T. Boyle - Riven Rock

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 shit-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, 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 passed 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 mass 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 grass, 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 massive 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 —

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?”