O"Kane unfolded the pellet of newsprint, smoothed out the wrinkles on the table, and began to read: EX-HARVESTER PRES TO HAVE MONKEY GLAND TRANSPLANT.
Mr. Harold McCormick, former president of International Harvester, whose sudden marriage last year to the Polish chanteuse, Madame Ganna Walska, rocked the company and scandalized the nation, has gone into hospital in Chicago for urologic surgery. His surgeon, Dr. V P. Lespina.s.se, known as "the dean of gland transplantation," is said to be experimenting with the use of monkey glands to improve Mr. McCormick"s chances of fathering children with his young wife. Madame Walska had no comment, except to say that her husband was "insatiable in his search for the realization of the physical demands of marriage-insatiable because they were unattainable for him anymore."
When he looked up, Mr. McCormick was wearing the strangest expression on his face, as if he"d just pulled himself up onto solid ice only to have it give way and plunge him back into the dark chilling waters all over again. "Monkeys," he said bitterly, "why does it always have to be monkeys?"
And then there was the earthquake.
It struck just before seven on June 29, 1925, and it flipped O"Kane up into the air above his bed, where he"d been sleeping off the effects of several boilermakers and a woman whose name he couldn"t remember, turned him over and dropped him back down again as neatly as an omelet flipped in a pan. Everything in his field of vision was alive, just like in his hallucinations the last time he"d given up drinking, but this was no hallucination. The painting over the bed came down on him, impaling one of the gamboling kittens on the bedpost, the wardrobe skittered across the room and toppled with a crash, plaster rained down, and still everything shook and danced and jittered as if the floor was electrified. It was exactly like being on a train coming into the station and the engineer hauling too hard on the brakes.
After pulling on his pants and shoes, O"Kane rushed headlong into the hall, where dust infested the air and the banister on the landing had given way in a conspiracy of splintered wood. Below, in Mrs. Fitzmaurice"s immaculate parlor, a welter of bricks and lath lay scattered over the carpet, and he could see where the building next door had poked its elbow through the wall. Like the hero he was, O"Kane a.s.sisted all the ladies out into the street and then spent the next ten hours running from one place to another, rescuing a child here, battling flames there, mad with the adrenal rush of it, soot-blackened and bleeding and hatless and shirtless, galvanized in the moment.
When the dust cleared, it was found that most of the older buildings in town were destroyed or severely damaged-the Fithian Building, the Mortimer Cook Building, St. Francis Hospital, the Potter Theater, the Diblee Mansion on the mesa to the south of town, the old Spanish Mission itself-and that three people had been killed (two of them when a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank crashed through the roof of the Arlington Hotel) and more than fifty injured. President Coolidge ordered the USS Arkansas Arkansas up from San Diego to give medical aid and detach a squadron of marines to patrol the streets against looters. up from San Diego to give medical aid and detach a squadron of marines to patrol the streets against looters.
Telephone lines were down, of course, and it was past five before O"Kane was able to get news of Riven Rock. He could picture the whole place in ruins-there was no way in the world that rigid rock structure could have survived such a shaking-and he thought about Mr. McCormick, sure, but it was Giovannella he was most worried for. Giovannella, who"d been in command of the kitchen four years now without incident, Giovannella, his sworn enemy who shrugged off his every advance and yet threw up the children to him constantly-yes, children: the infant girl she gave birth to in the summer of 1920 was named Edwina and had the same glaucous Dingle Bay eyes as little Guido. He loved her. He worshiped her. Mooned at her from the kitchen doorstep (he was forbidden to set foot inside), wrote her impa.s.sioned letters (which she never opened), begged her to-yes-marry him. That Giovannella. Giovannella Dimucci Capolupo, the most stubborn woman on G.o.d"s green earth, mother of his children, the love of his life-"You had your chance, Eddie," she said, "and you wasted it"-he was worried for her.
He was battling a blaze in a lunchroom down near the foot of State Street with an army of boys and men and soot-blackened women in kerchiefs-the bucket brigade, up from the sea, hand over hand-when he saw O"Mara limping up the street toward him. "O"Mara!" he shouted, dropping the bucket at his feet and rushing across the shattered pavement to grab the man by the narrow wedge of his shoulders. "What happened out there? Is anybody hurt?"
O"Mara gave him a distant look, as if he didn"t recognize him, but that was because of his wandering eyes, which you never could pin down. "The garage collapsed," he said, shaking out a cigarette and putting a match to it, "and all the cars got crushed. f.u.c.king destroyed, every one of them."
"And the house?"
"Still standing. There"s n.o.body hurt but Caesar Bisordi"s wife out in the cottages-the roof fell in on her-and I"m the one Hull sent into town to fetch a doctor, as if I could find one in all this mess."
O"Kane turned directly away from him and started out on foot, and all those paradisiacal hills and beaches were turned h.e.l.lish, fires everywhere, cars wrapped around trees and standing up to their skirts in ditches, and everything so absolutely hushed and silent you would have thought the word had gone deaf. He reached Riven Rock by six-thirty and found Mr. McCormick, preternaturally excited, out on the lawn in the company of Mart and Dr. Brush and one of the huskier laborers, surveying the damage. "Eddie!" he cried out when he saw O"Kane coming up the drive, "we"ve had a terrible big pounding here, worse than anything you ever saw. It-it blew out all the windows and look there at where the stone facing came loose...." He paused to catch his breath. "But you-you"re naked, Eddie. And you"ve got no hat-"
"I"m all right, Mr. McCormick, don"t you worry about me-I"m just glad to see you"re safe and well. It was pretty bad down there," addressing them all now. "You should see It-the city"s pretty well destroyed, streetcars lying on their sides, houses tumbled into the street, fires everywhere. And dust-Jesus, I had to clamp a rag over my mouth to keep from choking on it. I got here as soon as I could-and I had to walk the whole way."
Brush began to bl.u.s.ter out some nonsense about the milk cows and roosters sounding the alarm just before the tremor hit, and everyone began talking at once. O"Kane turned to Mart. "How"s Giovannella?" he asked, but before Mart could answer, Mr. McCormick came right up to them, looming and twitching. "And you"re, you"re bleeding-you know that, Eddie? You-you"re naked and you-you"re bleeding-"
"It"s nothing," O"Kane said, and he looked into his employer"s face and smelled the rankness of his breath and saw the frenzy building in his eyes and gave Mart a nod: this was when he was most likely to bolt.
"Eddie, you"re bleeding, you"re bleeding-"
"She"s okay," Mart said, stepping back a pace to avoid Mr. McCormick and giving O"Kane a look that could have meant anything. "She"s in the kitchen."
"Yes," Brush boomed, closing in on them with his arms spread wide just as Mr. McCormick shied away, "the house stood up pretty nicely, considering the magnitude of this thing-they"re saying it"s the worst earthquake since the one that hit Tokyo two years back or even the ought-six quake in San Francisco, for the main and simple ... but go ahead, Eddie, go on in there and get yourself cleaned up and see to the cook. We didn"t want to bring her out here, of course," he said, lowering his voice, "because of Mr. McCormick-and don"t worry about him, we"ve got Mr. Vitalio here to see to his needs." He glanced up to where Mr. McCormick was now pacing up and down the sward in front of the house, as agitated as he"d been over the gopher, and then he glanced at the laborer, a big black-haired wop with muscles you could see through his shirt. "Isn"t that right, Mr. Vitalio?"
The wop glanced uneasily at Mr. McCormick"s manic figure, as if he was expected to wrestle him to the ground at any moment-which he might well have to do before the day was out-and then he turned back to Dr. Brush and folded his arms across his chest. "That"s right," he said.
"Okay, then"-O"Kane was already turning away-"I"m going to go in and see about Giovannella."
But before he could escape, Brush caught him by the arm. "Oh, Eddie, I almost forgot: we might have to move Mr. McCormick into the theater building-just till we have somebody come out to see whether the house is safe or not-and I"ll want you to stay here tonight, for the main and simple reason that it"ll help calm him and we can"t really expect to see Nick or Patrick anytime soon, can we?"
O"Kane just nodded, and then he broke away, trotted up the drive and went round back of the house and into the kitchen. The place was shadowy and dark-the lights were out, of course-and there was litter everywhere. All the pots and pans had come down from their hooks, the cabinet drawers had disgorged their contents and jerked themselves out onto the floor, the stove was shoved out from the wall and the big meat locker in the back was tilted crazily against the doorframe. "Giovannella?" he called. "Giovannella? Are you there?"
At first there was no response, and he waded into the gloom, kicking aside saucepans, cheese graters and broken crockery, gla.s.s everywhere. "Giov? You here?"
Just then an aftershock hit the place with a sudden wallop, as if the earth were a long raveling whip and the house and kitchen riding on the business end of it. Things fell. Plaster sifted down. There was a clatter and a boom and then everything was still again. That was when Giovannella cried out-and it wasn"t a shriek of terror or a plea or a cry for help so much as a curse of frustration and rage.
He found her in the broom closet, trembling, her eyes climbing out of her head, and her clothes-ap.r.o.n, dress, stockings, shoes, all of it-steaming and wet with what he at first took to be blood. His heart froze. She looked up at him, her legs folded under her, her clothes saturated not with blood, he saw now-and smelled, smelled it too-but marinara sauce, and every emotion was concentrated in her eyes. "Eddie," she said. Just that: "Eddie."
He wasn"t wearing a shirt, his chest and arms filthy, a crust of blood like a badge over his right nipple; she was crumpled in the closet, as wet and redolent as a meatball. She"d cleaned up the kitchen three times already, working like a slave, like a maniac, and three times the after-shocks had brought everything down again, including the big pot of sauce she was making to feed everybody, because there was nothing, nothing to eat, and the poor people in the cottages with their stoves collapsed and their iceboxes smashed, what were they going to do? He saw it all in an instant, and if he needed the details to complete the picture, he would get them later, when night had fallen and there was no light but for the kerosene lanterns and Mr. McCormick was settled in the theater building and everybody on the estate had eaten sandwiches with fresh-squeezed orange juice and he took her deep into the big deserted stone house and found a bed and lay in it with her till the light came and he never wanted to get up again.
As for Mr. McCormick, he adapted readily enough to the theater building while repairs went on in the main house (after a short but violent period of adjustment, that is), but all the spirit seemed to have gone out of him when the earth stopped shaking. There was no novelty anymore, nothing new, and he sank back into the mora.s.s of his hopeless and stultified mind, so that by the time Dr. Kempf came to redeem him he"d regressed so far that O"Kane and Mart had to drag him into the shower bath each morning, force the deadweight of his limbs into his clothes and spoon-feed him at the table. And that was no pleasure at all.
Dr. Kempf didn"t rush into things the way Brush had, and he didn"t bl.u.s.ter or boom or pin Mr. McCormick to the floor-better yet, he wasn"t a Kraut and he didn"t have a beard. He was forty-one years old when he took over for Dr. Brush in the autumn of 1926, the author of two books (The Autonomic Functions and the Personality, (The Autonomic Functions and the Personality, 1918, and 1918, and Psychopathology, Psychopathology, 1920) as well as innumerable learned papers, and he"d most recently been a clinical psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth"s Hospital in Washington, D.C., before setting himself up in private practice in New York. He was of medium height and build, the hair on his crown was so spa.r.s.e and so severely slicked and pomaded it looked painted on and he had a dazzling full-lipped smile that was the key to his success on the interpersonal level. That and his eyes, which were a sympathetic and liquid brown-and perfectly round, as round as twin monocles set in his head. The McCormicks wanted to make him rich-or so it seemed to the amazed nurses when they discovered how much he was making per month: a cool ten thousand dollars. Mart, who had no great head for sums, was nonetheless quick to point out that that added up to $120,000 a year, more even than the King of Abyssinia could expect to make. If there was a King of Abyssinia. 1920) as well as innumerable learned papers, and he"d most recently been a clinical psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth"s Hospital in Washington, D.C., before setting himself up in private practice in New York. He was of medium height and build, the hair on his crown was so spa.r.s.e and so severely slicked and pomaded it looked painted on and he had a dazzling full-lipped smile that was the key to his success on the interpersonal level. That and his eyes, which were a sympathetic and liquid brown-and perfectly round, as round as twin monocles set in his head. The McCormicks wanted to make him rich-or so it seemed to the amazed nurses when they discovered how much he was making per month: a cool ten thousand dollars. Mart, who had no great head for sums, was nonetheless quick to point out that that added up to $120,000 a year, more even than the King of Abyssinia could expect to make. If there was a King of Abyssinia.
He settled himself, along with his wife, Dr. Helen Dorothy Clarke Kempf, at Meadow House, a princely stone-and-frame dwelling the McCormicks had erected on the southern verge of the estate for the comfort of the physicians, who could thus be near at hand in the event of an emergency. Dr. Brush had lived there for a time, and Dr. Hoch too, but Brush had opted eventually for town life and Hoch had moved on to less roomy accommodations, six feet underground. O"Kane tried to get some sort of fix on the new doctor-he didn"t want to get his hopes up too high and yet he couldn"t help himself-and during Kempf"s first week he attempted to read one of the doctor"s learned articles in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It was called, promisingly enough, "A Study of the Anaesthesia, Convulsions, Vomiting, Visual Constriction, Erythemia and Itching of Mrs. V G.," but it was dry as the stuffing of an old mattress and O"Kane nodded off twice just trying to get through it. In fact, in later years he kept a copy of it at his bedside as a soporific in case he couldn"t get to sleep. It was called, promisingly enough, "A Study of the Anaesthesia, Convulsions, Vomiting, Visual Constriction, Erythemia and Itching of Mrs. V G.," but it was dry as the stuffing of an old mattress and O"Kane nodded off twice just trying to get through it. In fact, in later years he kept a copy of it at his bedside as a soporific in case he couldn"t get to sleep.
The man himself was easier to read, thank G.o.d, and O"Kane liked him right from the start, from the first minute he walked into the room with his uncomplicated smile and took O"Kane"s hand in a good dry firm honest grip. Brush was there at the time, hearty and big-bellied and roaring, but Kempf had been closeted with his predecessor all morning and made it clear that O"Kane was the man he wanted to talk to. They were in the office in the theater building, three in the afternoon, day one of Dr. Kempf"s regime, Brush packing his books and effects in cardboard containers, Mr. McCormick napping quietly in the stone house under Mart"s semi-watchful eye. Kempf asked a few questions about Mr. McCormick"s present state, but Brush kept interfering, so finally he took O"Kane by the arm and steered him out into the theater itself, a cavernous high room with the chairs all set out in rows, acoustic panels on the walls and a deep mid-afternoon hush hanging in the air. They sat in two folding chairs under one of the big iron-girded windows, and Dr. Kempf leaned forward confidentially. "So tell me, Eddie," he said, and his voice was like Dr. Hamilton"s, smooth and hypnotic, "can it really be true that Mr. McCormick has had no contact whatever with a woman since, what was it, 1907? 1908?"
"Contact? He hasn"t even seen seena woman, not even on our drives, which we"ve been very careful about, back roads and all of that."
"And why is that?"
"Too dangerous. In the old days, in the beginning, when we first came out here, that is-"
"Yes?" Kempf was intent and concentrated, the annular eyes, the shining smile, as fixed on Eddie O"Kane as the needle of a compa.s.s.
"Well, he would attack them-women. Beat them. Maul them." O"Kane was remembering that girl on the train, the one going home to Cincinnati with her mother, and the way Mr. McCormick had pinned her down and forced his hand up her privates-and how he"d brought his tongue into play and licked her throat like a cow at a salt lick. Or a bull. A rutting bull.
"Did anyone ask him why he had all this hostility toward women? Dr. Hamilton? Dr. Meyer? Did you?"
O"Kane shifted in the chair. The seat was narrow and hard. "It was a s.e.xual thing," he said, "very disturbing for all concerned. I was embarra.s.sed, to tell you the truth. And besides which, he went catatonic about then, and n.o.body could ask him anything-or you could ask all you wanted, but he wouldn"t answer."
"But that was a long time ago," Kempf said.
"Eighteen years. Nineteen. Something like that."
Kempf leaned back in the chair, the hinges creaking under his weight. He had his hands wrapped behind his neck as if he were basking in the sun and he closed his eyes a minute, deep in thought. "He hasn"t made much progress, has he?" he said finally, snapping open his eyes and bringing the chair back to level again.
O"Kane could hardly deny it. He shrugged. "He has his periods." "I"ve been studying this, Eddie," the doctor said, handing him a manila folder with several sheets of bound typescript inside. It was a year-by-year account of Mr. McCormick"s condition, from the onset of his illness right on up to the present, and as O"Kane glanced over the entries he had the uneasy feeling that he was reading a shadow biography of himself-he was the one laboring just off the page here, he was the one living, breathing, drinking, s.h.i.tting, sleeping and whoring through all those compressed and hopeless years: In 1908, when the patient was seen by Drs. Kraepelin and Hoch, he was diagnosed as suffering from the catatonic form of dementia praec.o.x. At that time he was tube-fed and refused to walk.
In 1909, there occurred some mental clearness, then delirous excitement, after which he became dull. He continued to be spoon-fed and refused to move his bowels, but began to walk with the aid of his nurses.
They were just words on a page, clinical shorthand, as cold and indifferent as a news report of carnage in China or the eruption of a Peruvian volcano, but O"Kane felt himself oddly moved. The poor man, he was thinking, the poor man, and he wasn"t thinking only of Mr. McCormick. He skipped ahead and read on: In 1916, music became a regular activity. He talked more coherently and had more purposeful activity. He continued to wet the bed, was restrained during certain hours, was mixed and incoherent in his ideas, impulsive, and at times drank his own urine. He was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praec.o.x by Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, who now agreed with Drs. Hoch and Meyer.
And then again: In 1924, he pursued endless corrections and endless subst.i.tutions for Christmas cards. He had impulsive outbursts, began to stammer. He slumped in his seat while riding. He fussed about a calendar, about his father having received undeserved credit for the invention of the reaper.
In 1925, he read infrequently, was less willing to discuss his impersonal problems. The oddities of gait persisted and for a period he had to be spoon-fed. Because of an earthquake he had been removed to the theater building, on which occasion he tried to batter down the door.
When O"Kane handed the folder back to Kempf, there were tears in his eyes. He had to pause to dig out his handkerchief and dab at them, and then he blew his nose in a long lugubrious release of phlegm and emotion. "No, doctor," he said finally, "there hasn"t been the kind of improvement I-we all-hoped for, not at all."
Kempf was watching him closely, eyes glistening, the hair glued to his scalp. "You know what I find missing here, Eddie?" he said.
O"Kane looked up, took a deep breath. He shook his head.
"Treatment. That"s what"s missing. The patient has had all the finest minds here to examine him and diagnose his condition, quite accurately I"m sure, but his treatment has been almost purely custodial to this point, am I right?"
O"Kane could only blink. What was he suggesting-monkey glands? The talking cure?
"I think I can help him, Eddie-through intensive daily sessions, two hours at a sitting, seven days a week. I treated upward of three thousand cases at Saint Elizabeth"s, applying Freud"s a.n.a.lytic methods to patients suffering from hysteria, neurasthenia and a whole range of other neuroses, and to cases of schizophrenia too, and Mr. McCormick"s guardians have brought me here at great expense to devote myself solely to him."
"You don"t mean the talking cure, do you?" O"Kane said, and he couldn"t hide his astonishment. "Because Dr. Brush tried that back in the teens, and let me tell you, it was a disaster."
Kempf had begun to laugh-he didn"t want to, you could see that, but now he gave up all pretense of sobriety and threw back his head and howled. When he came back to himself in a flurry of breastbone pounding and head shaking, the room seemed much smaller to O"Kane. He felt the blood come to his face. "I don"t see the joke," he said.
"I don"t mean to-" the doctor began and then had to break off again and suppress a final chuckle. "Listen, Eddie, I know what you"re thinking, and I don"t mean to be critical, but psychoa.n.a.lysis has come a long way since then-and it isn"t just a parlor trick or a kind of psychological compress you squeeze on one day and forget about the next. It"s an ongoing and dynamic process-it may take years. And it may seem as if the patient-Mr. McCormick, in this case-is becoming yet more disturbed before he begins to improve, because of the repressed material we need to bring to the surface, deep fears and anxieties, s.e.xual matters, the whole construct of his personality. We"re going to open up all his old festering wounds and we"re going to sew them up and bandage them right. Do you understand me?"
"Sure," O"Kane said-what else could he say?-but he was doubtful. Doubtful in the extreme.
"His wife will be the first," Kempf was saying, "that"s only right. Of course, that"s sometime in the future yet, but our goal is to normalize his relations across the board with-" "
"You don"t mean women, do you? "
Kempf gave him a look. "Yes, of course. What could be more abnormal, abnormal, for any man, than to be shut away from half the population of the world? Good G.o.d, he didn"t even get to see his mother before she died-how can you expect a man to improve in a situation like that?" for any man, than to be shut away from half the population of the world? Good G.o.d, he didn"t even get to see his mother before she died-how can you expect a man to improve in a situation like that?"
"You can"t," O"Kane heard himself say, and he"d known it all along, they all had, he and Nick and Pat and Mart: give him women. Women. Women would cure him, sure they would.
I " V E SEEN YOUR FACE While Dr. Kempf was at Riven Rock, quietly revolutionizing Stanley"s treatment, Katherine and Jane Roessing were in Europe, beating the drums for Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement. As 1926 pa.s.sed into 1927 and she made her fruitless annual visit to Riven Rock and Stanley"s voice on the phone seemed weaker and less steady and ever more distant-the voice of a stranger, a phantom, someone she"d encountered in a reverie so long ago she couldn"t recall even the vaguest blurred outline of his face-Katherine was already planning for the Geneva Population Conference, to be held that August at Prangins. And why birth control? Because without it a woman was chattel and nothing more, a breeder, a prize mare or sow, and why educate a sow? Why hire one? Why teach her science and maths and the workings of the world? Pregnant and bloated every year of her life from sixteen to forty and beyond, every woman was handcuffed by her husband"s s.e.xual urges, and where was the hope of advancement in that? Besides, as Jane was quick to point out, it seemed axiomatic that the more ignorant and degraded you were, the more you bred-the Irish, Italians, Swedes and Bohemians whelped ten babies for every one a woman of their cla.s.s had. And where would that leave the race a generation hence if it kept on in that direction?
All right. So she stood in line at customs in Boston, her heart thundering in her ears, and smuggled in two steamer trunks and a handbag full of diaphragms for free distribution to women at Sanger"s clinics, and she pet.i.tioned congressmen and used her influence in Washington and spent Stanley"s money-and her own-on the clinics, the literature, the fight. It was all she had. Because she had no husband and no baby of her own and the Dexters would die with her-she would be the last of her line; she had no illusions about that.
She began to intuit as much all those years ago, after the headlong disaster of her honeymoon (it was like jumping off a bridge, over and over again, day after day, night after night), but she wouldn"t admit it, not even to herself. She could have divorced. She could have accepted the McCormicks" terms and had the marriage annulled. She could have faded away and emerged into another life altogether, her own life, remarried and secure, a life of babies and diapers and wet nurses, perambulators, primers and little lifeless porcelain dolls with little lifeless smiles frozen on their faces. But she didn"t. She couldn"t. She"d made her choice and she would live with it.
She and Stanley had taken separate cabins on the Brittania Brittania on their return to the States in the spring of 1905, and she was as close then to giving up on him as she"d ever been. It was a rough crossing, the Atlantic black and jagged, the whole great shuddering steel liner thrust up out of the water like a feather in a fishpond and then shoved back down again till the steel decks were awash and the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed the boiling spume into the air. She was sick the entire time. So sick she could barely crawl to the head and heave up a wad of nothing into the sea-stinking vacuum in front of her face. Stanley burst in on her at random-two in the morning or two in the afternoon, it was all the same to him-and he was white to the roots of his hair, his feet riding the deck beneath him as if he were a fly stuck to a windowpane. She smelled of herself. She was embarra.s.sed. One minute he would be solicitous, helping her to her bunk, dabbing at her face with a warm washcloth, and the next he would be shouting "Wh.o.r.e! Wh.o.r.e of Babylon!" Screaming it, howling it, his whole face swollen and his fists beating at the air. on their return to the States in the spring of 1905, and she was as close then to giving up on him as she"d ever been. It was a rough crossing, the Atlantic black and jagged, the whole great shuddering steel liner thrust up out of the water like a feather in a fishpond and then shoved back down again till the steel decks were awash and the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed the boiling spume into the air. She was sick the entire time. So sick she could barely crawl to the head and heave up a wad of nothing into the sea-stinking vacuum in front of her face. Stanley burst in on her at random-two in the morning or two in the afternoon, it was all the same to him-and he was white to the roots of his hair, his feet riding the deck beneath him as if he were a fly stuck to a windowpane. She smelled of herself. She was embarra.s.sed. One minute he would be solicitous, helping her to her bunk, dabbing at her face with a warm washcloth, and the next he would be shouting "Wh.o.r.e! Wh.o.r.e of Babylon!" Screaming it, howling it, his whole face swollen and his fists beating at the air.
When they landed she went straight to her mother"s-and there was no mention of the house they were planning in Marion, no mention of a life together at all-and Stanley went home to Chicago. To the Harvester Company. To his duties. To his mother. Katherine didn"t get out of bed for a week. She cried till there was no fluid left in her body, her mother and the housemaid plying her all the while with broth, tea and ginger ale. That was the worst. That was the low point-lower even than when she"d broken off the engagement. She was separated from her husband after only six months of marriage, no smiling tall handsome figure of a man to show off at the theater, parties and teas, Abigail Slaney with three adorable children already and Bessie Dietz with four, her schoolmates all grown matronly and plump in their advent.i.tious fecundity and she a withered root, a failure. A failure, after all.
And then the telegrams started arriving. A blizzard of telegrams, a spring storm. So many that she got to know by face, name and footfall every Western Union delivery boy in the Back Bay, and when she fell off to sleep at night bicycle bells jingled through her dreams. Stanley missed her. He hated his job. He hated the whole enduring concept of reapers, tractors and harvesters. He hated his mother. He wasn"t feeling well. Cyrus was president and Harold was vice president, but Katherine was his wife, his only wife, and he loved her, wanted to fall at her feet and worship her, wanted to quit his job and come to her in Boston and build a house for her in Marion and fill it full of things and live happily. Ever after.
He came in on the train this time, less than two months after they"d parted, and this time it was she who met him at the station, flushed and expectant. And when she saw him there in the crowd, the face of him, the brooding masculine beauty and power, Stanley Robert McCormick, the genius, the artist, the millionaire, she fell in love all over again. He took her in his arms right there on the platform and they embraced for all the world to see, shoe-shine boys and porters and peanut vendors and silly little women in silly little hats, and she didn"t care a whit. She held him, just held him, for what seemed like hours.
Josephine couldn"t disguise her pleasure. And she couldn"t have been prouder and noisier and more excited if Stanley was Teddy Roosevelt himself, returned triumphant from Havana all over again and plopped down in her front parlor. The ensuing month was one fete after another, the Stanley McCormicks toasted and congratulated from one house to the next, bluestocking Boston getting a look at the groom at last. All seemed well, and Stanley seemed to be enjoying himself, his nervous twitches and irritable moods all but evaporated, until one night they attended a dinner party given for them by Hugh and Claudia Dumphries on Beacon Hill and Stanley got it into his head that Butler Ames was among the guests.
They were eighteen at dinner, and Hugh, an old friend of Katherine"s mother and a celebrated landscape artist, stood to propose a toast. He was a fatigued-looking man, skeletally thin, with a gray tonsure and rectangular spectacles that distorted his colorless eyes; his preferred topic of conversation-his sole topic-was art and art history, and Katherine had thought Stanley would find him amusing. "To Katherine and Stanley," he proposed, lifting his gla.s.s at the head of the table.
Stanley was sitting to his immediate right. He"d been complaining all day about dogs and looking gla.s.ses, muttering under his breath in the cab on the way over, and Katherine should have seen it as a sign. "I won"t have it," he said, bolting up from the table as sixteen guests froze in place with their winegla.s.ses stalled in midair.
Hugh looked as puzzled as if the ceiling had cried out in pain or the walls begun to speak. He hunched his thin shoulders and gazed out myopically from the prison of his spectacles. "What?" he said. "What do you mean?"
"Stanley," Katherine warned, her voice tight in her throat.
Stanley ignored her. He was transformed, huge and threatening, looming over the table like a tree cut and wedged and about to thunder down on them. He pointed a finger at an innocuous-looking young man at the far end of the table whose name Katherine hadn"t quite caught when he was introduced at the door. "Not while he"s here," Stanley roared.
"Who?" half a dozen voices wondered.
Stanley trembled, tottered, swayed. His face was red. His finger shook as he pointed. "Him!"
The man he was indicating, ectomorphic and pale, with a fluff of apricot hair standing up straight from his head, looked over first one shoulder and then the other, utterly baffled. "Me?" he said.
"You!" Stanley bellowed, and Katherine got up from the table now to go to him, to calm him, to stop him. "You, friend. You! You! You"re, you"re a You"re, you"re a wife-stealer, wife-stealer, that"s what you are!" that"s what you are!"
Nothing was broken that night, not the innocent man"s head or their hosts" Wedgwood plate, but the dinner was a fiasco; after Katherine had got Stanley into the other room and calmed him and explained separately to the guests that her husband was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork at the Harvester Company, dinner went on, but Stanley didn"t utter a word more all evening, eating with a silent furious rect.i.tude that made them all-even his wife-cringe.
That was the end of the social whirl, and no matter how hard Katherine and her mother tried to put the best face on it, they had to admit that Stanley"s eccentricities had gone beyond the pale. Certainly everyone was eccentric to a degree, especially the most sensitive and artistic-Katherine"s Aunt Louisa never removed her boots, for instance, even to go to bed or to bathe, and Mrs. London, who lived two doors down from her mother, spoke of her aspidistras as if they were sentient beings with informed opinions on taxes and the munic.i.p.al elections-but neither was a danger to herself or others. And then there was Stanley"s family history to take into account, his sister Mary Virginia and his mother, who if she wasn"t actually unbalanced, was as close to the edge as normalcy would allow. Katherine agonized for days before deciding to call in a doctor-a psychiatrist, psychiatrist, and she could hardly bear to p.r.o.nounce the term aloud-but she remembered the look on Stanley"s face the day he hurled the vase across the room, the same look that came over him when he denounced her on the boat or ruined Hugh and Claudia"s party, and she went ahead with it. and she could hardly bear to p.r.o.nounce the term aloud-but she remembered the look on Stanley"s face the day he hurled the vase across the room, the same look that came over him when he denounced her on the boat or ruined Hugh and Claudia"s party, and she went ahead with it.
Discreet inquiries were made-no one in their set had ever needed a doctor of that that sort, and if they had they would never have admitted it-and on a leafy bright day in early August a very young-looking man with galloping palomino mustaches and two dull brown lidless eyes came up the walk of the house they"d taken in Brookline while their permanent residence awaited construction. His name was Dr. Jorimund Trudeau, and he"d had eleven years" experience at the Rockport Asylum for the Criminally Insane after taking his degree at Johns Hop-kins. The maid showed him into the room. sort, and if they had they would never have admitted it-and on a leafy bright day in early August a very young-looking man with galloping palomino mustaches and two dull brown lidless eyes came up the walk of the house they"d taken in Brookline while their permanent residence awaited construction. His name was Dr. Jorimund Trudeau, and he"d had eleven years" experience at the Rockport Asylum for the Criminally Insane after taking his degree at Johns Hop-kins. The maid showed him into the room.
Stanley was seated at a table by the window, poring over the plans for the new house, and Katherine had been pretending to read a magazine while the carpet crawled across the floor and the minute hand of the clock on the mantel advanced with a mechanical unconcern that made her want to scream aloud. She rose to greet the doctor, and Stanley gave him a quick startled look, though she"d been preparing him for this visit for days and they"d both agreed that he needed to consult a physician about his nerves, which were still-they both agreed-a bit overtaxed from all the recent change and excitement in their lives.
Introductions were made, Stanley rising gravely to take the doctor"s hand, and after an exchange of pleasantries about the weather and the season and the amount of fur the woolly bear caterpillars were carrying into the fall, Dr. Trudeau said, "So tell me, Mr. McCormick, how you"re feeling today-any nervous agitation? Anything troubling you? Business worries, that sort of thing?"
Stanley kept his head down. He had a T square in his hand, and he was making penciled alterations to the architect"s plans. "I feel slippery," he said.
The doctor exchanged a look with Katherine. "Slippery? How do you mean?"
Stanley turned his face to them, a pale hovering handsome face that hung like a moon over the world of the table and the ceaselessly altered plans. "Like a salamander," he said. "Like an eel. And all this room-you see this room? It"s like a big sucking f-funnel and I"m too covered in, in, well, slime slime to get a grip, do you know what I mean?" to get a grip, do you know what I mean?"
The doctor"s voice slid up the scale and he took on another tone altogether: "Do you happen to recall what day it is today, Mr. McCormick?"
Stanley shook his head. He grinned beautifully, heraldically. "Tuesday?"
"He"s been out of sorts lately," Katherine put in. "Really quite fl.u.s.tered."
"And what month?"
No response.
"Uh, could you tell me, generally, where we are at this moment-this house, I mean? The neighborhood? The state?"
Stanley looked down at the plans. It took him a moment, and when finally he spoke he addressed the table. "I-the Judges told me not to talk to you anymore."
It was at this point that Dr. Trudeau turned to Katherine. "Mrs. McCormick, I"m afraid I"m going to have to ask you to leave the room now, and I hope you won"t mind, but Mr. McCormick and I will need to consult in private from here on out-if you would, please?" And he rose to show her to the door of her own parlor.
Dazed, she left the room, the unread magazine rolled up like a wand in one hand, and dazed, she mounted the stairs, entered her bedroom, pulled back the covers and slid herself between them. It was the first time she"d been excluded, as if she could be of no help at all to her husband-as if, far from being a help, she might even be a hindrance-and it hurt her, hurt her all the way down to a place so deep inside even the biological sciences would have been hard-pressed to identify it. It was the first time, but it wouldn"t be the last.
Three days later, after having examined her husband for several hours each afternoon, Dr. Trudeau asked to have a minute alone with Katherine. Since Stanley was in the sitting room, blackening both sides of the plans with a freshly sharpened pencil, she took the doctor into the library. She was impatient with the man, because he"d cut her out like that right from the start, and she was apprehensive too, because of Stanley"s extremely odd replies not only to the doctor"s preliminary questions but to the more intimate and domestic ones she put to him in the course of a day, and as soon as they were settled she crossed her legs and demanded, "Well?"
The doctor pulled at the long cascading mustaches that were meant to distract the eye from his receding chin and parsimonious little mouth. He looked directly at her. "About your husband," he began, clearing his throat.