Anyway, he had to content himself with a wave this time because he knew how much this meeting meant to Dr. Hamilton — and to himself, himself and Rosaleen — and he hustled down the hall while Miss Ianucci stuck a finger in the corner of her mouth and sucked on it and crossed and uncrossed her legs and gave him the richest smile in all the world. Two doors down, three, and it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a run. He glanced up as he hurried past the portrait of John McLean, the decidedly unsmiling and bewigged philanthropist who’d given a hundred thousand dollars back in 1818 to open the doors of this fair institution, and though he was late, though he looked like hell and the smells of fear and hope were commingled in his sweat and his sweat was flowing as if it were the middle of July and he was carrying the entire McCormick family up a hill on his shoulders, apes and all, he couldn’t help thinking, for just the fleetingest instant, of what he could do with a hundred thousand dollars — and it wouldn’t be to endow any charitable organization, that was for sure, unless it was the Edward James O‘Kane Benevolent and Fiduciary Fund. But enough of that. Suddenly he was there, at the far end of the hallway, breathing hard, three minutes past eleven, half-soaked, sweating and wild-eyed, tapping respectfully at the smooth varnished plane of Dr. Hamilton’s door.
He could detect the purl of conversation from within, and his heart sank. This was what he’d been fearing since he’d slipped out of the house and into the festering gray maw of the dawn, what he was afraid of as he emptied bedpans and jerked rigid lunatics and simple morons down from the barred windows and up from the beds: she was there already. Which meant he was late. Officially. He cursed himself and tapped again, this time with a little more vigor, and felt even worse when the murmur broke off abruptly, as if he were interrupting something. There was an agonizing silence during which the wild thought that they were conspiring to leave him out of it altogether raced through his head, and then he heard Dr. Hamilton murmur, “That must be him now,” and any trace of composure he might have been able to muster evaporated in that instant. “Come in,” the doctor called, and O‘Kane felt his face flush as he pushed open the door and entered the room.
The first thing he noticed was the fire — a lavish crackling devil-may-care blaze that played off the paneled walls and cast a soft glow on the doctor’s collection of wax impressions of the human brain, the first fire O‘Kane had ever seen in this particular fireplace, even in the dim frozen mists of January or February. But there it was, a fire to take the dampness out of the air and create a relaxed and cozy atmosphere, as Dr. Hamilton had no doubt calculated. It was a surprise, a real surprise, as was the tray of finger sandwiches, a teapot and the decanter of sherry set out on the low table in front of the settee, and O’Kane’s estimation of Hamilton, already high, shot up another notch. “Oh, hello, Edward,” the doctor purred, coming up off the edge of his desk to take O‘Kane’s hand and give it a squeeze. “We were just about to begin.”
Anyone watching this performance would have seen nothing but good nature and cordiality in that hand-squeeze, but O‘Kane felt the black blood of anxiety and irritation pulsing through the doctor’s fleshless fingers and the damp recess of his palm: O’Kane was in the wrong, he was late, he’d violated the dictum of the three p’s and put everything in jeopardy. Despite all the doctor’s warnings of the previous day, despite skipping breakfast and leaving the house early and wearing his tweeds and collar under the hospital whites to save time and keeping the apes hurtling through the crowded jungle of his mind, limb by limb and minute by minute, he was late. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot. Already.
Awkward, red-faced, too big for his shrinking suit and towering over the room like some club-wielding troglodyte, O‘Kane could only duck his head and mumble an apology. He saw that Mrs. McCormick was already there — the younger Mrs. McCormick, the wife, not the mother. She was running the show now, and the older Mrs. McCormick, Mr. McCormick’s mother, was back in Chicago, sitting on her golden nest and laying her golden eggs and counting up the dividends. As far as Stanley’s — Mr. McCormick‘s — care was concerned, she’d left the field to the younger woman. For the moment, at least.
Since O‘Kane wasn’t wearing a hat or overcoat, it was just a matter of giving his tie a quick twist and bending from the waist to greet Mrs. McCormick and the woman who seemed at that instant to have sprung up beside her on the settee. He was momentarily confused. It seemed he was always confused in Mrs. McCormick’s presence, whether he was holding the door for her like a lackey as she stepped regally into the front hall at White Street or trying his aphasic best to respond to one of her multitiered questions about her husband’s progress — or lack of it. She was a society lady, that’s what she was, cold as a walking corpse, all fur, feathers and stone, and O’Kane wasn’t part of society. Not by a long shot. He wasn’t even part of the society that aspired to be part of society. He was a working man, son of a working man, grandson of a working man, and on and on all the way back to the apes — or Adam and Eve, whichever you believed in. Still, every time he saw her, locked in the cold hard glittering shell of her Back Bay beauty, it made him ache to be something he wasn‘t, to impress her or make her laugh or lean in close and whisper something filthy in her ear, and it took a tremendous effort of will simply to bend forward and touch his fingertips to her gloved hand and then turn to the older woman beside her, a woman with a face like a squashed bird framed in the riot of feathers that was her hat, a woman he knew as well as his own mother but couldn’t… quite. seem to—
But then he was seated — in the chair closest to the fire — an inoffensive smile attached to his face, the sweat already starting up again under his arms, and he had a moment to catch his breath and let recollection come roaring back at him. This older lady, the one dressed like a funeral director’s wife, was Mrs. McCormick’s mother, Mrs. Dexter. Of course she was. Dr. Hamilton was saying something now, but O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He worked his neck muscles and twitched his shoulders till he caught Mrs. Dexter’s attention and broadened his smile to a kind of blissful grimace. “And a good morning to you, Mrs. Dexter,” he said, hearing his father’s Killarney brogue creeping into his own booming, baleful voice, though he tried to fight it down.
Dr. Hamilton paused in the middle of whatever he’d been saying to give him an odd look. “And to you, Mr. O‘Kane,” the old lady returned cheerily, and this seemed to reassure the doctor, so he went on.