by T. C. Boyle
Dr. Kempf didn’t rush into things the way Brush had, and he didn’t bluster or boom or pin Mr. McCormick to the floor—better yet, he wasn’t a Kraut and he didn’t have a beard. He was forty-one years old when he took over for Dr. Brush in the autumn of 1926, the author of two books (The Autonomic Functions and the Personality, 1918, and Psychopathology, 1920) as well as innumerable learned papers, and he’d most recently been a clinical psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., before setting himself up in private practice in New York. He was of medium height and build, the hair on his crown was so sparse and so severely slicked and pomaded it looked painted on and he had a dazzling full-lipped smile that was the key to his success on the interpersonal level. That and his eyes, which were a sympathetic and liquid brown—and perfectly round, as round as twin monocles set in his head. The McCormicks wanted to make him rich—or so it seemed to the amazed nurses when they discovered how much he was making per month: a cool ten thousand dollars. Mart, who had no great head for sums, was nonetheless quick to point out that that added up to $120,000 a year, more even than the King of Abyssinia could expect to make. If there was a King of Abyssinia.
He settled himself, along with his wife, Dr. Helen Dorothy Clarke Kempf, at Meadow House, a princely stone-and-frame dwelling the McCormicks had erected on the southern verge of the estate for the comfort of the physicians, who could thus be near at hand in the event of an emergency. Dr. Brush had lived there for a time, and Dr. Hoch too, but Brush had opted eventually for town life and Hoch had moved on to less roomy accommodations, six feet underground. O‘Kane tried to get some sort of fix on the new doctor—he didn’t want to get his hopes up too high and yet he couldn’t help himself—and during Kempf’s first week he attempted to read one of the doctor’s learned articles in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It was called, promisingly enough, “A Study of the Anaesthesia, Convulsions, Vomiting, Visual Constriction, Erythemia and Itching of Mrs. V G.,” but it was dry as the stuffing of an old mattress and O’Kane nodded off twice just trying to get through it. In fact, in later years he kept a copy of it at his bedside as a soporific in case he couldn’t get to sleep.
The man himself was easier to read, thank God, and O‘Kane liked him right from the start, from the first minute he walked into the room with his uncomplicated smile and took O’Kane’s hand in a good dry firm honest grip. Brush was there at the time, hearty and big-bellied and roaring, but Kempf had been closeted with his predecessor all morning and made it clear that O‘Kane was the man he wanted to talk to. They were in the office in the theater building, three in the afternoon, day one of Dr. Kempf’s regime, Brush packing his books and effects in cardboard containers, Mr. McCormick napping quietly in the stone house under Mart’s semi-watchful eye. Kempf asked a few questions about Mr. McCormick’s present state, but Brush kept interfering, so finally he took O’Kane by the arm and steered him out into the theater itself, a cavernous high room with the chairs all set out in rows, acoustic panels on the walls and a deep mid-afternoon hush hanging in the air. They sat in two folding chairs under one of the big iron-girded windows, and Dr. Kempf leaned forward confidentially. “So tell me, Eddie,” he said, and his voice was like Dr. Hamilton‘s, smooth and hypnotic, “can it really be true that Mr. McCormick has had no contact whatever with a woman since, what was it, 1907? 1908?”
“Contact? He hasn’t even seena woman, not even on our drives, which we’ve been very careful about, back roads and all of that.”
“And why is that?”
“Too dangerous. In the old days, in the beginning, when we first came out here, that is—”
“Yes?” Kempf was intent and concentrated, the annular eyes, the shining smile, as fixed on Eddie O‘Kane as the needle of a compass.
“Well, he would attack them—women. Beat them. Maul them.” O‘Kane was remembering that girl on the train, the one going home to Cincinnati with her mother, and the way Mr. McCormick had pinned her down and forced his hand up her privates—and how he’d brought his tongue into play and licked her throat like a cow at a salt lick. Or a bull. A rutting bull.
“Did anyone ask him why he had all this hostility toward women? Dr. Hamilton? Dr. Meyer? Did you?”
O‘Kane shifted in the chair. The seat was narrow and hard. “It was a sexual thing,” he said, “very disturbing for all concerned. I was embarrassed, to tell you the truth. And besides which, he went catatonic about then, and nobody could ask him anything—or you could ask all you wanted, but he wouldn’t answer.”
“But that was a long time ago,” Kempf said.
“Eighteen years. Nineteen. Something like that.”
Kempf leaned back in the chair, the hinges creaking under his weight. He had his hands wrapped behind his neck as if he were basking in the sun and he closed his eyes a minute, deep in thought. “He hasn’t made much progress, has he?” he said finally, snapping open his eyes and bringing the chair back to level again.
O‘Kane could hardly deny it. He shrugged. “He has his periods.” “I’ve been studying this, Eddie,” the doctor said, handing him a manila folder with several sheets of bound typescript inside. It was a year-by-year account of Mr. McCormick’s condition, from the onset of his illness right on up to the present, and as O’Kane glanced over the entries he had the uneasy feeling that he was reading a shadow biography of himself—he was the one laboring just off the page here, he was the one living, breathing, drinking, shitting, sleeping and whoring through all those compressed and hopeless years:In 1908, when the patient was seen by Drs. Kraepelin and Hoch, he was diagnosed as suffering from the catatonic form of dementia praecox. At that time he was tube-fed and refused to walk.
In 1909, there occurred some mental clearness, then delirous excitement, after which he became dull. He continued to be spoon-fed and refused to move his bowels, but began to walk with the aid of his nurses.
They were just words on a page, clinical shorthand, as cold and indifferent as a news report of carnage in China or the eruption of a Peruvian volcano, but O‘Kane felt himself oddly moved. The poor man, he was thinking, the poor man, and he wasn’t thinking only of Mr. McCormick. He skipped ahead and read on:In 1916, music became a regular activity. He talked more coherently and had more purposeful activity. He continued to wet the bed, was restrained during certain hours, was mixed and incoherent in his ideas, impulsive, and at times drank his own urine. He was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox by Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, who now agreed with Drs. Hoch and Meyer.
And then again:In 1924, he pursued endless corrections and endless substitutions for Christmas cards. He had impulsive outbursts, began to stammer. He slumped in his seat while riding. He fussed about a calendar, about his father having received undeserved credit for the invention of the reaper.
In 1925, he read infrequently, was less willing to discuss his impersonal problems. The oddities of gait persisted and for a period he had to be spoon-fed. Because of an earthquake he had been removed to the theater building, on which occasion he tried to batter down the door.
When O‘Kane handed the folder back to Kempf, there were tears in his eyes. He had to pause to dig out his handkerchief and dab at them, and then he blew his nose in a long lugubrious release of phlegm and emotion. “No, doctor,” he said finally, “there hasn’t been the kind of improvement I—we all—hoped for, not at all.”
Kempf was watching him closely, eyes glistening, the hair glued to his scalp. “You know what I find missing here, Eddie?” he said.
O‘Kane looked up, took a deep breath. He shook his head.
“Treatment. That’s what’s missing. The patient has had all the finest minds here to examine him and diagnose his condition, quite accurately I’m sure, but his treatment has been almost purely custodial to this point, am I right?”
O‘Kane could only blink. What was he suggesting—monkey glands? The talking cure?
“I think I can help him, Eddie—through intensive daily sessions, two hours at a s
itting, seven days a week. I treated upward of three thousand cases at Saint Elizabeth‘s, applying Freud’s analytic methods to patients suffering from hysteria, neurasthenia and a whole range of other neuroses, and to cases of schizophrenia too, and Mr. McCormick’s guardians have brought me here at great expense to devote myself solely to him.”
“You don’t mean the talking cure, do you?” O‘Kane said, and he couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Because Dr. Brush tried that back in the teens, and let me tell you, it was a disaster.”
Kempf had begun to laugh—he didn’t want to, you could see that, but now he gave up all pretense of sobriety and threw back his head and howled. When he came back to himself in a flurry of breastbone pounding and head shaking, the room seemed much smaller to O‘Kane. He felt the blood come to his face. “I don’t see the joke,” he said.
“I don’t mean to—” the doctor began and then had to break off again and suppress a final chuckle. “Listen, Eddie, I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t mean to be critical, but psychoanalysis has come a long way since then—and it isn’t just a parlor trick or a kind of psychological compress you squeeze on one day and forget about the next. It’s an ongoing and dynamic process—it may take years. And it may seem as if the patient—Mr. McCormick, in this case—is becoming yet more disturbed before he begins to improve, because of the repressed material we need to bring to the surface, deep fears and anxieties, sexual matters, the whole construct of his personality. We’re going to open up all his old festering wounds and we’re going to sew them up and bandage them right. Do you understand me?”
“Sure,” O‘Kane said—what else could he say?—but he was doubtful. Doubtful in the extreme.
“His wife will be the first,” Kempf was saying, “that’s only right. Of course, that’s sometime in the future yet, but our goal is to normalize his relations across the board with—” “
“You don’t mean women, do you? ”
Kempf gave him a look. “Yes, of course. What could be more abnormal, for any man, than to be shut away from half the population of the world? Good God, he didn’t even get to see his mother before she died—how can you expect a man to improve in a situation like that?”
“You can‘t,” O’Kane heard himself say, and he’d known it all along, they all had, he and Nick and Pat and Mart: give him women. Women. Women would cure him, sure they would.
4.
I ‘ V E SEEN YOUR FACE
While Dr. Kempf was at Riven Rock, quietly revolutionizing Stanley’s treatment, Katherine and Jane Roessing were in Europe, beating the drums for Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement. As 1926 passed into 1927 and she made her fruitless annual visit to Riven Rock and Stanley’s voice on the phone seemed weaker and less steady and ever more distant—the voice of a stranger, a phantom, someone she’d encountered in a reverie so long ago she couldn’t recall even the vaguest blurred outline of his face—Katherine was already planning for the Geneva Population Conference, to be held that August at Prangins. And why birth control? Because without it a woman was chattel and nothing more, a breeder, a prize mare or sow, and why educate a sow? Why hire one? Why teach her science and maths and the workings of the world? Pregnant and bloated every year of her life from sixteen to forty and beyond, every woman was handcuffed by her husband’s sexual urges, and where was the hope of advancement in that? Besides, as Jane was quick to point out, it seemed axiomatic that the more ignorant and degraded you were, the more you bred—the Irish, Italians, Swedes and Bohemians whelped ten babies for every one a woman of their class had. And where would that leave the race a generation hence if it kept on in that direction?
All right. So she stood in line at customs in Boston, her heart thundering in her ears, and smuggled in two steamer trunks and a handbag full of diaphragms for free distribution to women at Sanger’s clinics, and she petitioned congressmen and used her influence in Washington and spent Stanley’s money—and her own—on the clinics, the literature, the fight. It was all she had. Because she had no husband and no baby of her own and the Dexters would die with her—she would be the last of her line; she had no illusions about that.
She began to intuit as much all those years ago, after the headlong disaster of her honeymoon (it was like jumping off a bridge, over and over again, day after day, night after night), but she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself. She could have divorced. She could have accepted the McCormicks’ terms and had the marriage annulled. She could have faded away and emerged into another life altogether, her own life, remarried and secure, a life of babies and diapers and wet nurses, perambulators, primers and little lifeless porcelain dolls with little lifeless smiles frozen on their faces. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She’d made her choice and she would live with it.
She and Stanley had taken separate cabins on the Brittania on their return to the States in the spring of 1905, and she was as close then to giving up on him as she’d ever been. It was a rough crossing, the Atlantic black and jagged, the whole great shuddering steel liner thrust up out of the water like a feather in a fishpond and then shoved back down again till the steel decks were awash and the wind snatched the boiling spume into the air. She was sick the entire time. So sick she could barely crawl to the head and heave up a wad of nothing into the sea-stinking vacuum in front of her face. Stanley burst in on her at random—two in the morning or two in the afternoon, it was all the same to him—and he was white to the roots of his hair, his feet riding the deck beneath him as if he were a fly stuck to a windowpane. She smelled of herself. She was embarrassed. One minute he would be solicitous, helping her to her bunk, dabbing at her face with a warm washcloth, and the next he would be shouting “Whore! Whore of Babylon!” Screaming it, howling it, his whole face swollen and his fists beating at the air.
When they landed she went straight to her mother‘s—and there was no mention of the house they were planning in Marion, no mention of a life together at all—and Stanley went home to Chicago. To the Harvester Company. To his duties. To his mother. Katherine didn’t get out of bed for a week. She cried till there was no fluid left in her body, her mother and the housemaid plying her all the while with broth, tea and ginger ale. That was the worst. That was the low point—lower even than when she’d broken off the engagement. She was separated from her husband after only six months of marriage, no smiling tall handsome figure of a man to show off at the theater, parties and teas, Abigail Slaney with three adorable children already and Bessie Dietz with four, her schoolmates all grown matronly and plump in their adventitious fecundity and she a withered root, a failure. A failure, after all.
And then the telegrams started arriving. A blizzard of telegrams, a spring storm. So many that she got to know by face, name and footfall every Western Union delivery boy in the Back Bay, and when she fell off to sleep at night bicycle bells jingled through her dreams. Stanley missed her. He hated his job. He hated the whole enduring concept of reapers, tractors and harvesters. He hated his mother. He wasn’t feeling well. Cyrus was president and Harold was vice president, but Katherine was his wife, his only wife, and he loved her, wanted to fall at her feet and worship her, wanted to quit his job and come to her in Boston and build a house for her in Marion and fill it full of things and live happily. Ever after.
He came in on the train this time, less than two months after they’d parted, and this time it was she who met him at the station, flushed and expectant. And when she saw him there in the crowd, the face of him, the brooding masculine beauty and power, Stanley Robert McCormick, the genius, the artist, the millionaire, she fell in love all over again. He took her in his arms right there on the platform and they embraced for all the world to see, shoe-shine boys and porters and peanut vendors and silly little women in silly little hats, and she didn’t care a whit. She held him, just held him, for what seemed like hours.
Josephine couldn’t disguise her pleasure. And she couldn’t have been prouder and noisier and more excited if Stanley was Teddy Roosev
elt himself, returned triumphant from Havana all over again and plopped down in her front parlor. The ensuing month was one fête after another, the Stanley McCormicks toasted and congratulated from one house to the next, bluestocking Boston getting a look at the groom at last. All seemed well, and Stanley seemed to be enjoying himself, his nervous twitches and irritable moods all but evaporated, until one night they attended a dinner party given for them by Hugh and Claudia Dumphries on Beacon Hill and Stanley got it into his head that Butler Ames was among the guests.
They were eighteen at dinner, and Hugh, an old friend of Katherine’s mother and a celebrated landscape artist, stood to propose a toast. He was a fatigued-looking man, skeletally thin, with a gray tonsure and rectangular spectacles that distorted his colorless eyes; his preferred topic of conversation—his sole topic—was art and art history, and Katherine had thought Stanley would find him amusing. “To Katherine and Stanley,” he proposed, lifting his glass at the head of the table.
Stanley was sitting to his immediate right. He’d been complaining all day about dogs and looking glasses, muttering under his breath in the cab on the way over, and Katherine should have seen it as a sign. “I won’t have it,” he said, bolting up from the table as sixteen guests froze in place with their wineglasses stalled in midair.
Hugh looked as puzzled as if the ceiling had cried out in pain or the walls begun to speak. He hunched his thin shoulders and gazed out myopically from the prison of his spectacles. “What?” he said. “What do you mean?”