by T. C. Boyle
O‘Kane was looking at her too. He couldn’t help but look at her, as long as it didn’t involve eye contact. She was fascinating to him, a real specimen, the kind of woman you saw only in glimpses—a silhouette behind the windowscreen of the long thrusting miracle of a Packard motorcar, a brisk commanding figure in a cluster of doormen and porters, the face of a photograph in a book—and how could he help contrasting her with his own Rosaleen? Sitting there perched on the very fractional edge of the settee with her finishing-school posture and her cleft chin stuck up in the air like a weathervane, wearing a dress of some satiny blue material that probably cost more than he would make in six months, she was like an alien, like the shining representative of some new and superior species, but for one thing: her husband was mad, as mad as the Apron Man or Katzakis the Greek or any of them, and all the manners and all the money in the world couldn’t change that.
“About the apes . . . ,” she said, and O‘Kane realized it was the first time she’d opened her mouth since he’d entered the room.
Hamilton’s voice fell away to nothing, the whisper of a whisper. “Yes?” he breathed, lounging back against the corner of the desk and resting his weight casually on his left ham, the doctor in his office, nothing the matter, nothing at all. “What about them? If there’s anything that you—”
“They are necessary, aren’t they—in your estimation, Dr. Hamilton? I understand that in order to lure such a promising young psychologist as yourself all the way out to the West Coast and uproot your family and your practice here at McLean, there has to be a quid pro quo”—and here she held up a finger to silence him, because he was up off the desk again and his mouth was already working in the nest of his beard—“and that your hominoid laboratory is a major part of it, in addition to your salary considerations, relocation expenses and the like, but is there really any hope of these apes figuring in Stanley’s cure?”
This was Hamilton’s cue, and with barely a flick of his eyes, he launched into a speech that would have done a drummer proud. He made no promises—her husband’s case was more complex than anyone had originally believed, far more complex—but he’d personally supervised dozens of cases just as severe and he’d seen those patients make huge steps toward recovery, even complete recovery, with the proper care. New advances were being made not only in the treatment of dementia praecox—or schizophrenia, as it was now more commonly called—but across the whole spectrum of human behavior and psychology, and new figures like Freud, Jung and Adler had begun to emerge to build on the work of Charcot, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. O‘Kane had heard it all before, and he found himself drifting, the heat making him drowsy, the heavy material of his trousers adhering to his flanks like a second skin—and itching, itching like the very devil. Hamilton’s voice droned on, hypnotic, soporific, the gloom beyond the windows like the backdrop of a waking dream. He came back to himself when the doctor finally got round to the question of the apes.
“—and while the behavioral sciences are in their infancy,” Hamilton was saying, “and ours will be among the first hominoid laboratories in the world, Katherine” (Katherine,he was calling her Katherine now), “I really and truly do expect that my intensive study of the lower primates will lead to any number of breakthroughs in human behavior, particularly with regard to sexual tendencies.”
Ah, and now it was out of the bag, O‘Kane thought, the crux of the matter, the subject you don’t discuss in mixed company, the thing men and women discover together in the dark. He watched the wife’s perfectly composed face, with its stingy lips and little turned-up nose and sculpted ears, for a reaction. There was nothing. Not a flicker. She was a scientist herself—the first female baccalaureate in the sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—and no quirk of the human organism could ruffle her. She was made of ice. Layers of it, mountains—she was a glacier in human form, an Ice Queen, that’s what she was.
“Yes, I understand,” she said, pursing her lips and shooting a look at O‘Kane that wilted him on the spot, as if he were the one who’d brought up the subject, “but apes are one thing and human beings quite another. I really don’t see how any discovery you make as to the”—and here she paused, for just a beat—“sexual proclivities of apes and monkeys can be applied to my husband’s case. I just fail to see it.”
This was a critical juncture, and O‘Kane, impelled by the heat of the fire, the closeness of the room and the sudden fear that the whole thing—orange trees, bungalow and all—was about to collapse like a house of cards, suddenly plunged in with a speech of his own. “But we’ll take the best care of him, ma’am, I and the Thompson brothers and Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Meyer too. He asks for us specially, you know, and we feel a real ... a real compassion for him that we don’t always feel with the other patients ... he’s such a gentleman, I mean, and bound to improve. And I admit I don’t know the first thing about apes—hominoids, that is—but I’m young and willing and I can learn, I can. You’ll see.”
There was a silence. Mrs. McCormick—Katherine—looked startled, as if the chair or the hat rack had suddenly begun to speak, but the old lady seemed satisfied—she had a sort of fixed benevolent old lady’s smile pasted to her lips—and Dr. Hamilton, his eyes jumping, paused only to stroke his beard for effect before coming in with the heavy artillery. ‘That’s right, Edward: it will be a learning process for all of us, and for the sciences in general, and beyond the good we’ll do for Mr. McCormick, we have an excellent chance of doing something good and valuable for all of humankind, and, what’s more“—spreading his hands wide with the flourish of an old character actor—”for every poor unfortunate sufferer like your husband, Katherine.“ His eyes held steady. He was slowing down, decelerating his delivery till every word could have been a paragraph in itself: ”And for every wife that suffers with him.“
The doctor’s words hung there a moment, the rain beating at the windows, the wax impressions—corpus callosum, medulla oblongata, pineal gland—glowing as if they’d come to life. Very faintly, so faintly O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d actually heard it, came the anguished cry of the Apron Man echoing across the rain-slick grounds. And then suddenly, without warning, Mrs. McCormick, Katherine, the Ice Queen, was weeping. It began with a sharp insuck of breath, as if someone had pricked her with a pin, and then the ice melted and in the next moment she was sobbing her heart out.
She tried to hide her face beneath the brim of her hat as she bent to fumble through her purse for a handkerchief, but O‘Kane saw that face naked and transformed, crumpled like a flower, and he saw the pain blossom in those rich insulated eyes. It was a revelation to him: she was human, after all, and more than that, she was female, intensely female, and never more female than in that moment. Her shoulders shook, her breath came in gasps, and even as her mother reached out to comfort her, O’Kane felt something give inside him. He wanted to get up and take charge, wanted to touch her, take her by the hand, but all he could do, roasting in the chair as the flames snapped and the sobs caught in her throat and the doctor wrung his hands, was murmur, “There, there,” over and over, like an idiot.
And then she looked up, the fire catching the sheen of her eyes and illuminating her wet face till it glowed like the face of some tortured saint amongst the cannibals. When she spoke, after a long, rending moment, her voice was soft and small, so small you could barely hear it. “And you meant to stick by your injunction then?”
This caught Hamilton by surprise. He groped behind him for the edge of the desk, sat himself down for half an instant and jumped up again as if it had been electrified. “What injunction? What do you mean?”
In the tiniest, most miserable voice: “No visitors.”
Hamilton drew himself up and let out such a deep rattling sorrowful breath it sounded as if he’d turned his lungs inside out. His eyes jumped and jumped again. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not even his wife?”
But the doctor was already swiveling his
head back and forth on his shoulders like a human metronome, and O‘Kane, welded to the chair in awestruck silence, could see where he was beginning to develop the jowls that would be his badge of high seriousness in the future. The man was a master negotiator, and he knew when to give and when to stand firm. “Not even his wife,” he said.
Long after Hamilton had disappeared and Nick and Pat Thompson begged off on the grounds of marital concord, O‘Kane sat over his beer and a plate of cold baked beans, hard-boiled eggs, salt herring and crackers with Martin, the third and youngest of the Thompson brothers. It was past nine o’clock and the barroom was raging with light and noise against the cold rain and lifeless streets beyond. O‘Kane picked up an egg, feeling half-boiled himself, what with the sainted whiskey and the good cleansing Boston brew percolating through his veins, and he began to peel it as if it were the very precious and frangible skull of an infant—or a monkey. Mart, though his eyes were glazed and his hair sticking straight up from his parting like the ruff of a grouse, watched with a kind of rapt fascination, as if he’d never seen anything like it before. He was big-headed and big-shouldered, like his brothers, but he was young yet—just twenty—and from the ribcage down he faded away to nothing. O’Kane carefully arranged the fragments of eggshell on the bare wood of the table, one at a time, then bit the denuded egg in two and washed it down with a swig of beer.
“Guess I ought to be going,” Mart sighed. “If I’m ever going to get up for work tomorrow.”
O‘Kane said, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” but it was a matter of form. He didn’t feel like leaving, not yet. He felt like . . . finishing his egg, to get something on his stomach, and then having another beer. No more whiskey, though: he’d had enough. That much he understood.
Rosaleen would be expecting him. Or no: she’d been expecting him for three hours and more now, and she would be laying for him like an assassin, furious, burnished to a white-hot cutting edge, her voice gone off into another, higher, shriller register, the accusatory register, the vituperative and guilt-making register. She would call him a drunk, a social climber, a puppet of the McCormicks, and she would mock his tweeds and howl anathema to California.
“One more?” O‘Kane said.
Someone at the bar behind him—he didn’t bother to turn round and see who—shouted out, “You damned fool, if I‘d’ve known you were going to salt the damn thing instead of smoking it or even jerking it, for crying out loud, I would’ve give the whole damn carcass to the orphanage.”
Mart seemed to take an unnaturally long time in answering. His eyes were small and seemed even smaller in proportion to that outsized head, and as O‘Kane gazed hopefully into them, already picturing the yellow sizzle of a final tasteless and dilatory beer, they were no more than distant grayish specks, planetary bodies faintly revealed in the universe of that big numb face, and receding fast. Mart shrugged. Reached down to scratch his calf. “I don’t see why not,” he said finally, and his enunciation could have been clearer, a whole lot clearer. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. One more.”
These were the dregs of their celebratory party: the half-filled glasses, the cold beans and herring, the shouts and smells of the crapulous strangers hemming them in on every side, the dead rinsed-out April night and the rain drooling down the windows—and above all, the lingering boozy glimmer of the golden fraternity of California. They would be leaving in two weeks by special car—a car called the Mayflower, customized by the Pullman Company with locks on the doors and restraints on the windows, and was O‘Kane the only one who saw the pure and lucent beauty of that resonant name? It was an omen, that’s what it was. They were pilgrims, leaving Plymouth Rock and North Boston and Waverley behind for the paradise in the west, for the hibiscus, the jasmine, the tangerines and oranges and the dates that rained down from the palms like a reward just for being alive.
They’d never have to buy another scuttle of coal for as long as they lived. And overcoats—they could throw away their overcoats and the moth-eaten mufflers and mittens that went with them. And if that wasn’t enough, their McLean salaries were to be doubled the minute they stepped aboard that train with Mr. McCormick. That would mean forty dollars a week for O‘Kane, and he just hoped the grapefruit ranchers, cowboys, oil barons, hidalgos and señoritas of Santa Barbara would leave him something to spend it on. If he let himself drift a minute he could feel that forty dollars in his pocket already, two tens and a twenty, or maybe four tens or eight fives. Forty slips of green-backed paper, a whole groaning sack of silver coins. He felt like he’d won the lottery.
But then he thought of Rosaleen again—saw her as vividly as if she were standing there before him, gouging him with her eyes, her jaws clamped in rage and resentment, going to fat at nineteen and always demanding more, more, more from him, as if he were the original cornucopia—or one of the McCormicks himself. She was the kind to kick up a fuss when he went out after work, even if it was only for a glass or two, even if it was only on a Saturday, because she was like a child, like an infant, always afraid of missing out on something—but give her a taste of it and she drank like a brewer’s horse. Sure. And there was no way in the world she was going to leave her own mum and da and her saintly brothers and traipse halfway around the globe with the likes of him and he must be as crazy as his idiots and morons to think she’d so much as budge because good Christ in heaven Waverley was enough of a trial as it was. That’s what she’d told him, time and again, California, and she spat all four syllables in his face like the stones of some sour inedible fruit, I’d as soon go to hell and back.
Something clenched in his stomach, his holy whiskey burning away down there in a sea of beer and immolating the hard white albumen of the egg as if it were paper put to fire, and he wondered briefly if he was going to be sick. He fought it down, swiveled round in his seat and shouted “Waiter!” in the direction of the bar, but with no one specific in mind. The mob there was just a blur, nothing more. “Waiter! Two more over here!”
Dr. Hamilton had bought the first two rounds, like a sport, like a creature of flesh and blood and a friend of the working man, and it must have been five-thirty or six at the time, still light beyond the windows, though with the rain and gloom you could hardly distinguish day from night. O‘Kane would never have described the doctor as a convivial man, or even a cheerful one—he was too much the worrier, the stickler for detail, too much the scientist—but tonight he was nothing short of giddy, for him at least, offering up a crusty joke or two and making a toast to “the healing sun and gentle zephyrs of California.” He was flushed to the roots of his beard with pride and pleasure—he was was going to have his apes and California too, and he was going to be known from here on out as personal psychiatrist to Stanley Robert McCormick, of the Chicago McCormicks. Of course, he would be overseen by one of the most exacting men in the field, Dr. Adolph Meyer, but Dr. Meyer was going to be three thousand miles away in his warren at the Pathological Institute of New York—a very long three thousand miles.
They all stood to shake hands with the doctor when he left (after an hour or so, during which he’d sipped at a single stale beer like somebody’s maiden aunt out celebrating a third-place citation at the flower show), and everybody felt fine. And then Nick bought a round of whiskies, and O‘Kane found himself narrating the events of the morning’s meeting for the table at large. The Thompsons were hungry for the details—this concerned their lives and careers too, and the lives of their families—and they leaned in to crowd the space of the little table with their massed heads and lumpen arms and the crude architecture of their shoulders. They hadn’t been invited to the meeting and O’Kane had, because O‘Kane was head nurse and Dr. Hamilton’s right-hand man and they weren’t, even though both Nick and Pat were older than he and had more years in at McLean. Neither seemed resentful—or at least they didn’t show it—but still O‘Kane felt compelled to give them the fullest accounting he could, with dramatic shadings and embellishments, of course. He was Irish and he loved a
n audience.
He told them how he’d worked himself into a sweat just trying to get there on time, nervous and unsure of himself, how he’d charged across the wet lawn with the Greek and the Apron Man hooting at his back and dashed by Miss Ianucci’s desk without stopping—and he gave them a moment to consider the picture of Miss Ianucci sitting there with her mobile legs and the spill of her uncorseted front in that taut shirtwaist—and then he was describing Mrs. McCormick and what she was wearing and how the old lady, Mrs. Dexter, had grilled him. All that was fine, all that he enjoyed. But when he came to the part about Mrs. McCormick‘s—Katherines—breaking down, he couldn’t do justice do it, couldn’t even begin to. “She was like a child,” he said, trying to shape the scene with his hands, “a little lost child. She broke down and cried right there in Hamilton’s office, and there was nothing her mother or anybody else could do. It was so ... I felt like crying myself.”
“Yeah, sure,” Nick said. He spoke in a measured growl, like a chained dog, the smoke of the cigarette squinting his eyes till they were no more than slashes in the blank wall of his face. “And I guess that’s supposed to prove she’s human then, just like us peasants.”
Pat sniggered. Mart’s eyes flitted round the table. There was a crash in the vicinity of the bar, followed by a curse and a thin spatter of applause. Nick just sat there, huge and squinting, watching O‘Kane.
All of a sudden O‘Kane felt the anger coming up in him—what did they know, they hadn’t been there, none of them—and before he could stop to think he was defending her, the Ice Queen herself. “You can be as hard-nosed as you want about it, Nick, and I felt the same way myself, I did—until this morning. And you know what made her break down? It was Dr. Hamilton. ’No visitors,‘ he said, ’not even his wife,‘ and that’s what got to her. She loves her husband, no matter how crazy he is, and she wants to be with him—it’s as simple as that. And I don’t care what you say.”