Mr. McCormick let go of the doctor’s hand then, and he fluttered round a bit, stamping his feet and wringing his hands as if they were wet before stuffing them awkwardly into his trouser pockets. He loomed over the doctor, who couldn’t have been more than five-four or five-five. It seemed as if he were about to say something, but he bit his tongue and just stared at the side of the doctor’s face, watching in fascination as Hoch traced the line of his scar with a blunt fingertip.
“This,” Hoch said, “this is what we call in Germany a dueling scar. From my student days. You see, it was thought to be a cosmetic attraction to the ladies, a sign of virility or a badge of honor perhaps, but of course that was all foolishness then, the vanity of the young, and I do not know if students of today in the university they still have this — what do you say, ‘rite’?—anymore.” And then he said something in rapid-fire German to Meyer, who rattled something back.
“Ah. So. Herr Doktor Meyer informs me that this habit is no longer so much practiced as formerly.” He gazed up at Mr. McCormick, like some wood gnome confronting a giant — and Mr. McCormick was a giant, despite the stoop that rounded his shoulders and at times bent him over double, depending on the degree of punishment his imaginary judges were inflicting on him. “Would you like to touch it?” the doctor said, his eyes glinting.
And Mr. McCormick, who didn’t favor physical intimacy and had never touched anyone except in anger in all the time O‘Kane had known him, reached up tentatively to explore the side of Dr. Hoch’s face with two tremulous fingers. He traced the crescent of the scar over and over, very gently, so gently he might have been petting a cat. It was all very strange, Mr. McCormick stroking, the doctor submitting, the room so silent you would have thought they were all locked away in an Egyptian tomb, and then Mr. McCormick looked as if he wanted to say something, his lips moving before any sound came out. “So, it — it,” he stammered, withdrawing his hand and tucking it away in his pocket, “it is possible after all.”
“Possible?” Dr. Hoch just stood there, inches from their stooped-over and trembling employer, looking up steadily into his eyes. Dr. Meyer shot a glance at O‘Kane, but O’Kane was dumbfounded. This was something new, this touching, and it would have to play itself out.
“To-to be a man,” Mr. McCormick said, and then sang out one of his nonsense phrases, “one slit, one slit, one slit.”
“Yes, yes it is,” Dr. Hoch said, his face a web of lines that bunched and gathered around that one terrific silvery slash, and he didn’t ask about mothers or fathers or boom out platitudes — he just waited.
“With a razor, I mean.” Mr. McCormick had straightened up now and he looked round the room as if seeing it in a new light. “When, when Eddie and Mart shave me, it’s a, it’s a dangerous thing, to be cut like that, but it can, you can—”
The little doctor was nodding. “That’s right,” he said.
“I mean, what I mean is… if I was cut there”—and he reached out to touch the scar again—“it would, just, heal, and then I w-would have a scar too.” He rocked back on his feet. “But here,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat, “here it’s very… dangerous. And here,” pointing down, “you’re not, not a man anymore.”
“But Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane broke in, “you know we always use a safety razor, you know that—”
Hoch looked at Meyer. Meyer looked at Hoch. Mr. McCormick drew himself up till his shoulders were squared and he was the very model of proper posture. He waited till he was sure he had O‘Kane’s attention, and the doctors’ too, and then spoke in a clear strong uninflected voice, “Yes, Eddie, I know.”
Well. O‘Kane was impressed — all that over a scar — but he thought nothing more of it as the summer faded into autumn and the War news dominated every conversation and Giovannella warmed and melted and gave way to him again, stealing out on Saturday afternoons to linger with him on a mattress in the garage out back of Pat’s house while the baby shook his rattle and pumped his legs and arms in the air. Meanwhile, the bearer of the scar, Dr. Hoch, was very patient with Mr. McCormick — none of this talking cure business — sitting with him throughout the day and into the night, putting in longer hours than O’Kane or Mart or anybody on the estate. Mostly he would just sit there with him, rumpled and avuncular, reading out an interesting bit from a book or magazine now and again, walking Mr. McCormick. to and from the theater building and accompanying him on his walks. Sometimes the two of them would sit for hours and not say a word, and other times Mr. McCormick would be positively verbose, going on and on about the reaper—“the Wonder of the Reaper,” he called it, after some book about his father — and his two brothers and the crying need for social welfare and reform in this cold unforgiving world.
They talked of the War too, and that was a bit odd, from O‘Kane’s point of view anyway, because here were the American millionaire and the prototypical Hun sitting cheek by jowl, but they never came to blows over it or even raised their voices, not that O’Kane could recall. War news trickled through to them all winter, often several days late, through the Los Angeles, Chicago and Santa Barbara papers, and the papers brought news of Katherine too. She was in Washington throughout that year—1918—and the next, where she’d been handpicked by the president himself to sit on the National Defense Women’s Committee, doing all sorts of things to prosecute the War, from putting women to work to selling Liberty Bonds and dreaming up those patriotic posters you saw everywhere. Every month or so she’d send Mr. McCormick detailed maps of the Western Front, showing the battle lines and trenches. He would pore over them for hours, commenting on places he’d visited on his honeymoon and sketching in all sorts of antic figures to represent armies, gun emplacements, and naval, horse and even air squadrons.
For a while there, especially through the summer and fall of 1918, the War became one of his pet obsessions, and he drew not only Dr. Hoch into it, but O‘Kane himself. When the armies advanced or retreated he painstakingly erased his figures and symbols and moved the lines forward and backward and drew them in all over again. He analyzed the offensive at Amiens over and over, and he’d never been more lucid or articulate, not since his golfing days at McLean, and when the papers announced the American victory at St. Mihiel in September, he paraded around the upper parlor for hours, shaking his fists and uncannily imitating the whistle and crash of a bombardment while the rumpled little doctor sat on and watched with his scarred impassive face.
Katherine returned in December for the holidays, and that was when the business of the scar came up again. She was late in getting to California because of her duties with the Defense Committee, arriving just two days before Christmas. She seemed tired, worn about the edges, and as she stood in the theater building under a monumental wreath of holly and mistletoe handing out Christmas bonuses to the employees, she looked old. Or older. O‘Kane watched her, always the lady, always perfect, always carved of the clearest coldest ice, and tried to tot up her age — she would have been, what, forty-one? Or forty-two? Well, for the first time it had begun to show — nothing extreme; she was hardly a hag yet — but there it was. Her clothes were as rich as ever, but they were yesterday’s fashions, the heavy drapery of the suffragette and the matron, nothing at all like the skimpy satiny look of Dolores Isringhausen or the walking light that was Giovannella. She was getting old, but so was everybody else, even lucky Eddie O’Kane, who was going to be thirty-six come March. And he felt it most keenly when he came up to her and she took his hand and gave him his envelope and a smile that didn’t mean a thing, not yea or nay, and he almost wished she’d come round cracking the whip again so they could all go back and start over, drenched in hope.