T. Boyle - Riven Rock

As it turned out, Dr. Brush wasn’t a man to rock the boat, even if it was in his power to do so, which it wasn’t. O‘Kane liked him well enough — he was hearty, quick with a laugh, a big physical man who relished his food and drink and didn’t go around acting as if he was better than everybody else in the world who didn’t happen to be a millionaire or a psychiatrist — but he didn’t respect him in the way he’d respected Dr. Hamilton. For all his dallying with his monkeys and all his airs and the stiff formality of him, at least Hamilton was a first-rate psychiatrist, one of the best men in the country, and Mr. McCormick had improved under his care, even if it was by fits and starts. Not that Brush didn’t have top-notch credentials, in addition to being handpicked by Dr. Meyer, but he was just too, well, clownish to make anything of himself in the long run, and that boded ill for Mr. McCormick. Hamilton had gotten what he wanted out of Riven Rock and then made himself scarce; Brush seemed content to bob like a great quivering buoy on the ebbing tide of that particular psychological backwater.

Oh, he started out energetically enough, eager to make a good impression like any other man in a new position, especially one who knows he’s going to be held accountable to the Ice Queen on the one hand and to Dr. Meyer, the world’s most humorless man, on the other. Basically, he adhered to Dr. Hamilton’s regimen, which accorded strict hours for Mr. McCormick’s activities, from the time he woke to the length of his shower bath and the hour he retired in the evening, but, being the new man in charge, he couldn’t help tinkering with one or two small things here and there. In the beginning, that is. Only in the beginning.

The first thing he did, and to O‘Kane’s mind this was a mistake, most definitely a mistake, was to attempt to apply the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. In those days — and this was in the summer and fall of 1916—the talking cure was considered little more than a novelty, a sort of glorified parlor game for the rich and idle, like dream analysis or hypnosis, and few psychiatrists had taken the lead of Dr. Freud in applying it to their severely disturbed patients. Like most people, O’Kane was deeply skeptical — how could you talk a raving lunatic out of drinking his own urine or stabbing his invalid grandmother a hundred times with a cocktail fork? — and Dr. Hamilton, though he subscribed to Freud’s theories and was ready to lecture O‘Kane and the Thompsons at the drop of a hat on such absurdities as infantile sexuality and mother lust, never applied the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. Better he felt, to keep the patient to a strict regimen, with a good healthy diet and sufficient exercise and intellectual stimulation, and let nature take its course. But Brush was new to the job, and he wanted to assert himself.

Both O‘Kane and Martin were present for the first session. It was a sunny morning, glorious really, the early fog dissipated, the summer at its height, and Mr. McCormick was taking the air on the sunporch after breakfast. The porch — or patio, actually — adjoined the upper parlor and was walled around to a height of eight feet, with barred windows at eye level and wicker furniture bolted to the concrete beneath the Italian tiles and arranged in a little cluster in the middle of the floor. The door to the sun porch was always kept locked when not in use and the furniture had been situated with an eye to preventing Mr. McCormick’s getting close enough to one of the walls to be able to boost himself over. It was a two-story drop to the shrubbery below, and even for a man of Mr. McCormick’s agility, that could well prove fatal.

Mr. McCormick had eaten well that morning — two eggs with several strips of bacon, an English muffin and a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and cream — and he seemed to be in an especially good mood, anticipating a new moving picture Roscoe had brought up from Hollywood the previous evening. It was a Lillian Gish picture, and Mr. McCormick, who wasn’t allowed to see women in the flesh, really savored the opportunity to see them come to life on the flat shining screen in the theater house. More than once he’d had to be restrained from exposing his sex organ at the sight of Pearl White hanging from a cliff or Mary Pickford lifting her skirt to step down from the running board of an automobile, but the doctors felt nonetheless that the mental stimulation provided by the movies far outweighed any small unpleasantness that might arise from their depiction of females — in distress or otherwise. O‘Kane wasn’t so sure. He was the one who had to get up in the middle of the film with the light flickering and Mr. McCormick breathing spasmodically and force Mr. McCormick’s member back into his pants, and that had to be humiliating for Mr. McCormick — and it certainly was no joy for O’Kane either. No, seeing women like that, all made-up and batting their eyes at the camera and showing off their cleavage and the rest of it, must have just frustrated the poor man all the more. Anybody would go crazy in his situation, and half the time O‘Kane wondered if they shouldn’t just go out and hire a prostitute once a month and let Mr. McCormick — properly restrained, of course — release his natural urges like any other man, but then that wasn’t being psychological, was it?

At any rate, Dr. Brush showed up that morning just after O‘Kane and Mart had taken Mr. McCormick out onto the sunporch, and he was determined to give the talking cure a try. “Mr. McCormick,” he cried, lumbering through the door and booming a greeting in his lusty big hail-fellow voice, “and how are you this fine morning?”

Mr. McCormick was seated in one of the wicker chairs, his feet up on the wicker settee, hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into the cloudless sky. He was dressed, as usual, as if he were on his way to his office at the Reaper Works, in a gray summer suit, vest, formal collar and tie. He didn’t respond to the greeting, nor acknowledge the doctor’s presence in any way.

Undeterred, Dr. Brush strode hugely across the tiles and stationed himself just behind Mr. McCormick, leaning forward to maneuver his great sweating dirigible of a face into Mr. McCormick’s line of sight. “And so,” Dr. Brush boomed, “aren’t you the lucky one to have such fine weather here all the year round? It must be especially gratifying in the winter, for the main and simple reason of defeating the ice and snow, but can you imagine how they’re all sweltering in that humidity back East… and here, it’s as pleasant as can be. What do you think it is, Mr. McCormick — seventy? Seventy-two, maybe? Huh?”

No response.

“Yes, sir,” the doctor concluded with a stagey sigh, “you’re a lucky man.”

Mr. McCormick spoke then for the first time since he’d been led out onto the porch. He still had his head thrust back and he was viewing Dr. Brush upside down, which must have been a bit peculiar, though it didn’t seem to faze him much. “Lucky?” he said, and his voice was barely a croak. “I‘m-I’m no luckier than a dog.”

“A dog?” And now the doctor was in a state of high excitement, dodging round the patio with little feints of his too-small feet and finally squeezing himself into the chair opposite Mr. McCormick. “And why do you say that, sir? A dog? Really. How extraordinary.”

Mart, who was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door, cracked his knuckles audibly. O‘Kane had been pacing back and forth in the shade at the far end of the patio, and he stopped now and found himself a good spot at the intersection of two walls and leaned back to listen. Mr. McCormick, still staring up into the sky, said nothing.

“A dog?” Brush repeated. “Did I hear you correctly, Mr. McCormick? You did say ‘a dog,’ didn’t you?”