by T. C. Boyle
It was a shame, everyone agreed, because Mary Virginia was the beauty of the family, a roll of the genetic dice that comes round only once in a generation. And she was as talented as she was pretty, good with languages and clever at drawing, an accomplished pianist who played with the subtlety and compassion of a woman twice her age and all the courage and ferocity of a man. She was twenty-three and unmarried at the time of her father’s death, though there had been no lack of suitors, her physical attractions enhanced as they were by the allure of her father’s fortune. In the two years since her coming out, there had been three offers for her hand. Her mother—Nettie Fowler McCormick, a real force in Chicago society and a matchmaker nonpareil—had convoked a family council on each of the three occasions, and each time, though the aspirants were well connected and had money of their own, Papa had to take them aside and gravely decline on his daughter’s behalf. And that was a shame, a real shame. But the McCormicks were scrupulous to the point of rigidity, and they felt they had no choice but to let the young men in question understand just what they were letting themselves in for.
The sad truth was that Mary Virginia was sick, sick in a way that didn’t show, not right away and not on the surface. Hers was a sickness that seemed to deepen as she grew into it, stretching and elongating to accommodate her like the skin of an anaconda. Ever since her thirteenth birthday she’d become increasingly distant, detached from the world of people, things and obligations, as if some essential thread had been cut in her mind. There were times when she didn’t seem to recognize her parents, the governess, her own sisters and brothers. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t talk. For hours at a time she crouched over her bruised knees, praying frantically, hysterically, chanting the name of God the Father until it was like a curse. Other times she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, dashing from room to room in a panic, blue in the face, choking for air when there was air all around her. And then she couldn’t sleep, sometimes for days, for weeks, and it would terrify Nettie to creep into her room at two or three in the morning and see her lying there rigid, staring into the crown of some private universe, awake but no more conscious of her mother than if she were blind and deaf.
At fifteen she came to life again, resurrected, hyperkinetic, throwing sparks from her fingers and laughing openmouthed at the great ongoing joke of the world, her every motion arrested and then accelerated and accelerated again till she rushed aimlessly from one room to another in a spastic herky-jerky trot that was like a cruel parody of poor Missy’s affliction. Where before she’d been without affect, wiped clean of emotion, now suddenly she became as passionate as a lover with Nettie, her own mother, clinging frantically to her at bedtime, protracting a goodnight kiss till it was a torture. She walked in her sleep, talked gibberish, scared off her schoolmates. And then, just after her sixteenth birthday, she began to mutilate herself.
It was one of the nurses, a French girl by the name of Marie Lherbette, who first reported it. Nettie was in the drawing room nestled in a Louis XVI chair across from an eager, well-fed young man whose passage to China she had agreed to pay on behalf of the Presbyterian Missionary Society. On the low table between them stood a tray of finger sandwiches and a pot of tea draped in a cozy crocheted by her grandmother in the early days of the century. The young man was making a complicated point about the Asiatic mind and the woeful lack of a Christianizing influence in so ancient but corrupt a culture, when Marie Lherbette knocked and entered the room with a low bow.
“Yes?” Nettie said. “What is it, Marie?”
The nurse looked down at her feet. She was twenty, pretty enough in her own way, and dutiful, but to Nettie’s mind too much imbued with, well, Frenchness, to be entirely trustworthy. “If madame please, may I have a word in private?”
“Now? Can’t you see that I’m occupied? ”
“There is”—the nurse searched for the word—“gravity in what I must tell you.”
Gravity? Nettie took one look at the nurse’s face and then rose and excused herself to the young man. A moment later she was following the nurse up the stairs to the children’s rooms. “What is it?” she demanded. “Is it Anita? Mary Virginia?”
“Miss Mary Virginia,” the nurse whispered over her shoulder, hurrying up the stairs and down the hall with quick nervous thrusts of her feet. Nettie struggled to keep up, her skirts tugging at her knees and clinging obstinately to her ankles, the carpet hissing beneath her, the furniture turned to stone. And then they were through the door and into her daughter’s room, and Nettie saw Mary Virginia stretched out on the bed in her insomniac’s trance, naked but for a pair of socks, saw the perfect bloody handprints on the flowered wallpaper and the long glistening runnels that trailed away from her private place and down her inner thighs as if some animal had been at her.
They took her to the McLean Hospital in Waverley, Massachusetts, where she was prodded, pinched, weighed, measured, auscultated, analyzed and interrogated by the biggest men in the field of psychiatry the McCormick money could attract—which is to say, all of them. Unfortunately, none of the experts could agree. One felt her problem was neurasthenia, another, delusional insanity, and yet another, dementia praecox. They wanted to keep her for observation—and for her own protection. She hadn’t bloodied herself again, except for two barely noticeable puncture marks she’d worked into her right underarm with a pen nib, but during the trip from Chicago in the private Pullman car, she’d begun to hold passionate conversations with phantoms out of thin air, and twice she’d attempted to throw herself from the train. Fortunately, Cyrus Jr. was there to restrain her, but Nettie was crucified with the burden of it.
Six weeks, the doctors said. At least. And so, reduced nearly to prostration herself, what with Mary Virginia’s collapse, Papa’s illness and her little ones pining for her in Chicago, Nettie decided to rent a house in Waverley and send for Harold and Stanley. It was one of Stanley’s earliest memories. Missy Hammond and their French nurse, Marie, were going to take him and Harold on a vacation trip for six whole weeks—and did he know how long six weeks were? And how many days were in a week? And what the first letter of the alphabet was? Yes. And they were going to go on the choo-choo train all the way across the great state of Illinois, through Indiana—could he say Indiana?—and Pennsylvania and New York to Massachusetts, where Mama and Big Sister were. Big Sister was sick, very sick, but she would be better soon and then they would all come home.
Stanley was two at the time, Harold five. Of the trip, he recalled a sensation of intense, blinding greenness, a sea of green beyond the moving windows, vast and oceanic, a world bigger than comprehension would allow. And of the house in Waverley he remembered nothing, except that the sun was there to illuminate this new, expansive and undifferentiated world of green, and that the deep grass beyond the edge of the yard was a place where snakes lived. His mama told him about them, lean hard whiplike things with the false glitter of a present wrapped for Christmas, little hidden gifts of poison and death that he must never touch. That was what he remembered of that trip to Massachusetts in the summer of ‘77, that and his big sister. Who was sick.
Mary Virginia improved at McLean. There was no miraculous cure, certainly not the sort of cure Nettie was expecting, demanding, hounding the doctors for day and night, but at least the imaginary conversations ceased and there were no more bloody stigmata on the walls. They all went home together, back to the brownstone mansion on Rush Street, with the ballroom that could accommodate two hundred and the steam-heated stable for the horses and the goat and cow (the Reaper King liked his milk fresh) and the pony Anita would get for her sixteenth birthday five years later. Mary Virginia grew older and prettier, but she had to withdraw from the Misses Kirklands’ Academy before graduation because Miss Nevelson, her Latin teacher, had a detachable head and kept putting it on backward and Mary Virginia couldn’t abide that—it was just the sort of thing she’d always hated—and so Nettie had arranged for a private tutor at home. There was a year of tenuous peace,
and then, at eighteen, Mary Virginia broke down again, victim of amorphous fears, and she had to be hospitalized—this time for six months.
A relatively smooth period followed, a time during which she haunted the rooms of the house at all hours of the night like some lost and wandering soul—but placid, thankfully—and then gradually, as in the unfolding of some natural event, she grew more excitable, and in her excitement, she turned to the piano. Suddenly she was up at dawn, hammering away at the keys with a fury that would have paralyzed a Chopin or even a Liszt, thundering and banging till her fingers were blunted and there was blood on the keys, using her elbows, her chin, even her teeth, and she went on for hours, sometimes seven or eight hours at a stretch, and nothing could distract her or dissuade her. Nettie wouldn’t have objected if only she’d play nicely, play properly, play some discernible tune. But no, her playing was an atonal orgy, senseless, barbaric, animalistic—it was disturbing, that’s what it was, and she was disturbed, her daughter was disturbed, and Nettie meant to put an end to it.
One night, as Mary Virginia lay tranced in her room, Nettie had the piano removed and taken to her brother-in-law’s place on East Erie Street, on permanent loan. If she never heard another note of piano music as long as she lived, Nettie would account herself blessed. As for Mary Virginia, she woke at dawn as usual, went to the place in the parlor where the piano had been, and without a word fell to her knees and began to pray. She prayed through the morning and afternoon and into the evening, through that night and into the next morning and the night and morning after that, her prayers stentorian, jangling, beating at the hallowed air of the McCormick sanctuary like the outraged hammers of fifty-six ivory keys.
She prayed herself into the hospital that time, but she was back at home and more or less placidly tranced as her twenty-first birthday approached. Nettie was against a coming-out party, but the Reaper King insisted. What would people think? That Cyrus Hall McCormick’s eldest daughter was mad? That he had no confidence in her? That her life was over before it had begun? Nonsense. She would have a coming-out party like any other girl of her age and class, and furthermore, it would be conceived and conducted on the grandest McCormick scale, a scale calculated to leave the Armours, Swifts and Pullmans in the dust. Was that clear?
It was. And in the grip of a February cold snap Nettie opened the house to six hundred and fifty guests, who were served champagne and oysters by an army of servants, followed by a formal dinner for fifty in the library and dancing till twelve in the third-floor ballroom. Mary Virginia, cool as the waxing moon in a white crepe gown and three-button French gloves, stood calmly—some said lethargically—in the receiving line, along with her parents, Cyrus Jr., and six white-clad alumnae of the Misses Kirklands’ Academy, and smiled at each of the six hundred fifty guests.
“Good evening,” she said to them, to each of them, individually, her voice disconnected from her body and her glorious, shining face, “my name is Mary Virginia McCormick and I am very pleased that you could come on the occasion of my entrance into society.” There were no prayers, no screams, no conversations with imaginary auditors, and the whole thing went off without a hitch, but for a very tricky half hour during which Johnnie Hand, the bandmaster, had acceded to the guest of honor’s request to sit in at the piano. Mary Virginia bent over the keys with a frown of concentration as the guests, band members and servants put on their about-to-be-charmed faces, and then launched into something that at first bore the faintest passing resemblance to a Chopin polonaise, but which quickly degenerated into the jangling, horrid, obscene cacophony her mother knew so well. The polite smiles dissolved from one face after another, the bandmaster looked stricken, and Mrs. Eulalia Titus, of Prairie Avenue, had to be assisted to the ladies’ room after one of her spells came up on her.
Nettie tried to end it with applause after the first minute or so, and the audience took it up dutifully, enthusiastically, and for a moment Mary Virginia’s efforts were drowned out by a tidal wave of applause, but when the clapping subsided, she was still at it. Head bent over the keyboard, elbows flailing, all thumbs and knuckles and flashing wrists, she tortured the instrument with variations no civilized ear had ever conceived of. At the five-minute mark, Nettie tried again, crying “Bravo!” and beating her hands together so forcefully she thought she’d dislocated both her wrists. And again the audience took it up, thankfully, beseechingly, crying “Bravo!” as if sounding a retreat. But Mary Virginia played on, played on till the ballroom was empty and Cyrus Jr. and one of his Princeton classmates had to take her by the wrists and pry her fingers away from the last thunderous chord that reverberated through the room like the end of a barrage.
Yes. And now she was mourning for her father.
Initially—for the first few seconds, anyway—Stanley was all right. No one was paying any attention to him—they were all looking at Mary Virginia, his big sister, the savior rushing in at the last minute to cow them all and rescue her little brother, and he soared, he really soared ... but when she went right by him and threw herself on that cold dead thing that used to be their papa, Stanley plummeted from the ceiling like a clay pigeon. This was his big sister, the angel in human form who used to take Harold and him on outings to the park, the furnace of affection who bundled him up on wintry afternoons for skating and hot chocolate on the lake and whispered in his ear till he shivered and pampered him when he caught cold, and she was ignoring him. She hadn’t come for him—she didn’t even see him.
Someone screamed. There was a rush for the coffin, Mama’s face lit with the sudden hellfire of her fury, Harold gaping in bewilderment and Missy and Anita biting down on their knuckles as if they were beef ribs or chicken wings, and Stanley made himself invisible. As soon as his mother let go of his hand, he was gone, vanished in the midst of the confusion, chairs rumbling, people crying out, all those oversized bodies in furious concerted movement. He didn’t stay to see his big brother and his uncles Leander and William wrest Big Sister away from his dead father, didn’t see the look of savagery and puzzlement on her face, didn’t see her toss and bite and kick till the flimsy rag of her shift pulled up over her hips to expose the scored and naked flesh beneath it. No: he ran straight downstairs to the oak wardrobe in the linen closet and burrowed.
Later, much later—it must have been past midnight—he ventured out into the hallway. He’d missed supper and Mama hadn’t come for him, which meant she was suffering with one of her headaches and mewed up like a prisoner in her room. He’d heard Marie calling for him, and then later Missy and Anita, but he’d just burrowed deeper among the towels and bedthings. He didn’t need them—he didn’t need his big sister or his mother or anybody—and even if he did, he couldn’t have done a thing about it. Once he climbed into the big bottom drawer of that wardrobe and inched it closed by applying his right shoulder to the rough unfinished surface of the plank above, he was powerless. There was something inside him gnawing its way out, something he’d swallowed, something alive, and it wouldn’t let him catch his breath or move his arms and legs or even lift his head to see where it was slashing through the skin of his belly with its claws and teeth and filling that hermetic space with a beard that wouldn’t stop growing till there was no room left in the box and no air either. For Stanley, a good boy, a bright boy, a pleasing and normal boy, it was the beginning of terror. From now on, there would be no place to hide.
The evening became the night, and all that while Stanley lay there rigid, listening to the enveloping sounds of the house, all the noise of the comings and goings and the clatter of silverware and crystal and the murmurous voices of the servants in the hall. He fought down his hunger, denying himself, shriving himself, lying there as still as the corpse of his father in the drawing room below. Finally, though, it was a need of the living that drove him out of his box: he had to pee.
By the time he crept from the wardrobe and stuck his head out the door to make sure no one was about, he had to go so badly he was squeezing himself, squeez
ing his peepee, though Mama wouldn’t let him call it that anymore. It wasn’t a penis either, not in Mama’s vocabulary. No: it was just a dirty thing little boys had attached to them for a dirty purpose and he wasn’t ever to touch it except to make pee, did he understand that? He didn’t understand, but every time she told him he nodded his head, looked down at the floor and let his eyes lead the retreat.
The hallway was deserted. Someone had left a light burning at the far end of it, outside the room they still called the nursery, and there was another light on in the bathroom across the hall. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. The mourners had taken their big blunt shoes and their furs and jewelry and their long condoling faces and gone home, and everyone else had turned in for the night—there was a funeral to attend in the morning, after all. Stanley squeezed himself. Two miniature goads stabbed at him down there, on either side, just above the groin. He held his breath a moment, listening, and then he darted across the hall to the bathroom, swinging the door shut behind him. He was peeing—relieving himself, and yes, it was a relief, the only relief he’d had all day—when he glanced up at the mirror and saw that someone was easing open the door behind him.
“I’m in here,” he sang out, turning away instinctively to shield himself. There was no answer but the faintest metallic grating of the hinges, the door swinging inexorably open, the noise of his urine in the porcelain bowl a sudden embarrassment, a steady boiling pent-up stream he was helpless to stop. He shot a nervous glance over his shoulder, expecting Harold. “Just a minute!” he cried, but it was too late.