by T. C. Boyle
They were quiet a moment, pulling at their cigarettes and solemnly rearranging the glasses on the table, all three watching him out of identical eyes. Then Pat, reflectively: “They say she’s in it for the money. Her husband committed, and all those McCormick millions just there for the taking.”
“And she’s legally entitled to it.” Nick was massaging the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray. His head floated up like a balloon, bobbing over the table on the taut cord of his neck. “So long as the McCormicks don’t buy her off or get the marriage annulled. She’s his wife, and that’s the long and short of it. But all that aside—and I think Eddie’s gone sweet on her, is that it, huh, Eddie?” He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest and gave his brothers a leer. “Who’s going to give Rosaleen the bad news—you, Pattie? How about you, Mart?”
They all three guffawed and slapped the table and dug their fingers in their ears, while O‘Kane put on a sheepish grin and ducked his head, all part of the ritual. But he was raging inside: they didn’t understand, they weren’t there, they didn’t see her.
“But as I was saying,” Nick went on, and the smoke and alcohol had roughened his voice till it wasn’t much more than a croak, “all that aside, Dr. Hamilton was right, absolutely and unconditionally—you can’t let Mr. McCormick have any visitors, and especially not the wife. Or the mother or sister either—or any woman, for that matter. Not after what he did to that little nurse from Rhode Island, what was her name—Florabelle? Christabel? Something like that”
“Arabella,” O‘Kane said. “Arabella Doane.”
Nick just shook his head, and no one was laughing now. They looked down the long tunnels of their beers, stretched their legs under the table, stared vacantly round the room as if seeing it for the first time. Mart suppressed a belch, patting his lips gently with the back of his hand. “That was a crime,” Nick said finally, “a real crime. And frankly, it makes me wonder what I’m doing going all the way out to California for a man like that.”
O‘Kane had nothing to say to this. He was thinking about Arabella Doane. She was a shadow in a back corner of his mind, a cat you pick up to stroke and then put down again when it stops purring. He remembered her hair—amazing hair, the exact color of ripe peaches— and the locket she wore with a miniature of Florence Nightingale, the Lady of the Lamp, inside. O’Kane knew about that locket because he’d played with it where it dangled between her breasts, and he knew the acid-sweet taste of her mouth like an apple split in two, and the strange wild scent of her when she was aroused. That was before Mr. Stanley McCormick got to her—and how he managed it was a mystery to all of them. But he got to her, all right, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she broke away long enough to scream there would have been hell to pay, real hell, the kind that involved the police and maybe even the mortician.... Now she was back in Rhode Island, with her mother, but the look of her that day, the way her eyes had melted away to nothing and the color had gone out of her so you could see every lash and hair on her head like brushstrokes in oil, came to him in infinite sadness.
Up at the bar, two drunks in working clothes had begun to harmonize on a doleful faltering version of “In the Sweet By and By,” their heads down low to the polished mahogany counter, and O‘Kane felt so depressed in that moment it was as if a mountain had collapsed on him. He was making a mistake, he was sure of it, the whole thing was wrong, absolutely and irreparably, and California was no dream but a nightmare, a sandpit, a trap. A man like that. Arabella Doane, Katherine Dexter McCormick. In the sweet by and by, the drunks sang, joined now by a chorus of ragged whiskey-choked voices that mocked the promise of the refrain, We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
But then Pat gave his brother a shove and said, “The man’s disturbed, Nick—you can’t blame him for that. He needs help, is all, like the rest of them.”
“That’s right,” O‘Kane heard himself saying, and the moment had passed. What had happened to Arabella Doane was regrettable—horrible, unconscionable—but they were on a mission now, and the mission was called Mr. Stanley McCormick. He was going to get well—they were going to make him well—and when he was well he was going to reward them and then they’d have their orange groves and their bungalows and all the rest. That was it, that was what it was all about.
Suddenly, and maybe it was the whiskey—sure it was, of course it was—he found himself in the grip of a strange pounding exhilaration that was like a rocket going off inside him, and he could barely contain himself. He wanted to get up and dance, lead a parade, roll over Niagara Falls in a barrel. “Come on,” he said, “cheer up, Nick. This is supposed to be a celebration, isn’t it?” And in the next moment, the blood pounding in his ears from the rapid ascent, he was on his feet and roaring, “Who’ll drink with me?” and the Thompsons were rising from their chairs like statues come to life and they were all banging their mugs together in a percussion of joy. “To California!” he shouted, and his voice leapt an octave to drown out the funereal maunderings of the drunks at the bar. “To California!”
But now it was just O‘Kane, Mart and the herring. The vocalists were long gone, and Nick and Pat and Dr. Hamilton too. The crackers were stale, the eggs like wood pulp. And here was the last beer, served up on a wet cork tray, just like the first one. He lifted it to his lips, but it didn’t smell right—it smelled like vinegar, like must, like the warm yellow fluid in the chimp’s gtass—and he set it down untasted before pushing himself up from the table, bidding farewell to the ghost of Mart’s fading eyes and making his way to the door, where somebody conveniently shoved his hat and overcoat into his face. And then he was on the street, five blocks from home, and the wind picked up the rain and poured it down his collar.
It wasn’t so late—9:30 by his watch—but no one was out, not even the last lonely man in town, and the streets were silent but for the incessant hiss of the rain. The storefronts were a wall of nothing, holes punched in the night, and the trees clawed at the dim globes of the streetlights. His head ached. The suit grabbed at him under the arms, and the cuffs of his trousers were already wet through again, and he could barely drag his feet for the weight of them. At the first corner he stopped to turn his face to the sky and smell the night, but there was nothing to smell except the wet cobbles and the cold, if the cold has a smell. He stood there a long moment, solitary in the dark, until he was sure his collar was ruined and his suit shrunk beyond repair, and then he turned and headed home to his wife.
2.
EVE
The first woman Stanley McCormick ever saw—really saw, in the way that Adam saw Eve—was his sister, Mary Virginia. Stanley was nine at the time, a skinny, precocious, secretive boy with skittish eyes and a burrowing instinct. He used to like to get underneath things—beds, settees, ramparts he would construct of pillows in the drawing room or folding chairs in the lofty cavern of the ballroom. These were his secret places, his lairs and hideouts, where he could evade his brother Harold, dodge the piano teacher and elude the governess, his sisters and whichever starchy long-nosed missionary-of-the-day had been invited to breakfast, tea or supper. But most of all, when he was hidden and secure, a bag of hard candy to hand, an adventure by Jules Verne or James Fenimore Cooper propped up on his chest and the lamp softly glowing, he could escape his mother. She was the one, the one whose love could pulverize rock and draw all the planets out of their orbits to come crashing down and obliterate him in his bed, she was the one he most wanted to escape—and most wanted to be with.
It was May of 1884, just after his father died. The house was in mourning—the city of Chicago was in mourning, the nation, the whole vast roofless world—and Stanley didn’t know what to do with himself. No one had ever died before, not in his experience, and what upset him more than the death itself was that he didn’t know what was expected of him, other than to look sorrowful. Should he beat his breast, throw himself down the stairs, carry on like Mary Virginia? People patted him on the head, bent down to whisper things in his ea
r and peer into his startled eyes. Did they expect him to cry, was that it? Or was he supposed to bear up like a man?
His mother was no help. She never stopped moving, not even to sit down, her face battered with grief till it looked like a piece of luggage dragged from port to port, and everywhere she went she was exiled from him—from him, Stanley, her last and youngest child, her baby—by a phalanx of mourners. He wanted to be earnest, wanted to be good, wanted to grieve properly, acquit himself well, please her, but whenever he looked up for approval, all he saw was hair and ears and the backs of heads. The heads converged on her, supported on shoulders like moving walls, there was a sudden blossoming of black armbands, and at the level of his eyes he could see nothing but hands that vanished and reappeared like some conjurer’s trick, big-knuckled veiny hands glittering with jewelry and clutching the drinks and sandwiches the servants scurried to provide through the din of grieving. He was there, startled, in kneepants and a collar that was too tight, trying to avoid the crash. He’d never realized death could be so loud.
And it got louder. Telegrams arrived nonstop, newspapers ran headlines and front-page eulogies. The employees of the McCormick Reaper Works sent over a replica of the reaper composed of five thousand flawless gardenias, with the main wheel symbolically broken, and four hundred workers shuffled in a solemn double line past the catafalque. Presidents, premiers, sultans, grand viziers, emperors and beglerbegs sent their condolences. Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the reaper, multimillionaire, recipient of the Cross of the French Legion of Honor, cranky, old, bullheaded, unloving, rheumatic, wheezy and tyrannical, was dead at seventy-five. Dead, and lying there in the drawing room in his coffin, as pale as a toad preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.
When it came time to pay his last respects, Stanley was led into the drawing room by his big brother, Cyrus Jr. Cyrus Jr. was then a bearded young man of twenty-five who suddenly found himself in control of a business that grossed seventy-five million dollars a year and whom everybody said looked just like Papa. Stanley couldn’t see the resemblance. His father was an old man, the oldest person of either sex he’d ever seen, sixty-five when Stanley was born, seventy by the time Stanley began to understand who he was, and finally, in the end, a fleshless, soulless artifact as ancient and unfathomable as a fossilized dinosaur egg. Stanley liked dinosaurs—he liked to dream about the rending teeth of the big carnivorous ones and the armor they all wore to protect themselves, even the slowest and smallest—but he didn’t like his father. Or hadn’t liked him.
And as he approached the coffin, Cyrus’s hand huge and soft in the feeble grip of his own and burning like a furnace, like a steam engine, like molten rock, he felt nothing but guilt. Not sorrow, not loss, but guilt. People looked at him and saw a grieving son, but what they didn’t know was that when his mother had convened the family nightly to pray for his father’s recovery, Stanley had bowed his head and pleaded with God to take the old Reaper King away forever. And God had listened, because Stanley didn’t love his progenitor and provider the way a son should—he feared him, feared and loathed him and shrank away from his booming wheeze and his twisted shellacked hands and the smell of something gone dead and rotten that seeped like poison from his flaring old hair-choked nostrils. It was a terrible thing not to love your father, a sin that reverberated through all the chasms of hell and howled in the very ears of the Devil himself. Stanley was a patricide, an ingrate, a worm. And he was only nine years old.
But there it was, the casket, huge, big as a boat and polished till you could see your face in it, and not just in the brass or gold or whatever it was, but in the wood too. It was elevated on a dais in the center of that familiar room with its old French furniture and wainscoted walls and the vaulted ceiling painted to mimic a summer sky replete with cottony clouds and birds on the wing, and that made it seem even bigger. This was the ship that would take the Reaper King on his final voyage, down to a place where it was always dark and wet and where the insects would burrow into his flesh and lay their eggs to hatch ... and then to heaven, because Stanley’s father was a good man who’d served humanity and God too and fed the multitudes, just as Christ had—Stanley knew that and would never deny it. He knew it because his mother had told him so. Told him again and again till he’d grown up with a whole litany of his father’s goodness to hold up against the living picture of the crabbed bitter old immitigable figure sunk into the wheelchair in the upper hallway.
Stanley’s legs were leaden, his feet stuck to the floor. There must have been two hundred people there, friends, relatives, strangers, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, and he couldn’t look into their faces, couldn’t even lift his head. He watched his feet, studying the sheen of his high-button shoes as they stuck and pulled free of the carpet, stuck and pulled free, step by step, closer and closer. The drinks and sandwiches were gone now, but the whole house smelled of them still, and this room especially. It smelled like a kitchen, reeking of canapes, smoked sausage, fish eggs and something else, something indefinable—perfume, he guessed it was. But not the sort of perfume ladies wore—something deeper, harsher, more intense and astringent. He was thinking about that, about what kind of perfume that might be and how the undertaker and his silent gliding palm-rubbing assistants just might happen to know, when all at once Cyrus Jr. squeezed his hand, a sudden violent pressure, and Stanley looked up to see the bright stony rail of the casket right there in front of him and his dead father’s nose projecting above it like some etiolated mushroom springing up out of the ground after a storm. He felt dizzy, as if he’d been etherized, and his legs almost failed him—they didn’t seem to have any bone left in them, weren’t even attached to his hips anymore—and then his mother was there, rising up from beside the coffin to wrap him in her arms.
She’d been kneeling in the shadows like some sort of supplicant, like the maharajah’s widow who throws herself on the funeral pyre, and he saw that his sister Anita was there too, eighteen and bereft, her wide baleful face like a picked-over field, and Missy Hammond, the governess, with the swollen hump of her disfigurement and the little red-flecked clots of her eyes staring up at him in misery. And Harold—Harold was kneeling beside them, his shoulders bunched and his hands clasped before him, Harold, his confidant and playmate, only two years older than Stanley and a virtuoso of sinuosity who only wanted to throw a ball and tackle and be tackled till he was indistinguishable from the sod itself, and here he was transformed into a professional mourner, as hollow and cringing as one of the undertaker’s assistants. It was a shock: Harold had loved their father, really loved him, and Stanley hadn’t. The shame burned into him, and he buried his face in his mother’s dress.
And then, somehow, he found himself up on the dais with his mother, staring down at the unhinged face of his dreams. There he was, his father, monstrous in death, as big as any giant or ogre, stretched out on his back as if he were sleeping, his eyes closed, his beard thrust up in a gray spume that shrouded his throat and chin and the new tie they were going to bury him in... but he wasn’t sleeping, he was dead, and there was a rigidity to his fresh-shaven cheeks and a depth to the pits and trenches beneath his eyes that all the mortician’s powder in the world couldn’t conceal. Stanley tried his best to look sad, aggrieved, troubled and heartsore, his mother right there beside him, clergymen fluttering on the periphery like a flock of crows, aunts, uncles and perfect strangers mewling and weeping and dabbing at their eyes, but he only managed to look the way he felt: scared. He wanted to bolt, break away from his mother and all her insuperable power to hold him there, and run before they saw the truth in his eyes, before the rotting stiff perfumed corpse of his father lurched upright in the casket and roared out his perfidy. And he might have, he might have broken for the door and shamed them all, if it wasn’t for Mary Virginia.
All this time she’d been waiting in the wings, weeping and gnashing her teeth, a prisoner of grief, but now, finally, her moment had come. Stanley wasn’t aware of it. He was only aware of hims
elf, slouching on the dais with all those people looking at him and wanting only to run, hide, burrow, hating his mother for holding him there and the mourners for invading his house and his father for dying and for having been alive in the first place. He was vaguely aware that someone was missing, someone vital, but he wasn’t thinking and he didn’t care and he only wanted to die himself, die on the spot and get it over with—until he heard his sister’s first shattering cry. Everything changed in that moment. Suddenly he was outside of himself, floating high over the room with the painted birds and watching his big sister annihilate the whole sorry long-faced crowd with the violence of her grief.
She came hurtling in from the hallway in a black shift that was like an undergarment, her arms naked, her feet bare, her hair kinked and wild and beating at her face like a flail, and all on the crest of that first rising shriek. Everyone in the room, even Mama the all-powerful, was frozen in place—or no, not frozen but melted down like silica and then quick-cooled to the fragile inanimacy of glass. But that first heart-seizing shriek was nothing more than a preface, an overture, a promise of what was to come. The next cry, protracted and operatic, crescendoing in a series of gut-wrenching whoops that sounded as if some animal were being eviscerated and eaten alive, scoured the walls and the ceiling and polished those glass faces and glassy eyes till nothing existed but Mary Virginia McCormick, the fount and apotheosis of grief.
Unimpeded, all but unrecognizable, her mouth open in a rictus of screaming and her limbs jerking and twitching with the exaltation of some uncontainable force, she darted across the rug and through the pall of smoked sausage and embalmer’s perfume, past the mourners and undertaker’s assistants and the members of her own family, vaulted the rail and plunged into the coffin as if she were diving into a swimming pool. “It’s me!” she cried, thrashing at what was left of the Reaper King till it seemed to Stanley’s stricken eyes that the corpse had come to life in a hideous rehearsal of his worst fears. No one moved. No one breathed. “Papa,” she sobbed, “it’s me, Mary Virginia,” and her hands were right there, right in the thick of it, wrapped tight round the rigid throat and reanimated beard. “Don’t you recognize me?”