Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  It wasn’t like him to be late—it was unprofessional, and Dr. Hamilton was a stickler for the “three p‘s,” as he called them: punctuality, propriety and professionalism—and O’Kane, already wrought up, felt like a piece of fat in the fryer as he charged across the wet lawn. He was sweating under the arms and the hair was dangling like rope in his face. It wasn’t like him, but he was behind his time because he’d gotten distracted over at White Street, and then in the back ward, and all because of the apes. Apes and monkeys, that is. They were all he could think about. And it was funny too because this was the kind of day that got the violents stirred up—it wasn’t just the full moon, it was any change in the weather, even from perpetual gloom to a driving downpour—and as he hurried across the lawn he could hear Katzakis the Mad Greek and the one they called the Apron Man hooting at one another from the maximum ward, hooting just like apes. Violents he knew inside and out—he ought to after seven years in the profession—but his experience with hominoids, as Dr. Hamilton called them, was limited. And why wouldn’t it be? South Boston, Danvers and Waverley weren’t exactly tropical jungles.

  In fact, aside from the usual boyhood encounters with the organ-grinder’s monkey, the sideshow at the circus, the zoo and that sort of thing, he’d only come within spitting distance of an ape once, and that was in a barroom. He’d gone into Donnelly’s one afternoon for a pint and a chat, and when he looked up from his beer there was a man sitting beside him at the counter with a one-eyed chimpanzee on a leash. For a shot of rye whiskey and a beer chaser the man got the chimp to pull out his organ and piss in a beer glass and then drink it down as if it was the finest eighty-six-proof Irish—and smack his lips to boot. When the man had chased his third shot he gave a look up and down the bar and said he would challenge anybody in the place to arm-wrestle the thing for half a dollar—this scrawny half-bald one-eyed little monkey that stank like all the souls in hell boiled in their own juice and then left out in the sun for a week after that—and there was a lot of elbowing and obscene commentary from the patrons as they worked themselves up to it. Finally, Frank Leary, a big squareheaded loudmouthed bull of a man who worked for the railroad, took him up on it, and the thing pinned Leary’s wrist to the bar in half a second and wouldn’t let go of his hand till there were tears in his eyes.

  The experience didn’t exactly qualify O‘Kane as a hominoid expert, as he would have been the first to admit, and he’d spent a painful hour in the library after work yesterday squinting into an encyclopedia in the vain hope of learning something—anything—that might impress Mrs. McCormick. Or, if not impress her, at least keep the level of humiliation down to a minimum if she suddenly took it into her head to grill him on the subject. The library was an alien place to O’Kane, damper than a Chinese laundry and three times as cold, the lighting hominoidally primitive and the illumination offered by the encyclopedia on the subject of apes nearly as dim. “Apes,” he read, “are intelligent animals and are more closely related to man than any other living primates. They are popular zoo and circus animals. They also have figured widely in the legends and folktales of many countries.” After a while he pushed himself up, replaced the book on the shelf and ambled over to Donnelly’s to fix this vast reservoir of knowledge in his brain with the aid of a mnemonic whiskey or two.

  And now he was late and his one good suit was crawling up his shins and he was wondering how he was going to break the staggering news to Mrs. McCormick, the Ice Queen herself, that apes were popular zoo and circus animals. But as he reached the verge of the lawn and vaulted the retaining wall there, crossed the flagstone walkway and started up the steps of the ad building, the multifarious marvel of his congested brain surprised him—the apes flew right out of his head and he was thinking about California. Or he wasn’t thinking about it, not exactly—he had a vision, a sudden vivid recollection of a place there, date palms shimmering beneath the golden liquefaction of the sun and orange trees with fruit like swollen buttocks and a little bungalow or whatever they called it snug in the corner—and this was odd, more than odd, since he’d never in his life been west of Springfield. It took him a minute to realize it must have been one of those orange crate labels he was calling up, the ones that make you want to throw down the snow shovel right that minute and catch the next train west. But there it was, real or illusionary—California—hanging in his head in all its exotic glory where the apes had been a moment before.

  And then finally, as he stepped through the big beveled-glass doors and into the dim paste-wax-and-coal-dust-smelling hall, he thought of his own Rosaleen, his sorrow and his joy, his sweet, randy, pugnacious, clover-lipped bride of three months and mother of his green-eyed boy, Edward Jr. What was she going to think when he told her they were moving to California for the sake of Mr. Stanley McCormick, late of the McCormick Reaper Works and the International Harvester Company, Mr. McCormick and a troop of apes? And what was her mother going to think and her cauliflower-eared brothers and her quibbling old stump of a father who’d wanted to skin him alive for getting her in trouble in the first place? As if it was all his fault, as if she hadn’t seen her chance and taken it—and hadn’t he done the right thing by her, and wasn’t she at that very moment sitting snug in the walkup on Chestnut Street with her baby and her new curtains and everything else a woman could want?

  He passed by Dr. Cowles’s office at a stiff-legged trot, swiping at his hair and wrestling with his tie and trying to contort his shoulders to fit the sodden confines of the suit, and it was all he could do to flick a little wave at Miss Ianucci, Dr. Cowles’s typewriter. Miss lanucci was a spaghetti twister from Italy who couldn’t seem to find a shirtwaist big enough to accommodate her appurtenances and who never ceased touching her lips and crossing and uncrossing her legs whenever O‘Kane got a chance to stop in and chat with her—which was every time he passed by unless he was on his way to a fire. People were always grousing about the immigrants—the I-talians this and the Polacks that, the Guineas and wops and bohunks, and his father was one of the most vocal and vehement, though he’d come over himself in an empty whiskey barrel aboard a transatlantic steamer not thirty years ago—but for his money they could let in all the Miss lanuccis they wanted. And wouldn’t that be a job, standing there at the bottom of the gangplank, and passing judgment on this one or that: Nah, send her back—she’s flat as an ironing board. Her? Yeah, we’ll take her. Come on over here, miss, and step into the examining room a minute won’t you? A man could create an entire race, a whole new breed based on tits alone—or hips or legs or turned-up noses and pinned-back ears. Look what they’d done with dogs....

  Anyway, he had to content himself with a wave this time because he knew how much this meeting meant to Dr. Hamilton—and to himself, himself and Rosaleen—and he hustled down the hall while Miss Ianucci stuck a finger in the corner of her mouth and sucked on it and crossed and uncrossed her legs and gave him the richest smile in all the world. Two doors down, three, and it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a run. He glanced up as he hurried past the portrait of John McLean, the decidedly unsmiling and bewigged philanthropist who’d given a hundred thousand dollars back in 1818 to open the doors of this fair institution, and though he was late, though he looked like hell and the smells of fear and hope were commingled in his sweat and his sweat was flowing as if it were the middle of July and he was carrying the entire McCormick family up a hill on his shoulders, apes and all, he couldn’t help thinking, for just the fleetingest instant, of what he could do with a hundred thousand dollars—and it wouldn’t be to endow any charitable organization, that was for sure, unless it was the Edward James O‘Kane Benevolent and Fiduciary Fund. But enough of that. Suddenly he was there, at the far end of the hallway, breathing hard, three minutes past eleven, half-soaked, sweating and wild-eyed, tapping respectfully at the smooth varnished plane of Dr. Hamilton’s door.

  He could detect the purl of conversation from within, and his heart sank. This was what he’d been fearing since h
e’d slipped out of the house and into the festering gray maw of the dawn, what he was afraid of as he emptied bedpans and jerked rigid lunatics and simple morons down from the barred windows and up from the beds: she was there already. Which meant he was late. Officially. He cursed himself and tapped again, this time with a little more vigor, and felt even worse when the murmur broke off abruptly, as if he were interrupting something. There was an agonizing silence during which the wild thought that they were conspiring to leave him out of it altogether raced through his head, and then he heard Dr. Hamilton murmur, “That must be him now,” and any trace of composure he might have been able to muster evaporated in that instant. “Come in,” the doctor called, and O‘Kane felt his face flush as he pushed open the door and entered the room.

  The first thing he noticed was the fire—a lavish crackling devil-may-care blaze that played off the paneled walls and cast a soft glow on the doctor’s collection of wax impressions of the human brain, the first fire O‘Kane had ever seen in this particular fireplace, even in the dim frozen mists of January or February. But there it was, a fire to take the dampness out of the air and create a relaxed and cozy atmosphere, as Dr. Hamilton had no doubt calculated. It was a surprise, a real surprise, as was the tray of finger sandwiches, a teapot and the decanter of sherry set out on the low table in front of the settee, and O’Kane’s estimation of Hamilton, already high, shot up another notch. “Oh, hello, Edward,” the doctor purred, coming up off the edge of his desk to take O‘Kane’s hand and give it a squeeze. “We were just about to begin.”

  Anyone watching this performance would have seen nothing but good nature and cordiality in that hand-squeeze, but O‘Kane felt the black blood of anxiety and irritation pulsing through the doctor’s fleshless fingers and the damp recess of his palm: O’Kane was in the wrong, he was late, he’d violated the dictum of the three p’s and put everything in jeopardy. Despite all the doctor’s warnings of the previous day, despite skipping breakfast and leaving the house early and wearing his tweeds and collar under the hospital whites to save time and keeping the apes hurtling through the crowded jungle of his mind, limb by limb and minute by minute, he was late. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot. Already.

  Awkward, red-faced, too big for his shrinking suit and towering over the room like some club-wielding troglodyte, O‘Kane could only duck his head and mumble an apology. He saw that Mrs. McCormick was already there—the younger Mrs. McCormick, the wife, not the mother. She was running the show now, and the older Mrs. McCormick, Mr. McCormick’s mother, was back in Chicago, sitting on her golden nest and laying her golden eggs and counting up the dividends. As far as Stanley’s—Mr. McCormick‘s—care was concerned, she’d left the field to the younger woman. For the moment, at least.

  Since O‘Kane wasn’t wearing a hat or overcoat, it was just a matter of giving his tie a quick twist and bending from the waist to greet Mrs. McCormick and the woman who seemed at that instant to have sprung up beside her on the settee. He was momentarily confused. It seemed he was always confused in Mrs. McCormick’s presence, whether he was holding the door for her like a lackey as she stepped regally into the front hall at White Street or trying his aphasic best to respond to one of her multitiered questions about her husband’s progress—or lack of it. She was a society lady, that’s what she was, cold as a walking corpse, all fur, feathers and stone, and O’Kane wasn’t part of society. Not by a long shot. He wasn’t even part of the society that aspired to be part of society. He was a working man, son of a working man, grandson of a working man, and on and on all the way back to the apes—or Adam and Eve, whichever you believed in. Still, every time he saw her, locked in the cold hard glittering shell of her Back Bay beauty, it made him ache to be something he wasn‘t, to impress her or make her laugh or lean in close and whisper something filthy in her ear, and it took a tremendous effort of will simply to bend forward and touch his fingertips to her gloved hand and then turn to the older woman beside her, a woman with a face like a squashed bird framed in the riot of feathers that was her hat, a woman he knew as well as his own mother but couldn’t... quite . . . seem to—

  But then he was seated—in the chair closest to the fire—an inoffensive smile attached to his face, the sweat already starting up again under his arms, and he had a moment to catch his breath and let recollection come roaring back at him. This older lady, the one dressed like a funeral director’s wife, was Mrs. McCormick’s mother, Mrs. Dexter. Of course she was. Dr. Hamilton was saying something now, but O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He worked his neck muscles and twitched his shoulders till he caught Mrs. Dexter’s attention and broadened his smile to a kind of blissful grimace. “And a good morning to you, Mrs. Dexter,” he said, hearing his father’s Killarney brogue creeping into his own booming, baleful voice, though he tried to fight it down.

  Dr. Hamilton paused in the middle of whatever he’d been saying to give him an odd look. “And to you, Mr. O‘Kane,” the old lady returned cheerily, and this seemed to reassure the doctor, so he went on.

  “As I was saying, Mrs. McCormick, if the terms are acceptable to you—and your mother, of course—I think we have a bargain. I’ve spoken to Mrs. Hamilton and to the Thompson brothers, and they’re all committed to the move—and to Mr. McCormick’s care and welfare, of course. Edward, here, can speak for himself.”

  O‘Kane shifted in his seat. He hadn’t understood till that moment just how much this whole thing meant to him—it was a new start, a new life, in a part of the country as foreign to him as the dark side of the moon. But that was just it—it wasn’t dark in California, and it didn’t snow, and there was no slush and drizzle and there were no frozen clods of horse manure in the streets and life there didn’t grind you down till you barely knew you were alive. A single acre of oranges could make a man comfortable—oranges that practically grew by themselves, without even the rumor of work, once they were in the ground—and ten acres could make a man rich. There was gold. There was oil. There was the Pacific. There was sun. “Oh, I’m committed, all right,” he said, trying to avoid the wife’s eyes.

  How old was she, anyway? She couldn’t have been much more than thirty, and here he was, a lusty strong big-shouldered hundred-and-ninety-pound Irishman from the North End who routinely stared down the craziest of the crazy, and he was afraid to look her in the eye? He made an effort and raised his head to take in the general vicinity of her. “Even if it means forever.”

  “And your wife—Mrs. O‘Kane?” At first he thought the voice had come out of the ceiling, as voices tended to do for so many of the unfortunates on the ward, but then he realized that the old lady was moving her lips. He tried to look alert as the birdy face closed on him. “How does she feel about it?”

  “Rose?” The question took him by surprise. He saw his wife in the kitchen of the walkup, stirring a pot of broth and potatoes, ignorant as a shoe, contentious and coarse and loud—but goodhearted, as good-hearted as any girl you’d find, and the mother of his son. “I—I guess I haven’t told her yet, but she’ll be thrilled, I know she will.”

  “It’ll mean leaving behind everything she knows—her parents, her relations, her former schoolmates, the streets where she grew up,” Mrs. Dexter persisted, and what did she want from him anyway? They were both watching him, mother and daughter, and they were two birds—both of them—beaky and watchful, waiting for the faintest stirring in the grass. “And where did you say she was from?”

  He hadn’t said. He was tempted to say Beacon Hill, to give an address on Commonwealth Avenue, but he didn’t. “Charlestown,” he mumbled, staring down at his wet and glistening shoes. He could feel the eyes of the younger one boring into him.

  “And for you too,” the old woman said. “Are you prepared to say good-bye to your own mother and father—and for as long as it takes for Mr. McCormick to be well again?”

  There was a silence. The fire snapped, and he felt the heat of it chasing the steam from his cuffs and flanks and the shrinking shoulders of h
is jacket. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, darting a glance at the younger woman. “I think so. I really do.”

  And then, thankfully, Hamilton took over. “The important thing,” he said, or rather, whispered in the narcotic tones he used on his charges, “is Mr. McCormick. The sooner we’re able to move the patient and establish him in the proper way in California, the better it will be for all concerned. Especially the patient. What he needs, above all, is a tranquil environment, with all the stresses that led to his blocking removed. Only then can we hope to—” He faltered. Mrs. McCormick had cleared her throat—that was all: cleared her throat—and that stopped him cold.

  Dr. Hamilton—Dr. Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, future author of Sex in Marriage, as well as “A Study of Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys and Baboons”—was a young man then, just thirty-one, but he cultivated a Vandyke and swept his dun-colored hair straight back from his brow in an attempt to add something to his years. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed pince nez identical to the president‘s, and he always dressed carefully in ash-colored suits and waistcoats and a tie that was such an unfathomable shade of blue it might as well have been black, as if any show of color would undermine his sense of duty and high purpose. (“Avoid bright clothing,” he’d admonished O’Kane on the day he hired him; “it tends to excite the catatonics and alarm the paranoics.”) Young as he was, he was a rock of solidity, but for one disconcerting little tic that he himself might not have been aware of: every thirty seconds or so his eyes would flick back behind his upper lids in a spasm so instantaneous it was like watching a slot machine on its final revolution. Needless to say, when he was nervous or wrought up the tic became more pronounced. Now, as he looked expectantly at Mrs. McCormick, his pupils began a quavering preliminary little dance.