“As I was saying, Mrs. McCormick, if the terms are acceptable to you — and your mother, of course — I think we have a bargain. I’ve spoken to Mrs. Hamilton and to the Thompson brothers, and they’re all committed to the move — and to Mr. McCormick’s care and welfare, of course. Edward, here, can speak for himself.”
O‘Kane shifted in his seat. He hadn’t understood till that moment just how much this whole thing meant to him — it was a new start, a new life, in a part of the country as foreign to him as the dark side of the moon. But that was just it — it wasn’t dark in California, and it didn’t snow, and there was no slush and drizzle and there were no frozen clods of horse manure in the streets and life there didn’t grind you down till you barely knew you were alive. A single acre of oranges could make a man comfortable — oranges that practically grew by themselves, without even the rumor of work, once they were in the ground — and ten acres could make a man rich. There was gold. There was oil. There was the Pacific. There was sun. “Oh, I’m committed, all right,” he said, trying to avoid the wife’s eyes.
How old was she, anyway? She couldn’t have been much more than thirty, and here he was, a lusty strong big-shouldered hundred-and-ninety-pound Irishman from the North End who routinely stared down the craziest of the crazy, and he was afraid to look her in the eye? He made an effort and raised his head to take in the general vicinity of her. “Even if it means forever.”
“And your wife — Mrs. O‘Kane?” At first he thought the voice had come out of the ceiling, as voices tended to do for so many of the unfortunates on the ward, but then he realized that the old lady was moving her lips. He tried to look alert as the birdy face closed on him. “How does she feel about it?”
“Rose?” The question took him by surprise. He saw his wife in the kitchen of the walkup, stirring a pot of broth and potatoes, ignorant as a shoe, contentious and coarse and loud — but goodhearted, as good-hearted as any girl you’d find, and the mother of his son. “I–I guess I haven’t told her yet, but she’ll be thrilled, I know she will.”
“It’ll mean leaving behind everything she knows — her parents, her relations, her former schoolmates, the streets where she grew up,” Mrs. Dexter persisted, and what did she want from him anyway? They were both watching him, mother and daughter, and they were two birds — both of them — beaky and watchful, waiting for the faintest stirring in the grass. “And where did you say she was from?”
He hadn’t said. He was tempted to say Beacon Hill, to give an address on Commonwealth Avenue, but he didn’t. “Charlestown,” he mumbled, staring down at his wet and glistening shoes. He could feel the eyes of the younger one boring into him.
“And for you too,” the old woman said. “Are you prepared to say good-bye to your own mother and father — and for as long as it takes for Mr. McCormick to be well again?”
There was a silence. The fire snapped, and he felt the heat of it chasing the steam from his cuffs and flanks and the shrinking shoulders of his jacket. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, darting a glance at the younger woman. “I think so. I really do.”
And then, thankfully, Hamilton took over. “The important thing,” he said, or rather, whispered in the narcotic tones he used on his charges, “is Mr. McCormick. The sooner we’re able to move the patient and establish him in the proper way in California, the better it will be for all concerned. Especially the patient. What he needs, above all, is a tranquil environment, with all the stresses that led to his blocking removed. Only then can we hope to—” He faltered. Mrs. McCormick had cleared her throat — that was alclass="underline" cleared her throat — and that stopped him cold.
Dr. Hamilton — Dr. Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, future author of Sex in Marriage, as well as “A Study of Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys and Baboons”—was a young man then, just thirty-one, but he cultivated a Vandyke and swept his dun-colored hair straight back from his brow in an attempt to add something to his years. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed pince nez identical to the president‘s, and he always dressed carefully in ash-colored suits and waistcoats and a tie that was such an unfathomable shade of blue it might as well have been black, as if any show of color would undermine his sense of duty and high purpose. (“Avoid bright clothing,” he’d admonished O’Kane on the day he hired him; “it tends to excite the catatonics and alarm the paranoics.”) Young as he was, he was a rock of solidity, but for one disconcerting little tic that he himself might not have been aware of: every thirty seconds or so his eyes would flick back behind his upper lids in a spasm so instantaneous it was like watching a slot machine on its final revolution. Needless to say, when he was nervous or wrought up the tic became more pronounced. Now, as he looked expectantly at Mrs. McCormick, his pupils began a quavering preliminary little dance.
O‘Kane was looking at her too. He couldn’t help but look at her, as long as it didn’t involve eye contact. She was fascinating to him, a real specimen, the kind of woman you saw only in glimpses — a silhouette behind the windowscreen of the long thrusting miracle of a Packard motorcar, a brisk commanding figure in a cluster of doormen and porters, the face of a photograph in a book — and how could he help contrasting her with his own Rosaleen? Sitting there perched on the very fractional edge of the settee with her finishing-school posture and her cleft chin stuck up in the air like a weathervane, wearing a dress of some satiny blue material that probably cost more than he would make in six months, she was like an alien, like the shining representative of some new and superior species, but for one thing: her husband was mad, as mad as the Apron Man or Katzakis the Greek or any of them, and all the manners and all the money in the world couldn’t change that.
“About the apes.,” she said, and O‘Kane realized it was the first time she’d opened her mouth since he’d entered the room.
Hamilton’s voice fell away to nothing, the whisper of a whisper. “Yes?” he breathed, lounging back against the corner of the desk and resting his weight casually on his left ham, the doctor in his office, nothing the matter, nothing at all. “What about them? If there’s anything that you—”
“They are necessary, aren’t they — in your estimation, Dr. Hamilton? I understand that in order to lure such a promising young psychologist as yourself all the way out to the West Coast and uproot your family and your practice here at McLean, there has to be a quid pro quo”—and here she held up a finger to silence him, because he was up off the desk again and his mouth was already working in the nest of his beard—“and that your hominoid laboratory is a major part of it, in addition to your salary considerations, relocation expenses and the like, but is there really any hope of these apes figuring in Stanley’s cure?”
This was Hamilton’s cue, and with barely a flick of his eyes, he launched into a speech that would have done a drummer proud. He made no promises — her husband’s case was more complex than anyone had originally believed, far more complex — but he’d personally supervised dozens of cases just as severe and he’d seen those patients make huge steps toward recovery, even complete recovery, with the proper care. New advances were being made not only in the treatment of dementia praecox — or schizophrenia, as it was now more commonly called — but across the whole spectrum of human behavior and psychology, and new figures like Freud, Jung and Adler had begun to emerge to build on the work of Charcot, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. O‘Kane had heard it all before, and he found himself drifting, the heat making him drowsy, the heavy material of his trousers adhering to his flanks like a second skin — and itching, itching like the very devil. Hamilton’s voice droned on, hypnotic, soporific, the gloom beyond the windows like the backdrop of a waking dream. He came back to himself when the doctor finally got round to the question of the apes.