That was an inviting prospect, and he leaned back on the bar and let the booze settle into his veins, his eyes drifting languidly over the crowd, and no, he wasn’t going to look at Dolores, not yet, or Katherine either. His bones were melting, his legs were dead and he was feeling all right and better than all right, when suddenly a massive shimmering sphere of flesh welled up in his peripheral vision and a big adhesive hand took hold of his wrist and was jerking him in the direction of the band. It was Brush. Dr. Brush. He was wearing a grass skirt and one of those flower necklaces over a bare blubbery chest and he had Mrs. Brush trailing from one hand and O‘Kane from the other and there was no yielding to the onward rush of that tumultuous moving mountain of flesh. “Kamehameha!” Brush shouted, wriggling his hips. “Yakahula, hickydula!”
O‘Kane felt his face go red. He was fighting like a fish at the end of a line and he saw Dolores’s face haunting the crowd and her sudden satiric smile and he was bumping into somebody — the dentist, wasn’t it? — and a drink spilled and then another. He finally broke the doctor’s grip and pulled up short in the middle of the whirling mob, everyone laughing, screaming with hilarity, and Brush hurtling onward in all his volatile-bosomed glory till he was right in front of the orchestra and every eye in the house was on him.
Eldred strummed till his hand looked as if it was going to fall off, the orchestra caught fire and Dr. Brush shook and shimmied and drove all his floating appendages in every conceivable direction while his poor oscillating wife tried to keep up with him through the whole panoply of her jerks and twitches. And that was the moment of revelation for O‘Kane, his hopes as feeble suddenly as a dying man’s: Brush was no savior or miracle worker and there was no way in the world he would ever even scratch the surface of Mr. McCormick’s illness — for the main and simple reason that he was a congenital idiot himself.
3. THE ART OF WOOING
When Stanley McCormick strode across the croquet lawn at the Beverly Farms Resort Hotel in Beverly, Massachusetts, on that still, sun-struck afternoon in the summer of 1903 and Katherine Dexter glanced up and saw him for the first time in her adult life, he really wasn’t himself. He’d been driving all day, driving hard, driving as if a whole gibbering horde of demons was on his tail with their talons drawn and their black leathery wings beating him about the head and shrieking doom in his ears. Something had seized him at breakfast that morning, an agitation, a jolt of the nerves that was like a switch thrown inside him, his whole being and private interior self taking off in a sudden frenzy like a spooked horse or a runaway automobile. That was why he’d had to leave his chauffeur behind when they stopped for gasoline at a feed store in Medford and the man never knew it till he came out from behind the shed where he was relieving himself to see the car hurtling up the road (nothing personal and Stanley wished him well, he did, but when the switch was thrown there was nothing he could do about it), Stanley driving on himself in the Mercedes roadster that was exactly like the one John Jacob Astor had entered in the New York-to-Buffalo endurance run two years earlier, ramming along down roads that were no better than cartpaths in a tornado of dust, flying chickens and furiously yapping dogs. He didn’t stop at all till he got to Danvers, the throttle open wide all the way, the engine screaming, and he breathless with the adrenaline rush of beating along at speeds in excess of twenty miles an hour.
At Danvers he got down, shaking so hard he was afraid his legs wouldn’t hold him upright, and already there was a crowd gathering, farmers in overalls and their red-faced wives, children on whirling legs, the man who sold insurance and the bank clerk just released to his lunch hour. Stanley tried to manage a smile, and he knew he must have been a sight, six foot four and looking like a man from Mars in his goggles and leather cap and the sweat-drenched greatcoat all furred with dust, feathers and moribund insects, but his facial muscles didn’t seem to want to cooperate. He lifted a feeble hand in greeting or warning or capitulation, he didn’t know what or which, and staggered into the restaurant next to the barber shop with the sign in the window that said HAIRCUT & SHAVE Two BITS.
Inside it was cool and dark, walls paneled in pine, a scent of sweet pine sap at war with the cooking smells, boiled wienerwurst, fried onions, beef gravy, lard vaporizing in the pan. Stanley couldn’t see a thing at first, dazed from the drive and the sun and the flywheel spinning round unchecked somewhere in the middle of his chest, under his sternum, and it wasn’t his heart, it was something else, the switch thrown, the throttle on full, everything rushing, rushing. And what did he want? A sandwich, that was all. And something to drink. Soda water. A Coca-Cola. Root beer. But why was it so dark in here? It took him a moment, racing and whirling, though he was standing stock-still two feet inside the door, every face turned to him, to realize he was still wearing his goggles. And further, that his goggles were encrusted with a filthy opaque scrim of road dirt and insect parts, making night of day and sorrow of joy and creating fear where there was nothing to fear. He lifted the goggles and pushed them back up atop his head.
And saw… a waitress. Standing right there in front of him with her womanly shape and her fine and interesting closely gathered womanly features — and her eyes, her eyes with a question in them. “Will you be having luncheon today, sir?” she was saying, and everybody in the place, at the counter and seated at the dark-wood tables, was hanging on the answer.
Stanley: “Yes. Yes, I’d like that. Luncheon, yes.”
The Waitress: “Can I show you to a table?”
Stanley: “Yes. Certainly. Of course. That’s just what I need. A table.” But he didn’t move.
The Waitress: “Maybe you’d like to clean up first, in the lavatory?”
Stanley: “Excuse me?”
The Waitress (movement at the door now, the crowd drawn to the roadster beginning to disperse and filter into the restaurant for a glass of water and some soda crackers and a good long look at this dusty apparition in the long trailing coat): “I said, maybe you’d like to clean up? The lavatory’s in back there, down the hall, first door to your left.”
And then Stanley was moving again, the flywheel spinning, down the hall, through the door and into the lavatory, sink and toilet and last year’s calendar on the wall. He stripped off the leather cap and goggles all in one motion, shrugged off the coat and found a hook for it on the back of the door. He stood over the toilet and relieved himself, throwing back his head to look up into the pigeon-haunted opacity of the skylight, chicken wire set in the glass for reinforcement. The noise of his urine against the porcelain was the most mundane sound in the world, a trickle and splash that took him back to the camp in the Adirondacks, he and Harold making water against the rocks like Iroquois raiders and Mama never knowing a thing about it. He saw the granite promontories, slabs of gray weathered rock layered like the skin of an onion, the fir trees stark against the iron water, and his fish, the gleaming iridescent thing he’d pulled from the secret depths and the guide saying it was the biggest lake trout he’d ever seen and Stanley should be proud — and he was proud.