“Yes, yes, well,” Dr. Hoch murmured, never moving a muscle, “we all have our disappointments, but I’m sure you will feel very much different when she is here in this house and you are speaking with her on the telephone apparatus. But now, well”—and he clapped his hands together feebly—“I’m not feeling so very good as I might and I was thinking maybe we all go for a ride, what do you think, Mr. McCormick? All of us together — Mr. O‘Kane, Mr. Thompson, you and me? For the change of scenery, yes? What do you say?”
Mr. McCormick’s face changed in that instant. He looked to O‘Kane and Mart and then back to the doctor with an enthusiast’s grin. He liked his ride, but in Dr. Brush’s time — and now Hochs — the rides were few and far between, because they were dangerous and a whole lot of bother for everyone concerned. Mr. McCormick, of course, had to be watched every second, wedged between O’Kane on the one side and Mart on the other, while the doctor, be it Hamilton, Brush or Hoch, was obliged to sit up front with Roscoe.
“Yes,” Mr. McCormick said, grinning wide round his decaying teeth — he hated dentists with an unreasoning passion and put up such a fight the doctors had all but given up on having his teeth treated — yes, I think I’d like that. I’d like that very much. For a, a change, sure. I’ll order Roscoe to bring one of the cars round. And we can take a lunch in paper sacks — can’t we?“
Mr. McCormick always took a while getting himself from one place to another — it was one of his quirks — and both O‘Kane and Mart had to help him choose the proper hat, gloves and overcoat and reassure him that he looked fine, absolutely fine and splendid, and that the weather outside wasn’t really anything to concern himself over. “It’s not like we’re in Waverley anymore,” O’Kane joked, and then he and Mart had him at the barred door to his quarters, and the keys turning in the locks.
There was no trouble, not on the stairs anyway, and Mr. McCormick, who’d just last month turned forty-four in a big fraternal celebration in the theater building, was looking every bit the lord of the manor with the hair silvering at his temples and a slate-colored felt hat that brought out the keenness of his eyes. He stood up straight for a change, with his shoulders squared and his head held high, and he didn’t drag his right foot or stop in the middle of the stairway and back up two steps for every one he went down — one of his favorite tricks. No, he was the soul of propriety until Torkelson, the butler, opened the front door for him, and then he was off, slipping out of O‘Kane’s grip like a Houdini and darting right past Roscoe and the waiting car.
This was nothing new. Probably half the time he got out of the house for his walks or the trip over to the theater building for a concert or movie, he’d break into a run and O‘Kane and Mart would have to run along with him, as if they all three were training for the marathon. Dr. Hamilton had felt that the running would do Mr. McCormick “a world of good” and that the staff should give him his head, so long as he didn’t break for the bushes or attempt to leave the property. Brush didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, and Hoch, in his Kraut — or Swiss — enthusiasm for physical suffering, concurred with Hamilton’s feelings on the subject. And so Mr. McCormick ran, and O’Kane ran with him — which at least had the unforeseen benefit of burning the whiskey out of his pores.
On this morning, though, Mr. McCormick got the jump on both him and Mart, and by the time they got around the car he was streaking up the drive, at least fifty yards ahead of them. “Wait up, Mr. McCormick! O‘Kane shouted, his temples already feeling as if they were about to explode. ”What about our drive?“
If Mr. McCormick heard him, he gave no sign. He just kept on, running in a flat-out sprint, running as if all his judges and demons were flocking after him, and he didn’t head for the main gate but instead surprised O‘Kane by lurching to his left, plunging deeper into the property. The road that way led to the stone garage that was set back away from the house in a grove of trees, and then it branched off to the west toward Ashley Road and the far side of the property. O’Kane chugged along, Mart at his side. “The son of a bitch,” he cursed. “Why today of all days? My head feels as big as a balloon.”
Mart, whose head wasas big as a balloon, just grunted, trotting along in his dogged, top-heavy way. “He’s heading toward the Ashley gate,” he observed in a wheezing pant, and O‘Kane looked up to see their employer wheeling again to his left and disappearing up the long snaking drive that bisected the estate. And that got his heart pounding, because that was where the nearest house was, Mira Vista, and there were women there now, imperious pampered overfed society women — women like Katherine.
O‘Kane gave it all he had, but he wasn’t worth much that morning, and he would have been the first to admit it. Sam Wah’s salvatory eggs were coming up in his throat like a plug, like something evil he was giving birth to, and his legs had begun to go numb from the hip sockets down when he became aware of a rumble and squeal at his back and turned to watch Roscoe motor on by in a farting blast of fumes, Dr. Hoch wired into the seat beside him with his beard flapping in the breeze through the open window. O’Kane kept going, though Mart had fallen by the wayside. He followed the dwindling rear panel of the big Pierce car until the gate appeared down a stretch of concrete road all hemmed in by trees and the car began to get larger again. A moment later he was there, choking for breath, feeling just exactly like the victim of an Indian uprising with six or seven arrows neatly stitched into his lungs, his groin and his liver.
Roscoe was still at the wheel, pale and washed out from his bout of the grippe, but Dr. Hoch was standing there at the open gate with Mr. McCormick, and Mr. McCormick didn’t even seem to be sweating. “What the—” O‘Kane panted, Ringing himself against the hood of the car for support. “What—?”
“Oh, Eddie,” Mr. McCormick said, his eyes gone away to hide in his head again. “Hi. I was just — I thought — well, we should go out this gate today, so I–I came to open it, because we should see the begonias, the new begonias—”
O‘Kane was stunned. He was obliterated. He had maybe nine breaths more to draw on this earth and then it was over. “Begonias’?” he wheezed.
Mr. McCormick gestured for him to turn round and look behind him. Bewildered, O‘Kane slowly pivoted and gazed back down the road that fled away into the distance and to the moving stain that was Martin Thompson limping there at the far end of it. And sure enough, there they were, a whole fresh-planted double row of them on either side of the pavement and stretching all the way back to Mart and beyond: begonias.
And then Christmas fell on them from the realms of space, the earth twisting round the sky and Aldebaran bright and persistent in the eastern sky, the season festive, the stuffed goose, the songs and drinks. Marshall Fields’ in Chicago sent out a decorated Christmas tree and foil-wrapped presents for the whole staff (which now numbered fourteen in the household and forty-seven on the grounds), along with the usual baubles and candies and tan-shelled Georgia pecans, and baskets of prime California navels that had traveled from the San Fernando Valley to Chicago and back to California again. Outside, on the front lawn, the big Monterey pine, as wide around at the base as two men fully outstretched till their fingertips met on either side, was festooned with multicolored lights and set ablaze in the night. O‘Kane sent his mother a sweater of virgin wool and a porcelain reproduction of the State of California flag for his father, and he sent Eddie, Jr. a jackknife care of his mother and not Rosaleen, who couldn’t be trusted with anything you didn’t tie round her neck with a note attached to it. And he found a filigreed bracelet in fourteen-carat white gold for Giovannella, who refused it on the grounds that Guido would want to know where it came from. “I’ll wear it only for you, Eddie,” she said. “When we’re alone. In bed.”