“Yes, that’s it-exactly,” Miss Howard said. “Suppose you were one of those unnaturally bred mothers, one who’d lost her own children and couldn’t have any more-wouldn’t you feel the desire to somehow acquire another, if only to prove that you could adequately perform what is perceived by society to be the basic feminine function?”
The Doctor’s face went blank, his hands fell to his side, and then he tossed the Schneider book onto the pile with the James. “And given the correct individual context,” he said, nodding, “that urge could grow to destroy normal inhibitory power… Well-where have you been for the last two days, my oracle of the feminine psyche?” He walked over and put his hands on Sara’s shoulders. “It’s taken me God knows how many hours and pages of fruitless reading to reach that very conclusion!” The Doctor walked to the door and called out into the hall, “Cyrus! Draw me a bath, if you don’t mind, and lay out fresh clothes!” He turned to Miss Howard again. “The last time we worked together, Sara, we studied the known laws of psychology. This time, the biases of our society will force us to write some new ones, I suspect. You must keep careful notes and be always on hand, for yours is the perspective we most need. The rest of us cannot-”
The Doctor was interrupted by the sound of light snoring coming from the sofa; we all turned to see Mr. Moore dozing. “Well,” the Doctor sighed, “let’s just say that certain other points of view will be far less crucial. However, let him rest, for the time being-because with any luck, we send him out onto the streets tomorrow.”
Once the Doctor’d gotten himself cleaned up and dressed, we found that the only way to rouse Mr. Moore was to offer him a late lunch at Delmonico’s restaurant on Madison Square. Dr. Kreizler had been spending less time than usual at that establishment, because Mr. Charlie Delmonico, keeping pace with the steady uptown movement of fashion and money, had recently opened an additional restaurant on Forty-fourth Street; and though he swore to the Doctor that he had no plans to close the Madison Square branch, the Doctor believed that it was only a matter of time before that fate befell the place. So he’d been withholding as much as he could of his patronage (he could never have stayed away altogether) as a method of protest.
Cyrus and I walked with the rest of them up to Madison Square. Though we never actually ate with the Doctor in the restaurant-that just wouldn’t have been possible in those days-we liked to go along, anyway, being as I’d been able to make friends with Mr. Ranhofer, the French head chef and bullyboy of the kitchen, and could usually net us a couple of containers of good food what we could eat in the park. We saw the Doctor and his guests to the main entrance, where Charlie Delmonico stood greeting patrons. Dr. Kreizler extended a hand what Mr. Delmonico shook, even as the Doctor announced half seriously, “I’m still not speaking to you, Charles.” Then, once they were inside, I ran around the corner to the delivery station.
Winding my way through shouting men carrying crates of vegetables and fruit, as well as ice-covered wooden pallets of fish and big sides of beef and lamb, I passed through a dark hallway and soon found myself in the brick kitchen, where dozens of pots and pans hung from the vaulted ceiling. I could already hear Mr. Ranhofer’s voice bouncing off the tiled walls: “No, no, no! Pig! I would not feed that to an animal! Why, why is it so impossible for you to learn?” The object of his bellowing, I soon saw, was a young dessert chef, who seemed to be taking all the insults very much to heart and looked ready to break down. Mr. Ranhofer-his huge round body wrapped in white and his big, similarly colored mustache bristling-tried to calm down a bit, then stepped over to the young man’s station. “Here, come, I show you-but only once!”
Waiting for the exercise to be over, I glanced around at the enormous space, where some twenty or thirty chefs, assistant chefs, and assistant assistants were all working like mad and hollering at the top of their lungs-sometimes to nobody at all that I could see. Different-colored flames occasionally shot up from the stoves, and the hundred different smells of the place-some tasty, some just peculiar-blended together into one unidentifiable aroma. The whole joint had the general air of some of the insane asylums I’d visited with the Doctor-except that in the elegant dining rooms upstairs, people were paying top dollar for what came out of this madhouse.
Eventually I saw an opening and grabbed at Mr. Ranhofer’s apron. “Say! Mr. Ranhofer!”
He turned and, after a quick smile, frowned. “Please-Stevie-go away! Not today, it is lunacy-lunacy!”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“He’ll kill me-that Charles will kill me! Three private luncheons and then to follow a dinner for eighty! How in God’s name can any human manage such things?”
“Ah, you’ll do it,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “You always do, right? That’s why you’re top dog in the chef pack.”
That got him. He smiled quickly again and called out, “Franz! Two containers-the soft-shell crab! Now!” He started wiping and wringing his hands as he surveyed all the activity in the place and then glanced down at me again. “Please-Stevie-take the food and go. This is no day for me to converse-” Something caught his eye. “No! Stop! Do not, you imbecile, how can you possibly-” Then he disappeared in a fat flash.
I took the containers of food from the man called Franz, who kept one eye out for his boss like he was wondering when it was going to be his turn to catch hell. On my way out I snuck two forks and a like number of napkins out of a rack, then ran back through the same hallway, which was now packed even thicker with deliverymen.
Cyrus was sitting on a bench inside Madison Square Park, beyond a long line of hansoms that were waiting for fares on Fifth Avenue. Still running, I made my way through the cabs, past the grass at the edge of the park, and then clear over the bench, handing Cyrus a container, a fork, and a napkin as I sat down on the ground beside him. We talked while we crunched on the crabs-done the way I liked them that day, just fried plain in some butter-and ate the side portions of Italian salad and rice with bananas. It was a fine meal, all the better for being free, and after I’d finished I lay on the grass and had myself a smoke.
“Cyrus,” I said, looking up through the big tree boughs and branches to the sky, “how long do you figure it’ll be before the Doctor gives Mrs. Leshko the sack?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, polishing off the last of his food. “But things can’t go on forever like this.”
“Yeah.” I waited a moment before voicing what’d been on my mind since I’d seen Pinkie’s “Little Maid of Acadie” the night before. “Cyrus?”
“Still here.”
“You figure the Doctor might hire Kat? As a maid, I mean.”
The long pause that followed told me clearly what Cyrus thought, but he soon gave out with the words: “Kat’d have to want the work, Stevie. She’s got big ideas. Big plans for herself. I doubt she’d be interested.”
“Yeah. I guess so. I just thought…”
“I know,” he said, trying hard to be sympathetic. “You could ask the Doctor-but like I say, she’d have to want the work.”
I didn’t pursue the topic, and after a few silent minutes we passed on to other things. But the idea had planted itself in my head, and I meant to explore it.
It was past four by the time the Doctor, Mr. Moore, and Miss Howard came out of Delmonico’s-and they didn’t look happy when they did. The Doctor just strode quickly past Cyrus and me, saying “We’ll walk” crisply, and the rest of us fell in with him. I started purposely dragging my steps, as did Cyrus and Miss Howard, while Mr. Moore kept up with the Doctor, talking to him. Neither Cyrus nor I needed to ask what had happened; Miss Howard could read the question in our faces.