful cast-iron filigree in a handsome diamond pattern, and the doors to each of the rooms were fitted with triple locks, and for each lock a separate key.

It was amazing, it really was, and yet O'Kane couldn't help thinking of the poor simple lunatics at the Boston Asylum, all herded into a cage to have the crusted s.h.i.t blasted off them with high-pressure hoses. But then they weren't Mr. McCormick, were they? And Mr. McCormick, being a gentleman, was used to gentle things, and O'Kane, being his nurse, applauded anything they could do for him, especially when money was no object. Stimulation? Give him all the stimulation he could stand, just so long as it didn't overexcite him and push him all the way back down the long tunnel of tube-feeding and diapers.

But everybody in the neighborhood was gathered here now, for drinks and frivolity and the showing of a new Bronco Billy picture from Santa Barbara's own Flying A Studios, and as O'Kane stepped into the room with the frantically grinning Mrs. Brush beside him, he felt as pleased as he had on Christmas Day as a boy. Nick's wife had put up decorations, streamers and such, there was a big spread on a table in the corner and a bar set up and a guy in a tuxedo standing behind it. And balloons, balloons all over the place. The orchestra had been playing an air when he first came to the door, cheerful and fluty, but now they shifted into something you could feel in the soles of your feet and a couple of people got up to dance. He handed Mrs. Brush over to a big glowing bald man who suddenly loomed up on his right-Dr. Ogilvie, Mr. McCormick's nominal dentist-and headed for the bar.

He ordered a highball and while the bartender was fixing it he glanced over his shoulder to see Katherine standing there not ten feet away, and she laughing at something the woman next to her was saying. She looked good, d.a.m.ned good, all in green and with a little green hat perched up on top of her hair like a bird's nest. He wasn't going to talk to her, of course, unless it was strictly necessary, and he turned back to the bar before she could catch him looking. That was when Dr. Brush and Mart elbowed their way in, the doctor flushed and hearty and lecturing Mart about the main and simple reason of something or other. "Eddie!" he cried, and a big arm looped itself over O'Kane's shoulder, an arm heavy as a python, and O'Kane could smell liquor on the doctor's breath. "They treating you all right?"

"Sure. Yeah." O'Kane lifted the gla.s.s to his lips, whiskey fumes probing at his nostrils, and made believe he was diving for pearls.

"You fellows are all right," Brush boomed, and he was squeezing Mart under his other arm, squeezing the two of them as if they were prize hams. "But listen. Eddie. I really want to tell you, for the main and simple reason, well, Gladys thinks you're a prince. And so do I."

O'Kane looked at Mart. Mart was clutching a drink, looking big-headed and dazed. It must have been something for him, going from his monk's cell in the back of the big house to all this.

"Listen. Between us. Because we're friends and, er, fellow employees of Mr. McCormick, you may have noticed that my wife's a little, what should we say-excitable? Not to worry. She was a patient once. Of mine, that is. Brilliant woman, one of the sharpest minds I've ever known-"

O'Kane, uncomfortable under the doctor's grip, gazed out across the room to where Mrs. Brush stood with the dentist, putting her face through all its permutations and showing her teeth like a rabbit at the end of every sequence. She didn't look all that brilliant. In fact, she looked suspiciously like some of the loonies he'd known at McLean.

"Tourette's syndrome," the doctor was saying. "It's not a form of insanity, not at all, just a weakness. A moral weakness, really. And we're working on it, we are. You see, her mind races ahead of her body just like an automobile stuck in neutral and the accelerator to the floor, causes her all sorts of embarra.s.sment for the main and simple reason that she refuses to control it ... but really, she's no crazier than you or I, not underneath, and I, er, I appreciate the way you gave her your arm there, Eddie, it was white of you,"

It was then that Dolores Isringhausen walked in with her friend of the vacuous smile and two men with penciled-in mustaches and their hair all slicked down with grease. Or she didn't walk exactly-she sashayed, rolling her corsetless hips from side to side like a belly dancer, and she managed to make every woman in the place, even Katherine, look like yesterday's news. In three years, every woman in America would look like her-or try to-all natural lines, legs and boyish figure, with the peeled-acorn hat and eye makeup, but for now she had the stage all to herself, she and her friend, that is. O'Kane was electrified-he hadn't expected this-and two emotions simultaneously flooded his system with glandular secretions that made him feel as twitchy as Mrs. Brush: l.u.s.t and jealousy. Who were those men, and one of them with his hand on her elbow?

In the next moment he was crossing the crowded room, all of Montecito there in their jewels and furs and cravats and n.o.body worried about the presumptive host of the party locked away in his room in the big house with the iron bars on the windows, not in the least, and it was no small wonder that he himself had been invited. Of course, he'd already seen the picture that afternoon with Mart and Mr. McCormick, but still he had to admit it was decent of Katherine-and Brush, he supposed-to include the nurses in a gathering like this. There were millionaires and tyc.o.o.ns here tonight and he was brushing shoulders with them, and not as somebody's bootlick or bottle washer either-he was off-duty, a guest like anybody else. That was something, and he knew it and savored it, and he promised himself he'd be on his best behavior, smiling Eddie O'Kane, quick with a handshake and a witty aside.

He caught up to Dolores at the buffet table, which was all piled up with good things from Diehl's Grocery and two of Diehl's best men in monkey suits back there to serve it up. She already had a Jack Rose c.o.c.ktail in her hand with the long black velvet glove clinging to it like a second skin, and she was laughing at something one of the mustachioed little weasels was saying, her head thrown back, her pulsing white kiss-able throat exposed for anyone to see. It had been three days since he'd gotten to know her in the way that counted most, the way you could keep score by, and he hadn't seen or heard from her since-he didn't know her phone number and he didn't have a car to drive out to her place and nose around. But that was all right. It wasn't love or anything like that he was feeling, but just a good healthy appet.i.te for second helpings, and he didn't want to seem overeager. Casual, that was the way he was, smooth as silk.

Still, when he saw the way she was laughing and the guy's hand touching hers to drive home the joke-and what was so funny?-he couldn't help bristling, though he knew he shouldn't and that this wasn't the place for it and that he had no more right to her than any half-dozen other men, and her husband not the least of them. "Dolores," he said, in a throat-clearing sort of way, "I see you made it to our little gathering."

She turned a face to him that was like a mask. His hand was throbbing. Was she going to cut him, was that it? The company too rich for him? Good enough for her in bed but not here amongst all these swells and capitalists? "Eddie," she said, the voice caught low in her throat, no inflection at all, "how nice to see you again."

He started in on a little speech about Mr. McCormick, how he was indisposed and what a shame it was he couldn't attend his own party, playing off the status of being Mr. McCormick's intimate and puffing himself up as if he were the host and all this his, when the mustachioed character cut him off. "You're a friend of Stanley's?" the man said. "I knew him at Princeton,"

"Well, I-" O'Kane stammered, and he felt himself sinking fast, over his head, out of his depth, and what was he thinking?

Dolores saved him. "My G.o.d, Eddie," she gasped into the breach, "what did you do to your hand?"

He held it up gratefully, a white swath of bandage that was the sudden cynosure of the whole party, and invented an elaborate story about protecting Mr. McCormick from a deranged avocado rancher who objected to their crossing his property on one of their drives, brandishing it in the other man's face as if challenging him to offer the slightest contradiction. And he felt good all of a sudden, not giving half a d.a.m.n what the other guy thought or who he was or how much money he had: Dolores was on his side, which meant that she wanted her second helpings too. And from him, handsome Eddie O'Kane, and not this penciled-in little twerp in the fancy-dress suit.

"What a shame," she said, "about your hand, I mean." And then she introduced the man in the mustache: "This is my brother-in-law, Jim-Tom's brother. He's visiting at the house for the week, and he's just back from Italy, where he saw Tom-"

And then the talk veered off into news of the War in Europe and all the American volunteers over there and how the U.S. was sure to be drawn into it before long, and O'Kane, bored with the whole subject, excused himself and went back to refresh his drink, figuring Dolores could come to him when she was ready. He found Mart still there, dissecting the Red Sox with an older gentleman whose jowls hung down on either side of his nose like hot water bags. "That Ruth's a h.e.l.l of a pitcher," the old man was saying, lifting a gla.s.s to his lips, "and if Leonard and Mays hold up I don't doubt for a minute we'll be back in the World Series again this year."

"But we've got no hitting," Mart said. "It's like a bunch of women out there, what I read anyway."

"Well, you're a bit off the beaten path out here, son, but you're right there. We've got enough, though-and this fellow Gardner at third's a good man, really capital...."

O'Kane, fresh drink in hand, drifted away again, not even deigning to glance at Dolores now-he was as sure of her as he'd ever been of any girl or woman in his life-and hoping Katherine would leave early so he could loosen up a bit. But just a bit, he reminded himself, and he could hear his mother's voice in his head: Use your manners, Eddie, and your nice smile, and that head G.o.d put on your shoulders, and you'll go as far in life as you want to. Use your manners, Eddie, and your nice smile, and that head G.o.d put on your shoulders, and you'll go as far in life as you want to. He thought maybe he'd circulate a little, meet some people. Who knows-maybe he could pick up some tips on growing oranges or finding a piece of property with one of these oil wells on it or oil under the ground anyway, and how did anybody know it was there in the first place? He thought maybe he'd circulate a little, meet some people. Who knows-maybe he could pick up some tips on growing oranges or finding a piece of property with one of these oil wells on it or oil under the ground anyway, and how did anybody know it was there in the first place?

That was when the orchestra went Hawaiian, stiff old Mr. Eldred putting down his violin and picking up a ukulele that was like a toy and strumming away as if he were born in Honolulu. It was a surprise, and everybody cried out and clapped their hands as "Song of the Islands" somehow arose from his rhythmically thrashing right hand and the rest of the orchestra came tiptoeing in behind him. O'Kane had been standing amid a group of regular-looking fellows who were heatedly debating the merits of a business that dealt in millimeters and centimeters of something or other, thinking he would wait for the appropriate moment to b.u.t.t in and ask their opinion of the land offerings in Goleta, but as one they turned to the orchestra and began clapping in time to the ukulele.

He couldn't really understand this Hawaiian craze-the music, to his ears, was as bland as boiled rice, nothing like the syncopated jolt of ragtime or jazz, which is what they ought to have had here and why couldn't Eldred pick up a trumpet if he was going to pick up anything? No, the only good thing about Hawaii was the hula as danced by a half-naked brown-skinned girl in a gra.s.s skirt, and he'd seen a pretty stimulating exhibition of that one night at a sideshow in Los Angeles with Mart and Roscoe, who'd happened to borrow one of the Pierce automobiles for the evening and no one the wiser. "See the gen-u-wine article straight from the Islands! the barker had shouted. "The gen-u-wine Hawaiian hula danced without the aid of human feet!" That had been something and well worth the dime it had cost him.

But this, this was a farce. Inevitably, a whole chain of half-stewed men and big-bottomed women would get up and start swaying obscenely across the floor, making fools of themselves and stopping the conversation-the useful and potentially useful conversation-dead in its tracks. And sure enough, there they were already, and Eldred launching into "On the Beach at Waikiki" now, O'Kane ordering another drink and looking on skeptically from behind the screen of Mart's head, the old Red Sox fan right up there in front of the orchestra wagging his jowls like one of those big-humped cows from India. O'Kane didn't care. He was enjoying himself anyway, a break from the routine, and the Ice Queen would tire of all this and go on back to her hotel soon, he was sure of it, and then he could fend off the little guys in the mustaches and let Dolores Isringhausen take him home in her car and do anything she wanted with him.

That was an inviting prospect, and he leaned back on the bar and let the booze settle into his veins, his eyes drifting languidly over the crowd, and no, he wasn't going to look at Dolores, not yet, or Katherine either. His bones were melting, his legs were dead and he was feeling all right and better than all right, when suddenly a ma.s.sive shimmering sphere of flesh welled up in his peripheral vision and a big adhesive hand took hold of his wrist and was jerking him in the direction of the band. It was Brush. Dr. Brush. He was wearing a gra.s.s skirt and one of those flower necklaces over a bare blubbery chest and he had Mrs. Brush trailing from one hand and O'Kane from the other and there was no yielding to the onward rush of that tumultuous moving mountain of flesh. "Kamehameha!" Brush shouted, wriggling his hips. "Yakahula, hickydula!"

O'Kane felt his face go red. He was fighting like a fish at the end of a line and he saw Dolores's face haunting the crowd and her sudden satiric smile and he was b.u.mping into somebody-the dentist, wasn't it?-and a drink spilled and then another. He finally broke the doctor's grip and pulled up short in the middle of the whirling mob, everyone laughing, screaming with hilarity, and Brush hurtling onward in all his volatile-bosomed glory till he was right in front of the orchestra and every eye in the house was on him.

Eldred strummed till his hand looked as if it was going to fall off, the orchestra caught fire and Dr. Brush shook and shimmied and drove all his floating appendages in every conceivable direction while his poor oscillating wife tried to keep up with him through the whole panoply of her jerks and twitches. And that was the moment of revelation for O'Kane, his hopes as feeble suddenly as a dying man's: Brush was no savior or miracle worker and there was no way in the world he would ever even scratch the surface of Mr. McCormick's illness-for the main and simple reason that he was a congenital idiot himself.

THE ART OF WOOING.

When Stanley McCormick strode across the croquet lawn at the Beverly Farms Resort Hotel in Beverly, Ma.s.sachusetts, on that still, sun-struck afternoon in the summer of 1903 and Katherine Dexter glanced up and saw him for the first time in her adult life, he really wasn't himself. He'd been driving all day, driving hard, driving as if a whole gibbering horde of demons was on his tail with their talons drawn and their black leathery wings beating him about the head and shrieking doom in his ears. Something had seized him at breakfast that morning, an agitation, a jolt of the nerves that was like a switch thrown inside him, his whole being and private interior self taking off in a sudden frenzy like a spooked horse or a runaway automobile. That was why he'd had to leave his chauffeur behind when they stopped for gasoline at a feed store in Medford and the man never knew it till he came out from behind the shed where he was relieving himself to see the car hurtling up the road (nothing personal and Stanley wished him well, he did, but when the switch was thrown there was nothing he could do about it), Stanley driving on himself in the Mercedes roadster that was exactly like the one John Jacob Astor had entered in the New York-to-Buffalo endurance run two years earlier, ramming along down roads that were no better than cartpaths in a tornado of dust, flying chickens and furiously yapping dogs. He didn't stop at all till he got to Danvers, the throttle open wide all the way, the engine screaming, and he breathless with the adrenaline rush of beating along at speeds in excess of twenty miles an hour.

At Danvers he got down, shaking so hard he was afraid his legs wouldn't hold him upright, and already there was a crowd gathering, farmers in overalls and their red-faced wives, children on whirling legs, the man who sold insurance and the bank clerk just released to his lunch hour. Stanley tried to manage a smile, and he knew he must have been a sight, six foot four and looking like a man from Mars in his goggles and leather cap and the sweat-drenched greatcoat all furred with dust, feathers and moribund insects, but his facial muscles didn't seem to want to cooperate. He lifted a feeble hand in greeting or warning or capitulation, he didn't know what or which, and staggered into the restaurant next to the barber shop with the sign in the window that said HAIRCUT & SHAVE Two BITS.

Inside it was cool and dark, walls paneled in pine, a scent of sweet pine sap at war with the cooking smells, boiled wienerwurst, fried onions, beef gravy, lard vaporizing in the pan. Stanley couldn't see a thing at first, dazed from the drive and the sun and the flywheel spinning round unchecked somewhere in the middle of his chest, under his sternum, and it wasn't his heart, it was something else, the switch thrown, the throttle on full, everything rushing, rushing. And what did he want? A sandwich, that was all. And something to drink. Soda water. A Coca-Cola. Root beer. But why was it so dark in here? It took him a moment, racing and whirling, though he was standing stock-still two feet inside the door, every face turned to him, to realize he was still wearing his goggles. And further, that his goggles were encrusted with a filthy opaque scrim of road dirt and insect parts, making night of day and sorrow of joy and creating fear where there was nothing to fear. He lifted the goggles and pushed them back up atop his head.

And saw ... a waitress. Standing right there in front of him with her womanly shape and her fine and interesting closely gathered womanly features-and her eyes, her eyes with a question in them. "Will you be having luncheon today, sir?" she was saying, and everybody in the place, at the counter and seated at the dark-wood tables, was hanging on the answer.

Stanley: "Yes. Yes, I'd like that. Luncheon, yes."

The Waitress: "Can I show you to a table?"

Stanley: "Yes. Certainly. Of course. That's just what I need. A table." But he didn't move.

The Waitress: "Maybe you'd like to clean up first, in the lavatory?"

Stanley: "Excuse me?"

The Waitress (movement at the door now, the crowd drawn to the roadster beginning to disperse and filter into the restaurant for a gla.s.s of water and some soda crackers and a good long look at this dusty apparition in the long trailing coat): "I said, maybe you'd like to clean up? The lavatory's in back there, down the hall, first door to your left."

And then Stanley was moving again, the flywheel spinning, down the hall, through the door and into the lavatory, sink and toilet and last year's calendar on the wall. He stripped off the leather cap and goggles all in one motion, shrugged off the coat and found a hook for it on the back of the door. He stood over the toilet and relieved himself, throwing back his head to look up into the pigeon-haunted opacity of the skylight, chicken wire set in the gla.s.s for reinforcement. The noise of his urine against the porcelain was the most mundane sound in the world, a trickle and splash that took him back to the camp in the Adirondacks, he and Harold making water against the rocks like Iroquois raiders and Mama never knowing a thing about it. He saw the granite promontories, slabs of gray weathered rock layered like the skin of an onion, the fir trees stark against the iron water, and his fish, the gleaming iridescent thing he'd pulled from the secret depths and the guide saying it was the biggest lake trout he'd ever seen and Stanley should be proud-and he was proud.

He was winding down. The switch clicked off. It was all right, just nerves, that was all. He ran the water in the sink and that was good too, the sound of it, the smell of that lavatory, and then he looked into the mirror and there was nothing there. No one. No person. No Stanley Robert McCormick, son of Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper. Just the wall behind him and the stall with the toilet. It was a trick, that was it, a trick mirror, the back wall painted there to scale and sealed behind a pane of translucent gla.s.s. He lifted his hand to the gla.s.s and touched it, and that was strange and frightening, because he could feel it, hard and real, but he couldn't see his hand reflected there.

The switch. It was off still, shut firmly and decisively off somewhere back there in the Adirondacks and the belly of that fish, that trout, but there was a finger on it now and the finger was itching to flick it on again, to start the cycle all over and the racing and the fear that was nameless and formless but no less terrifying for all that. He turned abruptly from the mirror and forced his head down till he could take in one thing at a time and build the world back to normalcy like a child with a set of wooden blocks, one block atop the other till a castle fortress rose from the center of the rug in the ballroom, towers, battlements and all. His shoes, he was staring at his shoes. They were not black. They were brown, but the brown was dust, road dust, and the road dust was there because he'd been motoring across country-and he'd been motoring for his nerves, to settle them, to relax and ma.s.sage them like overused muscles. What had Dr. Favill advised? A break from the Harvester Company, a vacation. "Why not something bracing? " he'd asked in all his rhetorical fervor. "A walking tour of the Hebrides? The Swiss Alps?" All right. And there were the cuffs of his trousers, sure, and the skirts of his jacket, his shirt front, and this, this was his tie, dangling loose.

He was ready. Ready for anything. And he swung back precipitately on the mirror, steeled and ready, and it was the biggest mistake he'd ever made, the switch thrown right back on again and no stopping it now: he was there, he was there in the mirror, all right, his hands and his cla.s.s ring and his suit and the shoulders it concealed, but instead of his head, Stanley Robert McCormick son of Cyrus Hall McCormick inventor of the mechanical reaper's head, there was the head of a dog. His eyes were the dog's eyes and the dog was him. That shrank him. That sent him down. A dog? Why a dog? He'd always liked dogs-he thought of Digger the beagle while looking at the dog in the mirror-but this was an ugly dog, a rutting stinking l.u.s.ting un-Christian unredeemed wh.o.r.emongering woman-ruining boxer dog, with a staved-in face and a tongue that hung down like a limp red phallus all smeared with the j.i.s.m that was its drool....

He was out again in the hallway, the lavatory door sighing closed behind him, a murmur of voices and the sounds and smells of cooking out there before him, and his feet carried him there, wanting something-a sandwich and a root beer-but did they serve dogs? There, out of the hallway now and standing rigid by the coatrack and every shining face and every furtive eye turned to him, and ...

The Waitress (again): "Are you ready for your table now, sir? Sir?"

Stanley: "I'm ... I don't think I'm ... I can't ... I-I don't think I'm hungry anymore-"

The Waitress (blanching, pinching, shrinking): "That's fine, absolutely. It happens to me all the time, one minute I'm wanting a slice of pie just as if I could die for it-lemon meringue's my favorite-and the next minute I feel like I just got done eating a cow and I couldn't hold another bite.... Well. You take care now."

The switch was on and it got him back through the door and into the street and past the crowd of gapers and auto fanciers and barefoot kids out of school for the summer, and then he was on the road again, driving fast, h.e.l.l-bent for leather, boxer dogs, winged things and womanly waitresses all left panting in his wake.

What helped him that day, as paradoxical as it may seem, was a flat tire. Flats were as common as rain in those days, when roads were unpaved, tires scarce and garages, mechanics and gasoline stations nonexistent, and every motorist routinely carried a jack and tire iron, an air pump, tire patches and spare inner tubes, in addition to as much surplus fuel and oil as he could find room for. So too Stanley. Usually he would get out and stretch his legs while the chauffeur repaired the tire and remounted the wheel, but on this occasion the chauffeur was back in Medford and the road, as far as he could see in either direction, was empty. And clearly, the car just wasn't going to go much farther with a punctured tire and blown inner tube.

Stanley climbed down from the car. It was the last day of August, lazy, hot and still, not a breath of breeze, solid white clouds bunched like fists along the horizon. He could smell the gra.s.s, acres of it, an infinity of gra.s.s, gra.s.s and weeds and rank shoddy stands of sumac against a complex of trees so thick and variegated he might have been in the Amazon instead of Ma.s.sachusetts. Tiger moths floated up out of the roadside weeds, gra.s.shoppers impaled themselves on spears of light, cows looked on stupidly from the fields. Without thinking twice he sloughed off his coat and jacket, peeled back his goggles, and bent to the cool substantial handle of the car jack, and the switch had already shut off, so dead and null and detached from the place inside him where it had been wired it was as if it had never existed, as if he hadn't raced and trembled and seen a dog staring back at him in the lavatory mirror at the restaurant where he'd tried to eat and couldn't. All memory of it was gone, vanished, erased. He was a man at the side of a country road, stopped somewhere between a town and a village, changing a tire.

He got his hands black, and the grit of the road worked itself into the knees of his trousers. There were grease smears on his shirt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and puddled in the dust. And he burned, his face reddened till it looked as if he'd been slapped to consciousness, faded, and been slapped again. But he did it. He changed the tire, without help, thanks or advice from anybody, and as he mounted the running board and slipped back behind the wheel, he felt as if he could do anything, brave any danger, as tough and intrepid as Sitka Charley, the Malemute Kid, Jack London himself.

The mood carried him to Beverly, got him down out of the car to ask about local accommodations and purchase fuel at the general store, and it swept him right across that vibrant glowing greensward of a croquet lawn and into the field of Katherine Dexter's keen sciential vision. He bathed, changed, combed his hair and trimmed his mustache in the mirror, and there he was, reproduced just like anybody else, and he even went so far as to wink at his own image in the gla.s.s. And then he went down to dinner, and he'd never been so hungry in his life.

The dining room was lively, full of vacationers bending to their soup and chops amid a subdued clatter of silverware and a crepitating hum of conversation that was soothing and rea.s.suring at the same time, and after standing in the vestibule a moment, Stanley allowed the maitre d' to show him to a table. When the waiter appeared, Stanley thought he might have a gla.s.s of wine for the stimulus-he was feeling exhilarated from his feat of driving and the adventure of the tire, and he wanted to prolong the sensation. He gazed out idly over the crowd of diners, the animated faces, the busy elbows, the pleasure everyone seemed to be taking in the smallest things, and he didn't notice Katherine, not at first, and he was thinking how pleasant it was to be sitting in that dining room way up north of Boston, roving free and with no one to account to, like a knight errant, if knights had automobiles. Then the wine arrived, chilled, in a bucket of ice, and the waiter presented him with the menu.