She gave him a look he couldn’t gauge and he felt her body tense, though she shrugged and said, “Sure, go ahead,” and let the smoke seep out of her nostrils in two ascending coils.
“I was wondering — you never had any kids, did you? Children, I mean?”
“Me?” She laughed. “Can you picture me as a mother? Come on, Eddie.”
“But how—?”
“Ah,” she said, twisting round to snub out the cigarette in the hammered brass ashtray on the night table, “I see where this is going. She had the baby, didn’t she, your little peasant girl?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes.”
“And it’s yours?”
“Yes.”
And then she laughed again, and the laugh irritated him, made him feel that spark of anger that always seemed to go straight to his hands. “You think it’s funny?”
In answer, she collapsed on him, pinning his face to the pillow and forcing a kiss that was like a bite, and then she rolled off him and lay sprawled on her back beside him. “I do,” she said. “And it is funny, because you’re like a baby yourself, like you were just born and still kicking. Sure, give me that look, go ahead, but to answer your question, I use a Mensigna pessary, Eddie,” and she reached between her legs to show him.
And now he was shocked, and maybe a little frightened too. She held the thing up where he could see it, a black rubber tube all slick with her juices — and his. It was unholy, that’s what it was, a murder weapon, a mortal sin you could see and feel and hold in your own two hands.
“It comes in fourteen sizes,” she said, enjoying the moment and the look on his face. “The only problem is,” and she was coy now, coy and already moving into him, “you have to go to Holland to get one.”
The rains that winter seemed unusually heavy, one February storm alone dropping eight inches in a single day over the sodden town and its sandbagged saloons, lunchrooms, barbershops, corner groceries and cigar stores and converting lower State Street into a chute full of roiling mud that inundated all the first-floor shops and dwellings. The dark sucking river that rode atop the mud washed a whole flotilla of cars out to sea while the incoming waves cannonaded the harbor and drove half the boats moored there up against the shore until there was nothing left but splinters. The sky was a torn sheet, gone gray with use and flapping on the line.
O‘Kane enjoyed it, at least at first. He missed weather, real weather, the nor’easters that roared in off Boston Harbor on a blast of wind, the thunderstorms that ignited the summer sky and dropped the temperature twenty degrees in the snap of two fingers, but after he ruined a new pair of boots beyond repairing and had to drink at a Chink place in Spanishtown for a week because Menhoff’s had six inches of mud all over the floor and creeping up the legs of the chairs, he began to feel afflicted. The rain kept coming, and everyone felt the burden of it, even Mr. McCormick, who announced he’d go mad if he didn’t see some sunshine soon. It was a trial, a real trial, but the rains made the spring all the sweeter, and by March you’d never think a drop had ever fallen or would ever again.
Dolores Isringhausen went back to New York the morning after. St. Patrick’s Day (which she didn’t spend with O‘Kane), Giovannella began to soften toward him and even let him in once or twice when Guido wasn’t looking to admire the baby up close, but no kissing and no touching, and Mr. McCormick improved to the point where he was more or less rational at least fifty percent of the time — and this despite Dr. Brush’s retreat from active intervention to a strictly custodial role. Or maybe because of it. Just leave the man alone, that was O’Kane’s philosophy, and if he wanted a two-hour shower bath, let him have it. Why not? It wasn’t as if he had a train to catch.
And then it was June, and Dr. Brush, all three hundred and twenty-seven pounds of him, was called up to serve his country behind the lines with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He left his wife with a cousin (hers) on Anapamu Street, had a long talk with Mr. McCormick about duty and patriotism and the conduct of the War, and headed out on the train, the only member of the McCormick medical team to be called to active duty. They stationed him in England, and O‘Kane pictured him tucking away an English breakfast with two pots of tea ard then sitting around under the elms with a bunch of spooked one-legged vets and asking if their fathers had spanked them.
As it turned out, Brush would be gone just over two years, and though he wasn’t accomplishing a damn thing as far as O‘Kane could see, except maybe by accident, the McCormicks — and Katherine — insisted on a replacement, the best money could buy. Or rent. Dr. Meyer came all the way out himself and brought the interim man with him, a Dr. August Hoch, who’d succeeded him as head of the Pathological Institute in New York. Dr. Hoch was a Kraut — all the headshrinkers were Krauts, it seemed, except Hamilton and Brush, and that was all right with O’Kane, since they’d invented headshrinking in the first place. It was just that there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in the country around that time, and understandably so, and it didn’t make it any easier bellying up to the bar at Menhoff’s when everybody in town knew you had a Kraut over you. In fact, he’d had to wipe the floor one night with a guy in a lunchroom who called Dolores Isringhausen a Hun to her face, and the irony of it was she wasn’t even German — her maiden name was Mayhew.
But Dr. Hoch was all right. He was a keen-eyed old duffer with gray chin whiskers and a thin white scar that carved a wicked arc from just beneath his left eye to the back hinge of his jaw. O‘Kane was there the day Meyer and Hoch walked in on Mr. McCormick, who’d just returned from his morning exercise — a tortuous and many-branching stroll to the Indian grounds and back. Mr. McCormick was off in the corner, holding a private conference with his judges, and Dr. Meyer, whom Mr. McCormick knew well from his semiannual visits, went right up to him and said he had somebody he’d like him to meet. “Or perhaps,” he added, his accent thick as sludge, “you will already know him, yes?”
Mr. McCormick left off with his judges and turned slowly round, his eyes passing mechanically from Dr. Meyer’s black-bearded face to Dr. Hoch’s gray-bearded one. He seemed to recognize Dr. Meyer, and that was all well and good, but Hoch was obviously a puzzle. There was something in his eyes — a spark of recognition? fear? bewilderment? — but O‘Kane couldn’t read it.
“To refresh your memory, maybe,” Dr. Meyer went on, rocking back on his heels as if he were about to perform some acrobatic feat, “you will recall that Dr. Hoch examined you in nineteen hundred and seven, when you were a guest at McLean, but perhaps you forget because then you are not so well as you are now?”
Dr. Hoch came forward, a shambling sort of man in a shapeless gray suit who’d let his mustache and chin whiskers go so long without trimming that they hung down to his collar and completely obscured his throat. The scar shone in the morning light like a trail of dried spittle or the glistening track a slug leaves on the pavement, silvery and ever so faintly luminescent. “How do you do, Mr. McCormick,” he said with a little bow, and he didn’t extend his hand until Mr. McCormick automatically reached out his own. “It is a great pleasure to see you once again, yes?” and his accent was thicker than Meyer’s.
Mr. McCormick held onto Dr. Hoch’s hand a long while — so long, in fact, O‘Kane began to think he’d have to move in and break the grip — and twice he raised his free hand as if to touch the doctor’s scar, but then dropped it again to his side. “Yes,” Dr. Hoch said finally, “and I see perhaps that you are interested in my scar?”