The White Plague Read online

  “Stephen is serious, Momma.”

  “Well, so am I!”

  “We’ll be back by midnight or soon after, Momma.”

  “That’s very late, Katie. What will the neighbors think?”

  “I’ll be giving them no cause to think anything, Momma.”

  “You’ll be with the others all the time?”

  “All the time,” Kate lied.

  Once she was in the car with Stephen, the guilt feelings made Kate angry and there was only one target. The sky was still luminous with the long twilight and there was a large moon low on the horizon, almost full, heavy with orange and the promise of a bright night. She stared out at the moon, intensely conscious of Stephen beside her and the privacy of the car, which purred along accompanied by a faint smell of burning oil. Stephen was not an expert driver and he compensated by holding down his speed. Several cars roared around them and cut in sharply, forcing him to swerve.

  “Why’re we going so slow?” Kate asked.

  “There’s plenty of time,” Stephen said.

  His calm, reasonable tone maddened her.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this, Stephen, and you know it!”

  He took his eyes off the road to stare at her and the car followed his gaze, rolling off the left edge of the paving onto gravel. Stephen jerked the wheel and they swerved back onto the paving.

  “But you told me you wanted…” he began.

  “No matter what I said! It’s wrong.”

  “Katie, what’s the matter with…”

  “I lied to Momma.” Two tears rolled down her cheeks. “She’ll be waiting there, worried. It’s not been easy for her, Stephen, since my father died.”

  Stephen pulled into a lay-by and stopped the car. He turned and faced her. “Katie, you know how I feel about you.” He reached for her hand, but she jerked it away. “I’ll not have you sad,” he said.

  “Then let’s really go to the fair.” She looked at him, her eyes glistening. “That way it’ll not really have been a lie.”

  “If that’s what you want, Katie.”

  “Oh, it is, it is.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll be doing.”

  It’ll save your money, too, Stephen,” she said, reaching for his hand. “You can buy that new stethoscope you’ve been wanting.”

  Stephen kissed her fingers, realizing that he had been maneuvered and this likely was a pattern that would be repeated many times in their life together. More than anything else, this amused him. He had no doubts they would be married after his graduation. And how like Katie it was, thinking of saving the money and the benefit to himself. He had mentioned the need for a new stethoscope only once. Again, she pulled away her hand.

  The headlights of an approaching car bathed her in a brief glare, leaving him with the image of her sitting stiffly, fists clenched in her lap, eyes tightly closed.

  “I love you, Katie,” he said.

  “Oh, Stephen,” she sighed. “Sometimes I ache with the love of you. It’s just…”

  “It’s the waiting,” he said.

  “Shall we go to Mallow?” she asked.

  He started the car and turned back the way they had come, thinking as he drove how lucky he was to have found Kate.

  “Let’s go around Cork,” she said. “If someone should see us… well, we shouldn’t be seen coming from this direction.”

  “I know a shortcut to the Mallow Road,” he said.

  She smiled in the darkness. “Is that where you take all your girls?”

  “Katie!”

  “It’s bad of me to tease,” she said.

  They drove in silence while Stephen turned off onto a narrow lane with high hedgerows on either side. This brought them presently to the Mallow Road at the eighteen-kilometer signpost.

  “We’ll be stopping at the Bridge House for petrol,” Stephen said. “They’ve a restaurant.”

  “There’ll be food at the fair,” she said.

  “You’re not hungry?”

  “Now that I think on it, a sandwich would be fine.”

  And cheaper, he thought. Kate seldom stopped being practical. It was a trait he admired. She’d be a good manager.

  At the Bridge House, he bought two beef sandwiches and two bottles of Guinness, passing them through the open window to Kate before paying for the petrol.

  “The man says it’s going thin, the left front tire,” she said.

  “I’ve had a look at your spare,” the attendant said. “Would you be liking it changed?”

  “No.” Stephen shook his head. “We’ve only a little ways to go.”

  “I’d be traveling it slow like,” the attendant said. He accepted Stephen’s money and made the change. “Slow as a peddler’s cart and the horse ready for the knackers.”

  Stephen hesitated, then: “Slow ‘tis.”

  He eased the car gently out of the Bridge House driveway behind a long lorry, which pulled away from him as he held his speed to forty kilometers an hour.

  Now that there was a reason to go slowly and they were headed for Mallow, Kate found herself content. She rested her head against the back of the seat and looked at Stephen. It was good to be here with him. She could see a whole lifetime of interludes such as this. They would start saving for a car, she thought. It was none too soon, automobiles being so dear. She was about to say this to him when the left front tire blew. The car swerved onto the verge, bumped over a curbing stone and slewed sideways on grass, coming to a stop with the headlights illuminating a grass-grown private driveway between two broken-down gateposts. The gate itself lay on its side against the right-hand post, leaving the driveway open.

  Stephen took several deep breaths through his open mouth, then: “Katie, are you all right?” His hands ached where they clutched the steering wheel.

  “Shaken a bit,” she said. “Should we be pulling off the road?”

  Stephen swallowed and eased the car ahead into the grass-grown driveway. The way turned left almost immediately and his headlights revealed the burned-out ruin of a cottage, all the charred roof beams collapsed into the center. He stopped the motor and they sat there a moment, listening to the insects and the faint murmuring of a nearby brook. Moonlight poured over the hills behind the ruined cottage. There was a forlorn feeling about the place.

  “Well, I’d best be changing the tire,” he said.

  “I’d like a sandwich first,” she said.

  He agreed and found an old blanket in the back, spreading it on the grass beside the car, then turning off the headlights. The moon was bright.

  “Almost like day,” Kate said as she brought the food to the blanket.

  They sat facing each other, chewing in unison, clinking their bottles of Guinness in a toast to the blown tire, the moon, to the folk “who lived here when it was a happy house.”

  Presently, Stephen finished his sandwich and drained his beer. Kate grinned at him. She didn’t know whether it was the drink or just being here with Stephen, but she felt an enormous sense of contentment. This didn’t stop her from saying as he stood up:

  “You’ll get your jacket all dirty. Take it off and the shirt with it now.”

  She stood up and helped him, folding the garments neatly and placing them on the edge of the blanket. He wore no undershirt, and the look of his bare chest in the moonlight she thought one of the most beautiful sights in the universe. Almost of its own volition, her right hand went out and his chest was warm beneath her caressing palm.

  How it all happened she could never fully explain afterward, even to her best friend and fellow student, Maggie MacLynn.

  “Ohhh, he was so strong, Maggie. I couldn’t help m’self. Nor did I want to. That’s shameless of me, I know, but it…”

  “Well, join the club, Katie darlin’. Will you be marrying now, I suppose?”

  They sat alone together the following Monday on the quad, having an early lunch. Maggie had drawn the story out of her, having noticed Kate’s quiet withdrawal. It had taken only a remi
nder of their childhood pledge “never to lie to each other about important things.”

  A tall, slender woman with hair the color of old gold, Maggie was considered one of the campus beauties. Some of the nursing students whispered that Maggie had chosen Kate as a friend “to set off her own looks.” But the truth was they had been close friends from childhood, since their first day of primary school.

  Maggie repeated her question, then: “Didn’t he even propose?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll say in confession, Maggie,” Kate said. “God help me, what’ll I do?”

  “What you say is this: ‘Father forgive me. I’ve had a sexual experience.’ Tell him it was the drink and the great power of the man and you’ll never do it again.”

  “But what if we do?” Kate wailed.

  “I try to go to a different priest,” Maggie said, matter-of-fact. “It saves the explainin’.” She studied Kate a moment. “I know you, Katie. Will you be marryin’ now?”

  “Don’t be stupid!” Kate flared, then: “I’m sorry, Maggie. But he was at me about that all the way back. And you know we can’t marry until he graduates and maybe not until he has his own shingle out. We’re not rich, you know.”

  “Then be careful, girl. You’re the marryin’ kind, the both of you. And there’s nothing like a little pregnancy to hurry things along.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  There was this Irish brain surgeon… (pause for laughter)

  – British music hall routine

  BY THE time he neared St. Louis, Missouri, on his third day on the road, John had decided on the name under which he would first conceal himself. There would be other name changes required later, he realized, but a new one was needed immediately.

  It was early afternoon and already there was color in the deciduous trees along the highway. The hills were brown and a nip could be felt in the air. The cornfields were a rubble of cut and broken stalks. Billboards advertised “winterizing.”

  There would be a world-wide hunt for John Roe O’Neill before long. That name had to be abandoned, he thought. McCarthy – that had been his mother’s name and it felt comfortable. Someone might make the connection but he would have abandoned it by then. His first name, that he felt he would have to keep; too late to learn to answer to anything other than John. John McCarthy, then, and to give it the proper Irish-American flavor, John Leo Patrick McCarthy.

  He entered the city and was enclosed by its living movement without much noticing. His awareness was goal-oriented: ordinary lodging. A Central District motel rented him a room and he still had time to lease a large safety deposit box in a nearby bank. The money went into this box and he breathed easier when he emerged onto the street, which was busy with its evening foot traffic.

  As he drove out of the parking lot, he glanced at his wristwatch: 4:55 P.M. Still plenty of time to take those first steps on the identity change. A newspaper classified advertisement led him to a rental room in a private suburban home. The landlady, Mrs. Pradowski, reminded him of Mrs. Neri: the same heavily weighted and cost-accounting watchfulness in her manner and behind the eyes. It was too soon to become John McCarthy. He had to leave a few “footprints” for the bloodhounds to follow. He showed Mrs. Pradowski his O’Neill driver’s license and said he was looking for a teaching post.

  Mrs. Pradowski said he could have the room tomorrow morning. She gave no sign that she recognized his name from the news stories, now months old. The Grafton Street bombing was, after all, many tragedies back in time and far distant from St. Louis. Her conversation revealed a primary interest in advance payment of rent and noninterference with her “bingo nights.”

  Now, to find out if the choice of St. Louis was correct. A pharmacy customer had warned him the previous winter: “They got a regular factory there making phony ID papers. You gotta watch it when you’re cashing checks.”

  It took him six days and uncounted glasses of beer in seedy bars to make contact with the “factory.” Eight days later he paid five thousand dollars and received a Michigan driver’s license and assorted membership and identification cards in the name of John Leo Patrick McCarthy. Another thirty-five hundred dollars got him an intensive lesson in altering passports plus a kit for making the alterations.

  “You got a real talent for this,” his instructor said. “Just don’t set up shop in my territory.”

  Next, there was the problem of the car. Honest Andrew’s Previously Owned Cars on Auto Row gave him twenty-two hundred dollars cash, the dealer sighing: “Boy, them big cars don’t move too fast anymore.”

  The next morning, he took a bus to Marion and bought a used Dodge Power Wagon. It was one of Mrs. Pradowski’s “bingo nights” and she was gone when he returned. He parked in the driveway, the wagon’s license plates obscured by mud, and loaded his gear. A note with fifty dollars “for the inconvenience” went on the kitchen table weighted by his house key. His note said a family crisis called him away unexpectedly.

  John spent the night in an outlying motel, collected his money from the safety deposit box in the morning, and John Leo Patrick McCarthy headed west.

  The transition had gone much more simply than he had anticipated. There remained one more essential detail to complete it. Over the next three days, he removed the hair from his head. There had been a choice – shave or do something more permanent. He chose the latter course, not an insurmountable task for a biochemist, although it proved painful and left a fine network of pink scars, tiny veins that he knew would fade in time.

  The mole on his left cheek vanished under an application of liquid nitrogen, leaving a scabbed sore that would in time become a puckered dimple.

  The change fascinated him. He examined it carefully in the bathroom mirror of a Spokane motel. The flashing neon of an adjoining hamburger stand cast a baleful stroboscopic glare across the side of his face as the light flashed on the bathroom’s drawn shade. He smiled. John Roe O’Neill, rather plump and with a rich matt of brown hair, a distinctive mole on his cheek, had become this bald, slender man with eyes of a burning intensity.

  “Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy,” he whispered.

  Four days later, the first Friday in October, he moved into a furnished rental house in the Ballard suburb of Seattle, Washington. He had a one-year lease and only a bank with which to deal. The owners lived in Florida.

  The Ballard house suited his purpose perfectly. The ease with which he had found it struck him as an omen. The owners had painted it a muddy brown with white trim. It sat anonymously in a mishmash row of other houses equally anonymous. The houses had been built on a long, low embankment, some sporting rockeries, some steep lawns. Most of them possessed daylight basements and garages under the main floor. John’s garage opened into the basement with ample room to unload the power wagon.

  The furniture was garage-sale jumble and the bed sagged. Old cooking smells permeated the house and persisted in the draperies. There was an odor of stale tobacco in the bathroom. He flushed the toilet and caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink.

  None of his old mildness had survived. This Other was driven from within. He leaned close to the mirror and looked at the puckering scar where he had removed the mole. In that pitted void he sensed a final break with his past, the past of Mary who had called the mole his “beauty spot.” He tried to remember the sensation of her kiss on that place; this memory, too, had gone. The shifting of his memories, the unchecked displacements, sent a shudder through him. He turned away from the mirror quickly. There were things to do.

  In the next few days he made essential changes in the house – translucent film over basement and garage windows to shield him from prying eyes, burglar alarms, a substantial stock of food. The fireproof box went into a bricked-over secret cache he built behind the furnace. Only then did he feel free to start setting up the purchase routine for the special equipment his project required.

  The thing that surprised him the most over the following weeks was the e
ase with which he acquired esoteric necessities. Telephone calls and money orders from anyone putting a “Doctor” in front of his name appeared to be the only requirement. He had everything sent to warehouse and accommodation drops, using different names, always paying cash.

  While he was busy, memories remained tame and manageable. At night in bed, though, the shifting kaleidoscope in his mind often kept him awake.

  It was an odd thing, he thought, and not easily explained. John O’Neill had found it impossible to remember the fatal bomb’s explosion. John McCarthy remembered it in detail. He remembered the newspaper clippings, O’Neill’s screaming features in the photograph. But that person of the photo was gone. John McCarthy could remember him, though. He could recall the talks with police, the accounts of witnesses, the cadaverous figure of Father Devon, who had never corrected that initial mistake, believing that John had fallen into “a mixed marriage.”

  John McCarthy found he could put it all together – the sisters at the hospital, the doctors. He could remember his Old Self standing at the bank’s window, the orange blast of the explosion. His memory replayed the scene at the slightest provocation – the little car, that brown elbow on the windowsill. There was Mary smiling and laughing as she hustled the twins across the street, the package clutched under her elbow. Odd, John thought, that they never found the package. Obviously it had contained the sweaters for the children. The cost of them had shown up on a credit card bill, Mary’s scrawled signature on the receipt.

  The entire incident at the Grafton Street corner assumed in time the nature of a movie. It was locked in a sequence that he could call up at will – the crush of people around Mary and the twins, her stopping beside that old Ford… and always the orange explosion peppered with shards of black. He found that he could control the flow of it, focus upon particular faces, mannerisms, gestures and bits of personality in that macabre companionship.

  And always the orange explosion, the sound thumping in his skull.

  These were, he knew, John O’Neill memories, somehow removed from John McCarthy. Insulated. It was like having a television screen in his mind with descriptive pictures and voices.