“Say, do you change at O’Hare? I could come out—”
“No. Change in Minneapolis.”
“Oh, Molly. Maybe I could come up there and get you when it’s over?”
“That would be very nice.”
Very nice.
“Do you have enough money?”
“The bank’s wiring me some.”
“What?”
“To Barclay’s at the airport. Don’t worry.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Me too, but that’ll be the same as now. Same distance by phone. Willy says hi.”
“Hi to Willy.”
“Be careful, darling.”
She had never called him darling before. He didn’t care for it. He didn’t care for new names; darling, Red Dragon.
The night-duty officer in Washington was glad to make the arrangements for Molly. Graham pressed his face to the cool window and watched sheets of rain whip over the muffled traffic below him, the street leaping from gray to sudden color in the lightning flashes. His face left a print of forehead, nose, lips, and chin on the glass.
Molly was gone.
The day was over and there was only the night to face, and the lipless voice accusing him.
Lounds’s woman held what was left of his hand until it was over.
“Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now . . .”
“I’m sorry too,” Graham said.
Graham filled his glass again and sat at the table by the window, staring at the empty chair across from him. He stared until the space in the opposite chair assumed a man-shape filled with dark and swarming motes, a presence like a shadow on suspended dust. He tried to make the image coalesce, to see a face. It would not move, had no countenance but, faceless, faced him with palpable attention.
“I know it’s tough,” Graham said. He was intensely drunk. “You’ve got to try to stop, just hold off until we find you. If you’ve got to do something, fuck, come after me. I don’t give a shit. It’ll be better after that. They’ve got some things now to help you make it stop. To help you stop wanting to so bad. Help me. Help me a little. Molly’s gone, old Freddy’s dead. It’s you and me now, sport.” He leaned across the table, his hand extended to touch, and the presence was gone.
Graham put his head down on the table, his cheek on his arm. He could see the print of his forehead, nose, mouth, and chin on the window as the lightning flashed behind it; a face with drops crawling through it down the glass. Eyeless. A face full of rain.
Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon.
At times, in the breathing silence of the victims’ houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak.
Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details of their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did.
Graham tried hard to know him. He tried to see him past the blinding glint of slides and vials, beneath the lines of police reports, tried to see his face through the louvers of print. He tried as hard as he knew how.
But to begin to understand the Dragon, to hear the cold drips in his darkness, to watch the world through his red haze, Graham would have had to see things he could never see, and he would have had to fly through time. . . .
25
SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI JUNE 14, 1938
Marian Dolarhyde Trevane, tired and in pain, got out of a taxi at City Hospital. Hot wind whipped grit against her ankles as she climbed the steps. The suitcase she lugged was better than her loose wash dress, and so was the mesh evening bag she pressed to her swollen belly. She had two quarters and a dime in her bag. She had Francis Dolarhyde in her belly.
She told the admitting officer her name was Betty Johnson, a lie. She said her husband was a musician, but she did not know his whereabouts, which was true.
They put her in the charity section of the maternity ward. She did not look at the patients on either side of her. She looked across the aisle at the soles of feet.
In four hours she was taken to the delivery room, where Francis Dolarhyde was born. The obstetrician remarked that he looked “more like a leaf-nosed bat than a baby,” another truth. He was born with bilateral fissures in his upper lip and in his hard and soft palates. The center section of his mouth was unanchored and protruded. His nose was flat.
The hospital supervisors decided not to show him to his mother immediately. They waited to see if the infant could survive without oxygen. They put him in a bed at the rear of the infant ward and faced him away from the viewing window. He could breathe, but he could not feed. With his palate cleft, he could not suck.
His crying on the first day was not as continuous as that of a heroin-addicted baby, but it was as piercing.
By the afternoon of the second day a thin keening was all he could produce.
When the shifts changed at three P.M., a wide shadow fell across his bed. Prince Easter Mize, 260 pounds, cleaning woman and aide in the maternity ward, stood looking at him, her arms folded on top of her bosom. In twenty-six years in the nursery she had seen about thirty-nine thousand infants. This one would live if he ate.
Prince Easter had received no instructions from the Lord about letting this infant die. She doubted that the hospital had received any either. She took from her pocket a rubber stopper pierced with a curved glass drinking straw. She pushed the stopper into a bottle of milk. She could hold the baby and support his head in one great hand. She held him to her breast until she knew he felt her heartbeat. Then she flipped him over and popped the tube down his throat. He took about two ounces and went to sleep.
“Um-hum,” she said. She put him down and went about her assigned duties with the diaper pails.
On the fourth day the nurses moved Marian Dolarhyde Trevane to a private room. Hollyhocks left over from a previous occupant were in an enamel pitcher on the washstand. They had held up pretty well.
Marian was a handsome girl and the puffiness was leaving her face. She looked at the doctor when he started talking to her, his hand on her shoulder. She could smell strong soap on his hand and she thought about the crinkles at the corners of his eyes until she realized what he was saying. Then she closed her eyes and did not open them while they brought the baby in.
Finally she looked. They shut the door when she screamed. Then they gave her a shot.
On the fifth day she left the hospital alone. She didn’t know where to go. She could never go home again; her mother had made that clear.
Marian Dolarhyde Trevane counted the steps between the light poles. Each time she passed three poles, she sat on the suitcase to rest. At least she had the suitcase. In every town there was a pawn shop near the bus station. She had learned that traveling with her husband.
Springfield in 1938 was not a center for plastic surgery. In Springfield, you wore your face as it was.
A surgeon at City Hospital did the best he could for Francis Dolarhyde, first retracting the front section of his mouth with an elastic band, then closing the clefts in his lip by a rectangular flap technique that is now outmoded. The cosmetic results were not good.
The surgeon had troubled to read up on the problem and decided, correctly, that repair of the infant’s hard palate should wait until he was five. To operate sooner would distort the growth of his face.
A local dentist volunteered to make an obturator, which plugged the baby’s palate and permitted him to feed without flooding his nose.
The infant went to the Springfield Foundling Home for a year and a half and then to Morgan Lee Memorial Orphanage.
Reverend S. B. “Buddy” Lomax was head of the orphanage. Brother Buddy called the other boys and girls together and told them that Francis was a harelip but they must be careful never to call him a harelip.
Brother Buddy suggested they pray for him.
Francis Dolarhyde’s mother learned to take care of herself in the years following his birth.
Marian Dolarhyde first found a job typing in the office of a ward boss in the St. Louis Democratic machine. With his help she had her marriage to the absent Mr. Trevane annulled.
There was no mention of a child in the annulment proceedings.
She had nothing to do with her mother. (“I didn’t raise you to slut for that Irish trash” were Mrs. Dolarhyde’s parting words to Marian when she left home with Trevane.)
Marian’s ex-husband called her once at the office. Sober and pious, he told her he had been saved and wanted to know if he, Marian, and the child he “never had the joy of knowing” might make a new life together. He sounded broke.
Marian told him the child was born dead and she hung up.
He showed up drunk at her boardinghouse with his suitcase. When she told him to go away, he observed that it was her fault the marriage failed and the child was stillborn. He expressed doubt that the child was his.
In a rage Marian Dolarhyde told Michael Trevane exactly what he had fathered and told him he was welcome to it. She reminded him that there were two cleft palates in the Trevane family.
She put him in the street and told him never to call her again. He didn’t. But years later, drunk and brooding over Marian’s rich new husband and her fine life, he did call Marian’s mother.
He told Mrs. Dolarhyde about the deformed child and said her snag teeth proved the hereditary fault lay with the Dolarhydes.
A week later a Kansas City streetcar cut Michael Trevane in two.
When Trevane told Mrs. Dolarhyde that Marian had a hidden son, she sat up most of the night. Tall and lean in her rocker, Grandmother Dolarhyde stared into the fire. Toward dawn she began a slow and purposeful rocking.
Somewhere upstairs in the big house, a cracked voice called out of sleep. The floor above Grandmother Dolarhyde creaked as someone shuffled toward the bathroom.
A heavy thump on the ceiling—someone falling—and the cracked voice called in pain.
Grandmother Dolarhyde never took her eyes off the fire. She rocked faster and, in time, the calling stopped.
Near the end of his fifth year, Francis Dolarhyde had his first and only visitor at the orphanage.
He was sitting in the thick reek of the cafeteria when an older boy came for him and took him to Brother Buddy’s office.
The lady waiting with Brother Buddy was tall and middle-aged, dredged in powder, her hair in a tight bun. Her face was stark white. There were touches of yellow in the gray hair and in the eyes and teeth.
What struck Francis, what he would always remember: She smiled with pleasure when she saw his face. That had never happened before. No one would ever do it again.
“This is your grandmother,” Brother Buddy said.
“Hello,” she said.
Brother Buddy wiped his own mouth with a long hand. “Say ‘hello.’ Go ahead.”
Francis had learned to say some things by occluding his nostrils with his upper lip, but he did not have much occasion for “hello.” “Lhho” was the best he could do.
Grandmother seemed even more pleased with him. “Can you say ‘grandmother’?”
“Try to say ‘grandmother,’” Brother Buddy said.
The plosive G defeated him. Francis strangled easily on tears.
A red wasp buzzed and tapped against the ceiling.
“Never mind,” his grandmother said. “I’ll just bet you can say your name. I just know a big boy like you can say his name. Say it for me.”
The child’s face brightened. The big boys had helped him with this. He wanted to please. He collected himself.
“Cunt Face,” he said.
Three days later Grandmother Dolarhyde called for Francis at the orphanage and took him home with her. She began at once to help him with his speech. They concentrated on a single word. It was “Mother.”
Within two years of the annulment, Marian Dolarhyde met and married Howard Vogt, a successful lawyer with solid connections to the St. Louis machine and what was left of the old Pendergast machine in Kansas City.
Vogt was a widower with three young children, an affable ambitious man fifteen years older than Marian Dolarhyde. He hated nothing in the world except the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had singed his feathers in the voter-registration scandal of 1936 and blasted the attempt in 1940 by the St. Louis machine to steal the governorship.
By 1943 Vogt’s star was rising again. He was a brewery candidate for the state legislature and was mentioned as a possible delegate to the upcoming state constitutional convention.
Marian was a useful and attractive hostess and Vogt bought her a handsome, half-timbered house on Olive Street that was perfect for entertaining.
Francis Dolarhyde had lived with his grandmother for a week when she took him there.
Grandmother had never seen her daughter’s house. The maid who answered the door did not know her.
“I’m Mrs. Dolarhyde,” she said, barging past the servant. Her slip was showing three inches in the back. She led Francis into a big living room with a pleasant fire.
“Who is it, Viola?” A woman’s voice from upstairs.
Grandmother cupped Francis’s face in her hand. He could smell the cold leather glove. An urgent whisper. “Go see Mother, Francis. Go see Mother. Run!”
He shrank from her, twisting on the tines of her eyes.
“Go see Mother. Run!” She gripped his shoulders and marched him toward the stairs. He trotted up to the landing and looked back down at her. She motioned upward with her chin.
Up to the strange hallway toward the open bedroom door.
Mother was seated at her dressing table checking her makeup in a mirror framed with lights. She was getting ready for a political rally, and too much rouge wouldn’t do. Her back was to the door.
“Muhner,” Francis piped, as he had been taught. He tried hard to get it right. “Muhner.”
She saw him in the mirror then. “If you’re looking for Ned, he isn’t home from . . .”
“Muhner.” He came into the heartless light.
Marian heard her mother’s voice downstairs demanding tea. Her eyes widened and she sat very still. She did not turn around. She turned out the makeup lights and vanished from the mirror. In the darkened room she gave a single low keening that ended in a sob. It might have been for herself, or it might have been for him.
Grandmother took Francis to all the political rallies after that and explained who he was and where he came from. She had him say hello to everyone. They did not work on “hello” at home.
Mr. Vogt lost the election by eighteen hundred votes.
26
At Grandmother’s house, Francis Dolarhyde’s new world was a forest of blue-veined legs.
Grandmother Dolarhyde had been running her nursing home for three years when he came to live with her. Money had been a problem since her husband’s death in 1936; she had been brought up a lady and she had no marketable skills.
What she had was a big house and her late husband’s debts. Taking in boarders was out. The place was too isolated to be a successful boardinghouse. She was threatened with eviction.
The announcement in the newspaper of Marian’s marriage to the affluent Mr. Howard Vogt had seemed a godsend to Grandmother. She wrote to Marian repeatedly for help, but received no answer. Every time she telephoned, a servant told her Mrs. Vogt was out.
Finally, bitterly, Grandmother Dolarhyde made an arrangement with the county and began to take in elderly indigent persons. For each one she received a sum from the county and erratic payments from such relatives as the county could locate. It was hard until she began to get some private patients from middle-class families.
No help from Marian all this time—and Marian could have helped.
Now Francis Dolarhyde played on the floor in the forest of legs. He played cars with Grandmother’s Mah
-Jongg pieces, pushing them among feet twisted like gnarled roots.
Mrs. Dolarhyde could keep clean wash dresses on her residents, but she despaired at trying to make them keep on their shoes.
The old people sat all day in the living room listening to the radio. Mrs. Dolarhyde had put in a small aquarium for them to watch as well, and a private contributor had helped her cover her parquet floors with linoleum against the inevitable incontinence.
They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw long ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of the old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.
Rinso white, Rinso bright
Happy little washday song.
Francis spent as much time as he could in the kitchen, because his friend was there. The cook, Queen Mother Bailey, had grown up in the service of the late Mr. Dolarhyde’s family. She sometimes brought Francis a plum in her apron pocket, and she called him “Little Possum, always dreamin’.” The kitchen was warm and safe. But Queen Mother Bailey went home at night. . . .
DECEMBER 1943
Francis Dolarhyde, five years old, lay in bed in his upstairs room in Grandmother’s house. The room was pitch dark with its blackout curtains against the Japanese. He could not say “Japanese.” He needed to pee. He was afraid to get up in the dark.
He called to his grandmother in bed downstairs.
“Aayma. Aayma.” He sounded like an infant goat. He called until he was tired. “Mleedse Aayma.”
It got away from him then, hot on his legs and under his seat, and then cold, his nightdress sticking to him. He didn’t know what to do. He took a deep breath and rolled over to face the door. Nothing happened to him. He put his foot on the floor. He stood up in the dark, nightdress plastered to his legs, face burning. He ran for the door. The doorknob caught him over the eye and he sat down in wetness, jumped up and ran down the stairs, fingers squealing on the banister. To his grandmother’s room. Crawling across her in the dark and under the covers, warm against her now.