by T. C. Boyle
He saw the flickering lights in the distance, heard the occasional shout—in English and Italian both—but he ignored them. Searching alone, weary now, tired of the whole business, he made his way back toward the main house, skirting the lawns and plodding mechanically through the Clover Garden, past the hothouses and the looming blocky rear wall of the garage till he was close enough to the apes to smell them. The hominoids, that is—the monkeys and baboons that were unlucky enough to provide the grist for Hamilton’s theoretical mill. O‘Kane had observed enough of the doctor’s experiments by now to form an opinion, and his opinion was that they were bunk. Aside from running the monkeys through the big wooden box with the gates in it, all Hamilton and his seedy-looking assistants seemed to do was make the monkeys fuck one another—or anything else that came to hand. Once, O’Kane had seen the wop lead a stray dog into the communal cage, and sure enough, the monkeys came chittering down from their perches and one after another fucked the dog. They threw a coyote into the cage. The monkeys fucked that. They tossed an eight-foot-long bull-snake into the cage. The monkeys fucked it and then killed it and ate it. As far as O‘Kane could see, the only thing Hamilton had established was that a monkey will fuck anything, and how that was supposed to be applied to Mr. McCormick and all the rest of the suffering schizophrenics of the world, he couldn’t even pretend to guess.
But he was drawn toward them now, almost irresistibly, the potent reek of the close air beneath the trees, the susurrus of their nocturnal movements, a sound like a distant breeze combing through a glade lush with ferns. The sound calmed him, and for a minute he forgot about Mr. McCormick and forgave the monkeys their stink. And then, all in an instant, he came fully alert.
The monkeys had begun to hiss and chitter the way they did in daylight, the noise sailing out to him and rushing back to roost again in the darkness ahead. He quickened his pace, shining the beam off the great twisted branches of the oaks and then catching the wire mesh of the big central cage that rose up into the crown of the trees. There was movement at the top of the cage, and there shouldn’t have been, all the monkeys put to rest in their individual cages at nightfall, but they were noisier now, much noisier—the gentle rustling of a moment ago become the jangling rattle of steel padlocks and cage doors straining against their latches—and he could see the tiny bodies flailing themselves to and fro behind the mesh. The light shot round in his unsteady hand, a root grabbed for his foot, and he was trying to understand, to fathom what was happening, when suddenly every hominoid in the place was screeching loud enough to raise the holy dead.
What was it? There, high in the branches of the central cage, the movement again. He stepped closer, the screeching, the stench, struggling to steady the light, and then, as if in a sudden vision, it became clear to him. These were no monkeys in the branches—they were too big, much too big. These were no monkeys, but apes, the rutilant naked one, white as any ghost, and the shaggy hunkering split-faced one, and their hands moving each at the place where the other’s legs intersected, two hands flashing in that obscene light until O‘Kane, who now truly had seen everything, flicked it off.
Mercifully.
PART I I
Dr. Brush ‘ s Time.
1.
LOVE IS LOYAL, HOPE IS GONE
The headline, set there for all the world to see in bold 30-point type, hit Katherine like a slap in the face. Her cheeks reddened. She felt the water come to her eyes, and her heart was suddenly beating at her ribs like a caged bird: LOVE Is LOYAL, HOPE Is GONE. And it got worse, much worse: SOCIETY FAVORITE CLINGS TO DEMENTED HUSBAND: HE’S ENSCONCED IN MANSION AT MONTECITO; WIFE COMES TO VISIT BUT CANNOT SEE HIM. She looked up at Carrie, whose face showed nothing, and then at her maid, Louisa, who looked as if she’d swallowed a live rat, and then finally at her hostess, Mrs. Lavinia Littlejohn, who’d just handed her the paper, already folded back to page 19. Mrs. Littlejohn was wearing that vacant smile Katherine’s mother seemed to be afflicted with more and more these days, as if smiling for a woman of her generation were some sort of twitch or tic. “I, um, thought you’d want to see it, dear,” Mrs. Littlejohn said, and the smile wavered a moment, uncertain of itself, and then came back stronger than ever.
Katherine held herself absolutely rigid, staring down at the newsprint in her lap until the letters began to shift and meld, and then, in her embarrassment, she looked up to survey the room again. Louisa was just vanishing through the door to the front parlor, where a dozen women were striding energetically to and fro, putting the finishing touches to banners and placards and chatting softly among themselves in the way of troops going into battle. Mrs. Littlejohn was still watching her, still smiling her autonomous maternal smile, and Carrie—Carrie Chapman Catt, Katherine’s special friend and comrade-in-arms—was studiously looking out the window. “I don’t know what to say,” Katherine murmured, “it’s so ... humiliating to have my privacy violated like this. I feel like I’ve been raped.”
Carrie looked her full in the face. She pursed her lips and made a tsking sound. “After two years in the Movement, I should think you’d be used to it—you’ve seen what they’ve written about me. But take the paper in the other room and find yourself a quiet nook—read it. All the way through. Really, there’s nothing but praise for you in there. And don’t let the headlines upset you—they’re made to be intentionally insipid and tasteless. That’s how they sell newspapers.”
Yes, but she’d wanted to keep the Dexter name out of it—and Stanley’s too. And her own deepest hopes and pains, her marriage, her suffering—how dare they? How dare they print a word about her private life? They could howl “No to Petticoat Rule” all they wanted—that was part of the privilege of living in a democracy, no matter how wrongheaded it was—but there were certain things that had to be held sacrosanct.
“Go on,” Carrie urged, maternal herself now, Mrs. Littlejohn clucking away in harmony, every doily on every table aglow with solicitude, “read it. It makes you out to be a saint, Kat, it does—and it’s publicity, good publicity that people can’t help linking with our cause.”
Katherine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Carrie Chapman Catt, the woman she admired above all others, admired to the point of worship even, she who had founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and demanded of her amenable second husband (now amenably deceased) four months of absolute freedom a year and the money to campaign for the vote in the manner to which she was accustomed, was willing to offer her up to the canaille for mere publicity. Katherine was stung. And in that moment she didn’t know what was worse, her dirty laundry aired in public by a bunch of ink-stained hacks or her idol’s cold streak of realpolitik. She set her jaw. Stood. And without a word to either woman stalked out of the room and up the stairs to the bedroom Mrs. Littlejohn had provided for her and Carrie during their campaign amongst the Fourth of July revelers on Nantasket Beach.
The house was near Hull and it looked out on Hingham Bay, the bay that gave onto the serious ocean, the true ocean, the cold somber Atlantic, and there were no palms here, no zephyrs, no parrots or monkeys or orange trees or anything else that smacked of frivolity or sensuality. Katherine settled into an armchair by the window and read through the article as if she were gulping water after three sets of tennis:It is not a case of lovers separated in death, but rather a separation in life, to overcome which if it were possible millions would be no barrier. In this case it is not a hero but a heroine who furnishes the lesson in constancy, and her most intimate acquaintances, those of the smartest set in New York, in Boston and Chicago, bow to her with admiration that is born of respect.
The heroine is the beautiful, intellectual and highly-accomplished Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, the young wife of Stanley McCormick, whose father was the brains behind the gigantic harvester corporation, an institution whose wealth no one could accurately estimate.
Stanley McCormick is insane, suffering from a form of dementia. He lives in California, where a mansion in the exclu
sive city of Montecito, which is populated by a colony of retired millionaires, is maintained for him.
The letters fled like ants across the page, accumulated into big black staring words with heads and pincers and then sentences that bit and stung and made her flesh crawl, beautiful, intellectual, highly-accomplished, insane: how dare they? How dare they? And then, farther on down the page, all wounds became one wound:Dr. Hamilton does not allow her to see her husband, much less converse with him. And yet, nothing daunted, Mrs. McCormick goes to Montecito in December of each year and spends the Yule-tide season near the man she loves.
Stanley McCormick does not know that his wife visits in the vicinity. This his wife knows and though she would give her life to be of benefit to him she sadly turns from the sanatorium and soothes herself with solitary walks on the grounds.
The mansion is surrounded by a garden that is beautiful to behold. It has been referred to as a veritable Garden of Eden with its tropical foliage, palms, long winding driveways and miniature forests. In this garden Mrs. McCormick forgets as she roams, listening to the song birds, viewing with keen interest a small menagerie maintained by Dr. Hamilton in which many specimens of the monkey tribe predominate. There is a scientific reason for this menagerie, but this is known only to scientists.
She wanted to tear the paper to pieces and fling it from her, but she didn‘t, she couldn’t, and though she tried not to think of Stanley—her Stanley, nobody’s but hers, not his mother’s or his sisters’ or his brothers‘, not anymore—though she’d thrown herself body and soul into the suffrage movement as a way of forgetting, here it was all over again, all her private pain, and served up to titillate the great unwashed in their linoleum kitchens. What would her mother think? And her father—he must be turning over in his grave.
Hope is gone, indeed. How would they know? They’d snooped and prodded and poked around enough to hear word of the hominoid colony, and yet they couldn’t begin to fathom its purpose or the hope it represented. This was obscene. Irresponsible. Yellow journalism at its worst. And whom had they been talking to? Hamilton, certainly. Some of the staff—O‘Kane? Nick? She remembered giving an interview herself, one of dozens connected with her work for Carrie and NAWSA, but she never dreamed they’d pry into her personal life as if she were an Evelyn Nesbit or Sarah Bernhardt or some such person. And they were wrong—hope was very much alive, even if it was dampened by the steady drizzle of the years. She hadn’t seen Stanley face to face in more than five years now, since he was at McLean, and he’d gotten so much worse before his recent improvement, what with his escape through the louvers and his descent all the way back into the darkness, so far back it was as if he’d been entombed all this time, but there was hope, there was. His nurses had taught him to walk again and to eat and he was lucid sometimes now, or so they told her... and science, science was making leaps all the time, what with glandular research and psychotherapy, with Freud, Jung, Adler. There was hope, abundant hope, and she would never give way to despair—and why didn’t they print that?
She’d been sitting there for some minutes, the paper in her lap, the bay beyond the windows scoured by tight bands of cloud that were like steel springs coiling and uncoiling over the steely plane of the water, the voices of the women in the parlor below drifting up to her in snatches. And then she looked down at the story again, the story about her, the beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, and settled on the last paragraph, the one that canonized her:One of Mrs. McCormick’s friends the other day said:
“Such a character as that woman possesses is an object lesson for the world. It would seem to me that she is living over a volcano and would be the most unhappy woman in the world. I know of her unstinted popularity in the leading social sets of the East, how easy it would be for her to forsake her afflicted husband and live the natural life, but she consecrated herself to Mr. McCormick and if she does not get her reward in this life, she surely will in the next.”
Despite herself, despite the demon of publicity and her anger and disappointment and the silent vow she was even now making never to speak with the press again, she couldn’t help feeling a flush of gratification over those lines set in print so cheap it came off on your gloves—because, after all, they were true.
It was quarter to four when Carrie and Mrs. Littlejohn came for her, and neither of them made reference to the newspaper articte—that was in the past, already forgotten, the smallest pebble in the road to equality. “Everyone’s ready,” Carrie said, striding briskly across the room to snatch her hat from the bureau in a flurry of animated elbows and flashing hatpins, “though the day is rotten in the extreme, could even rain, and I wonder just how many bathers will be out there on the strand and if the whole thing isn’t just going to be another grand waste of time.”
Katherine was already on her feet, grabbing up her purse and parasol and smoothing down her dress as if girding for battle—and it was a kind of battle, the antisuffragists as nasty as any mob, and they were sure to be there, jeering and catcalling, their faces twisted and ugly and shot through with hate. They were drunk too, half of them, tobacco stains on their shirts and their fingers smeared with grease and nicotine and every sort of filth, yammering like animals, big testosterone-addled beasts out of some Darwinian nightmare. They were afraid of the vote. Afraid of Temperance. Afraid, incredibly, of women. “And the local authorities?” she asked, slipping in beside Carrie to arrange her hat in the mirror. “The sheriff or whoever? Are they still threatening to deny us our right to speak?”
Carrie turned away from the mirror to give her a look. “What do you think?”
“So what will we do?”
“What else? Defy them.”
They were met on the boardwalk by the Norfolk County sheriff and two of his deputies. The sheriff was ancient, just barely alive from the look of him, and the deputies were huge with an excess of feeding, twin butterballs squeezed into the iron maidens of their distended duff-colored uniforms. “You’ll need a permit to hold a rally here,” the sheriff wheezed, wearily lifting his watery old turtle’s gaze from the stony impediment of Carrie’s face and easing it down on the minefield of Katherine’s. Behind Katherine were fourteen women waving the purple, white and gold banners of the Movement and brandishing placards that read HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY? NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and, the stiffest goad of all, DON’T TREAD ON US!
“We have no such permit,” Carrie responded, her voice ringing out as if she were shouting through a megaphone, heads turning, a crowd already gathering, children on the run, “as you well know, since your cronies at the courthouse have denied us one, but we have certain inalienable rights guaranteed us under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution—the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly—and we intend to exercise them.”
“Not in Norfolk County, you won‘t,” the old sheriff rasped, clamping his jaws shut like a trap.
“Go back to your kitchen, grandmaw!” a voice jeered, and there they were, the unshaven potbellied Fourth of July patriots gathered round their beery smirks, but there were women in the swelling crowd too, women with uplifted eyes and proud faces, women who needed to hear the news. All of a sudden Katherine felt as if she were going to explode, and she couldn’t keep it in, not here, not now, not in the face of this mindless barbarism, this naysaying and mockery. She whirled round to face the hecklers, and they were thirty or forty strong already, as if they’d been waiting all morning for this, for a little blood sport to ease the tedium of sucking on the bottle between shoving matches and filling each other’s ears with their filthy stories and crude jokes, and how could they dare presume to address Carrie Chapman Catt like that, grandmaindeed. Suddenly she was shouting at the biggest and stupidest-looking behemoth in the crowd, and no matter if he’d opened his mouth or not. “And you go back to the saloon where you belong, you common drunkard,” she cried, feeling the blood rise in her like a geyser. “It’s tosspots like you who ought to be
banned from voting, not good decent sober women! ”
That brought the storm down, all right—not the literal one, the one festering in the clouds and rumbling offshore in a tightly woven reticle of lightning—but the hurricane of testicular howls that was only awaiting an excuse to explode in all its wrath. Curses—the very vilest—rained down on them, faces nagged, an overripe tomato appeared out of nowhere to spread its reeking pulp all over the front of Katherine’s dress. Through it all, Carrie’s voice rang out: “To the water, ladies! If they won’t let us speak on the soil of Norfolk County, then we’ll bring our message home from the sea!”
Someone started the chant—“Forward, out of error,/Leave behind the night,/Forward through the darkness,/Forward into light!”—and then they were marching, down the length of the boardwalk and out onto the sand, their heels sinking away from them, shouts, jeers and laughter in their ears, and they didn’t stop marching until they were in the surf, sixteen strong and now seventeen and eighteen, the waves beating at them like some hostile force, their dresses ruined, shoes destroyed, and still they chanted while the sheriff blustered and wheezed and tried to head them off and the bullies pelted them with rotten vegetables, scraps of flotsam and seawrack, anything that came to hand.