Magnus understood instantly what was afoot. He drew himself up to his full boyish height. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Sure I knows who you are.”
Magnus fixed an imaginary monocle to his right eye. “I’m the grandson of an earl and my name is King.”
“You’re the son of a loafer and your name is bull.”
“Get off the sidewalk, you clumsy ox, and let me pass.”
The bully beat him up.
When Magnus told his mother about it, she complimented him. “Now you begin to sound like my father, your grandfather the earl. A true king after all.”
As time went on, Henrietta became more and more dispirited and lonely. Gradually she lost all pleasure in life. Even the times when young Magnus washed her feet, something he liked to do because he loved the slim length of her foot, meant little or nothing to her.
Magnus grew up to be a handsome fellow like his father: dark wavy hair, dark darting eyes, a long nose, full lips, a strong chin. From the Worthington side of the family he inherited double-jointed fingers. He could wrap his hand around the head of his walking stick like a monkey might grab hold of a knot.
Magnus had gone to deliver some laundry one day, when the postmaster spotted him and handed him a black-edged letter. The letter was from the Honorable Elizabeth Dulcie in England and it was addressed to his mother.
Magnus ran home with it all excited. At last the great news had come.
Henrietta read it; and collapsed at her ironing board.
“Mother!”
Henrietta stared at the calluses in the palms of her hands with low-dotted eyes.
“Mother?”
“Uncle George is dead.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Isn’t that good?”
“The letter says Uncle George went through the whole estate before he passed on. He died a poor man. And without issue. There is nothing left. It is all gone.”
“All of it?”
“All of it. Except the title.”
“Ha. Without the fortune the title means nothing. Not in America anyway.”
“I know.”
Three days later Henrietta died in her sleep Mercifully.
Magnus was just nineteen. Magnus had never worked a day in his life. Without his mother to support him Magnus was no better than a common tramp. Of no use to anyone. Excess baggage in America.
Luckily the mayor of Weldon was a decent fellow and took pity on Magnus. He knew there was some good in Magnus, that Magnus in his leisure time had read widely and well and could write presentable letters. He suggested Magnus become notary public as well as town correspondent for a Chicago newspaper.
Magnus gave it some thought, finally decided it was not for him.
Magnus had observed that the local doctor had more freedom than any other citizen in town. A doctor could be an agnostic, even a town knocker, and it was usually overlooked. A doctor was generally allowed his crank notions in return for his ability to heal rotted limbs and spoiled brains.
Magnus decided that if he had to work for a living it would be as a doctor.
Magnus sold what few possessions his mother had left him and was off for Chicago. He enrolled at Rush Medical College.
To his considerable surprise, Magnus discovered that learning came easy for him. He had a retentive memory, a graphic imagination, quick analytic ability. He outstripped everyone in his class.
Magnus soon became impatient with the slower minds around him. He even presumed to question his professors. His naturally imperious manner grated his classmates as well as the medical faculty.
Magnus saw that prescribing castor oil when constipated, and cinnamon when loose, and calomel when in doubt was not true medicine, not even as Hippocrates had conceived it to be. He decided to investigate Indian medicine and country folklore remedies. He managed to get hold of a microscope and began his own exploring. In short, Magnus graduated from Rush with a reputation for being a brilliant malcontent.
At about the same time Magnus’ love life underwent an abrupt change. Magnus had been totally devoted to his mother and as long as she had been alive had never dated a girl. Now suddenly he began to notice the girls, everywhere. It was as if he was out to make up for lost time. Let a body be wearing a dress and he was out to court it: waitresses, streetwalkers, older women, whores on the line. He even jumped the color line several times. His appetite was insatiable.
The last months at Rush it happened that Magnus had to change boardinghouses. He landed with an elderly spinster named Agnes Rodman. Miss Rodman had room for but one person and it was soon apparent that she expected the boarder to become a member of the family.
Miss Rodman was originally from England, and that Magnus liked. However, Miss Rodman had just reached the critical age, change of life, and she was as different in behavior and attitude from his own mother as a woman could possibly be.
Eventually Agnes Rodman would have been intolerable to live with if it hadn’t been for her niece Katherine Rodman.
Katherine was an orphan. Her father was Miss Agnes’ brother, and he and his wife had died in a pestilence. Aunt Agnes generally called her niece Kitty.
Kitty fooled one. Kitty looked seventeen but actually was thirteen. She was well developed physically, was precocious emotionally and mentally. Though shortish she had the long stride of the taller person. She had a large foot like Magnus’ own mother, and curly light brown hair, and sensual lips cut hauntingly at the corners. Most arresting of all were her eyes. They were dissimilar, the left eye green and the right eye brown.
While Aunt Agnes prattled on her end of the table about such things as that horseback exercise was not proper for a girl, that a hot mustard bath was good for the hidden sin, that a pregnancy could help to terminate an insanity, that a marriage was one of the best tonics for the female psyche, Magnus and Kitty were exchanging warm looks at their end of the table.
Kitty had been a recent problem to her aunt. A nine-year-old boy named Dennis had been their previous boarder. Kitty had on occasion been left alone with Dennis. Dennis was shy. To get him to play with her, Kitty had enticed him with candy. Dennis loved jelly beans and finally became quite friendly. Soon Kitty took to hiding the jelly beans so he would have to reach across her body to get at them. Or look under her. Then she took to hiding the jelly beans on her person: inside her folded knee, in her clapped-shut armpit. She got him to explore her everywhere, until he explored that part of her where, tickling, it made her dizzy. Aunt Agnes caught them at it. Dennis was promptly shipped off to distant kin.
Aunt Agnes trusted Magnus on first sight. His quietly superior airs, the way he swung his walking stick, inspired respect.
Soon Aunt Agnes was busy spinning webs and fantasies around Magnus, mostly in behalf of Kitty, but also in part for herself. The thought went through Aunt Agnes’ mind that in a few years, just as the young Dr. Magnus King should have established a fine practice in Chicago, Kitty would need a husband. Marrying Kitty off to Magnus would mend both sides of the fence at the same time—a girl who threatened to go wild would be safely harnessed in marriage, while she herself, Agnes Rodman, would for the rest of her natural life have free doctoring.
Aunt Agnes made up her mind that it wasn’t going to be her fault if Kitty didn’t make the perfect doctor’s wife. Aunt Agnes got out several old doctor books and began to bend Kitty’s ear knowingly about such matters as depraved appetites and prenatal impressions, about how tight lacing could be ruinous to the female innards, and the like.
Aunt Agnes also presumed to instruct Kitty on the nature of love. “At first one is attracted to the opposite sex because of animal passion, my dear. Plainly just that. Yet you must always bear in mind that out of this animal passion can rise a mighty and pure love, which is to the other what the delicate flower is to the unsightly tuber.”
Aunt Agnes even told Kitty what her husband could expect of her in the way of submission, and how much of this she was to allow her husband. “Two or three indul
gences a week may be looked upon as within the proper bounds of propriety.”
The truth was Kitty was already miles ahead of Aunt Agnes.
The second week of Magnus’ stay, on a Sunday, Kitty managed to sniffle convincingly enough so that Aunt Agnes permitted her to stay home from church. Magnus himself never went to church. Around eleven o’clock in the morning, with Aunt Agnes gone, Kitty knocked on Magnus’ door to ask him if he didn’t have some kind of cough syrup around for her cold. All Kitty had on was a wrapper.
Magnus did have something for her cold. He mixed together some brandy, honey, and the extract of horehound. He gave her several spoonfuls.
Magnus was terribly taken by Kitty. As he watched her lick her quaintly cut sensuous lips upon taking the cough medicine, he longed to kiss her. It came upon him suddenly that he had missed out on the whole business of a boy being in love with a girl, especially during puberty. What was more lovely to look upon, and to touch, than a just-budded girl of thirteen? Magnus began to regret his exploits with cheap women.
Kitty noted a small tintype on his desk. She leaned forward to have a look at it, and as she did so, she let slide a sidewise silverish look at him. Her green eye in particular smoked with it. She asked who the tintype was a picture of.
“My grandfather Worthington.”
“He looks distinguished.”
“He was. He was an earl.”
“In England?”
“Yes.”
She noted an emblem in one corner. “And this?”
“Our family coat of arms.”
Kitty bent for a closer look, and so managed it that her wrapper parted, revealing a lovely apricot of a breast.
Magnus could not resist a touch. And while Aunt Agnes partook of the blessed sacrament, the Lord’s Supper, in church, Magnus and Kitty partook of the blessed temptation, fornication, in bed.
Neither regretted it. Both fell immediately and deeply in love. The delicate flower of pure passion replaced all former philandering on his part and sneaky fun on her part.
She had no maidenhead. But Magnus was sure that no grown man had touched her there before. She had probably picked it apart herself.
Kitty told him she was in a family way the same day Magnus graduated from medical school. It was early spring. They were even more in love than ever. He had heard of an excellent opening in a new town on the frontier, Sioux City, in western Iowa, and felt he should make his start there, where he could begin with a clean slate on all counts. She agreed it would be a good place to go to, and suggested they elope.
Two days later, on a Sunday morning, they took the stage to Dubuque. From there they took the steamboat down the Mississippi to St. Louis, then back up the Missouri to Sioux City.
The captain on the first boat married them. The year was 1856. Magnus was twenty-one; Kitty was thirteen.
They lived in a back room, behind his office on Main Street in Sioux City.
The first months they were as happy as a couple of sleek minks. He couldn’t get enough of her. He had to be touching her all the time, nipping her Indian-dented lips, shaping her apricot breasts, stroking her long slim feet. They made love most every night.
He loved the scent of her. She’d found some puccoons growing wild on the prairies, and falling in love with them, decided she had to have their aroma around all year round. So she squeezed their orange blossoms until she got a drop of juice, then boiled their roots down to their essence, and made of the combination her personal perfume.
About the fourth month of her term she began to initiate the lovemaking. This inflamed Magnus all the more. That he should be having fleshly communion with her thirteen-year-old body at same time that he loved her as the mother of their coming child made for madness. A master passion took hold of him. It seemed to release him at last from the lethargy of his sad youth.
They were lying together in their back room after the noon meal. He was about to go out on call.
“Aunt Agnes would never approve of this.” He kissed her on the nape of her neck. “Never, never.” He suckled the lobe of her ear.
Kitty opened herself under him to hold him the more. “Why not?”
“Indulging your husband’s base passions in the middle of your term … why, Kitten, you know that can be injurious to the child. Besides, it’s a sin to enjoy it.”
“Can it?”
Magnus went on imitating dear Aunt Agnes’ manner. “I am minded of what your own dear mother told me. My sister-in-law. That it put the stamp of a passional nature in you. Yes, Kitty, you were a honeypot when you were already a year old.”
Kitty laughed. She kissed him. “My husband. My dear daddy husband.” She kissed him again. “I can’t help it, dear daddy husband, but I never did think that tubers were unsightly.”
“And I never did think that a mighty and a pure love was but a delicate flower.” Magnus sighed luxuriously. “I like all of it. As well as the fruit of it.”
They were desperately poor at first. In pay for his services they accepted chickens, cabbages, roasting ears of corn, pigs. They robbed prairie nests of part of their eggs for their breakfasts. They grubbed out wild onions to flavor their soups. Often they accepted the invitations of the nearby Yankton Indians to eat with them.
On Sunday they sometimes played a game.
Magnus would ask, “Lovey, what suit shall I wear today?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Suit yourself.”
“Ha. Shall it be the gray suit? Or shall it be the powder-blue suit? Or shall it be the tux? Or, perhaps, shall it be the black?”
“Oh, dear, what a dilemma.”
“Yes.”
“For a change, why don’t you just make it the black?”
Laughing, with all the gesture of a prince standing before a kingly wardrobe that ran the length of a castle bedroom, Magnus would reach into the closet and take out the only suit he had, the black.
That summer little Sioux City became the jumping-off place for western expeditions to the Dakotas. Steamboats brought supplies up the Missouri to the wharves of their town, where they were transferred to mule-drawn wagons. Magnus and Kitty watched many a mule train head out on the new Military Road, toward Yankton, despite wallows of gumbo mud.
Also that summer great lunging stagecoaches began to roll in from the East, across the prairies from Fort Dodge, bringing new citizens, special supplies, and ever-fattening bags of mail.
By the end of July, Sioux City had a population of four hundred souls and more than ninety buildings. Articles of incorporation were drawn up. A man named Weare opened a bank. The first issues of the Sioux City Eagle, named after Chief War Eagle, rolled off the presses. Boardwalks appeared on both sides of the main thoroughfare. Finally Sioux City was named the county seat of Woodbury County.
No one ever talked much about the fact that wolves still made nightly forays into the residential sections of town, sometimes even chasing down Main Street; or that Smutty Bear and his Yankton bunch occasionally beat the war drum all night long, still vainly hoping to scare off the whites; or that winters could be bone-cracking cold, so that the Missouri froze over; or that great prairie pumas still prowled in the tan bluffs north of town, sometimes yowling their great agony calls all night long.
Magnus and Kitty became part of the establishment. The ladies, not knowing Kitty’s true age, accepted her as one of their own. The hard-cash men about town, observing that Dr. Magnus had tight-lipped class about him, also accepted him as one of their own.
What finally won Kitty over to her new surroundings was not a white woman, but a Yankton Indian mother named Gooseberry June. It was the way Gooseberry June came to their back door, calling softly, “Gooseberries, gooseberries. Eat very good now. Before the goose comes down and gobbles.”
That November, Kitty began to have difficulty. The baby was due in January.
“I can’t seem to eat much, Magnus.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have room for it.”
Magnus comforted her. He bathed her feet with warm water just as he’d done for his mother Henrietta.
“And the child kicks so.”
“Sure sign it’s a true King.”
“The least little kick and it’s like he tears me all loose inside.”
“Sure sign it’s going to be a boy.”
“If that’s the way boys behave I want nothing but girls after this.”
“Don’t worry, Kitten. It’s nature’s way.”
“Sometimes I wish I was just a kitten. Just a plain old alley cat.”
When alone in his office, Magnus searched through his medical books to learn more about childbirth. He found all too little. And there was nothing about having them when too young.
Kitty meantime began to fall into deep silences.
“Your Aunt Agnes hasn’t poisoned your mind now?” he asked, arching a brow at her.
“But it does hurt.”
“It’s natural that it should hurt. And good.”
“I want what’s unnatural then.”
“Don’t let’s be childish.”
“So now it’s childish, is it, my daddy husband?”
Magnus shivered. He said, “God has a plan in all this.”
“Ha.”
“Pain actually can be a very good thing.”
“How so?”
“Because it makes things worthwhile.”
“Ha.”
“The human race would go downhill if it weren’t braced by pain now and then.”
“Lucky you that you’re a man and have only the fun of it.”
“Woman, gladly would I take on the pain of it for you if I could.”
“That I believe.”
“Besides, this pain you feel is really a key which is slowly but surely opening the door to the sleeping mother in you. To that greater love of which only a woman is capable.”
“Ha. How would you know?”
“I’ve watched mothers come to bloom in the lying-in wards in Chicago.”
“There had better be some reward for all this.”
Magnus reset his black bow tie. “The more pain the more love.”
King of Spades Page 3
