Someone at the bar behind him — he didn’t bother to turn round and see who — shouted out, “You damned fool, if I‘d’ve known you were going to salt the damn thing instead of smoking it or even jerking it, for crying out loud, I would’ve give the whole damn carcass to the orphanage.”
Mart seemed to take an unnaturally long time in answering. His eyes were small and seemed even smaller in proportion to that outsized head, and as O‘Kane gazed hopefully into them, already picturing the yellow sizzle of a final tasteless and dilatory beer, they were no more than distant grayish specks, planetary bodies faintly revealed in the universe of that big numb face, and receding fast. Mart shrugged. Reached down to scratch his calf. “I don’t see why not,” he said finally, and his enunciation could have been clearer, a whole lot clearer. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. One more.”
These were the dregs of their celebratory party: the half-filled glasses, the cold beans and herring, the shouts and smells of the crapulous strangers hemming them in on every side, the dead rinsed-out April night and the rain drooling down the windows — and above all, the lingering boozy glimmer of the golden fraternity of California. They would be leaving in two weeks by special car — a car called the Mayflower, customized by the Pullman Company with locks on the doors and restraints on the windows, and was O‘Kane the only one who saw the pure and lucent beauty of that resonant name? It was an omen, that’s what it was. They were pilgrims, leaving Plymouth Rock and North Boston and Waverley behind for the paradise in the west, for the hibiscus, the jasmine, the tangerines and oranges and the dates that rained down from the palms like a reward just for being alive.
They’d never have to buy another scuttle of coal for as long as they lived. And overcoats — they could throw away their overcoats and the moth-eaten mufflers and mittens that went with them. And if that wasn’t enough, their McLean salaries were to be doubled the minute they stepped aboard that train with Mr. McCormick. That would mean forty dollars a week for O‘Kane, and he just hoped the grapefruit ranchers, cowboys, oil barons, hidalgos and señoritas of Santa Barbara would leave him something to spend it on. If he let himself drift a minute he could feel that forty dollars in his pocket already, two tens and a twenty, or maybe four tens or eight fives. Forty slips of green-backed paper, a whole groaning sack of silver coins. He felt like he’d won the lottery.
But then he thought of Rosaleen again — saw her as vividly as if she were standing there before him, gouging him with her eyes, her jaws clamped in rage and resentment, going to fat at nineteen and always demanding more, more, more from him, as if he were the original cornucopia — or one of the McCormicks himself. She was the kind to kick up a fuss when he went out after work, even if it was only for a glass or two, even if it was only on a Saturday, because she was like a child, like an infant, always afraid of missing out on something — but give her a taste of it and she drank like a brewer’s horse. Sure. And there was no way in the world she was going to leave her own mum and da and her saintly brothers and traipse halfway around the globe with the likes of him and he must be as crazy as his idiots and morons to think she’d so much as budge because good Christ in heaven Waverley was enough of a trial as it was. That’s what she’d told him, time and again, California, and she spat all four syllables in his face like the stones of some sour inedible fruit, I’d as soon go to hell and back.
Something clenched in his stomach, his holy whiskey burning away down there in a sea of beer and immolating the hard white albumen of the egg as if it were paper put to fire, and he wondered briefly if he was going to be sick. He fought it down, swiveled round in his seat and shouted “Waiter!” in the direction of the bar, but with no one specific in mind. The mob there was just a blur, nothing more. “Waiter! Two more over here!”
Dr. Hamilton had bought the first two rounds, like a sport, like a creature of flesh and blood and a friend of the working man, and it must have been five-thirty or six at the time, still light beyond the windows, though with the rain and gloom you could hardly distinguish day from night. O‘Kane would never have described the doctor as a convivial man, or even a cheerful one — he was too much the worrier, the stickler for detail, too much the scientist — but tonight he was nothing short of giddy, for him at least, offering up a crusty joke or two and making a toast to “the healing sun and gentle zephyrs of California.” He was flushed to the roots of his beard with pride and pleasure — he was was going to have his apes and California too, and he was going to be known from here on out as personal psychiatrist to Stanley Robert McCormick, of the Chicago McCormicks. Of course, he would be overseen by one of the most exacting men in the field, Dr. Adolph Meyer, but Dr. Meyer was going to be three thousand miles away in his warren at the Pathological Institute of New York — a very long three thousand miles.
They all stood to shake hands with the doctor when he left (after an hour or so, during which he’d sipped at a single stale beer like somebody’s maiden aunt out celebrating a third-place citation at the flower show), and everybody felt fine. And then Nick bought a round of whiskies, and O‘Kane found himself narrating the events of the morning’s meeting for the table at large. The Thompsons were hungry for the details — this concerned their lives and careers too, and the lives of their families — and they leaned in to crowd the space of the little table with their massed heads and lumpen arms and the crude architecture of their shoulders. They hadn’t been invited to the meeting and O’Kane had, because O‘Kane was head nurse and Dr. Hamilton’s right-hand man and they weren’t, even though both Nick and Pat were older than he and had more years in at McLean. Neither seemed resentful — or at least they didn’t show it — but still O‘Kane felt compelled to give them the fullest accounting he could, with dramatic shadings and embellishments, of course. He was Irish and he loved an audience.
He told them how he’d worked himself into a sweat just trying to get there on time, nervous and unsure of himself, how he’d charged across the wet lawn with the Greek and the Apron Man hooting at his back and dashed by Miss Ianucci’s desk without stopping — and he gave them a moment to consider the picture of Miss Ianucci sitting there with her mobile legs and the spill of her uncorseted front in that taut shirtwaist — and then he was describing Mrs. McCormick and what she was wearing and how the old lady, Mrs. Dexter, had grilled him. All that was fine, all that he enjoyed. But when he came to the part about Mrs. McCormick‘s — Katherines — breaking down, he couldn’t do justice do it, couldn’t even begin to. “She was like a child,” he said, trying to shape the scene with his hands, “a little lost child. She broke down and cried right there in Hamilton’s office, and there was nothing her mother or anybody else could do. It was so… I felt like crying myself.”
“Yeah, sure,” Nick said. He spoke in a measured growl, like a chained dog, the smoke of the cigarette squinting his eyes till they were no more than slashes in the blank wall of his face. “And I guess that’s supposed to prove she’s human then, just like us peasants.”
Pat sniggered. Mart’s eyes flitted round the table. There was a crash in the vicinity of the bar, followed by a curse and a thin spatter of applause. Nick just sat there, huge and squinting, watching O‘Kane.
All of a sudden O‘Kane felt the anger coming up in him — what did they know, they hadn’t been there, none of them — and before he could stop to think he was defending her, the Ice Queen herself. “You can be as hard-nosed as you want about it, Nick, and I felt the same way myself, I did — until this morning. And you know what made her break down? It was Dr. Hamilton. ’No visitors,‘ he said, ’not even his wife,‘ and that’s what got to her. She loves her husband, no matter how crazy he is, and she wants to be with him — it’s as simple as that. And I don’t care what you say.”