At any rate, Dr. Brush showed up that morning just after O‘Kane and Mart had taken Mr. McCormick out onto the sunporch, and he was determined to give the talking cure a try. “Mr. McCormick,” he cried, lumbering through the door and booming a greeting in his lusty big hail-fellow voice, “and how are you this fine morning?”
Mr. McCormick was seated in one of the wicker chairs, his feet up on the wicker settee, hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into the cloudless sky. He was dressed, as usual, as if he were on his way to his office at the Reaper Works, in a gray summer suit, vest, formal collar and tie. He didn’t respond to the greeting, nor acknowledge the doctor’s presence in any way.
Undeterred, Dr. Brush strode hugely across the tiles and stationed himself just behind Mr. McCormick, leaning forward to maneuver his great sweating dirigible of a face into Mr. McCormick’s line of sight. “And so,” Dr. Brush boomed, “aren’t you the lucky one to have such fine weather here all the year round? It must be especially gratifying in the winter, for the main and simple reason of defeating the ice and snow, but can you imagine how they’re all sweltering in that humidity back East… and here, it’s as pleasant as can be. What do you think it is, Mr. McCormick — seventy? Seventy-two, maybe? Huh?”
No response.
“Yes, sir,” the doctor concluded with a stagey sigh, “you’re a lucky man.”
Mr. McCormick spoke then for the first time since he’d been led out onto the porch. He still had his head thrust back and he was viewing Dr. Brush upside down, which must have been a bit peculiar, though it didn’t seem to faze him much. “Lucky?” he said, and his voice was barely a croak. “I‘m-I’m no luckier than a dog.”
“A dog?” And now the doctor was in a state of high excitement, dodging round the patio with little feints of his too-small feet and finally squeezing himself into the chair opposite Mr. McCormick. “And why do you say that, sir? A dog? Really. How extraordinary.”
Mart, who was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door, cracked his knuckles audibly. O‘Kane had been pacing back and forth in the shade at the far end of the patio, and he stopped now and found himself a good spot at the intersection of two walls and leaned back to listen. Mr. McCormick, still staring up into the sky, said nothing.
“A dog?” Brush repeated. “Did I hear you correctly, Mr. McCormick? You did say ‘a dog,’ didn’t you?”
Still nothing.
“Well, if you did, and I’m quite sure there’s nothing wrong with my hearing — or maybe there is, ha! and I’d better have it tested — well, and if you did say ‘a dog’ I’d be very interested to hear just why you should feel that way, for the main and simple reason that it’s such an extraordinary position to take, and I’m sure both Mr. Thompson and Mr. O’Kane would like to hear your reasoning too. Wouldn’t you, fellows?”
Mart grunted, and it was hard to say whether it was an affirmative or negative grunt.
O‘Kane ducked his head. “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”
“Do you hear that, Mr. McCormick? All your friends would like to know just how you feel on the subject. Yes? Mr. McCormick?”
And yet still nothing. O‘Kane wondered if Mr. McCormick had even heard the question, or if he’d already shut his mind down, as impervious as a rodent buried deep in its burrow. At least he wasn’t violent. Or not yet, anyway.
The doctor pulled a cigar from his inside pocket and took a moment in lighting it. He drew on it, expelled a plume of smoke and gave the patient a canny look, which was unfortunately lost on Mr. McCormick, who continued to gaze into the sky as if he were Percival Lowell looking for signs of life on Mars. “Perhaps you feel caged-in here, is that it, Mr. McCormick?” the doctor began. “Is that what you’re saying — that you’d like more liberty? Because we can arrange that — more drives, more walks outside the estate, if that’s what you want. Is that it? Is that what you mean?”
After a silence that must have lasted five or six minutes, Dr. Brush changed his tack. “Tell me about your father, Mr. McCormick,” he said, leaning forward now and addressing Mr. McCormick’s long pale throat and the underside of his chin. “He was a great man, I’m told…. Did you love him very much?”
A gull coasted overhead. It was very still. Somewhere down below, off in the direction of the cottages, someone was singing in Italian, a monotonous drone that swung back and forth on itself like a pendulum.
“Did you… did you ever feel that you disliked him? Or harbored any resentment toward him? Perhaps he disciplined you as a boy or even spanked you — did that ever occur?”
O‘Kane became conscious of the movement of the sun, the sharp angle of the shadow beside him creeping inexorably nearer. He tried to make out the words to the song, though he couldn’t understand them anyway, and he tried not to think of Giovannella. Mr. McCormick, who had a genius for rigidity — he would have made the ideal sculptor’s model — never moved a hair. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Well,” the doctor said after a bit, and he got massively to his feet, puffing at the cigar, and began to pace back and forth, counting off the tiles, “well and so.” He stalked round back of Mr. McCormick again and again forced his face into Mr. McCormick’s line of vision. “And your mother,” he said, “what is she like?”
The second thing the doctor tried was by way of effecting certain small refinements in the daily schedule, for the sake of efficiency. He started with Mr. McCormick’s shower bath. “Eddie,” he said, taking O‘Kane aside just after his shift had ended one evening, “you know, I’ve been thinking about Mr. McCormick’s day and how he goes about using his resources, for the main and simple reason that I think we could inject a bit more efficiency into the scheme of things. Shake him up, you know? It’s the same old thing, day in and day out. You’d think the man’d be bored to death by now.”
O‘Kane, who had remained head nurse despite the change of regime and had seen his salary increased by five dollars a week since Brush took over, felt it prudent to act concerned, though he saw nothing at all wrong with the schedule as it stood. It wasn’t the schedule that was holding Mr. McCormick back, and it wasn’t the lack of intellectual stimulation either — it was the lack of women. Get him laid a few times and see what happened — he couldn’t be any worse for it than he was now. He gave Brush a saintly look. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well, I was looking at this item here, the shower bath,” the doctor said. They were standing at the doorway to the upper parlor; Mr. McCormick had been put to bed and Nick and Pat had just begun their shift. “ ‘Seven to eight A.M.: shower bath.’ Now doesn’t that seem a bit excessive? Even in the interest of proper hygiene? Why, I spend no more than five minutes under the shower myself, and ha! you’ll have to admit there’s a good deal more of me to wash than there is of Mr. McCormick. What I’m thinking is, couldn’t we cut that time back — gradually, I mean — till he takes a normal shower bath of five or ten minutes, and then we can apply the savings in time to his improvement and cure—”