Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (29 page)

“Sophie, what’s this all about? What’s the point of it? You’re confusing me.”

“Wait,” Sophie said. “Let me tell you about Larissa. Then you’ll see. You’ll start to understand.”

Her cheeks were glowing; he had rarely seen her so excited, except in bed. “Go on,” he said.

“Larissa and Otis McKee are a legend in Springhill. In 1868, when the settlers arrived over the pass, Otis was forty-nine. When he went to work at El Rico for William Lovell, Larissa, his wife with the crippled foot, was nineteen. Every evening, when the men quit work at El Rico, they bathed and went home to hearth and family. But not Otis McKee. He’d make some excuse and wait around while the others packed their gear. Why did he do that? Because after the other men headed back, Larissa, his young and sexy wife, would show up through the forest. Their cabin wasn’t far from the mine.

“In deep winter it wasn’t easy to work your way along the trail or through the forest, especially if you were crippled like Larissa. But from May onward, until the snow began to pile up in October, she came. Larissa was a young woman of purpose, and her purpose was to bathe with her husband in the spring. She liked to roll around there, winter and summer, in that warm water, and sit under the waterfall. Like a hot tub today, only this was totally natural, out in the forest in a little pool. Under the winter stars with the snow all around—or in summer with the scent of pine in the air and the breeze in the aspen trees—or in fall with those golden leaves rustling all around. The place was beautiful. Mysterious. They made love there—wonderful, passionate love—most every evening that she showed up. They splashed around and thrashed around. Oh! they were naughty. Married—I told you they were married—but still you can see there was something naughty about it…

“And there’s something else in their sex life that wasn’t quite comme il faut, not in the late nineteenth century. Back in Youngstown, Ohio, after Otis asked her to marry him and she said yes, Larissa did what I believe was a remarkable thing, considering the time and place. She found a copy of a sixteenth-century Arab sex manual called
The Perfumed Garden.
She bought it from a peddler. It’s an extraordinary book. Not only a hundred and one positions for lovemaking, but all kinds of instructions as to the use of fingernails, biting and proper kissing, creams and unguents, alleged aphrodisiacs, the use of the voice in the act of love. She pored over the manual night and day, because it seemed to promise such delight. When she and Otis came West to the Rocky Mountains, she brought it with her in her trunk. Grew her fingernails even before they reached what became Springhill—bought the ingredients for the unguents on a summer trip down to Carbondale. And then, with time, in that bubbling spring by the mine, she achieved that promised delight. She was crippled only in the foot—the rest of her was perfectly fine. Often she would play the violin to Otis to get him in the mood. Then they practiced just about all the positions
The Perfumed Garden
described except the ones where the woman has to be suspended by cords and pulleys. She wasn’t kinky, she was simply crazy about sex. She knew the eleven basic positions and plenty of the other more esoteric ones like the Ostrich’s Tail and Drawing the Bow and the Blacksmith’s Posture. And there are wonderful stories in the book which she read to him, like ‘Concerning Praiseworthy Women’ and ‘The Story of Bahloul.’ “

Here Sophie blushed, and she squeezed Dennis’s hand. He understood why: he had heard those stories. He had asked once where they came from, and in the shadows of the bedroom she had whispered in his ear, “Past lives.”

“At first Larissa didn’t tell her middle-aged husband she was getting a good part of her inspiration from a book. She thought he’d be shocked. But later she admitted it—and by then he didn’t care. This went on regularly for as long as Otis McKee worked the mine. But in 1897 he retired, although he still had a small share in El Rico’s profits. He was seventy-seven years old.

“I don’t mean that he and Larissa quit bathing in the spring. That was their secret pleasure, which, considering the moral strictures of the time, I suspect they thought of as their secret sin. They came once or twice a week at night, and on sunny Sunday afternoons in winter when they knew that Lovell and Hubbard and other workers wouldn’t be there. They did that until the day that Otis McKee died, in 1915, in perfect health except for mild rheumatism. If you’d bumped into him in the street you’d have thought he was a vigorous man in his early sixties. He might have gone on like that forever, or close to forever, but that wasn’t to be. He went down in Glenwood Springs to see the dentist about a bad toothache. He was crossing Grand Avenue when a car’s brakes failed. He was run over—his skull got crushed. He was ninety-five.

“Larissa was born in 1851 and lived to be one hundred years old— she died in 1951. She was in good health, and her passing was a cheerful, festive occasion. A big party was given for her a few days before the event. She played her violin, and she made a speech about how lucky she’d been in life, especially through meeting Otis. She thought she’d had a wonderful life and even a favored life. She made mention of the fact that when she was born there wasn’t yet electric light and radio, and when she died there was already television and jet airplanes. But those things, she pointed out, were only fluff—the superficial trappings of life that we inaccurately label progress. What really blessed your life was a community you were part of, friends who were loving and loyal, and family you could count on.

“I didn’t mention it yet, but she and Otis had children. There they were not so lucky. A son Malcolm died of polio when he was twelve. A daughter Clara died in childbirth. But a second daughter, named Sophie, was born in 1874. That Sophie married a man named Samuel Whittaker. She died on the same day as he did—both in good health, both aged one hundred, although the tombstone, as you noticed that day you went poking around while those deputies were digging up the Lovells’ empty graves, claims she was only seventy-six. Sophie was my maternal grandmother. I was named after her.

“Beatrice Whittaker Henderson, my mother—whom you just saved from a terrible injustice, although you don’t yet understand why—is that Sophie’s daughter. Bibsy was born in 1903. She’s ninety- two years old. Larissa McKee—who is almost like the patron saint of this town, for reasons that I’ll get to soon—was my great-grandmother. It was she who taught me to play the violin. She’d tried first to teach her daughter, and then my mother, but Grandma Sophie wasn’t interested and Bibsy wasn’t gifted. I was both, and before Larissa died she gave her old violin to me. Yes, I still have it—that’s the one I’ve been neglecting lately because I’ve been so upset about what was going on with you and the trial of my mother. And Larissa gave me her tattered old copy of
The Perfumed Garden,
which I’ve just about committed to memory.

“I loved Larissa enormously. She was a remarkable woman, a passionate woman, a woman whose sensitivity and powers of logic grew steadily over a long lifetime, and everyone who knew her says I resemble her in more ways than one. Nothing on earth flatters me more than that statement. I was twenty-one when she died. I was born in 1930. Are you starting to understand now? Do you see what happened, and why?”

Dennis rose angrily from his chair. He faced his wife, clasping her shoulders. “Sophie, you’re insulting my intelligence. You’re trying to tell me you’re sixty-five years old. I know your body. I’m looking into your face right now. You are
not
sixty-five!”

Sophie laughed; her white teeth gleamed in the firelight. “You’re right. I was born on November 5,1930. I’m only sixty
-four!
Here, right in this envelope, I have my birth certificate. Look at it! Do you think I had it falsified? Your father almost caught me out. Do you remember he wondered how I’d managed to take English courses under Professor Daiches at Cornell? I felt so foolish then, I had to slither out of it.”

Dennis was shaking his head, dumbfounded.

Sophie touched his face gently with her hand. “Do you think I have any reason to make up even a part of this story? Dennis, if you love me, believe me. Belief is the only way, the only path to where we need to go. Proof will come later.”

Chapter 24
Departure

NOT POSSIBLE, HE thought. He knew this woman intimately: the resilience of her skin, every curve, every bone, even every faint line around her eyes. They were the curves and lines of a young woman. He knew her in bed. She was not sixty-four years old. She held the paper in her hand that would be the proof. He hadn’t looked at it. Would not look at it.

“I’ll fill in some historical holes for you,” Sophie said. “That will help. Then we’ll get to what you’re looking for.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not ahead. Back. To understand what was happening to these people. In 1893 Grover Cleveland demonetized silver, which caused the ruin of Aspen for fifty years. But it didn’t seriously affect Springhill, because the country still needed coal. And they wanted marble too. Marble is crystalline limestone that can take a polish. The coal miners were aware that the marble was there, but in early times it was difficult to cut it in the big blocks that were required for most building purposes, and then transport them, so for a long time no one much cared about marble.

“The Colorado-Yule Marble Company was founded in 1906 over in Marble by an Iowa colonel whose claim to fame was that he’d bought the horse-drawn streetcar lines in Mexico City, electrified them, then sold them at a pretty profit. The colonel was the entrepreneurial adventurer—Springhill merely followed in his tracks. The Springhill Marble Company didn’t get going until 1911. It was a public company, with shares of stock, and bonds, and debentures, but it was entirely financed by the people in town. The consortium of miners and businessmen had to borrow money from Denver banks, but that was all paid off by 1927. The marble company’s been a hundred-percent- town-owned enterprise ever since then.

“Around 1904 two families of miners, the Crenshaws and the Rices, arrived from Boonville, California, where their teenaged kids had created a new kind of slang so their parents wouldn’t know what they were saying. But the parents caught on, and they began to speak it too. They brought the lingo here to Springhill, and we developed it our own odd way. You know:
Pat shied ottoing and Macree sized while the tweeds charled the hroady. They chiggreled
,
then piked in the horker to Ute for a regal.
That means, ‘Dad quit working and Mother cooked while the children milked the cow. They ate, then drove to Aspen for a treat.’ A secret language was a natural thing to be adopted, and then adapted, by the people up here. Already they had secrets to keep—and others to come.

“Let me tell you more,” Sophie said, beginning to pace the Zapotee rug in front of the fireplace, “about the spring at the El Rico… .

“You saw in the photograph how William Lovell looked twenty years younger than his age. A billy goat to boot—some of the young men in town wouldn’t let their wives dance with him at Saturday night shindigs. He visited the brothel down in Glenwood Springs once a week regularly until just a few years before his death, well into his nineties. Rebecca Lovell died in 1901, aged sixty-four, a withered old woman. Caleb, who worked at the mine, was in every respect his father’s son—a young-looking satyr. Naomi and John, the two other children, were normal. But what kind of fate had tapped this man on the shoulder and ignored the other? No one knew. Everyone speculated. People finally asked, ‘What do Francis Hubbard and the McKees and William Lovell and his son Caleb have in common?’ You didn’t have to be a genius to come up with the answer, but it did take some boldness of logic, a willingness to be called an idiot. The common solution to the question of the age disparity was that it was a sexual freakishness, a disgusting randiness that kept a few men looking and acting younger than their years. But then why did Larissa McKee—a woman!—also look so amazingly young? Where did the vitality come from—the vitality that in her early fifties made her the physical equal of any Springhill woman of thirty? It drove those younger women crazy.

“The popular answer to that was also simpleminded. She was a slut! Danced naked under the full moon, brewed potions and drank them with Otis, a slave to her bidding. God would have his revenge! One night, lying in bed, that goatish husband panting at her side, lightning would strike straight through the roof and fry her crippled bones!

“And then Larissa McKee changed the history of Springhill.

“She heard these stories about herself. She knew they weren’t true—so she wondered, what
was
true? She began to reason. She knew what no one else other than Otis knew—that she bathed in the spring in exactly the same way that the youthful-looking and long-lived men did.

“And she came forward. Not to defend herself against the scandalmongers, but to clear the brush away and blaze a path toward the truth—because she’d seen how enormous that truth was, how it could change everyone’s lives in a way they never even dared dream.

“ ‘The water,’ she said. ‘There’s something in the water at the spring.’

“At first everyone slapped their knees and howled. The goshdarned fountain of youth! What was the name of that crazy Spaniard who’d hunted all over the place for it? Ponce de León! Where was it supposed to be? Florida, right? Hell, no! It’s here in Gunnison County, Colorado!

“Larissa backed off from confrontation. She wasn’t out to be canonized or make converts. But of course she kept going to the spring with Otis. And pretty soon, she and Otis weren’t always alone there. The townspeople showed up on summer evenings, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone. They may not have been convinced, but plenty of them said to themselves, ‘Say, what if we’re wrong? What if she’s
not
crazy and there’s something to it? What have we got to lose? And look what we might gain! Let’s go there once a week.’ They came out to El Rico and asked, ‘Is that all right with you, William?’

“ ‘Be my guest,’ said Mr. William Lovell graciously.

“Still it took another eight or ten years before it fully dawned on anyone with half a brain that there was no other rational explanation. Larissa’s reasoning was ultimately seen to be simple, elegant, and inspired. William Lovell was the major convert. His three children were the proof, he proclaimed. One of them bathed in the spring and maintained his youth and vitality—two didn’t, and they aged. ‘Isn’t that a fact? And look what’s happening to the rest of you, the ones who are going there now and bathing. By God, look at yourselves!
You’re barely changing.’’