Pat snorted, burying his nose in his drink — a real drink, American style, mixed and heated in the kitchen by O‘Kane himself while Giovannella frowned over the dough for tomorrow’s bread and the scullery maid they’d hired to keep her company and deepen the presence of women in the house hummed a jazz tune and ran a wet cloth over the supper dishes. It was a toddy O’Kane was making, from a recipe his father had taught him — the only thing his father had taught him, besides a left jab maybe, followed by a swift right cross. Lemons, oranges, sugar, a stick of cinnamon, boiling water and what passed for rum these days. It had the right smell and it warmed you, though how much warming you needed when it was three hours past dark on the twelfth of December and still sixty-four degrees out was debatable.
O‘Kane could feel the rum like lead in his veins — he didn’t know how many he’d had thus far, but it was more than four, he was sure — and felt he’d better sit down. Nick and Pat seemed content to watch the fire, but the subject of Mr. McCormick’s initial meeting with his wife had been broached, and O’Kane wanted to chew it over a while. “It’ll get better,” he said. “Tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. No more talking on the phone — she’s due here tomorrow for lunch and she and Dr. Kempf both expect she’ll be eating it downstairs in the dining room with Mr. McCormick at her side.”
“I’d like to see it,” Nick said.
“Me too,” Pat put in.
“Kempf says she’s going to stay this time. Indefinitely.”
Nick sighed, bent to retrieve his cup from the floor and took a long ruminative sip. “She never gives up, that woman, does she? Twenty years she waits, and he bolts right by her like a runaway horse. Doesn’t she know it’s hopeless?”
“She’s looking old,” Pat said. “Like a little old lady. Like a widow. But that one with her, Mrs. Russ or whatever her name is, she’s a piece of something, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” O‘Kane said, “—you’ve got to have hope. Anything can happen. People like Mr. McCormick have just snapped out of it, miraculously — I’ve seen it myself. And look at what they’re doing with gland feeding and these hyperthyroid cases.”
No comment from either of the Thompson brothers. They pulled at their cups, their eyes sunk into their heads. They could figure the chances on their own.
“Look how far Mr. McCormick’s come already — he was right on the verge of going back under before Kempf came and you know it. He’s coming back to life with this talking cure, he is — I can see it in the way he holds himself and his walk is better and he’s hardly stuttering at all anymore.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, “and he still pisses his bed.”
“Kempf says he needs women around him, and maybe he’s right — it makes sense, doesn’t it? We’ve tried everything else, from apes to sheet restraints to Brush’s colossal fat arse — you remember how he pinned him to the floor that first day? ‘Compression is what they need,’ isn’t that what he said?” O‘Kane couldn’t help laughing at the memory of it. “Or maybe you guys weren’t there — you weren’t, were you?”
“Shit.” Nick sat straight up in the chair and cranked his head round to give O‘Kane an outraged look.
“What? He’s older now — he’s settled down. He can be with women — he should be. As long as he’s monitored.”
“Didn’t we — all of us — say that years ago? And we’re not getting paid half what the mint in Washington prints up each month either,” Nick growled, his voice scraping bottom. “I still say you go down to one of these hootch parlors on De la Guerra or Ortega Street and find him a willing little piece once a week and let him take out his urges like any other man. It’s all that spunk clogging his brain.” And he laughed, a fat rich braying laugh that made O‘Kane want to get up out of the chair and poke him in the face a few times, good cheer or no.
“Well, he jacks off enough, doesn’t he?” Pat said, rolling his cup between his hands; he was standing by the fire now, one elbow resting on the holly-strewn mantel, his face flushed with the drink. “I don’t look at you and Mart’s reports, but I’d say he’s going at it four or five times a week on our shift — and Lord help us if we don’t note down every little wad for Dr. Kempf, who in my opinion is half a pervert himself.”
O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He was thinking about that — Mr. McCormick with a woman — and whether they’d get to watch. He’d have to be restrained, of course, and the woman would have to know her business — and no syph or clap, thank you, or they’d all wind up losing their jobs.
“I think they’re lesbians,” Nick said.
“Who?”
“Your sweetheart Katherine and what’s her name, Mrs. Russ. You know, Eddie, cunt-lappers.”
Well, sure. He’d suspected as much himself, way out on the periphery of his mind, but he wouldn’t dignify Nick with a response. And so what if she was, which he doubted. It was better than going off and getting herself involved with a man — that was adultery — and she must still have had the itch, even if she was getting up in years, practically the prototypical old maid in her dowdy long skirts and outsized hats… but what he would have given just to touch her when she was younger, and he thought of that day in Hamilton’s office when she bowed her head and let the tears come. And why was she crying? Because she couldn’t see her husband. Well now she could, now that it was too late to matter.
He got up out of the chair, the fire jumping off Nick’s big face and hands and winking metallically from the strings of decorations. “Anybody for another?”
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Giovannella was still busy with the dough — enough to make Guinea loaves and hot muffins for the twenty-two regular staff who had to be fed twice a day and a little extra to sell on the side and maybe take home to her mother and father. And her children. Never forget the children. They were her shield and her badge and the whole reason she was alive on the earth and pounding away at a corpselike lump of dough in the grand environs of the McCormick kitchen. And she was pounding, hammering away at the dough with both fists as if it were something she’d just stunned and wanted to make sure of.
O‘Kane eased into the kitchen. Ever since their rapprochement during the earthquake two years back she’d tolerated his presence in the kitchen, but he could never tell when she’d lash out at him, not only verbally, but with any instrument, blunt or sharp, that came to hand, their entire history together bubbling and simmering in the stewpot of her eternally resentful peasant’s brain, from the time she was seventeen and a virgin and he’d seduced her, right on up to this morning, this afternoon and this evening. If Mr. McCormick had his problems with women, so did he, so did Eddie O’Kane, and they started and ended here, right here in this kitchen.
“You still at it?” she said, pounding the dough. The maid, a girl of twenty with no chin and an overripe nose but with a spread and bloom to her that more than made up for it, started slopping a mop around. It was quitting time. The kitchen was still redolent of dinner, a roast of pork with rosemary, brown gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans, with apple turnovers for dessert.
“It’s Christmas,” he said.
She looked up from the dough, just her eyes, and her eyes were little pre-prepared doses of poison. “With you, it’s always Christmas.”
He sidled up to the chopping board, where he’d left his cloven fruit and the bottle, keeping a wary eye out for any sudden movement. She wasn’t his wife, Giovannella, though he’d given in and in so many words asked her to be after the night of the marinara sauce and the big bed in the deserted and still subsiding house, but she carped and caviled at him as if she was. And that was strange too, utterly inexplicable, because that was what she’d wanted all along — for him to marry her — and then when he came for her and they were in bed and they’d had that sweetness and pleasure all over again, she’d refused him. “No, Eddie,” she’d said, the house crepitating round them, the dark an infestation, a dog howling in duress somewhere off in the shattered distance, “I can’t marry you — you’re already married, remember? Isn’t that what you told me? And besides, I couldn’t expect you, a man like you, to raise another man’s children, could I?”