by T. C. Boyle
In the way of these things, construction didn’t begin in earnest until Nettie and Stanley returned to Chicago, when the most equanimous of the architects was able to move forward expeditiously and no questions asked. Stanley fell back into his former way of life—the courses in Torts and Accounting, the big open office high above the floor of the Reaper Works where the tyrannical R lurked amongst the files, dinner with his mother and whatever Chester, Grover or Cornelius she deemed suitable for him that evening—and he forgot all about Mary Virginia, the house of her confinement, California. But he did leave his mark on the place, not only in the elaborate schema of alterations that became the house itself, but in the most essential way of all: he named it.
When Nettie acquired the property it was known simply as “the Stafford place,” after the man from whom she’d purchased it, O. A. Stafford, who’d had it from Colonel Greenberry W Williams, who had in turn purchased it from José Lugo and Antonio Gonzales, dueños of the original Mexican land grant. People had begun referring to the property, which still featured Stafford’s two-story frame house, his orange and olive groves and his succulent garden, as “the McCormick place.” To Stanley’s mind, this clearly wouldn’t do. I. G. Waterman, who owned the adjoining estate, called his place “Mira Vista,” and the Goulds, out on Olive Mill Road, had “La Favorita.” Then there was “Piranhurst,” “Riso Rivo,” “The Terraces,” “Cuesta Linda,” “Arcady.” If Mary Virginia’s house and grounds were going to be in any way reflective of her class and status, someone would have to come up with a suitable name, and while Cyrus, Harold and Anita went unwittingly about their business in Chicago and his mother spent more and more time sitting in the hotel gardens, Stanley began to fret over it. In fact, during the last month of his stay, the innominacy of the place became as much an obsession to him as the shoddy plans, and he stayed up late into the night sifting through Spanish and Italian dictionaries and poring over maps of Tuscany, Estremadura and Andalusia for inspiration.
And then, one afternoon in the final week of their California sojourn, it came to him. He was walking over the grounds with his mother and Dr. Franceschi, the landscape expert, elaborating his feelings regarding caryatids, statuary in general and the function of fountains in a coordinated environment of the artificial and the natural, when they emerged from a rough path into a meadow strewn with oaks all canted in one direction. The trees stood silhouetted against the mountains, heavy with sun, their branches thrust out like the arms of a party of skaters simultaneously losing their balance. It was October, the season of evaporative clarity, the sky receding all the way back to the hinges of the darkness beyond. Butterflies hung palely over the tall yellow grass. Birds called from the branches.
“What curious trees, Dr. Franceschi,” Nettie said, shielding her eyes from the sun, “all leaning like that, as if someone had come along and tipped them.”
Dr. Franceschi was a thin wisp of a man in his fifties, vegetally bearded, with quick hands and the dry darting eyes of the lizards that scurried underfoot and licked over the rocks. “It’s the prevailing winds that do it,” he said in a voice as breathy as a solo flute, “shearing down from the mountains. They call them sundowners—the winds, that is.”
“What about that one over there?” Stanley said, pointing to a tree that defied the pattern, its trunk vertical and its branches as evenly spaced as the tines of a fork. It was a hundred yards off, but he could see that there was a band of rock round the base of it, a petrified collar that seemed to hold it rigid.
“Oh, that, yes: I’d been meaning to show you that particular tree. It’s quite a local curiosity.”
And then they were crossing the open field, Nettie compact and busty, the jaunty horticulturist bouncing up off his toes like a balletomane, Stanley loping easily along with the great sweeping strides that made locomotion seem a form of gliding. As they drew closer, Stanley saw that the massive slab of sandstone girding the tree was split in two, and that the tree seemed to be growing up out of the cleft. “Very curious,” Dr. Franceschi was saying, “one of those anomalies of nature—you see, there was a time some years ago when an acorn fell from that tree there”—pointing—“or that one maybe, who knows, and found a pocket of sustenance atop this blasted lump of stone, and you couldn’t find a less promising environment, believe me—”
But they were there now and Stanley had his amazed hands on the rock itself, a massive thing, chest-high, big as a hearse, rough to the touch and lingeringly warm with the radiation of the sun. It was the very stuff of the earth’s bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn....riven rock ...
that was the place where he was now and no one had to tell him that or whisper over him like he was a corpse already and with the reek of illicit sex on their fingers like eddie had on his because eddie was down among the women he could hear and smell and feel in their tight-legged female immanence out in the yard and giggling in the cottages tiptoeing through the kitchen and oh mr. mccormick can never should never and will never know a thing about it a man like him that can’t control his unnatural urges and i heard about a man like that once from my cousin nancy cooper in sacramento hung like a barnyard animal and he had a woman a negress that would come to him on foot six miles one way just so she couldfeelhim in her and if you believe nancy and i do it was just too much for her and she died underneath him of an excess of pleasure and apoplexy and he went right out and got himself another negress just like her only bigger ...
but let them whisper let them stand over him and say their prayers for the dead—“Think about it, Mart, he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it”—and violate his every orifice with their tubes and their hoses and lay him on his side inthe shower bath that was like the chinese water torture and what did they think he was eddie and mart and dr. gilbert van tassel monkeyman hamilton that they could rape him like that no covering no place to hide naked as a rat and why didn’t they just leave him alone all of them his mother and katherine andcyrus the president and harold the vice president and anita too with her big swollen suety tits and her insinuatinghands like he was some sort ofpet or something some sort of baby ...
but it was his nerves and he wasblocked that wasall just a temporary condition not a thing like mary virginia his crazy bughouse sister with her white nightmare of a naked body and he would be up and about and better anyday now just like at mcleanthe first time but no he wouldn’t no he wouldn’t because what they didn’t understand and appreciate not a one of them especially katherine who only wanted to climb atop him and make his penis disappear inside her like mireille sancerre’s fingers and wouldn’t give him any peace not a second not a minute not an hour and she waslurking around somewhere even now he knew all about it with her binocularsand her sorrowful pitying face all drawn-up like a lemon-squeezer’s poor stanley poor poor stanley what they didn’t understand was that he couldn’t move a muscle to save his life because the Judges wouldn’t allow it they howled and shrieked in execration if he so much as shifted his tongue when sex-stinking eddie forced that tube down his throat the Judges who wouldn’t let him move and cried out his sins from every corner of the room sloth and depravity and sexual deviation and comptrollership not the presidency or even the vice presidency and corruption in his heart and impotence with his wife and deceit of his mother the Judges shouting him down with their lips writhing like a spadeful of earthworms through the black gnarled ape’s beards that covered their mouths and their screaming wet cunts ...
but all night he lay there and all day it was tuesday wasn’t it always tuesday and tuesday again and tuesday till all the months fell away like leaves from the trees and the years too and he prayed to the Judges to release him to commute his sentence time off for good behavior if only he could keep himself from sinning if only he could get back in the harness just once more
just one more time ...
7.
STANLEY OF THE APES
When Rosaleen stepped down off the train, thinner and paler than he’d remembered, with the Irish bloom caught in her cheeks and her eyes like tidal pools filling and draining and filling again and little Eddie all grown up in her arms, O‘Kane was helpless: he felt the surging oceanic tug of her—he couldn’t resist it, didn’t want to—and plunged in like a deep-sea diver. “Rose!” he called, spreading his arms for her, and he wanted to kiss her right there in public, wanted to have her on the platform, in the ferns, and how could he possibly wait till he got her back to the fresh-painted apartment on Micheltorena Street with the garden and birdbath out back and the big high-gunwaled boat of a bed Ernestine Thompson had helped him pick out? He was trembling. He was in love.
She didn’t say a word. Just held him, the surprising strength of her arms, the baby alive between them like a living sacrament, golden hair and a navy blue sailor’s suit, cooing and burbling and giving out a smell of new-made flesh, his flesh, Eddie O‘Kane’s.
“You look beautiful, Rose,” he murmured, still attached to her but drawing back now for a quick glance of appraisal, “never more beautiful, even on the night I met you at Alice Dundee’s.” He was feeling sentimental, filled to the eyes with soggy emotion, like when they sang the old songs at Donnelly‘s, and he wanted to say more, wanted to whisper intimacies into the soft white shell of her ear and smell the shampoo in the curling wisps of hair that had fallen loose there, but he caught the eye of a sour-looking man in evening clothes and bit his tongue. This wasn’t the place.
People were moving past them on the platform, society types, the rich come to soak themselves in the hot springs and suck up all the fat rich things the hotels had to offer, and all at once he felt self-conscious. An old lady with a matching pair of spoiled little apricot-colored dogs stopped to gape at them as if they were a couple of spaghetti twisters just off the boat and he was embarrassed, he was, and he just wanted to get this over with, get past the awkwardness and take her home.
And then, without warning, she began to cry and he felt his teeth clench. She gasped out his name—“Eddie! Oh, Eddies‘—and it was a war cry, an accusation, a spear thrust right through him and pulled out again. He let go of her and she looked off into the distance, biting her lip, before wearily lifting her free arm to dab at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, a new dress, pale ocher, the color of the last leaf left on the elm tree at the very end of the fall, blanched and twisting in the wind.
“Four months, Eddie,” she said, trailing off in a series of truncated sobs that were like hiccoughs, erp, erp, erp. Her eyes incinerated him. She snatched in a breath. “My father cursed you every day, but I knew you wouldn’t desert me, Eddie, I knew it.” And all at once she was thrusting the baby at him like a hastily wrapped gift, the child that used to be a baby, with his forcemeat legs and the look caught between fright and wonder as if he didn’t recognize his own father even and where was the reward in that? O‘Kane couldn’t take him, not yet, and held up his hands to show how inadequate they were.
“Look how big he’s gotten,” she demanded in a high strained chirp of a voice, “did you ever think he’d be so big?” This was succeeded by a whole lexicon of baby talk as she bobbed her tearful angry hopeful face up and down like a toy on a string and touched her nose to Eddie Jr.’s and let him dangle finally from one gloved hand until his feet touched the pavement in his scuffed white doll’s shoes and he stood there grinning and triumphant.
“ ‘Oose ’ittle man is he, huh? Huh?” Rosaleen cooed and the people flitted by and the cars pulled up at the curb and O‘Kane stood erect in the glow of the late afternoon sun, at a loss, his hands hanging limp at his sides, half a wondering smile on his face.
Roscoe was waiting for them at the far end of the platform, the car at their disposal, courtesy of Katherine and Dr. Hamilton, who’d given O‘Kane the afternoon off. Roscoe squared his chauffeur’s cap on his head, very formal, very impressive, and gave O’Kane a hand with the luggage while Rosaleen and the baby settled themselves in the rear seat, and then they were off, up the gradual incline that was State Street and into the trembling blue lap of the mountains that hung over the town like a pall of smoke. “Such a grand car,” Rosaleen purred, but she wasn’t smiling, not yet, “and you know it’s my first ride ever, don’t you?” He stole a peek at her under the inflexible arch of her hat, his brown colleen, his wife, and kissed the corner of her mouth as tenderly as he knew how until she turned to him and kissed him back, just a peck, with lips as cold as the stones of the sea.
She was pleased with the apartment, he could see that, though she fussed around the place for half an hour, saying things like “Oh, Eddie, you call this a sofa, and those curtains, and what an unusual bed—is that lacquer on it or what?” and quietly disparaging the view, as if there were another ocean and another set of islands he could have presented her with, but it was for form’s sake, for the sake of establishing their roles, or reestablishing them, she in the house and he at Riven Rock earning a handsome wage as an essential cog in the McCormick machine. Through it all, the baby was a saint, nothing less. He crawled around the front room a bit, putting things in his mouth and pulling them out again all glistening with drool, and then he fell into a sleep that was like a coma, not so much as a snort or whimper out of him. By then the sun was almost gone, the sitting room walls lit like the inside of a peach, everything rosy, everything fine—but for the one thing, the most important thing.
Rosaleen was in the kitchen, poking her head in the cabinets, inspecting the icebox. She’d seen everything twice already and O‘Kane was beginning to think she was avoiding him. It had been four months. She was hurt and angry, and she had a right to be. He stood at the window, awkward in the silence, handsome Eddie O’Kane with the three o‘clock luck in his eye and never at a loss for words, and here he didn’t know what to say, how to begin it—with an apology, an excuse, a plea? Or maybe he should just move into her and touch her, this exciting stranger hovering over the kitchen sink. “Are you hungry?” he finally asked.
She drifted into the room then, slow and insouciant, and gave him the full benefit of her eyes. “I’m famished, Eddie,” she said, and her voice had the same effect on him as that first sure sip of whiskey on a night when the barroom is lit like the reaches of heaven and nothing is impossible, “famished,” she said. “For you.”
And so it went, Eddie O‘Kane and the bliss of domesticity. Elsie Reardon moved into the room he vacated in the servants’ quarters and Roscoe came for him every morning at 7:30 after dropping off Nick and Pat. Mart wasn’t too pleased, having to spend the first hour of his day sitting alone with Mr. McCormick in that interval when the shifts changed, and maybe he was a little jealous too, used to having O’Kane to himself and hungering after his own bride and his own life but so shy and tongue-tied he’d die in his tracks if a girl so much as looked at him. Katherine and her mother packed up and went back east at the end of October, Dr. Hamilton procured another dozen monkeys from God knew where, and Julius, the big orange ape, lacking any other apes to mount, sniff and soak with urine at the doctor’s pleasure, was given the run of the place, appearing as if by legerdemain on the roof of the garage one minute and in the kitchen the next, his feet drawn up under him on a three-legged stool and a perspiring glass of milk clamped firmly in his spidery hand. And at home, in the three-room apartment they rented from a retired munitions salesman by the name of Rowlings who lived upstairs and watched every move they made, Rosaleen, who was no housekeeper at all, tried her best to move the piles of rubbish from one corner of the place to another and spent a good hour every evening immolating a piece of meat on the new Acme Sterling Steel Range in the kitchen.
Before long it was winter, iceless and snowless, sunshine pouring down like liquid gold, hissing rains that stood the earth on its head and rattled the boulders in Hot Springs Creek like the teeth of a boxer’s jaw and every leaf of every
tree green as the Garden of Eden. O‘Kane sent his mother pictures of the palms and the winter flowers and she wrote him that nobody in the neighborhood could believe it, weather like that, and what a bitter winter it was at home, his cousin Kevin down with a lung disorder and the doctors baffled and Uncle Billy suffering with the ague, but she was fine, if you discounted the sciatica that was like the devil’s own pitchfork thrust into her every fifteen seconds, night and day, and his father, knock on wood, was as strong as the day he retired from the ring, preserved as he was in alcohol like a fish in a jar, and not so much as a sniffle. O’Kane had no complaints about the weather—he didn’t miss the snow a bit, not even at Christmas—but as the days wore on, Rosaleen began to get under his skin.
The apartment was too small, for one thing, though it had seemed plenty big enough the day he’d rented it, and the baby was always underfoot, walking now, into everything, howling all night like a cat skinned alive and filling his diapers like the very genius of shit. His favorite trick was picking through the trash, which Rose never emptied, and whenever he was quiet for more than five minutes at a time you’d be sure to find him crouching behind the sofa with a half-gnawed bone or an orange gone white with mold. And that was a funny thing, the oranges. When O‘Kane was a boy, they were five cents each, the price of a beer, and he saw them at Christmas only, and only then if he was lucky. And now he was drowning in them, oranges like an avalanche, a nickel a basket, and he didn’t even like the flavor of them anymore, too cloying, almost poisonously sweet, and with all that juice running down your chin and gumming up your fingers.
But Rosaleen. She was so insipid, stupid as a clam, nattering on about sewing and patterns and what was prettier the blue or the yellow till sometimes he wanted to jump up from the table and choke the breath out of her. And her housekeeping—or lack of it. She was as filthy and disorganized as her whey-faced mother and her tuberous brothers, dirty Irish, shanty Irish, not fit to kiss the hem of his mother’s dress and you never saw so much as a speck of dust in the O‘Kane household, no matter how poor they might have been. She was putting on weight again too, and that drove him to distraction, because every time he looked at her, the fat settling into her hips and thighs and ballooning her breasts till she could barely straighten up, he was sure she’d gone and got pregnant again. And that he couldn’t abide. Not at his age, not when he had his whole life ahead of him still. Maybe it wasn’t right, but the way he felt, the burden of just one kid more would put him in the asylum himself—they’d have to chain him to Mr. McCormick and they could rave at each other and piss their pants side by side. Well, and not to put too fine a point on it, as his father would say, it was inevitable that he began to stray, just a bit, from the nest.