by T. C. Boyle
“To refresh your memory, maybe,” Dr. Meyer went on, rocking back on his heels as if he were about to perform some acrobatic feat, “you will recall that Dr. Hoch examined you in nineteen hundred and seven, when you were a guest at McLean, but perhaps you forget because then you are not so well as you are now?”
Dr. Hoch came forward, a shambling sort of man in a shapeless gray suit who’d let his mustache and chin whiskers go so long without trimming that they hung down to his collar and completely obscured his throat. The scar shone in the morning light like a trail of dried spittle or the glistening track a slug leaves on the pavement, silvery and ever so faintly luminescent. “How do you do, Mr. McCormick,” he said with a little bow, and he didn’t extend his hand until Mr. McCormick automatically reached out his own. “It is a great pleasure to see you once again, yes?” and his accent was thicker than Meyer’s.
Mr. McCormick held onto Dr. Hoch’s hand a long while—so long, in fact, O‘Kane began to think he’d have to move in and break the grip—and twice he raised his free hand as if to touch the doctor’s scar, but then dropped it again to his side. “Yes,” Dr. Hoch said finally, “and I see perhaps that you are interested in my scar?”
Mr. McCormick let go of the doctor’s hand then, and he fluttered round a bit, stamping his feet and wringing his hands as if they were wet before stuffing them awkwardly into his trouser pockets. He loomed over the doctor, who couldn’t have been more than five-four or five-five. It seemed as if he were about to say something, but he bit his tongue and just stared at the side of the doctor’s face, watching in fascination as Hoch traced the line of his scar with a blunt fingertip.
“This,” Hoch said, “this is what we call in Germany a dueling scar. From my student days. You see, it was thought to be a cosmetic attraction to the ladies, a sign of virility or a badge of honor perhaps, but of course that was all foolishness then, the vanity of the young, and I do not know if students of today in the university they still have this—what do you say, ‘rite’?—anymore.” And then he said something in rapid-fire German to Meyer, who rattled something back.
“Ah. So. Herr Doktor Meyer informs me that this habit is no longer so much practiced as formerly.” He gazed up at Mr. McCormick, like some wood gnome confronting a giant—and Mr. McCormick was a giant, despite the stoop that rounded his shoulders and at times bent him over double, depending on the degree of punishment his imaginary judges were inflicting on him. “Would you like to touch it?” the doctor said, his eyes glinting.
And Mr. McCormick, who didn’t favor physical intimacy and had never touched anyone except in anger in all the time O‘Kane had known him, reached up tentatively to explore the side of Dr. Hoch’s face with two tremulous fingers. He traced the crescent of the scar over and over, very gently, so gently he might have been petting a cat. It was all very strange, Mr. McCormick stroking, the doctor submitting, the room so silent you would have thought they were all locked away in an Egyptian tomb, and then Mr. McCormick looked as if he wanted to say something, his lips moving before any sound came out. “So, it—it,” he stammered, withdrawing his hand and tucking it away in his pocket, “it is possible after all.”
“Possible?” Dr. Hoch just stood there, inches from their stooped-over and trembling employer, looking up steadily into his eyes. Dr. Meyer shot a glance at O‘Kane, but O’Kane was dumbfounded. This was something new, this touching, and it would have to play itself out.
“To-to be a man,” Mr. McCormick said, and then sang out one of his nonsense phrases, “one slit, one slit, one slit.”
“Yes, yes it is,” Dr. Hoch said, his face a web of lines that bunched and gathered around that one terrific silvery slash, and he didn’t ask about mothers or fathers or boom out platitudes—he just waited.
“With a razor, I mean.” Mr. McCormick had straightened up now and he looked round the room as if seeing it in a new light. “When, when Eddie and Mart shave me, it’s a, it’s a dangerous thing, to be cut like that, but it can, you can—”
The little doctor was nodding. “That’s right,” he said.
“I mean, what I mean is ... if I was cut there”—and he reached out to touch the scar again—“it would, just, heal, and then I w-would have a scar too.” He rocked back on his feet. “But here,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat, “here it’s very ... dangerous. And here,” pointing down, “you’re not, not a man anymore.”
“But Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane broke in, “you know we always use a safety razor, you know that—”
Hoch looked at Meyer. Meyer looked at Hoch. Mr. McCormick drew himself up till his shoulders were squared and he was the very model of proper posture. He waited till he was sure he had O‘Kane’s attention, and the doctors’ too, and then spoke in a clear strong uninflected voice, “Yes, Eddie, I know.”
Well. O‘Kane was impressed—all that over a scar—but he thought nothing more of it as the summer faded into autumn and the War news dominated every conversation and Giovannella warmed and melted and gave way to him again, stealing out on Saturday afternoons to linger with him on a mattress in the garage out back of Pat’s house while the baby shook his rattle and pumped his legs and arms in the air. Meanwhile, the bearer of the scar, Dr. Hoch, was very patient with Mr. McCormick—none of this talking cure business—sitting with him throughout the day and into the night, putting in longer hours than O’Kane or Mart or anybody on the estate. Mostly he would just sit there with him, rumpled and avuncular, reading out an interesting bit from a book or magazine now and again, walking Mr. McCormick. to and from the theater building and accompanying him on his walks. Sometimes the two of them would sit for hours and not say a word, and other times Mr. McCormick would be positively verbose, going on and on about the reaper—“the Wonder of the Reaper,” he called it, after some book about his father—and his two brothers and the crying need for social welfare and reform in this cold unforgiving world.
They talked of the War too, and that was a bit odd, from O‘Kane’s point of view anyway, because here were the American millionaire and the prototypical Hun sitting cheek by jowl, but they never came to blows over it or even raised their voices, not that O’Kane could recall. War news trickled through to them all winter, often several days late, through the Los Angeles, Chicago and Santa Barbara papers, and the papers brought news of Katherine too. She was in Washington throughout that year—1918—and the next, where she’d been handpicked by the president himself to sit on the National Defense Women’s Committee, doing all sorts of things to prosecute the War, from putting women to work to selling Liberty Bonds and dreaming up those patriotic posters you saw everywhere. Every month or so she’d send Mr. McCormick detailed maps of the Western Front, showing the battle lines and trenches. He would pore over them for hours, commenting on places he’d visited on his honeymoon and sketching in all sorts of antic figures to represent armies, gun emplacements, and naval, horse and even air squadrons.
For a while there, especially through the summer and fall of 1918, the War became one of his pet obsessions, and he drew not only Dr. Hoch into it, but O‘Kane himself. When the armies advanced or retreated he painstakingly erased his figures and symbols and moved the lines forward and backward and drew them in all over again. He analyzed the offensive at Amiens over and over, and he’d never been more lucid or articulate, not since his golfing days at McLean, and when the papers announced the American victory at St. Mihiel in September, he paraded around the upper parlor for hours, shaking his fists and uncannily imitating the whistle and crash of a bombardment while the rumpled little doctor sat on and watched with his scarred impassive face.
Katherine returned in December for the holidays, and that was when the business of the scar came up again. She was late in getting to California because of her duties with the Defense Committee, arriving just two days before Christmas. She seemed tired, worn about the edges, and as she stood in the theater building under a monumental wreath of holly and mistletoe handing out Christmas bonuses t
o the employees, she looked old. Or older. O‘Kane watched her, always the lady, always perfect, always carved of the clearest coldest ice, and tried to tot up her age—she would have been, what, forty-one? Or forty-two? Well, for the first time it had begun to show—nothing extreme; she was hardly a hag yet—but there it was. Her clothes were as rich as ever, but they were yesterday’s fashions, the heavy drapery of the suffragette and the matron, nothing at all like the skimpy satiny look of Dolores Isringhausen or the walking light that was Giovannella. She was getting old, but so was everybody else, even lucky Eddie O’Kane, who was going to be thirty-six come March. And he felt it most keenly when he came up to her and she took his hand and gave him his envelope and a smile that didn’t mean a thing, not yea or nay, and he almost wished she’d come round cracking the whip again so they could all go back and start over, drenched in hope.
Anyway, the next day, the day before Christmas, she came to the house early in a flurry of presents and fruitcakes and rang up her husband from downstairs, to chat with him and extend her Christmas greetings. O‘Kane was playing dominoes with Mart when the phone rang and the doctor got up to answer it. “It’s for you, Mr. McCormick,” he said, and his eyes were moist and wide. “It’s your wife.”
It took Mr. McCormick a minute to get up the steam and cross the room to where the doctor stood holding the telephone out to him, and when he did start across the floor he regressed into his two-steps-forward-one-step-back mode, hunching his shoulders and dragging down his face, his right leg suddenly dead and trailing behind him in a kind of wounded tango. When he finally did get to the phone, lift the receiver to his ear and bend to the mouthpiece, he didn’t seem to have much to say other than a moist gulping swallow of a hello. She seemed to be doing all the talking. At least at first.
Dr. Hoch settled into an armchair at a discreet distance, and O0‘Kane and Mart went on with their game, but all three were listening, of course they were—if not for therapeutic reasons, then for curiosity’s sake; that, and to poke a hole, however small, in the tight fabric of their boredom.
Five minutes into the conversation, Mr. McCormick’s voice suddenly came up in a froglike croak. “Did you see Dr. Hoch’s scar?”
There was a silence while she responded, and if O‘Kane strained to hear over the crackle of the fire and the ambient sounds of the house, he could just make out the faintest whisper on the other end of the line, and it was funny—she could have been halfway around the world for all the faintness of her voice, but here she was right downstairs. That must have been odd for Mr. McCormick, because he knew where she was as well as anybody. But then he was used to it, O’Kane figured. Sure. And what a thing to get used to—to have to get used to—tike the prisoner in solitary who falls in love with the mouse that shares his cell or the galley slave who comes to like the feel of the oar in his hand.
But now Mr. McCormick was saying something about cuts—his singsong chant, “one slit, one slit, one slit” creeping into it. “I can be cut too,” he said. “Sh-shaving. In my throat. Ever think of that?”
She was saying something, the tiniest whisper of a mechanical squawk. The fire snapped. Mart stretched and something popped in his shoulders.
“You’re in Washington!” Mr. McCormick suddenly shouted. “With me-men! You’re in Washington all alone, ar-aren’t you? I know you are, I know, and do you kn-know what Sc-Scobble did to his wife, or—or almost did, because she was, was UNFAITHFUL?” And he roared out this last so that the doctor jumped and O‘Kane had to fight himself to keep from getting up and pacing round the room.
She said something back, trying to calm him, Now, Stanley, you know better—
“Do you know?” he roared.
Silence on the other end. Apparently she didn’t.
And then, in a voice as calm as it was clear and unobstructed, he was quoting, quoting a poem:Scobble for whoredom whips his wife and cries
He’ll slit her nose; but blubbering she replies,
“Good sir, make no more cuts i’ th’ outward skin,
One slit’s enough to let adultery in.”
He stood there poised over the phone a long moment, and whether Katherine was making any reply to this or not, O‘Kane never knew, but he felt his heart turn over and his eyes were burning as if he’d got caustic soda in them. He hadn’t given it much thought, Mr. McCormick locked away here in his tower and she out there in the world, but of course she was unfaithful to him, how could she not be, Ice Queen or no? It had been twelve years at least. And how could any woman go without it as long as that?
5.
THE MATCH OF THE YEAR
When Katherine refused him, all but laughing in his face on that rainy thick-bodied September night with the horses clopping stupidly through the streets and the clock thundering doom in his ears, Stanley got to his feet, made a curt bow and bolted for the door, deaf to her calls and pleas. “Stanley, what are you doing?” she cried, springing up in alarm. “I was just... I thought we were—she protested, hurrying after him, but he never hesitated, not even to retrieve his hat and coat, flinging himself down the stairs and out into the rain. ”Stanley!“ she called, her voice echoing down the stairway and out the open door. ”Be reasonable! You’ve got to give me time!“
He never even heard her. He was running, the hair hanging wet in his face, his collar askew and his shirtfront soaked through to the skin, and he ran all the way back to the hotel, arms pumping, elbows flailing, eyes flashing white. Pedestrians fell away from him beneath the bonnets of their umbrellas like so many wilted toadstools, carriages swerved to avoid him as he slashed across the street, dogs barked at his heels. “Watch where you’re going,” someone growled and a police officer shouted out to him, but he paid no heed. He never felt the cobblestones beneath his feet or the raindrops on his face, didn’t smell the wet richness of the old stones or the barnyard ferment of the horse dung in the gutters, didn’t notice the way the night gathered around the streetlights as if to smother them.
She’d laughed at him. Refused even to take him seriously. Made a joke of the whole thing. But then why wouldn’t she? He was a fool, ungainly, stupid, the least likely suitor in the world, not half the man Butler Ames was. What had he been thinking? A woman like Katherine could have her pick of all the men in the world, and why would he ever think she’d stoop to consider someone like him?
The clerk at the front desk gave him a startled look when he burst through the door in his wild-eyed, rain-soaked, hatless frenzy. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked, practically shouting, and the bellhop rounded the corner at a dead run. “Have you been injured? Should I call a doctor?”
“The bill,” Stanley wheezed, and what had become of his voice? He pounded his breastbone with an urgent fist. “I want to, to settle up.”
“Sir?” the clerk said, making a question of it, and then he took a closer look at Stanley’s eyes and collar and the water dripping from his nose and chin, and changed his tone. “Yes, sir,” he said, all servility and unctuous concern. “I have it right here. Mr. McCormick, isn’t it?”
“I’ll be wanting my motorcar brought round.”
Again the clerk lapsed into amazement. He flashed a nervous look at the bellhop. “Sir?”
“My automobile. From the stables out back. I’ll need it brought round, at, at once.”
“But sir, it’s nearly midnight and our motor man has gone off duty—I’m afraid no one here can operate the machine, sir, and besides, don’t you know it’s raining?”
Stanley was extracting bills from his wallet and laying them out in a neat row on the marble countertop. “Never mind,” he said, “I’ll fetch it myself. And please, just put this toward the bill, and, and keep the change.”
“What about your luggage, sir?” The clerk was shouting at his retreating form, but Stanley never looked back.
The Mercedes wasn’t equipped with a top, but that didn’t faze Stanley. He draped a rug over his knees, wrapped himself in a tan duster, settled his saturated sc
alp beneath a wide-crowned felt hat and started off down the dark street in a roar of backfiring cylinders and ratcheting gears. The rain drove down in silver sheets and beat off the dash and the seats till there was a regular stream flowing between his feet and out over the running board. His hat collapsed and his goggles steamed up. The wind cut through him. And once he left the city, heading for the Adirondacks and his mother, the blackness closed over him and the thin stream of illumination from the headlamps was all but swallowed up in it. He couldn’t see a thing.
Still, he kept going. He was in shock, so hurt and mortified he felt like a burnt-out cinder, immolated in shame, and he had no other thought than to make it home as quickly as he could. He hurtled through the night, spooking foxes, skunks and opossums and striking terror in the breast of every slumbering horse and stertorous cow within earshot, and through it all he was picturing the yellow pine camp on Saranac Lake with its six-foot-high fireplace and overstuffed couches and a hundred rustic nooks and niches where he could burrow deep and lick his festering wounds.
Katherine had rejected him. That was the fact of his life. It was his sorrow and his burden and it wet him through and hurled wind in his teeth and basted him in mud. Inevitably, though, as the night wore on and the car rocked and lurched its way through the storm, the thunder of the elements and the even, unbroken whine of the engine began to soothe him. Sure. He was making good time, conquering the night, alone and adventuring, and he got as far as Westborough before he took a wrong turn, blew out both front tires simultaneously and sank to the axles in an evil-smelling plastic mud that sucked the boots from his feet the minute he abandoned the car.
There were no lights anywhere. But he labored on, barefooted, and the night was hallucination enough for him. He followed one road to another and on to the next till it was dawn and still raining and a farm-house loomed up out of the gloom like an island at sea. The farmer obliged him by taking him back into town—which he’d somehow managed to circumvent by a good five miles during his nocturnal ramblings—and then wishing him the very best of everything as he stood shivering and shoeless on the platform at the Westborough train station. He caught the first train to Albany and hired a man and a coach to take him up to Saranac as he huddled sleepless on the cold leather seat, Katherine’s face slipping in and out of his consciousness and a whole host of unattributed voices chanting in his ears till he had to put his hands up and force them shut.