"Yes?"
"I"m afraid it"s more than nerves."
For Stanley"s part, he knew something was wrong, deeply wrong, dog-in-the-mirror wrong, Mary-Virginia wrong, and it so terrified him he felt the pain of it in every fiber and joint of his body, in the pulp of his teeth, singing out, pain, pain, pain, in his brain and his fingertips, cancerous pain, killing pain, and he wanted to cooperate with the doctor and find a way out of it, he really did. But the Judges were strict and implacable, they were captious and shrill, and they wouldn"t let him. He heard the doctor"s voice clearly enough, heard the questions addressed to him, but there was static all around him, a noise of grumbling and dissent, and it sometimes drowned out the thin piping psychological voice as if it were the dying gasp of those pinched and hairy lips. Still, Stanley was fighting it, a ritualistic fight no one would understand, two steps up and one step down, don"t step on the cracks, hold your breath for sixty seconds and the Judges will vanish with an obscene flap of their black robes, and when the doctor advised him to go off somewhere and live a simple stress-free rustic life for a while, a life of hiking (how they loved hiking, these doctors), wood chopping, long walks and meditation, he said yes, yes, of course, we"ll leave tomorrow.
Katherine found the place. It belonged to one of her mother"s bridge partners-or maybe it was her mother"s bridge partner"s mother-and they were able to lease it for two months without any fuss or trouble. It was in Maine, deep in the woods, a modest cabin of fourteen rooms and fourteen baths overlooking a lake, the leaves exploding all around them, simple tastes, simple fare, just Stanley and his wife, the chauffeur, the cook and two housemaids. Stanley chopped wood, and it was very therapeutic. He beat h.e.l.l out of that wood, utterly destroyed it, and yet he was creating something too-the fuel for their fire. And every morning he built the fire, the Judges carping over his shoulder, no you idiot, that"s not how you do it, you don"t stack the logs like that, it"ll never catch, where"s your sense, more kindling, more kindling, and he took his time, sometimes hours, but then the moment would come, triumphant and complete, and he"d apply the match and watch the whole thing blaze up. And Katherine. She was there. White-faced. Sweet. His wife. He loved her, joked with her, cut the Judges right off-and so what if she was a s.l.u.t, so what if she was all white underneath and her body a weapon of destruction and she as capable of that disappearing trick, that v.a.g.i.n.al sleight-of-hand, as the wh.o.r.e in Paris? So what?
Some days he wouldn"t speak to her, not a word. He"d fling himself out of bed, dress in casual clothes (shirt, collar, tie, sweater and sport coat) because this was the wild rural backcountry woods of Maine, after all, and then come to breakfast and there she"d be, full of white smiling cheerfulness, and the Judges would be at him, a game really, could he, would he, did he have the resourcefulness today to ignore her every word and gesture and shut her out completely? Of course he did. He was a man of iron. A man of steel. Inflexible. Inexorable. A walking trap, serrated teeth, snap, shut, game over. On other days, the game reversed itself, and he couldn"t stop talking to her, all sorts of silly nonsense about love and holding hands and sweethearts and the poems of Robert Herrick. She was there, right there with him, his wife, his love, Katherine, and that made him feel better.
One afternoon-there was a nip in the air, every leaf singed with it-he went down to the lake to find an old man perched there on the end of the boat dock, fishing. He didn"t remind Stanley of his father, really, this old man, but he was about the age of his father when he died, and he did have his father"s bellicose beard and unforgiving eyes and the boxy giant"s build, but that wasn"t it, that didn"t affect him at all. "Good afternoon," Stanley said, his feet leaping away from the cracks between the boards as he made his way up the dock. The water gleamed all around him in a sick watery way.
The old man-he wasn"t like Stanley"s father at all-glanced up from his pole and his bait and the float that bobbed in a liquid dream at the end of the line. "Afternoon," he said.
Stanley had reached the end of the dock now, a boat tethered there, beardy reeds, a smell of muck and decay. He loomed over the man, who was dangling his heavily shod feet over the lip of the gently quaking wooden structure, his feet lolling there, just lolling there, inches from the water. Stanley was very erect, very proper, the tight clasp of the collar, his beautifully brushed hair, his shoes glowing at the nether end of him like toeless hairless impervious new and improved feet-or better yet, hoofs. Hoofs of iron, hoofs of lead, hoofs of indestructible horn. "What are you doing," Stanley said, "fishing?"
"Ayeh," the old man replied.
"I fished once," Stanley said. "In the Adirondacks, when I was a boy. The guide said I should be proud."
The old man said nothing. He spat in the water, a circle of concentrated spittle, minuscule bubbles, floating there on the unbroken surface like something else altogether, like j.i.s.m, sperm, s.p.u.n.k. The float twitched at the end of the line, plunged suddenly, and the old man s.n.a.t.c.hed it back with a whip of the rod, the line hissing through the sunlit air, but there was nothing there, not even a fish"s disappointed lips, no bait fish either, just a hook. "That one," Stanley observed, "got away. "
A look, that was all: the old man gave him a look. "Ayeh," he said, fishing a minnow from the bucket beside him and impaling it on the wickedly curved device of the hook, where it wriggled in its pain, fishy pain, a pain not worth mentioning, dumb animals and dumber. And then the float shot through the air and slapped the water like the flat of a hand-thwap!-and in that moment Stanley"s mind failed him.
What happened next is entirely from the fisherman"s point of view because Stanley was no longer, in a sense, there. But the fisherman got wet, tattooed by those hard h.o.r.n.y shoes and then lifted right out of his collar and flung into the cold clean enveloping water. And he d.a.m.ned near drowned too, what with the cold and the weight of his clothes and boots, but it was his own two arms and legs and the McCormick money that saved him and hushed him and made him comfortable in the declining years of his old man"s life.
Katherine was upset-no, distraught would be more accurate. For days on end she had no one to talk to but the servants, Stanley haunting the place like a revenant, as silent as if he"d had his tongue cut out. They were together, yes, and he seemed calmer (but for the single terrifying incident with the fisherman at the boat dock), and yet he was more remote than ever. There would be nothing from him, no spark, no animation at all, and for hours he"d be gone in the forest or obsessively chopping wood-wood enough for a village-and he"d pa.s.s right by her as if she didn"t exist. That was the hardest thing. That made the breath catch in her throat and it darkened the room and put out the sun in the sky.
And then the next day he"d walk into the room completely transformed. "Katherine," he"d say, "do you remember that woman with the funny little dog in Nice?" and go off on a fascinating reminiscence of all the dogs in his life-and hers, because hadn"t she had dogs too? He would be attentive and affectionate, taking her arm when they went in to dine, rowing her round the lake for hours-no, no, she wasn"t to touch an oar-getting up from his reading to adjust the pillow behind her head. Sometimes this would go on for days and her hopes would leap up. The long face was gone, the muttering, the halting walk, the whinnying laugh: he was Stanley again, her Stanley, Stanley of the charm and sweetness and concern. She reveled in his smile, his dimples, the way his eyes seemed to reach out and hold her. He was hers. All hers.
"What do you think of Jack London?" he asked one morning when they were lying on a blanket in a meadow, the sun palely warming, the season crashing down all round them. He was lying on his side, his head propped up on one hand, a stalk of yellowed gra.s.s between his teeth.
Katherine had been reading desultorily in a book of Wallace"s-The Malay Archipelago-that one of her professors had particularly recommended. She was planning to begin graduate research during the winter semester, once Stanley had recovered. Her hand was clasped in his. She looked up from her book and into the blue sheen of his eyes. "Oh, I don"t know," she said. "I certainly like him for his social consciousness, but as for his adventure stories... well, I guess I prefer stories about proper people, Edith Wharton, that sort of thing. You know I do."
"He"s a real he-man," Stanley said.
She looked at him, looked into his eyes, his grin. "Yes," she said, "I suppose he is."
"Chasing after gold, mushing dogs, risking everything." He glanced away from her, at the line of trees at the edge of the meadow, one flame of motionless color. "I"m not like him at all," he said, dropping his voice. "I"m-I"m-I"ve been pampered and coddled all my life, up to my ears in my father"s m-money. I haven"t accomplished a thing, not the smallest thing, not even on my ranch. I"m not a he-man. I"m not even a man."
"Oh, Stanley, you are, you are are-"
He couldn"t look at her. "Not to you I"m not."
She slid a hand up over his shoulder and gently, very gently-hold your breath, Katherine, hold your breath now-laid her cheek against his. "I love you, Stanley," she whispered.
"I feel-" he began and trailed off.
"You will be a man to me, Stanley, I know you will. You just need to... relax."
Cheek pressed to cheek, the sky all around them, the trees, the silence. "I feel better now," he said.
She lifted her head so she could look into his eyes, the softest fragmentary wisp of a smile playing across her lips. "Do you think we could-?" she whispered.
A trace of panic. "Here? Out-outside?"
She held him to her.
"In the light?"
It wasn"t ideal. It wasn"t even natural. And it was a failure, absolute, unmitigated, beyond hope or repair. He managed, after an eon and a half of fumbling and apologizing and kissing her ear so a.s.siduously it ached for days afterward, to pull her dress up and her bloomers down and to work himself out of his trousers, but when it came to the blind impulsive moment of insertion, of becoming one with her after all, he shrank back and she felt nothing but a premature wetness and a grasping yearning sucking drain of emptiness that would never, in all her natural life, be stopped or plugged or filled.
So the years went by, years of abstinence and denial, a withdrawal from the world of men so complete that Katherine became a kind of prisoner herself, Mrs. Stanley Robert McCormick, married and yet not widowed, attached to a man and yet detached from him too. Jane helped. Her mother helped. NAWSA and the American Birth Control League and the War Service Department, they all helped. But the fact was, she turned fifty-two years old in 1927, and as far as men were concerned she might as well have been a nun. s.e.xual love-heteros.e.xual love, procreative love-was a thing she would never experience, she was resigned to that, but beyond s.e.xual love there was dutiful love, a platonic and idealized love, and when her activism flagged, when the speeches became repet.i.tive and the speakers crabbed and insipid, she thought of Stanley. Still. After all these years. Was it even love at this point, she wondered, or just curiosity? She managed his affairs with the fierce uncompromising zeal she"d brought to NAWSA and the birth control movement and saw that he was provided with the best of everything, and she wrote him and spoke with him on the phone, but it was all an abstraction. She wanted to see him, just see him, and that was what Kempf had promised her.
Dr. Kempf. The new man. The Freudian. The profligate who cost as much as any six doctors combined, and yet she"d gone along with the other guardians (Stanley"s brother Cyrus and his sister Anita, Favill having pa.s.sed on and Bentley retired, thank G.o.d) and hired him. Anything was better than stasis and cynicism, even at ten thousand dollars a month.
It took him over a year, but finally, in the fall of 1927, after she"d sent all the delegates home, closed up Prangins for the winter and smuggled her trunks of diaphragms through customs, he wired her to say that the time had come. Stanley had undergone a radical transformation through a.n.a.lysis, his hatred of his tyrannical father and fear and mistrust of his emasculating mother out in the open, his misogyny examined from every perspective, his knowledge of himself and his phobias brought into line, and he was now ready, if not to take up ballroom dancing or reinvigorate the International Harvester Company, at least to entertain and comport himself as a gentleman with members of the opposite s.e.x. He was ready. But Dr. Kempf-Edward, call me Edward-felt it only right that she, Katherine, should be the first woman in two decades her husband would lay eyes on-see, that is-and perhaps even, if conditions were right, touch.
When she received Kempf"s telegram and then spoke with him via long distance, she was in Boston, at her mother"s, seeing to the affairs that had piled up in her absence, and Jane had gone on to Philadelphia to look after her own concerns. Katherine called her that night with the news, and they arranged to leave for Santa Barbara two weeks hence-just after the Thanksgiving holiday. Katherine engaged a private car for the two of them and when the train made its Philadelphia stop Jane was there with her hair all aflame and her face opening like the petals of a flower. "I don"t believe it," she said, once they were settled and she had an illicit drink and a cigarette in her hand and the station had begun to move and the tracks took them in a rush through the artificial canyons of the city. "Do you?"
Katherine gave her a wry look, took the cigarette from the embrasure of her fingers and drew deeply on it. "What choice do I have?" she said, exhaling.
The servants were shuffling around, getting things settled, and the train, lurching around a long bellying curve, began to pick up speed. The lights flickered. Jane sipped her iced gin-good Bombay gin smuggled in amongst the prophylactic devices-stretched her legs and kicked off her heels. "Twenty years," she murmured. "It"s going to be like seeing someone raised from the dead."
Roscoe was waiting for them at the station in Los Angeles, and by the time they made the long drive up the coast to Santa Barbara it was dark and they were both exhausted, and so they decided to wait till morning before going out to Riven Rock. They dined quietly in their cottage at the El Mirasol, just across the street from the place where Katherine would eventually build a house for herself, replete with a gymnasium for Stanley, and then she telephoned the estate.
b.u.t.ters answered, and she could hear him calling up the stairs to Nick so that Nick could have Stanley pick up the extension. She heard a click, and then Nick"s voice, saw-edged and abraded: "Mrs. McCormick, ma"am? It"ll be just a minute. He"s been sitting up late tonight, waiting for you-he"s very excited-and he"s just been doing his, you know, his ablutions and his teeth, ... Oh, but wait, here he is-"
"Katherine?"
"h.e.l.lo, Stanley: it"s good to hear your voice."
"You too."
"I"m looking forward to seeing you."
"Me too."
"It"s going to be such-it"s been such a long time. I feel like a girl on a first date. I"m so excited. And I can"t tell you how pleased I am to hear of your progress with Dr. Kempf. He tells me you"re your old self again."
A pause. "I have my slippers on."
"Yes, so Nick told me-you"re getting ready for bed. I hope we didn"t keep you up, the train was late getting in and then with the long drive and whatnot we both just felt, Jane and I, that tomorrow, when everyone"s fresh, would be better for the big event."
"One is you and one is me."
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"The slippers. Two souls: Katherine and Stanley. Two soles, two souls-get it?"
She gave a laugh, not so much because she was amused but because she was bewildered and because this was Stanley, Stanley working through the convolutions of his mind. "Yes," she said, "yes, yes, I do-that"s very good. Two souls." A pause. The fraught silence of the wires. "Well," she sighed, "I won"t keep you. Till tomorrow, then?"
A hiss, a sound as of two wooden blocks rhythmically pounded, and then Stanley"s voice, full of grain and sand and silt, so far from her he might have been on the moon: "Tomorrow."
Katherine was a bundle of nerves as the car took her out to Montecito the next morning, her stomach sinking through the floor, her skin horripilated and her breathing shallow. It was the way she felt just before she had to give a speech, stretched taut as a rubber band and then snapped back into place again. She lit a cigarette, set it down in the ashtray, and then lit another. Palms flashed by the windows and she didn"t even see them, let alone attempt to categorize them. But Jane was there. And Jane took her hand and leaned across the seat to give her a kiss on the corner of the mouth. "It"ll be all right, Kat," she breathed. "You"ll see."
Then they were skirting the high stone wall that hemmed in the property, and Roscoe, gray-haired now but as jumpy and energetic as ever, turned the wheel sharply and let it slide back through his fingers again, and they swung into the familiar drive. That was when Katherine came to attention. She couldn"t help herself. She saw where Hull and his crew had been busy among the rhododendrons and saw that the ground cover needed cutting back at the edge of the drive. And there, the house, rising up out of the dense landscape like a stone monolith, like a fortress, like a prison.
"Well," she said, turning her face to Jane, "wish me luck," and while Jane waited in the car with a magazine and Roscoe stood motionless at the buffed and flashing door, she stepped out into the drive and went up the broad stone steps at the front of the house. The door opened as if by magic and there was b.u.t.ters, rigid as a corpse, saying, "Morning, madame, and welcome back," through the stiffest of formal grins. The entrance hall was the same, a severe high deep-ended room softened with tropical plants, tapestries and the statuary she"d bought in Italy for Stanley"s edification and enjoyment; on the wall of the staircase going up to her husband"s quarters hung the two Monets and the Manet they"d selected together, on their honeymoon. The door closed soundlessly behind her, and then b.u.t.ters, his face like a shying horse"s, all pinched in the nostril and wild in the eye, said, "I will inform Mr. McCormick that you"re here, madame." She stood there, in her hat and gloves and furs, and watched the ghostly form of the butler recede up the stairway.
She found herself pacing: three steps this way, three steps that. Should she wait for him in the library? The drawing room? Or here, here where she could see him coming down the stairs-and more importantly, he could see her-and they could gain those extra seconds to prepare themselves separately for what was to come? She pulled off first one glove, then the other-Stanley would want to take her hand and draw her to him for a kiss, and it wouldn"t do to offer him a glove as if he were just anyone she"d happened to meet on the street. There. That was better. She held her hands out before her, fingers spread wide, to examine them, steady hands, attractive hands still, her nails done just that morning, the wedding ring in place, right where Stanley had put it twenty-three years ago. And there, glittering on her wrist, the tourmaline bracelet, for equally sentimental reasons.
Her heart raced. Would he find her attractive still? She was a girl the last time he"d seen her, or a young woman of thirty-two, nearly the age of Christ when they nailed him to the cross, and she wasn"t a young woman any longer. She was fifty-two years old. Fifty-two and still well-preserved for all the pa.s.sage of the years. Jane thought so, and her mother too. She still had her skin and her eyes-and her hair was dark yet, for the most part. The hairdresser at the hotel had helped-she just hoped Stanley wouldn"t notice. Of course, he"d gone gray himself. At least he appeared to be gray the last time she"d seen him, but that was through the flat distorting lens of her binoculars.
There was a noise from the landing above, and her heart stopped. The clank of the iron door, a murmur of voices, male voices, deep and true. She moved toward the foot of the staircase to intercept him, to get the very first look at him at the top of the stairs... and there they were, three of them, three forms, and then the ghost that was the butler. Stanley was in the middle-ashen, towering, his hair streaked silver and white-and O"Kane was on one side of him, tight to his shoulder, and Martin on the other. They came down the stairs that way, three abreast, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, as if this were some sort of military maneuver, each step a hurdle, halfway down now, O"Kane"s left arm locked against Stanley"s right, Martin"s right against his left, their hands clenching his sleeves in the long jacket of his cuffs.
Then he saw her, and the procession halted. Three right legs were bent at the knee, three right feet arrested in their polished shoes. Stanley stopped and his eyes seemed to rivet her, nail her, drive holes right through her flesh and out the other side. He stopped. O"Kane and Martin stopped. The three men regarded her, Stanley with a panicky look now, a look she knew from the days that led up to his breakdown, and O"Kane and Martin drained and white, their eyes seeking anything but hers. And then, as if it were all just a momentary hitch, all three looked to their feet and came on down the stairs.
They halted at the bottom, not three paces from her, one step more and then out onto the marble floor. Stanley was staring down at his shoes. "Stanley," she said, "Stanley, darling. It"s all right. It"s me, Katherine. Your wife. I"ve come to see you."
He lifted his eyes then, but his head was c.o.c.ked to one side, as if he didn"t have the strength to raise it. "They," he said, his voice unnatural and high, "they wo-won"t let me go. Eddie and Mart. They think... They"ve got my sleeves. My sleeves!"
Katherine wanted to touch him, lay a hand on his cheek, hold him in her arms and comfort him, poor Stanley, poor, poor Stanley. "Let him go," she said.
Immediately, O"Kane and Martin released their grip and took a step back from him, and there he was, all alone before her, his shoulders slumped, his hair slicked, his head canted to one side-and who was that, up there at the top of the stairs, watching from the shadows? Kempf. Of course. Kempf. Well, it was quite an intimate little gathering, wasn"t it? The husband and wife reunited in the presence of one butler, one psychiatrist and two apelike nurses. She tried again. "Stanley, Stanley, look at me," and she moved forward to touch his arm.
It was then that he broke. Straight for the door. A scramble of his feet, fifty-three years old and you would have thought he was eighteen, the door a quick slice of light, O"Kane and Martin leaping forward, and he was gone. Katherine was suddenly in motion herself, no time to think, out the gaping door and onto the front steps, and there he was, Stanley, her husband, leading the nurses twice round the drive in a burst of speed before making for the car, Roscoe locking the doors against him, Jane"s startled face, and then O"Kane had him in a bear hug and Stanley was whinnying "No, no, no, you don"t understand, you don"t-"
Katherine came forward as if in a trance, no thought for Jane or herself or anyone else but Stanley, and Martin had joined the fray now, all three men flailing on the ground in a confusion of limbs, gravel crunching, dust attacking the air. She came forward, bludgeoned by her emotions, and stood over them until her husband was subdued and panting and the nurses working to improve their grips, one pinioning his shoulders, the other clamped to his legs. "Stanley," she begged, pleading now, her eyes wet, everything confused and hurting, "it"s only me."
He flashed his eyes at her then and jerked his head as far as O"Kane"s straining limbs would allow. "I"ve-" he began, and there was wonder on his face, the wonder of discovery, epiphany, eureka, eureka, "I"ve seen your face," he said. "I"ve seen your face!"
IN THE PRESENCE OF LADIES.
"No, you wouldn"t call it auspicious," O"Kane said. "Not exactly. But it"s a start, and I think Kempf deserves some credit." He was in the upstairs parlor, the door secured, a fire snapping complacently in the marble fireplace, Mr. McCormick off in dreamland, and he was feeling expansive and generous, full of seasonal good cheer-not to mention rum-and as far as goggle-eyed Dr. Kempf was concerned, he"d been a skeptic and now he was a believer. Mr. McCormick had made enormous progress over the course of the past year and a half and what had happened out there in the drive this afternoon was nothing more than a minor setback, he was sure of it. The brothers Thompson, Nick and Pat, who"d come on duty an hour ago, were struggling with the concept. They weren"t convinced. Not at all.
"From what I hear, from Mart, anyway, the whole thing was a farce," Nick rasped in his burnt-out voice that was like the last sc.r.a.pings of the pot, irritating and metallic. "He just ran for the door, couldn"t even look her in the face. And Roscoe says he tried to get hold of the car, for Christ"s sake."
Pat gave a low whistle. "Imagine him behind the wheel? What would it take to stop him-the whole Santa Barbara police force? The army? The navy? Hey, call out the marines!"
It was Christmas, or just about, and the place was bedecked, sprangled and festooned for the season, Mr. McCormick having been especially fixated on the decorations this year, and O"Kane had lingered to have a cup or two of Christmas cheer with his colleagues (he was going to quit drinking, absolutely and finally, the day after New Year"s). He was also temporarily stranded, because Roscoe was out ferrying Mrs. McCormick and Mrs. Roessing around somewhere.
Nick was sunk into an overstuffed chair in front of the fire, his feet propped up on an ottoman, his hands nested over his stomach. Like Pat-and to a lesser extent, Mart-he"d acc.u.mulated flesh over the years, steadily and inexorably, but the funny thing was they"d all three finally achieved some sort of mysterious physical equilibrium, having grown into their heads like crocodiles. "I don"t know if auspicious or not auspicious is the word for it-to me it"s just more of the same, with or without Kempf."
O"Kane shrugged. He gazed round at the streamers and popcorn chains, the clumps of mistletoe and endlessly replicated effigies of Father Christmas and snowmen hanging like cobwebs from the ceiling. "At least he didn"t attack her."
Pat snorted, burying his nose in his drink-a real drink, American style, mixed and heated in the kitchen by O"Kane himself while Giovannella frowned over the dough for tomorrow"s bread and the scullery maid they"d hired to keep her company and deepen the presence of women in the house hummed a jazz tune and ran a wet cloth over the supper dishes. It was a toddy O"Kane was making, from a recipe his father had taught him-the only thing his father had taught him, besides a left jab maybe, followed by a swift right cross. Lemons, oranges, sugar, a stick of cinnamon, boiling water and what pa.s.sed for rum these days. It had the right smell and it warmed you, though how much warming you needed when it was three hours past dark on the twelfth of December and still sixty-four degrees out was debatable.
O"Kane could feel the rum like lead in his veins-he didn"t know how many he"d had thus far, but it was more than four, he was sure-and felt he"d better sit down. Nick and Pat seemed content to watch the fire, but the subject of Mr. McCormick"s initial meeting with his wife had been broached, and O"Kane wanted to chew it over a while. "It"ll get better," he said. "Tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. No more talking on the phone-she"s due here tomorrow for lunch and she and Dr. Kempf both expect she"ll be eating it downstairs in the dining room with Mr. McCormick at her side."
"I"d like to see it," Nick said.
"Me too," Pat put in.
"Kempf says she"s going to stay this time. Indefinitely."
Nick sighed, bent to retrieve his cup from the floor and took a long ruminative sip. "She never gives up, that woman, does she? Twenty years she waits, and he bolts right by her like a runaway horse. Doesn"t she know it"s hopeless?"
"She"s looking old," Pat said. "Like a little old lady. Like a widow. But that one with her, Mrs. Russ or whatever her name is, she"s a piece of something, isn"t she?"
"I don"t know," O"Kane said, "-you"ve got to have hope. Anything can happen. People like Mr. McCormick have just snapped out of it, miraculously-I"ve seen it myself. And look at what they"re doing with gland feeding and these hyperthyroid cases."
No comment from either of the Thompson brothers. They pulled at their cups, their eyes sunk into their heads. They could figure the chances on their own.
"Look how far Mr. McCormick"s come already-he was right on the verge of going back under before Kempf came and you know it. He"s coming back to life with this talking cure, he is-I can see it in the way he holds himself and his walk is better and he"s hardly stuttering at all anymore."
"Yeah," Nick said, "and he still p.i.s.ses his bed."
"Kempf says he needs women around him, and maybe he"s right-it makes sense, doesn"t it? We"ve tried everything else, from apes to sheet restraints to Brush"s colossal fat a.r.s.e-you remember how he pinned him to the floor that first day? "Compression is what they need," isn"t that what he said?" O"Kane couldn"t help laughing at the memory of it. "Or maybe you guys weren"t there-you weren"t, were you?"
"s.h.i.t." Nick sat straight up in the chair and cranked his head round to give O"Kane an outraged look.
"What? He"s older now-he"s settled down. He can be with women-he should be. As long as he"s monitored."
"Didn"t we-all of us-say that years ago? And we"re not getting paid half what the mint in Washington prints up each month either," Nick growled, his voice sc.r.a.ping bottom. "I still say you go down to one of these hootch parlors on De la Guerra or Ortega Street and find him a willing little piece once a week and let him take out his urges like any other man. It"s all that s.p.u.n.k clogging his brain." And he laughed, a fat rich braying laugh that made O"Kane want to get up out of the chair and poke him in the face a few times, good cheer or no.
"Well, he jacks off enough, doesn"t he?" Pat said, rolling his cup between his hands; he was standing by the fire now, one elbow resting on the holly-strewn mantel, his face flushed with the drink. "I don"t look at you and Mart"s reports, but I"d say he"s going at it four or five times a week on our shift-and Lord help us if we don"t note down every little wad for Dr. Kempf, who in my opinion is half a pervert himself."
O"Kane wasn"t listening. He was thinking about that-Mr. McCormick with a woman-and whether they"d get to watch. He"d have to be restrained, of course, and the woman would have to know her business-and no syph or clap, thank you, or they"d all wind up losing their jobs.
"I think they"re lesbians," Nick said.
"Who?"
"Your sweetheart Katherine and what"s her name, Mrs. Russ. You know, Eddie, c.u.n.t-lappers."
Well, sure. He"d suspected as much himself, way out on the periphery of his mind, but he wouldn"t dignify Nick with a response. And so what if she was, which he doubted. It was better than going off and getting herself involved with a man-that was adultery-and she must still have had the itch, even if she was getting up in years, practically the prototypical old maid in her dowdy long skirts and outsized hats... but what he would have given just to touch her when she was younger, and he thought of that day in Hamilton"s office when she bowed her head and let the tears come. And why was she crying? Because she couldn"t see her husband. Well now she could, now that it was too late to matter.
He got up out of the chair, the fire jumping off Nick"s big face and hands and winking metallically from the strings of decorations. "Anybody for another?"