“Did you hear what I said?”
Looking down, looking at her feet in a pair of dusty old high-buttoned shoes some customer must have left behind at the shop: “I heard. But listen, let’s go outside and talk so Mrs. Fitzmaurice—”
“I don’t want to go outside. I want to be here. With you. Look,” she said, backing off a step and stripping the child away from her shoulder so he could see the fat infantile face staring sleepily into his own, “your son, Eddie. He’s your son and you’re my husband. Don’t you understand? I’m a widow. Don’t you know what that means?”
“I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”
He watched the lines gather in her forehead while her eyes narrowed and her mouth drew itself tight. “I spit on your marriage,” she said, swinging wildly away from him, and he was afraid she was going to knock over one of the darkened lamps, afraid she was going to wake the house, stir up Mrs. Fitzmaurice, turn everything in his life upside down.
He told her to shut up, to shut the fuck up.
She told him to go to hell.
And who was that now? Somebody at the head of the stairs — was it Maloney? — and an angry voice looping down at them like a lariat. “Keep it down, will ya? People are tryin’ to sleep up here.”
“Come on,” he whispered, “let’s talk about it outside.”
“No. Right here. Right now.”
He rolled his eyes. He was tired. He was angry. He was disappointed. “What do you want from me? You want me to move you into a new brick house tonight, with new curtains and furniture brand-new from the store with the paper wrapping still on it? Is that what you want?”
She stood there immovable, black widow’s weeds, the black veil caught like drift on the crown of her hat, the child fat and imperturbable and staring at him out of his own eyes.
“Come on,” he coaxed, “let’s go over to Pat’s and talk things out where we can be comfortable, and we can, you know…. I want you,” he said.
“I want you too, Eddie.” And she moved into him and pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, a fierce furious sting of a kiss, all the madness and irrationality of her concentrated in the wet heat of her mouth and lips and tongue, and he knew it would be all right, all right for both of them, if he could just take her up to his room and make love to her, ravish her, fuck her.
She pulled away and gave him a long analytic look, as if she were seeing him from a new perspective, all distance and shadow. The muscles at the corners of her mouth flexed in the faintest of smiles.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“I’m pregnant.
Well, and it was déjà vu, wasn’t it? Simple arithmetic: one child subtracted, one child added. All he could say was, “Not again?”
She nodded. Saturated him with her eyes. Behind her, blighting both walls of the narrow hallway, were the dim greasy slabs of the oil paintings Mrs. Fitzmaurice had rendered herself, kittens and puppies frolicking in an unrecognizable world of bludgeoning brushstrokes and colliding colors. She shifted the child from one shoulder to the other.
“Jesus,” he said, and it was a curse, harsh and harshly aspirated.
Her voice fell off the edge and disappeared: “I want you to take care of me.”
This was his moment, this was the hour of his redemption, the time to cash in his three o‘clock luck though it was past eleven at night, and he could have taken her in his arms and whispered, Yes, yes, of course I will, but instead he gave her a sick smile and said, “Whose baby is it?”
“Whose—?” The question seemed to stagger her, and suddenly the weight of the child on her shoulder, little Guido Capolupo O‘Kane, seemed insupportable, and she began fumbling behind her as if for some place to set him down. It took her a minute, but then she came back to herself, straightening up, arching her back so that her breasts thrust out and her chin lifted six inches out of her collar. “Guido’s,” she said, “it’s Guido‘s,” and then she found the doorknob and let in the night for just an instant before the door clicked shut behind her.
And handsome Eddie O‘Kane, who’d failed every test put to him, and wasn’t rich and wasn’t free and had to bow and scrape to Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick and her demented husband and chase after every skirt that came down the street? What did he need? That was easy. Simple. Simplest thing in the world.
He needed a drink.
7. PRANGINS
The Dexter château stood on a hill just outside Geneva, at Prangins, in the village of Nyon. It was a turreted stone structure of some twenty rooms surrounded by orchards and formal gardens and with a great lolling tongue of lawn that stretched all the way down to the shore of the lake, where Josephine kept a pair of rowboats and a forty-foot ketch. No one knew exactly how old the place was, but portions of it were said to date from the time of the Crusades, after which it was built up and fortified by successive generations of noble and not so noble men. Voltaire had once lived there, and in 1815 it was acquired by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who made use of a secret tunnel in the cellar to slip off into the night when his existence became a liability to too many people. The property was surrounded by a formidable wall and high, arching iron gates, and when Katherine broke off her engagement to Stanley, she fled across the Atlantic and closed the gates behind her.
She needed time to think. Time to settle her own nerves, and never mind Stanleys — he’d meant to hit her with that vase, he had, right up until the last minute. He could have scarred her for life, killed her — and for what? What had she done to deserve it? She’d lost her patience maybe and she’d been short with him, but only because he was so obsessive and gloomy, making mountains of molehills all the time, afraid of her touch, afraid of what was happening between them, afraid of love. All that she could understand and forgive, but violence was inexcusable, unthinkable, and the truly awful thing was what it said about Stanley in his darkest soul.
The first day at Prangins all she did was sleep, and when Madame Fleury, the housekeeper, poked her stricken face in the door inquiring if madame wanted anything to eat, Katherine told her to go away. At dusk, she thought she ought to get up, but she didn‘t — she just lay there, sunk into the pillows, holding herself very still. She watched the darkness congeal in the corners and fan out over the floor, and then she was asleep again, the night a void, black and silent, no wind, not a murmur from the lake. In the morning, she woke to the sound of birds and the shifting light playing off the water, the floating aqueous light of her girlhood when she would spend half the day rowing out into the lake till she was beyond the sight of shore, and for the first thirty seconds she didn’t think of Stanley. She was at Prangins, behind the walls, behind the gate, secure and safe and with nothing to do but read and walk and row and all the time in the world to do it, and what was so bad about that? Suddenly she was hungry, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since she’d got off the train from Paris, her stomach in turmoil, in revolt, but growling now in the most placable and ordinary way. She rang for the housekeeper and had breakfast sent up, a good Swiss breakfast of fresh eggs and cheeses and wafer-thin slices of Black Forest ham with rolls hot from the oven and fresh cream for her coffee, and she ate it all in a kind of dream, sitting at the window and gazing out over the lake.
She forced herself to get dressed and to greet the servants, most of whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a year, and then she went down to the lake and took one of the rowboats out. There was a breeze with a scent of snow blowing off the mountains, but the sun was warm and she relished the feel of the oars in her hands, the spume, the rocking of the boat, each stroke taking her farther from all the complexities of her life, from Stanley and wedding gowns and arborio rice by the bushel — and the specter of babies, that too. What had he shouted over the clamor of the crowd and the mindless blast of the ship’s horn? I can have children!