T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Still nothing.

“Well, if you did, and I’m quite sure there’s nothing wrong with my hearing — or maybe there is, ha! and I’d better have it tested — well, and if you did say ‘a dog’ I’d be very interested to hear just why you should feel that way, for the main and simple reason that it’s such an extraordinary position to take, and I’m sure both Mr. Thompson and Mr. O’Kane would like to hear your reasoning too. Wouldn’t you, fellows?”

Mart grunted, and it was hard to say whether it was an affirmative or negative grunt.

O‘Kane ducked his head. “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

“Do you hear that, Mr. McCormick? All your friends would like to know just how you feel on the subject. Yes? Mr. McCormick?”

And yet still nothing. O‘Kane wondered if Mr. McCormick had even heard the question, or if he’d already shut his mind down, as impervious as a rodent buried deep in its burrow. At least he wasn’t violent. Or not yet, anyway.

The doctor pulled a cigar from his inside pocket and took a moment in lighting it. He drew on it, expelled a plume of smoke and gave the patient a canny look, which was unfortunately lost on Mr. McCormick, who continued to gaze into the sky as if he were Percival Lowell looking for signs of life on Mars. “Perhaps you feel caged-in here, is that it, Mr. McCormick?” the doctor began. “Is that what you’re saying — that you’d like more liberty? Because we can arrange that — more drives, more walks outside the estate, if that’s what you want. Is that it? Is that what you mean?”

After a silence that must have lasted five or six minutes, Dr. Brush changed his tack. “Tell me about your father, Mr. McCormick,” he said, leaning forward now and addressing Mr. McCormick’s long pale throat and the underside of his chin. “He was a great man, I’m told…. Did you love him very much?”

A gull coasted overhead. It was very still. Somewhere down below, off in the direction of the cottages, someone was singing in Italian, a monotonous drone that swung back and forth on itself like a pendulum.

“Did you… did you ever feel that you disliked him? Or harbored any resentment toward him? Perhaps he disciplined you as a boy or even spanked you — did that ever occur?”

O‘Kane became conscious of the movement of the sun, the sharp angle of the shadow beside him creeping inexorably nearer. He tried to make out the words to the song, though he couldn’t understand them anyway, and he tried not to think of Giovannella. Mr. McCormick, who had a genius for rigidity — he would have made the ideal sculptor’s model — never moved a hair. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

“Well,” the doctor said after a bit, and he got massively to his feet, puffing at the cigar, and began to pace back and forth, counting off the tiles, “well and so.” He stalked round back of Mr. McCormick again and again forced his face into Mr. McCormick’s line of vision. “And your mother,” he said, “what is she like?”

The second thing the doctor tried was by way of effecting certain small refinements in the daily schedule, for the sake of efficiency. He started with Mr. McCormick’s shower bath. “Eddie,” he said, taking O‘Kane aside just after his shift had ended one evening, “you know, I’ve been thinking about Mr. McCormick’s day and how he goes about using his resources, for the main and simple reason that I think we could inject a bit more efficiency into the scheme of things. Shake him up, you know? It’s the same old thing, day in and day out. You’d think the man’d be bored to death by now.”

O‘Kane, who had remained head nurse despite the change of regime and had seen his salary increased by five dollars a week since Brush took over, felt it prudent to act concerned, though he saw nothing at all wrong with the schedule as it stood. It wasn’t the schedule that was holding Mr. McCormick back, and it wasn’t the lack of intellectual stimulation either — it was the lack of women. Get him laid a few times and see what happened — he couldn’t be any worse for it than he was now. He gave Brush a saintly look. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I was looking at this item here, the shower bath,” the doctor said. They were standing at the doorway to the upper parlor; Mr. McCormick had been put to bed and Nick and Pat had just begun their shift. “ ‘Seven to eight A.M.: shower bath.’ Now doesn’t that seem a bit excessive? Even in the interest of proper hygiene? Why, I spend no more than five minutes under the shower myself, and ha! you’ll have to admit there’s a good deal more of me to wash than there is of Mr. McCormick. What I’m thinking is, couldn’t we cut that time back — gradually, I mean — till he takes a normal shower bath of five or ten minutes, and then we can apply the savings in time to his improvement and cure—”

O‘Kane shrugged. “Well, sure, I suppose. But Mr. McCormick is very adamant about his shower bath, it’s one of his pet obsessions, and it may be very difficult to—”

“Ach,” the doctor waved a hand in his face, “leave that to me — obsessions are my stock in trade.”

And so, the following morning, once O‘Kane and Mart had ushered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath, Dr. Brush appeared, barefooted and mountainous in a long trailing rain slicker the size of a two-man tent. “Good morning, good morning!” he boomed, the raw shout of his voice reverberating in the small cubicle of the shower bath till it was like a hundred voices. “Don’t mind me, Mr. McCormick,” he called, his pale fleshy toes gripping the wet tiles, water already streaming from the hem of the rain slicker, “I’m just here to observe your bathing in the interest of efficiency, for the main and simple — but just think of me as one of your efficiency experts you manufacturing men are forever introducing into your operations to cut corners and increase production…. Go ahead, now, don’t let me interfere—”

Mr. McCormick was seated naked on the floor beneath one of the three showerheads, rubbing furiously at his chest with a fresh bar of Palm Olive soap. He looked alarmed at first, and even made as if to cover his privates, but then seemed to think better of it, and turning away from the doctor, he continued lathering his chest.

“Now I thought,” the doctor went on, steam rising, the water splashing against the walls and leaping up to spatter his legs, “that we might begin today by limiting our bathing to perhaps, oh, how does fifteen minutes sound to you, Mr. McCormick? You see, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a more than reasonable length of time to thoroughly cleanse ourselves, for the main and simple reason that the human body can only hold so much dirt, especially when one bathes daily, don’t you think?”

O‘Kane stood in the bathroom doorway, his usual station, where he could observe Mr. McCormick at his bath and yet not intrude too much on him, and Mart was in the parlor, preparing the table for Mr. McCormick’s breakfast. While the shower stall was quite large — there was room enough for three people at least — O’Kane couldn’t help feeling the doctor was taking an unnecessary risk. There was no telling how Mr. McCormick might construe this invasion of his privacy, efficiency or no, and if he were to get violent, there was always the possibility of a nasty fall, what with the slick tiles and steady flow of water. He didn’t like the situation, not one bit, and he gloomily envisioned himself charging into the fray and ruining yet another suit.

But Mr. McCormick surprised him. He didn’t seem particularly agitated — or not that O‘Kane could see. He merely kept the white slope of his back to the intruder and soaped himself all the more vigorously as the doctor went on jabbering away and the water fell in a cascade of steely bright pins. This went on for some time, until at a signal from Brush, O’Kane called to Mart and Mart went below to cut off the water supply.