It was a mistake. Oh, Julius was a model ape for the rest of the drive, holding hands with her and peering out the window with a docile, almost studious look, but when the car pulled up in front of the Potter, with its promenading guests, snapping pennants and all-around bustle of activity, he began to show signs of excitement. In particular, he kept swelling and deflating the naked leathery sacks of his jowls as if they were bellows or a set of bagpipes, and his eyes began to race round in their sockets. As the doorman approached, he was banging the crown of his bald head against the window, over and over, till the car had begun to rock with the motion.
“Now, Julius, take my hand and behave yourself,” Katherine said, as the door pulled back and Roscoe helped her down onto the pavement. Uncoiled, Julius sprang down in a sudden flash of bright orange fur, and all eyes were on them. People stopped in mid-stride. A pair of bicyclists skidded to a halt. The doorman gaped. But Katherine, smiling serenely, held tight to Julius’s hand and ambled up the walk as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary, and that was part of the joke, of course it was, to stroll right on into the hotel lobby as if she were on the arm of her husband. And it was all right, faces breaking out in surprise and delight after the initial shock, Katherine soaring, humming a Christmas tune to herself—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”—until they reached the revolving glass doors.
She was able to lead Julius in, breaking her grip on his hand just as the transparent compartments separated them, but then Julius balked. Perhaps it was the novelty of the situation, the oddness of inhabiting that little glassed-in wedge of space, or maybe it was fear and bewilderment, but Julius suddenly put on the brakes and stopped the door fast. Katherine was trapped, as were an elderly woman she recognized from the breakfast room and a man in a bowler hat and corkscrew mustache who seemed to have skinned his nose on the panel in front of him. They looked first to her, and then to Julius, who stood there resolute, his massive arms locked against the glass on either side in all their rippling splendor. “Julius!” she cried, her voice magnified in that vitreous cubicle till it screamed in her own ears, “now you stop that this instant!” And she leaned forward with all her weight, the old lady and the bowler-hatted gentleman taking her cue and simultaneously flinging themselves against the glass walls in front of them.
The door wouldn’t budge, not a fraction of an inch. But the fifth partition was open to the lobby, and one of the bellhops, a powerfully built young man, stepped into the breach, and with a mighty effort, coordinated with the renewed impetus of Katherine and her fellow hostages, succeeded in moving the doors just enough to trap himself as well. Julius lifted his upper lip and grinned at her like a horse. He licked the glass. Cooed. But nothing would move him. And no matter how furiously the young bellhop and the man with the skinned nose exerted themselves, the door remained fixed in position, as immovable as if it had been welded to the floor.
A crowd gathered. Someone called the fire department. Katherine had never been more embarrassed in her life, both men and the old lady looking daggers at her, the rest of the pullulating world, from floor-sweeps to jeunesse dorée, studying her as if she were a sideshow attraction, elbows nudging ribs, smirks spreading across faces, silent quips exchanged by bug-eyed strangers in the walled-off vacuum of the lobby. She took it for half an hour — half an hour at least — the firemen there with their useless pry bars, Julius the equal of all comers, and then she broke down, and she didn’t care who was watching or where her dignity had fled.
“Julius!” she screamed, pounding at the glass like a madwoman, “you stop this now! You stop it!” She sobbed. She raged. She backed up and kicked savagely at that grinning intransigent unreasoning glassed-in hominoidal face till she broke a heel and fell reeling to the little wedge of tiled floor beneath her. ‘
Julius did a strange thing then. He dropped his arms, just for an instant, just long enough to part the fringe of orange hair concealing his genitalia and expose himself, right there, inches from her face, the long dark organ in its nest, the meaty bald testicles, the maleness at the center of his being, and then, before anyone could act, he shot out both hands again to catch the glass on either side of him and hold it fast in his indomitable grip.
2. FOR THE MAIN AND SIMPLE REASON
It was in 1916, in the spring, that Dr. Brush took over for Dr. Hamilton. O‘Kane remembered the day not only for what it represented to Mr. McCormick and the whole enterprise of Riven Rock — a changing of the guard, no less, and this far along — but for the heavy fog that lay over the place late into the day, and no chance of clearing. It was a transformative fog, thick and surreal, and it closed everything in like the backdrop to a bad dream so that he half expected to see ghosts and goblins materializing from the gloom along with Rosaleen and his father and the walleyed kid who’d rubbed his nose in the dirt when he was six and afraid of everything.
He was sitting with Mart and Mr. McCormick in the upper parlor, just after lunch — and Mr. McCormick had eaten very nicely, thank you, allowing the napkin to be tucked into his collar without a fuss and using his spoon with a wonderful adroitness on the peas, potatoes and meat loaf — when there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs and they all three glanced up in unison to see a huge puffing seabeast of a man laboring up the steps under the weight of the cigar clenched between his teeth. O‘Kane’s first impulse was to laugh out loud, but he restrained himself. It was too much, it really was — the man was a dead ringer for William Howard Taft, right down to the pinniped mustache and the fifty-six-inch waistline. And after Hamilton, with his Rooseveltian spectacles, O’Kane was beginning to see a pattern developing here — he supposed the next one, if there was a next one, would look like Wilson, all joint and bone and sour schoolmastery lips. Was this some sort of private joke Dr. Meyer was pulling on them — Dr. Adolph Meyer, that is, who looked just exactly like what he was, a Kraut headshrinker with a gray-streaked headshrinker’s beard and a sense of humor buried so deep not even the Second Coming could have exhumed it?
“Mr. McCormick, I presume?” the fat man called when he’d reached the landing and stood poised outside the barred door like a traveling salesman unsure of the neighborhood. He was trying for a genial smile, but the cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth distended it into a sort of flesh-straining grimace. “And Mr. O‘Kane? And that would be Mr. Tompkins, yes?”
“Thompson,” Mart returned in a voice dead and buried while Mr. McCormick blinked in bewilderment from his place at the table — he wasn’t used to new people, not at all — and O‘Kane got up from his chair to unlock the door and admit the new psychiatrist. Rising from the chair, moving through the desolate space of that penitentiary of a room, the most familiar room in the world, a place he knew as well as any prisoner knew his cell, he couldn’t help feeling something like hope surging through him — or maybe it was only caffeine, from Sam Wah’s black and potent Chinese tea. But who was to say that this man standing so mountainously at the door wasn’t the miracle worker who would transform Mr. McCormick from a disturbed schizophrenic sex maniac incapable of tying his own shoes into a kindhearted and grateful millionaire ready to reward those who’d stood by him in his time of need?