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 scalp 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.