T. Boyle - Riven Rock

A crowd gathered. Someone called the fire department. Katherine had never been more embarrassed in her life, both men and the old lady looking daggers at her, the rest of the pullulating world, from floor-sweeps to jeunesse dorée, studying her as if she were a sideshow attraction, elbows nudging ribs, smirks spreading across faces, silent quips exchanged by bug-eyed strangers in the walled-off vacuum of the lobby. She took it for half an hour — half an hour at least — the firemen there with their useless pry bars, Julius the equal of all comers, and then she broke down, and she didn’t care who was watching or where her dignity had fled.

“Julius!” she screamed, pounding at the glass like a madwoman, “you stop this now! You stop it!” She sobbed. She raged. She backed up and kicked savagely at that grinning intransigent unreasoning glassed-in hominoidal face till she broke a heel and fell reeling to the little wedge of tiled floor beneath her. ‘

Julius did a strange thing then. He dropped his arms, just for an instant, just long enough to part the fringe of orange hair concealing his genitalia and expose himself, right there, inches from her face, the long dark organ in its nest, the meaty bald testicles, the maleness at the center of his being, and then, before anyone could act, he shot out both hands again to catch the glass on either side of him and hold it fast in his indomitable grip.

It was in 1916, in the spring, that Dr. Brush took over for Dr. Hamilton. O‘Kane remembered the day not only for what it represented to Mr. McCormick and the whole enterprise of Riven Rock — a changing of the guard, no less, and this far along — but for the heavy fog that lay over the place late into the day, and no chance of clearing. It was a transformative fog, thick and surreal, and it closed everything in like the backdrop to a bad dream so that he half expected to see ghosts and goblins materializing from the gloom along with Rosaleen and his father and the walleyed kid who’d rubbed his nose in the dirt when he was six and afraid of everything.

He was sitting with Mart and Mr. McCormick in the upper parlor, just after lunch — and Mr. McCormick had eaten very nicely, thank you, allowing the napkin to be tucked into his collar without a fuss and using his spoon with a wonderful adroitness on the peas, potatoes and meat loaf — when there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs and they all three glanced up in unison to see a huge puffing seabeast of a man laboring up the steps under the weight of the cigar clenched between his teeth. O‘Kane’s first impulse was to laugh out loud, but he restrained himself. It was too much, it really was — the man was a dead ringer for William Howard Taft, right down to the pinniped mustache and the fifty-six-inch waistline. And after Hamilton, with his Rooseveltian spectacles, O’Kane was beginning to see a pattern developing here — he supposed the next one, if there was a next one, would look like Wilson, all joint and bone and sour schoolmastery lips. Was this some sort of private joke Dr. Meyer was pulling on them — Dr. Adolph Meyer, that is, who looked just exactly like what he was, a Kraut headshrinker with a gray-streaked headshrinker’s beard and a sense of humor buried so deep not even the Second Coming could have exhumed it?

“Mr. McCormick, I presume?” the fat man called when he’d reached the landing and stood poised outside the barred door like a traveling salesman unsure of the neighborhood. He was trying for a genial smile, but the cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth distended it into a sort of flesh-straining grimace. “And Mr. O‘Kane? And that would be Mr. Tompkins, yes?”

“Thompson,” Mart returned in a voice dead and buried while Mr. McCormick blinked in bewilderment from his place at the table — he wasn’t used to new people, not at all — and O‘Kane got up from his chair to unlock the door and admit the new psychiatrist. Rising from the chair, moving through the desolate space of that penitentiary of a room, the most familiar room in the world, a place he knew as well as any prisoner knew his cell, he couldn’t help feeling something like hope surging through him — or maybe it was only caffeine, from Sam Wah’s black and potent Chinese tea. But who was to say that this man standing so mountainously at the door wasn’t the miracle worker who would transform Mr. McCormick from a disturbed schizophrenic sex maniac incapable of tying his own shoes into a kindhearted and grateful millionaire ready to reward those who’d stood by him in his time of need?

“We were expecting you earlier,” O‘Kane said, by way of making conversation until he could insert the three separate keys into the three separate locks and let the swollen savior in so they could shake hands and get off to a proper start.

“Yes,” Dr. Brush rasped, chewing around his cigar, “and I expect Gilbert’ll be up in arms over it, but I’m late, you see, for the main and simple reason that this damnable fog made it damned near impossible to find the door of the hotel, let alone give the damned driver a chance of finding the damned road out here — and where in hell are we, anyway? Good God, talk about the hinterlands—”

Actually, he’d been scheduled to take over more than two years earlier, and Hamilton had prepared O‘Kane and the Thompsons and everybody else for the passing of the baton, but word had it that Katherine had opened her checkbook and said, “How can I persuade you to stay on, Dr. Hamilton?” And Hamilton, who’d already written up his monkey experiments for some high-flown scientific journal and was anxious to get back and circulating in the world of sexual psychopathology, where new advances were being made almost daily, had, so Nick said, demanded on the spot that she double his salary and provide him with the use of a new car. “Done,” Katherine said, and wrote out a check. And so, Dr. Brush was late. Not just by a couple of hours, but by two years and more.

There was an awkward moment after the door had been shut and treble-locked behind him, when Brush began advancing hugely on Mr. McCormick and throwing out a grab bag of hearty greetings and mindless pleasantries, wholly unconscious of the telltale signs that Mr. McCormick was feeling threatened and on the verge of erupting into some sort of violent episode, but O‘Kane caught the big man by the elbow and steered him toward an armchair on the far side of the room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here, doctor?” he said so that everyone could hear him. And then, sotto voce, “You’ve got to give Mr. McCormick his space, at least until the two of you are better acquainted — he’s very particular about that. You see, he’s not sitting there alone — his judges are there with him, wigs, robes, gavels and all, though you and I can’t see them.”

The big man looked perplexed. He must have been forty or so, though it was hard to tell considering the amount of flesh he carried, especially in the face — every line and wrinkle was erased in the general swell of fatty tissue, giving him the look of a very well fed and pampered baby. “Well, I just—” he began, looking down at O‘Kane’s hand clamped round his arm and then allowing himself to be led, like some great floating zeppelin, to the chair. “I just felt ”—and now he looked again to Mr. McCormick, who was doing his shrinking man routine, hunching his shoulders and declining into the chair so that soon only his head would be visible above the tablecloth—“that we should meet, and as soon as possible, Mr. McCormick, sir, for the main and simple reason that we’ll be spending so much valuable time together in the coming weeks and months, and while I, er, should really have waited for a proper introduction from that good friend of yours, Dr. Hamilton, I just thought, er, for the main and simple reason—”