Her dismal reverie was interrupted by a knock upon her door. The visitor was Mrs. Rutland’s downstairs maid Hildy. “Begging your pardon, miss, but I have a question for you, if you could but spare me a moment.”
“What is it, Hildy?” Penny, who had been sitting with her knees pressed against her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, now granted freedom to all of her limbs and stretched herself cat-like upon the window seat.
“I noticed the spot in your panties. Will you be needing a rag or two?”
“A rag or two?”
“Now that you’re blossoming into a young lady.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Hildy stared at Penny for a moment without speaking. Then she said, “You haven’t been told a thing about it?”
“About what?”
“Your mother and grandmother — one of them hasn’t…?”
Penny shook her head slowly, uncomprehendingly.
Hildy tutted. She shut the door behind her. She crossed to Penny and took her by the hand and led her to the bed, where the two sat down next to one another. “It’s nothing to be afeared. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Your grandmother knows her roses but she apparently don’t know a thing about the rose that blooms in every young woman.”
“I’m not dying?”
Hildy smiled and nearly laughed, but held herself back, for it would have come at Penny’s expense. “No, my dear little girl. You’re just beginning to live.”
Then Hildy told Penny everything there was to tell, even those things that Penny could scarcely believe.
At table that evening there was more talk of roses between Penny and her grandmother as her grandfather read his newspaper and nearly nodded off in his soup. After a subdued evening spent reading and listening to Caruso on the gramophone, Penny was sent up to bed with a kiss upon the cheek from her grandmother and a mumbled goodnight from her preoccupied grandfather. After Penny had left the room, Hildy was rung for and a sum of money changed hands and Hildy was made slightly richer, though Mrs. Rutland had asked nothing from her.
The day came near summer’s end when Penny was packed up and put on a train back to Boston. There had been not a word spoken on that brief exchange in the garden. It was as if it had never happened. On the train Penny wept for her grandmother whose world she felt was too narrowly circumscribed, but she knew the woman wasn’t unique in this respect. It was the way of things with the upper class, for whom the natural and elemental were made floral and fragrant and gay, and any discussion of pruning and budding and disbudding was forever limited to the literal and never to the analogous, though rose gardens do blaze with all sorts of sanguineous possibilities.
1912 TRISKAPHOBIC IN WISCONSIN
Dr. Remley paced. It was one o’clock in the morning and it wasn’t like him to lose sleep over any one particular patient in his care. But John Schrank was a special case. Since being committed to the Central State Mental Hospital in Waupun (after first having spent time in the Northern Hospital for the Insane in Oshkosh), Schrank, called “Uncle John” by the younger of his fellow inmates, had been a model ward of the state — pleasant and scrupulously well-behaved. During his twenty-eight years of internment he had rarely exhibited any of the symptoms by which he had earlier been assigned the diagnosis of “dementia praecox, paranoid type.”
Schrank was a quiet, solitary man, obsessed with politics, but interested in little else.
During all the years of his institutionalization he’d never had a single visitor. The sole love of his life, a young woman named Elsie Ziegler, had died in the General Slocum steamer disaster in 1904. It was through Schrank’s references to Elsie and the tragedy that surrounded her death that Dr. Remley got his most revealing look into the soul of a man whose psychopathic criminality should have suggested nothing but violent depravity without compunction.
Uncle John was truly an enigma.
“I remember the day of all the funerals, Doc,” Shrank had once confided to Remley. “June 18, a Saturday. There were over 150 of them, most in Kleindeutschland — that’s the neighborhood in New York where most of us lived in those days. The bells tolled without stopping. Nearly every door and window in our neighborhood was draped in black. I remember wandering the streets with all the other men — weeping men, tortured men, their faces pallid and drawn. Since most of those who died were women and children — the innocent of innocents — it was the husbands, the fathers, the fiancés and boyfriends who were left behind. The church outing took place in the middle of the week, you see. Those of us who hadn’t taken that fateful trip — it was our duty now to carry that heavy burden of grief upon our shoulders to the end of our days.
“In the midst of all those ambling, listless men, I spied a young girl walking with an older man. She was eleven or twelve years old. She reminded me of Elsie. The girl had Elsie’s hair, Elsie’s eyes, the turn of my Elsie’s cheek. I asked her name. Catherine Gallagher, she said. She told me that she’d been on the boat but had survived — one of only about three hundred who did. She’d lost her mother, her nine-year-old brother, a baby sister. I hugged her in the street before letting her go on with her grandfather to the funeral of the family members she’d watched die.
“It was hard for me to understand how life could be ripped away so easily. That those who most deserved to live often did not, and those who did not deserve the precious gift of life — such as the man I fired upon in 1912—survived in spite of heavy odds.
“I don’t know what happened to little Catherine Gallagher. I have always nurtured the wish that she should have a very long and happy life to make up for what happened to all those who were not as lucky as she.”
That night in 1940, the doctor had tried to get Schrank to talk about what was troubling him. Why was he sitting at the window, unable to speak, or even to eat or sleep? Why was Uncle John, in his mid-sixties now, and usually quite genial in his dealings with the other inmates and the staff — why was he now so refractorily uncommunicative, so completely unreachable? Was he reliving the loss of his beloved Elsie with more intensity than usual? Or was it memory of that other day — the one in 1912—that drew him so deeply inside himself?
The night after President William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet, Schrank had had a vivid dream. The deceased president spoke to him. In a room filled with crepe and flowers, McKinley’s lifeless body suddenly became vivified, the murdered president waking from his death slumber to sit straight up and point to a spot in the darkness. “Avenge my death!” he commanded of Schrank. The one in the darkness who was being fingered for the crime wasn’t the man who had actually pulled the trigger, an anarchist named Czolgosz. It was the man whom Schrank would later stalk from city to city until destiny finally brought them together in Milwaukee.
Luck had been against Schrank when the time came to exact revenge. On one occasion he had stood waiting by a particular door only to have his quarry unknowingly give him the slip and go out another. In a different city there had been far too many people standing between Schrank and his target for him to get off a good shot. In Chattanooga, the potential assassin had a good opportunity to make his kill but he lost his nerve. In Chicago, Schrank had hesitated again. Standing at convenient proximity to his victim outside the Hotel La Salle, Schrank’s desire had been arrested by qualms about bringing notoriety to the city of Chicago — a city he loved.