by T. C. Boyle
First it was two nights a week, Friday and Saturday, and who could blame him for that? And he did take Rose with him now and again, when they could get the girl from down the street to mind little Eddie, and he had to spoil his own evening and watch her get drunk as a sow and listen to the incessant nagging whine of her voice every time he lifted a glass to his lips—“Eddie, don’t you think that’s enough now,” and “Let’s go home, Eddie, I’m bored,” and “How can you stand this place?” The two nights stretched to three and then four and he began to run with some of the boys at Cody Menhoff’s. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, they’d have a shot and a beer at every place in town and then all pile into a car and drive up over San Marcos Pass and all the way out to Mattei’s Tavern in Los Olivos and he wouldn’t come home till three in the morning, stinking, absolutely stinking. That took the smile off Rose’s face, all right. She’d pounce on him like a harpy and their wars would rage all over the apartment and out onto the front porch, furniture flying, the baby squalling, Old Man Rowlings punctuating every shout and cry with an outraged thump from above.
Spring began in February and lasted through the end of May and it was a glorious time, the vegetable world in riot, every breeze a barge-load of spices. Saturday afternoons he’d take Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. to the park or hop the streetcar down to the beach, where he’d lie flat on the sand with a beer propped on his chest and stare up into the sky while his face and limbs turned brown as a wop’s. The Ice Queen—Katherine—returned in May and she never said a word to him about Rosaleen or Eddie Jr., just hello and good-bye and how did my husband look and what did he eat today, stiff as ever, winter on two feet, and she took her lawyers with her down to the Santa Barbara Municipal Courthouse and had her husband declared incompetent.
O‘Kane first heard about it one night when he couldn’t get home after work—Roscoe was running Mrs. McCormick across town to some fancy-dress party and wouldn’t be back till late. The last thing he wanted was to stick around the place, and Rosaleen was sure to give him hell over it, the meal ruined and she slaving over the stove since three and all the rest of it, but he had no choice unless he wanted to walk—and he didn’t. He was able to cajole a plate of home fries and ham out of the Chink cook—and he would have killed for a beer or even a glass of wine, but there was nothing in the house and Sal and the rest of the McCormick wops had been pretty cool to him ever since the Dimucci business—so he took the plate and a glass of buttermilk upstairs to see if maybe Nick wanted to play a couple of hands of poker to while away the time.
Nick was sitting behind the barred door to the upstairs parlor with a newspaper spread out on the footstool before him, and Pat was leaning back in a chair just outside the open door to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom. “Can’t get home to the hearth,” O‘Kane said, setting down his plate so he could dig out his keys and swing open the heavy iron door, “so I figured I’d stop round and see what the night nurses are up to. Anybody for a hand of poker?”
Nick didn’t think so. Not right then, anyway. Pat stirred himself, glanced over his shoulder at Mr. McCormick, who was apparently asleep, though you could hardly tell because he’d been so blocked and lifeless lately, and said that yeah, he might play a hand or two.
“By the way,” Nick said in a casual rumble, “did you see this in the paper?”
O‘Kane had started across the room, thinking to set plate and glass down on the sideboard while he pulled out the card table, and he stopped now, arrested in mid-stride. “What?”
“This. Right here.”
O‘Kane stood there like an altar boy with the collection plate held out stiffly before him, except it was ham and potatoes on the plate and not a heap of pocket-worried coins, and he was no altar boy, not anymore. He looked over Nick’s shoulder to where Nick’s thick stump of a finger was pointing, and there it was, the cold truth about the Ice Queen, in 6-point type:M‘CORMICK GUARDIANSHIP TO WIFE
Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, wife of Stanley Robert McCormick of Riven Rock in Montecito, petitioned today in Superior Court to have her husband declared an incompetent person. Mr. McCormick, youngest son of the late Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, has suffered from mental illness since shortly after his marriage to Mrs. McCormick in 1904. The Honorable Baily M. Melchior, Superior Court Judge, appointed Mrs. McCormick, along with Henry B. Favill and Cyrus Bentley, both of Chicago, as joint guardians.
“So what do you think of your poor heartbroken wife now, Eddie—‘She loves him and she wants to be with him,’ isn’t that what you said?” Nick was squinting up at him from eyes set deep in the big calabash of his head. He was running a finger along the lapel of his jacket and smirking as if he’d just won a bet at long odds. From across the room, Pat let out with a strangled little bark of a laugh.
O‘Kane shrugged. “There’s no love lost between her and me,” he said, and he was thinking of the lecture her Imperial Highness had given him on trifling with a girl’s affections, as if she would have the vaguest notion of what went on between a man and a woman, and that still rankled, because no woman was going to tell him what to do, especially when it came to his own private affairs. “I’m in this for Mr. McCormick’s sake, and I wouldn’t walk across the street for her, if you want to know the truth.”
“That comes as a surprise to me,” Nick rumbled, still with that mocking tone, his eyes glistening, cat and mouse. “You were the one had the crush on her—and not so long ago at that. Am I right, Pat?”
The plate was going cold in his hand. Outside, beyond the windows, the sky was darkening. It was getting late, and he knew Rosaleen would be working herself up, pans burning on the stove, garbage up to her ankles, the baby squatting behind the couch with some scrap of offal in his mouth and she taking a hard angry pull at the bottle she kept hidden away in back of the icebox where nobody would think to look. He thought of ringing up Old Man Rowlings and having him give her a message, but then why bother? She’d be riding her broom by now anyway. He gave Pat a look and then turned back to Nick with another shrug. “Let’s just say my eyes have been opened.”
Nick was turned halfway round in his chair, neckless and massive, his shoulders looking as if they’d been inflated with a pneumatic pump. “Right from the start I told you she was a gold digger, didn’t I?”
“I’m not going to defend her, not anymore, but I still think you’re wrong. If I’m not mistaken, she’s got her own millions that her father left her—and that château in Switzerland and all the rest of it. So what does she need with his money?”
“Hah. You hear that, Pat? ‘What does she need with his money?’ Come on, Eddie, wake up. Did you ever in your life meet anybody thought they had enough money? You get that rich, you only want to get richer.”
O‘Kane still hadn’t set the plate down—or the buttermilk either. He was beginning to feel like a waiter. And he was hungry too, but there was something here that needed to be settled—or at least thrashed out.
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Nick said, and he dug a pre-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket and stuck it between his lips, “this right here”—tapping the newspaper—“really opens things up for your Mrs. Katherine McCormick.”
“What do you mean?”
The flare of the match, a whiff of sulphur. “Don’t you get it? He’s incompetent and she’s got hold of the will she had him make out the day after they got married—the one that leaves everything to her?—and now she can traipse all over the country and do whatever she damn well pleases in any kind of society, because when they ask her ‘So where’s your husband?’ she just dabs at her eyes and says, ‘The poor man’s locked away at Riven Rock with his nurses—and he’s mad as a loon.’ ”
Pat let out another laugh. He’d come awake now, setting all four legs of the chair down on the floor and hunching forward, elbows propped up on the buttress of his thighs. “So you think she’d be seeing other men then? Secretly, I mean?”
“Call a spade a spade, why
don’t you, Patrick.” Nick let the smoke spew out of his nostrils, a blue haze settling in his lap and then rising, deflected, to irradiate his blunt features and the vast shining dome of his forehead. “You mean whoring around, don’t you?”
“It’s not right to talk about her like that and you know it,” O‘Kane heard himself say, and immediately regretted it. Here he was, defending her again.
“Not right?” Nick echoed. “Why not? You think just because she’s a millionaire’s wife she’s any better than you? You think she doesn’t itch between her legs like any other woman?”
It was a stimulating proposition, the Ice Queen in heat, but O‘Kane never had the opportunity to pursue it. Because just then there was a movement in the room behind Pat, and when he looked up Mr. McCormick was standing in the doorway.
At first no one moved, and they might have been at the very last scene of a play, just before the lights go down. A long slow moment breathed by, the smallest sounds of the house magnified till every creak and rustle was like a scream. And then, very slowly and deliberately, O‘Kane crossed to the sideboard and set down the plate and beside it the glass, freeing up his hands—just in case. “Mr. McCormick!” he cried, his voice animated with pleasure and surprise, as if he were greeting an old friend on the street, and he exchanged a glance with Pat, careful to make no sudden moves. “Good evening, sir. How are you feeling?”
Nick had folded up the newspaper, and though he hadn’t got to his feet, you could see he was ready to spring if need be; Pat, inches from Mr. McCormick and all but impotent in the grip of the chair, looked up with quickened eyes. This was the first time Mr. McCormick had been out of bed in two weeks or more, and the first time in memory he’d got up without any prompting. He’d been violent on the last occasion, veering from a state of utter immobility to the frenzy of released energy that was like a balloon puffed and puffed till it exploded, and it had taken both O‘Kane and Mart to subdue him. But now he merely stood there in his crisp blue pajamas, stooped and hunched over to the right where the muscles of his leg had gone slack from disuse. He didn’t seem to have registered the question.
“You must be feeling better,” O‘Kane prompted. It was vital to engage him in conversation, the first step—he was waking up, coming out of it, coming back to the real world after his long sojourn in the other one.
Mr. McCormick looked right at him, no bugs, no demons, no eyes crawling up the walls. “I ... I ... is it lunchtime yet? I was wondering about lunch....” And then: “I’ve been sleeping, haven’t I?”
For all his experience and all the cynicism it bred, O‘Kane was exhilarated, on fire: Mr. McCormick was talking! Not only talking, but making sense-or nearly—and he wasn’t lashing out, wasn’t cursing and spitting and attacking his nurses as if they were the devil’s minions. He was hungry, that was all, just like anybody else. In a flash O’Kane saw ahead to the weeks and months to come, the feeding tube discarded, Mr. McCormick dressing himself, using the toilet, joking again, Mr. McCormick reaching into his breast pocket, pulling out his checkbook, Let’s see about that acreage you were interested in, Eddie ...
“Hello, Mr. McCormick,” Nick offered from his chair in the corner of the room, and Pat, his face hung like a painting at the level of Mr. McCormick’s waist, echoed the greeting.
“My wife,” Mr. McCormick said, and it was as if they didn’t exist, his eyes focused on some point in the distance, through the walls and across the grounds and all the way out to that fancy-dress party on Arrellaga Street. He shuffled into the room, unsteady on his feet, skating on gravel, his arms leaping to steady himself. “Katherine,” he said, and the name seemed to surprise him, as if he hadn’t spoken it, as if the syllables had somehow separated themselves from the air and spontaneously combined. He shuffled his feet. Started forward. Thought better of it. Stopped. Finally, moving with the wincing deliberation of a man walking across a bed of hot coals, he made the center of the room, his shoulders violently quaking. “Mother,” he said, and he was looking straight into O‘Kane’s eyes now, “I must have fallen asleep....”
“Mr. McCormick!” O‘Kane had no choice but to raise his voice, calling out to someone drowning at sea, the waves crashing, the rocks drawing nearer, and he couldn’t let him go under again, he couldn’t. “Mr. McCormick, sir. Good evening! Don’t you want something to eat? Look, look here,” gesturing to the plate on the sideboard and waving him on like a traffic cop, “don’t you see what we’ve fixed you for dinner? Good ham, it’s delicious. Here, try a bite—you like ham, you know you do.”
And there he was, pale as water, standing suddenly at the sideboard in his pajamas, barefooted, long-armed, slumped to one side like a poorly staked sapling, and he was eating, forcing the congealed lumps of potato into his mouth, his jaws working, eyes lit with accomplishment, normalcy, the first step....
But it wasn’t to be.
The three of them watched in silence as he ate, jamming the food into his mouth with both hands, gulping and gnashing, licking his fingers and wiping his palms on the breast of his pajamas, and that was fine, a small miracle, until the demons took him and he swung violently round on them with O‘Kane’s fork clutched in his hand. Now he was hunted, brought to bay like an animal, the old fever in his eyes. “My wife!” he shouted, “I want my wife! Do you hear me?! Do you?!”
O‘Kane’s voice was a long swallow of syrup, the most reasonable and soothing voice in the world. “Mr. McCormick, it’s me, Eddie O’Kane. And look, your friends Nick and Pat too. Your wife isn’t here—you know that. You’ve been asleep, that’s all. Dreaming. And here’s your luncheon, nice, just the way you like it.”
Mr. McCormick took a spastic slice at the air, wielding the fork like a dagger. His bare toes gripped the floor. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “You,” he sputtered. “They, they—Katherine. I want to fu-fuck her, I do, and you bring her here right now. D-do you hear me? Do you?”
How much of the conversation had he overheard? O‘Kane was thinking about that as he signaled Pat with his eyes and began to inch forward, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet. You think she doesn’t itch betweenherlegs like any other woman?
And then, just before he hurled the fork at O‘Kane’s face, smashed the plate and glass and tore the sideboard out from the wall preparatory to upending it on Pat’s shins, Mr. McCormick dropped his voice and lulled them for just the fleetingest instant. “I want to fu-fuck her,” he breathed, bowing his head, and he might have been a boy telling his mother what he wanted for his birthday—then, only then, did he explode.
The fork took a divot out of O‘Kane’s cheek, just below his right eye, and he could hear it rattling across the floor behind him as Pat sprang forward and Mr. McC-ormick, shaky on his feet but with the astonishing dexterity of the deranged and otherworldly, upended the sideboard and danced clear. There was a keening in the air now, a razor-edged hysterical singsong chant, “No, no, stay away, stay away,” Mr. McCormick backing into the corner in a wrestler’s crouch, O’Kane and Nick going in low to pull his legs out from under him.
It was a brief but savage struggle that twice saw Mr. McCormick break free and rush the barred door as if he could dart right on through it, but there was no key in the lock this time and they finally ran him to the ground in his bathroom, where he tried to hold the door against the combined weight of the three of them. The shame of it all was Nick. Nick lost his temper. Cursing, his eyes dark streaks in the livid pulp of his face, he was the first through the bathroom door, and he ignored all the rules—open hands only, no blows, use your legs and shoulders and try only to restrain the patient, not subdue him—standing back from Mr. McCormick and letting his fists fall like mallets, the thump of flesh on flesh, not the face, never the face, hitting their employer and benefactor repeatedly in the chest and abdomen until he went down on the tile floor. But that wasn’t enough for Nick—he was possessed, mindless, as crazed as Katzakis or the Apron Man or Gunderson, the big Swede with the rolled dou
gh for arms who killed and decapitated his wife and daughter and held six men at bay for over three hours till finally they had to chloroform him. Nick wouldn’t stop. He kept pounding Mr. McCormick over and over again, though Mr. McCormick was bundled up on the floor with his hands over his head, crying “No, no, no!”
“Nick!” O‘Kane roared, snatching at the heavy arms as they rose and fell, and he felt it coming up in him himself, the uncontainable hormonal rush that makes every one of us a potential maniac. Before he knew what was happening he’d jerked Nick to his feet, spun him around and driven his fist into the soft dollop of flesh in the center of that shining sphere of an overcooked face.
“Eddie!” Pat was shouting, “Nick!” bodies everywhere, the footing treacherous, Mr. McCormick hunched up in the fetal position on the cold hard tiles but with one eye open, one glistening mad eye on the madness churning above him, Nick coming back at him now, at O‘Kane, squaring off, shouting, “You son of a bitch I’ll kill you!” and the fury of their voice magnified in that confined space till the bathroom echoed like some private chamber of hell.