by T. C. Boyle
A week went by, and O‘Kane took to walking into town at night, five miles there and five miles back, avoiding the Italians who gathered after supper on the big rock in the orchard with their checkers and squeezebox and grappa; he sat up till one and two in the morning with Nick and Pat and the softly snoring husk of their employer, shunning his room till he was so shot through with exhaustion he could shun it no longer. To his relief, there were no more pebbles, no more alarums in the night. Giovannella was gone. It was over. And he was just trying to adjust to the sad reality of that fact, feeling a little wistful and blue, when on a clear flower-spangled Saturday morning, Baldessare Dimucci and his eldest son, Pietro, trundled up the long stone drive in their manure cart and parked in front of the garage. Elsie Reardon came to get him. “There’s two men want to see you, Eddie,” she said, peering in through the bars to Mr. McCormick’s quarters. “Two wops.”
When Hamilton summoned him to the library that evening after his shift, O‘Kane didn’t think anything of it—usually the doctor wanted to compare notes on Mr. McCormick’s progress, or lack of it, either that or talk his ear off about Julius’s bowel movements or Gertie and how many times she’d been mounted by Jocko while Mutt looked on. But as soon as he stepped into the room and saw Mrs. McCormick and her mother sitting there like hanging judges and the doctor drawing a face about half a mile long, he knew he was in for it. Even before Katherine said, “Good evening, Mr. O’Kane, please take a seat,” in her iciest voice and the mother flashed him a quick fading smile out of habit and the doctor cleared his throat ostentatiously and let the light glare off his spectacles so you couldn’t see his eyes flipping, O‘Kane was thinking of how to explain away the little contretemps in the courtyard, dredging up mitigating circumstances and constructing an unassailable wall of half-truths, plausible fictions and unvarnished lies.
Over the years, in his relations with women—and those relations had been extensive, prodigious even—he’d learned that it was always best to deny everything. And so he’d attempted to do with Dimucci père and fils, but the Dimuccis, choleric and quick to act, the end product of centuries of blood feuds and immutable codes of peasant honor, would have none of it. “Eddie,” the old man cried out so that every blessed soul within a thousand yards could hear him, “you ruin-a my daughter Giovannella and now you got marry,” while the son, five-foot-nothing and with a face like a fox caught in a leg snare, glared violence and hate. They wouldn’t listen to reason. O‘Kane tried to tell them they weren’t in Sicily anymore, that this was a free country and that Giovannella was a grown woman and as guilty as he—guiltier, for the way she strutted around the kitchen and pouted her lips over every little thing and let her breasts hang loose like ripe fruit in a sack—but when he got to the part about ripe fruit Pietro came for him and, regrettably, he had to pin him to the wall of the house like a butterfly on a mounting board.
He felt bad about that. He was no monster. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. In all the time he’d been with Rosaleen he’d only slipped from the straight and narrow two times, not counting Giovannella, and then only when she was so big with the baby she couldn’t satisfy him—or wouldn’t. She refused to use her mouth or even her hand, and she was downright peevish about it, as if he’d asked her to shoot the pope or sell her soul to the devil or something. And both times, sure enough, some Judas betrayed him—he suspected it was her oldest brother, Liam, who always had his nose in somebody’s business, or her schoolfriend, Irene Norman, who worked at Bisby’s Lunchroom and chewed over every piece of gossip in town three times a day—and Rosaleen had raised holy hell, as if she needed anything to set her off. He denied everything. Told her whoever was filling her head with all that crap was a small, mean-spirited person who wasn’t worth giving a thought to, but Rosaleen screeched her lungs raw all the same and dented every pot and pan in the house. “Admit it!” she demanded, screaming. “Admit it,” she whispered after a night of lying awake beside him and sobbing, “admit it and I’ll forgive you,” but he knew better than that, knew he’d hear about Eulalie Tucker and Bartholemew Pierson’s wife Lizzie every minute of every hour of every day of his life if he breathed a word.
But now, in the library, surrounded by the rich and many-hued spines of the hundreds of beautiful leatherbound books Katherine had stocked on the teakwood shelves in the past weeks against the day of her husband’s recovery, he felt at a loss. How much did they know? How much did it matter? Was he their nigger slave, to be whipped and reprimanded and hounded over every little detail of his private life? That was what he was thinking as he took his seat and tried to look at Katherine without blinking or staring down at his shoes. There was a moment of excruciating silence, during which he heard the call of a monkey echoing forlornly over the grounds. “Yes?” he said finally, taking the initiative. “Can I be of help?”
Katherine stiffened. She was dressed in velvet, in the royal shade of maroon Monsignor O‘Rourke used to don for Lent and Advent, with a matching hat and plume of aigrettes. Her posture, as always, was flawless, knees and feet pressed together and neatly aligned, her back held so rigidly it was concave, her chin thrust forward and her lips clamped tight. “You certainly can,” she said, and her eyes gave him no respite. “Perhaps, Mr. O’Kane, you could offer an explanation of this incident—or rather, this affair—with the peasant girl.”
He tried to hold her eyes, tried to project innocence, humility, a ready willingness to do all he could to clear up what was at worst a simple misunderstanding, but he couldn’t. Her eyes were like whistling bullets, explosions in the dark. He looked to the mother, but she was off in a dream of her own, and then to Hamilton, but he was mimicking Katherine. “Well,” he said, trying on his winningest smile, the one his mother claimed could restart the hearts of the dead, raising his eyes to meet hers and grinning, grinning, “it’s all innocence is what it is, a school-girl crush, that’s all. You see, the girl in question was filling in here temporarily in the kitchen while Mrs.—”
Katherine cut him off. She took that rigid coatrack of her perfect back and perfect shoulders and leaned so far forward he thought she was going to splinter and crack. “You do understand, Mr. O‘Kane, that I am in charge here now?” she said, and he was quick to note the edge of impatience in her voice.
This was no time for improvisation—she was the conductor and he was the orchestra. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, and meant it. In the past months she’d redecorated the house, removing the gloomy Spanish paintings, heavy black furniture and pottery to the attic above the garage and replacing it with seascapes and western scenes, modern chairs and sofas with square edges and low backs, draperies that gave back the light and made the place look less like a West Coast version of McLean and more like the home of an important and consummately sane man with just the slightest, most temporary indisposition. She’d hired a new head gardener, a landscape architect and half a dozen new wops and Mexicans. And though the McCormicks still owned the house and Mr. McCormick paid a monthly rental back to his mother, all decisions, no matter how trivial, went through Katherine. She was in charge. There was no doubt about it.
“Good,” she said, “because I want you to keep that in mind when you hear what I’m about to say.”
O‘Kane glanced round the room. The doctor shifted uneasily in his chair; the old lady smiled faintly.
“I’ve spoken with the parties involved, Mr. O‘Kane—in Italian, so as to be absolutely certain of the facts—and I find your behavior reprehensible. You’ve trifled with this young girl’s affections, Mr. O’Kane, and worse, you’ve taken advantage of her. Ruined her, as they say. Do you think a female is just an object, Mr. O‘Kane, a bit of flesh put on this earth to satisfy your lusts? Is that what you think?”
O‘Kane’s head was bowed, but he was fuming. He didn’t give a damn who she was, she had no right—he was no stave—he was free to—“No,” he said.
There was a pause. The lights glinted on the spines of the books, the crystal on the sideboar
d. The old lady, Katherine’s mother, seemed to be humming to herself.
“Now Dr. Hamilton tells me you’re an excellent nurse,” Katherine went on, her voice strung tight, “and I know personally how devoted you are to my husband, but believe me, if it weren’t for that I’d dismiss you on the spot. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” he said, and he was croaking, croaking like a frog, like something you’d step on and squash.
“Because as long as you work for Mr. McCormick you are his representative in the community and you will conduct yourself as befits his unimpeachable moral standards or you will find yourself looking for employment elsewhere. Not to mention the fact, which is perhaps the saddest feature of this whole affair, that you are a married man. You’ve taken holy vows, Mr. O‘Kane, before God and man, and there is no earthly excuse for abjuring them. You disappoint me, you really do.”
O‘Kane had nothing to say. The bitch. The meddling snooty Back Bay bitch. How dare she dress him down like some schoolboy? How dare she? But he kept quiet because of the orange trees and Mr. McCormick and the best chance he had. He’d show her. Someday. Someday he would.
“There’s one more thing,” she said, relaxing finally into the embrace of the chair, though her feet remained nailed to the floor. “I’ve purchased two second-class tickets in your wife’s name. I will expect her here by the end of next week.”
6.
THE HARNESS
The second woman Stanley McCormick ever saw in a natural state was a French streetwalker by the name of Mireille Sancerre who wore undergarments of such an intense shade of red she was like a field of poppies suddenly revealed beneath the muted lights of her room. “Do you like maybe to watch?” she asked coyly as he lay paralyzed on her patchouli-scented sheets and saw the flaccid silky things fall from her to expose the whiteness at the center of her, the whiteness he expected and dreaded and lusted for. He was twenty years old, four months out of Princeton and a neophyte in the art studios of Monsieur Julien on the rue de Clichy in Montmartre. His brother Harold, who’d graduated with him in June, had just married Edith Rockefeller, and his mother, feeling Stanley’s loss, had taken him on a tour of Italy and the antiquities of Europe as a way of distracting him. They got along beautifully, Stanley and his mother, savoring the chance to be alone together after the separation of college, but they quarreled over Stanley’s plan to stay on in Paris for a few months and study sketching. To Nettie’s mind, the most corrupt and iniquitous city in Europe was hardly the place for her youngest child to take up residence on his own for the first time in his life, while Stanley argued that Paris was the cynosure and sine qua non of the art world and protested that he might never have such an opportunity again.
“Mother,” he cried, his face working and his eyes like mad hornets buzzing round his head as he stalked back and forth across the gilded expanse of their suite at the Elysée Palace Hotel, “it’s the chance of a lifetime, my one opportunity to study with a French master before I go home to Chicago and step back into the harness. I’m only twenty. I’ll be at the Reaper Works until I die.”
Nettie, enthroned in her chair, lips drawn tight: “No.”
“But mother, why? Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I done well at college and made you proud? Better than Harold—a hundred times better. I’m just asking for this one little thing.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No. And that’s final. You know perfectly well the temptations a young man of high character would be assaulted with daily in a city like this, a place I’ve always felt was full of foreigners of the very lowest repute, what with their obscene and sacrilegious views and their mocking attitude toward the moral and reflective life, and don’t you think for a minute I haven’t seen these pig-eyed Frenchmen smirking at us behind our backs.... And what of your health? Have you thought about that? Who’s going to nurse you if that Egyptian fever comes back again—you’re still frail from that, you know, and your color is nothing short of ghastly. Hm? I don’t hear you, Stanley.”
He had no answer to that, though he felt his color was fine, a little blanched and pallid, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. He’d been pacing and now he stopped in front of the sitting room mirror and saw a face he barely recognized, staring eyes and collapsed cheeks, a gauntness that frightened him—he did need to gain back some of the weight he’d lost in his bout with typhus, he admitted it, but where better to do it than in the gustatory capital of the world?
“And your nervous condition—what about that?” his mother persisted. “No, I couldn’t leave you here, never—Id be prostrate with worry the whole way back. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
No, Stanley wouldn’t want that, and he knew all about the severity of her heart condition and how much she needed him and how it would absolutely rend her to be without him even for a day, let alone two months or more, especially now, of all times, when Harold and Anita were gone and she had to go back to that big empty house all by herself and be alone with the servants, but for the first time in his life he stood up to her. For two weeks he gave her no peace, not a minute’s worth, imploring, importuning, beating his breast, brooding and glowering and slamming doors till even the servants were in a state, and finally, against her better judgment, she relented. She found him a suite of very suitable rooms with a Mrs. Adela van Pele, a pious Presbyterian lady in her late middle age from Muncie, Indiana, who ran an irreproachable establishment in Buttes-Chaumont while her husband, the celebrated evangelist Mies van Pele, converted headhunters along the Rajang River in Borneo, and she had a long talk with Monsieur Julien, who assured her that her son would sketch only the most suitable subjects—that is, still lifes and landscapes, as opposed to anything even remotely corporeal. Satisfied, but weeping and tearing at her hair nonetheless, Nettie took passage home—alone. And it was on the very night of his mother’s departure—on the way back from seeing her off, in fact—that Stanley, the blood singing in his ears, encountered Mireille Sancerre.
Or rather, she encountered him. He was walking down an unfamiliar street near the Gare du Nord at the time, wondering what to do first, and not paying a bit of attention to his surroundings. Should he go out for a meal at any restaurant that struck his fancy, and no one there to debate or belittle his choice? Or have a drink at a café and watch the people stroll by? Or he could go to a show, one of the titillating ones he’d heard so much about at college, or even, if he could work up the nerve, find a little shop where he could purchase a deck of those playing cards with the pictures on the reverse and steal silently back to his rooms to examine them at his leisure before Mrs. van Pele could get hold of him and coax him into singing hymns till bedtime.
Of course, just as keenly as he was tempted, he was struggling with his impure desires, thinking of how pious Mrs. van Pele really was, and what good company, and how generous it was of her to praise his voice, when Mireille Sancerre bumped into him. But this was no ordinary bump, the sort of casual contact one might encounter between acts at the opera or at a gallery or museum—it was a head-on collision, with plenty of meat and bone behind it. One minute Stanley was loping down the street in a daze, and in the next he was entangled, arm-in-arm and breast-to-breast, with a young woman, a female, whose entire repertoire of scents exploded in his nostrils while her huge quivering eyes seemed to burst up out of the depths of her face like buoys pinned beneath the waves and suddenly released. “Oh, monsieur, pardon!” she gasped. “Des milliers de pardons!”
And then, he never understood how, she convinced him in a matter of seconds to throw over every principle he’d ever held sacred and every last drop of the ethical and religious training he’d imbibed since birth, and come with her to her apartment. There were no introductions through mutual acquaintances, no recitations of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or exchanging of coats of arms, no preliminaries of any kind. Within a hundred and eighty seconds of their encounter, Stanley found himself walking off down the street with this
magnificent glossy thing on his arm, this little painted poupée, going he knew not where but prepared to kill anyone who might stand in his way.
“And so,” she said again as the red sheaves fell away from her like the petals of a stripped flower to show all that chilling nullity beneath and the severed breasts and the black bull‘s-eye of hair right in the middle of the canvas, “do you like maybe to watch?” and in that moment her index and middle fingers disappeared inside of her like a magician’s trick, right there in the center of that black bull’s-eye, and he said no, the voice caught like a burr in his throat, no, he didn’t want to watch, he couldn’t watch, he was feeling faint and his blood was rushing like the famous cataract where all the brides and grooms of America went to celebrate their honeymoon and would she please, could she please, turn out the light....
In the morning, he didn’t know where he was—or at first, even who he was. He was a creature of nature, that was all, a pulsating nexus of undifferentiated sensations, and he had eyes, apparently, that opened and saw, and ears that registered the sounds filtering up from the street, and a groin that lived entirely on its own. He saw that he was in a cheap room, cheaply decorated, empty wine bottles on the dresser, discolored plates soaking in a tub on the floor, eggs in a basket, apples, a border of faded crepe tracing the perimeter of the ceiling, female clothes in a heap. For a long while he just lay there staring, and he was outside himself, he was, because there was some dark place inside him that knew what he had done and reveled in it and wanted to snuff it up and snuff up more of it, and he refused to let that dark place see the light.