by Daniel Kraus
Leather spun upon his heel and faced his astonished wife. Mrs. Leather, said he, was tasked with marshaling what few pieces of furniture and finery remained and reorganizing them into a few key rooms, while shutting off routes to emptied spaces so that the Cockshuts would find no evidence of desperation.
The doctor widened his focus to include me. His individualized attention typically clenched me inside an invisible fist of fear, but this time I chewed that fear, swallowed it, and stood tall.
“Mr. Finch, you are tomorrow’s centerpiece. Yours is the part of Dapper Young Man, if you think you have the chops to play it. None of your dissension, please; remember what happens should you fail. The city street will become our operating table, broken glass our set of scalpels. Concentrate, Finch, upon who you could be should you prevail in this performance.”
Performance. The word poked at me.
“Should there be seating cards?” he asked himself. “Aye, there should! On yours, Finch, let us indulge in showmanship.”
Showmanship. That word poked me as well.
“‘The Revolutionary Zebulon Finch.’ No, that connotes rebellion. ‘The Trailblazing Zebulon Finch’? No, not enough. ‘The Thaumaturgic Zebulon Finch’? Well, that’s too much. ‘The Astonishing Zebulon Finch’?”
At last I found my tongue.
“No,” said I. “Not that one.”
“And what of me?”
We turned as one to find Merle, her fine chin pointed at the chandelier, her hands clasped knuckle-white. She had not made a direct address to the doctor in what might have been a year. Her chest, as usual, rose and fell rapidly, out of anticipation or wrath it was eternally difficult to say.
“You?” Leather’s inspirational timbre flattened. “You are to stay away.”
Her eyes slitted.
“I’m not invited to dinner?”
“Young lady, you are not invited to anything. Your entire presence here has been uninvited.”
Her cheeks darkened to scarlet.
“I have every right to sit alongside my father.”
“You crave our food, nothing more. For once you shall not have it.”
“Papa.” Her lip quivered. “Tell him that I may join you.”
Relations between Merle and me had been on gravel footing from the outset. But since her veranda outburst, I’d made it my purpose to shield her from Leather’s aberrations until I earned her trust, at which point together we might abscond. Taking a stance between Merle and Leather was a delicate proposition.
“I . . . see no real harm,” said I. “Can’t she—”
“Papa.” Leather mocked her plosives. “A cat mimics affection better. You are sub-cat; I’ll grant you status of leech. Except leeches have value in a laboratory setting, whereas your style of bloodsucking is futility itself.”
Long had my pride been abraded when a man showed indifference to my opinion. I might be weak of limb, but not too weak to take up an iron paperweight and bludgeon the doctor’s egocentric skull! What prevented me was simple confusion; I had little experience acting on the behalf of anyone but myself. Into the space left by my inaction tumbled the quick-tongued Merle.
“How dare you say this to me,” said she.
“I am sure you have been called much worse,” said Leather. “Show your face at this dinner and be very sorry that you did. Have I made myself abundantly clear? Have I used words small enough for you to decipher? Indicate, girl, indicate!”
“You are the one who will be sorry. You have no idea how sorry.”
With that, she turned and ran. Her lovely skirts made a colorful fuss, putting to shame my continued silence; I stood there mouthing the air like a beached fish.
“Mr. Dixon,” called Leather.
From the next room: “Sir?”
“A third footman for tomorrow. Stationed outside the brat’s room. There’s a good man.”
Activity hastened the afternoon and evening. The quietude of the house at night supplied me additional hours to consider my duties, both to Leather and Merle. I got up, as I was wont to do, and commenced upon my usual directionless wander—perhaps the last of its kind should the next day’s event go awry. I got no farther than the second-floor landing. There stood my daughter in a sleeping gown, her hair brushed to perfection and her pale face aglow through a veil of moonlight.
I advanced so that we stood upon equal footing and adopted a smile, defense against what I feared would be castigation for failing to land her a dinner invite.
“I see you have inherited my insomnia,” said I.
Merle snatched the lapel of my bedshirt and her sharp little underbite gnashed at my chin.
“I’ll stay away from his hoity-toity affair. What choice have I? But that means you have to succeed on your own. Think of Mrs. Leather if my welfare isn’t enough for you. Think of her daughter. Think of them on the street eating garbage. Make Dr. Cockman, whatever his name is, make him see who you really are, see everything you’re really capable of. You show him that, he can’t deny us anything. No one can.”
Johnny had not been a son, but even at his besotted end he’d been more childlike than this girl. Had scar tissue hardened the raw vulnerability that had once caused her to shatter a mirror with her fist?
“Of course,” said I. “I shall do my best—”
“If you are my father, then you will do what is required. Anything that is required to take care of me.”
Small, simple, sensible words, were they not? Yet they burrowed into me like metal screws, leaving unsealable gouges that blooded with a single repulsive fact. Daddy’s little girl? Perhaps. But Merle Ruby Watson was, by then, older than her papa.
And, as you shall see, craftier as well.
XV.
THE COCKSHUTS WERE FIFTY-FIVE MINUTES late. With a brigade of queasy servants lined behind him, erect and tensed for the bugle-blast call to arms, Leather had arrived at, as you might imagine, quite a state. He had spent the previous eight hours in the lab hooked to the Isolator in an attempt to bloat himself with oxygen enough for this oceanic plunge, and now labored to relearn how humans breathed. I sympathized to a point; I, too, could barely remember.
Just when I thought he might start gnawing upon the carpet, the door knocker broke the silence. Dixon bolted from the parlor. Leather gave us, his servicemen in this sortie, a hard final inspection. The doctor himself looked as if plucked from the Paris beau monde, his rented formal wear finished with soft-toe pumps bowed with corded silk, a boldwing collar with piqué bow tie, and hair parted so fiercely that his white line of scalp burned like phosphorescence.
He nodded at Mary and Gladys. “Yes.” He looked at me; I’d left the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring in my room following his earlier complaints. He nodded. “Yes.” He exhaled and stared down the doorway. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Seconds later the parlor was violated by a man in his late fifties the size of a nine-drawer bureau. His garish ivory oxford coat strained at his dimensions and he had not yet bothered to remove the matching bowler. He wore his hair in long carrot-colored curls and, though facial hair fashion in 1913 had caught up to Leather and me, Cockshut proudly displayed two fluffed muttonchops, which swooped to connect beneath his nose. His cheeks looked patted with a touch of blush.
When this effeminate behemoth saw Leather, he rapped upon the floor with a walking cane topped with an alabaster monkey head.
“There he is—the young lion! At last I enter his den.”
Leather broke forward and took the man’s goliath, ringed mitt in an overeager, two-handed handshake.
“Obediah. You honor me with your presence.”
“Squeeze my hand harder, Corny, and fifteen of your most strapping servants will be tasked with lifting my fat body from the floor.”
Corny. Mary cringed. I did, too, a common reaction, or so I assume, for sons f
irst witnessing their fathers subjugated. Leather ate his pride and shaped his lips into a self-effacing grin. It was at this point that Mrs. Cockshut entered. Though in bodily shape she recalled the soft, thickish Mary, she was swathed in a chiffon dress inwrought with gold, one shoulder of sapphire netting, the other of strung jewels. With one hand she hugged a spotted mink stole; the other she extended to Leather as she approached.
“Olive, dear.” Leather kissed her fingers. “You are radiant.”
Olive and Mary exchanged obligatory kisses; the three long feathers of Olive’s headpiece bobbed about. Mary could not prevent a slight sinking of her shoulders. Long has it been my experience that no woman enjoys discovering her fashion to be obsolete.
You would think it choreographed how the Cockshuts turned to address me.
“This must be the famous Mr. Finch.” Cockshut pounded his monkey cane and sauntered up, eyeing me in a manner almost lewd. “Corny has told me the most enchanting things. I do look forward to learning more about your strange and unusual body.”
“Obediah,” scolded Olive. But her eyes twinkled.
Cockshut held up a finger.
“I am crassness incarnate. We will arrive at the, shall we say, meatier matters in due time. How about an aperitif? Corny, if you tell me that your house is as dry as your office, I shall weep like a widow.”
Enter the untested footmen! Thanks to Dixon, they were models of competence, blending into the background like veterans. Mary relaxed and held court with Olive alongside the prettiest window, while Leather chased around Cockshut, who, despite his weight and cane, liked to stick his nose into every cranny of the room. I resolved to remain seated at the center of the room, a parlor game none of the guests had yet figured out how to play.
Dixon interrupted my woolgathering to announce that dinner was served. Cockshut cackled in glee, removed his bowler at last, and charged ahead of the women past a cortege of straight-backed servants. Leather gave a signal and two musicians positioned in the connecting alcove took up their lute and clavichord. While we sat and napkined ourselves, the duo struggled through their first pages. It was, of course, the music of Carlo Gesualdo, and the notation was, of course, reproduced by none other than Leather himself. In no time at all Gesualdo’s dementia began to infect the players. They plucked and struck every note with tortured fealty.
Leather took the head of the table. I sat to his right while Cockshut took the foot. Gladys joined us, quiet as instructed, and the women filled the table’s gaps. For several magnificent minutes, the entire evening, predestined for disaster, shimmied along a high wire of success. Even I became caught up in our audacious plot until, quite abruptly, I remembered how Leather had categorized this piece of music: a threnody, a hymn to the dead.
The living among us had their spoons poised above the first course of green turtle à l’Anglaise when Cockshut tipped an ear to the air.
“Thunderation! What is this cacophony?”
Mary and I looked at each other in alarm.
Leather’s attempt at an easygoing air was horrific.
“It is the work of an Italian named Gesualdo.”
“This is composed? I thought the musicians were tuning their instruments.”
Olive snickered into her hand. A daub of turtle soup escaped her lips.
“Amusing,” said Leather. I watched his every tortured twitch until, at last, he bent to the pressure.
“The truth is,” said he, “I find Gesualdo to be undervalued.”
Cockshut nudged his wife.
“Young people and their music, eh, dear? It takes a good many years for the palate to detect fish from fowl.”
Cockshut clapped his hands above his head.
“Players! I say! Players! Goodness, Corny, did you gas them with nitrous oxide? Yes, you two! Do your audience the cardinal favor of advancing to the finis so that we may dine without fear of choking. Let’s hear something of quality. Mozart!”
Mozart! The cracking of Leather’s teeth could be heard from across the state; I imagined his spoon emerging from his mouth as a lump of chewed silver. The players, though, nodded their gratitude and dove into something cheerful. Leather closed his eyes for the first several bars, his nostrils quivering for additional air.
The soup was removed. In swept the small plates—olives, celery, radishes, salted almonds. Now that Gesualdo no longer drove our party to gradual psychosis, the harmonics of a traditional dinner party emerged: gregarious chewing, convivial slurping, the satisfying shiver of cutlery; and from the hallway, the murmur of footmen and whispers of maids. The sole disruption was a single, unsuitable sound that grew in prominence: a chronometer pacing from the room directly above. Merle’s room. Merle’s designer footwear, too.
Click click, click click.
Cockshut was old but missed nothing.
“What have you got up there, old boy? Another mystery guest?”
“Forgive the noise. It is a visitor.”
Click click, click click.
“The step has a feminine cadence, lest mine ears deceive me.”
Leather nodded in reluctant capitulation. Cockshut twirled his orange hair in relish.
“Ever the private one, aren’t you? If this visitor of yours is of the concubinal variety, for heaven’s sake do not speak it aloud! The ladies present would be forever scandalized.” He leaned over his plate and affected a stage whisper. “But tell me in private later, yes? I myself am a man of irregular appetites.”
Olive’s snickering lips wore a mustache of almond salt.
It was this gross detail that drove home the scene’s outrage; Leather’s hand reached for the Isolator that was not there, and I, for once, shared his asphyxiation. The doctor had come to America to create counteragents against ingrained ideas and behaviors. Now these plebeian perverts were injecting into his world the bacteria of dismissive doubt.
Leather knew how to fight disease: operate quickly or lose the patient.
“Here, here.” Leather pushed away his plate. “Let us cut to the core of it.”
“Striped bass!” Cockshut clapped his hands like a schoolgirl upon spying the incoming course. “Noisettes of lamb! Virginia ham au champagne! Oh, Corny, thou dost know the way to my big, blubbery heart!”
Footmen, young and overeager, stole the small dishes that had barely been touched. Leather knew that if he could not resuscitate life back into his dying cause, he and his family might never see such placeware, or such food, ever again.
“Your heart, I hope, Obediah, can be reached by roads more systematic. Allow me to speak of Mr. Finch and the wonders he contains.”
“Ah-ah, but you know what they say! Politics before science, and we shan’t upset convention. Let’s see, let’s see. What make you, an Englishman, of our Woodrow Wilson? Does our commander possess behind his spectacles grit equal to that of the Kaiser? Now this is conversation, eh? Run with it, my boy, run with it!”
Cockshut turned his jubilant attention to his plate of fish.
“War will rage,” growled Leather, “men will die, graves will green, ad nauseum. This, right here at this table, is what is important. The secrets I close in on are beyond war. They make war irrelevant.”
“War irrelevant? Why, war is the only relevant thing! Oh, but I forget that you are young. Too young, perhaps, to understand the necessity of war. Definitely too young to solve the mysteries of life and death—too young, even, to handle your whiskey or grow a proper beard! As a man of advanced age, I urge you to slow down. Enjoy life or die trying, I say.”
Mary was well-trained in the role of wife. She knew the scent of disaster.
“The potatoes en croquettes,” chirped she. “Are you quite sure, Obediah, that they are not over-seasoned?”
Leather pointed at a sideboard.
“A stethoscope rests behind you. Put it to Mr. Finch’s chest. Listen fo
r yourself.”
“Put it to your own chest,” said Cockshut. “For your heart beats to exhaustion, methinks.”
Leather thumped the table with a fist; silverware jumped.
The doctor had begun to wheeze.
“Six feet away from you sits the greatest medical find of the century! And yet you natter away at claptrap! You, sir, are supposed to be a surgeon.”
Cockshut deposited flakes of fish upon his tongue and crossed his eyes in ecstasy.
“And you, Corny, are supposed to be a human being. One cannot subsist on knowledge alone. Claptrap, so it happens, is essential to the diet.”
Leather, then, did something unexpected.
From the plate of ham he took up an eight-inch, two-pronged serving fork, and turned to me.
“Mr. Finch, I am going to stab you.”
Gladys dropped her butter knife.
Cockshut’s vigorous chewing ground to a halt.
Olive gasped—a low, but elated, inhalation.
I became aware that everyone awaited my response to this crazed proposition. I gave Leather a cold, steady look.
“And where is it you intend to stab me?”
“Can this not wait?” asked Mary. “Let us delay this . . . demonstration until after dessert.”
Leather’s face was a quivering mask of asthmatic resolve.
“The forearm. ’Twixt radius and ulna. You may roll up your sleeve if you wish.”
Cornelius Leather was a better, truer, nobler man than the Barker. Wasn’t that what he had assured me? Wasn’t that why I had fled the body-strewn field of honor and its bulleted corpses and crossed thirteen colonies to find him? Now he asked to play butcher upon me, and in front of others, as if I were once more upon a lit stage.
“I would very much prefer that you not do this,” said I.
“I will do it and you will allow it.”
For a terrible moment we stared at each other.
The musicians finished a movement of Mozart.
