by T. C. Boyle
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
PART I - Dr. Hamilton’s Time
Chapter 1. - HOW HIS HAND
Chapter 2. - EVE
Chapter 3. - PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
Chapter 4. - FALSE, PETTY, CHILDISH AND SMUG
Chapter 5. - GIOVANNELLA DIMUCCI
Chapter 6. - THE HARNESS
Chapter 7. - STANLEY OF THE APES
PART I I - Dr. Brush ‘ s Time.
Chapter 1. - LOVE IS LOYAL, HOPE IS GONE
Chapter 2. - FOR THE MAIN AND SIMPLE REASON
Chapter 3. - THE ART OF WOOING
Chapter 4. - ONE SLIT’S ENOUGH
Chapter 5. - THE MATCH OF THE YEAR
Chapter 6. - OF DEATH AND BEGONIAS
Chapter 7. - PRANGINS
PART III - Dr. Kempf’s Time
Chapter 1. - BENIGN STUPORS
Chapter 2. - LA LUNE DE MIEL
Chapter 3. - ON SHAKY GROUND
Chapter 4. - I ‘ V E SEEN YOUR FACE
Chapter 5. - IN THE PRESENCE OF LADIES
Chapter 6. - SICK, VERY SICK
Chapter 7. - THREE O‘CLOCK
Chapter 8. - COME ON IN JACK
EPILOGUE
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
Praise for Riven Rock
“The Stanley McCormick of Boyle’s fiction, or faction, is a memorable character. The youthful Katherine is also a touching creation; her personal traits are beautifully interwoven with the spirit of America’s Age of Innocence.... The book is filled with good writing and richly observed scenes; it has humanity and humor in abundance.”
—D. M. Thomas, The New York Times BookReview
“Riven Rock is at once a love story and a social and medical history of the first third of the 20th century.... As in The RoadtoWellville, Boyle’s characters step out of their period costumes to command our attention and affection. We want to know what happens to them, and we believe the worlds they inhabit.”
—Paul Kafka, The Boston Globe
“Boyle writes with the muscle of a collegiate fullback ripping the OED in two just for fun... he has always shown an affection for the surrealist scalpel of Dr. Frankenstein, grafting the sublime onto the ridiculous. But twenty years on, he has refined his riffs.”
—Jonathan Levi, LosAngelesTimes
“Who less but T. Coraghessan Boyle could write a novel featuring
Stanley McCormick, son of mechanical reaper inventor Cyrus Mc-
Cormick, and make it into a wise and touching history of sexual
attitudes in the early twentieth century? Riven Rock, Boyle’s seventh
novel, retains the eccentric detail and verbal flourishes that his fans
have come to expect, yet its story of fierce, one-sided love brings a
new maturity to his work... Boyle’s best novel to date.”
—The Seattle Times
“A flamboyant meditation on love in all of its absurdity and all its undeniability ... a long, Dickensian parable about love that tells us nothing about love—except that it is inescapable.”
—The San Jose Mercury News
“A brutal look at beastly sexuality... what matters is how Boyle has succeeded in using his tools—baroque wordplay, a dark, sometimes surreal sense of humor, a formidable imagination—in conjuring up a world that is familiar yet singularly strange.... the language and imagination are so vibrant that scenes stay with the reader long after finishing.”
—The Atlanta Journal Constitution
“[A] fluently affecting book that has some truly affecting moments ... Boyle uses his rich, exuberant language to make Stanley’s madness alarmingly palpable.”
—Michiko Kautani, TheNewYork Times
“Riven Rock is Boyle’s most affecting book, because the pain of each of his central characters is so heartbreakingly palpable . . . [Boyle‘s] dialogue is tone-perfect, his storytelling is mesmerizing ... Boyle’s language has often functioned in the service of wit rather than wisdom. This time, however, he has fashioned it into a subtle instrument for probing the depths.”
—Dan Cryer, NewYork Newsday
“Stanley McCormick and his wife Katherine emerge as Boyle’s most memorable creations in an epic novel that spans almost four decades but nevertheless retains its human scale.... Readers with a taste for Boyle’s blustering, often hysterical language will find plenty of it here. And those who suspected that the writer could do more may be pleasantly surprised to discover that in Riven Rock, he has.”
—The New York Daily News
“In Riven Rock, his seventh novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle has taken the depressing story of Stanley R. McCormick and turned it into a thrilling, romantic, careening tale of love, redemption, and the rewards of the faithful heart ... this is a novel about love and sex and the way they work, or don’t, together.... This is a noble achievement, a work of art.”
—Salon magazine
“The craziest love story imaginable, but a love story nevertheless, one that chills the bones as you read. Vintage Boyle: a freakishly inventive black comedy, peopled with irresistible eccentrics, that leaves a bracing and bitter aftertaste.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Boyle’s unique humor and appreciation of life’s total absurdities, along with his ability to capture a whole universe of feeling in a single phrase, make this book simply a joy to read.”
—Booklist
PENGUIN BOOKS
RIVEN ROCK
T.C. Boyle is the acclaimed author of twelve novels, including World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Drop City, a New York Timesbestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published eight collections of short stories. In 1999 he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including TheNewYorker, Harper‘s, Esquire,The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T.C. Boyle’s Web site is www.tcboyle.com.
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998
Published in Penguin Books 1999
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Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1998
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p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17404-3
I. Title.
PS3552.0932 R58 1998
813’.54—dc21 97-34632
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FOR KAREN KVASHAY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following for their assistance in gathering material for this book: Armond Fields, Frank and Sheila
McGinity, James Emerson, and Cindy Knight.
SEX IS A TALENT, AND I DO NOT HAVE IT.
—Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
PROLOGUE
1927, World Without Women
For twenty years, twenty long dull repetitive years that dripped by with the sleepy incessant murmur of water dripping from a gutter, Stanley McCormick never laid eyes on a woman. Not his mother, not his sisters, not his wife. No nurse or librarian, no girl in pigtails on her way to school, no spinster sweeping her porch or housewife haggling with the grocer, no slut, flapper or suffragette. It wasn’t a matter of choice. Stanley loved his mother, his wife, his sisters, he loved other people’s mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, but he loved them too much, loved them with an incendiary passion that was like hate, that was indistinguishable from hate, and it was that loving and hating that fomented all his troubles and thrust him headlong into a world without women.
He was twenty-nine when he married Katherine Dexter, a woman of power, beauty, wealth and prestige, a woman as combative and fierce as his mother, with heartbreaking eyes and a voice so soft and pure it was like a drug, and he was thirty-one when he first felt the cold wolf’s bite of the sheet restraints and entered the solitary world of men. He went blank then. He was blocked. He saw things that weren’t there, desperate, ugly things, creatures of his innermost mind that shone with a life more vivid than any life he’d ever known, and he heard voices speaking without mouths, throats or tongues, and every time he looked up it was into the face of masculinity.
The years accumulated. Stanley turned forty, then fifty. And in all that time he lived in the company of one sex and one sex only—men, with their hairy wrists and bludgeoning eyes, their nagging phlegmy voices and fetid breath and the viscid sweat that glistened in their beards and darkened their shirts under the arms. It was like joining a fraternity that never left the house, entering a monastery, marching in step with the French Foreign Legion over the vast and trackless dunes and not an oasis in sight. And how did Stanley feel about that? No one had bothered to ask. Certainly not Dr. Hamilton—or Dr. Hoch or Dr. Brush or Dr. Meyer either. But if he were to think about it, think about the strangeness and deprivation of it, even for a minute, he would feel as if a black and roiling gulf were opening inside him, as if he were being split in two like a Siamese twin cut away from its other self. He was a husband without a wife, a son without a mother, a brother without sisters.
But why? Why did it have to be like this? Because he was sick, he was very sick, he knew that. And he knew why he was sick. It was because of them, because of the bitches, because of women. They were the ones. And if he ever saw his wife again, if he saw his mother or Anita or Mary Virginia, he knew what he would do, as sure as the sun rises and the world spins on its axis. He would go right up to them, Katherine or Mary Virginia or the president’s wife or any of them, and he would show them what a real man was for, and he would make them pay for it too, he would. That was how it was, and that was why he’d lived for the past nineteen years at Riven Rock, the eighty-seven-acre estate his father’s money had bought him, in his stone mansion with the bars on the windows and the bed bolted to the floor, within sight of the hammered blue shield of the Pacific and the adamantine wall of the Channel Islands, in the original Paradise, the lonely Paradise, the place where no woman walked or breathed.
PART I
Dr. Hamilton’s Time
1.
HOW HIS HAND
How his hand came into contact with her face—her sweet plump irritating little burr of a wifely face that found a place beside his each night on the connubial pillow—was as much a mystery to O‘Kane as the scalloped shell of the sky and the rain that fell as one angry inveterate thing over all this weary part of the earth. It wasn’t late—not ten o’clock yet. And he wasn’t angry. Not yet, anyway. On the contrary, he’d been celebrating—polluting himself, as she would say, living it up, for he’s a jolly good fellow and three cheers for this one and that one and rah, rah, rah—celebrating with Nick and Pat and Mart, and with Dr. Hamilton, yes, with him too. Celebrating the rest of his life that had just been turned on like an electric switch, flooding him with light, light that poured from his nostrils and ears and his mouth and no doubt his rectum too, though he hadn’t yet had occasion to look down there, but he would, he would eventually. And then he had come home, and there she was, stalking the sitting room like a bristling tireless little rat-gnawing thing, all primed and ready to pounce.
He hadn’t meant to hit her—and he’d hit her only once, or maybe twice, before—and the thing was, he wasn’t even angry, just... irritated. And tired. Drained to the core. The noise she made, and the baby squalling in the back room, and the way she kept thrusting her face at him as if it was a volleyball, tanned, stitched and puffed up to regulation pressure, and she wouldn’t let him have this, not even this, after all the gut-wrenching and indecision it had cost him over the past two months, and when the inflated ball of her face had come at him for maybe the fiftieth time he slammed it right up and over the net, just as if he was still in school and diving for a low one on the hard foot-compacted turf of the volleyball court. That opened her up, all right, and there was no peace for him after that, she was like an artesian well, a real gusher, tears and blood and rage exploding at him, and all he could think of, dodging away from that streaming face till he was so drained and exhausted he toppled into a blackness deeper than the last dying wink of consciousness, was Mrs. McCormick—Katherine—and what a lady she was, and Rosaleen stuck to him like flypaper and howling till the windows went to pieces and the roof collapsed and the whole drugged and dreaming town fell away into some deep fissure of the earth.
Earlier that day, in the morning, it had been different. He’d awakened at first light and saw her there beside him, the soft petals of her eyelids and her lashes and lips and the fragile composition of her face, and he thought about kissing her, leaning over and brushing his lips against the down of her cheek, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to wake her—or his son either. It was too peaceful, the submarine light, the stealthy tick of the clock, the rudiments of birdnoise, and he didn’t want to have to talk to her about the McCormicks and the meeting and what he feared and what he hoped—he hardly knew himself. He stripped off his flannels at the side of the bed and slipped naked into the sitting room with his good Donegal tweed over one arm and a fresh suit of underwear over the other, and dressed like a thief of clothes. Then he was out the door and into another life.
The year was 1908, and he’d just turned twenty-five. He was a hair under six feet, with the pugilist’s build he’d inherited from his father (who’d put the prototype to good use in a series of mostly victorious bare-knuckle fights in the nineties), and his mother’s wistful sea-green eyes with the two hazel clock hands implanted in the right one, inflexibly pointing, for this lifetime at least, to three o‘clock. His mother had always told him that chronometric eye would bring him luck—great luck and fortune—and when he questioned her, skeptical even at ten and eleven, she just pointed to the proof and insisted that the hour was preordained. But what about you? he would say, lifting his eyes to the c
olorless walls of the four rooms they shared with his grandmother, his uncle Billy, his four sisters and three cousins, where’s your three o’clock luck? And she would frame his face with her hands, the softest touch in the world, and whisper, “It’s right here, right here, between my hands.”
The morning flew. He’d started off at the White Street house, where they’d installed Mr. McCormick to get him away from the disturbing influence of the other patients, and then he’d gone on to McLean and now he was late, cutting across the lawn out front of the administrative building on a day that was like a wet dishrag, though it was the last week of April and he would have sacrificed to the gods to see a ray of sun—he was late and hurrying and he didn’t give a damn for the fact that he’d left his hat and overcoat back in the nurses common room and the cuffs of his good Donegal tweed trousers were soaking up the damp like a pair of fat swollen sponges tied to his ankles. He should have, because when the tailor came over from Ballyshannon and settled into the rooming house down the street from them and his mother said he should take advantage of the opportunity and have one nice suit made because if he ever hoped to work with his brains instead of his back he’d have to look like one of the quality, he’d laid out eighteen dollars for it. Eighteen dollars in good hard Yankee coin he’d earned at the Boston Lunatic Asylum scraping blood, vomit and worse off the walls. And here it was, wet through in the shoulders and crawling up his shins and sure as the devil it was going to shrink, but what did he care? It was two minutes to eleven, the hair was hanging wet in his eyes and Dr. Hamilton was waiting for him. If things worked out, he could buy six suits.