T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Yes, I understand,” she said, pursing her lips and shooting a look at O‘Kane that wilted him on the spot, as if he were the one who’d brought up the subject, “but apes are one thing and human beings quite another. I really don’t see how any discovery you make as to the”—and here she paused, for just a beat—“sexual proclivities of apes and monkeys can be applied to my husband’s case. I just fail to see it.”

This was a critical juncture, and O‘Kane, impelled by the heat of the fire, the closeness of the room and the sudden fear that the whole thing — orange trees, bungalow and all — was about to collapse like a house of cards, suddenly plunged in with a speech of his own. “But we’ll take the best care of him, ma’am, I and the Thompson brothers and Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Meyer too. He asks for us specially, you know, and we feel a real… a real compassion for him that we don’t always feel with the other patients… he’s such a gentleman, I mean, and bound to improve. And I admit I don’t know the first thing about apes — hominoids, that is — but I’m young and willing and I can learn, I can. You’ll see.”

There was a silence. Mrs. McCormick— Katherine —looked startled, as if the chair or the hat rack had suddenly begun to speak, but the old lady seemed satisfied — she had a sort of fixed benevolent old lady’s smile pasted to her lips — and Dr. Hamilton, his eyes jumping, paused only to stroke his beard for effect before coming in with the heavy artillery. ‘That’s right, Edward: it will be a learning process for all of us, and for the sciences in general, and beyond the good we’ll do for Mr. McCormick, we have an excellent chance of doing something good and valuable for all of humankind, and, what’s more“—spreading his hands wide with the flourish of an old character actor—”for every poor unfortunate sufferer like your husband, Katherine.“ His eyes held steady. He was slowing down, decelerating his delivery till every word could have been a paragraph in itself: ”And for every wife that suffers with him.“

The doctor’s words hung there a moment, the rain beating at the windows, the wax impressions — corpus callosum, medulla oblongata, pineal gland — glowing as if they’d come to life. Very faintly, so faintly O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d actually heard it, came the anguished cry of the Apron Man echoing across the rain-slick grounds. And then suddenly, without warning, Mrs. McCormick, Katherine, the Ice Queen, was weeping. It began with a sharp insuck of breath, as if someone had pricked her with a pin, and then the ice melted and in the next moment she was sobbing her heart out.

She tried to hide her face beneath the brim of her hat as she bent to fumble through her purse for a handkerchief, but O‘Kane saw that face naked and transformed, crumpled like a flower, and he saw the pain blossom in those rich insulated eyes. It was a revelation to him: she was human, after all, and more than that, she was female, intensely female, and never more female than in that moment. Her shoulders shook, her breath came in gasps, and even as her mother reached out to comfort her, O’Kane felt something give inside him. He wanted to get up and take charge, wanted to touch her, take her by the hand, but all he could do, roasting in the chair as the flames snapped and the sobs caught in her throat and the doctor wrung his hands, was murmur, “There, there,” over and over, like an idiot.

And then she looked up, the fire catching the sheen of her eyes and illuminating her wet face till it glowed like the face of some tortured saint amongst the cannibals. When she spoke, after a long, rending moment, her voice was soft and small, so small you could barely hear it. “And you meant to stick by your injunction then?”

This caught Hamilton by surprise. He groped behind him for the edge of the desk, sat himself down for half an instant and jumped up again as if it had been electrified. “What injunction? What do you mean?”

In the tiniest, most miserable voice: “No visitors.”

Hamilton drew himself up and let out such a deep rattling sorrowful breath it sounded as if he’d turned his lungs inside out. His eyes jumped and jumped again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not even his wife?”

But the doctor was already swiveling his head back and forth on his shoulders like a human metronome, and O‘Kane, welded to the chair in awestruck silence, could see where he was beginning to develop the jowls that would be his badge of high seriousness in the future. The man was a master negotiator, and he knew when to give and when to stand firm. “Not even his wife,” he said.

Long after Hamilton had disappeared and Nick and Pat Thompson begged off on the grounds of marital concord, O‘Kane sat over his beer and a plate of cold baked beans, hard-boiled eggs, salt herring and crackers with Martin, the third and youngest of the Thompson brothers. It was past nine o’clock and the barroom was raging with light and noise against the cold rain and lifeless streets beyond. O‘Kane picked up an egg, feeling half-boiled himself, what with the sainted whiskey and the good cleansing Boston brew percolating through his veins, and he began to peel it as if it were the very precious and frangible skull of an infant — or a monkey. Mart, though his eyes were glazed and his hair sticking straight up from his parting like the ruff of a grouse, watched with a kind of rapt fascination, as if he’d never seen anything like it before. He was big-headed and big-shouldered, like his brothers, but he was young yet — just twenty — and from the ribcage down he faded away to nothing. O’Kane carefully arranged the fragments of eggshell on the bare wood of the table, one at a time, then bit the denuded egg in two and washed it down with a swig of beer.

“Guess I ought to be going,” Mart sighed. “If I’m ever going to get up for work tomorrow.”

O‘Kane said, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” but it was a matter of form. He didn’t feel like leaving, not yet. He felt like. finishing his egg, to get something on his stomach, and then having another beer. No more whiskey, though: he’d had enough. That much he understood.

Rosaleen would be expecting him. Or no: she’d been expecting him for three hours and more now, and she would be laying for him like an assassin, furious, burnished to a white-hot cutting edge, her voice gone off into another, higher, shriller register, the accusatory register, the vituperative and guilt-making register. She would call him a drunk, a social climber, a puppet of the McCormicks, and she would mock his tweeds and howl anathema to California.

“One more?” O‘Kane said.

Someone at the bar behind him — he didn’t bother to turn round and see who — shouted out, “You damned fool, if I‘d’ve known you were going to salt the damn thing instead of smoking it or even jerking it, for crying out loud, I would’ve give the whole damn carcass to the orphanage.”

Mart seemed to take an unnaturally long time in answering. His eyes were small and seemed even smaller in proportion to that outsized head, and as O‘Kane gazed hopefully into them, already picturing the yellow sizzle of a final tasteless and dilatory beer, they were no more than distant grayish specks, planetary bodies faintly revealed in the universe of that big numb face, and receding fast. Mart shrugged. Reached down to scratch his calf. “I don’t see why not,” he said finally, and his enunciation could have been clearer, a whole lot clearer. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. One more.”

These were the dregs of their celebratory party: the half-filled glasses, the cold beans and herring, the shouts and smells of the crapulous strangers hemming them in on every side, the dead rinsed-out April night and the rain drooling down the windows — and above all, the lingering boozy glimmer of the golden fraternity of California. They would be leaving in two weeks by special car — a car called the Mayflower, customized by the Pullman Company with locks on the doors and restraints on the windows, and was O‘Kane the only one who saw the pure and lucent beauty of that resonant name? It was an omen, that’s what it was. They were pilgrims, leaving Plymouth Rock and North Boston and Waverley behind for the paradise in the west, for the hibiscus, the jasmine, the tangerines and oranges and the dates that rained down from the palms like a reward just for being alive.