Riven Rock Part 10

He began with the ox joints consomme, followed by cuc.u.mber spears, olives and the boiled halibut with egg sauce and Parisienne potatoes. He chose the boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce for his meat course, with apple fritters, boiled onions, new green peas and the tomato salad au mayonnaise. For dessert, he began with the bread pudding in cognac sauce, then sampled the Roquefort and Edam cheeses with fruit and biscuit, and he was lingering over his cafe noir when he happened to glance up and catch the eye of a young woman seated all the way across the room from him in the midst of a gay-looking young group.

Or he didn't catch her eye, not exactly-she seemed to have caught his. She was staring at him, and she never flinched or turned away when he looked up and saw that she was staring. Normally he wouldn't have made a thing of it-if anything, he would have shied away and pretended to study the configuration of his cuticles for the next half hour-but he'd never felt so good and the wine was sparkling in his veins and invading his eyes and inhabiting his smile, and there was something about her that was maddeningly familiar, almost as if he knew her.... And after all he'd been through that day, well, he couldn't help himself. When one of the men in her party got up from the table and crossed the room to the lavatory, Stanley rose inconspicuously and made his way to the lavatory too. Avoiding the mirrors, he watched as the man emerged from one of the stalls and washed up at the sink, and then he cleared his throat, introduced himself and asked if he might not have an introduction to the young lady in blue?

The man was Morris Johnston. He was of average height and build, he dressed in an average way, and his hair and eye color were resolutely average as well-that is, he was neither stout nor thin, not showy but no stick-in-the-mud either, and his coloring was mouse brown. "Oh, you mean Katherine?" he said, not at all taken aback.

"Yes," Stanley managed, tugging at his collar, which suddenly felt like a garrote round his throat, "Katherine," and he was trying out the name. "I think I know her. What's her family name?"

Morris flashed a smile. "Dexter," he said. "Katherine Dexter. But you're not from Boston, are you?"

It all came back to him then, from the look of Monsieur LaBonte's tortured mustaches to the smell of the wax on the polished floorboards of his studio and the feel of that twelve-year-old girl in his arms, all wing and bone and tentative shuffling feet, the girl who was Katherine Dexter, now grown and mature and sitting in the next room, dressed in blue. "No," he said, remembering the moistness of her palms in that overheated room, the proximity of their bodies, the quality of her laugh on a certain winter day when the temperature plummeted and the snow dropped softly from the sky like the plucked feathers of some rare celestial creature, "I used to know her in Chicago."

He was shy, Stanley, furtive still, the boy who burrowed, but there was something about Katherine that made him want to open up, turn himself inside out like a glove or a sock, to hide nothing, to spill it all, fears, dreams, hopes, predilections, theories, fixations. They reminisced about Chicago, and when they'd gone round for the second time and remembered everything twice and exhausted the roster of mutual acquaintances and experiences, he saw the light fading in her eyes-she was tired? bored? sated with Monsieur LaBonte and Prairie Avenue and b.u.mpy Swift?-and he felt a terrible tension rising in him. He had to hold her there, he had to, even if it meant reaching out to touch her wrist where it lay so casually, so nakedly perfect on the table before him, touch it and seize it and pull her to him, though he knew he could never do that, even if he'd sat beside her every night for a thousand years. But if she left him, if she got up from the table, if she danced with Morris Johnston or yawned and put a hand to her mouth and excused herself to turn in for the night or even to use the ladies' room, he would die. His mouth was full of ashes, his heart was pounding, and even as she leaned toward this other one, this Butler Ames, a whisper on her lips, he felt the voice tighten in his throat and heard himself blurting, "Have you read Debs's Unionism andSocialism?" Unionism andSocialism?"

It was the key, the first principle, the beginning. And so much was engendered there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, because the key fit and the key turned, and from that moment on he wooed her with the sweetest phrases from the driest texts, with reform, the uplifting of the poor, the redistribution of wealth and the seizing of the means of production for the good and glory of the common man.

In the morning, at first light, he was outside her door, rapping. He needed to talk to her, but he didn't want to disturb her, didn't want to spoil her sleep or upset her schedule-they'd been up past one, after all-and so he rapped gently. Very gently. So gently he could barely detect the sound himself. There was no response and he knew he should leave it at that, but he needed to talk to her-he'd been up all night with the need of it-and he rapped harder. And when that got no reaction he began to thump the door with the heel of his hand, louder and progressively louder, until finally he forgot himself altogether and he was boxing with that mute stubborn unreasoning slab of wood, left/right, left/right, and he set up such a racket that the janitor came running with his mop and an old woman in a cap poked her head out of the next door up the hall and chastised him with a look that wilted him on the spot. "Shhhhh!" she hissed. "Get away from there now. Are you crazy?"

He ducked away, shamefaced, and let his shoulders sag beneath the weight of his criminality, but ten minutes later he was back at Katherine's door again, rapping. This time, the instant his knuckles made contact with the wood, her m.u.f.fled voice rose wearily from some buried niche of her room: "Who is it?"

"It's me, Stanley. I've got to talk to you."

"Who?"

"Stanley. From last night?"

A pause. "Oh, Stanley." Another pause. "Yes. All right. Just let me get dressed."

"That's fine," he said, raising his voice so she could hear him through all that rigid cellulose and the vacant s.p.a.ce of her sitting room, "because I wanted to tell you what I've done with my ranch in New Mexico-that's where I've spent the better part of the past two years, you know, roughing it like a cowboy in all that fine air and dramatic scenery, you should see it, you really should-but what I wanted to tell you is that I've organized the ranch as a cooperative concern where we all share equally in the profits, from the meanest hand to the one-legged Mexican cook, every one of us equal under the western sun, and you might not know that I'm the one who inst.i.tuted the profit-sharing scheme at the Harvester Company, against my brothers' objections, and I set aside the money for the McCormick Factory Workers' Club too-"

And then the door opened and there she was, Katherine, the sweetest compression of a smile, her eyes searching his, and she was dressed in her tennis whites, a racquet dangling casually from her hand. "Do you play?" she asked.

"I-well-yes-I-well, in college, at Princeton, that is-"

"Singles?"

"Sure."

"You don't mind playing before breakfast, now? Because if you do, don't be afraid to tell me." She was smiling up at him as if he'd just bought her all of Asia and laid the deed at her feet. "You'll play then?"

"Sure."

But this was a conundrum, a real conundrum. It weighed on him as he hurried back to his room to change into his tennis things while she waited just outside the door, and he was still worrying it as he won service on a spin of the racquet and took his position behind the baseline. He'd never played tennis with a woman before and he didn't know the etiquette involved: he didn't want to overpower her-that wouldn't be gentlemanly, not at all-and yet he didn't want her to think he was playing down to her either. And so he tried to moderate his serve accordingly, putting the first one right in the center of the box at what must have been half the usual velocity, and with a very nice straightforward bounce to it. She surprised him by driving it directly back at him, and the surprise showed: his return was a bit tardy and he slapped the ball impotently into the net. She was glowing, beautiful, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon beneath the straw boater that was cinched under her chin with a strip of white muslin. "Love-fifteen," she chirped.

"I'm sorry," he called, "I'm afraid I'm a bit rusty, I've been so busy lately with the Harvester business and the ranch and a thousand and one other things I just haven't had time to, to-"

The ball was in the air, rising above the arc of his racquet as if it had a life of its own, and he served again, this time with a bit more muscle, and again she drove it right back, a wicked slashing shot into the far corner he just managed to return with a flailing backhand, and he felt a momentary thrill of satisfaction over that effort until she caught the ball at the net and put it away with a stroke as efficient as it was elegant. He admired that, he really did, a woman so athletic and fit, so nimble-she was like an Olympian, like Diana the huntress with her bow, only in this case the bow was a tennis racquet, and as he bent to retrieve the ball he congratulated himself on his evenhandedness and restraint, though of course he would have to a.s.sert himself before long, etiquette or no. "Love-thirty," she called.

By the fourth game he was down three games to one and sweating so copiously you would have thought he'd been in for a swim with his clothes on. Katherine, on the other hand, was barely ruffled, as neat and composed as she'd been when she emerged from her room an hour ago. She was a master, it seemed, at putting the ball just out of his reach and whipping him from one end of the court to the other with a whole grab bag of trick shots, lobs, aggressive net play and stinging ground strokes. He began to strain, hammering his serves as if the object of the game was to put the ball right through the turf and bury it three feet deep in the ground, and of course, the harder he tried the wilder his shots became. He double-faulted, then double-faulted again. By the end of the first set, which she won, six games to one, he was panting just like a-well, a dog.

"Are you all right?" she asked. She was standing at the net, preparing to switch sides. There wasn't a mark on her, not so much as a single bead of sweat, though it was a muggy morning, the temperature eighty already-at least.

"Oh, no, no-I-its just-well, I do admire the way you play. You're really quite good."

She gave him a mysterious smile, but she didn't say a word.

Later, over breakfast on the patio, he sank into his chair and swatted gnats while she told him all about her career at the Inst.i.tute, the circulatory systems of snakes and toads and her hopes for the emanc.i.p.ation of women. And how did he feel about it? Did he believe women should have the vote?

Well of course he did-he was right-thinking and progressive, wasn't he? And he told her so, but he didn't really elaborate, because he was exhausted, for one thing-all that motor travel, his frayed nerves, up all night, three sets of tennis-and because he was fixated at that moment on the way Katherine's lips parted and closed and parted again to reveal her even white teeth and the animated pink tip of her tongue as she spoke, her eyes flashing, her knuckles drilling the table in declamatory fervor. He realized then, in that gnat-haunted moment with the sugary scent of new-mown gra.s.s on the air and his melon getting warm and his eggs cold, that he wanted to kiss those lips, touch that tongue with his own, and more, much more: he wanted her, all of'her, right down to and including the problematic whiteness at the center of her. Katherine, he wanted Katherine. He wanted to marry her, that's what he wanted, and the knowledge of it came to him in a moment of epiphany that made him shudder with the intensity of his longing and the nakedness of his need.

"Are you catching a chill?" she asked, scrutinizing him with her ice-blue gaze.

"No," he said.

"And you're not eating-don't tell me you're not hungry after all that exercise?"

This was the time to tell her how he felt, this was the time for sweet talk, for lovers' banter, the time to say, How can mere food hope to sustain me when I have the vision of you to feast on?, but he didn't tell her that, he couldn't, and he fiddled with his fork a minute before lifting his eyes to hers. "When the ma.s.ses have enough on their plates," he said, "when the tenements have been torn down and good decent housing erected in their stead and on every table a leg of lamb and mint jelly, then I'll eat."

Two days later, Katherine was gone. Her vacation was over, the new semester beginning, her thesis beckoning. Before she left, she gave him a blue bow tie and a box of maple sugar candy molded in the shapes of squirrels, rabbits and Scotch terriers, and he gave her a copy of the Debs pamphlet and a first edition of Frank Norris's The Pit. He'd begged her to stay, prostrating himself at her feet, all wrought-up with speeches about conditions in the textile mills, settlement houses and the immigrant poor, but he never mentioned love-it wasn't in his power-and she had to go, he understood that. Still, he was devastated, and no sooner had she boarded the train than he was off for Boston in the Mercedes. He packed hurriedly, with none of the indecision that had plagued him in recent years, and he brought Morris Johnston along with him, both as a sympathetic ear he could fill with praises of Katherine and as a buffer against any subversive lavatory mirrors that might spring up like windmills in his path.

On arriving, he took rooms at a hotel near Katherine's mother's place on Commonwealth Avenue and began his siege. He sent flowers daily, whole greenhouses full, and he called each evening on the stroke of seven, his palms sweating, heart thumping, eyes crawling in his head. The maid greeted him with a sentimental smile, and Mrs. Dexter, Katherine's mother, beamed and prattled and plied him with an endless array of sweetmeats, sandwiches, fruits, nuts and beverages, while he sat awkwardly in the parlor and thought of Katherine dressing in the empyreal realms above him. And did Mr. McCormick appreciate how clever her daughter was? Mrs. Dexter wanted to know. She'd tried to discourage her with this scientific business from the beginning, heaven knew, because science just wasn't a lady's provenance, or hadn't been, until Katherine came along to tackle it with her keen intellect and persevering nature, but now she had to admit that her daughter couldn't have made her prouder, and would he like another chocolate?

And Katherine. She was receptive, very sweet and encouraging, a paragon, especially during his first few visits, and that made him soar with a kind of elation he'd never known, but by the end of the week she'd begun to beg off on account of her studies and he found himself spending more and more time with Mrs. Dexter, a teacup balanced on one knee and a plate of sandwiches on the other. She had to study, of course she did-she was a brainy intellectual young woman and she'd been working eight years for this-but still it threw him into a panic. What if she were using her studies as an excuse, a way to get rid of him early so she could slip out at nine or ten and flit around with Butler Ames, whom he'd already encountered twice on her very doorstep? He was beside himself. He couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep. And he didn't dare look in the mirror.

But on Friday she consented to go to dinner and the theater with him, and he took her and her mother to dine at his hotel and then to a very amusing production of The Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest. At least Stanley found it amusing, and Katherine seemed to enjoy herself too, laughing in all the right places, but he worried that it might be too frivolous for her, not enough concerned with the pressing issues of the day, and when they got back to her place he started in on Debs again, by way of compensation. "Do you know what Debs says?" he began as Mrs. Dexter made a discreet exit and the maid set down a plate of poppy seed cakes and vanished. At least Stanley found it amusing, and Katherine seemed to enjoy herself too, laughing in all the right places, but he worried that it might be too frivolous for her, not enough concerned with the pressing issues of the day, and when they got back to her place he started in on Debs again, by way of compensation. "Do you know what Debs says?" he began as Mrs. Dexter made a discreet exit and the maid set down a plate of poppy seed cakes and vanished.

Katherine sat across from him, in an armchair. Outside, it was raining, the streets shining with it, the sound of the horses' hoofs magnified in the steadily leaking night air. You could hear them-clop, clop, clop-and that was all, but for the hiss of the rain and the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. "No," she sighed, tucking her feet up under her skirts and settling into the chair. "I don't really know."

" 'The few who own the machines do not use them,' " Stanley quoted, leaning forward with a sage look. " 'The many who use them do not own them. ' You see? Simple, direct, brilliant. And of course the result is the sort of inequity you and I see and abhor every day but that the rest of the world seems to turn its back on. He wants national laws to protect workers against accidents on the job, unemployment and old age insurance programs, public works for the unemployed-and until workers take over the means of production, a decrease in the work hours as production increases-"

She didn't seem to be listening. She was stirring a cup of tea with a demita.s.se spoon, her eyes unfocused and vague.

"He says," Stanley went on, "he says-"

"Stanley?"

"I-um-yes?"

"Please don't take this the wrong way, but while I admire your commitment to the progressive causes, I really do, don't you ever stop to wonder why you seem, well, so obsessed with them?"

"Me? Obsessed?"

She laughed then, and he didn't know whether to laugh with her or to bristle because she might have meant it as a barb, the tiniest dart that would tear his flesh open, a wound that would grow wider and wider till there was room enough for all the Butler Ameses of the world to march right on through him. His face was blank. He reached for a poppy seed cake and got it halfway to his mouth before he thought better of it and set it back carefully on the plate.

"Could it be a defensive reaction, do you think? I mean, because you and I have so much in contrast to the poor?"

"Well-I-yes. Yes, of course. My father, you see, he's the one. He wouldn't allow a union in his shop, the Haymarket Riots, all that, and it's not right, it's not. My father-" he said, and he found he couldn't quite organize his thoughts beyond that, because his head was suddenly filled with the image of that cranky imperious old man with his jabbing rapier of a beard, filling the halls of the house with his roars and his bile and his unloving fierce stifling presence. "My father-" he repeated.

Katherine's voice was very soft, so soft he had to. strain to hear it over the noise of the rain, the plodding horses, the ticking of the clock that rose suddenly in volume till it was like a whole symphony of clocks all beating time in unison, tearing away at the hours, the minutes, the seconds he had left before she got up and dismissed him. "I know it must be hard," she said, "but you have to put it behind you. And as admirable as progressive reform may be, there are other things in life-music, painting, all the arts-and when a man and woman are alone together, when they're as intimate as you and I are now, don't you think there are more appropriate things to talk about?"

"Well, yes," he said, but he didn't have a clue.

Another sigh. "Oh, Stanley, I don't know about you. You're very sweet, but really, you do have a lot to learn about the art of wooing." And then she stood and the maid was there and the evening was over.

He was back the next day, undeterred, ready to hire Cyrano to rehea.r.s.e his speeches for him, anything, but he couldn't seem to get socialism out of his head. In the afternoon, he took Katherine and Mrs. Dexter to the art museum, and he was able to talk knowledgeably about t.i.tian, Tintoretto and the Dutch masters and fill them in on his experiences as a pupil of Monsieur Julien in Paris, but inevitably he found the conversation veering back toward social welfare and reform, because what was art after all but a plaything of the rich? Katherine couldn't dine with him that evening-she was busy preparing for the following day's cla.s.ses-and he brooded over a long tasteless repast, which he interrupted three times to wire his mother on the subject of Katherine and her perfection, her intellect, her beauty, and his mother wired back almost immediately: WORRIED SICK STOP HAVEN'T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WEEK STOP VERY INCONSIDERATE STOP KATHERINE WHO? STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

Then-and he couldn't help himself; he felt he'd explode like an overbaked potato if he had to look at those pallid hotel-room walls another second-he took a stroll past Katherine's house. A stroll, that was all. A const.i.tutional. For his health. He had no thought of snooping, no thought of encountering Butler Ames or his ilk on the doorstep or catching Katherine slipping into a coach in her dinner clothes, nothing of the kind. It was raining again. He'd forgotten his umbrella and his silk hat was like a lead weight bearing down on the crown of his head and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through by the time he'd made his eighth circuit of Katherine's block. And when he became conscious of that, the wetness beginning to seep through now, he just happened, by the purest coincidence, to be pa.s.sing by the front entrance of Mrs. Dexter's neat and prim narrow-shouldered stone house at 393 Commonwealth Avenue.

Katherine had made it very clear that she couldn't see him, and he respected that, he did, but he couldn't seem to prevent himself from mounting the steps and pressing the buzzer anyway. All sorts of things went through his head in the interval between pressing the buzzer and the maid's appearance-visions of Butler Ames, with his blowfish eyes and prissy little hands, making love to Katherine over a box of chocolates, Katherine husbanded with nineteen faceless suitors, Katherine out dancing at that very moment and not lucubrating over a stack of scientific texts shot through with diagrams of the internal anatomy of lizards, turtles and snakes-but there was the maid with her mawkish smile, and the entrance hall, and Mrs. Dexter rushing to greet him as if she hadn't seen him in six months rather than six hours.

His reward for braving the elements was a tete-a-tete with Mrs. Dexter that stretched past eleven o'clock (and wasn't it just five after eight when he arrived?), a gallon and a half of scalding tea and the ever-present platter of poppy seed cakes and sandwiches, which were soggy now and looking a bit frayed around the edges. Mrs. Dexter said things like, "You know, I'm afraid Katherine's had so many gentlemen calling on her lately that she's going to have to hold a lottery if she ever wants to get married"; and, "That Butler Ames is a darling, a perfect darling, don't you think so? "; and, "Did I ever tell you the time Katherine saw her first Angora goat-she was three at the time, or was it four?" Ever polite, Stanley sat there stiff as a post and made the occasional supportive noise in the back of his throat, but otherwise he didn't have much to say-about progressivism, Butler Ames or anything else.

Finally, at half-past eleven, Katherine crept into the room in a pair of carpet slippers and her mother jumped up as if she'd been bitten and promptly disappeared. "Stanley," Katherine said, extending her hand, which he rose to take in his, and then she clucked at him as if he were a naughty child or a puppy that's just peed on the carpet. "Didn't I tell you I couldn't see you tonight?" she scolded, wagging a finger at him, and he would have felt miserable, abject, run through with a rusty sword of rejection and humiliation, but for the fact that she was smiling.

Now. Now's the time, he told himself. "I-well-I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought-"

They were still standing, hovering awkwardly over the tea table and the platter of soggy sandwiches. She arched her eyebrows. "Just happened?"

He laughed-a braying nervous peal of a laugh-and she joined him, her whole face lit up, and then somehow they were both seated on the sofa, side by side. "All right," he said, "I admit it, I just couldn't-well-you know what I mean, I couldn't stay away-from you, that is."

And what did she say? "Oh, Stanley"-or something like that. But she was smiling still, showing her teeth and her gums, and there was no mistaking the light in her eyes: she was glad he'd come. That made him bold, reckless, made him stew in the moment till he was a pot boiling over and there was no need for Debs now, his eyes on hers, hands clenching and unclenching in his lap as if they were feeling for a grip on a slick precipice, the taste of stale tea coming up in his throat. "Listen, Katherine," he said, "I've been meaning to, to say something to you, I mean, I've been thinking about it all day, and I-I-"

That smile. She leaned forward to toy with one of the sandwiches, then lifted it to her lips and took a bite, carving a neat semicircle out of the center of it. "Yes?"

"Well, let me, let me put it this way. What if there was a man, a young man, of good family and with good intentions, but not worthy of consideration in the eyes of a woman, well, a hypothetical woman sort of, well, like yourself ... and he really, but he hadn't done anything in his life, he was nothing, a worthless sh.e.l.l of a hypothetical man not fit to kiss the hem of this hypothetical woman's skirt, but he, he-"

She'd begun to see what he was driving at, or fumbling toward, and she tried to compose her face, but it wasn't working-she looked like nothing so much as a woman hurtling toward a crash in a runaway carriage, the smile gone, the sandwich arrested in mid-air, something like shock and fright in her eyes, but Stanley was committed, he was driving forward and there was no stopping him. "Stanley," she said, her voice lost somewhere deep in her throat, "Stanley, it's late-"

He wouldn't listen, didn't hear her. "You see, this man, this hypothetical man, is so far beneath her he would never presume to even entertain the faintest hope in the world that she would, she might, well ... marry him, I suppose, but if he asked her, this hypothetical but utterly worthless man who hasn't accomplished a thing in his whole life, would she-would you-I mean, knowing the circ.u.mstances-"

There was a furrow between her eyebrows, and why had he never noticed that before? She didn't look apprehensive now so much as puzzled-or pained. "Stanley, are you asking me what I think you are?"

He took a deep breath. His heart was thumping like a drum. "I just, well, I wanted your opinion, because I value it, 1 really do-"

"Are you asking me-?"

He couldn't look her in the eye. All the drums of the Mohawks were pounding in his ears. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump. "Yes." "Yes."

"But we've just met-you don't know anything about me. You're joking, aren't you? Tell me this is a joke, Stanley, tell me-"

The rain, the clock, the hoofs, the drums. He looked up, as sorrowful as any whipped dog. "No," he said, "it's no joke."

ONE SLIT'S ENOUGH As it turned out, Dr. Brush wasn't a man to rock the boat, even if it was in his power to do so, which it wasn't. O'Kane liked him well enough-he was hearty, quick with a laugh, a big physical man who relished his food and drink and didn't go around acting as if he was better than everybody else in the world who didn't happen to be a millionaire or a psychiatrist-but he didn't respect him in the way he'd respected Dr. Hamilton. For all his dallying with his monkeys and all his airs and the stiff formality of him, at least Hamilton was a first-rate psychiatrist, one of the best men in the country, and Mr. McCormick had improved under his care, even if it was by fits and starts. Not that Brush didn't have top-notch credentials, in addition to being handpicked by Dr. Meyer, but he was just too, well, clownish to make anything of himself in the long run, and that boded ill for Mr. McCormick. Hamilton had gotten what he wanted out of Riven Rock and then made himself scarce; Brush seemed content to bob like a great quivering buoy on the ebbing tide of that particular psychological backwater.

Oh, he started out energetically enough, eager to make a good impression like any other man in a new position, especially one who knows he's going to be held accountable to the Ice Queen on the one hand and to Dr. Meyer, the world's most humorless man, on the other. Basically, he adhered to Dr. Hamilton's regimen, which accorded strict hours for Mr. McCormick's activities, from the time he woke to the length of his shower bath and the hour he retired in the evening, but, being the new man in charge, he couldn't help tinkering with one or two small things here and there. In the beginning, that is. Only in the beginning.

The first thing he did, and to O'Kane's mind this was a mistake, most definitely a mistake, was to attempt to apply the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. In those days-and this was in the summer and fall of 1916-the talking cure was considered little more than a novelty, a sort of glorified parlor game for the rich and idle, like dream a.n.a.lysis or hypnosis, and few psychiatrists had taken the lead of Dr. Freud in applying it to their severely disturbed patients. Like most people, O'Kane was deeply skeptical-how could you talk a raving lunatic out of drinking his own urine or stabbing his invalid grandmother a hundred times with a c.o.c.ktail fork?-and Dr. Hamilton, though he subscribed to Freud's theories and was ready to lecture O'Kane and the Thompsons at the drop of a hat on such absurdities as infantile s.e.xuality and mother l.u.s.t, never applied the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. Better he felt, to keep the patient to a strict regimen, with a good healthy diet and sufficient exercise and intellectual stimulation, and let nature take its course. But Brush was new to the job, and he wanted to a.s.sert himself.

Both O'Kane and Martin were present for the first session. It was a sunny morning, glorious really, the early fog dissipated, the summer at its height, and Mr. McCormick was taking the air on the sunporch after breakfast. The porch-or patio, actually-adjoined the upper parlor and was walled around to a height of eight feet, with barred windows at eye level and wicker furniture bolted to the concrete beneath the Italian tiles and arranged in a little cl.u.s.ter in the middle of the floor. The door to the sun porch was always kept locked when not in use and the furniture had been situated with an eye to preventing Mr. McCormick's getting close enough to one of the walls to be able to boost himself over. It was a two-story drop to the shrubbery below, and even for a man of Mr. McCormick's agility, that could well prove fatal.

Mr. McCormick had eaten well that morning-two eggs with several strips of bacon, an English m.u.f.fin and a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and cream-and he seemed to be in an especially good mood, antic.i.p.ating a new moving picture Roscoe had brought up from Hollywood the previous evening. It was a Lillian Gish picture, and Mr. McCormick, who wasn't allowed to see women in the flesh, really savored the opportunity to see them come to life on the flat shining screen in the theater house. More than once he'd had to be restrained from exposing his s.e.x organ at the sight of Pearl White hanging from a cliff or Mary Pickford lifting her skirt to step down from the running board of an automobile, but the doctors felt nonetheless that the mental stimulation provided by the movies far outweighed any small unpleasantness that might arise from their depiction of females-in distress or otherwise. O'Kane wasn't so sure. He was the one who had to get up in the middle of the film with the light flickering and Mr. McCormick breathing spasmodically and force Mr. McCormick's member back into his pants, and that had to be humiliating for Mr. McCormick-and it certainly was no joy for O'Kane either. No, seeing women like that, all made-up and batting their eyes at the camera and showing off their cleavage and the rest of it, must have just frustrated the poor man all the more. Anybody would go crazy in his situation, and half the time O'Kane wondered if they shouldn't just go out and hire a prost.i.tute once a month and let Mr. McCormick-properly restrained, of course-release his natural urges like any other man, but then that wasn't being psychological, was it?

At any rate, Dr. Brush showed up that morning just after O'Kane and Mart had taken Mr. McCormick out onto the sunporch, and he was determined to give the talking cure a try. "Mr. McCormick," he cried, lumbering through the door and booming a greeting in his l.u.s.ty big hail-fellow voice, "and how are you this fine morning?"

Mr. McCormick was seated in one of the wicker chairs, his feet up on the wicker settee, hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into the cloudless sky. He was dressed, as usual, as if he were on his way to his office at the Reaper Works, in a gray summer suit, vest, formal collar and tie. He didn't respond to the greeting, nor acknowledge the doctor's presence in any way.

Undeterred, Dr. Brush strode hugely across the tiles and stationed himself just behind Mr. McCormick, leaning forward to maneuver his great sweating dirigible of a face into Mr. McCormick's line of sight. "And so," Dr. Brush boomed, "aren't you the lucky one to have such fine weather here all the year round? It must be especially gratifying in the winter, for the main and simple reason of defeating the ice and snow, but can you imagine how they're all sweltering in that humidity back East... and here, it's as pleasant as can be. What do you think it is, Mr. McCormick-seventy? Seventy-two, maybe? Huh?"

No response.

"Yes, sir," the doctor concluded with a stagey sigh, "you're a lucky man."

Mr. McCormick spoke then for the first time since he'd been led out onto the porch. He still had his head thrust back and he was viewing Dr. Brush upside down, which must have been a bit peculiar, though it didn't seem to faze him much. "Lucky?" he said, and his voice was barely a croak. "I'm-I'm no luckier than a dog."

"A dog?" And now the doctor was in a state of high excitement, dodging round the patio with little feints of his too-small feet and finally squeezing himself into the chair opposite Mr. McCormick. "And why do you say that, sir? A dog? Really. How extraordinary."

Mart, who was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door, cracked his knuckles audibly. O'Kane had been pacing back and forth in the shade at the far end of the patio, and he stopped now and found himself a good spot at the intersection of two walls and leaned back to listen. Mr. McCormick, still staring up into the sky, said nothing.

"A dog?" Brush repeated. "Did I hear you correctly, Mr. McCormick? You did say 'a dog,' didn't you?"

Still nothing.

"Well, if you did, and I'm quite sure there's nothing wrong with my hearing-or maybe there is, ha! and I'd better have it tested-well, and if you did say 'a dog' I'd be very interested to hear just why you should feel that way, for the main and simple reason that it's such an extraordinary position to take, and I'm sure both Mr. Thompson and Mr. O'Kane would like to hear your reasoning too. Wouldn't you, fellows?"

Mart grunted, and it was hard to say whether it was an affirmative or negative grunt.

O'Kane ducked his head. "Yeah," he said, "sure."

"Do you hear that, Mr. McCormick? All your friends would like to know just how you feel on the subject. Yes? Mr. McCormick?"

And yet still nothing. O'Kane wondered if Mr. McCormick had even heard the question, or if he'd already shut his mind down, as impervious as a rodent buried deep in its burrow. At least he wasn't violent. Or not yet, anyway.

The doctor pulled a cigar from his inside pocket and took a moment in lighting it. He drew on it, expelled a plume of smoke and gave the patient a canny look, which was unfortunately lost on Mr. McCormick, who continued to gaze into the sky as if he were Percival Lowell looking for signs of life on Mars. "Perhaps you feel caged-in here, is that it, Mr. McCormick?" the doctor began. "Is that what you're saying-that you'd like more liberty? Because we can arrange that-more drives, more walks outside the estate, if that's what you want. Is that it? Is that what you mean?"

After a silence that must have lasted five or six minutes, Dr. Brush changed his tack. "Tell me about your father, Mr. McCormick," he said, leaning forward now and addressing Mr. McCormick's long pale throat and the underside of his chin. "He was a great man, I'm told.... Did you love him very much?"

A gull coasted overhead. It was very still. Somewhere down below, off in the direction of the cottages, someone was singing in Italian, a monotonous drone that swung back and forth on itself like a pendulum.

"Did you ... did you ever feel that you disliked him? Or harbored any resentment toward him? Perhaps he disciplined you as a boy or even spanked you-did that ever occur?"

O'Kane became conscious of the movement of the sun, the sharp angle of the shadow beside him creeping inexorably nearer. He tried to make out the words to the song, though he couldn't understand them anyway, and he tried not to think of Giovannella. Mr. McCormick, who had a genius for rigidity-he would have made the ideal sculptor's model-never moved a hair. He didn't even seem to be breathing.

"Well," the doctor said after a bit, and he got ma.s.sively to his feet, puffing at the cigar, and began to pace back and forth, counting off the tiles, "well and so." He stalked round back of Mr. McCormick again and again forced his face into Mr. McCormick's line of vision. "And your mother," he said, "what is she like?"