by T. C. Boyle
She had her foot on the first step when O‘Kane caught up with her—and he wouldn’t dare touch her, he wouldn’t dare—leaping three steps in a bound and turning to face her from the higher stair, his arms spread in expostulation, the big man, the cheat, the deceiver, disappointment made flesh. “Mrs. McCormick, no,” he said, “please. Dr. Hamilton said—”
“Step aside,” she said.
“Mrs. McCormick,” pleading, his stricken face and meaty hands, and now Nick was there beside him, her mother tugging at her arm from behind, “I’m sorry, very sorry, but Dr. Hamilton said your husband can’t have any visitors just now—yet, I mean—and especially not women, because of what happened on the train, that is, the incident—”
“What incident?” She felt her heart stop. “What are you talking about? ”
She saw O‘Kane exchange a glance with Nick Thompson, and then Nick, with his big head and bloat of muscle, said that she’d better talk to the doctor and O’Kane agreed, his head bobbing up and down on the fulcrum of his chin, and her mother said, Yes, that would be best, in the sort of voice she used on the cats when they scratched the furniture.
Katherine’s pulse was like a Chinese rocket. Drums were pounding in her head. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. “All right, then,” she said, shaking off her mother’s hand and struggling to keep her voice steady, “I’ll talk to the doctor. Where is he?”
Another look passed between the two men on the stairs. “He’s outside,” O‘Kane said after a moment.
“Outside?” Katherine was astonished. She’d come all this way and Hamilton wasn’t even here to greet her? “What’s he doing, taking the air?”
“No,” Nick began, tugging at the knot of his tie with one blocky forefinger and wincing under the constraint, “he’s out there with the—”
“The apes,” O‘Kane interjected. “Or monkeys. You see, this sea captain—from Mindanao—he was here no more than an hour ago with the first of the two monkeys—hominoids, that is—in a wicker cage. He heard Dr. Hamilton was looking for hominoids and he got a ride out here with Baldessare Dimucci, the manure man, and, uh, the monkeys—hominoids—were overheated or chilled or something and Dr. Hamilton had to see to them right away, because if he didn’t, well, he was afraid they‘d—”
Katherine raised her voice then—she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t right to show any emotion with the help—it just brought you down to their level, and she’d known that all her life—but she just couldn’t restrain herself, not here, not now. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t give two figs for the manure man and his monkeys—I want to see my husband. And if I can’t see him, I want to know why. Now, will you lead me to Dr. Hamilton this instant or am I going to have to terminate the employment of every last person on these grounds and start all over again?”
Sixty seconds later, after having determined that her mother would rather stay behind and “have a nice chat with Mr. Thompson,” Katherine was back outside, following O‘Kane through the garden at the rear of the house. If she weren’t in such a state she might have appreciated what Dr. Franceschi had accomplished with his bold arrangements of daphnes and rock roses, the flood of gazanias, long-necked birds of paradise, nasturtiums the size of saucers, but appreciation would have to wait. She saw nothing but an undifferentiated mass of vegetation and the back of O’Kane’s head, where the soft blond hair of his nape joined inaVand descended into the white band of his collar. The path took them through the garden and into an open field of golden, waist-high grass, from the depths of which two piebald cows looked up at them stupidly, and finally into the dense shade of a stand of live oak.
“Dr. Hamilton?” O‘Kane called, and there was an odd note to his voice, a note of warning, as if to intimate that he wasn’t alone. He slowed his pace, edging forward into the shadows, Katherine right behind him. It was warm. She could feel the perspiration on her brow, at the hairline, just under the brim of her hat.
“Edward?” The doctor’s voice came from somewhere off to the right, arising disembodied from the twisted maze of snaking limbs and overarching branches. “Are they here already?” the voice called. “Because if they are, you’re going to have to stall them a minute while I—”
“I’ve got Mrs. McCormick with me,” O‘Kane shouted, and in that instant the doctor appeared, materializing out of the gloom where two massive gray trunks intersected like crossed swords not thirty feet away. He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar was unfastened and there seemed to be something in his hair, some foreign matter, dander or fluff or something—or was it straw? “Katherine!” he cried, scurrying across the cracked yellow earth in dusty shoes and a pair of trousers that looked as if they’d been used to clean out the stables. “How good to see you!”
She allowed him to take her hand while he writhed and groveled and disparaged himself for the state of his clothes and hair and most of all for not having been there to greet her in person, but it was all the fault—a chuckle here, nervous and high-pitched—of the hominoids, the anthropoids, the monkeys, because didn’t she see that they’d gotten very lucky indeed with Captain Piroscz and she had to have a look at them, just a look, because they were so, so engaging—
At this juncture there was a long trailing inhuman shriek from the clump of vegetation just ahead, and the wizened frowning face of a little fur-covered homunculus peered out at them from a frame of cupped leaves. “Oh, there you are, you little devil,” Hamilton chided, and he inched forward with his left arm crooked at the elbow and held out stiffly before him, as if he were inviting the thing to dance. “Come on,” he crooned, “come to Papa.”
The monkey—Katherine recognized it from her lab work as a rhesus—merely stared at the doctor out of its saucer eyes. It was a spectacularly unattractive specimen, the color of mustard left out to dry overnight on the edge of a knife, its fur patchy and worn and its skin maculated with open sores and dark matted scabs. There seemed to be something wrong with one of its front paws and its eyes weren’t quite right—there was some sort of film or web over the cornea. When Hamilton got within five feet of it, coaxing and making kissing noises with his lips, it let out another howl and vanished into the canopy overhead.
The doctor dropped his arm to his side and let out a little laugh. “I’m sorry, Katherine,” he said, and she could see that he wasn’t sorry at all, “sorry to have to put you through this—they’re just feeling their oats, that’s all. And perhaps I shouldn’t have released them, but they were looking so pathetic in that cramped bamboo cage and you just knew they hadn’t so much as stretched their limbs the whole way across the Pacific, probably not since they’d been captured in the jungles of the Orient ... besides which, this is where I’ve decided to construct the apery and I do intend to give them as much freedom as possible.” There was a pause, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, and then he clapped his hands suddenly and wrung them as if they were wet. “Well,” he said. “And so how are you?”
Katherine was about to say that she wasn’t feeling well at all, that she was worn out from worry and travel and not a little irritated and that she was stunned and disconcerted to find the doctor’s henchmen daring to interfere with her seeing her husband and that furthermore she demanded to know just where she stood, but she never got the chance. Because at that moment, as the doctor slouched there in disarray and O‘Kane shuffled his feet in the dirt and the declining sun coppered the branches of the trees, the monkey suddenly plopped down from above and landed squarely on Hamilton’s head, digging its fingers into his scalp and hissing like a cornered cat. But that wasn’t all: in the next instant it was joined by another, which came sailing out of thin air to adhere, caterpillar-like, to the doctor’s shoulder. “Screeee-screeee!” they jeered, boxing furiously at one another with leathery fists while the doctor’s pince-nez flew in one direction and his collar in the other. And then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone again, hurtling through the branches like phantoms.
Katherine couldn’t help herself. She was furious, maddened, out for blood, but at the sight of the punctilious little doctor’s utter helplessness in the face of such primitive energy, she had to laugh. To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O‘Kane, the bruiser, who’d gone absolutely pale at the sight of the tiny hominoids that couldn’t have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny.
“They just won’t listen to reason,” Hamilton snorted, facetious and gay, the pince-nez dangling jauntily from his throat, his collar crushed underfoot. The monkeys rode high in the treetops, chittering and screeching. O‘Kane shuffled his feet. Katherine pressed a handkerchief to her face, suppressed a sneeze. “Ha!” Hamilton exclaimed, “I know the type, don’t think I don’t,” and he let out an extraneous laugh. “The devils, the very devils—they’re even worse than my patients.”
That was when the gaiety went out of the air, as thoroughly as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. Katherine’s face was burning. Now, suddenly, she felt nothing but outrage. “I want to see my husband,” she said, and her voice was small and cold.
Hamilton frowned. He was hateful, ridiculous, a smear of monkey urine on his sleeve, lint in his hair—he was a man and he was going to deny her. “I’ve been meaning to write you,” he said.
5.
GIOVANNELLA DIMUCCI
O‘Kane had been dreaming of Rosaleen—or someone like her, a silvery succubus of feathery lips and needful flesh hovering just out of reach—when he was awakened, as he was every morning, by the strangled croaking wheeze of Sal Oliveirio’s bedraggled rooster. This was succeeded by the lowing of cows and a garbled disquisition in Italian featuring three or four voices, and then, after a bit, by a smell of woodsmoke and the potent aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling in the pan. He didn’t get up right away—he wasn’t on duty till eight this morning—but lay there staring at the ceiling and the thin veneer of light on the windows, hoping to fall back into the dream. He had a hard-on—It seemed he always had a hard-on lately, day and night, and that was because he was living the life of a monk in his cell—and he stroked himself with a slow yearning rhythm, thinking of Rosaleen, the girl on the train, Katherine, until the moment of release came and he could lie still again.
But he couldn’t get back to sleep, and that was annoying because sleep was a refuge from boredom and he was bored, he had to admit it—itchy and restless and bored. It was the middle of July and he’d been in California for seven weeks now, living in a ground-floor room in the servants’ quarters of the big stone house, while the servants—wops, mostly, but there were a couple of Spaniards or Mexicans mixed in—crowded into the cottages out back. Mart was in the room next to him, but Nick and Pat had moved into town when their families came out to join them—and Rosaleen was supposed to have come with them, two weeks ago now, but O‘Kane had put her off. He told her it was because he hadn’t been able to find a decent place for her and the baby, and that was the truth—he hadn’t. Of course, he’d been into town exactly four times since he’d arrived, and when he was there—at night, in the company of Mart and Roscoe LaSource, the chauffeur—he wasn’t looking for apartments.
He felt bad about that, and he missed his son—and Rosaleen too, and maybe even his parents and Uncle Billy and his sisters into the bargain—but he wanted to experience California on his own, wanted to suck everything he could out of this otherworldly place where lizards licked over the rocks and the flowers were like trees and the ocean stretched all the way to China. It was just what he’d imagined, only so much richer and more complex, as if what he’d pictured California to be was just the first page in a whole encyclopedia of imaginings. There were ferns twenty feet tall, trees that shed bark instead of leaves, palms as thin as lampposts, and flowers, flowers everywhere—the whole world was flowers. It was drier than he would have guessed—it hadn’t rained a drop in the whole time he’d been here, if you discounted the mist that settled on everything and made a lingering dream of the mornings—and he’d never realized that Riven Rock and all these grand estates were going to be so far from town, five miles at least. Maybe he ought to buy a bicycle—or sprout a pair of wings. Christ, as it was he felt as much a prisoner as poor Mr. McCormick, and that was what he missed most—the saloons, the shops, the pavement, streetlights, civilization.
He’d never lived in the country before, never awakened to roosters and cows, never spent so much time with foreigners—Italians, that is. They were everywhere, shambling along the dirt lanes in baggy pants and sweat-stained shirts, hewing stones, trimming hedges, hoeing up weeds in the orchards, not to mention slapping the hind end of every cow and goat in the county six times a day and pounding the laundry in big tubs out in the courtyard or creeping through the house with mops and brooms and a look of greasy resignation. But they were all right, the Italians. Most of them spoke English, or at least a version of it he and Mart could untangle, and he sat most nights on a rock in the middle of the orange grove with Sal and Baldy and some of the others, passing a jug of red wine or a jar of that liquid fire they called grappa. And their women weren’t half bad, the young ones especially. They were more the bucolic type than Miss Ianucci maybe, but one or two of them really managed to get his attention.
And the oranges. They were right there hanging from the trees, no different from apples or peaches back East, and not a day passed when he didn’t get up in the morning and saunter out in the perfumed air and pick himself two or even three of them and shuck the peels while he walked, the sun in his face, hummingbirds hanging over the flowers like bits of colored foil suspended in the air and the mountains standing up in front of him all wrapped in mist like an oil painting.
But still, he couldn’t help thinking of Rosaleen as he heaved himself out of bed, slapped some water on his face and swept his hair back with the comb while he studied his chin in the mirror and debated whether he could get by without a shave. Maybe he should send for her—the McCormicks were paying for it. Then he could get a place downtown, on one of those streets up by the old Mission with all the shade trees, and he’d be close to the saloons and the lunch counters and the Chinese laundry, and he’d get it steady every night and never have to wake up to the damn chickens and feel so lonely and cored out. That’s what he was thinking as he stood at the mirror knotting his tie and beginning to entertain notions of breakfast, Sam Wah’s flapjacks and three eggs cooked in butter with a slab of fried ham and the fresh-baked bread he could already smell, when he happened to glance down at the letter on the bureau. It was from Rosaleen and it had come two days ago, and though he’d read it through six times already, in his present frame of mind he couldn’t resist idly picking it up. And once it was in his hand, he almost involuntarily unfolded it and smoothed it out on the cool marble surface:Dear Eddie:
The son is shinning I bot a new pair of short pance for Eddie Juner thank you for the money. He is so cut & I want you every nite so much to stick your thing in me I’m like a starving woman with someboddy cooking bakon in the air so pleese Eddie send for the tikets becoz Mildred Thompson and Ernestine and the boys all left tow weeks ago & I miss you
Yours in Love & Lust, Rosaleen
He could hear her voice and see her in a jerky series of poses, mainly sexual, that was as flickery and fleeting as one of Edison’s motion pictures, and that softened him. But then he took another look at the looping backward scrawl of her cursive and the spelling that never got past the third-grade level and wondered what had ever possessed him to marry her. When she told him she was pregnant back in September, the two of them walking home hand-in-hand from Brophy’s Bar & Grill, the sky full of stars and her lips swollen like sponges and so sweet he might have been licking the lid of a jar of honey, he should have run and never looked back, should have bolted for Alaska, Siberia, anyplace. But he didn’t. He married her. Stood at the altar and swore before God and Father Daugherty to live with her for the rest of his life. Yes. But she was in Waverley,
returned to the bosom of her family, back with her father and mother and her fat-faced semimoronic brothers, and he was here, in California, without a care in the world. And how could you argue with that?
Mart was in the dining room, hunched over his plate and chewing with a mindless stolidity, when O‘Kane came in for breakfast. The doctor and Mrs. Hamilton weren’t up yet. They were staying in one of the guest rooms in the east wing, with their squally little baby, until they could find a suitable house in the neighborhood. The servants were fed in the servants’ hall, to the rear of the house, and Mr. McCormick was fed by his nurses, through a tube, at nine o’clock on the dot. So on this particular morning, with the palest whitest ghostliest sun suspended in an ether of mist that washed away the background till the whole house might have been a ship at sea, it was just Mart and O‘Kane at breakfast. “Top of the morning to you, Mart,” O’Kane crowed, tipping back the cover of the serving tray while the housemaid, a sexless spinster in her forties by the name of Elsie Reardon, fluttered around him with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice in one hand and a gleaming silver coffee urn in the other.
Mart grunted a reply. He’d washed his hair, which he combed forward to soften the great gleaming lump of his forehead, and the hair, dangling wetly, had the effect of a bit of packing material pasted atop a lightbulb. There was egg on his chin.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” O‘Kane sighed, sinking into the chair across from him. “I mean, being a bachelor out here in the middle of nowhere when your brothers are at home getting theirs every night and even Dr. Hamilton’s got his wife with him ... and the wops, they’re out there in those cottages screwing like dogs. I can’t stand it. I’m going crazy here.”
Mart looked interested. He set down his fork, dabbed at his chin with the napkin. Elsie poured coffee with a scandalized face, then stumped out of the room. “What about Rose?”