by T. C. Boyle
“Ach,” the doctor waved a hand in his face, “leave that to me—obsessions are my stock in trade.”
And so, the following morning, once O‘Kane and Mart had ushered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath, Dr. Brush appeared, barefooted and mountainous in a long trailing rain slicker the size of a two-man tent. “Good morning, good morning!” he boomed, the raw shout of his voice reverberating in the small cubicle of the shower bath till it was like a hundred voices. “Don’t mind me, Mr. McCormick,” he called, his pale fleshy toes gripping the wet tiles, water already streaming from the hem of the rain slicker, “I’m just here to observe your bathing in the interest of efficiency, for the main and simple—but just think of me as one of your efficiency experts you manufacturing men are forever introducing into your operations to cut corners and increase production.... Go ahead, now, don’t let me interfere—”
Mr. McCormick was seated naked on the floor beneath one of the three showerheads, rubbing furiously at his chest with a fresh bar of Palm Olive soap. He looked alarmed at first, and even made as if to cover his privates, but then seemed to think better of it, and turning away from the doctor, he continued lathering his chest.
“Now I thought,” the doctor went on, steam rising, the water splashing against the walls and leaping up to spatter his legs, “that we might begin today by limiting our bathing to perhaps, oh, how does fifteen minutes sound to you, Mr. McCormick? You see, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a more than reasonable length of time to thoroughly cleanse ourselves, for the main and simple reason that the human body can only hold so much dirt, especially when one bathes daily, don’t you think?”
O‘Kane stood in the bathroom doorway, his usual station, where he could observe Mr. McCormick at his bath and yet not intrude too much on him, and Mart was in the parlor, preparing the table for Mr. McCormick’s breakfast. While the shower stall was quite large—there was room enough for three people at least—O’Kane couldn’t help feeling the doctor was taking an unnecessary risk. There was no telling how Mr. McCormick might construe this invasion of his privacy, efficiency or no, and if he were to get violent, there was always the possibility of a nasty fall, what with the slick tiles and steady flow of water. He didn’t like the situation, not one bit, and he gloomily envisioned himself charging into the fray and ruining yet another suit.
But Mr. McCormick surprised him. He didn’t seem particularly agitated—or not that O‘Kane could see. He merely kept the white slope of his back to the intruder and soaped himself all the more vigorously as the doctor went on jabbering away and the water fell in a cascade of steely bright pins. This went on for some time, until at a signal from Brush, O’Kane called to Mart and Mart went below to cut off the water supply.
A moment later, the shower ran dry. Mr. McCormick darted a wild glance over his shoulder at the doctor and then at O‘Kane—Here it comes, O’Kane thought, tensing himself—but Mr. McCormick did nothing more than shift his haunches on the wet tiles so that he could reach up and try the controls. He twisted the knobs several times and then, in a sort of crabwalk, moved first to his left and then to his right to try the controls of the other two spigots. He was a long time about it, and when he was finally satisfied that the water had been cut off, he found the exact spot where he’d been situated before the interruption and continued soaping himself as if nothing were the matter.
Dr. Brush, for his part, was saying things like “All right, now, Mr. McCormick, very good, and I suppose we’ll just have to move on, won’t we?” and “Now, isn’t that an improvement? Honestly now?” He stood there optimistically over the slumped form of their employer, his toes grasping the floor like fingers, the yellow slicker dripping, the short hairs at his nape curling up like duck’s feathers with the moisture. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t heeding him. In fact, Mr. McCormick was expressing his displeasure with the whole business by applying the dwindling bar of Palm Olive as if it were a cat o’ nine tails, and when it was gone, he reached for another.
“Well, then,” Dr. Brush confided to O‘Kane later that day, “it’s a contest of wills, and we’ll just see how far the patient is prepared to go before he sees the wisdom of employing himself more efficiently.”
The next morning, the doctor was back, only this time there was but one bar of soap in the dish and the shower was curtailed after ten minutes. Again, Dr. Brush made all sorts of optimistic assertions about time and energy saving and the value of discipline, but Mr. McCormick never wavered from his routine. He soaped himself for a full hour after the shower was stopped and appeared for breakfast with greenish white streaks of Palm Olive decorating his cheeks and brow, as if he were an Indian chieftain painted for war. And then the next day after that, the shower was cut to five minutes and only powdered soap was provided, but still Mr. McCormick persisted, as O‘Kane knew he would. When the water was stopped, Mr. McCormick rubbed himself all over with the powdered soap till it dissolved in a yellowish scum and hardened like varnish all over his body.
The climax came on the fourth day.
Dr. Brush ordered that no soap be provided, and he appeared as usual, jocular and energetic, reasoning with Mr. McCormick as if he were a child—or at the very least one of the aments at the Lunatic Hospital. “Now can’t you see,” he said, his voice flattened and distorted by the pounding of the water till the water was cut off by signal five minutes later, “that you’re being unreasonable, Mr. McCormick—or no, not unreasonable, but inefficient? Think if we were running the Reaper Works on this sort of schedule, eh? Now, of course, your soap will be restored to you as soon as you, well, begin to, that is, for the main and simple—”
Mr. McCormick bathed without soap and he didn’t seem to miss it, not on the surface anyway, but he sat there under the dry shower for a good hour and a half, and when he got up he reached for his towel, though he was long since dry himself. No matter. He took up that towel like a penitent’s scourge and whipped it back and forth across his body till the skin was so chafed it began to bleed and he had to be dissuaded by force. The next morning he never even bothered to turn the shower on, but simply took up the towel as if he were already wet and rubbed himself furiously in all the chafed places till they began to bleed again, and it was only after a struggle that took the combined force of O‘Kane, Mart and Dr. Brush to overcome him, that he desisted.
And so it went for a week, till Mr. McCormick was a walking scab from head to toe and Dr. Brush finally gave up his vision of efficiency. In fact, he gave up any notion of interfering with Mr. McCormick at all, either through adjusting his schedule or drawing him into therapeutic conversation, and after that, for the year or so before he was called away to military duty among the shell-shocked veterans of the Western Front, he really seemed content to just—float along.
Well, that was all right with O‘Kane: he had his own problems. As the fall of 1916 bled into the winter of 1917 and the War drew closer, his skirmishes with Rosaleen and Giovannella seemed to intensify till he was in full retreat, capable of nothing more than a feeble rearguard action. At least with Rosaleen the battles were fought through the U.S. Postal Service and at a distance of three thousand and some-odd miles. He hadn’t heard from her in two years, and then suddenly she was dunning him for money, letters raining down on him in a windswept storm of demands, complaints and threats. And what did she want? She wanted shoes for Eddie Jr., who was the “spiting immidge of his father” and going to be nine soon, and a new Sunday suit for him too, so he’d look his best for her wedding to Homer Quammen, and did he remember Homer? And by the way, she was filing papers for divorce and she felt he owed her something for that too, and he shouldn’t think for a minute that her remarrying would in any way lift his obligation to support Eddie Jr., especially since Homer was as “pore as a church moose.
He sent her the money, forty dollars in all, though he resented it because he was putting away every spare nickel against a land deal Dolores Isringhausen’s brother-in-law was letting him in on, and he never heard a
word of thanks or good-bye or anything else. The letters stopped coming though, so he assumed she’d got the money, and by the time he did finally hear from her he’d forgotten all about it. It was in December, sometime around Christmas—he remembered it was the holiday season because Katherine was back in town, piling the upper parlor hip-deep in presents and wreaths and strings of popcorn and such and generally raising hell with Brush and Stribling, the estate manager—and he’d just got back from his shift with a thought to wheedling a sandwich out of Mrs. Fitzmaurice and then going out for a drink at Menhoff‘s, when he noticed a smudged white envelope laid out on the table in the entry hall for him. He recognized Rosaleen’s cramped subhuman scrawl across the face of it—Edw. O’Kane, Esq., C/O Mrs. Morris Fitzmaurice, 196 State Street, Santa Barbara, California—and tucked it in his breast pocket.
Later, sitting at a table at Menhoff‘s, he was searching his pockets for a light to offer the girl from the Five & Dime when he discovered it there. He lit the girl’s cigarette—her name was Daisy and she had a pair of breasts on her that made him want to faint away and die for the love of them—and then he excused himself to go to the men’s, where he stood over the urinal and tore the letter open, killing two birds with one stone. Inside, there was a photograph and nothing more, not even a line. He held it up to the light with his free hand. The photo was blurred and obscure, as if the whole world had shifted in the interval between the click of the shutter and the fixing of the image, and it showed a wisp of a kid in short pants, new shoes and a jacket and tie, smiling bravely against a backdrop of naked trees and a hedge all stripped of its leaves. O‘Kane looked closer. Squinted. Maneuvered the slick surface to catch the light. And saw the face of his son there shining out of the gloom, Eddie Jr., his own flesh and blood, and he would have known that face anywhere.
Sure. Sure he would.
He stood at the urinal till he lost track of time, just staring into the shining face of that picture, and he felt as bad as he’d ever felt, bad and worthless and of no more account than a vagrant bum in an alley. His son was growing up without him. His mother and father didn’t even know their own grandson, his sisters didn’t know their nephew. Nobody knew him, nobody but Rosaleen—and Homer Quammen. God, how that hurt. She might as well have sent him a bomb in the mail, raked him with shrapnel, flayed his flesh. He thought he was going to cry, he really thought he was going to break down and cry for the first time since he was a kid himself, the sour smell of piss in his nostrils, mold in the drains, the air so heavy and brown it was like mustard gas rolling in over the trenches, but then he heard the ripple and thump of the piano from the front room and came back to himself. Daisy was out there waiting for him, Daisy with all her petals on display and ripe for the picking.
All right. So. He shook himself, buttoned up, flushed. And then, and it was almost as if he were suffering from some sort of tic himself like poor Mrs. Brush, he felt his right hand contract and the picture was crumpled and lying there in the urinal alongside the scrawled-over envelope. He never got another one. And he never heard another word about divorce either.
With Giovannella it was different. And worse. A whole lot worse. She’d defied him, of course, and after she pulled the slick red spike out of his palm and they stopped right there to consider the phenomenon of his blood sprouting and flowering in that white pocket where just an instant before there’d been no blood at all, she never said a word, not I’m sorry or Forgive me or Did I hurt you? No, she just tore up the slip of paper with Dolores Isringhausen’s doctor’s name on it and threw it in his face, and he was clutching his hand and cursing by then, cursing her with every bit of filth he could think of, and Jesus in Heaven his hand hurt. “Whore!” he shouted. “Bitch!” You fucking Guinea bitch!“ But her body was rigid and her face was iron and she clutched that gleaming spike of steel in her white-knuckled fist till he was sure she meant to drive it right on through his heart, and he backed out the door and went on down the rickety stairs, cursing in a steady automatic way and wondering where he could find a doctor himself—and on Sunday no less.
She wouldn’t see him after that. And he wanted her, wanted her as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life, and not to wrangle and fight over husbands or babies or San Francisco or anything else, but to love her, strip her naked, splay her out on the bed and crush her in his arms and love her till there was no breath left in her. But she spurned him. He crept up to the apartment above the shoe repair shop and she shut the door in his face; he waylaid her in the street when she went out to the market and she walked right by him as if she’d never laid eyes on him before in her life. When he grabbed for her elbow—“Please, Giovannella,” and he was begging, “just listen to me, just for a minute”—she snatched it away, stalking up the street with her quick chopping strides and her shoulders so stiff and compacted they might have been bound up with wire.
But what really tortured him was watching her grow bigger, day by day, week by week. Every Sunday afternoon she strolled up and down the street on the arm of Guido, the amazing Italian dwarf who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds with his boots on, and she made sure to pass right by the front window of the rooming house and all the saloons of Spanishtown—and Cody Menhoff’s too, just for good measure. At first you couldn’t tell, nobody could, because the baby was the size of a skinned rat and it wasn’t a baby at all, it wasn’t even human, but by the end of June she was showing and by mid-July she looked as if she were smuggling melons under her skirt. He would follow her sometimes, half-drunk and feuding with himself, and he would watch as people stopped to congratulate her, the men smiling paternally, the women reaching out to pat the swollen talisman of her belly, and all the while Guido the shoemaker grinning and flushed with his simpleminded pride. O‘Kane felt left out. He felt evil. He felt angry.
The baby was born at the end of October. O‘Kane heard of it through Baldy Dimucci, who was passing around cigars as if he were the proud father himself, and no hard feelings over what had happened eight years ago—and more recently too. Or were there? The old man had sought him out as he came down to lunch in the kitchen of the big house one sun-kissed afternoon just before Halloween. O’Kane had seen the truck in the drive that morning (no more donkey carts for Baldy: he’d prospered, owner of a thriving nursery business now and a new Ford truck too) and had wondered about it, but he didn’t make the connection with Giovannella and the baby till Baldy came through the kitchen door, unsteady on his feet and reeking of red wine and cigar smoke. “Hey, Eddie,” he said, while Sam Wah scowled over the stove and O‘Kane spooned up soup, “you hear the good-a news?”
“Good news? No, what is it?”
Baldy advanced on him, his face crazy with furrows, eyes lit with wine, a big garlic-eating grin. “Giovannella,” he said, and he wasn’t as drunk as he let on, “Giovannella and-a my son the law, they have their baby.”
O‘Kane just blinked. He didn’t ask what sex it was or if its hair was blond and one of its green Irish eyes imprinted with a lucky hazel clock, because he already knew, and the knowledge made him feel sick and dizzy, as if the ground had dipped beneath him. So he didn’t say anything, didn’t offer congratulations or best wishes to the new mother-he just blinked.
“Here,” Baldy said, standing over him in his best suit of clothes and the wine stains on his shirt, “have a cigar.”
O‘Kane went straight to her apartment after work, but he didn’t dare go up because there was a whole red-wine-spilling, accordion-playing, pasta-boiling wop hullabaloo going on up there and people all over the stairs, boisterous and laughing out loud. And when he did manage to sneak up two days later, the door was answered not by Giovannella but by a big square monument of a woman who shared a nose and eyes with her and nothing more. This was the mother, and no mistaking it. She said something in Italian and he tried to see past her into the familiar room, but she filled the whole picture all by herself and she knitted her black eyebrows and repeated whatever it was she
’d said on pulling open the door and finding him there on the landing with his mouth hanging open. “Giovannella,” he said, the only word of Italian he knew, but the woman didn’t look to be all that impressed. One trembling blue-veined maternal hand went to the cross at her throat, as if to ward off some creeping evil, while the other gripped the edge of the door to bar his way, and in the instant before she slammed the door in his face with a violence that rocked the whole rotten stairway right down to its rotten supports, he heard the baby cry out, a single searing screech that resounded in his ears like an indictment.
The day he finally did get a look at Giovannella’s baby—his son, another son, and he a stranger to both of them—was the day Dolores Isringhausen came back from New York to open up her villa for the winter. It was a Saturday, and when he got off his shift there was a note waiting for him in the front hall at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The envelope was a pale violet color, scented with her perfume, and all it said on the front was “Eddie.” He tore it open right there, standing in the hallway and old Walter Hogan watching him out of bloodshot eyes. “Got in last night,” he read, “and I’m already bored. Call me.” She hadn’t even bothered to sign her name.
He called her and her voice purred inside him till it felt as if all his nerve endings had sprouted fine little hairs, and he pictured her as he’d last seen her, in a Japanese robe with nothing underneath. “It’s Eddie,” he’d said, and she came right back at him with that cat-clawing whisper: “What took you so long?” They made a date for supper, and he kicked himself for not having a car to squire her around in. He didn’t like her driving—it was wrong somehow. It made him feel funny, as if he was half a man or a cripple or something, and he didn’t want anyone to see him sitting there like a dope in the passenger’s seat and a woman behind the wheel. The thing was, he didn’t need a car, not with Roscoe ferrying him to and from Riven Rock six days a week and everything in downtown Santa Barbara an easy walk or a seven-cent streetcar ride. He was saving his money, because he didn’t intend to be a nurse forever, and a car was just a drain, when you figured up the cost of gasoline, tires, repairs, and how many times had he seen Roscoe up to his ears in grease? But tonight he could sure use one—anything, even a Tin Lizzie that’d crank your arm off—just to pull up in Dolores’s drive and toot the horn a couple of times, and he felt cheap and low and thought he ought to stroll up to Menhoff’s to raise his spirits a bit.
