by T. C. Boyle
“We’ve got to understand, each and every one of us, what a danger Mr. McCormick is in his present condition, not only to others but to himself,” the doctor went on. “Did you see what he did to that young woman in the space of something like thirty seconds? Shocking. And believe me, I’ve seen the whole range of psychosexual behavior.”
There wasn’t much O‘Kane could say to this. He was waiting to be dismissed, waiting to do his penance at the patient’s bedside and get it over with, let life go on and the dawn break and Buffalo appear on the horizon like some luminous dream. And he was waiting for something else too, something Hamilton couldn’t guess at and would never suspect: he was waiting for the doctor to retire so he could slip up to the parlor car and have a couple whiskies to steady his nerves and ease the tedium of the coming hours—if he hadn’t actually needed them before, he needed them now.
But the doctor wasn’t finished yet. He was going to make O‘Kane squirm, make him appreciate the hierarchy of the McCormick medical team and what he expected of his underlings, because he wouldn’t tolerate another lapse in security like the one tonight, even if it meant instituting certain personnel changes, and he hoped O’Kane caught his meaning. “I don’t have to emphasize,” he said, pulling at his beard with one hand and fumbling around for his pipe with the other, “how much Mr. McCormick’s health and welfare means to all of us, to me and Mrs. Hamilton, to you and your wife and your coworkers and their wives. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I will not have any unprofessional behavior or personal shoddiness jeopardize it.”
O‘Kane watched the doctor’s hands tremble as he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his big curved flugelhorn of a pipe and lit it. He’d never seen him so worked up and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like being lectured to either. And while he might have looked composed and contrite, all the while he was seething, thinking he could just reach out and snap the doctor’s reedy stalk of a neck like a match-stick and never have to listen to another word.
Hamilton shook out the match and looked up from his pipe. “What I mean is, I’m afraid we’re going to lose him if he gets free again.”
“Lose him? You don’t think he’s suicidal, do you?”
“Pfffft!” The doctor waved an impatient hand and turned away in disgust, pulling vigorously at his pipe. The smoke rose in angry plumes. He wouldn’t dignify the question with a response.
O‘Kane was irritated. “I may not have the clinical experience you do, or the education either, but believe me I’ve seen more cases of dementia praecox than you could—”
“Schizophrenia,” the doctor corrected. “Kraepelin’s configuration—literally, ‘early insanity—isn’t half so useful as Dr. Jung’s.”
The smell of incinerated tobacco filled the compartment till there was no other odor in the world. Smoke wreathed the lamp, settled on the pages of the ape book spread open on the bed beside the doctor’s flank, drew a curtain over the room. “Think of it this way,” Hamilton went on, lecturing out of habit now, “ ‘schizo,’ a splitting, and ‘phrenia,’ of the mind. A schizophrenic, like Mr. McCormick and his sister before him, has been split down the middle by his illness, withdrawing from our reality into a subsidiary reality of his own making, a sort of waking nightmare beyond anything you or I could imagine, Edward.” The way he pronounced the name was a goad in itself, a slap in the face. I’m in charge here, he was saying, and you’re an ignoramus. “And if you don’t believe these patients are eminently capable of doing anything they can to escape that nightmare, including inflicting violence on themselves—extreme violence—then you’re a good deal less observant than I give you credit for.”
“Yes, yes, all right—schizophrenic, then. It’s all the same to me.” O‘Kane was hot, angry, humiliated by this whole idiotic scene. He’d left the key in the lock. He was wrong. He admitted it. But Hamilton just wouldn’t let it go. “Call it what you will,” O’Kane said, and he couldn’t help raising his voice, “I’ve seen them so blocked they’ve had to have their fingers pried away from the toilet seat, and while you’re home in bed in the middle of the night I’m the one who has to hose them down after they’ve smeared themselves with their own, their own—”
“I’m not questioning your experience, Edward—after all, I hired you, didn’t I? I’m just trying to acquaint you with some of the special considerations of this case. The greatest threat to Mr. McCormick is himself, and if you want to live in California and tramp through those orange groves you’re always talking about, you’re going to have to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day. We can’t have a repetition of what happened here this evening, we just can’t. And we won’t. If it wasn’t for the serendipity of the young woman’s being there, as callous as that may sound, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would have thrown open the last door in the last car and kept on going out into the night—and by the way, did you see how much she resembled Katherine?”
“Who?”
“The young woman—what was her name?”
“Brownlee,” O‘Kane said. “Fredericka Brownlee. She’s from Cincinnati,” he added, not because it was relevant but because he loved the sound of it: Cincinnati. “I found out she’s on her way home from Albany, where her mother and her were visiting—I think it was her mother’s aunt.” The reference to Katherine had taken him by surprise—he hadn’t seen the resemblance and he hated to admit that Hamilton was right, not now, not tonight, but maybe there was something there after all. She was younger than Mrs. McCormick—twenty-two or twenty-three maybe—and not really in her league at all, but there was something in her eyes and the set of her mouth and the way she threw back her shoulders and stared straight into you as if she were challenging you to anything from a game of chess to the hundred-yard dash, and that was like Katherine, he supposed. They were both part of that class of women used to getting their own way, the ones who wanted the vote and wanted to wear pants and smoke and turn everything upside down—and had the money to do it.
Hamilton had made him come along when they paid Miss Brownlee a visit, checkbook open wide, after they’d got Mr. McCormick secured and she’d had an opportunity to change clothes and treat the two minor abrasions on her left cheek where Mr. McCormick had ground her face into the fabric of the seat. It was an awkward meeting, for obvious reasons, but Dr. Hamilton was at his smiling, genial, smooth-talking, manipulative best, and O‘Kane, after having given each of the porters a dollar and a five-spot to the old gentleman who’d been trampled, didn’t have to do much more than look sympathetic and work up a rueful grin when the occasion demanded it. Mrs. Brownlee, her features pinched with outrage, said she was incapable of believing that even the most depraved monster would attack an innocent child absolutely without warning or provocation and in a public place no less and that in her estimation this wasn’t a matter for apology or even remuneration but the sort of thing the police and the courts of law ought to take up, not to mention the authorities of the New York Central Line who’d allowed this person to be brought aboard in the first place.
Hamilton purred and simpered and pursed his lips, squeezing out apologies and mitigations in short whispery bursts while the elder lady scorched him with every sort of threat known to mankind, short of surbate and crucifixion, and Miss Brownlee stared down at her clasped hands and then at the black gliding window before finally settling her eyes on O‘Kane. She’d been badly frightened, physically injured, subjected to a humiliating and vicious assault, but now she was bored—or so it seemed to him—profoundly bored, and she just wanted to forget the whole business. And she was looking into O’Kane’s eyes to see if he was bored too, and there was something complicitous in that look, something challenging, flirtatious even.
O‘Kane stared back at her, saying nothing, letting the doctor carry the weight of the negotiations—five hundred dollars was the figure they finally settled on, and it was only because Mrs. Brownlee was willing to make an exception for the McCormick name and agree to hush the
thing up and abjure all mention of courts and lawyers—and he couldn’t help seeing her as she was half an hour earlier, bleeding and impotent, Mr. McCormick on top of her and her face twisted with fear, and that gave him a strange sensation. He’d rescued her and should have felt charitable and pure, should have remembered Arabella Doane, but he didn’t—he wanted to see her nude, nude and spread out like dessert on the thin rolling mat of his berth. There was a thread of crusted blood just under the slash of her cheekbone and a blemish at the corner of her mouth, the flawless bone-white complexion tarnished and discolored, and he looked at that blemish and felt lewd and wanton, felt the way he did when Rosaleen rolled over in bed and put her face in his beneath the curtain of her hair and just breathed on him till he awoke in the dark with a jolt of excitement. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t admirable, but there it was.
“You really think she looks like Mrs. McCormick?” O‘Kane said after a moment.
The doctor hadn’t responded to his comment regarding the Brown-lees’ itinerary, apparently finding the destinations of Cincinnati and Albany considerably less exotic than O‘Kane did. Pipe dangling from between clenched teeth, he shifted his buttocks and took up the ape book with both hands, glancing at O’Kane as if surprised to see him there still. “I would have thought it was obvious,” he murmured, his eyes flipping in a weary, mechanical way. The lecture was over. He looked sleepy, already disengaging himself, thinking now only of his pajamas, his toothbrush and his apes. “Not that this girl has the hundredth part of Katherine’s charm and sophistication,” he sighed, fighting back a yawn, “but physically, I think there’s no question—”
For the past fifteen minutes O‘Kane had wanted nothing more than to escape this miserable little box of a room, his ears burning, the foretaste of whiskey teasing his tongue and dilating his throat, but now he lingered, puzzled. “So what you’re saying is of all the women on the train he could have, well, assaulted—he chose her purposely? Given that the fit was on him, of course.”
The doctor’s eyes were dead behind his spectacles. He yawned again and bunched his shoulders against a sudden dip of the rails. “Yes. That’s right. He might have attacked any woman—or he might have thrown himself under the wheels, as I said ... but he chose her.”
“But why? Why would he want to attack a woman that reminded him of his own wife?”
The question hung there a moment, the noise of the train clattering in to fill the void; deep down, O‘Kane already knew the answer.
Hamilton sighed. He rocked on the edge of his bed, spewing smoke and wearing a faint thin-lipped smile. “Psychopathia Sexualis,” he said.
O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d heard him, what with the sacerdotal rasp of the Latin and the uncontainable rushing silence that magnified every nick and fracture of the rails till it roared in his ears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”
But instead of repeating himself, Hamilton set down the pipe and bent over to slide a suitcase from beneath the bed. He unlatched it and threw back the lid and O‘Kane saw that it was filled with books. The doctor fumbled through them a moment and fished out a thick volume bound in leather the color of dried blood. “Krafft-Ebing,” he grunted, dropping the book in O’Kane’s lap. “Here, Edward—educate yourself.”
The night rolled on toward morning. Buffalo came and went. O‘Kane, fortified by three quick whiskies and as many beer chasers, sat by the glow of the gaslamp and studied the wooden form of his employer. Mr. McCormick was blocked again, frozen and immobilized and no more harm or trouble than a gargoyle or bookend, but he was in a more restful position now, held in place by the sheets like an Egyptian mummy that would fall to pieces if it weren’t for its wrappings. It was sad, though, as sad as anything O’Kane had seen at the lunatic asylum in Boston or in his two years at McLean. Mr. McCormick was a fine figure of a man, really, as handsome as any stage actor or politician—if you could get past the bughouse look in his eyes, that is—and here he was, in the prime of his life and with all his wealth and education and a wife like Katherine, reduced to this. He was no better than an animal. Worse. At least an animal knew enough to keep itself clean.
O‘Kane watched his employer’s face for signs of life—the clamped lips, inflexible jaw, the nose like a steel rod grafted to his face and the pale blue gaze of the eyes focused on nothing—and wondered what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all. Did he know he was traveling? Did he know he was going to California? Did he know about oranges and lemons and the kind of money a man could make? But then what did he want with money? He had all the money any hundred men could ever want, and look at all the good it did him.
For the past hour O‘Kane had been reading, but he wasn’t reading aloud and he wasn’t reading The Sea Wolf either. No, the book spread open in his lap was the one Dr. Hamilton had given him, and it took his breath away. It was nothing short of an encyclopedia of sexual perversion—and never mind the title and degrees attached to the author or the resolutely clinical tone. A parade of sexual cannibals, pederasts, satyrs, urine drinkers and child molesters the likes of which no human fancy could have invented marched across the page, rank upon rank, each filthy obsession leading to a yet filthier one. It was scandalous, is what it was, though all the climactic moments were rendered in Latin to mask the shock of it, and O’ane had to rely on context, a vivid imagination and his early training as an altar boy to piece it out.
He’d been deep into a section called “Lust Murder (Lust Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous Lust Extending to Anthropophagy),” the alcohol working in his brain like a chemical massage, totally unconscious of where he was or what he was doing, when Mr. McCormick suddenly made a noise deep in his throat. It was a croak or groan, the sort of deep regurgitant sound a dog makes when it’s working up a puddle of vomit. But then, just as abruptly as it arose, the noise ceased, and Mr. McCormick never moved a muscle the whole time, his eyes still fixed and his head frozen over the pillow like the high dive at the city pool that never got any closer to the water.
Suddenly he groaned again and his lips parted. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,” he said.
“Mr. McCormick? Are you all right?” O‘Kane reached out a hand to touch his shoulder and reassure him.
This gave rise to a vibrato ratcheting, like a door opening on un-oiled hinges: “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
“It’s all right. I’m here with you. It’s me, O‘Kane. Lie still now—you need your rest.”
“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
The eyes hadn’t moved, not even to blink. The teeth were clenched tight and the ratcheting, creaking, back-of-the-throat rasp seemed to be forcing itself right through the bone and enamel. “There, there,” O‘Kane murmured. “Would you like me to read to you, is that it?” And he was leaning forward to set down Krafft-Ebing and pick up Jack London, when he caught himself. Sea stories were such a bore—all those spars and jibs and tortured cockney accents. He hated sea stories. He’d always hated them. It was then that an idea came to him, a wonderful golden perverse inspiration. What the hell, he thought, the whiskey barreling through his veins on its admirable journey to his brain and his tongue and the fingertips that turned the pages. Educate yourself,Edward.
“Let’s see,” he said, leafing through the big volume in his lap, “ ‘Koprolagnia, Hair Despoilers, Mutilation of Corpses,’ ah, here we are. Oh, you’ll like this, Mr. McCormick. You’ll really like this.” And then, in the precise, well-modulated voice the nuns had dredged out of him fifteen years earlier, he began to read aloud as the train beat through the night and his audience of one lay rigid and enthralled: “ ‘Case 29, the Girl-Cutter of Augsburg.’ ”
4.
FALSE, PETTY, CHILDISH AND SMUG
All her life Katherine Dexter had been disappointed in men. Men had failed her in more ways than she could count—some actively and with malice aforethought, others passively, through no fault of their own. They’d let her down when she most needed them, broken her heart, stood in her way, barred the door and thrown up t
he barricades. She didn’t like to generalize, but if she did she would find the average man to be false, petty, childish and smug, an overgrown playground bully distended by nature and lack of exercise until he fitted his misshapen suits and the ridiculous bathing costume he donned to show off his apelike limbs at the beach. He was unreliable, loud, demanding, clannish, he defended his prerogatives like a Scottish chieftain, and he expected the whole world to bow down to him and fetch him his pipe and newspaper and coffee brewed just the way he liked it, with cream and sugar and the faintest hint of chicory. And why? Because men were the patriarchs and providers of the earth and obeisance was their due, and that was the way of things, ordained by God, Himself a male.
She let out a sigh. She was tired, cranky, disoriented, her nose had begun to run and she could feel a headache coming on. She’d wrapped up her affairs on the East Coast in a sustained frenzy of list-making, shopping and packing, her mother more a hindrance than a help, and she’d been stuck on the train for six days on top of that. And now here she was, seated on the divan in the reception room of her suite at the Potter Hotel in palmy Santa Barbara, with an invigorating view of the brown-sugar beach and the naked glaring belly of the ocean, in the process of being disappointed all over again.
The men in question this time were Cyrus Bentley, a beaky glabrous little functionary of the McCormicks who never seemed to stop talking, even to pause for breath, as if it were some sort of trick, like fire breathing or sword swallowing, and his accomplice, Dr. Henry B. Favill. Dr. Favill was a tall, elegant and icily imposing man who was inordinately proud of his dog-eating Indian ancestors, unhappy in marriage and stuffed to the eyeballs with McCormick money. They were the family attorney and physician, respectively, solid men in their late forties, universally admired and petted and accustomed to getting their own way. The theme of their little gathering was Stanley. Stanley had provided the context for all previous relations between these two gentlemen and Katherine, and they always took care on these occasions to refer to him by his Christian name and never “Mr. McCormick,” “your husband” or even “the patient,” by way of asserting previous claims. They’d been looking after the family’s legal and medical interests since she was a girl at Miss Hershey’s School in Boston, and they made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she was the interloper here.