I felt no ressentiment. McCabe had snuffed it out when she put her finger on chance. Blindly. By chance. I forgave her on that day for anything she may have done (she, personally, distinctly, and through her, the first McCabe, the one whose execution I still thought would set me free). I had forgiven her, even as my overfilled bedpans allowed her to play the Magdalene a while longer. Her presence did not bother me. It actually put me into a comfortably neutral gear, equidistant between happiness and sadness, boredom and excitement, vigil and sleep. She was now cutting some yellow roses from the top of the bush, which she could reach with her long arms. Those were not my secateurs in her hands. That is, the Judge’s secateurs, which I kept under lock and key in the gardening shed. She was moving her lips. Singing? I put down the binoculars. Perhaps this was not meant to be a crime of pure reason.
18
Pilgrims
McCabe and Petrona spent the entire day before Thanksgiving in the kitchen. Mrs. Crandall joined them at noon. I saw her zoom up the driveway in her husband’s black Lincoln Continental, halt in a gravel-scattering screech, and run into the house carrying in her arms something bulky and heavy in a blanket. All day long I heard the three of them laughing among the clash of pots and pans. That is, I identified Petrona’s and Mrs. Crandall’s laughs, which I had heard before (Petrona’s at the kitchen phone, when she thought she was alone; Mrs. Crandall’s at the public library, all the time, shamelessly), and I assumed the third one must have been McCabe’s. It was the laughter of a crystalline soprano. As different from old McCabe’s ample contralto guffaws as a coyote’s howl from the twelve bells of St. Mary le Bow.
Mrs. Crandall was the last person I expected to see in the house. This was a puzzling and unwelcome development. Had McCabe invited her? Why? When? Was this the first time she had been allowed inside the house, or had she been here before? I had not heard her voice inside it, or the voice of any other stranger except the doctor. There had been whispers during the first days after I had regained consciousness, but I could not tell dream from reality then.
At noon I heard Petrona leaving the lunch basket outside my room, as usual. I instantly wheeled myself to the door, hoping to cross-examine her, but I was too late. When McCabe had brought me my breakfast at nine o’clock, as usual, she asked me how I’d spent the night, as she always did, and we said something about the weather. Not a word about Mrs. Crandall or the upcoming kitchen activities. I would now have to wait until the evening to ask her. Directly, or deviously? I had not confronted this dilemma since we had settled into our dispassionate domestic routine. I felt rusty.
Evening was when McCabe and I spent some time together. She would sit next to me by the window, scanning the sky with the Judge’s binoculars and jotting remarks in the small notebook she always carried. When it rained, we would play Chinese checkers. That soon began to bore me. The only unknown was the speed with which my blacks would slaughter McCabe’s reds. “Don’t you feel sorry for them?” I asked her, after one notably swift carnage. “Someone has to win,” she answered indifferently. I found a dusty Scrabble set that the Judge had wedged between Toynbee’s A Study of History and Carlyle’s The French Revolution. Scrabble would expand McCabe’s vocabulary. I would have to let her win now and then to keep her interested. Fear proved stronger than boredom in the end. I couldn’t even bring myself to touch the letters. Was it just a reading game, or could it be considered a form of writing? I had not tested my illness since that Sunday evening in New York when I lost nouns, the last words I could still write.
After birdwatching or Chinese checkers, we would have dinner on the Judge’s desk, from a cart Petrona would leave outside the door before going home. She was surpassing herself in the cooler days of November. We ate pozole, choucroute, boeuf bourguignon, an airy arroz con pollo, polenta with mushrooms. I decided to give her a Christmas bonus out of my own pocket. To reward her improved cooking, and also to get her on my side for when the time came. The wines were cannily chosen, too. Was it Petrona, or McCabe who picked them? Both were wine illiterates. I never asked. I didn’t even care anymore how they could get into the wine cellar while I was still holding the only key. The endgame was approaching. Besides, I confess that I enjoyed my nightly oenological surprises.
After dinner, I would choose music for McCabe. Easy things at first, like Chopin’s mazurkas. She would sit in a straight-backed chair, her long legs stretched before her, crossed at the ankles. If asked, she would say this one was very nice, and that one she did not understand, and that other one she liked less than the one she had heard a week earlier. Since I had already forgotten which was which, and she could not remember titles or composers, she would whistle the music for me. She was an accomplished, pitch-perfect whistler. She spoke using two hundred words at most, but had the instinct of a good hunting dog if dogs hunted music, not ducks.
On Thanksgiving Eve, when it got too dark for McCabe to scan the sky for laggard flocks, we dined on a pumpkin velouté soup (a Mexican standard reinterpreted with a delicate French technique. Petrona astounded me—I did not think McCabe, much less Mrs. Crandall, could have pulled this off), braised quail and jasmine rice, and leeks au gratin. The wine was a Cahors Clos Triguedina 1998. Two bottles. Dessert was an upside-down pineapple cake. “Is this our Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked in my most inoffensive voice, fishing for information about Mrs. Crandall’s presence and the unusual kitchen activity, which the size and art of this dinner alone could not explain, since Petrona had been gradually exceeding herself on both counts for the past month. “It’s only Thanksgiving Eve,” said McCabe firmly. Was she dumb, or just a bad liar? Unable to tell, I uncorked the Cahors, tasted it, and declared it extraordinary. She smiled indulgently, as she often did, lately.
There was a prodigious amount of food on the table that evening. Dinner lasted more than three hours. “All we’re missing now is the flying hog,” I quipped when the wine went to my head. McCabe’s face suddenly became so pale and translucent that when she drank wine to hide her perturbation I could see it swirling inside her mouth. I showed her the Judge’s translation of Rabelais’ Quart Livre, one of the few works of fiction on his bookshelves. The skin on her face slowly recovered its normal opacity and hue. Her hands were greasy from the quail, she said, so she did not want to touch the book. I opened it to an illustration of the monstrous, bejeweled hog flying over the andouille army opposing that of Pantagruel. The andouille warriors were depicted throwing off their weapons and falling on their knees, their hands joined together in silent adoration of the winged hog, on whose golden collar the Ionic inscription ΥΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΝ (“a hog teaching Minerva”) could be read. McCabe examined the illustration for a long time, while chewing on the tiny quail bones. She asked me to tell her the story, because she would never be able to read a book as old and valuable as this. “Put it back on the shelf. I’m afraid of an accident,” she said, her voice raspy from all the eating and drinking. I obeyed and she relaxed on her seat, attacking another portion of quail.