Mary Virginia — Big Sister — gave him a wan smile in return, and then, just as casually as if he wasn’t there at all, she hiked up her shift and sat on the toilet. She looked off into space and he heard the fierce hissing sound of her pee as he turned away to wash up—Always wash up, his mother told him, always.He was confused. His face was hot. He wanted his mother.
But then Mary Virginia began to laugh, a high hoarse chuckling laugh that startled him and made him turn round again despite himself. “Stanley the moper,” she said. “You’re always so mopey, Stanley — what’s the matter? Is it Mama?” And then: “I’ll bet you’ve never seen a woman pee before, have you?”
Stanley shook his head. His sister’s legs were white, whiter than her feet, and the shift was hiked up over her knees.
“Women sit down when they pee, did you know that? Because we don’t have a little peepee like boys do — women are different.” She rose awkwardly, as if she couldn’t catch her balance, and muttered something he didn’t catch. Then she said, “Would you like to see?”
He didn’t know what to do. He just stood there at the sink, frozen in place, and watched his big sister pull the shift up over her head until she was white all over. Hugely white. White as a statue. And he saw her breasts, heavy and white under the glow of the gaslamp, and her navel, and the place where her penis should have been and there was only hair, blond hair, instead. “You see?” she said, the words thick in her mouth, and he thought for a minute she was eating candy, caramel candy, and she was going to give him some — she was only teasing him, that’s what this was all about.
But there was no candy, he knew that, and he wanted only to run, run for the drawer in the wardrobe that would never give him a moment’s comfort again, run to his mother, run to Harold, Missy, Anita, anyone — but he didn’t. He stood there at the sink and stared at the white glowing naked body of his sister, his big sister who was very beautiful and very sick, until she bent for the shift and covered herself again in the featureless black of her mourning.
After that, after the funeral and the letters of condolence and the black crepe, Mary Virginia went away. Stanley couldn’t place the time exactly — it could have been a week after the funeral, two weeks, a month — but Mama saw to the arrangements, and Big Sister was gone. He never told anyone about that night in the bathroom, not even Harold, but it stayed with him long after the funeral, a deep festering pocket of shame. Girls were different from boys and women from men, everyone knew that, but now Stanley, alone among his friends and schoolmates, knew how and why they were different, and it was a knowledge he hadn’t asked for, a knowledge that complicated his dreams and made him shy away from his mother, Anita, Missy and all the other females who crowded into his life. He looked into their faces, looked at their hair, their skirts, their feet, and knew how white they were underneath their clothes, the palest bleached-out belly-of-a-frog sort of white, with breasts that hung there like the stumps of something missing and that scar between their legs where there should have been flesh. It was an excoriating vision, a waking nightmare, more than any nine-year-old boy could be expected to carry with him for long, and it took all that spring and a summer in the Adirondacks before it finally began to fade.
Mary Virginia visited Rush Street only once a year from then on, always in the company of her doctor, a small thin-lipped woman with the figure of a man and great wide bulging eyes that so fascinated the boys they couldn’t look at her without giggling. These visits were brief — two or three days at a time that had Mama and Anita so wrought up and fearful you would have thought Mary Virginia was an anarchist with a ticking bomb, but in fact she was as docile as a cow and nearly as fat. She made her last visit to Chicago in 1892, for the Christmas holidays, descending on the house in a storm of servants, white-clad nurses and luggage. Stanley was no longer a boy. He’d begun his freshman year at Princeton that fall, involved with a thousand things and arduously growing into the six-foot-four-inch frame that left him towering over his classmates, and he hadn’t given a thought to his crazy big sister in months — she was gone, out of sight, an embarrassment to him and the family. But when he saw her that Christmas coming down the stairs like a somnambulist or sitting beside her mannish little doctor at the dinner table, he was shocked at the change in her. His big sister the beauty had been transformed into a clinging overweight spinster who would burst into tears if you stopped talking to her even for a minute.
She kept to her room mostly, and with the whirl of festivities, the parties, presents, songs and toasts, Stanley saw little of her. In fact, over the course of the three days she spent with them, he was alone with her only once — after lunch on the last day, when she suddenly looped her arm in his and asked him to take her out for a turn round the garden. It was raw and drizzling and her skirts would be ruined, but both Mama and the bug-eyed doctor gave him a look, and he went.
Stanley wasn’t good at small talk, but he chattered away at the swollen moon of her face, afraid to stop for fear of setting her off, and they went round the yard twice before she said a word. They were passing through the denuded arbor for the second time when all of a sudden she tugged violently at his arm and pulled herself close to him, face to face, as if they were dancing a minuet. She was trying to tell him something, but she stuttered now and drawled out her words till they were whole private symphonies of meaning — utterly unintelligible, even to her doctor. The drizzle beaded her lashes and brows and glistened on her hat. It was cold. He looked into her eyes and they were floodplains of madness. “St-Stanley,” she said, making an effort. “Little brother—”
She was puffy and white, soft as dough, and he knew how white she was underneath — saw it in a flash, the whole thing coming back to him in that instant — and while his mad hopeless fat-faced sister clutched at his arms and breathed in his face he felt himself growing hard in a sudden shock of shame and desire. And hate — hate too. What was she doing to him? What did she want from him? Couldn’t she just leave him alone? He tried to push her away but she held on, drawing him down till their faces were inches apart, her lips cracked and flushed with blood, her tongue moving against the roof of her mouth like some amphibious thing crawling up out of the mud. “St-Stanley,” she stuttered, fighting to get the words out through the tight weave of her sickness. “You-you’re my favorite, you are, you know why?”
He didn’t know why. His groin was throbbing. He was a member of the Guitar and Mandolin Club and the tennis team and he had a term paper to write on the poetry of Robert Herrick and in two days he’d be back on the train to New Jersey. There was a dog barking somewhere. He could smell beef and gravy on her breath.
“Because you… because you’re just like me.”
3. PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
It was their second day out of Boston on the New York Central Line, and Massachusetts was already behind them — and half of New York too. O‘Kane studied the timetable and let the names of the stops whisper in his head: Albany, Schenectady, Herkimer, Utica, Syracuse. To him, these were exotic ports of call, every one of them, places he’d heard about for years but never thought he’d see — the cities whose names sat so lightly on the tongues of the drummers and other worldly types he encountered while shoveling up beans and egg salad at the lunch counter or sipping a whiskey in the hotel bar, all the while trying his level best not to seem as ignorant, circumscribed and provincial as he was. He’d got down at Albany and walked to the end of the platform and back, just so he could say he’d been there, but he really didn’t get much of a thrill out of it — the whole time he was afraid the train would suddenly lurch out of the station and leave him palpitating in the dust. And what was there to see, anyway? Tracks. Refuse. A dead pigeon with feet as rigid as window poles and half a dozen lumps of petrified human waste.