by Mark Dunn
“Should I put on the percolator?” asked Jane. “My head is spinning from the wine. Yours is too, I’m sure.”
“Damn the coffee! It isn’t coffee I want. It’s you. Come sit in my lap.”
Jane sniggered in an unintended parody of a coquette. This response to Tom’s request made her seem both girlish and absolutely ridiculous, for she wasn’t a girl, nor was she some blushing geisha. “Your lap? No, Mr. Katz, I think not.”
“Then come sit next to me.” Tom patted the cushion and slid to one side to make a little more room for her.
“I’ll do that, but only if you promise to be a gentleman.”
“What a bughouse proposition!” remonstrated Katz. “I will do no such thing! Because it isn’t a gentleman you want right now, Jane. It’s me. And I want you, so let’s end all the pussyfooting and get down to cases.”
Jane took a tentative step toward the sofa. “I wouldn’t know how to get down to cases if I tried.”
“Have you never even been kissed?”
Jane shook her head.
“Then let me redress that egregious wrong right at the outset.” Katz reached out in a move that was both imperiously demanding and somewhat suggestive of the clawing “gimme-gimme” of a spoiled, importunate child.
Jane, overcome by his hungry attention, took the necessary steps to place herself directly before him. He responded by depositing her ham-handedly into his lap.
“I will not—” Jane squirmed, scarcely able to get out the words. “I will not let you take the kind of brazen ad—advantage of me that your friend Mr. Castle took with Miss Barton last week.”
Tom looked up at Jane, stretching his neck to meet her eyes because of how tall she sat upon his thighs. “What the deuce are you talking about? At Golden Gate Park?”
“Yes, at Golden Gate Park. In the Japanese gardens.”
“None of this rings a bell.”
“He didn’t tell you? I’d assumed he would have bragged about it all over town.”
“Honest, I don’t know a thing about it,” lied Tom with a look of feigned conviction.
Jane rolled her eyes, her own look one of feigned petulance. “Well, I’m certainly not going to give you all the contemptible details. Suffice it to say, your friend Jerry Castle was an absolute orangutan, and that isn’t being very kind to orangutans.”
“Well, that does sum the duck up perfectly.” Tom pointed to the space next to him, and Jane took her cue to remove herself from his lap.
However, once detached from him, reattachment in a different manner was quickly achieved, as Tom pushed her backward into the curve of the sofa. To anyone in casual, slightly squinting observance of this picture it would look as if the two were being devoured by a great puckered roseate mouth. Jane could feel his weight upon her, his hot breath upon her neck.
“When I look at you,” he cooed softly, his lips close to her ear, “I see a woman unlike any I’ve ever met.”
“In what way do you mean?” said Jane, pushing the heels of her palms ever so slightly against his chest to signal her need for breathing room.
“So many different ways.”
Jane reached up and, surprising herself with her boldness, began to thread her fingers through his tousled hair.
“But one way most especially. You’re a woman who is needful of something she’s never experienced before, or more than likely will ever experience again.”
Jane now permitted her maundering fingers to move down his temples to his cheeks, to caress each with lambent fingertips. Then after pronating her wrists with the balletic litheness of the sylphic romance-novel heroine whom she imagined herself at this moment to be, she tenderly stroked his face with the backs of her hands. “You’ve misspoken, Tom. You mean ‘more than likely experience’ with any other man but you.” She smiled at the thought that was forming inside her still cloudy head. “Because once you are mine and I am yours, I intend to be faithful and true—to never seek intimacy with anyone else.”
“Nicely put, Jane, but that isn’t what I meant at all.” Tom caught Jane’s right hand and brought it to his lips.
He kissed her knuckles. She closed her eyes in silent rapture, but then just as suddenly opened them and asked him point-blank: “What do you mean?” Her look now registered undisguised confusion.
“That I have no intention of spending the rest of my life with you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It isn’t difficult. You are, as I’ve often said, a very bright girl. Probably the smartest of your set. Smart enough to know there’d be nothing dottier for me to do than to be married to you for even ten minutes, let alone for the remainder of my days. Positorily bug-house.”
Jane wanted up. Tom released his hold on her. She slipped out from under him and sat straight up and patted her pompadour back into place and made adjustments to her calico skirt and blue linen blouse (both purchased from Pemberton, Day & Co. with her shopgirl discount, though it still took a bite out of her small salary). Finally, she said between pursed, angry lips, “Is this the person you become when you drink, Mr. Katz? A repellent one-night roué?”
“I sobered up a good while ago.”
“Then you’ll have no trouble understanding me clearly when I say that it’s time for you to go. If your pursuit of me has only been for the purpose of a single night of debauched conquest, which you’ll either conveniently deny any memory of to your friends or, or blame on all those Manhattan cocktails we had at the Fatted Pig, then let me serve notice here and now: I won’t go along with even a minute more of it.”
Calmly: “You’ll go along with it.”
“What did I just say?”
Tom got up from the sofa. “Get up.”
Jane remained seated on the sofa.
“Get up. I want to show you something.” Jane rose slowly, warily. Tom reached out and took Jane—not by the hand, but by the wrist, as one leads a recalcitrant child who will not come otherwise—over to the mirror on the wall. He positioned her before it. “Take a good look at yourself. What do you see?”
Jane looked at her reflection in the glass. The gaslight was low. She hadn’t bothered to turn up the flame when they’d first entered the room, thinking that Tom would appreciate the romantic mood created by the muted lighting. Now he did the unthinkable. He reached over and turned up the jet himself—all the way to its limit. It flared obscenely, flooding the room with harsh bright light. In that unforgiving illumination, every flawed feature which lived upon Jane’s face stood out in exaggerated relief: the “horsey” nose, eye sockets set so deeply into her face that the dark brown of her globes seemed to disappear almost entirely in their retreat, a chin that jutted protuberantly like a witch’s in a children’s fairy story.
“That’s what I look like,” said Jane to herself, mesmerized by the starkness of the image before her. “A witch.”
Yet Tom was not content with her only thinking about the way she looked. “Say what you see,” he said, his voice steely, cold. “It’s just you and me. No one but us is listening.”
“I see a—a hideous woman.”
Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘hideous.’ That’s not being very kind to yourself, now, is it? I would use the less punishing word, ‘unattractive.’ But hideous, or unattractive, or just plain ugly or just plain plain, it’s all the same, isn’t it?” Tom gestured with a casual hand toward the image in the mirror. “No man wants to make love to a woman who looks like this.”
Jane took a moment to reply. The words were freighted with such pain that she could hardly bring them to voice. “Then why do you?”
Tom smiled. “Because, my dippy darling, I and I alone have the capacity to ignore your repulsiveness in my mission of mercy. This is what I’ve always sought to do—from that first afternoon at Pemberton, Day when we discussed the photography session in Miss Colthurst’s absence. I felt pity for you, working among all those pretty young women, and looking the way you did—the way you do.” Stand
ing behind her, he moved his head slightly to the side to better see the reflected image Jane was beholding with a mixture of sadness and absolute horror. “I wanted to give you that thing you’ll never have otherwise, because, speaking as a man, even ugly men have no use for ugly women. We men—let me speak frankly here—we know our worth is gauged not by the way we look, but by what we are capable of doing—the things we make of our lives. A woman’s worth, on the other hand, is measured largely by her looks, her shape and carriage, by that sparkle in her eye—all of these things appealing to a man in a primal sort of way. This desire in the human male to seek out an ideal—it’s the way we’ve evolved, how biology tells a man to be. A man doesn’t go looking for a Jane. He seeks out a Molly or a Carrie. You know exactly what I mean. This is the quest. This is the game. The plain Janes of the world play no part in this game, in this ‘chase,’ unless, of course, they get lucky. But I doubt you are ever going to get lucky, Jane. Look at yourself.”
Jane turned away. “I don’t want to look at myself anymore.”
Tom turned Jane around so she was forced to look at him. “I wanted to give you something tonight, Jane. I wanted to show you what it was like to be with a man, so you’ll have that one special memory to sustain you.”
The room was spinning, whirling about her. Jane was still very drunk and not used to this feeling; it had been a sort of twirling, pinwheel kind of dream, but now it had transmogrified itself into a terrible, ugly, formless nightmare. Yet as Tom was speaking to her in a soft and confiding voice, the ragged edges of the nightmare were being smoothed away. In their place was a form of tortuous, perverted kindness. Jane had a sense of the distortion. She had the feeling that what there was left of respect for self was being whittled away by the man who stood next to her, gauging her worth by his own selfish measure, leaving her a hollow reflection of who she used to be. And she was too weak to fight it. And she hated herself for it. She hated herself for submitting to him based on that singular desire to know what it would feel like in those next moments to be loved, even if the love wasn’t real.
And in the end she became a helpless victim to that need, regardless of the price it cruelly exacted from her dignity.
Tom ran the back of his hand across Jane’s wet cheek in a gesture which replicated what she had done only moments before to him. The act represented great tenderness of feeling, whether or not there was any sincerity behind it.
He dropped his voice to a seductive whisper. “I’m giving you the chance to see what the world would be like if you had been born beautiful. This is my gift to you, Jane.”
Jane’s eyes brightened. Then in the next moment all the light went out. “But it would only be pretend.”
“Of course it would only be pretend. But won’t we have fun with it all the same?”
Tom Katz took Jane to the sofa and undressed her and made carnal love to her. And all the while, he did not look at her. But she looked at him and imagined in those moments all the things she had imagined in all the hundreds, the thousands of moments of longing for an intimacy that had been denied to her.
And then when it was over…
But then when it was over…
A most horrible thing: the thing he made her do.
After the two had dressed, or at least after she had covered her nakedness with her pretty pink silk chemise (purchased from the damaged-goods table in the basement of Pemberton, Day, because there was a long snag in it that could not be repaired), he stood up. He asked her to kneel before him.
She obeyed.
“Now look up at me. Look up at me, Jane. We aren’t finished yet. There. That’s a girl. I want you to thank me.”
It took a moment for her to form the words. “Thank you,” she mumbled. Her eyes had strayed. He snapped his fingers to return them to his face.
“Say it as if you mean it.”
“Thank you,” said Jane in a stronger voice. “Please go.”
“First, you must tell me that you’ll always be grateful for what I’ve done for you today.”
Jane shook her head. “I’m not grateful. I want to die.”
“You’ll be grateful once your head is clear and you’ve had time to think about it. I’m going now. You don’t have to see me out. In fact, I’d rather you not. I’d like to remember you in parting—there on the floor, wanting more—begging me with your eyes for more.”
Jane shook her head again. The word was all but inaudible: “Go.”
Tom left. Jane did not move. She remained on her knees for several minutes, even as her kneecaps began to ache from the hardness of the oak floorboards. And then she lay herself down, lay on her side, pulling her knees up tight against her stomach. She closed her eyes. The room was no longer spinning. The cloud was lifting. She was thinking more cogently. She was thinking about what she’d just done—what she had allowed herself to do, what she had intentionally surrendered herself to.
This is how Ruth and Carrie found her. They went to her and knelt next to her, Ruth taking her carefully into her arms like the Madonna in the Carracci Pietà.
“What did he do to you?” Carrie asked in a terrified whisper.
Jane didn’t answer.
“Tell us what he did,” said Ruth. “Tell us, Jane. Did he do the thing we think he did?”
“Walk me to my bed, sisters. My legs are weak.”
Having tucked Jane into bed, Ruth put the question to her again.
Jane smiled and said, “You’re so sweet to come.”
“But we came too late,” said Carrie softly. “If only Lyle had been here.”
“I’m here now,” said a voice at the door. Ruth and Carrie turned. Lyle was standing in the hallway just outside Jane’s bedroom, his face hidden in shadow.
“Where were you?” snapped Ruth.
“I came as fast as I could. I saw her leave from the Fatted Pig saloon, and I came.”
“Did you crawl, you useless bastard?” cried Ruth. She had been running her hand through Jane’s perspiration-drenched hair. Now her hand stopped so she could point accusingly at Jane’s brother.
Carrie had begun to cry. “Oh stop it, Ruth. Just stop it. He cares about her. He’s here. He came. He’s here.”
Ruth turned back to Jane. “Tell us what happened.”
“I’ll tell you, yes.”
Jane swallowed.
Lyle stepped into the room. His head was half bowed and he was holding his cap at his waist with both hands, with respect and reverence, as if he were visiting a deathbed or a body upon a bier.
Jane formed her words with great difficulty: “He raped me.”
“I thought so,” said Ruth, speaking for Carrie and Lyle as well.
“But it isn’t what you think,” said Jane.
“What do you mean?”
“He—”
“Yes?”
“Raped—”
“Yes?”
“My heart, Ruth. He raped my heart.”
The blows came fast and furious, but they were clumsy and generally missed their mark. Pat was dodging them with some success, even as he snatched up his clothes and tried to find a way around the drunken, enraged man who looked at him with flaming, murderous eyes. Molly screamed at her father to stop. She screamed that she wanted Pat there, that she loved Pat and wanted to be with him.
Michael Osborne heard none of this. There was a fire in his head and it would not be put out until he had killed the young man who had come to his flat to take his daughter’s heart away from him—to steal the only thing left of the family he once possessed in full.
And so he swung and largely missed, and picked up a rail-back chair and pitched it in Pat’s direction, but it struck nothing but the wall, where it splintered into pieces. Molly didn’t suspend her screams. Pat made it past the madman and into the front parlor (where Osborne saw his dental patients), and he very nearly made a clean escape with both life and limb intact when Molly’s father overcame him, and with the kind of bodily strength that comes only to
those for whom strength is sought to do the most incredible kind of good or the most incredible kind of bad, Michael Osborne shoved Pat toward the window with such terrific force that Molly’s young lover was propelled through the shattering panes of glass and the brittle framework of the sash and out the window and directly into the smooth ceramic enamel of the enormous tooth, which swung wildly from the impact, and, though fixed to the projecting wrought-iron rod above, did not prevent Pat’s plunge to the concrete sidewalk three floors below.
Where he lay.
Motionless.
Chapter Eighteen
Zenith, Winnemac, July 1923
Maggie was the last to hear what had happened. Ruth had tried to reach her by telephone all through the night, but she wasn’t home. Maggie wasn’t even in Zenith. The previous morning, and in spite of her mother’s vociferous opposition, she’d put herself on the train to the Winnemac state capital, Galop de Vache, for the purpose of meeting Mr. and Mrs. Caster, the adoptive parents of the brother whose existence she’d only recently discovered. Maggie had done this even though Herbert Mobry had asked her to wait until after he’d had the chance to pay his own visit of inquiry to the Casters.
Herbert and Lucile Mobry hadn’t known she’d gone—that is, not until Clara Barton told them. She told them over late-morning Denver sandwiches at Lily’s Lunch Box on Chaloosa Street.
“The girl certainly has a mind of her own!” Lucile had marveled aloud.
“Oh, she’s every bit as stubborn and willful as her father,” Clara exasperatedly agreed. “But what was I to do? Block the door with my body? She was put into such a foul mood when I confirmed it all. Yes, I could have told her years ago. But I never saw any purpose to it. Why should I give her one more reason to hate me?”
“Maggie doesn’t hate you, not at all,” said Herbert, shaking his head in his wonted display of pastoral, avuncular understanding.
“There, there,” Lucile Mobry contributed. Clara had been a longstanding member of the congregation Herbert Mobry used to shepherd, and the Mobrys continued to feel responsible both for Clara’s spiritual health and for her general sense of well-being.
