That was what hit her now, the irony of it, and that was saddest of alclass="underline" poor Stanley had been designing his own prison and he never knew it. No one did. He had all the promise in the world — member of half a dozen clubs at college, editor of the school paper, chairman of the Casino committee, tennis prodigy, scholar, painter, athlete, poet, the McCormick wealth at his fingertips and every possibility alive to him — and when Mary Virginia was moved to Arkansas to be with her new doctor, no one suspected that Riven Rock would be anything other than a happy place, a winter resort, one of half a dozen McCormick homes scattered round the country. But Stanley still had promise. He did. Bucketloads of it. He was a young man yet and he had plenty of time to get on with his life and do something in the world — if he could just get well again. That was the first step. That was what mattered, and all the lawyers and doctors and quibbling McCormicks in the world didn’t have a thing to do with it.
Katherine still hadn’t moved. The sun melted into the windows, the sky yawned, the stillness was absolute. Her mother was down on the pavement now, feathers everywhere, a whole aviary’s worth, gazing up at her with the clear-eyed, analytic look Katherine remembered from her girlhood and the odd case of tonsillitis or indigestion it was meant to ferret out. The chauffeur, so wiry and intense behind the wheel, seemed to have died on his feet as he stood there poised to help her down from the floating step of the Packard. “Katherine?” Josephine was saying. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she heard herself say.
“Because if you’re not,” Josephine went on, “we don’t have to do this at all, not today, not when you’re still so worn out and exhausted from your trip—”
Then she was on her feet, towering above them, moving forward to descend from the car while the windows exploded with light and the chauffeur’s clawlike hand suddenly appeared on the periphery to offer support, and she watched her own tight-laced foot as it hovered in the air over the terra incognita of her husband’s private asylum. “I told you I’m all right,” she said, and there it was again, that hint of asperity and exasperation, “—didn’t I?”
Her mother shut up then, clamping her lips together and setting her jaw in her best imitation of pique, too giddy with California and her mineral soak to harbor any real resentment and too concerned about the delicacy of “the Stanley situation,” as she’d begun to call it, to push any further. In silence, trailed by the chauffeur and walking as stiffly as two strangers looking for their seats at the opera, Katherine and her mother went up the walk, mounted the great stone slabs of the front steps and rang the bell. O‘Kane appeared at the door even before the tympanic echoes of the bell had died away in a series of dull reverberations that seemed to take refuge in the huge clay pots that stood on either side of the entrance. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d been expecting someone else altogether. Or no one at all. “Good evening,” he managed to sputter, holding the door for them and trying his best to compose his face around a smile.
“Good evening,” Katherine returned, but brusquely, in the way of getting it over with, and she didn’t acknowledge his smile with one of her own — she was too wrought up for smiling, too sad and angry and pessimistic, and O‘Kane’s awkwardness irritated her. What did it mean? That they hadn’t been expected? But that was absurd — someone had to have dispatched the car, and at breakfast her mother-in-law had gone on ad nauseam about the charms of Riven Rock and how much everyone was looking forward to her seeing and approving of it. Or was it Hamilton? Was he going to flip his eyes and tell her that Stanley had taken a turn for the worse and she couldn’t see him, her own husband, in his own house, after waiting day by miserable day through six night-marish months and traveling all this bone-rattling, sinus-pounding, headache-forging way?
“Oh, Mr. O‘Kane,” her mother shrieked behind her, “so nice to see you again — and how are you finding California? Missing your wife, I’ll bet? Hm? Yes?”
Katherine wanted to strangle her. She wanted to wheel round on her and shout, “Shut up, mother, just shut up!” and even before she had a chance to see what crimes against taste Stanley’s own small-town philistine of a mother had committed with regard to the furnishings, she found herself snapping at O‘Kane. “Where’s my husband?” she demanded, striding into the room with half a mind to begin trying doors at random.
O‘Kane slammed the front door on the chauffeur and sprinted to her even as Nick Thompson rose from a chair at the foot of the stairs to intercept her. “Is he upstairs, is that it?” she demanded of the blunted eyes and napiform head of the elder Thompson. There seemed to be pottery everywhere, shelves of it — urns, bowls, vases, cups — and all of it a dull earthen brown. The place was hideous — It looked like a Spanish bordello, like a bullring, and she had a sudden urge to smash every last clay pot and Andalusian gewgaw in a frenzy of noise and dust and shattering because she knew in that moment they were going to stop her from going up those stairs, saw it in their eyes and the way they slung their shoulders at her and braced themselves as if she were one of the madwomen they’d kept locked away at McLean in a shit-bespattered cell.
She had her foot on the first step when O‘Kane caught up with her — and he wouldn’t dare touch her, he wouldn’t dare — leaping three steps in a bound and turning to face her from the higher stair, his arms spread in expostulation, the big man, the cheat, the deceiver, disappointment made flesh. “Mrs. McCormick, no,” he said, “please. Dr. Hamilton said—”
“Step aside,” she said.
“Mrs. McCormick,” pleading, his stricken face and meaty hands, and now Nick was there beside him, her mother tugging at her arm from behind, “I’m sorry, very sorry, but Dr. Hamilton said your husband can’t have any visitors just now — yet, I mean — and especially not women, because of what happened on the train, that is, the incident—”
“What incident?” She felt her heart stop. “What are you talking about? ”
She saw O‘Kane exchange a glance with Nick Thompson, and then Nick, with his big head and bloat of muscle, said that she’d better talk to the doctor and O’Kane agreed, his head bobbing up and down on the fulcrum of his chin, and her mother said, Yes, that would be best, in the sort of voice she used on the cats when they scratched the furniture.
Katherine’s pulse was like a Chinese rocket. Drums were pounding in her head. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. “All right, then,” she said, shaking off her mother’s hand and struggling to keep her voice steady, “I’ll talk to the doctor. Where is he?”
Another look passed between the two men on the stairs. “He’s outside,” O‘Kane said after a moment.
“Outside?” Katherine was astonished. She’d come all this way and Hamilton wasn’t even here to greet her? “What’s he doing, taking the air?”
“No,” Nick began, tugging at the knot of his tie with one blocky forefinger and wincing under the constraint, “he’s out there with the—”
“The apes,” O‘Kane interjected. “Or monkeys. You see, this sea captain — from Mindanao — he was here no more than an hour ago with the first of the two monkeys — hominoids, that is — in a wicker cage. He heard Dr. Hamilton was looking for hominoids and he got a ride out here with Baldessare Dimucci, the manure man, and, uh, the monkeys — hominoids — were overheated or chilled or something and Dr. Hamilton had to see to them right away, because if he didn’t, well, he was afraid they‘d—”