by T. C. Boyle
Finally, after the sun had invaded the curtains to illuminate the foot of the bed and trace a series of parallelograms across the floor, he sat up. He was alone. He’d known he was alone from the moment he’d opened his eyes and begun to absorb sensation like a sponge, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it because to admit it would be the first step in recalling the name Mireille Sancerre. But now he was up and now he recalled that name—it was on his lips like a fatal kiss—and everything he’d done came hurtling at him in a shriek of accusation. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. He was naked. He was naked in a strange woman’s bed—Mireille Sancerre’s bed. Slowly, with the dread and reluctance of the fear that verges on hysteria, he let his fingers creep across his abdomen and touch the hair between his legs, caked and crusted hair, laminated with the juices of Venus, and then, in a panic of hate and renunciation, to his penis.
His penis. It was there, whole and alive, and it began to grow in his hand until he pictured it like some terrible uncontainable thing out of a fairy tale, the beanstalk that would sprout right up through the roof and up into the reaches of the sky, and he snatched his hand away. Oh, what had he done, what had he done? He was venal. Doomed. Condemned to hell and perdition. He wished he was back in college again, back safe in his rooms with his books and pennants and his leather harness—the one he’d fashioned for himself when he first discovered the sin of self-pollution. He was only a sophomore then, but that was the start of it—and this, this was the end, all of life dirtier and progressively dirtier and every one of us an animal rooting in it. The first time he’d ever awakened with the wet evidence of his depravity on the sheets he’d gone right out to the nearest saddlery and brought himself a bridle and a set of leather-working tools. Ignoring his classes, he worked furiously at the thing, working through trial and error and with every particle of his perfectionist’s zeal, until, by suppertime, it was done. Two cuffs for his hands and two for his ankles, joined by the knotted strips of the shortened reins, and he wore it every night, his harness, so that he would never—could never—touch himself while he slept and dreamed or woke in the groggy sensual limbo of dawn. And how he wished he had that harness now....
But it was too late. Of course it was. The damage was done, he’d given way to his bestial instincts and he’d ruined a woman, ruined Mireille Sancerre, and there was only one thing to do: marry her. For the sake of his soul and hers. Yes, of course. The only thing to do. The realization gave him new life, and all at once he was up out of the bed and fumbling for his clothes—but what time was it? He couldn’t seem to find his watch or his stickpin, the one his mother had given him on graduating Princeton, the one with the three winking sapphires she said were no match for his eyes ... and then, as he pulled on his trousers and his jacket and felt through all his pockets, he was amazed, in the way of a man staggering out of a train wreck, to find that his wallet was gone too. But of course, he understood in an instant that Mireille Sancerre had taken his things, as a down payment on the mortgage of her ruination, and she had every right to them, every right to everything he owned.... After all, she was the one, the only one: she was his wife.
Stanley stayed on in her room through the hobbled morning and the decrepit afternoon, afraid to show his face on the street, the corruption festering in his flagitious eyes and sensual mouth, and though he was so thirsty he could have crawled a mile for a single drop of water and so gutted with hunger he was like a mad howling carnivore in the jungle, he never moved from the bed. Sometime in the late afternoon he found himself back in the wardrobe in the linen closet on the day before his father’s funeral and there was a rasping harsh voice excoriating him there, a disembodied voice that raked the flesh from his bones, and he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. The sun shifted, paled, died. At long last, when it was dark, fully dark, he came back to that bed in Mireille Sancerre’s cheap room that smelled of fermenting vegetables and scraps of rotting meat, and he saw his chance. In an instant he was on his feet and leaping at the door he’d been staring at all day, the door that gave onto a gloomy sweat-stinking stairwell, and before he could think he was charging down the stairs, oblivious to the startled faces on the landings and the cries at his back, down the stairs and into the street. He stumbled then and fell, a searing nugget of pain in his left palm and his knee too, but he picked himself up, found his legs and ran, ran till he could run no more.
Two weeks later, Harold stopped by Mrs. van Pele’s to look him up. He brought Edith with him—they were honeymooning in Europe and had just arrived on the Continent after a week’s stay in London—and Edith balanced herself like a buttercup on the cushions of Mrs. van Pele’s best chair with a glass of Mrs. van Pele’s best sherry on her knee while Harold went up to fetch Stanley down from his rooms. Unfortunately, Stanley wasn’t fetchable—at least not at first. Harold found him in bed, lying atop the bedclothes on his side with his wrists and ankles drawn up awkwardly behind him; his face was turned to the wall and he didn’t look up when his brother entered the room.
“Stanley!” Harold boomed, and he was an effervescing bubble of enthusiasm, filled to bursting, a twenty-two-year-old millionaire intoxicated with his new bride and his travels and his unshakeable alliance with the Rockefellers. “Wake up,” he cried, “Harold’s here! Come on, little brother, get up out of that bed and let’s drink some champagne and celebrate!” “
But Stanley didn’t get up out of bed—he barely lifted his eyes. As Harold looked on, stupefied, Stanley’s shoulders began to heave, his visible eye clouded over and he began weeping, his breath coming in a series of harsh protracted gasps that seemed to suck all the air out of the room.
“What is it, Stanley?” Harold said, the enthusiasm erased from his voice. “Are you still sick? Is it that Egyptian thing?”
A long moment, the gasps fighting for control. “Worse,” Stanley croaked, “a thousand times worse. I’ve lost my immortal soul.”
It took nearly an hour to extract the story from him, Stanley hesitant and euphemistic, his shame burning in his eyes as he talked on and on about repentance, atonement and eternal damnation, and twice during that time Harold descended to the parlor to commiserate with his bride, whom he would divorce twenty-six years later for the ambitious operatic fleshpot, Ganna Walska, and twice sent down for scalding cups of tea. Stanley told him how he’d been searching for the unfortunate girl for two weeks now and had even gone to the trouble of hiring a private detective to track her down, but with no success. He’d been in too much of a state over the enormity of his crime to have paid any attention to the street or even the neighborhood where he’d awakened on that fateful morning, and though he’d haunted the alleys and byways around the Gare du Nord every night since, he’d been unable to locate her. He didn’t know her address, her place of business, her connections, and yet he was determined to do the right thing by her—determined, in short, to marry her.
When Harold had heard him out, the room stifling, his wife impatient and petulant and the landlady wearing the mask of a tragedian as she tiptoed through the door with the tea things, he felt nothing but relief. Only Stanley could be so hopelessly naive, he thought, Stanley the holy, Stanley the sheltered, and he didn’t want to laugh at that naïvete—this was a delicate situation, he knew that—but in the end he couldn’t help himself. “Is that it?” he said. “Is that all of it?” And then he laughed. Guffawed. Let out with a howl his wife could hear downstairs as she fretted and grimaced and swore she’d get him back for this.
“Stanley, Stanley, Stanley,” he said finally, and the laughter rolled off him in sheets, like a disturbance of the weather, and there was no stopping it. “Don’t you see? She’s a prostitute, a putain, a whore. She’s had you and a thousand other men. She’s no purer than Beelzebub—and she’s gone and fleeced you on top of it. Why do you think she disappeared? Because your sapphire stickpin and your gold watch and the hundred-franc notes in your wallet bought her a six months’ holiday in a very comfortable hotel in Marseille or Saint-T
ropez or some such place.”
Stanley was sitting up now, staring into the dark waters of his teacup like a suicide brooding over the Seine. His voice was dead in his throat. “I’ve got to marry her.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Those swollen suffering eyes, the eyes of the anchorite and the mad suffering saint: Stanley was staring at him now. Fixedly. “Easy for you to say—you’re a respectable man. You’re married. You’re clean.”
Harold was on his feet, all patience lost, striding to and fro with the shell of an empty teacup in his hand. It was getting late, Edith was furious and Stanley, gloomy deluded Stanley, was spoiling his good time. He gave it one more try, pulling up short right in front of him, right at his very feet. “She’s a slut, Stanley, a professional. You don’t owe her anything, not money or redemption—if I were you, I’d be worrying about disease, not marriage. It’s crazy. Mad. Irresponsible.” Suddenly he was shouting. “You don’t marry a whore!”
“She’s not a whore.”
“She is.”
“She’s not. You don’t even know her.”
“Why did she let you have her then? Why did she take you home? Huh? Why do think she makes her offices in the street?”
Stanley was silent a long while, and they looked at each other in mutual disgust, each wondering how he could possibly be related to the other. From below came the faint unremitting buzz of Mrs. van Pele’s banalities as she bored Edith into an upright grave. Finally, just as Harold felt he could take it no longer, on the very brink of slamming his way out of the room and to hell with his little brother and his saintly scruples, Stanley spoke up. “What am I going to tell Mother?” he said.
After that, Stanley never strayed from the straight and narrow. He came home directly after his lessons with Monsieur Julien, and to help fill his evenings when he wasn’t praying with Mrs. van Pele or entertaining her with his clarion renditions of “Macedonia” and “Surely Goodness and Mercy Will Follow Me All the Days of My Life,” he took vocal lessons with the renowned tenor, Antonio Sbriglia. There was no thought of playing cards, obscene or otherwise, no desire to frequent cafés or even restaurants, no further mention of marriage to Mireille Sancerre or anyone else. He polished his modest skills under Monsieur Julien’s tutelage, producing a series of charcoal studies of the Pont-Neuf at every hour of the day, from the savage tranquillity of dawn to the miasmic melancholy of the swallow-hung evening, and he became expert at reproducing Cézanne’s apples. He was genuinely offended by the excesses of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, and though Monsieur Julien urged him to begin a study of the human form, he steadfastly refused. Two months to the day after his mother departed for the United States, he was on the boat home.
For the next six years, Stanley lived with his mother in the family fortress at 675 Rush Street, fixed in the mise-en-scène of his childhood like a stamp in a philatelist’s album. He had his own room now, of course, with a view of the gardens and a private bath, but the nursery where he’d spent the better part of his life remained unchanged and the halls were a stew of recollected odors, from the sharp stab of the camphor ointment his father used to rub on his ankles and knees to assuage the ravages of his rheumatism to the ghostly echo of Mary Virginia’s French perfume and the lingering dark must of a long-dead beagle by the name of Digger. He worked full-time at the Reaper Works, of which Cyrus Jr. was president and Harold vice president, juggling his schedule to accommodate his course load at Northwestern, where he was studying contract law. Officially, he was comptroller of the company, but Nettie was grooming him to oversee the legal department as well, thus consolidating all the McCormicks’ vital interests in the hands of her sons, after the model of the Medicis.
As for social life, Stanley was limited to two friends from Princeton—one of whom lived in New York and made infrequent trips to the Midwest—and the companions his mother chose for him from among the duller and more complacent scions of Chicago’s most rigorous and devout mercantile families. After a few failed experiments, she decided against including young ladies in her dinner and card parties, concluding that Stanley, whose health was still delicate, wasn’t at all ready for the emotional strains of courtship and marriage, just as she herself wasn’t ready to give him up, not yet anyway. Certainly he would be married one day, that was an absolute, but he was too young yet, too shy, too much in need of his mother’s guidance.
In the spring of his second year at home, when the Parisian debacle had begun to fade from his memory (though the face of Mireille Sancerre would flower in his mind at the most inconvenient times, as when he was taking his final exam in Contracts or ordering half a dozen shirts from the wilting young brunette at Twombley’s), he agreed to accompany his mother to Santa Barbara, to see to the arrangements for Mary Virginia’s house there. The spring semester had just ended, and with his brother’s collusion he was able to take a six-week leave from the Reaper Works. It was decided that somebody had to see mother through the ordeal of getting Mary Virginia settled once and for all, and since Anita had her young son to look after, and Cyrus Jr. and Harold were both too wrapped up in the business to take off just then (a very difficult time, what with the cutthroat competition from Deering, Warder, Bushnell and Glessner and a battle raging over entry into the markets in India and French Indochina), Stanley was elected.
He didn’t mind. Not at all. Though he took pains to conceal it, he wasn’t really feeling himself—hadn’t been for some time. It was his nerves, that and a certain intensification of his little compulsive habits, like washing his hands over and over till the skin was raw, or adding a column of figures fifteen or twenty times because each time he was afraid he’d made a mistake and each time confirmed that he hadn’t but might have if he weren’t so vigilant, or avoiding the letter R in his files because it was an evil letter, one that growled in his ears with unintelligible accusations and fierce trilling criticisms. He’d been working too hard. Putting too much pressure on himself to perform at the top of his law school class and do the sort of job his mother expected of him at the Reaper Works. Let Cyrus and Harold stay behind—he was glad of the change. So glad he found himself whistling as he packed his bags, the very ones he’d brought back from France, and though he did get a bit bogged down over the question of what to bring and what to leave behind—he drew up long tapering lists on scraps of paper, bits of cardboard, anything that came to hand, and then promptly lost them—he did finally manage to get everything he needed into three steamer trunks and an array of suitcases and handbags so overstuffed they nearly prostrated a team of porters at the station. And on the morning they left, the sun so brilliant everything seemed lit from within, he felt like a subterranean released from the deepest pit.
The first day out, he did nothing but sit at the window with an unopened book in his lap. The country soothed his eyes and he watched the Chicago sun draw away west into Missouri and go to war with the clouds. He slept well and ate well (his mother had brought along a skeleton crew of servants, including the Norwegian cook), and by the third day he was so relaxed he began to feel restive. That was when Nettie suggested he take a look at the plans for Mary Virginia’s house, to see what he thought, because she was wondering herself about the music room, whether it should be in the east or west wing, depending on the sunlight and Mary Virginia’s inclination to play piano in the morning or evening, and if it would really matter all that much because of the plethora of sunshine in California anyway. What did he think?
Stanley took up the blueprints like a man snatching a life jacket off the rail of a sinking ship. He spread them out on the table and studied them for hours, oblivious to everything, his mother, the servants, the yellow plains of Texas and the distant dusty cowboys on their distant dusty mounts. With a T square and a handful of freshly sharpened pencils, he began a detailed series of modifications, moving walls, drawing elevations where none had been provided, even sketching in shrubbery and the odd shadowy figure of Mary Virginia seated at the piano or strolling across th
e patio.
What did he think of the plans? That they were all wrong, that they were an insult, a product of nescient minds and ill-conceived notions. What did he think? That Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge should be dismissed for incompetence, that any fool off the street could have come up with a more practical and pleasing design and that the architects’ man in Santa Barbara had damned well better bring his drawing board along. But all he said to his mother was, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to suggest some changes....”
They wound up staying nearly four months, taking rooms at the Arlington (the Potter, with its sea views, six hundred rooms and twenty-one thousand dollars’ worth of custom-made china plate, wouldn’t be completed until 1903), and in that time Stanley altered every least detail of the original plans, from the height of the doorways to the type of molding to be used in the servants’ quarters. And he altered them daily, sometimes hourly, obsessed, fixated, stuck in a perfect groove of concentration. Inevitably, this caused some friction with the people who’d been engaged to do the actual building—Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge’s architect quit within the month, as did the builder, and the architect’s replacement, sent all the way from Boston, didn’t last out the week. Stanley wasn’t fazed. Nor was Nettie. She had faith in her son, and she was heartened to see him so concerned for his poor sister’s welfare, pouring all his Fowler intensity into his blueprints and his beautiful orthogonal drawings and the elevations with their darling little puffs of shrubbery and people moving about the rooms—and it was the Fowler coming out in him, the perfect image of her own father, which wasn’t to deny the McCormicks anything, not at all, but she knew her boy. And the way he went after those architects and builders and even the Sicilian stonemasons—nothing escaped him. And if he was indecisive, well, that was a Fowler trait too, and it only meant that he was passionately involved, putting himself to the test over and over again, questioning everything.