Riven Rock Part 3

"Mother?"

"Yes, dear?" her mother screamed.

"You haven't been talking to Mr. Bentley, have you? Or Mr. Favill, maybe? "

No response. The engine whined and chewed away at itself; a pair of ugly glittering birds heaved up and out of the roadway, leaving a long wet pounded strip of meat behind them. "Turkey vultures," Katherine whispered to herself, "Cathartes aura," "Cathartes aura," and it was automatic with her to cla.s.sify everything that moved. She peered at her mother's face through the clinging wraith of the veil and felt her heart sink. The headache was back. Her sinuses were in flood. She felt betrayed. "Have you?" she cried into the wind. and it was automatic with her to cla.s.sify everything that moved. She peered at her mother's face through the clinging wraith of the veil and felt her heart sink. The headache was back. Her sinuses were in flood. She felt betrayed. "Have you?" she cried into the wind.

"I'm sorry," her mother shouted, leaning forward and cupping her hands to her mouth, "I didn't hear you. Dear."

"Yes, you did," Katherine shouted back. "You met with them, didn't you? Didn't you?"

But all her mother would say, as the chauffeur jerked his shoulders and the car twitched and shimmied and plunged into one pothole after another, was, "Very pleasant gentlemen, both of them."

After that, they drove on in silence, the dusty roads of Santa Barbara giving way to the dusty cartpaths of Montecito, "the Millionaires' Eden," as the newspapers had it, the place where robber barons, industrialists and breakfast food magnates alike came to escape the snow and potter around their grandiose estates in a botanical delirium of banana trees, limes, k.u.mquats and alligator pears. Katherine was predisposed to hate the place-Why did the McCormicks always have to pull the strings? What was so bad about Waverley and Ma.s.sachusetts? Had no one ever gotten well there?-and now, her mood spoiled again, she settled in to loathe it in earnest. There was beauty everywhere she looked, intense, physical, immediate, but her eyes were veiled and it was a cloying beauty, destructive and hateful, the sort of beauty that masked the snake and the scorpion-and the McCormicks. Even when the chauffeur turned off Hot Springs and onto Riven Rock Road and they pa.s.sed through the main gate and the big stone fairy castle of a house stood before her, the house of the Beast bristling with roses, Stanley's house, she made herself feel nothing.

Then the engine coughed and died with a final tubercular wheeze, and the silence washed over them like a benediction. Josephine was the first to free herself of her veil, which she'd pinned jauntily to the towering precipice of her hat. Leaning over the side of the car to shake out the dust and kick the rug from her legs in the same motion, she observed drily that the house was a bit ostentatious, wasn't it?

It was. Of course it was. What else would you expect of the McCormicks? Katherine unpinned her own veil and patted her hair back in place while the little chauffeur-Roscoe something-or-other-scrambled out to help her down. But she wasn't ready yet-she would take her own good time-and she sat there a moment gazing up at the windows opaque with sun and wondering if Stanley were behind one of them, if he were gazing out at her even then. The thought made her self-conscious, and her hands fluttered involuntarily to her hair again.

The history of the house, as she knew it, was as sad as anything she could conceive of. Her mother-in-law had built it as a refuge for Mary Virginia in the late nineties, a private sanatorium with one patient-out of sight, out of mind-and they couldn't have picked a spot farther from Chicago society unless they'd gone up to the Alaska Territory or put her on a boat for the Solomon Islands. It was a place where Mary Virginia could be alone with her doctor, her nurses, the scullery maids, cooks and washerwomen and the horde of Sicilian gardeners who'd transformed the property from a sleepy orange grove with a clapboard farm-house plunked down in the middle of it to a proper estate with proper grounds that wouldn't have been out of place in Grosse Pointe or Scars-dale. Nettie had hired the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge to design the house-two stories, in the style of the Spanish missions, with rounded arches and a tower at one end-and she'd got a noted botanist, Dr. Francisco Franceschi, to oversee the landscaping, with its 150 specimens of daphnes imported from j.a.pan, the nine-hole golf course and all the rest. And that was sad. Because the McCormicks felt if they sank enough money into the place they could salve their consciences, breathe easy, close the chapter on their sad mad daughter and sister.

But it got even sadder than that, because Stanley was here then, sweet-tempered, vigorous, witty, a twenty-one-year-old Princeton grad with a sweet shy smile and eyes that fastened on you till you felt there was no one else alive in the world. He'd come with his mother to give her support and help with the arrangements. But simply to help wasn't enough for Stanley-he was a perfectionist, a zealot, mad for detail. He met daily with Dr. Franceschi, quizzed the stone masons and arborists, pored over the plans with the young architect Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge had hired to oversee construction, moving a wall here, adding a nook or courtyard there, and a window, always a window. He was the one who'd suggested moving the patient's quarters from the ground floor to the second story-for the views-and he'd designed the rooms himself, right down to the molding of the windows and doorframes and the tiles in the bath.

That was what hit her now, the irony of it, and that was saddest of all: poor Stanley had been designing his own prison and he never knew it. No one did. He had all the promise in the world-member of half a dozen clubs at college, editor of the school paper, chairman of the Casino committee, tennis prodigy, scholar, painter, athlete, poet, the McCormick wealth at his fingertips and every possibility alive to him-and when Mary Virginia was moved to Arkansas to be with her new doctor, no one suspected that Riven Rock would be anything other than a happy place, a winter resort, one of half a dozen McCormick homes scattered round the country. But Stanley still had promise. He did. Bucketloads of it. He was a young man yet and he had plenty of time to get on with his life and do something in the world-if he could just get well again. That was the first step. That was what mattered, and all the lawyers and doctors and quibbling McCormicks in the world didn't have a thing to do with it.

Katherine still hadn't moved. The sun melted into the windows, the sky yawned, the stillness was absolute. Her mother was down on the pavement now, feathers everywhere, a whole aviary's worth, gazing up at her with the clear-eyed, a.n.a.lytic look Katherine remembered from her girlhood and the odd case of tonsillitis or indigestion it was meant to ferret out. The chauffeur, so wiry and intense behind the wheel, seemed to have died on his feet as he stood there poised to help her down from the floating step of the Packard. "Katherine?" Josephine was saying. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she heard herself say.

"Because if you're not," Josephine went on, "we don't have to do this at all, not today, not when you're still so worn out and exhausted from your trip-"

Then she was on her feet, towering above them, moving forward to descend from the car while the windows exploded with light and the chauffeur's clawlike hand suddenly appeared on the periphery to offer support, and she watched her own tight-laced foot as it hovered in the air over the terra incognita of her husband's private asylum. "I told you I'm all right," she said, and there it was again, that hint of asperity and exasperation, "-didn't I?"

Her mother shut up then, clamping her lips together and setting her jaw in her best imitation of pique, too giddy with California and her mineral soak to harbor any real resentment and too concerned about the delicacy of "the Stanley situation," as she'd begun to call it, to push any further. In silence, trailed by the chauffeur and walking as stiffly as two strangers looking for their seats at the opera, Katherine and her mother went up the walk, mounted the great stone slabs of the front steps and rang the bell. O'Kane appeared at the door even before the tympanic echoes of the bell had died away in a series of dull reverberations that seemed to take refuge in the huge clay pots that stood on either side of the entrance. He looked startled. Looked as if he'd been expecting someone else altogether. Or no one at all. "Good evening," he managed to sputter, holding the door for them and trying his best to compose his face around a smile.

"Good evening," Katherine returned, but brusquely, in the way of getting it over with, and she didn't acknowledge his smile with one of her own-she was too wrought up for smiling, too sad and angry and pessimistic, and O'Kane's awkwardness irritated her. What did it mean? That they hadn't been expected? But that was absurd-someone had to have dispatched the car, and at breakfast her mother-in-law had gone on ad nauseam about the charms of Riven Rock and how much everyone was looking forward to her seeing and approving of it. Or was it Hamilton? Was he going to flip his eyes and tell her that Stanley had taken a turn for the worse and she couldn't see him, her own husband, in his own house, after waiting day by miserable day through six night-marish months and traveling all this bone-rattling, sinus-pounding, headache-forging way?

"Oh, Mr. O'Kane," her mother shrieked behind her, "so nice to see you again-and how are you finding California? Missing your wife, I'll bet? Hm? Yes?"

Katherine wanted to strangle her. She wanted to wheel round on her and shout, "Shut up, mother, just shut up!" and even before she had a chance to see what crimes against taste Stanley's own small-town philistine of a mother had committed with regard to the furnishings, she found herself snapping at O'Kane. "Where's my husband?" she demanded, striding into the room with half a mind to begin trying doors at random.

O'Kane slammed the front door on the chauffeur and sprinted to her even as Nick Thompson rose from a chair at the foot of the stairs to intercept her. "Is he upstairs, is that it?" she demanded of the blunted eyes and napiform head of the elder Thompson. There seemed to be pottery everywhere, shelves of it-urns, bowls, vases, cups-and all of it a dull earthen brown. The place was hideous-It looked like a Spanish bordello, like a bullring, and she had a sudden urge to smash every last clay pot and Andalusian gewgaw in a frenzy of noise and dust and shattering because she knew in that moment they were going to stop her from going up those stairs, saw it in their eyes and the way they slung their shoulders at her and braced themselves as if she were one of the madwomen they'd kept locked away at McLean in a s.h.i.t-bespattered cell.

She had her foot on the first step when O'Kane caught up with her-and he wouldn't dare touch her, he wouldn't dare-leaping three steps in a bound and turning to face her from the higher stair, his arms spread in expostulation, the big man, the cheat, the deceiver, disappointment made flesh. "Mrs. McCormick, no," he said, "please. Dr. Hamilton said-"

"Step aside," she said.

"Mrs. McCormick," pleading, his stricken face and meaty hands, and now Nick was there beside him, her mother tugging at her arm from behind, "I'm sorry, very sorry, but Dr. Hamilton said your husband can't have any visitors just now-yet, I mean-and especially not women, women, because of what happened on the train, that is, the incident-" because of what happened on the train, that is, the incident-"

"What incident?" She felt her heart stop. "What are you talking about? "

She saw O'Kane exchange a glance with Nick Thompson, and then Nick, with his big head and bloat of muscle, said that she'd better talk to the doctor and O'Kane agreed, his head bobbing up and down on the fulcrum of his chin, and her mother said, Yes, that would be best, in the sort of voice she used on the cats when they scratched the furniture.

Katherine's pulse was like a Chinese rocket. Drums were pounding in her head. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. "All right, then," she said, shaking off her mother's hand and struggling to keep her voice steady, "I'll talk to the doctor. Where is he?"

Another look pa.s.sed between the two men on the stairs. "He's outside," O'Kane said after a moment.

"Outside?" Katherine was astonished. She'd come all this way and Hamilton wasn't even here to greet her? "What's he doing, taking the air?"

"No," Nick began, tugging at the knot of his tie with one blocky forefinger and wincing under the constraint, "he's out there with the-"

"The apes," O'Kane interjected. "Or monkeys. You see, this sea captain-from Mindanao-he was here no more than an hour ago with the first of the two monkeys-hominoids, that is-in a wicker cage. He heard Dr. Hamilton was looking for hominoids and he got a ride out here with Baldessare Dimucci, the manure man, and, uh, the monkeys-hominoids-were overheated or chilled or something and Dr. Hamilton had to see to them right away, because if he didn't, well, he was afraid they'd-"

Katherine raised her voice then-she couldn't help herself. It wasn't right to show any emotion with the help-it just brought you down to their level, and she'd known that all her life-but she just couldn't restrain herself, not here, not now. "Enough!" she cried. "I don't give two figs for the manure man and his monkeys-I want to see my husband. And if I can't see him, I want to know why. Now, will you lead me to Dr. Hamilton this instant or am I going to have to terminate the employment of every last person on these grounds and start all over again?"

Sixty seconds later, after having determined that her mother would rather stay behind and "have a nice chat with Mr. Thompson," Katherine was back outside, following O'Kane through the garden at the rear of the house. If she weren't in such a state she might have appreciated what Dr. Franceschi had accomplished with his bold arrangements of daphnes and rock roses, the flood of gazanias, long-necked birds of paradise, nasturtiums the size of saucers, but appreciation would have to wait. She saw nothing but an undifferentiated ma.s.s of vegetation and the back of O'Kane's head, where the soft blond hair of his nape joined inaVand descended into the white band of his collar. The path took them through the garden and into an open field of golden, waist-high gra.s.s, from the depths of which two piebald cows looked up at them stupidly, and finally into the dense shade of a stand of live oak.

"Dr. Hamilton?" O'Kane called, and there was an odd note to his voice, a note of warning, as if to intimate that he wasn't alone. He slowed his pace, edging forward into the shadows, Katherine right behind him. It was warm. She could feel the perspiration on her brow, at the hairline, just under the brim of her hat.

"Edward?" The doctor's voice came from somewhere off to the right, arising disembodied from the twisted maze of snaking limbs and overarching branches. "Are they here already?" the voice called. "Because if they are, you're going to have to stall them a minute while I-"

"I've got Mrs. McCormick with me," O'Kane shouted, and in that instant the doctor appeared, materializing out of the gloom where two ma.s.sive gray trunks intersected like crossed swords not thirty feet away. He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar was unfastened and there seemed to be something in his hair, some foreign matter, dander or fluff or something-or was it straw? "Katherine!" he cried, scurrying across the cracked yellow earth in dusty shoes and a pair of trousers that looked as if they'd been used to clean out the stables. "How good to see you!"

She allowed him to take her hand while he writhed and groveled and disparaged himself for the state of his clothes and hair and most of all for not having been there to greet her in person, but it was all the fault-a chuckle here, nervous and high-pitched-of the hominoids, the anthropoids, the monkeys, because didn't she see that they'd gotten very lucky indeed with Captain Piroscz and she had to have a look at them, just a look, because they were so, so engaging engaging- At this juncture there was a long trailing inhuman shriek from the clump of vegetation just ahead, and the wizened frowning face of a little fur-covered homunculus peered out at them from a frame of cupped leaves. "Oh, there you are, you little devil," Hamilton chided, and he inched forward with his left arm crooked at the elbow and held out stiffly before him, as if he were inviting the thing to dance. "Come on," he crooned, "come to Papa."

The monkey-Katherine recognized it from her lab work as a rhesus-merely stared at the doctor out of its saucer eyes. It was a spectacularly unattractive specimen, the color of mustard left out to dry overnight on the edge of a knife, its fur patchy and worn and its skin maculated with open sores and dark matted scabs. There seemed to be something wrong with one of its front paws and its eyes weren't quite right-there was some sort of film or web over the cornea. When Hamilton got within five feet of it, coaxing and making kissing noises with his lips, it let out another howl and vanished into the canopy overhead.

The doctor dropped his arm to his side and let out a little laugh. "I'm sorry, Katherine," he said, and she could see that he wasn't sorry at all, "sorry to have to put you through this-they're just feeling their oats, that's all. And perhaps I shouldn't have released them, but they were looking so pathetic in that cramped bamboo cage and you just knew they hadn't so much as stretched their limbs the whole way across the Pacific, probably not since they'd been captured in the jungles of the Orient ... besides which, this is where I've decided to construct the apery and I do intend to give them as much freedom as possible." There was a pause, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, and then he clapped his hands suddenly and wrung them as if they were wet. "Well," he said. "And so how are you?"

Katherine was about to say that she wasn't feeling well at all, that she was worn out from worry and travel and not a little irritated and that she was stunned and disconcerted to find the doctor's henchmen daring to interfere with her seeing her husband and that furthermore she demanded to know just where she stood, but she never got the chance. Because at that moment, as the doctor slouched there in disarray and O'Kane shuffled his feet in the dirt and the declining sun coppered the branches of the trees, the monkey suddenly plopped down from above and landed squarely on Hamilton's head, digging its fingers into his scalp and hissing like a cornered cat. But that wasn't all: in the next instant it was joined by another, which came sailing out of thin air to adhere, caterpillar-like, to the doctor's shoulder. "Screeee-screeee!" they jeered, boxing furiously at one another with leathery fists while the doctor's pince-nez flew in one direction and his collar in the other. And then, just as suddenly as they'd appeared, they were gone again, hurtling through the branches like phantoms.

Katherine couldn't help herself. She was furious, maddened, out for blood, but at the sight of the punctilious little doctor's utter helplessness in the face of such primitive energy, she had to laugh. To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O'Kane, the bruiser, who'd gone absolutely pale at the sight of the tiny hominoids that couldn't have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny.

"They just won't listen to reason," Hamilton snorted, facetious and gay, the pince-nez dangling jauntily from his throat, his collar crushed underfoot. The monkeys rode high in the treetops, chittering and screeching. O'Kane shuffled his feet. Katherine pressed a handkerchief to her face, suppressed a sneeze. "Ha!" Hamilton exclaimed, "I know the type, don't think I don't," and he let out an extraneous laugh. "The devils, the very devils-they're even worse than my patients."

That was when the gaiety went out of the air, as thoroughly as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. Katherine's face was burning. Now, suddenly, she felt nothing but outrage. "I want to see my husband," she said, and her voice was small and cold.

Hamilton frowned. He was hateful, ridiculous, a smear of monkey urine on his sleeve, lint in his hair-he was a man and he was going to deny her. "I've been meaning to write you," he said.

GIOVANNELLA DIMUCCI.

O'Kane had been dreaming of Rosaleen-or someone like her, a silvery succubus of feathery lips and needful flesh hovering just out of reach-when he was awakened, as he was every morning, by the strangled croaking wheeze of Sal Oliveirio's bedraggled rooster. This was succeeded by the lowing of cows and a garbled disquisition in Italian featuring three or four voices, and then, after a bit, by a smell of woodsmoke and the potent aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling in the pan. He didn't get up right away-he wasn't on duty till eight this morning-but lay there staring at the ceiling and the thin veneer of light on the windows, hoping to fall back into the dream. He had a hard-on-It seemed he always had a hard-on lately, day and night, and that was because he was living the life of a monk in his cell-and he stroked himself with a slow yearning rhythm, thinking of Rosaleen, the girl on the train, Katherine, until the moment of release came and he could lie still again.

But he couldn't get back to sleep, and that was annoying because sleep was a refuge from boredom and he was bored, he had to admit it-itchy and restless and bored. It was the middle of July and he'd been in California for seven weeks now, living in a ground-floor room in the servants' quarters of the big stone house, while the servants-wops, mostly, but there were a couple of Spaniards or Mexicans mixed in-crowded into the cottages out back. Mart was in the room next to him, but Nick and Pat had moved into town when their families came out to join them-and Rosaleen was supposed to have come with them, two weeks ago now, but O'Kane had put her off. He told her it was because he hadn't been able to find a decent place for her and the baby, and that was the truth-he hadn't. Of course, he'd been into town exactly four times since he'd arrived, and when he was there-at night, in the company of Mart and Roscoe LaSource, the chauffeur-he wasn't looking for apartments.

He felt bad about that, and he missed his son-and Rosaleen too, and maybe even his parents and Uncle Billy and his sisters into the bargain-but he wanted to experience California on his own, wanted to suck everything he could out of this otherworldly place where lizards licked over the rocks and the flowers were like trees and the ocean stretched all the way to China. It was just what he'd imagined, only so much richer and more complex, as if what he'd pictured California to be was just the first page in a whole encyclopedia of imaginings. There were ferns twenty feet tall, trees that shed bark instead of leaves, palms as thin as lampposts, and flowers, flowers everywhere-the whole world was flowers. It was drier than he would have guessed-it hadn't rained a drop in the whole time he'd been here, if you discounted the mist that settled on everything and made a lingering dream of the mornings-and he'd never realized that Riven Rock and all these grand estates were going to be so far from town, five miles at least. Maybe he ought to buy a bicycle-or sprout a pair of wings. Christ, as it was he felt as much a prisoner as poor Mr. McCormick, and that was what he missed most-the saloons, the shops, the pavement, streetlights, civilization.

He'd never lived in the country before, never awakened to roosters and cows, never spent so much time with foreigners-Italians, that is. They were everywhere, shambling along the dirt lanes in baggy pants and sweat-stained shirts, hewing stones, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g hedges, hoeing up weeds in the orchards, not to mention slapping the hind end of every cow and goat in the county six times a day and pounding the laundry in big tubs out in the courtyard or creeping through the house with mops and brooms and a look of greasy resignation. But they were all right, the Italians. Most of them spoke English, or at least a version of it he and Mart could untangle, and he sat most nights on a rock in the middle of the orange grove with Sal and Baldy and some of the others, pa.s.sing a jug of red wine or a jar of that liquid fire they called grappa. And their women weren't half bad, the young ones especially. They were more the bucolic type than Miss Ianucci maybe, but one or two of them really managed to get his attention.

And the oranges. They were right there hanging from the trees, no different from apples or peaches back East, and not a day pa.s.sed when he didn't get up in the morning and saunter out in the perfumed air and pick himself two or even three of them and shuck the peels while he walked, the sun in his face, hummingbirds hanging over the flowers like bits of colored foil suspended in the air and the mountains standing up in front of him all wrapped in mist like an oil painting.

But still, he couldn't help thinking of Rosaleen as he heaved himself out of bed, slapped some water on his face and swept his hair back with the comb while he studied his chin in the mirror and debated whether he could get by without a shave. Maybe he should send for her-the McCormicks were paying for it. Then he could get a place downtown, on one of those streets up by the old Mission with all the shade trees, and he'd be close to the saloons and the lunch counters and the Chinese laundry, and he'd get it steady every night and never have to wake up to the d.a.m.n chickens and feel so lonely and cored out. That's what he was thinking as he stood at the mirror knotting his tie and beginning to entertain notions of breakfast, Sam Wah's flapjacks and three eggs cooked in b.u.t.ter with a slab of fried ham and the fresh-baked bread he could already smell, when he happened to glance down at the letter on the bureau. It was from Rosaleen and it had come two days ago, and though he'd read it through six times already, in his present frame of mind he couldn't resist idly picking it up. And once it was in his hand, he almost involuntarily unfolded it and smoothed it out on the cool marble surface: Dear Eddie: The son is shinning I bot a new pair of short pance for Eddie Juner thank you for the money. He is so cut & I want you every nite so much to stick your thing in me I'm like a starving woman with someboddy cooking bakon in the air so pleese Eddie send for the tikets becoz Mildred Thompson and Ernestine and the boys all left tow weeks ago & I miss you Yours in Love & l.u.s.t, Rosaleen He could hear her voice and see her in a jerky series of poses, mainly s.e.xual, that was as flickery and fleeting as one of Edison's motion pictures, and that softened him. But then he took another look at the looping backward scrawl of her cursive and the spelling that never got past the third-grade level and wondered what had ever possessed him to marry her. When she told him she was pregnant back in September, the two of them walking home hand-in-hand from Brophy's Bar & Grill, the sky full of stars and her lips swollen like sponges and so sweet he might have been licking the lid of a jar of honey, he should have run and never looked back, should have bolted for Alaska, Siberia, anyplace. But he didn't. He married her. Stood at the altar and swore before G.o.d and Father Daugherty to live with her for the rest of his life. Yes. But she was in Waverley, returned to the bosom of her family, back with her father and mother and her fat-faced semimoronic brothers, and he was here, in California, without a care in the world. And how could you argue with that?

Mart was in the dining room, hunched over his plate and chewing with a mindless stolidity, when O'Kane came in for breakfast. The doctor and Mrs. Hamilton weren't up yet. They were staying in one of the guest rooms in the east wing, with their squally little baby, until they could find a suitable house in the neighborhood. The servants were fed in the servants' hall, to the rear of the house, and Mr. McCormick was fed by his nurses, through a tube, at nine o'clock on the dot. So on this particular morning, with the palest whitest ghostliest sun suspended in an ether of mist that washed away the background till the whole house might have been a ship at sea, it was just Mart and O'Kane at breakfast. "Top of the morning to you, Mart," O'Kane crowed, tipping back the cover of the serving tray while the housemaid, a s.e.xless spinster in her forties by the name of Elsie Reardon, fluttered around him with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice in one hand and a gleaming silver coffee urn in the other.

Mart grunted a reply. He'd washed his hair, which he combed forward to soften the great gleaming lump of his forehead, and the hair, dangling wetly, had the effect of a bit of packing material pasted atop a lightbulb. There was egg on his chin.

"I don't know how you stand it," O'Kane sighed, sinking into the chair across from him. "I mean, being a bachelor out here in the middle of nowhere when your brothers are at home getting theirs every night and even Dr. Hamilton's got his wife with him ... and the wops, they're out there in those cottages s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g like dogs. I can't stand it. I'm going crazy here."

Mart looked interested. He set down his fork, dabbed at his chin with the napkin. Elsie poured coffee with a scandalized face, then stumped out of the room. "What about Rose?"

O'Kane shrugged. "I'm talking about now, today, tonight. I'm used to having it, you know? Of course, look who I'm talking to-you probably never had a good screw in your life, am I right?"

Mart protested, but weakly, and O'Kane saw the truth hit home.

"It's like this ham"-and he held up the pink slab of it on the tines of his fork, crisp from the pan and iridescent with smoke-cured grease. "If Elsie didn't give you any tomorrow, you wouldn't think much of it. But if two days went by, three, a week-you know what I mean? And s.e.x-well, that's a real bodily necessity, just like food and water and moving your bowels-"

"And whiskey," Mart put in with a sly smile. "Don't forget whiskey."

O'Kane grinned back. "What do you say we talk Roscoe into going into town tonight?"

And then it was the morning routine. Say goodnight to Nick and Pat, who were just coming off their shift, and h.e.l.lo to Mr. McCormick, bent up double like a pretzel in his bed; then it was strip off Mr. McCormick's nightgown and swab up the mess he'd left on the sheets, pack the whole business up for the laundress and give Mr. McCormick his shower bath, and all the while O'Kane thinking about Robert Ogilvie, director of the Peachtree Asylum in Stone Mountain, Georgia, who suspended all his catatonics on a rack in a big metal tub, day and night, and just changed the water when it got mucked up. No stains, no smells, no laundry-just a plug and a faucet. Now that was progress.

"He's not looking real good this morning," O'Kane observed when they first walked into the room and stood over the fouled bed and saw the position Mr. McCormick had got himself into.

Mart was oblivious. He merely bobbed his big head with the hair dried round it in a fringe and stared down at their employer as if he were a piece of furniture. "I've seen him worse."

Sometime during the night Mr. McCormick had hunched himself up like a fetus in the womb, and he'd managed to lock one foot behind the other in a way that looked uncomfortable, painful even-the sort of thing you'd expect from a swami or contortionist. He was breathing hard, his ribs heaving as if he'd just come back from a ten-mile run, and his eyes were open and staring and his hands locked together in an unbreakable clasp, but he didn't respond to them at all. They had no choice but to lift him out of bed as he was, a hand each under his armpit and b.u.t.tock, and haul him over to the shower bath where the water would take some of the crust off him and they could get at the rest of it with a bar of Palm Olive soap and the scrub brushes, and it wasn't any different from any other day, but for the pose he was in. Still and all, it was a strange sensation to have to drag a man around like that, a grown naked man worth n.o.body knew how many millions and as lifeless as a side of beef hanging from a meathook. Only his eyes were alive, and they didn't register much-the quickest jump to the needles of water in the shower bath or the light bulging at the windows and then back to nothing.

It was eerie. Unsettling. No matter how often O'Kane experienced it or how many patients he'd seen like this-and he'd bathed them one after another at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, twenty at a time, hosing them down afterward like hogs in a pen-it still affected him. How could anybody live like that? Be like that? And what did it take for the mechanism to break down, for the normal to become abnormal, for a man like Mr. McCormick, who had everything and more, to lose even the faculty of knowing it?

"I wish he'd come out of it, Mart," he said after they'd set him down on his side under the spray of the shower bath. "Even if he got violent again-anything."

"Are you kidding?" Mart rubbed the spot over his left eye where their employer had slugged him on the train. Steam rose from the floor. Water hissed against the tiles. Mr. McCormick, his skin glistening and the hair a dark skullcap pressed to his temples and creeping up the back of his neck, began to grunt softly.

"Think about it, Mart-he's Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn't even know it. I mean, I've been so blind drunk I didn't know where I was and I've slept in an alley once and one time I woke up on the beach with a bunch of crabs scuttling all over me, but I knew right away I was Eddie O'Kane."

Mart didn't seem to grasp the point. He just stared down at the hunched-up shape on the naked tiles and began to shake his head. "I wish he'd stay like this forever, nice and quiet." And then he lowered his voice, because you could never tell what Mr. McCormick was thinking or what he might retain. "If he gets well he won't need us anymore, that's for sure-and then where would we be?"

At nine, after they'd ma.s.saged Mr. McCormick's muscles to loosen him up a bit and got his feet untangled, Mart pried open the patient's jaws with a wooden dowel and O'Kane jammed the feeding tube between his teeth. (And Mr. McCormick had good strong teeth, but they'd gone yellow because he wasn't able to keep them up.) The tube consisted of a hollowed-out piece of bamboo a headhunter might have used to blow darts through and an ordinary kitchen funnel, and for breakfast Mr. McCormick was having the same thing they'd had-ham, eggs, toast and coffee-but it had been painstakingly reduced to a thick black gruel by Sam Wah, the Chinese cook. While O'Kane was thus employed, hovering over the gaping mouth of his patient like some flightless bird with its unfathomable chick, waiting out the tedious drip of the mash, repet.i.tively wiping the patient's mouth and chin and pinching his nostrils to encourage the swallowing reflex, he couldn't help reflecting on the lack of progress Mr. McCormick had made over the course of the past two months.

He hadn't always been like this. When he first came to McLean two years back, he'd just broken down and the prognosis was good. He was very disturbed, of course, particularly the first couple of days, lashing out at anybody who came within three feet of him and raving to beat the band about all sorts of things-Jack London, his father, dentists, the Reaper Company and women, especially women, shouting out "c.u.n.t" and "slit" and "wh.o.r.e" till the walls rang and his face was as bleached out as a ream of white bond paper scattered in the snow-but after a week in the sheet restraints he came around. He was calm suddenly, reasonable, a dignified gentleman who dressed himself in the morning without any tics or other nonsense and went around chatting and joking with the other patients and their relatives till people began to take him for one of the doctors. And Mr. McCormick, loving a joke, played along, dispensing advice, walking down the corridors arm-in-arm with the disappointed parent, the cousin from Bayonne, the somber sibling and the grim-faced husband, and he was fine with the women too, the soul of courtesy and with the softest, most genteel and solicitous voice O'Kane had ever heard.

Within a week he'd singled out O'Kane-called him "Eddie" and asked for him especially-and together they took long walks on the sanatorium grounds, played golf, croquet, shuffleboard and chess. He insisted there was nothing wrong with him-just nerves and overwork, that was all-and he spoke and dressed so beautifully and had such a smile on his face for everybody, O'Kane almost came to believe him. In the evenings he would hold the ward spellbound with tales of his travels-and he'd been everywhere, all the capitals of Europe, Egypt, way out to Albuquerque, Carson City and San Francisco-and he charmed everybody, doctors, nurses and patients, with his jokes. He was forever joking-not practical jokes, nothing malicious or unbalanced, as you found with so many of the other patients, nothing like that at all. Nothing off-color either. And while the jokes themselves might have been old in his mother's time ("What did the breeze say to the windowscreen? "; ' 'Don't mind me, I'm just pa.s.sing through' "), he took such obvious delight in them, his face opening up with that gift of a smile he had and his eyes crinkled to slits, they were irresistible, even when you'd heard them ten times already.

Everyone was optimistic. Everyone was pleased. Nerves, that's all it was. But then one morning, after an extended visit from his wife, he wouldn't get out of bed. The smile was gone, the jokes dead and buried. He wouldn't talk, wouldn't eat, wouldn't use the toilet or clean himself. Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Cowles and Dr. Meyer all tried to reason with him, talking till their throats went dry, pleading, remonstrating, cajoling and threatening-they even brought the august Dr. Emil Kraepelin all the way from Munich to try his hand-but Mr. McCormick just seemed to sink deeper into himself, like a man mired to his chin in quicksand and not a thing in the world anybody could do about it. It wasn't long after that that he attacked Nurse Doane-Arabella-and had to go back to the sheet restraints.

The hope was that California would bring him around, but as far as O'Kane could see it was an exercise in futility. At least so far. Mr. McCormick was as blocked now as he'd ever been, so deeply buried beneath his layers of phobias and hallucinations he didn't even recognize his nurses. And no one seemed to care-he'd been delivered to Riven Rock trussed up like a prize turkey and with no more consciousness than a fat feathered bird and that was the end of it, out of sight, out of mind. No one except Mrs. McCormick, that is. Katherine. She'd stayed on the whole, time, long after Mr. McCormick's mother and sister and Mr. Harold McCormick had left, coming out to the estate every morning without fail, probing Hamilton and the nurses, quizzing the maids, the butler and even the cook with his deracinated English. What did my husband have for breakfast? Is he eating? How's his color? What did my husband have for breakfast? Is he eating? How's his color? O'Kane had twice seen her creeping round the shrubbery with a pair of opera gla.s.ses in the hope of catching a glimpse of her husband when he was wheeled out on the sunporch. But Nick and Pat had lost all interest, treating their employer as if he were just another drooler on the violent ward, Mart didn't seem to trouble himself much one way or the other, and Hamilton was so busy with his apes and finding a house and mollifying his wife over the move from Ma.s.sachusetts, he'd barely had time to stick his head in the door lately. O'Kane had twice seen her creeping round the shrubbery with a pair of opera gla.s.ses in the hope of catching a glimpse of her husband when he was wheeled out on the sunporch. But Nick and Pat had lost all interest, treating their employer as if he were just another drooler on the violent ward, Mart didn't seem to trouble himself much one way or the other, and Hamilton was so busy with his apes and finding a house and mollifying his wife over the move from Ma.s.sachusetts, he'd barely had time to stick his head in the door lately.

And where did that leave O'Kane? Out here in the wings of Paradise with a bunch of wops and an ache in his groin that was like a fever, waiting for the day when Mr. McCormick would get well again and reward his diligence and loyalty, the day when his own oranges would hang heavy on the limbs and he could finally, at long last, take center stage and let the drama of his own life begin.

In the afternoon he was sitting at the desk in the upper hallway, just inside the barred door to Mr. McCormick's quarters, playing solitaire and flipping open his watch every thirty seconds to personally record the testudineous advance of time, when Dr. Hamilton came stutter-stepping up the stairs, all out of breath. "Edward," he cried, "Edward, you've got to see this!"

O'Kane looked up from the cards, glad of the distraction. He gave a glance to Mart and the bundled form of Mr. McCormick in the center of the bed behind him and then got up to unlock the door, ever mindful of the three p's. "What is it?" he asked, turning the keys in their locks. "Another hominoid?"

In the light of the hallway, illumined by the tireless California sun streaming in through the upper windows, the doctor's head seemed to glow. He was showing a lot of scalp lately, pale striations against the dun slick of his hair, and O'Kane saw with a shock that his hairline had begun to recede-and when had that started? His face too-the lines seemed to have deepened and there was something else, something altogether queer about him ... but of course, he'd shaved his beard. "You shaved your beard," O'Kane heard himself saying.

The doctor waved him off, as if it wasn't worth mentioning-but it was, because that beard was his psychiatric badge, the very twin of the beard that sprouted from the face of Dr. Freud. How could he practice psychiatry without a beard? It was unthinkable. "The wife never cared for it," Hamilton explained, breathing hard from his exertion, "and besides, with the hominoids it was becoming a liability-Mary was afraid it would attract fleas. Or worse. But enough of the beard-I've got something to show you, Edward, something truly astounding, the best find yet. Come on, come on: what are you waiting for?"

And then they were down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door, heading toward the hominoid laboratory, the doctor so worked up it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a trot. O'Kane could hear the screeching and caterwauling of the monkeys long before they hit the path that wound in under the oaks, and he could smell them too-a ripe festering flyblown reek of hominoid sweat and vomit and the killing stench of monkey fur clotted with excrement. And he could call them monkeys now, outside Hamilton's hearing anyway, because that's what they were: nine rhesus monkeys and a pair of olive baboons. Apes, as it turned out, weren't so easy to come by. The doctor had made application to every exotic animal dealer, circus and zoo up and down the coast, hoping for chimps, but there were none to be had.

He found monkeys, though, and there were more coming. After the first two ratlike little things died with blood leaching out their ears and a.n.u.ses, the doctor got lucky and was able to purchase nine more at a single stroke from one of the local millionaires, an eccentric who had a whole menagerie running wild on his property, ostriches, kangaroos, boa constrictors, impala and dik-dik, and he'd tracked down the baboons in a decrepit zoo in Muchas Vacas, Mexico, where a few pesos went a long way. O'Kane was just happy he didn't have to look after the things-and they hadn't been there two weeks when Hamilton began hinting around, but in the end he wound up hiring two scrawny little brown men, one wop and one Mexican, to construct the cages and hose the reeking piles of c.r.a.p out of them every morning.

Monkeys didn't have a whole lot of appeal for O'Kane-they reminded him too much of the droolers and s.h.i.t-flingers he'd been wedded to for the past seven years, and that was an era he wanted to put behind him, permanently. He was head nurse to Stanley McCormick now, and before long he'd be an orange rancher or an oil man, strutting around the lobby of the Potter Hotel in a Panama hat while his own motorcar stood out front at the curb. Of course, as long as he was under the thumb of Hamilton he'd at least have to feign interest in hominoids, but he really didn't see the point-a whole wagonload of monkeys wouldn't cure what ailed Mr. McCormick. And as far as he could tell, Katherine wasn't much for hominoids either, though she was willing to go along in the hope that Hamilton's experiments would lead to a cure for her husband, and she spent a good part of each visit out there under the trees listening to Hamilton go on about hominoid micturition, auto-eroticism and frequency of copulation. The doctor had given the monkeys names like Maud, Gertie and Jocko, and the way he talked about them you'd have thought he'd personally fathered them all. ("Jocko achieved coitus with Bridget six times yesterday, and twice with Gertie," he would say, or, "The minute I let Jimmy into Maud's cage she a.s.sumed the s.e.xually submissive posture and exposed her genitalia.") To O'Kane's way of thinking, the whole business was a bit, well, excessive. Not to mention dirty-minded.

But there was Hamilton, standing between the grinning wop and the grinning spic, ready to flick a filthy checkered tablecloth off what looked to be a cage behind him. He was beaming like a magician. The monkeys screeched and stank. Sunlight filtered softly through the trees. "Ready, Edward? Voila!"

The tablecloth fluttered to the ground and the cage stood revealed. Inside was a pale orange aggregation of limbs and hair that looked like nothing so much as a heap of palm husks until it began to stir. O'Kane saw two liquid eyes, nostrils like gouges in a rubber tire, the naked simian face. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he said, "what is it?"

"Orang-utan," the doctor p.r.o.nounced. "Literally, 'man of the forest.' His name is Julius, and he comes to us all the way from Borneo, courtesy of one of Captain Piroscz's colleagues, Benjamin Butler, of the Siam." Siam." The doctor's grin ate up his face. "Our first ape." The doctor's grin ate up his face. "Our first ape."

O'Kane took a step back when Hamilton reached down to unlatch the mesh door of the cage. He was thinking of the one-eyed chimp in Donnelly's and the way it had taken hold of Frank Leary's hand-and wasn't that a fine thing for an ape to do?

"It's all right," the doctor rea.s.sured him, "he's quite tame. A former pet. Come on, Julius," he cooed, his voice sweetened to the hypnotic whisper he used on his ravers and lunatics, "come on out now." A pair of oranges, held seductively aloft, was the inducement.

"Are you sure-?" O'Kane began.

"Oh, yes, there's nothing to worry about," Hamilton said over his shoulder. "They've had him on shipboard since he was a baby and they all loved him, the whole crew, and they hated to give him up, but of course now that he's full-grown it became too dangerous, what with the rigging and pots of hot tar and whatnot.... Come on, that's a boy."

Soundlessly, the shabby orange creature unfolded itself from the cage, crouching over its bristling arms like a giant spider. O'Kane took another step back and the two keepers exchanged a nervous glance-the thing was nearly as big as they were, and it certainly outweighed them. And, of course, like all the rest of the hominoids, it stank like a boatload of drowned men.

Julius didn't seem much interested in the oranges, but he folded them into the slot in the middle of his plastic face as if they were horse pills and shambled through the dust to where the monkeys and baboons were affixed to the doors of the cages and shrieking themselves breathless. He exchanged various fluids with them, his face drooping and impa.s.sive even as they clawed at the mesh and bared their teeth, then sat in the dirt sniffing luxuriously at his fingers and toes before lazily hoisting himself into the nearest tree like a big dangling bug, where he promptly fell asleep. Or died. It was hard to tell which-he was so utterly inanimate and featureless, it was as if someone had tossed a wad of wet carpeting up into the crotch of the tree.

O'Kane could feel Hamilton's eyes on him. "Well?" the doctor demanded. "What do you think? Magnificent, isn't he?"

The two keepers had moved off into the big central enclosure Hamilton had designed as a communal area where his hominoids could "interact," as he called it, busying themselves with setting up the apparatus for one or another of the doctor's arcane experiments. The monkeys, locked up in their individual cages, watched them with shining eyes. They knew what the doctor's experiments meant: eating, fighting and f.u.c.king, and not necessarily in that order. O'Kane was at a loss for words.

"You don't look terribly enthusiastic, Edward," Hamilton observed, the beardless jaw paler than the rest of his face, like the etiolated flesh beneath a bandage. His eyes did a quick flip.

"No, it's not that-I was wondering if you can get more, uh, hominoids like this orange one. It must be pretty rare. I have to admit I've never seen anything like it."