Complete silence would have been better than that fumbling explanation. “Female problem” added to the mystery that was disease all the mystery that was woman. Nathaniel could hardly sleep that night, trying to place where on his mother’s anatomy the problem existed. Soon, his brain was alight with shameful images he had glimpsed in contraband bootlegged into the dormitory by his classmates, everything from French postcards to “marriage” manuals to anatomical drawings doctors’ sons had torn from their fathers’ medical texts. He recollected the time, last year in the Marlborough Street town house, when he had come upon the maid washing bloody underclothes in boiling water and vinegar in the cellar laundry room. Turning toward him, her long Celtic face half lit by the gasflame flickering under the copper tub, Moira asked what did he think he was staring at? He answered that he didn’t know, as she picked up a shift speckled with scarlet stains and tossed it into the tub like a murderess getting rid of evidence, except she wasn’t furtive about it. “Well, I’ll tell you, then,” she said. “You’re lookin’ at what you came from, and what all of us came from. You’re lookin’, lad, at the dark powers of Mother Nature herself. And you’re lookin’ at God’s own curse on woman for temptin’ Adam.”

The dark powers of Mother Nature herself, yes, and all contained within that alluring, terrifying entity, that vessel of the fecund unknowable, a woman’s body. His own mother’s body.