You shall have rings on your fingers
And bells on your toes,
Elephants to ride upon
My little Irish rose.
She let him kiss her then, a lingering oneiric kiss that gave him time to adjust to her — she was taller than Giovannella, leaner, her lips taut as rope — and then they were in the car and breathing hard, both of them. “That was beautiful, Eddie — the song, I mean,” she murmured, her voice husky and low, “and the kiss too, that was nice,” and then she put the car in gear and it was the first time in his life he’d been in an automobile and a woman driving, and he told her his ma had taught him the song, back East, back in Boston, where he was born.
“And the kiss?”
He took hold of her hand. She was playing a game he liked better than any he could of. “It was a hundred girls taught me that, but none as pretty as you.”
It was still light out, and as the car climbed smoothly up through the San Marcos Pass and snaked down into the farmland of the Santa Ynez Valley, O‘Kane gazed out on the world and saw it in all its lambent immanence, caught there for him as if on a motion picture screen, only in color, living color. Every bush along the roadway was on fire with blossoms, the trees arching up and away from the windscreen of the car in a wash of leaves and each a different shade of green, the mountains cut into sections like towering blocks of maple sugar pressed in a mold, enough maple sugar to sweeten all the tea in China. He was glowing with the whiskey and the anticipation of what was coming, a sure thing, the deserted wife and the husband off sitting around a campfire in one of those places you read about in the newspaper, and he sank back in the seat and listened to the engine, gazing out into all that spread of the natural earth, and didn’t he see the face of God there, God the all-forgiving, and His Son the redeemer?
Sure he did. And this wasn’t a fierce and recriminating God who would rear back and hurl bolts of lightning and cause the earth to erupt and point the infinite finger of damnation at a child-murdering adulterer hurrying on his way to indulge yet another sin of the flesh… no, no, not at all. The Lord was smiling, a smile broad as a river, tall as any tree, and that smile made O‘Kane feel as if a lamp had been lit inside him. Everything would work out, he was sure of it. Of course, he was stewed to the gills, and that might have had something to do with this sudden manifestation of the Deity and the feeling of benevolence and well-being that had stolen over him in the space of a breath… but still, there it was, and as he sat there molded into the seat beside Dolores Isringhausen with the whiskey in his veins and the slanting sun warm against the swell of his jaw, he thought maybe he’d died and gone on to his reward after all.
It was early the next morning, after they’d made love twice on the satin sheets in her bedroom, and the slow quiet cigarette-punctuated murmur of their conversation had fallen away to nothing, that he thought of Giovannella again. Dolores lay on her back beside him, sprawled like a doll thrown from a cliff, her breasts fanned out on the fulcrum of her rib cage, her legs splayed. She was smoking, the cigarette standing erect between her lips, jetting a stream of smoke straight up into the air, and he was idly stroking the hair between her legs, as relaxed as a dead man except for the accelerating spark of Giovannella in his head.
“Dolores?” he said into the silence of the room.
“Hm?”
“Do you know any doctors? Personally, I mean.”
And though when the sun came up it was Sunday, the Lord’s day, and all the faithful were trotting in and out of the churches whether they were Catholics or Protestants or Egyptian dog worshipers, O‘Kane was on his way to Giovannella’s with the stiff white slip of paper on which Dolores Isringhausen had written a name and address in her looping graceful boarding-school hand, and when he got there he waited round the corner till the shoemaker went out to do whatever it is shoemakers do on Sundays. Then he looked over his shoulder, swallowed his pounding heart, and mounted the swaybacked stairs on the outside of the building.
Giovannella looked startled. Not hopeful, not angry, just startled. “You can’t come here today, Eddie. Guido, he only went out for a walk — he could be back any minute.”
“To hell with Guido,” he said, and he was in the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. And what was the first thing he saw, nailed to the wall in the vestibule in all His crucified agony? Sure: Christ, staring him in the face.
“Eddie. You got to go. You can‘t—”
“I brought you this,” he said, holding the slip of paper out to her.
There was nothing in her face. He watched her eyes drop, her lips part, and there, just the tip of her tongue. She was no reader. “Cy… rose?… Brown,” piecing it out, “one-two, one-two Cha… pala. M, period, D, period.” She looked up. “M.D.? What does that mean?”
“Doctor,” he said, and he shifted on the balls of his feet, feeling sick and evil, “M.D. means doctor. Don’t you know anything?”
Comprehension started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up through the clamped muscles of her jaw to her eyes, and they weren’t loving and kind eyes, not this morning, not any more. She let out a curse, something in Italian, and though he couldn’t appreciate the nuances, he got the gist of it. “You son of a bitch.” she said. “You big cocky son of a bitch. What makes you sure it’s your baby, huh?”
“Because you told me. Because you came to me. Guido can’t make you feel a thing, isn’t that what you told me? That he’s only this big?”
“He’s a better man than you.”
“The hell he is.”
“He is. And didn’t you ever think I might have just said that for you, to make you feel like a big man, huh? Because I did, I did, you son of a bitch. I lied. I lied to you, Eddie. Guido’s hung like a horse — how do you like that? And you’ll never hurt my baby—my baby, not yours. Never!” “
It was Rosaleen all over again, and he had half a moment to wonder about the shifting magnetic poles of love, from Venus to Mars and no middle ground, no place to regroup and sound the retreat, and when she came at him with the ice pick that had been lying so quietly atop the icebox all this time he was only trying to protect himself, and both of them watched with the kind of astonishment reserved for the magician in the cape as the shining steel rivet passed right on through his open palm and out the other side as if there was no such thing as flesh and no such thing as blood.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t shake,” O‘Kane said, nodding a greeting to Dr. Brush at the door and holding up his bandaged right hand in extenuation, Mart right behind him, the string orchestra already playing something light as air and the big new room beyond all lit up and festive. “Ah, and this must be Mrs. Brush,” he said, feeling convivial, ready to break into song, tell jokes, quaff a beer or a cup or two of punch laced with gin. He was about to say he’d heard a lot about her, but then he realized he’d heard nothing, not a word. She could have been a Fiji Island cannibal with a bone through her nose for all he’d heard about her, but here she was, standing right beside her husband at the door, a pinched, rawboned woman with a squared-off beak of a nose and two staring black eyes no bigger than a crow’s.