by Laura Argiri
Simion, for his part, was struck by this woman’s grim loyalty—she might indeed skin her profligate offspring alive, certainly figuratively, possibly literally and leatherally, but she meant to rescue him as well. To take him out of the way of harm both received and committed.
But just as he was so thinking, the door rang with a vigorous hollow knock and swung open again. And they were all surveyed in deadly silence by a very large and strong-looking old man in a clerical coat that looked like he’d been wearing it since about 1850, with a headful of wild hair that looked as if it had been dipped in grease no long time ago, and a most objectionable smell.
Peter took his gaze from Araminta, realizing who had just walked in. He felt a savage spasm of adrenaline and joy—it traveled between his eyes and his intimate zones like electric current. He felt like someone who has written a love letter and gotten a never-anticipated, favorable reply, then arranged a rendezvous with an object of passion with whom he never expected so much as a conversation. When Peter wrote that postcard, had he really thought to lay eyes on this man? It was that ticklish kind of situation wherein fantasy is about to get beyond its bounds and into the realm of actual actions and real consequences: nearly always a folly, often a transgression, sometimes a crime.
“What an enormous lout,” Peter thought, “and what self-assurance he’s got.” Peter knew his look from other backwoods Southerners: a haunted look, unfocused, visionary, crazed, with something of cracked glass about it. The eyes look inward as if they see fire. It is a violent look that is as still as a stone. Usually, when such a man enters the company of well-dressed strangers, he cringes minutely and angrily, an acknowledgment of caste. Not this one, though. He impressed Peter with his strangler’s hands, his stony uprightness, his look of physical impenetrability, as if he lacked orifices and had no nerves in his skin.
There is a god, thought Peter. Possibly several of them. He stood and bowed. He was the one who approached John Ezra first. “Do I have the pleasure of greeting Reverend Satterwhite?”
John Ezra ignored him. “So,” he said in Simion’s direction, “my son is a violent young hellion and allows a foreigner to work out his lust upon his body?”
Simion turned to Porter. “Did you tell him that as a foregone conclusion? Because if you did, I swear I’ll sue you down to your lights and liver! Because that’s not true!”
“Whatever the gentleman says you’ve done, I’m sure you’ve done that and worse,” rumbled John Ezra. “I’ve always known things were wrong with you—if you’re more than half human, I’ll eat my hat.” He turned his gaze to Porter. “I am sorry to be late, Reverend. That bedizened female over there summoned a policeman to harass me at the train station.”
Piero took exception in Italian to the tone of this. Araminta made a small impatient trivializing gesture with her lilac-gloved right hand.
“What do you want me to do with the creature?” John Ezra asked Porter in a sort of deranged reasonableness. He might have been offering to shoot a calf born with two heads or drown a deformed kitten.
Doriskos rose and addressed himself to John Ezra. He said, “You aren’t going to do anything with him or to him. I’ve read your letters to him, and I think you’re out of your mind. My mother actually sold me, but her doing so was a kindness in comparison to what you’ve been to Simion.”
“And who are you to tell me such a thing, sir?”
“My lover,” Simion cut in. As John Ezra leveled that cracked-glass gaze at him, he elaborated: “The man who gave me a home and saw that I didn’t lack for anything and burned up a bunch of your awful tracts, and who has rights over me now if anyone does.”
“He admits it!” Peter yelped. “Did you hear that? He said that—”
“Be silent,” Noah Porter said to him. “I won’t tell you again not to interrupt. Simion, not five minutes ago both you and Professor Klionarios denied this allegation. And now you say that you are involved in an abominable relation with him. What would you have this assembly believe?”
“I didn’t deny it, I said we’ve never practiced either of the classical vices, as you call them, but I didn’t say that I don’t love him, and he didn’t say he doesn’t love me. He is my lover. I won’t deny him. I may want my degree, but I don’t want it that much. You know, speaking of the unspeakable, I found out some unspeakable things about Yale early on. I found out that many of your fine, well-brought-up young men are actually yokels and louts, educated peons. Not too unlike the yokels and louts I grew up with. And now I’ve found out that you and the fine Reverend over there have much in common, too, and I do mean common.”
Before anyone else could summon a response to that flung gauntlet, John Ezra broke the choked silence. “Never mind him, Reverend,” he growled to Porter. “He must always take his chance to spout his rot. He could talk rings around Satan himself, but it doesn’t avail him with me. Nor should you allow it to influence you.”
Simion locked eyes with Porter and pointed to John Ezra. “One time that man tore my clothes off me and locked me in the cellar overnight in the dead of winter. Another time he kicked me in the back and made me piss blood for weeks. A nice person for a fancy college president to get in cahoots with!”
“What I want to know,” said John Ezra, ignoring his son, “is where is the man who made this monstrosity?” He unpocketed the infamous postcard and held it up for all to view. “This is a picture of my shameless son, bucky-tailed naked, with someone handling him as if he were a harlot of Nineveh or Babylon, and I want to know where the person who made this object is.”
“Right over here,” said Doriskos. “I made that. Half of it’s me. Don’t you notice the resemblance?”
Peter watched his mother’s face as she put two and two together and, as was her wont, got four. She looked at John Ezra, then at Doriskos and Simion, and understood the situation. “Peter Tattnall Geoffrey!” cried Araminta. “Don’t tell me that you used those cards I sent you to try to discredit that man! This man is your classmate’s father, and you knowingly sent him that?”
“Yes ma’am!” Peter averred in insane cheer. “That’s exactly what I did!” Things were going in quite a jolly, interesting way, he thought, though the wrath on his mother’s brow would have daunted a less desperate man.
Araminta addressed Doriskos directly: “Sir, I never imagined that my son would be capable of such vileness when I sent him those cards. I saw your piece at the Albion, and I thought it marvelous. When I bought that catalogue with those cards for Peter, it was my intention to inspire him to do some work of his own. I see he has been inspired in a very different manner than what I intended, and I plan to undo as much of the harm that he has done as I can.”
“I doubt if that’s possible at this point,” Doriskos began, then paused, mesmerized. Araminta apparently intended to start undoing the harm, or at least punishing it, on an immediate basis. She took her hand from Piero’s arm and made straight for Peter, her little kid-soled shoes of lavender satin making soft crisp sounds on the old wood. She took Peter by his left ear, pinched it until he squealed, and dealt him a roundhouse slap to his right cheek.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve made a beginning. Dr. Porter, if you have started some sort of prosecution against this artist on Peter’s behalf, I want it stopped immediately.”
Noah Porter stated: “What I chiefly want is a stop to all this contumely, madam, immediately. We will have a civilized discussion, or we will have no discussion at all.”
“What’s to discuss?” asked John Ezra truculently. “He’s a bad boy; he always was a bad boy. He’s a changeling, a miscarriage that lived. Now you say he’s a practitioner of the sodomitical abominations—”
“No, sir, not precisely, it is a matter in some apparent doubt,” Porter doddered, hearing the rumble of wrath all too plainly in that voice and feeling his own fear of it. The shriveling cringe of his viscera informed him that he was indeed in the presence of a man who would thrust a naked small child down cellar in w
inter, or kick that child hard enough to make him bleed, or for that matter whip an aged horse or hound for the slowness of its old brain and bones. This was indeed not the kind of ally he was accustomed to having, and his chest hurt in a tight, ominous manner, as if a hard finger poked him in the heart. “Grave accusations have been made,” he managed to say.
“I hope you didn’t summon me from my duties to travel seventy miles on horseback and four hundred by train for trivialities, sir,” said his brother cleric. “Do you want me to take that creature back to Haliburton with me, or what? What is it that you do want?”
“Back to Haliburton! I wouldn’t go two steps with you!” spat Simion. “You’re a dirty drunk and a crazed old fool, and I’m a sane man and a free agent even if Yale doesn’t give me my degree! I’d rather be shot than go as far as the front porch with you!”
Then the noise stopped, as noise tends to before the unthinkable happens. John Ezra looked from face to face, striking them all silent as his lead eyes rested on them. “You would, would you, you polluted abomination?” he asked, in a tone of dangerous rationality. “Unlike a lot of your wants, that’s one I’m in the way of supplying.” He then withdrew from the pocket of his clerical coat a pre-Civil War pistol. Not so old, however, that it didn’t have a safety clasp—and the safety was off. Deliberately, unhurriedly, he held it in both hands, but he seemed to be having problems deciding who to use it on first, faced with such a variety of tempting targets. A calm observer of the scene, though there wasn’t one, would have noticed that Araminta Geoffrey had stepped swiftly in front of Peter, who wriggled in his chair to peer around her. Piero, in his turn, jumped up and tried almost successfully to get in front of her.
Then Simion felt a gentle and painless snap, as if his rationality was a frayed tendon; from his own mouth, he heard the words, “Hey, shitheels, over here!”
“Simion, for God’s sake!” cried Moses, who had been shocked to silence by the above but now regained his breath.
“Hey, Reverend Erl-King, over here!” cried Simion. “Got yourself a gun, eh? Well, shoot that antique at me, trash, see if you’re not too drunk to hit something within the city limits! You are a no-good drunk, you know, and a loon, and a filthy old devil! Go ahead, try it, I want you to! Because if you shoot me, they’ll have to hang you same as anyone else who tried the same thing, and if they hang you, I’ll be there to watch with roses in my hair! I’ll hire a dance band, I’ll send the hangman chocolates in a box with a big red bow! I’ll do it if I have to rise from the dead before Easter! God damn you, try it!”
It was somehow worse than watching someone try suicide by any of the usual methods. Dr. Porter clutched his chest and gasped. Van Rakle bolted for the door, unregarded by John Ezra, who was quite uninterested in killing him. Doriskos looked at the space between Simion and John Ezra—“That’s what’s known as point-blank range,” he thought. Empty air between that slug of pig iron and the bone wall over Simion’s tenuously healed heart.
Wholly concentrated upon that empty air, Doriskos staggered up, a movement almost drunken in its clumsiness. He took an unsteady step and reached with his right hand around Simion to thrust him down in his chair and get in front of him. At that second, there was a loud report, harsh but seeming no louder than a big rock heaved at a dustbin. Doriskos found the right sleeve of his white coat suddenly slick and wet. When he clutched his right wrist with his other hand, blood ran hotly, effortlessly out between his fingers. He still said nothing; he wavered. To his surprise—the only emotion he felt in that moment—it hurt only trivially, considering the quantity of gore, though it created a horrid sense of reduced pressure in his head, a swooning vertigo.
“For Chrissake, shoot your goddamn slut son, not him!” yelped Peter.
As if from afar, Doriskos heard the yells of the old divines and the young Italian—Piero was the one who managed to wrestle John Ezra down. Piero wrenched the gun out of John Ezra’s hand and threw it well clear of him. Once John Ezra was relieved of the gun, the jury felt safe in assisting Piero to subdue the embattled cleric. Moses seized Simion by the back of his suit coat and held the staggering Doriskos round the waist. “Walk!” he hissed into the bleeding man’s ear.
“Where are you going, Dr. Karseth?” asked Porter feebly.
“To my surgery! This man has been wounded. You can have your deuced hearing some other time! Simion, get on Doriskos’s other side, and help him, and don’t even think of arguing with me. Go!”
The pain of getting shot was not half so bad or a sixth as protracted as that of having the bullet extracted and the unimportant-looking hole it made washed, and washed, and washed some more—first with water, then with various searing anti-infective compounds. Doriskos shivered with shock and pain. When Moses finally saw fit to let the hole soak in soapy water for a while, he took time out to give Doriskos a dose of laudanum. Doriskos then faded to sleep, hearing but not able to worry much about the ominous whispers between Simion and Moses about tetanus.
The opiate made him lightly delirious when he woke, though he didn’t have a fever yet. Once he was awake, Helmut gave him cold water, then helped him raise himself up in his chair while Simion slid his bloodied trousers off him. The blood had dried and stuck them in splotches to his thighs, and they came away with a nasty pulling discomfort that he could feel through the haze. His jacket and shirt and undershirt, which had been cut off him with the kitchen shears, lay in pieces on the hearth. Helmut sponged the dried blood off him. Doriskos wondered why all this activity was being foisted upon him—it was tiring. He wondered what Andrew Carpallon was doing in Helmut’s kitchen, looking most uncharacteristically contrite.
“All right,” Andrew was telling Karseth. “Here they are. Tickets for Springfield, then Albany. They’re leaving for England in July anyhow, aren’t they?”
“They’re leaving for England as soon as possible, what with today. As soon as we know that this gunshot wound is going to heal properly…he can’t get on a boat until we’re sure he’ll have no gangrene, no tetanus…”
“Will you stop?” interposed Simion.
“Boy dear, write me a cheque. For five hundred dollars. You get on the next train. I sent Carpallon for the schedule, there’s a train to Springfield. From Springfield, you take the train to Albany. Or wherever it goes next, just so it’s nowhere near the eastern seaboard line. You want to stay strictly away from the eastern seaboard line, anywhere that people—”
“You mean police?”
“I do,” said Moses. “If this affair goes any farther, they’ll be on your doorstep, so you can look upon that pistol-shot as a blessing, albeit a very backhanded one, since it suspended the proceedings before they went against you in good earnest, so now…wire me from Albany. Tell me…in German, since they won’t understand it, how that wound is doing. I shall have cashed the cheque, and I’ll wire you funds and further instructions.”
“Where do you get all these ideas on being fugitives?”
“From myself, and hours and hours awake at night. Are you quite certain you understand everything I’ve told you about taking care of that arm?”
“I understand.”
“Very well. Go by the back alley to your house and change—you’ve got blood all over you—and get Doriskos something to change into. Have Kiril pack you and Doriskos a couple of changes of clothes. Meanwhile, I’ll pack up the boiled gauze and ointments and cleaning solutions in my old leather bag. Don’t light a lamp in the house, just a candle. Hurry.”
Doriskos received all these plans with doped composure. Bandaged, sponged clean, and thoroughly drugged, he let himself be helped into fresh clothes and got into the carriage as instructed, moving only a little seasickly, listing a little, but navigating. He looked very sallow, but no one looking at him would have been able to guess that he had a fresh gunshot wound under his right shirtsleeve and the cuff of his black summer-weight linen coat. Moses and Helmut remained behind, having to look unimplicated in their friends’ flight. Before
they headed out to Doriskos’s buggy, Helmut kissed them both with a fierce tearless grief. Andrew drove them to the station and carried their small luggage onto the train. Having done this, he fidgeted around miserably until the warning whistle blew, then essayed to make a last confession, which floated down through Doriskos’s haze.
“I should…before I go…before you go, that is…listen, there’s something I have to tell you before you go. Do you remember the note you didn’t find?”
“Note I didn’t find?”
“After our trip to New York? When things got so bloody?”
“I didn’t find any note,” said Doriskos with sweet fogginess.
“I know you didn’t find it. But Simion did leave you one, on the foyer table. He didn’t mean to go off to New York with me with no word to you. The truth is that I put the note down in the Delft vase on the foyer table and hoped someone would pour water into it. Because I felt an unwarranted contempt for you, and because I was jealous. I did you a great deal of harm, and I’m very sorry.”
“Andy!” said Simion, in genuine shock.
“Like I said, I’m very sorry. A wicked deed but mine own.”
“Why?” asked Doriskos dreamily.
“Because I loved this creature here. I still do, in my fashion. But I don’t love him as you do—I don’t think there are many people who even can love someone else as you love him.”
Doriskos sighed, his head too light and heavy and generally clouded for any more cogent reaction. “What a curious thing to do.” It was easier on Andy than I forgive you. Did people who actually weren’t lovers ever forgive one another anything?
“Can I do anything more for you?” persisted Andrew. “Please?”
“You can try to explain all this to Kiril. And there are drawings of mine that need to be burnt, and a room that needs painting. Remind him. He’ll know what I mean. Tell him we’ll send for him.”