By the third day, she couldn’t help telegraphing her mother to tell her about him, about Stanley Robert McCormick, heir to the McCormick fortune, a tall physical man from Chicago who wasn’t afraid of the intellectual side of things, right-thinking, sweetly shy, worth all the Butler Ameses of the world put together. And her mother, who’d been nagging her for the past six months to think of what she was going to do when she graduated MIT next year at the age of twenty-nine, already old for marriage and the very last hope of the Dexter line, telegraphed back within the hour: MAKE ME A HAPPY WOMAN.
But that was all a long time ago, an Ice Age ago, and now the best she could do was watch her handsome husband through a pair of binoculars like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare creature in the wild — that, and make sure he had every comfort, every material thing money could buy to ease his trials, and the best treatment available to bring about his cure. And even if she couldn’t be with him for Christmas, she was determined to scour every shop and every catalogue and bury him in an avalanche of presents so that his doctor, handing each one over, would announce, like a benediction, This one’s from Katherine.
And she was doing just that one morning after her mother arrived, directing O‘Kane and LaSource to carry in great towering armloads of foil-wrapped gifts and arrange them under the tree in Stanley’s quarters, when Julius suddenly appeared out of nowhere to clamber through the open door and into the back seat of the car. Her first thought was to shoo him away — it was two days before Christmas and she was anxious to get back to the hotel and relax with her mother over a cup of eggnog and a concert of Christmas carols in the courtyard where poinsettias grew up out of the ground in a red blaze that mocked the pitiful hothouse plants they had to make do with in Boston — but then she looked at him there, one leg folded over the other, his eyes lit with expectation, and changed her mind. Suddenly she was whimsical. The beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, hard-nosed suffragist, brilliant organizer, manager of all Stanley’s properties and her own too, the woman who never let herself go, looked at that strange pleading hunched-up figure of male dejection sunk into the leather seat and felt silly, lighthearted, girlish. It was Christmas. Julius was in the car. What a lark it would be to show him off to everyone in the hotel. After all, if you could have tropical palms, birds of paradise and poinsettias in December, you could have a tropical ape too. Maybe she’d even see if she could find him a Father Christmas outfit — and a fluffy white beard.
She had to open the windows, not so much as to allow Julius to snake out a long-fingered hand and snatch at the roadside vegetation or the odd bicyclist, but enough to dissipate the very intense and peculiar odor he carried with him. For the most part he behaved himself, cooing softly, licking the windows with a dark spatulate tongue, surprising her fingers with his own — he liked to hold hands, like a child — and she fell into a reverie as the trees slid by and the sun spread a blanket of warmth over the interior of the car. She was thinking about Hamilton and the hope he’d held out to her — Stanley had improved, he’d definitely turned the corner, and he, the doctor, was full of optimism for the future, perhaps even to the extent of allowing her a Christmas visit next year, if not sooner — but she was puzzling too over something he’d said just yesterday.
It was the middle of the afternoon and she’d just started up the hill with her binoculars when he scurried out the back door of the house and fell into step with her. “About this new man coming in after the New Year,” he began, “I just wanted to say—”
“What new man?”
“Do you mean to say Dr. Meyer hasn’t apprised you of the situation?”
“Why no — he hasn’t said a word.”
“Oh, well, in that case, well, you know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me here and I’ll always be grateful for it — in terms of the hominoid colony, I mean — but my researches have gone about as far as they can, I think, and they’ve been enormously successful and enlightening and I really do feel I can write them up and make a significant contribution to our knowledge of human sexuality… Well, what I’m trying to say is that the new man is a fellow who’s been working quite closely with Dr. Meyer at the Pathological Institute, an excellent man by the name of Brush, Dr. Nathaniel Brush—”
“But Gilbert, you’re not thinking of leaving us, are you? With my husband improving so? It would, it would be a blow to him, to us all—”
But Hamilton, turning away so she couldn’t see the telltale quirk of his eyes, evaded the question. “He’ll be working with me for a while, to get him acquainted with Mr. McCormick and our day-to-day operations here, all under the direction of Dr. Meyer, of course, and really, I have the utmost confidence in Nat Brush, I do—”
She came out of her reverie when Julius suddenly presented her with a hat, a lady’s hat, replete with pins and feathers and a small but unmistakable quantity of well-tended brunette hair, torn out by the roots. One minute she was gazing out the window, brooding over Hamilton’s evasiveness, and the next she was staring down at the unfamiliar hat in her lap. It took her a moment, and then suddenly she was craning her neck to peer out the back window and pounding on the glass partition all in the same motion. Roscoe brought the car smartly around — it was new, one of the matching pair of Pierce Arrow sedans she’d ordered for Stanley in the wake of her weekend at Lavinia Littlejohn‘s — and they backtracked to where they found a hatless and irate young woman stopped astride her bicycle in front of a clump of cabbage palm. Katherine got out of the car, the hat held out before her in offering, mortified, absolutely mortified, and she was apologizing even before she’d crossed the road.
The young woman, a pale welt of anger stamped between her eyes, began cursing her in Italian, and she was pretty, very pretty and young, a girl really, and where had she seen her before?
“Scusi, scusi,” Katherine was saying in a hush, spreading her hands wide in extenuation. “I’m so sorry, I feel terrible. You see, it was”—and she gestured at the car—“it was our pet, Julius. He’s an ape, you see, and I know I shouldn’t have had the window open, but—”
“I don’t want nothing from you,” the girl spat, glaring, and she snatched her hat back and furiously jammed it down over her ears, the bicycle all the while clutched between her legs.
“I — realty, can I offer you something, for the inconvenience? The price of a new hat? A lift to town, perhaps?”
The girl made a rude gesture, thumb under chin, and brushed at the air with flapping hands, as if scattering insects. “Get away from me, lady,” she snarled, and then repeated herself: “I don’t want nothing from you.” She shoved forward in an angry, unsteady glide, her feet pounding at the pedals, and then she was gone.
That should have been Katherine’s warning right there, and if she’d been thinking she would have turned round and gone straight back to the house to divest herself of one very importunate ape, but she wasn’t thinking, and she didn’t go back. “You naughty boy,” she scolded, shaking a finger at him as she climbed back into the car, and he looked so contrite, burying his face in his hands and hunching his shoulders in submission, that she hesitated. He cowered there in the corner of the seat, emitting a series of soft high-pitched sounds that might have been the whimpers of a baby fussing in a distant room, and Katherine marveled at how human and tractable he really was: he’d been naughty, and he was sorry for it. She leaned forward and tapped on the glass to get Roscoe’s attention. “Drive on,” she commanded.