She reached for his bandaged hand and then drew back as if she’d burned herself on a hot stove, but immediately reached for it again, and then once more, before O‘Kane finally offered his left hand and tucked the bandaged one discreetly behind his back. But the sequel was even stranger, because she went through the same routine all over again, reaching out for his good hand and then drawing back once, twice, three times, and when he looked into her face for an answer she greeted him with a whole battery of facial tics and distortions — enough to make the gone-but-not-forgotten Hamilton look like an amateur. She said something in a loud squawk of a voice, twitching and shaking and jerking her head up and down all the while, before Dr. Brush intervened.
“Gladys, yes,” he boomed, swinging tumultuously round in the entrance hall and slamming the door behind them. “These are the two men I told you about, Edward O‘Kane — we call him Eddie — and Martin Tompkins, er, Thompson. That’s it, dear, yes, go ahead and say hello—”
Mart, thick-headed and slow to grapple toward judgment or even awareness, gave Mrs. Brush a bewildered look and reached for her hand, which she immediately snatched away and hid behind her back. Mart looked to O‘Kane, and O’Kane’s eyes told him everything he needed to know: the psychiatrist’s wife was a nutcase.
And what was she wearing? Something plain and old-fashioned, drab as a horse blanket, and hanging right down to the floor, as if this were the nineteen-oughts still. But she was smiling, or at least that seemed to be a smile flashing through the frenetic semaphore of tics, twitches and grimaces, and that was enough for O‘Kane. He smiled back, offered her his arm, which she took after another whole rigama-role of back and forth and back and forth again, and led her up the six steps and into the big room full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces.
The celebration was both in honor of Dr. Brush’s taking over the reins and to christen the new theater building, built so that Mr. McCormick could have a comfortable place in which to view moving pictures, concerts and plays. It was a grand building, the size of any three houses a normal family would occupy, dominated by the vast two-story-high theater, with offices for Dr. Brush and the estate manager to either side and a bedroom for Mr. McCormick tucked in back in the event he should tire while watching a picture. Everyone felt he needed more stimulation — Drs. Meyer, Hamilton and Brush, Katherine, even the Chicago McCormicks — and the theater house was designed to serve the purpose. It was a short walk from the main house — no more than four or five hundred feet — and the landscape architects had put sprinklers high up in the trees along the path so that Mr. McCormick could hear the soothing murmur of a gentle rainfall as he strolled to and from the building in fair weather, and there was stimulation for you: rain on command. Nor had they overlooked security: all the windows were protected, inside the double panes of glass, with a graceful cast-iron filigree in a handsome diamond pattern, and the doors to each of the rooms were fitted with triple locks, and for each lock a separate key.
It was amazing, it really was, and yet O‘Kane couldn’t help thinking of the poor simple lunatics at the Boston Asylum, all herded into a cage to have the crusted shit blasted off them with high-pressure hoses. But then they weren’t Mr. McCormick, were they? And Mr. McCormick, being a gentleman, was used to gentle things, and O’Kane, being his nurse, applauded anything they could do for him, especially when money was no object. Stimulation? Give him all the stimulation he could stand, just so long as it didn’t overexcite him and push him all the way back down the long tunnel of tube-feeding and diapers.
But everybody in the neighborhood was gathered here now, for drinks and frivolity and the showing of a new Bronco Billy picture from Santa Barbara’s own Flying A Studios, and as O‘Kane stepped into the room with the frantically grinning Mrs. Brush beside him, he felt as pleased as he had on Christmas Day as a boy. Nick’s wife had put up decorations, streamers and such, there was a big spread on a table in the corner and a bar set up and a guy in a tuxedo standing behind it. And balloons, balloons all over the place. The orchestra had been playing an air when he first came to the door, cheerful and fluty, but now they shifted into something you could feel in the soles of your feet and a couple of people got up to dance. He handed Mrs. Brush over to a big glowing bald man who suddenly loomed up on his right — Dr. Ogilvie, Mr. McCormick’s nominal dentist — and headed for the bar.
He ordered a highball and while the bartender was fixing it he glanced over his shoulder to see Katherine standing there not ten feet away, and she laughing at something the woman next to her was saying. She looked good, damned good, all in green and with a little green hat perched up on top of her hair like a bird’s nest. He wasn’t going to talk to her, of course, unless it was strictly necessary, and he turned back to the bar before she could catch him looking. That was when Dr. Brush and Mart elbowed their way in, the doctor flushed and hearty and lecturing Mart about the main and simple reason of something or other. “Eddie!” he cried, and a big arm looped itself over O‘Kane’s shoulder, an arm heavy as a python, and O’Kane could smell liquor on the doctor’s breath. “They treating you all right?”
“Sure. Yeah.” O‘Kane lifted the glass to his lips, whiskey fumes probing at his nostrils, and made believe he was diving for pearls.
“You fellows are all right,” Brush boomed, and he was squeezing Mart under his other arm, squeezing the two of them as if they were prize hams. “But listen. Eddie. I really want to tell you, for the main and simple reason, well, Gladys thinks you’re a prince. And so do I.”
O‘Kane looked at Mart. Mart was clutching a drink, looking big-headed and dazed. It must have been something for him, going from his monk’s cell in the back of the big house to all this.
“Listen. Between us. Because we’re friends and, er, fellow employees of Mr. McCormick, you may have noticed that my wife’s a little, what should we say — excitable? Not to worry. She was a patient once. Of mine, that is. Brilliant woman, one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known—”
O‘Kane, uncomfortable under the doctor’s grip, gazed out across the room to where Mrs. Brush stood with the dentist, putting her face through all its permutations and showing her teeth like a rabbit at the end of every sequence. She didn’t look all that brilliant. In fact, she looked suspiciously like some of the loonies he’d known at McLean.
“Tourette’s syndrome,” the doctor was saying. “It’s not a form of insanity, not at all, just a weakness. A moral weakness, really. And we’re working on it, we are. You see, her mind races ahead of her body just like an automobile stuck in neutral and the accelerator to the floor, causes her all sorts of embarrassment for the main and simple reason that she refuses to control it… but really, she’s no crazier than you or I, not underneath, and I, er, I appreciate the way you gave her your arm there, Eddie, it was white of you,”
It was then that Dolores Isringhausen walked in with her friend of the vacuous smile and two men with penciled-in mustaches and their hair all slicked down with grease. Or she didn’t walk exactly — she sashayed, rolling her corsetless hips from side to side like a belly dancer, and she managed to make every woman in the place, even Katherine, look like yesterday’s news. In three years, every woman in America would look like her — or try to — all natural lines, legs and boyish figure, with the peeled-acorn hat and eye makeup, but for now she had the stage all to herself, she and her friend, that is. O‘Kane was electrified — he hadn’t expected this — and two emotions simultaneously flooded his system with glandular secretions that made him feel as twitchy as Mrs. Brush: lust and jealousy. Who were those men, and one of them with his hand on her elbow?