by T. C. Boyle
“B-but Dr. Kempf’s not, not here, I mean—today. Be-because—”
“Because he’s on vacation. He explained that to you last week. You remember, don’t you?” In fact, Kempf was tied up at the trial, defending himself and Freud in front of a roomful of lawyers, reporters and McCormicks, but Mr. McCormick, on strictest orders, was to know nothing of that. Each morning Nick went through the newspapers with a pair of scissors and excised any reference to what was going on in the courtroom downtown.
“Don‘t—don’t you bullshit me, Eddie. I’m not crazy and I’m—I’m not stupid. I know what—I know what’s going on. Let me out. For a d-drive, I mean, just a drive. I‘m—I’m nervous, Eddie, and you know how a drive always calms me. Please?”
And here was where O‘Kane’s judgment let him down. They were shorthanded, and so a drive would involve just Roscoe up front and himself, Mr. McCormick and Nurse Gleason in back, and there was risk in that, especially given Mr. McCormick’s mood that morning. But it would be nice to get out, the day grainy and close and pregnant with something—rain, he supposed, more rain—and they could stop for sandwiches to go and maybe a little pull at a bottle of something to speed up the future of his thirty-five hundred bucks, which he could also slip into a postbox because it wasn’t doing one lick of good sitting in his pocket. Kempf wasn’t there. Mart wasn’t there. The Ice Queen wasn’t even close.
O‘Kane gave him his richest smile. “Sure, okay,” he said. “Why not? Let’s go for a drive.”
It was raining by the time they swung through the gate, the mountains just a rumor in a sky that started at the treetops, everything heroically glistening and the road a black wet tongue lapping at the next road and the next one beyond that. Mr. McCormick, his eyes bright and his lips tightly tethered, sat between O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason in a yellow rain slicker, the hood pulled up over his head. Nurse Gleason wasn’t saying anything—she didn’t like this, not one bit—but to Roscoe, exiled up front, it was business as usual. And here was the rain, fat wet pellets bursting on the hood of the car and trailing down the windows like the tears of heaven, as O’Kane’s mother would say, the very tears of heaven.
They got soft drinks and sandwiches at a drugstore downtown, Roscoe doing the honors while O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason sat stiffly in the car on either side of their employer, and what the hell, O’Kane was thinking, better to get him out than keep him cooped up in that parlor all day and him feeling the way he was, so agitated and disturbed—and it was Kempf who was nuts if he didn’t think Mr: McCormick knew exactly what was going on. They ate in the car, windows steamed, Mr. McCormick going through two tuna-salad-on-ryes and a bottle and a half of ginger ale, O‘Kane unwrapping his own sandwich—roast beef and horseradish sauce—with a maximum of show and crinkling of waxed paper to mask the fact that he was surreptitiously spiking his ginger ale with a good jolt from the pint bottle Roscoe had picked up for him.
Lunch seemed to improve everybody’s mood, and they drove east of town toward Ojai for a while and then swung back along the coast road, the rain slackening and then picking up again before falling off to an atomized drizzle. “Let-let’s drive by the B-Biltmore,” Mr. McCormick said, and then, “Turn left here, Roscoe,” and Roscoe obeyed because Mr. McCormick was the boss. In a sense.
The Biltmore was on Channel Drive, just off Olive Mill, and it had been erected two years earlier to cater to the tastes of the itinerant tycoons in the wake of the Potter’s incineration and the New Arlington’s destruction in the quake. It was quite the place, a hundred and seventy-five luxurious rooms, ballroom, dining room, tennis courts and all the rest—and right on the ocean too, for ocean bathing and lolling richly and idly on the confectionery beach. Mr. McCormick had never of course been inside nor had he even set foot on the grounds, but he often asked to drive slowly by it and get a look at who was passing through its portals, women included—especially women. And that was all right, as long as he didn’t try to get out of the car, but on this particular day they found their way blocked by the train heading south to Los Angeles, the crossguard down, the rain misting around them, the trees and succulents and sharp-leafed exotic shrubs all shining with it, eight cars in the line ahead of them. The train creaked and rattled, brakes whining, the slow backward illusion of the wheels caught in suspended time.
That was when O‘Kane saw the postbox, right there across the street, not twenty paces away. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, feeling for the envelope in his pocket, and then he was out on the glistening street and smelling the rank wet insistent odor of the eucalyptus buttons crushed into the pavement. He crossed the street and dropped the envelope in the box and had turned to hustle back to the car when he saw the dog, pale brown with a white star on its chest, trembling and wet, raising the black shining carbuncle of its nose to the slit of the window—and there was Mr. McCormick’s hand, extended, the last bits of tuna salad and rye descending toward the dog’s yearning pink mouth. And that was all right, no problem, no trouble, no hurry, even the thunder of the train something to hold and consider on a mild wet close-hung afternoon away from the cage of Riven Rock that made you wonder half the time who was the prisoner and who the keeper.
Sure. But then O‘Kane watched the dog jerk suddenly back and away as the door flung itself violently open and Mr. McCormick’s left shoe appeared beneath it on the pavement, and then the other shoe, the creased legs of his pants, the door gaping now and Mr. McCormick half-in and half-out, turning briefly to flail his fists at the shadow of Nurse Gleason’s desperately clinging form. O’Kane broke for the car, but it was too late, Mr. McCormick out in the street with a wild look in his eye and his hat on the ground like a dead thing and the yellow slicker already flapping behind him. He was gone, running in the spastic ducking canter O‘Kane knew so well, elbows flying, his head hanging there above his shoulders like an afterthought, but what did he want—the dog? Yes, the dog, skittering away from him suddenly in the direction of the train, the gleaming steel back-whirling wheels and manufactured thunder, and “Here, doggie, here, pooch, come here, come here.”
O‘Kane gave it everything he had, no time to think of the danger or the consequences, intent only on that loping mad twisted form he’d followed one place or another for the better part of his life, wedded to it, inured, stuck fast, but his knee wouldn’t cooperate. Mr. McCormick was running flat-out, dipping and feinting to grab at the dog, past the line of cars now, staring faces, a man with a cigar, lady in a hat, right up to the crossguard—and then, without hesitating, a simple compression of the spine, heartbeat and a half, he was under it.
It was almost inevitable that the dog would die. A brown streak shooting through the gap of the grinding wheels, the cars rocking, the slowest train in the world, and here was the dog’s last and final moment in this time, no sound at all but the screech of the wheels, and when O‘Kane reached Mr. McCormick, there was one long stripe of blood painted down the front of him, from his sorrowful stricken eyes to the yellow waist of the rain slicker.
“Eddie,” he said, but he jerked his arm away when O‘Kane tried to take it, and the train was right there, as loud as the very end of everything, “Eddie, I want to die,” he said. “Eddie, let me die.”
That was a moment O‘Kane would remember for the rest of his life, the life he would spend breathing air and eating food and sharing the sofa with Mr. Stanley Robert McCormick, a life he had no flake of choice in, because he didn’t let Mr. McCormick die under those ratcheting wheels, already blooded, already released, but seized him in his arms and hugged him to him with a fierceness no force on earth could ever hope to break.
8.
COME ON IN JACK
Katherine McCormick sat stiffly on one of the high-backed wooden benches of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse and studied the muraled walls with a vehemence of concentration that obliterated everything around her. Her clothes were flawless, her face neutral, her hair pinned up tightly beneath the brim of her hat. Her mother, looking sweet
and determined, perched protectively on one side of her, and Jane on the other. Above all, she kept telling herself, she mustn’t show any emotion. These people were like hounds, a whole yammering pack of them, the world of men arrayed against her yet again—the jostling rude loudmouthed reporters, the twanging hayseed of a judge, the McCormicks and their hired guns and even Bentley, her old nemesis, looking on from the wings with a mocking grin. But this time she had Newton Baker on her side, and if there was any man in America with more presence in a courtroom or a bigger reputation, short of Clarence Darrow himself, she’d like to know it. This was a fight she wasn’t going to lose.
So she studied the murals as if she were in the Prado or the Rijksmuseum, and tried to control her breathing and the wild fluttering surges of her heart. The courthouse was newly built, a replacement for the old structure that had fallen victim to the earthquake, and it was a grand high-crowned edifice in an ersatz Moorish-Iberian style, with hand-painted tiles from Algeria, half a mile of wrought iron, a flurry of arches and broad stone steps and a white watchtower that would have made Don Quixote feel right at home. The murals had been rendered by a Dutch set designer more usually employed by Cecil B. DeMille, and there was no danger of mistaking him for the reincarnation of Rembrandt. The one Katherine was fixed on at the moment depicted a group of noble savages and their dog looking suitably impressed as a group of halberd-wielding Spaniards descended on them from a galleon glimpsed mistily in the distance. The legend beneath it read: “1542. Fifty years after Columbus Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo lands at Las Canoas with the Flag of Spain. ”
Well, it was a distraction. And she needed a distraction, because Oscar Lawler, the McCormicks’ attorney, backed by his three assistants and the resources of two Los Angeles law firms, was leading some miseducated, misguided and thoroughly self-satisfied fool of a physician through his paces vis-à-vis the dangers of endocrine treatment. “Moreover, in the cases of quiescent catatonia,” the doctor droned, “it is now generally recognized that they do not depend on thyroid, pituitary or gonadal insufficiency.... In some instances the administration of thyroid substances has been followed by an exacerbation of the symptoms and in more than one instance an actual acute frenzy has developed....” And blah, blah, blah. Why didn’t Newt stand up and object? Why didn’t he slam his fist down on the table and put an end to this charade? When would they ever get to cross-examination?
After lunch, it seemed. The doctor, a true by-the-rote man who spewed up everything the McCormicks had crammed down him, came back to court with a smear of mustard on his collar, and Newton Baker stood up and went to work on him. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Orbison,” Newt wanted to know, “that to expect a cure for a man in Mr. McCormick’s condition through purely psychoanalytical means is an exercise in futility? Especially when, as a number of your distinguished colleagues in the medical profession have testified in this court, he is clearly dyspituitary and could be immeasurably helped, if not even cured, by feedings of the extract of the thyroid gland?”
Dr. Orbison, the smear of mustard in evidence, denied it. He felt that the patient had improved markedly under Dr. Kempf’s regime and he reiterated that gland feeding was dangerous and irresponsible in a case like Mr. McCormick’s.
“But isn’t it the case, doctor, that Dr. Kempf’s ‘treatment’ consists in nothing more than telling dirty stories for two hours each day, and this under the cover of medical authority, which makes it all the more detrimental, not to say reprehensible, and has had the effect of arousing in the patient an antipathy toward women—and toward his wife in particular? ”
Mr. Lawler objected. Mr. Baker was leading the witness. Judge Dehy sustained the objection and the question was stricken from the record, but not before the doctor denied it.
“All right then, sir,” Newt intoned, all solemnity and barely suppressed indignation, “deny me this: isn’t it a fact that Mr. McCormick is hopelessly insane and that his present physician’s treatment amounts to nothing more than so much hocus-pocus?”
Katherine gave a start, and all the courthouse saw her, the smug McCormicks, the scribbling reporters, and three assistants to Mr. Lawler and the stewing mass of whey-faced gawkers and hangers-on who only lusted after the most degrading details of her and her husband’s private life: Newt had gone too far. Yes, she understood he was trying to make a point, trying to suggest that psychoanalysis had its limits in cases like Stanley‘s, but hopelessly insane? He didn’t believe that, did he? The doctor, the McCormicks’ man, might have believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that God and his angels had set up a summer camp on Pluto, but he denied that her husband was hopelessly insane, and for a minute she forgot which side she was on.
There was more of the same the next day and the next and the day after that, doctors and more doctors, doctors for Lawler and the McCormicks, doctors for her and Newton Baker, and none of them had a thing to say you couldn’t have written on the back of a penny postcard. Then she had to endure the testimony of the nurses—Edward James O‘Kane, sinfully handsome even in his decline, taking the stand to say that yes, Dr. Kempf had done wonders, and how was that for gratitude? And worse: Lawler called witnesses to impugn her character, as if she were unfit to have the guardianship of her own husband. She was a radical, a feminist, a member of the American Birth Control League, and more than that they could only imply, because they wouldn’t dare, and it took everything she had in her to sit on that leather-upholstered bench and listen to them try to cast their filthy aspersions on Jane Roessing when there wasn’t a man or woman in that courtroom fit to wipe her feet....
Yes. And then they called her, Katherine Dexter McCormick, to the witness stand.
Did she swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and etcetera?
She did.
And she looked out over the courtroom with a calm and steady gaze, sweeping the tentative faces of Kempf and Cyrus and Harold and Anita, the twittering crush of reporters and curiosity seekers, the lawyers and expert witnesses huddled in their separate corners like teams out of uniform, before settling finally on Jane and her mother, drawn together now in the space she’d vacated. She gave them the briefest tight-lipped smile and then raised her eyes to Newt Baker’s. Now, she thought, now they would hear the truth, now they would hear how a greedy and vengeful family tried from the beginning to isolate her and cut her out and how their only intent was to separate her from her husband and preserve the McCormick fortune at all costs and how Kempf was simply the latest in a long line of quacks and charlatans hired to exclude her not only from her husband’s care but from his rooms and his house and the very sight of him. And who was the loser in all this? She was. And Stanley, never forget Stanley, deprived of her support and physical presence through all these cruel, inexorable, downwinding years. Oh, she had a story to tell.
Newt Baker led her through it step by step, as well as he could, but of course motive wasn’t admissible here except by implication and every time she began to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth Oscar Lawler popped up like a jack-in-the-box to object. Still, Newt was able to guide her toward a thorough airing of the central question at issue here: Kempf’s competence.
“When did you first suspect the efficacy—or lack thereof—of Dr. Kempf’s methods, Mrs. McCormick?” Newt asked in the gentlest wafting breeze of a voice.
“When he informed me, in all seriousness, that my husband’s teeth, which are in a deplorable state, would be somehow miraculously repaired through the effects of Freudian analysis.”
“His teeth?”
“Yes, you see my husband has an unreasoning fear of dentists because a dentist was involved in an altercation with him on the day of his breakdown, his final breakdown, that is. And this is quite clearly a case of the patient leading the physician, as if words alone could rectify a physical ailment—one that is well within our scope and means to repair through the expedient of dental surgery. This is a matter of tooth decay, not mental manipulation.”
Newt
gazed at the judge a moment, then leaned in close to the witness stand. His hair was silver now, not a trace of the color she remembered from the War years, and he carried himself with the exaggerated care that hinted at fragility, the first ineluctable whisper of old age—though he couldn’t have been more than sixty, if that. “And that,” he was saying, “was when you first began to suspect that Dr. Kempf’s treatment, though we’ve heard it irresponsibly lauded here in this court, might be akin to mental healing or Christian Science even?”
“That’s correct.” Katherine drew herself up, sought out Kempf’s eyes, gave the judge a look as if to be sure he was listening, and then came back to Newt, who was waiting there like a catcher crouched behind the plate at Fenway Park, and she the pitcher all wound-up and ready to let fly. “I told him it was utter nonsense, unscientific and ineffective, and that there were physical treatments available to treat physical problems like my husband‘s—thyroid feeding, for instance. He proceeded to give me a long account of his new theory, which he’s embodied in a monograph called ’The Autonomic System’ or some such. He sees himself as very big in the field and explained to me how this new theory of his was being gradually accepted and how widely it would affect the position of psychoanalysis. But no amount of talk, whether it be therapeutic or merely harmful and alienating, is going to cure a physical ailment.”
“And Dr. Kempf persisted in applying this ‘theory’ to your husband, despite the fact that noted physicians like Dr. R. G. Hoskins of Harvard found your husband ’indubitably endocrinopathic,‘ I believe the term was?”
“Yes.”
Newt took a moment to stride from one end of the raised platform in front of the box to the other. This was his moment, and he seemed to swell himself in proportion to it. “And that was when Dr. Kempf, who had been engaged above your objections by your husband’s other two guardians—Cyrus and Anita McCormick—at the staggering sum of ten thousand dollars a month, turned on you and banished you altogether from your husband’s house?”