by T. C. Boyle
That was when he spotted Giovannella. She was across the street in front of the greengrocer‘s, bending over to inspect the tomatoes, and beside her, in a perambulator the color of a bat’s wing, was the baby. Guido was nowhere in sight. O’Kane looked both ways and back over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, then crossed the street and slipped up behind her, just another face in the crowd, and he was actually squeezing the fruit like a discerning housewife when he peered into the perambulator and saw the miniature features puckered like a sinkhole in the ground, eyes shut fast, a frilly blue bonnet pulled down over invisible eyebrows. But the skin—the fat clenched hands, the sinking face—was the color of Giovannella‘s, Giovannella’s purely, without adulteration, cinnamon on toast, Sicilian clay. Or dirt. Sicilian dirt.
Giovannella was aware of him now, looking up from her tomatoes while Wilson, the big-armed greengrocer, weighed them for her in a silver shovel-scoop of a scale, staring at him out of her stygian eyes. Her lips curled ever so slightly at the corners. “He’s beautiful, my baby, isn’t he, Eddie?”
O‘Kane looked to Wilson, and Wilson knew, everybody knew. Except maybe Guido. “Yeah,” he said, “sure,” and he felt numb all over, as if he’d been to the dentist and breathed deep of the gas till his mind fled away.
Oh, and her smile was rich now, her lips spread wide, teeth gleaming white in the sun. “You know what we decided to name him, Eddie? Huh?”
He didn’t have a clue. He looked to Wilson again and Wilson looked away.
“ ‘Guido,’ Eddie. We named him ‘Guido.’ After his father.”
And what did he feel then? Relieved? Thankful? Glad he hadn’t fathered another child to be raised a stranger to him? No. He felt betrayed. He felt rage. He felt jealousy, hot and electric, like a wire run right on up through him from his cock to his brain and the current on full. Wilson disappeared behind his melons and Guinea squash. A woman in a felt hat faded from black to gray bent over the radishes and then moved away down the aisle and into the cool depths of the shop. He looked hard at Giovannella. “What are you saying?”
The baby might as well have been carved of wood—it was there, in the carriage, sunk into itself. Giovannella tucked the brown paper sack of tomatoes under one arm and gave him a savage look. “You’re a big man, huh, Eddie? Always so cocksure—isn’t that right? The ladies’ man. The big stud.” She bit her lip, shot a glance around to see if anybody was watching. He was confused, adrift on a heavy sea, the sun throwing shadows across the street and the pavement glowing as if it was wet with rain. What did she want from him? What was the problem?
And then, as if he’d been awaiting his moment in the center of the stage, the baby woke up and flashed open his eyes—and there it was, for all the world to see, the green of Dingle Bay and three o‘clock in the afternoon.
Well, and that ruined the day for him, put a real kibosh on it, sent him into a funk that only whiskey could hope to salve. Of course, the moment the kid opened his eyes she whisked him away, the wheels of the perambulator spinning like a locomotive’s and the first feeble waking cry magnified into an infantile squall of rage, but by then she was at the corner and hustling down De la Guerra Street until the stony white columns of the First Security Bank swallowed her up. He didn’t follow her. Let her go, he thought, let her play her games, and wouldn’t she have made a sterling assistant to Savonarola, the hot iron glowing in her hand? The bitch. Oh, the bitch.
His hand shook under the weight of the first whiskey, and he sat at a table in the corner, stared out the window and watched the pigeons rise up from the street and settle back down again till he knew every one of them as an individual, knew its strut and color, knew the cocks from the hens and the old from the young. There they were, fecund and flapping, like some mindless feathered symbol of his own feckless life, leaping up instinctively as each car passed and then pouring back down again in its wake, oblivious, strutting, pecking, fucking. He was thinking about Giovannella and Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. and little Guide—Guido, for Christ’s sake—and wondering where he’d gone wrong. Or how. He was no biologist, like Katherine, but he knew that if the male of the species—namely, Eddie O‘Kane—sticks his thing in the female enough times, no matter the time of month or the precautions taken, eventually she’s going to swell up and keep on swelling till there’s another yabbering little brat in the world.
But he caught himself right there. This was no ordinary brat, this was no black-eyed little shoemaker’s son, this was Guido O‘Kane, his son, and he had to take responsibility for him. But how? Slip Giovannella money each month and play the Dutch uncle? Catch the shoemaker in an alley some night and make her a widow and then go ahead and marry her, which is what he should have done in the first place? But then—and there was an icy nagging voice in the back of his mind, the voice of the Ice Queen reading him the riot act in the downstairs parlor—he was already married, wasn’t he?
All this was going through his head when the little two-seat Maxwell with its trim white tires and expressive brakes pulled up to the curb and sent the pigeons into a paroxysm of flight. He could see Dolores Isringhausen sitting at the wheel, her pearl gloves, the way she cocked her head back and the glassy cold look of her eyes. She didn’t get out of the car. She didn’t come in. Just tapped the horn as if she were summoning some lackey, some black buck to slip into the manor house and service her while the master’s away, and what did she think he was? He didn’t move a muscle. Raising the glass to his lips, he took a long slow sip, as if he had all the time in the world, eyes locked on hers all the while. He wanted to gesture to her to come in, but he didn‘t, and when she tapped the horn again, her features drawn in irritation, he got up, crossed the barroom and went to her.
“What was that about?” she said, glancing up as he climbed in beside her. “Didn’t you see me? You were looking right at me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, the car lurching forward with a crunch of the tires, and by the time he got settled they were charging down State toward the ocean, the blue skin of the sky joined to the blue skin of the sea by a thin gray seam of mist that blotted the islands from view. She had the top up, for discretion’s sake, and she drove too fast, dodging round a market wagon and a double-parked car, nipping in behind the trolley and shooting through the intersections as if there was no other car on the road. “I saw you,” he said, and he could feel the weight lifting off him, just a hair, “and it was good to see you, damn good.... I just needed a minute to feast my eyes on you and think how lucky I am. Or how lucky I’m going to be.”
“What’s the matter,” she said, bunching her lips in a moue, “all your girlfriends on strike?” She leaned into him for a kiss, but she never took her eyes off the road. They rattled over the streetcar tracks and in and out of a pair of potholes that nearly put his skull through the canvas roof, and then she swung left on Cabrillo, heading away from town. “You still seeing the little Italian slut, the one with the dirty eyes? You know, the breeder?”
“Nah,” he lied, “there’s nobody right now.” And he gave her his smile, their faces so close, the car jolting, the smell of her. “I’ve been saving myself for you.”
By way of response, she produced a flask from beneath the seat, took a drink and handed it to him. “Then I guess I can expect a pretty hot time,” she said finally, giving him a sidelong glance, her smile tight around lips wet with gin, and like any other actor taking his cue, he reached out and laid a hand on her thigh.
They didn’t stop at a roadhouse, lunchroom or restaurant, but went straight up Hot Springs Road and into the hills of Montecito in a hurricane of dust and flying leaves that didn’t abate till she swung into the tree-lined drive of the villa and glided up to the garage. She killed the engine and he wondered if he should go round and open the door for her, but she didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and in the next moment they climbed separately out of the car and headed up the walk in front of the house. The place was deserted, no servants or gardeners o
r washerwomen, no eyes to see or ears to hear, and she took him by the hand and led him straight up to the bedroom. He knew what to do then, and as the afternoon stretched into the evening and the sun crept across the floor through the French doors flung open wide on a garden of ten-foot ferns, he used his tongue and his fingers and his hard Irish prick to extract all the pleasure from her he could, and it was like breaking for the goal with the ball tucked under his arm, like swinging for the fence, one more empty feat and nothing more. He didn’t love her. He loved Giovannella. And he thought about that and how odd it was as he thrust himself into Dolores Isringhausen with a kind of desperation he couldn’t admit and the sun moved and the woman beneath him locked her hips to his and he felt the weight slip back down again, hopeless and immovable, till it all but crushed him.
He must have fallen asleep, because when the phone rang in the next room it jolted him up off the sheets and she had to put a hand on his chest to calm him. He watched as she got up to answer it, her legs and buttocks snatching at the light, and not a sag or ripple anywhere on her. How old was she, anyway—thirty-five? Forty? He’d never asked. But he could see she’d never had any children—or if she had, it was a long time ago. He took a drink from the flask and watched a humming-bird hovering over the trumpet vine with its pink cunt-shaped flowers and listened to her whispering into the receiver. And who was that she was talking to—tomorrow’s lay?
She came back into the room in a susurrus of motion, hips rolling in an easy glide, and straddled the white hill of his knee. He waited till she’d reached over to the night table for a cigarette and held a match to it, and then he said, “So your husband—he isn’t back from the War yet, is he?”
“Who, Tom?” She twitched her hips and rubbed herself there, on his knee, and he could feel the warmth and wetness of her. “He’s never coming back—he’s having too much fun pulling the trigger on all the whores of Asiago.”
“Does he know about you? I mean, that you‘re—”
“What? Unfaithful? Is that the word you’re looking for?”
He watched her eyes for a signal, but they were as glassy and distant as ever. She merely shrugged and shifted her thighs to accommodate the angle of his knee. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”
“What do you think?”
What did he think? He was a little shocked, that was all, to think how loose her morals were—and her husband’s too. He wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing, not if he were over in Italy fighting the Huns or the Austrians or whoever they were. He didn’t say anything, but she was watching him, working herself against his shin now, the tight little smile, the bobbed hair, the gently swaying breasts.
“Better I should lock myself in a nunnery till the great warrior comes home?”
No. Or yes. But he’d leapt ahead of her already, and he realized he didn’t give a damn for her or her husband or what they did with their respective groins—he was thinking about that half-Italian baby in the perambulator and the pale wondering face in the crumpled-up photograph. “You mind if I ask you something?”
She gave him a look he couldn’t gauge and he felt her body tense, though she shrugged and said, “Sure, go ahead,” and let the smoke seep out of her nostrils in two ascending coils.
“I was wondering—you never had any kids, did you? Children, I mean?”
“Me?” She laughed. “Can you picture me as a mother? Come on, Eddie.”
“But how—?”
“Ah,” she said, twisting round to snub out the cigarette in the hammered brass ashtray on the night table, “I see where this is going. She had the baby, didn’t she, your little peasant girl?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes.”
“And it’s yours?”
“Yes.”
And then she laughed again, and the laugh irritated him, made him feel that spark of anger that always seemed to go straight to his hands. “You think it’s funny?”
In answer, she collapsed on him, pinning his face to the pillow and forcing a kiss that was like a bite, and then she rolled off him and lay sprawled on her back beside him. “I do,” she said. “And it is funny, because you’re like a baby yourself, like you were just born and still kicking. Sure, give me that look, go ahead, but to answer your question, I use a Mensigna pessary, Eddie,” and she reached between her legs to show him.
And now he was shocked, and maybe a little frightened too. She held the thing up where he could see it, a black rubber tube all slick with her juices—and his. It was unholy, that’s what it was, a murder weapon, a mortal sin you could see and feel and hold in your own two hands.
“It comes in fourteen sizes,” she said, enjoying the moment and the look on his face. “The only problem is,” and she was coy now, coy and already moving into him, “you have to go to Holland to get one.”
The rains that winter seemed unusually heavy, one February storm alone dropping eight inches in a single day over the sodden town and its sandbagged saloons, lunchrooms, barbershops, corner groceries and cigar stores and converting lower State Street into a chute full of roiling mud that inundated all the first-floor shops and dwellings. The dark sucking river that rode atop the mud washed a whole flotilla of cars out to sea while the incoming waves cannonaded the harbor and drove half the boats moored there up against the shore until there was nothing left but splinters. The sky was a torn sheet, gone gray with use and flapping on the line.
O‘Kane enjoyed it, at least at first. He missed weather, real weather, the nor’easters that roared in off Boston Harbor on a blast of wind, the thunderstorms that ignited the summer sky and dropped the temperature twenty degrees in the snap of two fingers, but after he ruined a new pair of boots beyond repairing and had to drink at a Chink place in Spanishtown for a week because Menhoff’s had six inches of mud all over the floor and creeping up the legs of the chairs, he began to feel afflicted. The rain kept coming, and everyone felt the burden of it, even Mr. McCormick, who announced he’d go mad if he didn’t see some sunshine soon. It was a trial, a real trial, but the rains made the spring all the sweeter, and by March you’d never think a drop had ever fallen or would ever again.
Dolores Isringhausen went back to New York the morning after. St. Patrick’s Day (which she didn’t spend with O‘Kane), Giovannella began to soften toward him and even let him in once or twice when Guido wasn’t looking to admire the baby up close, but no kissing and no touching, and Mr. McCormick improved to the point where he was more or less rational at least fifty percent of the time—and this despite Dr. Brush’s retreat from active intervention to a strictly custodial role. Or maybe because of it. Just leave the man alone, that was O’Kane’s philosophy, and if he wanted a two-hour shower bath, let him have it. Why not? It wasn’t as if he had a train to catch.
And then it was June, and Dr. Brush, all three hundred and twenty-seven pounds of him, was called up to serve his country behind the lines with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He left his wife with a cousin (hers) on Anapamu Street, had a long talk with Mr. McCormick about duty and patriotism and the conduct of the War, and headed out on the train, the only member of the McCormick medical team to be called to active duty. They stationed him in England, and O‘Kane pictured him tucking away an English breakfast with two pots of tea ard then sitting around under the elms with a bunch of spooked one-legged vets and asking if their fathers had spanked them.
As it turned out, Brush would be gone just over two years, and though he wasn’t accomplishing a damn thing as far as O‘Kane could see, except maybe by accident, the McCormicks—and Katherine—insisted on a replacement, the best money could buy. Or rent. Dr. Meyer came all the way out himself and brought the interim man with him, a Dr. August Hoch, who’d succeeded him as head of the Pathological Institute in New York. Dr. Hoch was a Kraut—all the headshrinkers were Krauts, it seemed, except Hamilton and Brush, and that was all right with O’Kane, since they’d invented headshrinking in the first place. It was just that there was a lot of anti-German
sentiment in the country around that time, and understandably so, and it didn’t make it any easier bellying up to the bar at Menhoff’s when everybody in town knew you had a Kraut over you. In fact, he’d had to wipe the floor one night with a guy in a lunchroom who called Dolores Isringhausen a Hun to her face, and the irony of it was she wasn’t even German—her maiden name was Mayhew.
But Dr. Hoch was all right. He was a keen-eyed old duffer with gray chin whiskers and a thin white scar that carved a wicked arc from just beneath his left eye to the back hinge of his jaw. O‘Kane was there the day Meyer and Hoch walked in on Mr. McCormick, who’d just returned from his morning exercise—a tortuous and many-branching stroll to the Indian grounds and back. Mr. McCormick was off in the corner, holding a private conference with his judges, and Dr. Meyer, whom Mr. McCormick knew well from his semiannual visits, went right up to him and said he had somebody he’d like him to meet. “Or perhaps,” he added, his accent thick as sludge, “you will already know him, yes?”
Mr. McCormick left off with his judges and turned slowly round, his eyes passing mechanically from Dr. Meyer’s black-bearded face to Dr. Hoch’s gray-bearded one. He seemed to recognize Dr. Meyer, and that was all well and good, but Hoch was obviously a puzzle. There was something in his eyes—a spark of recognition? fear? bewilderment?—but O‘Kane couldn’t read it.