And then, somehow, he found himself up on the dais with his mother, staring down at the unhinged face of his dreams. There he was, his father, monstrous in death, as big as any giant or ogre, stretched out on his back as if he were sleeping, his eyes closed, his beard thrust up in a gray spume that shrouded his throat and chin and the new tie they were going to bury him in… but he wasn’t sleeping, he was dead, and there was a rigidity to his fresh-shaven cheeks and a depth to the pits and trenches beneath his eyes that all the mortician’s powder in the world couldn’t conceal. Stanley tried his best to look sad, aggrieved, troubled and heartsore, his mother right there beside him, clergymen fluttering on the periphery like a flock of crows, aunts, uncles and perfect strangers mewling and weeping and dabbing at their eyes, but he only managed to look the way he felt: scared. He wanted to bolt, break away from his mother and all her insuperable power to hold him there, and run before they saw the truth in his eyes, before the rotting stiff perfumed corpse of his father lurched upright in the casket and roared out his perfidy. And he might have, he might have broken for the door and shamed them all, if it wasn’t for Mary Virginia.
All this time she’d been waiting in the wings, weeping and gnashing her teeth, a prisoner of grief, but now, finally, her moment had come. Stanley wasn’t aware of it. He was only aware of himself, slouching on the dais with all those people looking at him and wanting only to run, hide, burrow, hating his mother for holding him there and the mourners for invading his house and his father for dying and for having been alive in the first place. He was vaguely aware that someone was missing, someone vital, but he wasn’t thinking and he didn’t care and he only wanted to die himself, die on the spot and get it over with — until he heard his sister’s first shattering cry. Everything changed in that moment. Suddenly he was outside of himself, floating high over the room with the painted birds and watching his big sister annihilate the whole sorry long-faced crowd with the violence of her grief.
She came hurtling in from the hallway in a black shift that was like an undergarment, her arms naked, her feet bare, her hair kinked and wild and beating at her face like a flail, and all on the crest of that first rising shriek. Everyone in the room, even Mama the all-powerful, was frozen in place — or no, not frozen but melted down like silica and then quick-cooled to the fragile inanimacy of glass. But that first heart-seizing shriek was nothing more than a preface, an overture, a promise of what was to come. The next cry, protracted and operatic, crescendoing in a series of gut-wrenching whoops that sounded as if some animal were being eviscerated and eaten alive, scoured the walls and the ceiling and polished those glass faces and glassy eyes till nothing existed but Mary Virginia McCormick, the fount and apotheosis of grief.
Unimpeded, all but unrecognizable, her mouth open in a rictus of screaming and her limbs jerking and twitching with the exaltation of some uncontainable force, she darted across the rug and through the pall of smoked sausage and embalmer’s perfume, past the mourners and undertaker’s assistants and the members of her own family, vaulted the rail and plunged into the coffin as if she were diving into a swimming pool. “It’s me!” she cried, thrashing at what was left of the Reaper King till it seemed to Stanley’s stricken eyes that the corpse had come to life in a hideous rehearsal of his worst fears. No one moved. No one breathed. “Papa,” she sobbed, “it’s me, Mary Virginia,” and her hands were right there, right in the thick of it, wrapped tight round the rigid throat and reanimated beard. “Don’t you recognize me?”
It was a shame, everyone agreed, because Mary Virginia was the beauty of the family, a roll of the genetic dice that comes round only once in a generation. And she was as talented as she was pretty, good with languages and clever at drawing, an accomplished pianist who played with the subtlety and compassion of a woman twice her age and all the courage and ferocity of a man. She was twenty-three and unmarried at the time of her father’s death, though there had been no lack of suitors, her physical attractions enhanced as they were by the allure of her father’s fortune. In the two years since her coming out, there had been three offers for her hand. Her mother — Nettie Fowler McCormick, a real force in Chicago society and a matchmaker nonpareil — had convoked a family council on each of the three occasions, and each time, though the aspirants were well connected and had money of their own, Papa had to take them aside and gravely decline on his daughter’s behalf. And that was a shame, a real shame. But the McCormicks were scrupulous to the point of rigidity, and they felt they had no choice but to let the young men in question understand just what they were letting themselves in for.
The sad truth was that Mary Virginia was sick, sick in a way that didn’t show, not right away and not on the surface. Hers was a sickness that seemed to deepen as she grew into it, stretching and elongating to accommodate her like the skin of an anaconda. Ever since her thirteenth birthday she’d become increasingly distant, detached from the world of people, things and obligations, as if some essential thread had been cut in her mind. There were times when she didn’t seem to recognize her parents, the governess, her own sisters and brothers. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t talk. For hours at a time she crouched over her bruised knees, praying frantically, hysterically, chanting the name of God the Father until it was like a curse. Other times she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, dashing from room to room in a panic, blue in the face, choking for air when there was air all around her. And then she couldn’t sleep, sometimes for days, for weeks, and it would terrify Nettie to creep into her room at two or three in the morning and see her lying there rigid, staring into the crown of some private universe, awake but no more conscious of her mother than if she were blind and deaf.
At fifteen she came to life again, resurrected, hyperkinetic, throwing sparks from her fingers and laughing openmouthed at the great ongoing joke of the world, her every motion arrested and then accelerated and accelerated again till she rushed aimlessly from one room to another in a spastic herky-jerky trot that was like a cruel parody of poor Missy’s affliction. Where before she’d been without affect, wiped clean of emotion, now suddenly she became as passionate as a lover with Nettie, her own mother, clinging frantically to her at bedtime, protracting a goodnight kiss till it was a torture. She walked in her sleep, talked gibberish, scared off her schoolmates. And then, just after her sixteenth birthday, she began to mutilate herself.
It was one of the nurses, a French girl by the name of Marie Lherbette, who first reported it. Nettie was in the drawing room nestled in a Louis XVI chair across from an eager, well-fed young man whose passage to China she had agreed to pay on behalf of the Presbyterian Missionary Society. On the low table between them stood a tray of finger sandwiches and a pot of tea draped in a cozy crocheted by her grandmother in the early days of the century. The young man was making a complicated point about the Asiatic mind and the woeful lack of a Christianizing influence in so ancient but corrupt a culture, when Marie Lherbette knocked and entered the room with a low bow.
“Yes?” Nettie said. “What is it, Marie?”
The nurse looked down at her feet. She was twenty, pretty enough in her own way, and dutiful, but to Nettie’s mind too much imbued with, well, Frenchness, to be entirely trustworthy. “If madame please, may I have a word in private?”
“Now? Can’t you see that I’m occupied? ”
“There is”—the nurse searched for the word—“gravity in what I must tell you.”