T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Mr. Lawler objected. Mr. Baker was leading the witness. Judge Dehy sustained the objection and the question was stricken from the record, but not before the doctor denied it.

“All right then, sir,” Newt intoned, all solemnity and barely suppressed indignation, “deny me this: isn’t it a fact that Mr. McCormick is hopelessly insane and that his present physician’s treatment amounts to nothing more than so much hocus-pocus?”

Katherine gave a start, and all the courthouse saw her, the smug McCormicks, the scribbling reporters, and three assistants to Mr. Lawler and the stewing mass of whey-faced gawkers and hangers-on who only lusted after the most degrading details of her and her husband’s private life: Newt had gone too far. Yes, she understood he was trying to make a point, trying to suggest that psychoanalysis had its limits in cases like Stanley‘s, but hopelessly insane? He didn’t believe that, did he? The doctor, the McCormicks’ man, might have believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that God and his angels had set up a summer camp on Pluto, but he denied that her husband was hopelessly insane, and for a minute she forgot which side she was on.

There was more of the same the next day and the next and the day after that, doctors and more doctors, doctors for Lawler and the McCormicks, doctors for her and Newton Baker, and none of them had a thing to say you couldn’t have written on the back of a penny postcard. Then she had to endure the testimony of the nurses — Edward James O‘Kane, sinfully handsome even in his decline, taking the stand to say that yes, Dr. Kempf had done wonders, and how was that for gratitude? And worse: Lawler called witnesses to impugn her character, as if she were unfit to have the guardianship of her own husband. She was a radical, a feminist, a member of the American Birth Control League, and more than that they could only imply, because they wouldn’t dare, and it took everything she had in her to sit on that leather-upholstered bench and listen to them try to cast their filthy aspersions on Jane Roessing when there wasn’t a man or woman in that courtroom fit to wipe her feet….

Yes. And then they called her, Katherine Dexter McCormick, to the witness stand.

Did she swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and etcetera?

She did.

And she looked out over the courtroom with a calm and steady gaze, sweeping the tentative faces of Kempf and Cyrus and Harold and Anita, the twittering crush of reporters and curiosity seekers, the lawyers and expert witnesses huddled in their separate corners like teams out of uniform, before settling finally on Jane and her mother, drawn together now in the space she’d vacated. She gave them the briefest tight-lipped smile and then raised her eyes to Newt Baker’s. Now, she thought, now they would hear the truth, now they would hear how a greedy and vengeful family tried from the beginning to isolate her and cut her out and how their only intent was to separate her from her husband and preserve the McCormick fortune at all costs and how Kempf was simply the latest in a long line of quacks and charlatans hired to exclude her not only from her husband’s care but from his rooms and his house and the very sight of him. And who was the loser in all this? She was. And Stanley, never forget Stanley, deprived of her support and physical presence through all these cruel, inexorable, downwinding years. Oh, she had a story to tell.

Newt Baker led her through it step by step, as well as he could, but of course motive wasn’t admissible here except by implication and every time she began to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth Oscar Lawler popped up like a jack-in-the-box to object. Still, Newt was able to guide her toward a thorough airing of the central question at issue here: Kempf’s competence.

“When did you first suspect the efficacy — or lack thereof — of Dr. Kempf’s methods, Mrs. McCormick?” Newt asked in the gentlest wafting breeze of a voice.

“When he informed me, in all seriousness, that my husband’s teeth, which are in a deplorable state, would be somehow miraculously repaired through the effects of Freudian analysis.”

“His teeth?”

“Yes, you see my husband has an unreasoning fear of dentists because a dentist was involved in an altercation with him on the day of his breakdown, his final breakdown, that is. And this is quite clearly a case of the patient leading the physician, as if words alone could rectify a physical ailment — one that is well within our scope and means to repair through the expedient of dental surgery. This is a matter of tooth decay, not mental manipulation.”

Newt gazed at the judge a moment, then leaned in close to the witness stand. His hair was silver now, not a trace of the color she remembered from the War years, and he carried himself with the exaggerated care that hinted at fragility, the first ineluctable whisper of old age — though he couldn’t have been more than sixty, if that. “And that,” he was saying, “was when you first began to suspect that Dr. Kempf’s treatment, though we’ve heard it irresponsibly lauded here in this court, might be akin to mental healing or Christian Science even?”

“That’s correct.” Katherine drew herself up, sought out Kempf’s eyes, gave the judge a look as if to be sure he was listening, and then came back to Newt, who was waiting there like a catcher crouched behind the plate at Fenway Park, and she the pitcher all wound-up and ready to let fly. “I told him it was utter nonsense, unscientific and ineffective, and that there were physical treatments available to treat physical problems like my husband‘s — thyroid feeding, for instance. He proceeded to give me a long account of his new theory, which he’s embodied in a monograph called ’The Autonomic System’ or some such. He sees himself as very big in the field and explained to me how this new theory of his was being gradually accepted and how widely it would affect the position of psychoanalysis. But no amount of talk, whether it be therapeutic or merely harmful and alienating, is going to cure a physical ailment.”

“And Dr. Kempf persisted in applying this ‘theory’ to your husband, despite the fact that noted physicians like Dr. R. G. Hoskins of Harvard found your husband ’indubitably endocrinopathic,‘ I believe the term was?”

“Yes.”

Newt took a moment to stride from one end of the raised platform in front of the box to the other. This was his moment, and he seemed to swell himself in proportion to it. “And that was when Dr. Kempf, who had been engaged above your objections by your husband’s other two guardians — Cyrus and Anita McCormick — at the staggering sum of ten thousand dollars a month, turned on you and banished you altogether from your husband’s house?”

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 arsenal. 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.