Three times Harmon Stores asks Cora to come back to him (Lovelady uses the number three for its symbolic connotations) and three times Cora refuses. Rather than ask a fourth time, Harmon has her brought back to his house by force.
If she is a prisoner, Cora tells her husband, she will live like a prisoner; she refuses any sustenance other than bread and water. Harmon tries to win back her affection, plying her with gifts and attentions. Whatever Harmon does, it has the reverse effect of its intention. When Cora becomes seriously undernourished, Dr. Rankin steps in (he is one of the few physicians in his income bracket who still makes house calls) and feeds her intravenously. Eventually, a truce is negotiated and Cora agrees to live with her husband as his wife provided that Harmon makes no sexual demands on her. It will be in actuality, Cora says, what it has been in spirit — ”a marriage in pretension only.”
Each day before going in to breakfast, Harmon knocks on the door to Cora’s room to ask if he might come in and talk to her. Each day, Cora, true to her vow, refuses him entrance. It goes on this way for months, Lovelady using repetition to astonishing effect. “I will come back again and ask tomorrow,” Harmon says. “I can’t stop you from asking,” Cora answers, “though I would give anything to spare us both the ordeal.” Cora’s terrible pride keeps the pair apart (Lovelady perceives pride as the deadliest of the deadly sins) and just when she is about to relent, Harmon relinquishes his quest for conversation, goes on an extended trip around the world, leaving Cora the house and an exceedingly generous settlement.
When Cora discovers that Harmon has gone — she is content at first not to be constantly importuned — she falls into a spiraling depression. One day in despair she tears her clothes off and invites in the local toughs to punish her sexually in an orgy that lasts four days and thirty-two (236–267) torrid pages. I can only hope that the reader will not come to this vast panoramic novel for those pages alone. When the ordeal is over, when Cora is released from the intensive-care ward of the hospital, she feels as if she were “newborn,” cleansed by “the trick of violence.”
Having cut himself off from all human communication, Harmon knows nothing of Cora’s ordeal. He goes from one suicidal adventure to another, exciting forgetfulness through unremitting activity. No matter what he does, however, no matter where he is, Cora’s image haunts his consciousness.
At one point, each unbeknownst to the other, both Cora and Harmon are hospitalized in opposing parts of the world, their separate disabilities the only remaining connection between them. Lovelady, it must be mentioned here, has a craftsman’s affection for the parallel plot, and with no little brilliance he alternates chapters concerning Cora’s and Harmon’s analogous plights.
Harmon’s hereditary disease has caught up with him; he is dying, finds himself more enfeebled each day, while Cora, a disjunctive parallel, gradually regains her full health. In a dream she has a prescience that Harmon is dying in a remote mountain village on the other side of the world. In the morning she wires Dr. Rankin for corroboration. The news arrives two hours later in eight words: HARMON HAS SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR LEFT.
Part II begins with Cora dedicating herself to locating her dying husband. She will tell him before he dies — it is her hope and salvation — that she “forgives him his trespass.” Cora hires the now world-famous detective, Bill Wall, to help her find “the only man she has ever loved” before he dies. Their relationship, she informs Bill, must be “all business,” and she enlists an oath of abstinence from him before they set out on their quest. Bill, we learn, is still in love with Cora and, despite his oath, accompanies her with the sole hope of renewing her affections.
Lovelady specializes in a certain kind of novelistic chase — more exciting than the immediate thrills the cinema can produce — the race against time. We cut from Cora to Harmon, Harmon to Cora, watch days turn into weeks. Harmon is a little weaker each day, Cora a little nearer to the mountain hospital in the Himalayas where her husband lies at death’s door. One day, the local wise man Naja — a storied figure in these parts — comes to visit Harmon in his hospital room.
“Are you in need of death?” Naja asks him. Harmon is almost too weak to respond, says it is his fate. “The sins of my father are visited on me. Necessity is itself.”
Naja (or the Nadna, as he is called) tells Harmon that his illness is merely a failure to breathe correctly and so an invitation to be taken away by death. Harmon, bereft of other choices, takes breathing lessons from the guru. The Nadna has him do the breathing exercises for longer periods each day — the first day, one hour, the second two, the third three, and so on. Eventually, Harmon spends an entire twenty four hours doing breathing exercises. “If nothing else,” the Nadna says, “you will learn to breathe correctly before you die.”
Each day the Nadna admonishes Harmon for not working hard enough. “You will never learn to breathe, rich man, unless you take every breath as if it were your last,” he says. “Why do you hold back? What are you saving it for?”
The doctors, who expected Harmon’s death imminently (in fact, his room had already been assigned to another terminal case), are amazed at his continuing survival.
One day, the Nadna, a man notably short on compliments, tells Harmon that one of the breaths he has listened to is the first true breath Harmon has ever taken. “Your progress is slow,” says the guru, “though inexorable.” This praise brings a smile of pleasure to Harmon’s face. The next day Harmon feels a little stronger and sits up in bed while doing his breathing exercises. The day after that, Harmon walks about the hospital room for a full five minutes.
Meanwhile, Cora, crossing the Sahara, is attacked by a tribe of nomads, has her virtue compromised many times, and is sold to a brothel in Marrakesh. Bill Wall tracks her down and rescues her at the loss of his right eye and much of his dignity. (Gang rape is a recurrent motif in THE SWAN FLIES.) Although still traumatized by her unfortunate experience, Cora is anxious to continue the journey.
“What’s the point of going on?” the detective asks. “According to your timetable, Harmon must be dead by now.”
“He lives in my heart,” Cora says. Although not normally an irrational person, Cora has a mystical sense that Harmon still partakes of the sentient world, and she insists on completing her trip with or without the detective’s help. The detective officially resigns from her employ but then follows after her on the next plane to see that no further harm comes to Cora.
The plane, chartered from Marrakesh, will take Cora only so far. There are areas in the world, Lovelady is telling us, which even airplanes can’t reach. Cora must ascend the mountain, as Harmon had, to reach the hospital in which, she assumes, Harmon is spending his final days. If she avoids the luxury of sleep, it will take her two days and two nights to reach the mountain village of Ygenta.
The very day she begins her ascent is the day the Nadna chooses to leave Harmon without a word of goodbye. The loss of the guru is particularly disturbing to Harmon, who has just mastered the breathing exercises and is eager to show off his prowess. “Where might he have gone?” he asks the doctor and the various attendants at the hospital. No one seems to know where the guru keeps himself. It is a far-off cave, someone reports, circumscribed by clouds. Harmon vows to find the guru so that he can thank him properly, with the idea of bringing the holy man back to the States, where his deeds can earn just recognition.