T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“There really is no earthly excuse for having left that key in the lock,” Hamilton was saying, his voice never rising above its customary whisper despite his obvious agitation. The presidential spectacles threw daggers of light round the little box of a room. He fidgeted with his hands and tugged spasmodically at his beard. O‘Kane shifted in his seat. To his reckoning, this was the twelfth time the issue of culpability had come up, and now, as on each of the previous eleven occasions, O’Kane pursed his lips, bowed his head and gave Hamilton the look his mother called “the choirboy on his deathbed.”

“We’ve got to understand, each and every one of us, what a danger Mr. McCormick is in his present condition, not only to others but to himself,” the doctor went on. “Did you see what he did to that young woman in the space of something like thirty seconds? Shocking. And believe me, I’ve seen the whole range of psychosexual behavior.”

There wasn’t much O‘Kane could say to this. He was waiting to be dismissed, waiting to do his penance at the patient’s bedside and get it over with, let life go on and the dawn break and Buffalo appear on the horizon like some luminous dream. And he was waiting for something else too, something Hamilton couldn’t guess at and would never suspect: he was waiting for the doctor to retire so he could slip up to the parlor car and have a couple whiskies to steady his nerves and ease the tedium of the coming hours — if he hadn’t actually needed them before, he needed them now.

But the doctor wasn’t finished yet. He was going to make O‘Kane squirm, make him appreciate the hierarchy of the McCormick medical team and what he expected of his underlings, because he wouldn’t tolerate another lapse in security like the one tonight, even if it meant instituting certain personnel changes, and he hoped O’Kane caught his meaning. “I don’t have to emphasize,” he said, pulling at his beard with one hand and fumbling around for his pipe with the other, “how much Mr. McCormick’s health and welfare means to all of us, to me and Mrs. Hamilton, to you and your wife and your coworkers and their wives. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I will not have any unprofessional behavior or personal shoddiness jeopardize it.”

O‘Kane watched the doctor’s hands tremble as he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his big curved flugelhorn of a pipe and lit it. He’d never seen him so worked up and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like being lectured to either. And while he might have looked composed and contrite, all the while he was seething, thinking he could just reach out and snap the doctor’s reedy stalk of a neck like a match-stick and never have to listen to another word.

Hamilton shook out the match and looked up from his pipe. “What I mean is, I’m afraid we’re going to lose him if he gets free again.”

“Lose him? You don’t think he’s suicidal, do you?”

“Pfffft!” The doctor waved an impatient hand and turned away in disgust, pulling vigorously at his pipe. The smoke rose in angry plumes. He wouldn’t dignify the question with a response.

O‘Kane was irritated. “I may not have the clinical experience you do, or the education either, but believe me I’ve seen more cases of dementia praecox than you could—”

“Schizophrenia,” the doctor corrected. “Kraepelin’s configuration — literally, ‘early insanity — isn’t half so useful as Dr. Jung’s.”

The smell of incinerated tobacco filled the compartment till there was no other odor in the world. Smoke wreathed the lamp, settled on the pages of the ape book spread open on the bed beside the doctor’s flank, drew a curtain over the room. “Think of it this way,” Hamilton went on, lecturing out of habit now, “ ‘schizo,’ a splitting, and ‘phrenia,’ of the mind. A schizophrenic, like Mr. McCormick and his sister before him, has been split down the middle by his illness, withdrawing from our reality into a subsidiary reality of his own making, a sort of waking nightmare beyond anything you or I could imagine, Edward.” The way he pronounced the name was a goad in itself, a slap in the face. I’m in charge here, he was saying, and you’re an ignoramus. “And if you don’t believe these patients are eminently capable of doing anything they can to escape that nightmare, including inflicting violence on themselves — extreme violence — then you’re a good deal less observant than I give you credit for.”

“Yes, yes, all right — schizophrenic, then. It’s all the same to me.” O‘Kane was hot, angry, humiliated by this whole idiotic scene. He’d left the key in the lock. He was wrong. He admitted it. But Hamilton just wouldn’t let it go. “Call it what you will,” O’Kane said, and he couldn’t help raising his voice, “I’ve seen them so blocked they’ve had to have their fingers pried away from the toilet seat, and while you’re home in bed in the middle of the night I’m the one who has to hose them down after they’ve smeared themselves with their own, their own—”

“I’m not questioning your experience, Edward — after all, I hired you, didn’t I? I’m just trying to acquaint you with some of the special considerations of this case. The greatest threat to Mr. McCormick is himself, and if you want to live in California and tramp through those orange groves you’re always talking about, you’re going to have to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day. We can’t have a repetition of what happened here this evening, we just can’t. And we won’t. If it wasn’t for the serendipity of the young woman’s being there, as callous as that may sound, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would have thrown open the last door in the last car and kept on going out into the night — and by the way, did you see how much she resembled Katherine?”

“Who?”

“The young woman — what was her name?”

“Brownlee,” O‘Kane said. “Fredericka Brownlee. She’s from Cincinnati,” he added, not because it was relevant but because he loved the sound of it: Cincinnati. “I found out she’s on her way home from Albany, where her mother and her were visiting — I think it was her mother’s aunt.” The reference to Katherine had taken him by surprise — he hadn’t seen the resemblance and he hated to admit that Hamilton was right, not now, not tonight, but maybe there was something there after all. She was younger than Mrs. McCormick — twenty-two or twenty-three maybe — and not really in her league at all, but there was something in her eyes and the set of her mouth and the way she threw back her shoulders and stared straight into you as if she were challenging you to anything from a game of chess to the hundred-yard dash, and that was like Katherine, he supposed. They were both part of that class of women used to getting their own way, the ones who wanted the vote and wanted to wear pants and smoke and turn everything upside down — and had the money to do it.

Hamilton had made him come along when they paid Miss Brownlee a visit, checkbook open wide, after they’d got Mr. McCormick secured and she’d had an opportunity to change clothes and treat the two minor abrasions on her left cheek where Mr. McCormick had ground her face into the fabric of the seat. It was an awkward meeting, for obvious reasons, but Dr. Hamilton was at his smiling, genial, smooth-talking, manipulative best, and O‘Kane, after having given each of the porters a dollar and a five-spot to the old gentleman who’d been trampled, didn’t have to do much more than look sympathetic and work up a rueful grin when the occasion demanded it. Mrs. Brownlee, her features pinched with outrage, said she was incapable of believing that even the most depraved monster would attack an innocent child absolutely without warning or provocation and in a public place no less and that in her estimation this wasn’t a matter for apology or even remuneration but the sort of thing the police and the courts of law ought to take up, not to mention the authorities of the New York Central Line who’d allowed this person to be brought aboard in the first place.