She stopped swinging then and stood there rigid, but he kept his hands up, just in case. He glanced round to see if anybody was watching, but the lot was deserted. Her eyes were wet. She made a noise deep in her throat and he thought she was going to start crying on him, but she snapped back her head in a sudden fierce motion and spat down the front of his shirt, a glistening ball of Italian sputum that hung there like a jewel on a string. “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” she demanded, and still she wasn’t shouting. “You stinker,” she hissed. “You pig. Don’t you have a heart?”
Well, he did. He did have a heart, but he wasn’t going to start a war with all of Sicily and he sure as hell wasn’t going to have somebody named Guido Capolupo raising his own flesh and blood, and so as soon as Giovannella had turned her back on him and fled across the lot in her stiff-legged skirt-hampered trot, he went up to Menhoff’s to see what he could do about it. He figured he would have a beer and a whiskey to ease the throbbing in his head and the sourness of his gut — though he didn’t need the stuff, not really, not like his old man — and maybe make some discreet inquiries, that was all.
Menhoff’s was pretty lively that afternoon, and that helped him get over his initial shock, glad-handing people, putting on a face — he even shot a couple games of pool. But for all that he was in another world, aching all the way down from his grinding molars to the marrow of his bones, and why use chalk on the cue when he could powder it with the dust of his own teeth? He’d been planning a picnic at the beach with a girl he’d met at a party the week before, but he knew he couldn’t go through with it now, and he rang her up and begged off in a blizzard of promises and lies. Giovannella was right — abortion was a dirty business, as foul a sin as there was. And he was a Catholic still, though he didn’t go to Mass anymore, except for Christmas and Easter, and he believed God was watching him and judging him and holding him in contempt even as he sat there at the bar and lifted a beer to his lips. But what was the alternative? He tried to picture himself in San Francisco, a place he knew only from postcards, Giovannella swelling up till her navel was extruded and her tits were like balloons and her legs lost their shape, and what then? Living in sin. A baby that was a bastard in the eyes of the church and society too. And then another baby. And another.
He’d been with Mr. McCormick eight years now, longer than he’d been at the Boston Asylum and McLean put together, and he was making good money, and putting some of it in the bank against the day he struck out on his own, and whether it was in oranges or oil or even one of these new service businesses sprung up in the wake of the automobile, he didn’t know anymore. But he wasn’t about to leave Mr. McCormick. It was a question of loyalty — he wanted to see him improve, he did; in a way he’d staked his life on it — and even with Hamilton leaving and this new man, Brush, coming in, he knew he was going to be at Riven Rock for a good long while yet. But Giovannella. Giovannella, Giovannella, Giovannella. He could just let it go, turn his back on her and let the shoemaker raise a little O‘Kane like one of those hapless sparrows the cowbird preys on, shoving its egg right in on top of the nest and nobody the wiser. He could. But it would hurt, and he’d already had enough hurt from Rosaleen and Eddie Jr.
He was on his second round — or was it his third? — when Dolores Isringhausen walked in. She was with another woman, both of them in furs, cloche hats, bobbed hair and skirts crawling up their calves, and a whole noisy mob of people shouldering in behind them. She was from New York, Dolores, married to a rich man off playing boy scout on the Italian front, and she ran with a fast crowd. Nobody in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like her. She smoked, drank Jack Rose cocktails and drove her own car, a little Maxwell runabout with all-white tires she’d had shipped out from the East. O‘Kane was fascinated by her. He’d sat with her a couple of times with one group or another and he loved the knowing look on her face and her glassy cold eyes and the way the dress clung to her hips, always something silky and tactile and never the stiff penitential weeds half the women in town dragged themselves around in, as if they were traipsing from one funeral to another. And she didn’t seem to have any objection to saloons, either.
“Hello, Eddie,” she said, coming right up to him at the end of the bar, the other woman trailing behind her with a pasted-on smile and an empty greeting for this one or that. “You’re looking glum. What’s the matter? It’s Saturday. The night beckons.”
As if to prove her wrong — about the glumness, that is — he flashed her a smile, all teeth, the smile of a caveman just back from clubbing a mastodon and laying it at the feet of his cavewoman inamorata, and he shifted his shoulders inside his jacket to show her what he had there. His eyes fastened on hers. “I was just waiting for you to come in and brighten the day.”
Her eyes were the strangest color — purple, he guessed you’d call them — and he saw that she was wearing some sort of theatrical makeup on her upper lids to bring them out. She didn’t respond to his overture, not directly. Ducking her head, she fished a cigarette holder out of a black bead reticule and gave him a look. “Why don’t you come sit with us,” she said, nodding toward the restaurant in back, where Cody Menhoff himself was scurrying around setting up a table for her. “You can light my cigarette for me.” And then she was sweeping across the room, the other woman right behind her and the rest of the group converging on the table with its clean white cloth and a platter of sandwiches and a Jack Rose cocktail in a tall-stemmed glass set right in the center of it like a tribute.
There were four men in her party (all jerks, and O‘Kane could have whipped any two of them with one hand tied behind his back) and three women made up to look like Parisian streetwalkers, or what O’Kane supposed Parisian streetwalkers would look like. He wouldn’t know. Not actually. Unlike these swells, with their thin-lipped smiles and their cigarette holders and racquet club drawl, he’d never been to Paris. Or to New York, for that matter.
Dolores and her friend of the vapid smile made the party nine, and O‘Kane brought it to ten. She made a place for him right beside her and as the conversation veered from the War to skirt lengths to gossip about people O’Kane didn’t know, she leaned in close and gave him the full benefit of her eyes and her husky timbreless voice: “How about that light you promised me?”
O‘Kane put a match to her cigarette and the whole table lit up, smoke everywhere, glasses already empty and the waiter bringing another round, and every one of them drinking a Jack Rose cocktail (1½ oz. apple brandy, juice of ½ lime, 1 tsp. grenadine; shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass).
“What’s the matter, Eddie,” Dolores purred, lifting her chin to exhale, her lips contracted in a little pout, “don’t you smoke?”
He shrugged. Smiled. Let his eyes climb right out of his head and into hers. “Once in a while I like a cigar with a glass of whiskey, usually late at night. I’m not one for cigarettes, though, not generally.”
“Oh, you’ll like these. Here, try one.”
And then she was touching the glowing tip of her cigarette to the one he’d plucked from her monogrammed case and he was as close to her as he’d been to Giovannella an hour ago, only this was different, this was nice, the beginning of the dance instead of the end. “Swell,” he said, exhaling. “Very smooth.”
She looked at him. “They ought to be. They came all the way from Turkey.”
They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, and she drank Jack Rose cocktails as if they were no more potent than lamb’s milk and smoked up all the cigarettes in her case. And what did they talk about? Life. Santa Barbara. Mr. McCormick. Her husband. Italy. The War. Music. Did he like music? He did, and when they went out front arm-in-arm to climb into her car and drive out to Mattei’s for supper and the rest of the party be damned, he pressed her up against the hood and sang to her in the soft lilting tenor that was another legacy of his father: