Katherine pursed her lips and then couldn’t suppress a cold little smile. “That’s a lot of nursing.”
“It is, yes.”
“Four years’ worth, by my count.”
O‘Kane said nothing. Outside the sun was brightening in gradual increments, like a gas lamp slowly screwed up till the room was filled with light.
“And your son?” Katherine asked.
“I haven’t seen him, devoting all my time to Mr. McCormick, as I’m sure you’re aware, but I’m told he’s doing well, a regular little tiger, he is.”
“Oh?” Katherine was irritated. The man was a womanizer, a Lothario, as insensitive to a woman’s thoughts and feelings as he might have been to a trained seal‘s, thinking of one thing only, as if sexual attraction were the end rather than the beginning of a relationship, and it was shameful the way he’d deserted his wife and child and then had the gall to lie about it. Nursing her mother, indeed.
O‘Kane was standing at the door, waiting to be dismissed. He hadn’t moved an inch since she’d entered the room. “Well, Mrs. McCormick, I’ll tell you,” he said, looking up now to engage her eyes, bold as brass, “to be truthful, sometimes you enter a matrimonial state with the best of intentions all round, and things just don’t seem to work out.” He paused. “You know what I mean?”
That stung — and she was in no mood — and she might have said something she would later regret, was right on the verge of it, when there was a rap at the door and they both turned, expecting Hamilton. The door pushed slowly open, and it wasn’t the doctor standing there in the doorway, not at all — it was Julius, the big orange ape. Katherine was so surprised she let out a gasp, and in the next moment she was laughing, as much at herself as at this gangling pouchy hunched-over thing shuffling into the room like an animated bedspread. Julius. She’d forgotten all about him.
He crossed the room on his knuckles, skittering lightly over the carpet without seeming to touch it, using his feet less for locomotion than as a sort of rudder. Ignoring O‘Kane, he came straight to Katherine, gazing up at her out of eyes the color of sunlit mud and tugging gently at her skirts with one long leathery hand. He made a soft cooing or grunting sound and announced his presence olfactorily as well, bringing with him his own little pocket of redolence. He stood nearly five feet tall, weighed one hundred eighty pounds and had an armspan of seven and a half feet, and if he’d wanted to he could have traversed Montecito without ever touching ground, relying on brachiation alone. And right now he had hold of her hand and was sniffing it as if it were the rarest of treasures, a look of simian transport on his face.
“He’s a nasty stinking smelly beast,” O‘Kane observed, “and I for one wouldn’t be giving him the run of the place, that’s for sure — but then it’s not for me to say, is it?”
Katherine paid him no mind. Julius was amusing, he was delightful, and now he was kissing her hand like some country swain, a tickle of whiskers, the warmth of his lips, and she was thinking how much she liked animals, dogs, cats, horses, apes, even snakes and bats and such, the whole reason she’d gone into biology in the first place. And when was the last time she’d had a pet?
“Julius!” she cried, utterly charmed, “you’re tickling me!” And then she looked at O‘Kane, trying to keep a straight face. “Dr. Hamilton writes that my husband and Julius are quite inseparable—”
O‘Kane winced as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. He shuffled his feet and addressed a point just over her left shoulder. “That’s Dr. Hamilton’s doing, not mine, and as I say, I don’t think it’s a healthy or even a decent thing—”
“But why? He seems quite tame. And if he helps my husband show an interest in things, if he stimulates him in any way, that’s got to be positive. Surely you wouldn’t object to a dog or a cat or some more conventional pet, would you, Mr. O‘Kane? And an ape is so much more intelligent—”
Julius dropped her hand and mounted the swivel chair in a single fluid motion, spinning once, all the way round, and then, as if resisting the temptation to twirl himself as a child would, he tucked his legs under the desk and made a pretense of looking through the papers, for all the world like some jowly potbellied old banker at his desk.
O‘Kane seemed on edge, and she remembered the day Hamilton had got his first two rhesus monkeys from the ship’s captain and the look on O’Kane’s face when they came flying out of the trees. He was afraid, that was all, frightened of a creature as placid and harmless as poor Julius — but of course, being typically male, he would never admit it. Even now, she noticed, he kept his distance — and you didn’t see Julius going up to kiss his hand. “No,” he said, “it’s not that,” and he was fumbling for his words. “A pet would be fine, and I’ve seen improvement in patients of all types with a little dog, for instance, but… Julius is… he seems to be a bad influence on Mr. McCormick—”
“A bad influence?”
“He — well, Mr. McCormick sometimes apes Julius’s behavior, if you’ll forgive the expression, and not the other way round.”
Katherine lifted her eyebrows. Julius was playing with the paper-weight, a glass ball the size of a fist, balancing it on the tip of his flattened nose and then inserting it in his mouth like some petrified fruit.
“I mean, for instance, when we take Mr. McCormick for a drive in one of the cars, to calm him, you know, and provide the stimulus of a change of scene, Julius always comes along, and if Julius, say, presses his face to the glass, well then so does Mr. McCormick, and it’s just not—”
“Dignified?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean — it’s not dignified.”
Julius had cocked his head and begun to make a series of muted lip-smacking noises and soft disembodied cooings that sounded like a ventriloquist’s rendition of a flock of doves taking sudden flight, and he fixed his eyes apprehensively on the door, which stood open still. Katherine turned to look, and so did O‘Kane. She heard footsteps in the hall then and in the next moment Dr. Hamilton appeared in the doorway, spectacles flashing and a wide welcoming grin on his face, but when she turned round again, Julius had vanished.
Over the course of the next two weeks, Katherine made the trip out to the estate every day, seeing to the multifarious issues, large and small, that had accumulated in her absence, and every day, at three, she secreted herself in the bushes on the knoll to the west of the house and watched as O‘Kane and Mart led Stanley out onto the sunporch for a bit of air and exercise. She felt faintly ridiculous about the whole business — a woman of her age and position crouching in the shrubbery like a bird-watcher or a Peeping Susan — and depressed too, the misery of her situation brought home to her every time a wasp settled on her hat or the voices of the gardeners rose from below. What was she doing? What was wrong with her? Other women went to the theater on their husband’s arm, chatted with him over meals, felt his solid presence in bed beside them, had children and grandchildren and a house full of warmth, and the closest she could get to Stanley was through a pair of ground lenses magnified to a power of 460 feet at 1,000 yards.
But there he was now, wandering round the sunporch like a refugee, dragging his right leg behind him and hunching his shoulders as if carrying some great weight there. She twisted the focus on the binoculars and was struck anew by how old Stanley looked — he would be forty next year, and you wouldn’t have guessed he was a day under fifty. And how thin. Certainly some of that was attributable to the long period during which he’d had to be tube-fed and the tasteless mush he’d been forced to consume, but now that he was eating on his own she would have thought he’d put some weight back on. Of course, it was difficult to tell at this distance, but it seemed he’d got some of his color back, and that was something anyway. And the look in his eyes — it was so much more like the old Stanley, the Stanley she’d fallen in love with, the man who had such an irresistible presence, so forceful and passionate, and yet shy and vulnerable too.