"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 bulls.h.i.t 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 h.e.l.l, 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 tyc.o.o.ns 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.tons 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.
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 tw.a.n.ging 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 n.o.ble 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. " "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 a.s.sistants 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-a-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 psychoa.n.a.lytical 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 a.s.sistants to Mr. Lawler and the stewing ma.s.s of whey-faced gawkers and hangers-on who only l.u.s.ted 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 psychoa.n.a.lysis had its limits in cases like Stanley"s, but hopelessly insane? 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 G.o.d 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. He didn"t believe that, did he? The doctor, the McCormicks" man, might have believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude? 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 s.p.a.ce she"d vacated. She gave them the briefest tight-lipped smile and then raised her eyes to Newt Baker"s. Now, Now, she thought, she thought, now 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. 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 a.n.a.lysis."
"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 psychoa.n.a.lysis. 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?"
Mr. Lawler rose to object. Judge Dehy, who seemed either to be asleep or in a state of suspended animation, made a show of rustling about in his seat before murmuring, "Objection overruled."
Katherine turned her face to the judge, all the hurt stabbing at her eyes, the crime of it, the abuse, the indecency and injustice. She felt her voice quaver. "Yes," she said, "yes. That"s it. That"s exactly it."
Then it was Lawler"s turn, and he couldn"t make her so much as flinch, though to a man like that no accusation was too scandalous or irresponsible, no scab too thin to pick, and he went after her with everything in his mercenary"s a.r.s.enal. He questioned her competency as a guardian, her scientific background, her attachment to "radical" causes, her friendship with Mrs. Roessing, but nothing, nothing could make her waver. It was "Yes, Mr. Lawler," and "No, Mr. Lawler," throughout the afternoon and into the next morning.
-And wasn"t it the case that her husband had improved dramatically and that it was Dr. Kempf who was responsible?
-No, she insisted, no it wasn"t. Her husband had simply settled down with age.
-But she wanted his money, didn"t she, to devote to her radical causes and Mrs. Margaret Sanger"s G.o.dless movement to prevent natural conception?
-No, she didn"t want money. She wanted control of her husband"s care because of the mess the McCormicks had made of it. She loved her husband. She wanted to see him well.
And then, eleven o"clock in the morning and with Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his Indians and their fawning dog all lit with the glow of the day advancing beyond the windows, Oscar Lawler rested his arms on the rail of the witness box and drank her up with his hateful liver-complected eyes. There was dandruff on the shoulders of his brown suit, dandruff in his eyebrows; his nails were bitten to the quick. He was so close she could almost smell him. "Then you believe," he said, his voice rich with irony, "in contradiction of your own attorney and his string of "expert" witnesses, that your husband is not hopelessly insane. Is that correct?"
"Yes," she said, her voice nothing more than a whisper, "yes, I believe it," but Newton Baker was rising to object or request an adjournment or dash outside to climb the flagpole and howl at the sky, but she wasn"t really there, not any longer. The phrase Lawler had used-the phrase Newt had used, just to make a point-came back at her, beating at her like a rising sea, hopelessly insane, hopelessly insane, hopelessly insane, hopelessly insane, till she felt herself letting go and she wasn"t in the courtroom anymore staring down at that chittering little rodent of a man in his litigious brown and his sleek lawyerly shoes... no, she was in Boston, twenty-three years ago, and it was the morning of the day Stanley went out of her orbit for good and ever. till she felt herself letting go and she wasn"t in the courtroom anymore staring down at that chittering little rodent of a man in his litigious brown and his sleek lawyerly shoes... no, she was in Boston, twenty-three years ago, and it was the morning of the day Stanley went out of her orbit for good and ever.
The night had held, a dense fabric of the familiar and the usual, Stanley stretched out like a corpse across the bed in the guestroom, Katherine lying awake and staring into the darkness of her room down the hall. She awoke to the smell of bacon and came down to breakfast feeling as drained and exhausted as if she"d been up a hundred nights in a row: the German teacher had gotten away unharmed, but who was next and how would it end? Stanley was already up and dressed, seated at the table in the dining room with the newspaper folded neatly at his elbow and a pyramid of sausages, bacon, eggs and fried tomatoes all mounded up in the center of the plate before him. He looked, of all things, crisp crisp-crisp and fresh in a new shirt, collar and cuffs, his face newly shaven, his hair still damp and fastidiously combed away from the sweep of his brow and the tight plumb-line of his parting. "Good morning, Stanley," she murmured, and he glanced up quickly, frowned, and went back to his newspaper.
Josephine wasn"t down yet, and Katherine took the place across from her husband and rang for tea and a toasted m.u.f.fin and jam. She didn"t have much of an appet.i.te, not after what she"d been through the night before, but she"d always believed in exercise and vigor and the fuel to sustain it, and she felt she"d force herself to have something at least. The maid appeared, a little curtsy, face of stone, the door swinging once and then twice and here was sustenance set out before her. She b.u.t.tered her m.u.f.fin in silence, waiting for Stanley to take the lead, and then made a pa.s.s at the jam and poured a dollop of cream into her tea, stirring all the while. Her heart was pounding. She had to say something. "Looks to be a pleasant day," she said, "for January, I mean. I just don"t think I can stand any more of this gloomy weather, and at least the sun"s shining for a change...." She trailed off.
Stanley looked up then, and his eyes seemed to be swollen, leaping right out of his head, as if there were a corpse nailed to the wall behind her. "I-Katherine," he suddenly blurted, "about the, uh, the German teacher-"
"Yes?"
"I"ve decided not to study German, not-not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Maybe next month. Or the month after that. It-it"s my teeth, you see, I mean my tooth, you see, I-well, it aches and hurts me and I think, my mood yesterday-"
She softened. And she hoped, still and foolishly, because wouldn"t that be something if it was all just a kind of poisoning of the system and hadn"t she just yesterday remarked to her mother about his breath being tainted? "You poor thing," she said. "Do you want me to have a look?"
"No."
"Well, what about a dentist then? Shouldn"t you be seeing a dentist if it"s bothering you, especially in light of your nerves and the sort of thing that took place in this house last night?" And here she couldn"t stop herself. "Really, Stanley, I don"t mean to lecture but you can"t just go around brawling with people on the docks and, and kidnapping kidnapping German teachers. It"s gone too far. It has. You need help, Stanley, professional help, and you"ve got to let me take you someplace where you can get the kind of care and rest you need ... just till your nerves are settled." She tried on a smile. "Wouldn"t that be the best thing to do?" German teachers. It"s gone too far. It has. You need help, Stanley, professional help, and you"ve got to let me take you someplace where you can get the kind of care and rest you need ... just till your nerves are settled." She tried on a smile. "Wouldn"t that be the best thing to do?"
He stood abruptly, in the same motion s.n.a.t.c.hing a fistful of food from his plate and forcing it into his mouth. He was shaking his head back and forth automatically, his cheeks bulging, his eyes sinking all the way back down to nothing, pitiful starved eyes that seemed to beg for help and intervention, and she got up too and reached out to him.
The table lay between them, the cold eggs, the sausage and bacon subsiding in a pool of congealed fat. His jaws were working and yet he winced with every downward thrust. "My, my tooth," tooth," he said, spewing bits of partially masticated food, "I-I"ve got to f-find a dentist-" he said, spewing bits of partially masticated food, "I-I"ve got to f-find a dentist-"
"I"ll call mother"s dentist-he"s really quite good and I"m sure, if it"s an emergency, he"d be-"
"No, no," Stanley cried, still chewing, food down the front of his shirt now, "I-I have to go," and he shot out the door, through the hall and down the stairs, where he s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat and overcoat before plunging into the cube of light that stood there in place of the front door.
All right, fine, she was thinking, trying to calm herself, trying to stop quaking and fuming every time he entered or left the room. He"d gone to the dentist to have a bad tooth seen to. What could be more normal or prosaic? She shook her head as if to clear it, squashed all her worries and presentiments, and went back up to bed.
When she woke it was past ten and she saw that she was going to be late for her appointment with Professor Durward, who was in the process of setting up a very intriguing set of experiments into the nature of simian s.e.xuality with a young Harvard psychiatrist by the name of Hamilton. She was hoping to get some direction from him regarding her own future at the Inst.i.tute-she very much wanted to work with larger animals, rats, rabbits, apes and monkeys, rather than the microbes or fruit flies everyone seemed to prefer. But she"d have to call and rescheduie-if she could even get through on the phone-or maybe she could make it after all, if she hurried.
In the end, she chose to take a cab to the Inst.i.tute and she did manage to catch Professor Durward, who seemed to have forgotten all about her, and she stayed on through the afternoon and examined some of his charges with him-a shipment of twelve rhesus monkeys from India. They stared out at her from their cages in a dull yellow bundle of limbs and parodic faces, their toes and fingers so human-like as they gripped the wire or groomed themselves and their babies. There were two babies among them, she remembered, spa.r.s.e clinging things that had been born on shipboard, or so Professor Durward claimed.
It was late in the afternoon by the time she got home, and she found Stanley waiting for her on the front steps, highly agitated. His collar was torn, there was a gash over his left eye and his lower lip was yellow and crusted. He"d had a fight with the dentist or the dentist"s receptionist or a man in the waiting room or the taxi driver who brought him there, she could see that in a minute, one of a thousand fights, fights that would go on till he was stopped. Or killed. She took one look at him and wanted to walk right on by, sick to death of him, ready to call it quits, send him back to his mother, anything, but the choice wasn"t in her hands, not this time.
The minute he saw her he leapt to his feet and grabbed her arm. "You-you can"t leave me like that," he said, breathless, the veins swollen in his neck above the slashed collar. "Who was it," he demanded, forcing her up the steps and against the slab of the door, "one of your boyfriends? But-Butler Ames? Huh? Tell me!"
"I"ve been at the Inst.i.tute," she said.
"Lies!" he spat. "All lies!"
She told him he was hurting her-and he was, the strength of him, his hand like a ligature right there above her elbow-but he just kept repeating "Who was it?" over and over again. Then she took her key out and they were in the hallway, fighting away from one another, the maid"s stricken face lost somewhere behind the plants, and then she was free of him and dashing up the stairs, his feet thundering behind. Up and up, no time to stop or reason, down the hallway and into her room, the door shut and bolted and him out there on the runner pounding and pounding. "Let me in!" he cried, and he was furious, pounding, "let me in!"
After a minute he stopped, and the fury had gone out of his voice. "Please," he begged, "please let me in. I-I"ll be good, I will." He was sobbing now, hot and cold, and where was the tap to turn it off, where was it? "I-I love you, Katherine. Don"t leave me."
She clung to the door, and she found that she was crying too, a dry rasp of the throat and the water stinging her eyes. This was it, this was her life, this was her marriage, a madman in the hall and an inch-and-a-half thickness of mahogany between her and harm, yes, harm, because all of a sudden he"d begun to rage again, hammering the door with his shoulder, the bolt shivering, the frame heaving and protesting. "Go away!" she screamed.
There was no answer, not for the longest time, and she held her breath and listened, listened so hard she could hear the thoughts colliding in his head and the blood bolting through his veins, and then there was a sudden crash and the wood gave way where it was thinnest, right in the middle of the center panel, and she could see his face through the snarling hole, nothing but eyes, all eyes, seeking her out. "I"ll k-kill you, you b.i.t.c.h!" he roared.
She backed away from the door, all the way across the room to the bed, and he began shouting out to someone only he could see. "Jack!" he cried. "Jack London! Come on in, Jack, and we"ll both have her!"
That was when she retreated to the closet, the last place she could go, the key on the inside of the door and the door shut tight, and nothing but darkness now and fear, fear and hate, because he was what she was afraid of and that made her hate him beyond all forgiveness or consolation. Stanley. Stanley Robert McCormick, the madman, the lunatic, the nut, the s.e.xual hypochondriacal neurasthenic. And that was what she was left with when they came and got him and they put him in the straitjacket and the sheet restraints and used all their outraged male muscle to hold him down.
But that wasn"t how she wanted to remember him, not now in the stairwell of the courthouse with the reporters shoving their faces at her and Newt Baker guiding her by that same abused elbow with a grip as gentle and tactful as it was firm. That wasn"t right. That wasn"t Stanley. No, she remembered him the way he was that night in Chicago, the ground frozen hard and his mother looming beside them in the carriage like some excrescence and demanding that they take Miss Dexter directly home: "Rush Street? Have you lost your senses?"
He"d fought for her. Stood up to his mother and made his choice. And when he came back to the carriage he was ten feet tall, her Stanley, all hers. A hush, the door pulled to, that intimate s.p.a.ce all ordained, hot bricks for their feet under the fur robe, the pale light fading, the horses moving now through the richest haze of possibility. He was shy and awkward and he wanted to talk about Debs, "About Debs and what he said in the paper the other-the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I"ve-"
He never got to finish the thought, as if it would have mattered, because Debs could only take you so far, and Debs didn"t matter now and he never would again. She put her hand on his chest and felt his heart living there beneath his coat, his jacket, his shirt. "Hush, Stanley," she said, and she felt her face move toward his through the heavy atmosphere and complex gravity of love. "You don"t need to talk now," she whispered, "not anymore. Just kiss me, Stanley. Kiss me."
EPILOGUE.
1947, World Without Walls And so he died a prisoner, Stanley Robert McCormick, seventy-two years old and his hair white as bone, handsome, tall and bereft till the last. Nurse Gleason was gone, along with her stalwart charms, and Muriel gave up visiting for her own life, and though the new doctor-Dr. Russell-had a shining golden b.u.t.tercup of a secretary and there was a dietician with two b.r.e.a.s.t.s roaming around somewhere in the depths of the house and the Italian woman, Eddie O"Kane"s wife, cooked on in the kitchen, Stanley never got to touch any of them or hold them in his arms the way his mother had held him or the way Katherine had. She came to visit almost every day, Katherine, or every other day, because sometimes he didn"t want to see her, just refused, flatly and absolutely, and no one to make him say different, and she came haunting the streets all the way from her house in downtown Santa Barbara with the grand modern rooms and the gymnasium she"d built for him to use when he came visiting, but he never came visiting.
He couldn"t touch her her either, because he"d been up in the Yukon Territory with Sitka Charley and the Malemute Kid and whole considerable teams of dogs and she wasn"t woman enough for him-no, she was an old lady, of the very properest and stiffest sort, and she sat and read to him from the paper and made him kiss her on the cheek every time she came and went. Then he became ill with pneumonia and all the florid faces and vivid formless things came back to him again and inhabited him and raised an unholy yowl of voices inside him, and the Judges were there too in their flapping black robes and no surcease. He was thirty-one years old when he was blocked the first time and he was worth six million dollars and he knew all about that because he was the comptroller and could add up two columns of figures as well as any man or mathematician alive. And when he died finally and was finally released into a world without walls or bars or restraints, he was worth thirty-four million and more, because it wasn"t his money they"d locked up-it was his body. And his mind. either, because he"d been up in the Yukon Territory with Sitka Charley and the Malemute Kid and whole considerable teams of dogs and she wasn"t woman enough for him-no, she was an old lady, of the very properest and stiffest sort, and she sat and read to him from the paper and made him kiss her on the cheek every time she came and went. Then he became ill with pneumonia and all the florid faces and vivid formless things came back to him again and inhabited him and raised an unholy yowl of voices inside him, and the Judges were there too in their flapping black robes and no surcease. He was thirty-one years old when he was blocked the first time and he was worth six million dollars and he knew all about that because he was the comptroller and could add up two columns of figures as well as any man or mathematician alive. And when he died finally and was finally released into a world without walls or bars or restraints, he was worth thirty-four million and more, because it wasn"t his money they"d locked up-it was his body. And his mind.
Katherine inherited that money, all of it, and everything else too-the properties in Chicago that were minted of gold, the securities and stocks, Stanley"s eight grades of underwear and the house at Riven Rock with the bars on the windows and the eighty-seven acres with their views of the stunned and scoured islands and the nurses who were all through with nursing now. She sold the estate to pay the inheritance taxes and she took what was left to seed the causes and inst.i.tutions she believed in-MIT, the League of Women Voters, the Santa Barbara Art Museum and Dr. Gregory Pincus, an old friend of Roy Hoskins, who developed a little yellow progesterone-based pill that would free women forever from s.e.xual constraint. All that was to the good, but she lost the court case, despite what the newspapers said. Kempf was sent packing, that much she"d accomplished, but the McCormicks were still there in all their obstinacy and immovability and the judge had added three whisker-pulling male physicians to the board of guardians and all the wrangling went on and on. It was a partial victory, she supposed, but there was little consolation in that. Because she never did get the thing she wanted most-her husband-not until he was dead.
And by then it was too late.
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE[image]
In fourteen smart, funny, and richly crafted works, T. C. Boyle strips away the veneer of respectability draped across the American psyche, and exposes the comical truths beneath.
AFTER THE PLAGUE.
These sixteen stories display an astonishing range, as Boyle zeroes in on everything from air rage to abortion doctors to the story of a 1920s Sicilian immigrant who constructs an amazing underground mansion in an effort to woo his sweetheart. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, these new stories find "one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers" (The New York Times) (The New York Times) at the top of his form. at the top of his form. ISBN 0-14-200141-4 ISBN 0-14-200141-4
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