Mart grunted a reply. He’d washed his hair, which he combed forward to soften the great gleaming lump of his forehead, and the hair, dangling wetly, had the effect of a bit of packing material pasted atop a lightbulb. There was egg on his chin.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” O‘Kane sighed, sinking into the chair across from him. “I mean, being a bachelor out here in the middle of nowhere when your brothers are at home getting theirs every night and even Dr. Hamilton’s got his wife with him… and the wops, they’re out there in those cottages screwing like dogs. I can’t stand it. I’m going crazy here.”
Mart looked interested. He set down his fork, dabbed at his chin with the napkin. Elsie poured coffee with a scandalized face, then stumped out of the room. “What about Rose?”
O‘Kane shrugged. “I’m talking about now, today, tonight. I’m used to having it, you know? Of course, look who I’m talking to — you probably never had a good screw in your life, am I right?”
Mart protested, but weakly, and O‘Kane saw the truth hit home.
“It’s like this ham”—and he held up the pink slab of it on the tines of his fork, crisp from the pan and iridescent with smoke-cured grease. “If Elsie didn’t give you any tomorrow, you wouldn’t think much of it. But if two days went by, three, a week — you know what I mean? And sex — well, that’s a real bodily necessity, just like food and water and moving your bowels—”
“And whiskey,” Mart put in with a sly smile. “Don’t forget whiskey.”
O‘Kane grinned back. “What do you say we talk Roscoe into going into town tonight?”
And then it was the morning routine. Say goodnight to Nick and Pat, who were just coming off their shift, and hello to Mr. McCormick, bent up double like a pretzel in his bed; then it was strip off Mr. McCormick’s nightgown and swab up the mess he’d left on the sheets, pack the whole business up for the laundress and give Mr. McCormick his shower bath, and all the while O‘Kane thinking about Robert Ogilvie, director of the Peachtree Asylum in Stone Mountain, Georgia, who suspended all his catatonics on a rack in a big metal tub, day and night, and just changed the water when it got mucked up. No stains, no smells, no laundry — just a plug and a faucet. Now that was progress.
“He’s not looking real good this morning,” O‘Kane observed when they first walked into the room and stood over the fouled bed and saw the position Mr. McCormick had got himself into.
Mart was oblivious. He merely bobbed his big head with the hair dried round it in a fringe and stared down at their employer as if he were a piece of furniture. “I’ve seen him worse.”
Sometime during the night Mr. McCormick had hunched himself up like a fetus in the womb, and he’d managed to lock one foot behind the other in a way that looked uncomfortable, painful even — the sort of thing you’d expect from a swami or contortionist. He was breathing hard, his ribs heaving as if he’d just come back from a ten-mile run, and his eyes were open and staring and his hands locked together in an unbreakable clasp, but he didn’t respond to them at all. They had no choice but to lift him out of bed as he was, a hand each under his armpit and buttock, and haul him over to the shower bath where the water would take some of the crust off him and they could get at the rest of it with a bar of Palm Olive soap and the scrub brushes, and it wasn’t any different from any other day, but for the pose he was in. Still and all, it was a strange sensation to have to drag a man around like that, a grown naked man worth nobody knew how many millions and as lifeless as a side of beef hanging from a meathook. Only his eyes were alive, and they didn’t register much — the quickest jump to the needles of water in the shower bath or the light bulging at the windows and then back to nothing.
It was eerie. Unsettling. No matter how often O‘Kane experienced it or how many patients he’d seen like this — and he’d bathed them one after another at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, twenty at a time, hosing them down afterward like hogs in a pen — it still affected him. How could anybody live like that? Be like that? And what did it take for the mechanism to break down, for the normal to become abnormal, for a man like Mr. McCormick, who had everything and more, to lose even the faculty of knowing it?
“I wish he’d come out of it, Mart,” he said after they’d set him down on his side under the spray of the shower bath. “Even if he got violent again — anything.”
“Are you kidding?” Mart rubbed the spot over his left eye where their employer had slugged him on the train. Steam rose from the floor. Water hissed against the tiles. Mr. McCormick, his skin glistening and the hair a dark skullcap pressed to his temples and creeping up the back of his neck, began to grunt softly.
“Think about it, Mart — he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it. I mean, I’ve been so blind drunk I didn’t know where I was and I’ve slept in an alley once and one time I woke up on the beach with a bunch of crabs scuttling all over me, but I knew right away I was Eddie O‘Kane.”
Mart didn’t seem to grasp the point. He just stared down at the hunched-up shape on the naked tiles and began to shake his head. “I wish he’d stay like this forever, nice and quiet.” And then he lowered his voice, because you could never tell what Mr. McCormick was thinking or what he might retain. “If he gets well he won’t need us anymore, that’s for sure — and then where would we be?”
At nine, after they’d massaged Mr. McCormick’s muscles to loosen him up a bit and got his feet untangled, Mart pried open the patient’s jaws with a wooden dowel and O‘Kane jammed the feeding tube between his teeth. (And Mr. McCormick had good strong teeth, but they’d gone yellow because he wasn’t able to keep them up.) The tube consisted of a hollowed-out piece of bamboo a headhunter might have used to blow darts through and an ordinary kitchen funnel, and for breakfast Mr. McCormick was having the same thing they’d had — ham, eggs, toast and coffee — but it had been painstakingly reduced to a thick black gruel by Sam Wah, the Chinese cook. While O’Kane was thus employed, hovering over the gaping mouth of his patient like some flightless bird with its unfathomable chick, waiting out the tedious drip of the mash, repetitively wiping the patient’s mouth and chin and pinching his nostrils to encourage the swallowing reflex, he couldn’t help reflecting on the lack of progress Mr. McCormick had made over the course of the past two months.
He hadn’t always been like this. When he first came to McLean two years back, he’d just broken down and the prognosis was good. He was very disturbed, of course, particularly the first couple of days, lashing out at anybody who came within three feet of him and raving to beat the band about all sorts of things — Jack London, his father, dentists, the Reaper Company and women, especially women, shouting out “cunt” and “slit” and “whore” till the walls rang and his face was as bleached out as a ream of white bond paper scattered in the snow — but after a week in the sheet restraints he came around. He was calm suddenly, reasonable, a dignified gentleman who dressed himself in the morning without any tics or other nonsense and went around chatting and joking with the other patients and their relatives till people began to take him for one of the doctors. And Mr. McCormick, loving a joke, played along, dispensing advice, walking down the corridors arm-in-arm with the disappointed parent, the cousin from Bayonne, the somber sibling and the grim-faced husband, and he was fine with the women too, the soul of courtesy and with the softest, most genteel and solicitous voice O‘Kane had ever heard.