by T. C. Boyle
“Mr. McCormick, I presume?” the fat man called when he’d reached the landing and stood poised outside the barred door like a traveling salesman unsure of the neighborhood. He was trying for a genial smile, but the cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth distended it into a sort of flesh-straining grimace. “And Mr. O‘Kane? And that would be Mr. Tompkins, yes?”
“Thompson,” Mart returned in a voice dead and buried while Mr. McCormick blinked in bewilderment from his place at the table—he wasn’t used to new people, not at all—and O‘Kane got up from his chair to unlock the door and admit the new psychiatrist. Rising from the chair, moving through the desolate space of that penitentiary of a room, the most familiar room in the world, a place he knew as well as any prisoner knew his cell, he couldn’t help feeling something like hope surging through him—or maybe it was only caffeine, from Sam Wah’s black and potent Chinese tea. But who was to say that this man standing so mountainously at the door wasn’t the miracle worker who would transform Mr. McCormick from a disturbed schizophrenic sex maniac incapable of tying his own shoes into a kindhearted and grateful millionaire ready to reward those who’d stood by him in his time of need?
“We were expecting you earlier,” O‘Kane said, by way of making conversation until he could insert the three separate keys into the three separate locks and let the swollen savior in so they could shake hands and get off to a proper start.
“Yes,” Dr. Brush rasped, chewing around his cigar, “and I expect Gilbert’ll be up in arms over it, but I’m late, you see, for the main and simple reason that this damnable fog made it damned near impossible to find the door of the hotel, let alone give the damned driver a chance of finding the damned road out here—and where in hell are we, anyway? Good God, talk about the hinterlands—”
Actually, he’d been scheduled to take over more than two years earlier, and Hamilton had prepared O‘Kane and the Thompsons and everybody else for the passing of the baton, but word had it that Katherine had opened her checkbook and said, “How can I persuade you to stay on, Dr. Hamilton?” And Hamilton, who’d already written up his monkey experiments for some high-flown scientific journal and was anxious to get back and circulating in the world of sexual psychopathology, where new advances were being made almost daily, had, so Nick said, demanded on the spot that she double his salary and provide him with the use of a new car. “Done,” Katherine said, and wrote out a check. And so, Dr. Brush was late. Not just by a couple of hours, but by two years and more.
There was an awkward moment after the door had been shut and treble-locked behind him, when Brush began advancing hugely on Mr. McCormick and throwing out a grab bag of hearty greetings and mindless pleasantries, wholly unconscious of the telltale signs that Mr. McCormick was feeling threatened and on the verge of erupting into some sort of violent episode, but O‘Kane caught the big man by the elbow and steered him toward an armchair on the far side of the room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here, doctor?” he said so that everyone could hear him. And then, sotto voce, “You’ve got to give Mr. McCormick his space, at least until the two of you are better acquainted—he’s very particular about that. You see, he’s not sitting there alone—his judges are there with him, wigs, robes, gavels and all, though you and I can’t see them.”
The big man looked perplexed. He must have been forty or so, though it was hard to tell considering the amount of flesh he carried, especially in the face—every line and wrinkle was erased in the general swell of fatty tissue, giving him the look of a very well fed and pampered baby. “Well, I just—” he began, looking down at O‘Kane’s hand clamped round his arm and then allowing himself to be led, like some great floating zeppelin, to the chair. “I just felt ”—and now he looked again to Mr. McCormick, who was doing his shrinking man routine, hunching his shoulders and declining into the chair so that soon only his head would be visible above the tablecloth—“that we should meet, and as soon as possible, Mr. McCormick, sir, for the main and simple reason that we’ll be spending so much valuable time together in the coming weeks and months, and while I, er, should really have waited for a proper introduction from that good friend of yours, Dr. Hamilton, I just thought, er, for the main and simple reason—”
Mr. McCormick spoke then, and with no impediment. “Dr. Hamilton is no friend of mine.”
Brush was on it like a hound. “Oh? And why do you say that, sir? I’m told he’s been your very good friend over the course of many years now and that he’s very much concerned for your welfare, as indeed Mr. O‘Kane and Mr. Tompkins are, and I myself.”
No reply from Mr. McCormick, whose chin now rested at the level of the table. O‘Kane could read the look in Mr. McCormick’s eyes, and it wasn’t auspicious, not at all. “Well, then, Dr. Brush,” he interjected, clapping his hands and rubbing them together vigorously, “why don’t you let me show you around a bit, at least until Dr. Hamilton arrives?”
While Mart entertained Mr. McCormick with some hoary card tricks Mr. McCormick had already seen half a million times, O‘Kane led the psychiatrist into the bedroom. “There isn’t much to see here, really,” he apologized, indicating the brass bed bolted to the floor in the center of the room. Everything else, right down to the pictures on the walls and the nails that held them, had been removed. There were no curtains, no lights. Here and there along the walls you could make out a faded patch where a piece of furniture had once stood.
“Rather spartan, isn’t it?” the doctor observed, swinging his tempestuous frame to the left and poking his head into the bathroom, which contained only toilet, sink and shower bath, and the infamous window, of course, now louverless and with the neat grid of iron bars neatly restored.
“We did have a rug,” O‘Kane said, “a Persian carpet, really quite the thing. But we found that Mr. McCormick was eating it.”
“Eating it?”
“At night, when no one was watching. Somehow he managed to get a section of it unraveled with just his fingers alone, and then he’d pull out strands of it and swallow them. We found the evidence in his stools. Of course, the rest of the stuff, the furniture and pictures and all that, well, he destroyed most of it himself the last time he escaped.”
And then they were back in the upper parlor, standing around awkwardly, awaiting Dr. Hamilton, who’d spent two hours that morning awaiting the fog-delayed Dr. Brush. By this time, Mr. McCormick had retreated to the sofa, where he was reading aloud to himself in a cacophonic clash of words and syllables: “ ‘TARzan is NOT an APE. He is NOT LIKE his peoPLE. HIS WAYS are NOT their ways, and SO TARzan is going BACK to the LAIR of his OWN KIND ....’ ”
O‘Kane was just about to suggest that they take a tour of the lower floor and then perhaps look round for Dr. Hamilton, who was most likely out in the oak forest overseeing the dismantling of his hominoid colony, when Dr. Brush abruptly swerved away from him and loomed up on Mr. McCormick, cigar smoke trailing behind him as if it were the exhaust of his internal engine. “How marvelous, Mr. McCormick,” he boomed, “you read so beautifully, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic I find it myself to read good literature aloud, for the main and simple—”
But Dr. Brush never had a chance to round off his homily, because at that moment Mr. McCormick slammed the book shut and hurled it at him end over end, prefatory to leaping out of the sofa and tackling the doctor round the knees. The flying book glanced off the side of Brush’s head and he was able to take a single hasty step back before Mr. McCormick hit him and he found himself swimming through the air with an improvised backstroke before crashing down on one of the end tables, which he unfortunately obliterated. O‘Kane was there in an instant, and the usual madness ensued, he tugging at one end of Mr. McCormick’s wire-taut body and Mart at the other, but Brush, for all his size, proved remarkably agile. Without ever losing his masticular grip on the big tan perfecto, he was able to fling Mr. McCormick off, squirm round and pin him massively to the floor beneath all three hundred twenty-seven pounds.
Mr
. McCormick writhed. He cursed, scratched, bit, but Dr. Brush simply shifted his weight as the crisis demanded, not even breathing hard, until finally Mr. McCormick was subdued. “Ha!” Brush laughed after a bit, O‘Kane and Mart standing there stupefied, their hands hanging uselessly at their sides. “Trick I learned at the Eastern Lunatic Hospital. Always works. The patient, you see, after a while he feels like he’s a little bird nestled inside the egg, not even a hatchling yet, and calm, so calm, for the main and simple reason that I represent the mother bird, a nurturing force that cannot be denied, for the main and simple—”
“Just a minute, Dr. Brush—I don’t mean to interrupt, but I think, well, I’m afraid you’re hurting Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane put in, alarmed by the coloration of his employer’s face, which had gone from a deep Guinea-wine red to the palest blood-drained shade of white.
The big doctor was unconcerned. He squared the cigar in his mouth, shifted his haunches. “Oh, no, no, that’s just the thing, don’t you see—a little compression. It’s what they all need.”
Afterward, when apologies had been made all around and Mr. McCormick, very contrite, was put to bed for his afternoon nap, O‘Kane felt it politic to escort Dr. Brush out onto the fog-shrouded grounds in search of Dr. Hamilton. “Can’t see a damned thing,” Brush complained, moving cautiously forward as O’Kane, familiar with the terrain, led the way. “Afraid of barking a damned shin. Or worse. You sure he’s out here?” And then, in a stentorian voice: “Gilbert? Gilbert Hamilton! Are you there?”
The trees stood ghostly, ribbed in white like so many masts hung with tattered sails. The leaves were damp underfoot. Nothing moved, and there was no sound, not even of birds. O‘Kane felt his way, and he didn’t even have the stench of the hominoids to guide him. All but two of the baboons and monkeys had been sold off to private collectors or donated to zoos, and Hamilton was packing up his notes and equipment and shipping it back east to his mentor, a small monkey-obsessed scholar by the name of Yerkes who’d spent some time at Riven Rock a year ago. As for Julius, he’d been removed from the premises after the Potter Hotel incident and sold for a song to a traveling circus—on Katherine’s orders.
There was a smell of burning in the air, and of something else too, something rank, and before long they could hear the crackling of a fire, and then they saw the flames, a moiling interwoven ball of them, up ahead at the edge of the oak grove. Two figures, in silhouette, slipped back and forth in front of the fire, feeding the flames with scraps of timber. As they drew closer, the big doctor tramping heavily behind him and cursing steadily under his breath, O‘Kane recognized Hamilton’s gnomelike assistants, and he called out to the shorter of them, the Mexican. “Hey, Isidro, you seen Dr. Hamilton?” And then, showing off one of the handy phrases he’d picked up amongst the denizens of Spanishtown: “ El Doctor Hamilton, dondy estis?”
They were at the edge of the fire now and O‘Kane saw that the two men were burning up the dismantled cages, wire and all. Paint sizzled and peeled. Wood split. Fingers of flame poked up through the mesh, weaving an intricate pattern, leaping high to drive back the fog even as the smoke settled in to replace it. The heat was intense, a hundred stoves stoked to capacity, and they had to step back away from it; O’Kane looked at the two scurrying men and hoped they knew what they were doing—a blaze like this could get out of hand and bring the whole place down, orchards, cottages, Pierce Arrows and Mr. McCormick too. Isidro, the Mexican, paused with an armload of rubbish to consider the question of Hamilton’s whereabouts, then nodded his head toward the place beneath the trees where the cages had stood even this morning.
They found Dr. Hamilton fussing around a pile of odds and ends he meant to keep, the chute with the doors at the end of it, a couple of the smaller cages, a pegboard he’d used to gauge the monkeys’ intelligence. “Gil!” Dr. Brush boomed, bobbing through the fog to seize Hamilton’s hand. “I’m late, I know it, but it was for the main and simple reason of this damned fog, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m here now and I’ve met everybody and I’m raring to go.”
“Nat,” Hamilton said, shaking with one hand and adjusting his spectacles with the other. “Yes, well, the weather’s been unusual. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Pah!” Brush returned, waving a big flipperlike hand. “No inconvenience to me, for the main and simple reason that I’m here to stay. California. God bless it. But what’s this—leftover monkeys?”
He was pointing to a small cage set atop the psychological chute. In it, O‘Kane saw, were the two remaining hominoids, a pair of rhesus monkeys the doctor called Jack and Jill. They were runts, even for monkeys, and though they’d been displaced and seen all their companions exiled and their home of the last several years demolished, they still had the spirit to fuck—which is what they were doing at the moment, black lips drawn back in erotic transport, the cage swaying rhythmically to the persistent in-and-out motion of the monkey on top, presumably Jack, but you never could tell. That much O’Kane had learned about hominoids.
Hamilton seemed a bit fuzzy. “Yes,” he said, gazing down on them, “the last two. Jack and Jill. I’d had half a mind to take them with me, but now I’m not so sure. The zoo down in Los Angeles is filled up with them—rhesus, that is—and I can’t seem to get rid of them in any case.”
The big doctor huffed a few times. His cigar had gone out, but he still clutched it with his teeth as if it were the last link of a breathing tube and he a sponge diver wending his way along the bottom of the sea. “Why not set ‘em free? Let ’em go. Liberate ‘em. For the main and simple reason that they’re sentient creatures, just like you and me, and it’s a cruelty to keep them caged up like that, and the climate here’ll support ’em, I don’t doubt that, for the main and simple—”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Hamilton said. “Haven’t I, Edward?”
O‘Kane hadn’t the faintest idea what Hamilton had or hadn’t thought of, but he nodded his head anyway.
“Well?” Brush demanded. “And so?”
Hamilton took his time, the fog settling in, the fire of demolition snapping and roaring off in the distance. He looked down at the copulating monkeys. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of study,” he sighed, “it’s that they’re nothing but dirty stinking little uncontrollable beasts. Set them free?” He looked up. “They don’t deserve it.”
It was about that time that Giovannella came to O‘Kane with the news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore, but Giovannella Capolupo, married, at her father’s insistence, to a little hunched-over wop with a single black eyebrow drawn like a visor across the top third of his head. Guido, his name was, Guido Capolupo. He had a shoemaker’s shop in a back alley in Spanishtown, with a cramped little cell of an apartment above it, which was convenient for O’Kane, who was then living at a boardinghouse not five minutes away.
Giovannella, sleek and beautiful, with her eyes like chocolate candies and her feet primly crossed at the ankles, sat waiting for him in the parlor under the watchful eye of the landlady, Mrs. Fitzmaurice. It was a Saturday afternoon, 2:00 P.M., and he’d just come back from his half-day shift at Riven Rock and collapsed into his bed like a jellyfish, utterly drained after a long night of celebrating somebody’s birthday at Menhoff‘s, he couldn’t remember whose. He closed his eyes. And in the very next instant there was an impatient rapping at the door and who was it? Mrs. Fitzmaurice. And what did she want? There was a young lady downstairs for him.
“Giov,” he crooned, crossing the carpet and taking her hand, feeling better already, and he couldn’t kiss her there in public, though he wanted to, and he couldn’t read her chocolate-candy eyes either. “What do you say?”
“I’m pregnant.”
At first it didn’t register on him. The sun was fat in the windows and outside the streets were placid and inviting, all the long Saturday afternoon stretching languidly before him. Since he was up, he was thinking of maybe suggesting a stroll
up to Menhoff‘s, for a little hair of the dog. He blinked. Tried on a smile.
Giovannella was beaming suddenly. “I thought you’d be mad, Eddie, but I’m so happy.” She gave his hand a squeeze, though Mrs. Fitzmaurice, studiously watering her geraniums at the far window, was watching like a moral executioner, ready to pounce at any hint of impropriety.
O‘Kane wasn’t following. “Mad? About what?”
“You’re the father, Eddie,” her voice soft as a heartbeat. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m pregnant.”
In the next moment he had her out the door and they were stalking up the street, pedestrians trying not to stare, the streetcar clanking by, a roadster parked at the curb, a sedan beyond, an old Reo beyond that. His blood was surging, and it wasn’t all bad. He was angry, of course he was angry, but there was a crazy exhilaration to it too. Sure the kid would be his—her husband, Guido, looked to be about a hundred and twelve years old though she insisted he was only thirty-six, and how could she have relations with a guy who looked like that, even if he was her husband? Of course the kid was his—unless she’d been fooling around with somebody else, and if she fooled around with him why wouldn’t she fool around with somebody else? But no, it had to be his, and it would come out with fair hair and sea-green eyes, he just knew it, and Baldy Dimucci and this Guido would hit the roof. There’d be a vendetta. Sicilian assassins. They’d crawl through the ground-floor window at night, brutally dispatching Mrs. Fitzmaurice and old Walter Hogan, who spent half his life snoring in a chair by the front door, and then come up the stairs and cut his own miserable throat.