The smell of incinerated tobacco filled the compartment till there was no other odor in the world. Smoke wreathed the lamp, settled on the pages of the ape book spread open on the bed beside the doctor’s flank, drew a curtain over the room. “Think of it this way,” Hamilton went on, lecturing out of habit now, “ ‘schizo,’ a splitting, and ‘phrenia,’ of the mind. A schizophrenic, like Mr. McCormick and his sister before him, has been split down the middle by his illness, withdrawing from our reality into a subsidiary reality of his own making, a sort of waking nightmare beyond anything you or I could imagine, Edward.” The way he pronounced the name was a goad in itself, a slap in the face. I’m in charge here, he was saying, and you’re an ignoramus. “And if you don’t believe these patients are eminently capable of doing anything they can to escape that nightmare, including inflicting violence on themselves — extreme violence — then you’re a good deal less observant than I give you credit for.”
“Yes, yes, all right — schizophrenic, then. It’s all the same to me.” O‘Kane was hot, angry, humiliated by this whole idiotic scene. He’d left the key in the lock. He was wrong. He admitted it. But Hamilton just wouldn’t let it go. “Call it what you will,” O’Kane said, and he couldn’t help raising his voice, “I’ve seen them so blocked they’ve had to have their fingers pried away from the toilet seat, and while you’re home in bed in the middle of the night I’m the one who has to hose them down after they’ve smeared themselves with their own, their own—”
“I’m not questioning your experience, Edward — after all, I hired you, didn’t I? I’m just trying to acquaint you with some of the special considerations of this case. The greatest threat to Mr. McCormick is himself, and if you want to live in California and tramp through those orange groves you’re always talking about, you’re going to have to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day. We can’t have a repetition of what happened here this evening, we just can’t. And we won’t. If it wasn’t for the serendipity of the young woman’s being there, as callous as that may sound, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would have thrown open the last door in the last car and kept on going out into the night — and by the way, did you see how much she resembled Katherine?”
“Who?”
“The young woman — what was her name?”
“Brownlee,” O‘Kane said. “Fredericka Brownlee. She’s from Cincinnati,” he added, not because it was relevant but because he loved the sound of it: Cincinnati. “I found out she’s on her way home from Albany, where her mother and her were visiting — I think it was her mother’s aunt.” The reference to Katherine had taken him by surprise — he hadn’t seen the resemblance and he hated to admit that Hamilton was right, not now, not tonight, but maybe there was something there after all. She was younger than Mrs. McCormick — twenty-two or twenty-three maybe — and not really in her league at all, but there was something in her eyes and the set of her mouth and the way she threw back her shoulders and stared straight into you as if she were challenging you to anything from a game of chess to the hundred-yard dash, and that was like Katherine, he supposed. They were both part of that class of women used to getting their own way, the ones who wanted the vote and wanted to wear pants and smoke and turn everything upside down — and had the money to do it.
Hamilton had made him come along when they paid Miss Brownlee a visit, checkbook open wide, after they’d got Mr. McCormick secured and she’d had an opportunity to change clothes and treat the two minor abrasions on her left cheek where Mr. McCormick had ground her face into the fabric of the seat. It was an awkward meeting, for obvious reasons, but Dr. Hamilton was at his smiling, genial, smooth-talking, manipulative best, and O‘Kane, after having given each of the porters a dollar and a five-spot to the old gentleman who’d been trampled, didn’t have to do much more than look sympathetic and work up a rueful grin when the occasion demanded it. Mrs. Brownlee, her features pinched with outrage, said she was incapable of believing that even the most depraved monster would attack an innocent child absolutely without warning or provocation and in a public place no less and that in her estimation this wasn’t a matter for apology or even remuneration but the sort of thing the police and the courts of law ought to take up, not to mention the authorities of the New York Central Line who’d allowed this person to be brought aboard in the first place.
Hamilton purred and simpered and pursed his lips, squeezing out apologies and mitigations in short whispery bursts while the elder lady scorched him with every sort of threat known to mankind, short of surbate and crucifixion, and Miss Brownlee stared down at her clasped hands and then at the black gliding window before finally settling her eyes on O‘Kane. She’d been badly frightened, physically injured, subjected to a humiliating and vicious assault, but now she was bored — or so it seemed to him — profoundly bored, and she just wanted to forget the whole business. And she was looking into O’Kane’s eyes to see if he was bored too, and there was something complicitous in that look, something challenging, flirtatious even.
O‘Kane stared back at her, saying nothing, letting the doctor carry the weight of the negotiations — five hundred dollars was the figure they finally settled on, and it was only because Mrs. Brownlee was willing to make an exception for the McCormick name and agree to hush the thing up and abjure all mention of courts and lawyers — and he couldn’t help seeing her as she was half an hour earlier, bleeding and impotent, Mr. McCormick on top of her and her face twisted with fear, and that gave him a strange sensation. He’d rescued her and should have felt charitable and pure, should have remembered Arabella Doane, but he didn’t — he wanted to see her nude, nude and spread out like dessert on the thin rolling mat of his berth. There was a thread of crusted blood just under the slash of her cheekbone and a blemish at the corner of her mouth, the flawless bone-white complexion tarnished and discolored, and he looked at that blemish and felt lewd and wanton, felt the way he did when Rosaleen rolled over in bed and put her face in his beneath the curtain of her hair and just breathed on him till he awoke in the dark with a jolt of excitement. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t admirable, but there it was.
“You really think she looks like Mrs. McCormick?” O‘Kane said after a moment.
The doctor hadn’t responded to his comment regarding the Brown-lees’ itinerary, apparently finding the destinations of Cincinnati and Albany considerably less exotic than O‘Kane did. Pipe dangling from between clenched teeth, he shifted his buttocks and took up the ape book with both hands, glancing at O’Kane as if surprised to see him there still. “I would have thought it was obvious,” he murmured, his eyes flipping in a weary, mechanical way. The lecture was over. He looked sleepy, already disengaging himself, thinking now only of his pajamas, his toothbrush and his apes. “Not that this girl has the hundredth part of Katherine’s charm and sophistication,” he sighed, fighting back a yawn, “but physically, I think there’s no question—”
For the past fifteen minutes O‘Kane had wanted nothing more than to escape this miserable little box of a room, his ears burning, the foretaste of whiskey teasing his tongue and dilating his throat, but now he lingered, puzzled. “So what you’re saying is of all the women on the train he could have, well, assaulted — he chose her purposely? Given that the fit was on him, of course.”
The doctor’s eyes were dead behind his spectacles. He yawned again and bunched his shoulders against a sudden dip of the rails. “Yes. That’s right. He might have attacked any woman — or he might have thrown himself under the wheels, as I said… but he chose her.”