She writes every day.
MALLORY
BY CAROL O’CONNELL
In 1994, after my first book was published, I received a fan letter and a great deal of religious material from a woman who wanted to save me from eternal damnation. That was when I realized that I was onto something with my protagonist, who is an officer of the NYPD, a woman, and a sociopath. Call her Detective Mallory or just plain Mallory, neither Miss nor Ms., but never call her Kathy. She likes that chilly distance of the surname.
Aloof? Perhaps. In Stone Angel, she is likened to a cat:
The cat hissed and arched its back as Charles’s hand moved toward the sugar bowl. Apparently, he had violated some house rule of table manners. Slowly, his hand withdrew from the bowl and came to rest on the table by his cup. The cat lay down, stretching her lean body across the checkered cloth, and the tail ceased to switch and beat the wood. When his hand moved again, she bunched her muscles, set to spring, relaxing only while his hand was still. The cat controlled him.
Now who did that remind him of?
The old woman was back at the table. “Don’t touch that cat. She doesn’t like people-barely tolerates them. She’s wild-raised in the woods. When I found her, she was too set in her ways to ever be anybody’s idea of tame. She had buckshot all through her pelt and chicken feathers in her mouth. Now that told me, right off, that she was a thief. And she is perversity incarnate. Sometimes she purrs just before she strikes.
Charles nodded while the woman spoke, and he ticked off the familiar character flaws as she listed them. Now he peered into the cat’s slanted eyes. Mallory, are you in there?
Miss Trebec bent down to speak to the cat, to explain politely that an animal did not belong on the table when company was calling. The cat seemed to be considering this information, but she left the table in her own time, as though it were her own idea. The tail waved high as she disappeared over the edge.
It was disconcerting that the animal made no sound when she hit the floor. It crossed his mind to look under the table, to reassure himself that the cat did not float there, waiting to catch him in some new breach of etiquette. Instead he peered into his cup as he stirred the sugar in his coffee. When he looked up to ask his hostess a question, the cat was riding the woman’s shoulders.
(And, after wading through all of that, here is your punch line: A passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses inspired Mallory and best defines her in only eleven genius words. Mr. Joyce wrote, “Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.”)
However, like a cat, Mallory seems to have no affinity for these animals. In Dead Famous she had an encounter with New York City ’s only attack cat, a pathetic creature with nerve damage. When he’s in pain, he lashes out at strangers, and this earned him the name Huggermugger, Mugs for short. He was softly creeping up behind Mallory when a tiny squeak of excitement gave him away. Then he paused as their eyes met, and they mutually agreed that she could kill him any time she liked. Mugs, wise cat, retreated to his basket.
I am nothing like my protagonist. Consequently, I am, in person, a huge disappointment to everyone who expects her and gets me. Mallory is tall, I’m short; she’s blond, I’m not; she carries a gun, and I don’t. Yet every time I lecture, someone will ask, “Is Mallory autobiographical?” I’m always stunned, but I never harm these people. I say, “No. Mallory is a sociopath, and I’m a nice person… I’m a relatively nice person.” Given that proviso, people generally do not push their luck with the question.
I blame this on the Germans.
When I arrived in Berlin on tour with my first book, I was told that a local journalist had written an article that mistook Mallory’s Oracle for a rather strange third-person memoir. In every interview, and there were many, I set the reporters straight. Mallory was a work of pure fiction, I said, “Not me. Nothing like me. I’m a wimp.” But they preferred the earlier, erroneous version of me, and my correction never appeared in any of their newspaper interviews. To this day, many German people believe that I’m a tall blonde with disturbing defects.
So where did the fleshed-out Mallory come from? Well, in the usual order of things, she began as a little sociopath. The detective’s introduction to the NYPD came at a tender age.
The haunt of Grand Central Station was a small girl with matted hair and dirty clothes. She appeared only in the commuter hours, morning and evening, when the child believed that she could go invisibly among the throng of travelers in crisscrossing foot traffic, as if that incredible face could go anywhere without attracting stares. Concessionaires reached for their phones to call the number on a policeman’s card and say, “She’s back.”
The girl always stood beneath the great arch, pinning her hopes on a tip from a panhandler: Everyone in the world would pass by-so said the smelly old bum-if she could only wait long enough. The child patiently stared into a thousand faces, waiting for a man she had never met. She was certain to know him by his eyes, the same rare color as her own, and he would recognize Kathy’s face as a small copy of her mother’s. Her father would be so happy to see her; this belief was unshakable, for she was a little zealot in the faith of the bastard child.
He never came. Months passed by. She never learned.
Toward the close of this day, the child had a tired, hungry look about her. Hands clenched into fists, she raged against the panhandler, whose fairy tale had trapped her here in the long wait.
At the top of the rush hour, she spotted a familiar face, but it was the wrong one. The fat detective was seen in thin slices between the bodies of travelers. Though he was on the far side of the mezzanine, Kathy fancied that she could hear him huffing and wheezing as he ran toward her. And she waited.
Crouching.
One second, two seconds, three.
When he came within grabbing distance, the game was on-all that passed for sport in the life of a homeless child. She ran for the grand staircase, shooting past him and making the fat man spin. Sneakers streaking, slapping stone, the little blond bullet in blue jeans gained the stairs, feet flying, only alighting on every third step.
Laughing, laughing.
At the top of the stairs, she turned around to see that the chase was done-and so early this time. Her pursuer had reached the bottom step and could not climb another. The fat man was in some pain and out of breath. One hand went to his chest, as if he could stop a heart attack that way.
The little girl mouthed the words, Die, old man.