McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

He spends his Sundays in a ritual of food, drink, and melancholy music, seated in the cramped “Dental Parlors” he has set up on a modest Polk Street storefront. The room is a blend of a modest clinic and a personal haven, with a battered operating chair by the bay window, a steel engraving of Lorenzo de’ Medici hanging above, and a weary concertina that sighs out the same six airs he learned to play as a boy. At three‑feet‑three and built like a draft horse, his massive hands pull teeth with a thumb’s grip, while his mind drifts back to the mines where he once hauled ore for his father’s hard‑handed wage.

His life is a quiet climb from a mining camp to a small but respectable practice, funded by the modest inheritance his mother left him after a long, labor‑filled life of feeding miners. Though his world is simple—eating, smoking, sleeping, and music—there is an undercurrent of yearning, a sense that the routine comforts mask a deeper restlessness. As the city’s bustle swirls outside his window, the gentle hum of his ordinary existence hints at the forces that may soon test his strength and the fragile peace he has built.