An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, the novel's first-person narrator, is a decorated World War II hero, former congressman, and professor of existential psychology at a New York university. He hosts a television show and has published a book called The Psychology of the Hangman. Once a man of promise who met Jack Kennedy the night both were elected to Congress in 1946, Rojack has spent the years since in decline, haunted by killing four German soldiers in close combat under a full moon. That experience left him with a mystical relationship with death and the moon that drove him from politics into an increasingly fractured inner life.

Rojack married Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, the daughter of enormously wealthy Barney Oswald Kelly, but after eight years their marriage has become a vicious war. They have lived apart for a year, though neither can fully let go. One night, at a cocktail party overlooking Sutton Place, Rojack experiences a spiritual crisis on the balcony under a full moon, climbing over the railing and nearly letting himself fall. He pulls back but feels as though something essential has departed from him.

Driven by an irresistible need to see Deborah, Rojack goes to her borrowed duplex overlooking the East River Drive. They argue viciously. Deborah mocks his heroism, taunts his background and class roots, and reveals she has three lovers. When she makes an obscene taunt, Rojack slaps her. A violent struggle follows: He gets his arm around her throat and, feeling as if he is pushing through an enormous door into a vision of jeweled cities, strangles her to death.

In a heightened sensory state, Rojack goes downstairs and has sex with the maid Ruta, an encounter he experiences as a contest between divine and diabolical forces. Returning to Deborah's body, he lifts it to the window and pushes her out. She falls 10 stories onto the East River Drive, causing a multi-car pileup. Rojack howls in grief, then calls the police and tells Ruta that Deborah killed herself.

At the accident scene, Rojack smears some of Deborah's blood on his face to appear grief-stricken. A beautiful blonde woman with green-gold eyes wipes the blood from his cheek; her companion, a dark-haired Italian named Tony, calls her Cherry. Detective Roberts takes Rojack to the precinct, where Rojack fabricates a story about Deborah's suicidal depression and her conviction she had cancer. Lieutenant Leznicki interrupts with damaging news: Deborah's hyoid bone, a small bone in the throat, is broken, a classic sign of strangulation. Roberts presses for a confession, but Rojack holds firm. He is released when the police decide to prioritize their arrest of Eddie Ganucci, a Mafia figure caught in the pileup, and a preliminary autopsy suggests Deborah may indeed have had cancer.

Rojack finds Cherry singing at an after-hours club. Exhausted and drunk, he believes he is engaging in psychic warfare with the patrons. A retired prizefighter named Romeo tries to drive Rojack away, but Cherry claims Rojack as her guest. Roberts calls the club to warn that Cherry is dangerous and that Rojack's father-in-law, Kelly, is flying into town. Cherry quits her job, and she and Rojack leave together.

Cherry takes Rojack to a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side that once belonged to her younger sister. They make love in a transcendent experience. At climax, Rojack hears a voice asking if he truly wants to know about love. He chooses love and falls asleep in Cherry's arms in total peace.

The next day brings wreckage: Rojack's television show is cancelled, his university pressures him into a leave of absence, and Deborah's friend Bettina calls to insist that Deborah predicted she would be murdered, that Deborah was a spy, and that Ruta is actually Kelly's mistress planted to watch Deborah. At the precinct, Roberts confronts Rojack with three pieces of forensic evidence pointing toward murder: dependent lividity (a pattern of blood settling indicating the body rested face-down before the fall), the broken hyoid bone, and traces on the carpet suggesting Deborah's bowels voided before the fall. Rojack parries each point. Then Roberts receives a phone call: The official medical report rules the death a suicide. Someone powerful has intervened. Roberts tells Rojack he has a big brother somewhere and asks if Rojack is CIA. Rojack is freed for good.

He returns to Cherry, and they make love again. Afterward, Cherry tells her history: orphaned at four, raised in a small Southern town where her half-brother was committing incest with her half-sister. She drifted through the South until an older wealthy man she calls Daddy Warbucks installed her in apartments across the country; he turned out to have deep Mafia connections. After extricating herself, she came to New York and fell in love with Shago Martin, a celebrated Black singer. She stole Shago from her own younger sister, who then went mad and killed herself in the apartment where Cherry and Rojack now lie. Cherry and Shago were together two years before his abusiveness drove her away.

Rojack confesses he killed Deborah. Cherry says she already knew. They declare their love, but Cherry reveals that Daddy Warbucks was Kelly himself. Rojack feels as if he and Kelly are bound by the same blood. Cherry believes she is pregnant.

Shago arrives, letting himself in with a key, carrying a switchblade and a furled umbrella. He threatens Rojack, then claims it was all an act. His speech becomes a dazzling monologue revealing he is on the verge of returning to heroin. When Shago pushes and curses Rojack, Rojack grabs him and throws him down the stairs. At the bottom, bloodied, Shago refuses to break: He tells Rojack he does not hate him and wishes Cherry luck. Rojack takes Shago's umbrella and leaves for the Waldorf Towers to confront Kelly, ignoring a voice urging him toward Harlem.

At Kelly's suite, Ruta confirms that Kelly helped free Rojack. Rojack visits Deborah's daughter Deirdre, who shares a disturbing conversation in which Deborah predicted her own murder. Kelly embraces Rojack with overwhelming intensity; Rojack senses Kelly knows the truth. In his library, Kelly tells his life story: growing up poor, making a fortune, and conceiving Deborah by invoking Satan. He describes an affair that brought him occult powers and nearly led to incest with another woman's daughter. When he pulled back, a mysterious fire broke out next door and Deborah screamed in her crib; Leonora, his wife, left and took Deborah. He then reveals that when Deborah returned to live with him at 15, he was consumed by incestuous desire, kissed her, and she kissed him back. He vowed to send her back to the convent, breaking the compulsion.

The confrontation escalates until Rojack admits he killed Deborah. Kelly receives the confession with a satisfied smile. A suffocating sexual menace fills the room. Rojack rejects Kelly's implicit invitation to depravity and announces a ritual ordeal on the terrace.

On the rain-swept parapet, one foot wide, 30 stories above the street, Rojack forces himself forward step by step, completing two full sides while Deborah's presence tries to pull him off. As he turns onto the third side, Kelly jabs the umbrella at his ribs to push him over. Rojack catches it, jumps down, and strikes Kelly across the face. He flees downtown by cab, tormented by a voice insisting the walk must be done a second time: The first was for himself, but the second was for Cherry.

Near Cherry's building, Rojack finds ambulances and police. Roberts tells him Shago has been beaten to death with an iron pipe in Morningside Park. Cherry is brought out on a stretcher, badly beaten. She whispers that it was a friend of Shago's who got it wrong, a retaliatory attack meant for Rojack. She tells him she is going to die, and moments later she does.

In the Epilogue, Rojack drives west. In Las Vegas, he discovers Cherry left him an intuitive ability to read luck at the dice tables. He wins $24,000 in four weeks and prepares to leave for Guatemala and Yucatán. On his last night, he finds a phone booth in the desert. Cherry's voice comes through, telling him she is well, that Marilyn says hello, and that the moon is a mother to her. In the morning, feeling something like sane again, Rojack drives south.