by T. C. Boyle
All that was bad enough—the abuse of Mr. McCormick when he was defenseless and just coming out of his haze; the fight with Nick that dredged up all the mistrust and rancor that must have lain brooding between them like a copperhead with somebody’s foot on its tail, though he never suspected and never would have admitted it if he had; the grim prospect of the championship bout awaiting him when he finally did get home to Rosaleen—but for O‘Kane, on that unlucky night, it was just the beginning.
No sooner had Pat separated him and Nick than he turned and stalked out of the apartment, his knuckles raw, Nick raving at his back, Mr. McCormick all but comatose on the floor. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking son of a bitch!” Nick bellowed. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here anyhow—you’re on the day shift, jackass!” He went right on down the stairs and out the front door without a word to anybody, and then he was walking up the drive, engulfed by the night. The lights faded at his back and the darkness closed in on him, a smell of tidal flats on the air, the cold underbelly of the fog catching and tearing and spilling its guts in the treetops. He didn’t think about it twice: he just started walking.
Five miles. His feet were blistered—he wasn’t used to this anymore—he was bleeding from the cut under his eye where the fork had gouged him, and his upper lip was split and swollen. He raged against Nick the whole way, Nick who was thirty-four years old and resented O‘Kane because O’Kane was younger, smarter, better looking, because O‘Kane was head nurse and he wasn’t. Well, fuck him. O’Kane had blackened one of his eyes for him and done some damage that wasn’t so obvious maybe, but he would feel it tomorrow, that was for sure. He walked on, the anger tapering off inside him as the fog came down and the chill of the night took hold of him—and he was getting soft, as addicted to the sun as a lizard on a rock, and what would Boston be like now? Two cars went by, but they were going in the wrong direction. And then, to cap things off, he got to the foot of State Street five minutes after the last streetcar had left.
What he needed was a drink. Or two. But for some unfathomable reason—birth, death, the end of the universe and all things available to man—Cody Menhoff’s was closed at 9:45 P.M. on a Thursday night in the middle of May with grown men expiring for the want of a drink, and he stood there dumbfounded at the locked door, licking the crusted-over scab on his lip, till he heard a shout from across the street. “Hey, partner,” someone called to him, “you looking for a drink?”
He wound up in a saloon in Spanishtown, the seething hovel of mud-brick houses and ramshackle chicken coops where all the Mexicans and Chinks who worked the hotels lived and where you could always find a drink and a whore—not that he was looking for the latter, not especially. What he found himself doing was drinking dirty brown liquid out of a dirty brown cup with a character in a peaked cap and military mustaches who could have been Porfirio Díaz himself for all O‘Kane knew. But he didn’t care. He had no prejudices—spics, wops, Chinks, Krauts, Micks, it was all the same to him. Set up another round and let’s chase it with a couple of those Mexican beers that smell like wet pussy and taste like they were strained through the crotch of somebody’s union suit. Yeah, that’s right, that’s the one. Slainte! How you say it? Salud. Okay, salud!
He was there an hour maybe, long enough to forget his split lip and the pain radiating from a place just above his left temple where Nick had twice caught him with a right hand that felt as if it had been launched from a cannon, and then he thought he might want to see some American faces for a while and wandered up the street to a place he’d been to once or twice before. It was festive inside. Full of life. He saw a raft of women’s hats, pinned-up hair, men in shirtsleeves. The player piano was going and some drunk, a guy he thought he might have recognized from Menhoff‘s, was singing along and running his hands over the keys in pantomime:They heeded not his dying prayer
They buried him there on the lone prairie
In a little box just six by three
And his bones now rot on the lone prairie
He had a terrific voice, the drunk, very plaintive and evocative, and O‘Kane asked him if he knew “Carrick Fergus” and he did but there was no roll for it so they had to settle for “The Streets of New York,” which they ran through twice, O’Kane harmonizing, and then “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” That made them thirsty, so they sat at a table and O‘Kane ordered whiskey for them both and never mind the chaser, and he was just settling in and feeling expansive, telling the drunk—whose name was Joe something—about Mr. McCormick and how he’d finally woken up like Sleeping Beauty and how he, O’Kane, came to have this gash in his cheek and the split lip and aggravated temple, when he looked up and saw Giovannella Dimucci sitting across the room in the dining area with a man who had his arm around her shoulder and was leaning in to whisper something in her ear. But Giovannella wasn’t looking at the man she was with. She was staring across the room. At O‘Kane.
Who can say what a man feels at a time like that? What miswired connections suddenly fuse, what deadened paths and arterial causeways come roaring to life all in an instant? O‘Kane pushed himself up from the chair without so much as a word to Joe something, who was in the middle of a disconnected monologue revolving around the loss of his hat, his wallet and his left shoe, and propelled himself across the crowded room in a kind of trance. His hips were tight, as compact as pistons, he could feel the heavy musculature of his legs grip and relax and grip again with each stride as he swung his shoulders out and back in a rhythmic autonomous strut, his heart beating strong and sure, everything in the sharpest focus. He wasn’t looking at Giovannella or the man with her, or not at his face anyway—his eyes were locked on the arm that insinuated so many things, the arm he wanted to break in six places. It would have been no use pointing out to him that it was Giovannella’s absolute and unfettered right to go where and with whom she pleased and that it was nobody’s business but her own as to when and how that unwitting arm had come to drape itself so casually across her shoulder, no use at all. The die was cast. Words were useless.
O‘Kane walked right up to the table and tore the arm off Giovannella’s shoulder as he might have stripped a dead limb from a tree and found to his consternation that the arm was attached elsewhere. There was a question of sinew, bone, cartilage, and the initially startled and then outraged flaxen-haired and beefy farmboy in a pair of pale blue washed-out overalls who formed the trunk of this particular tree. “You can’t do that,” O’Kane said, meaning a whole range of things, and when the arm spontaneously tried to reassert itself he slapped it away and showed the farmboy the bloody divot under his eye and the aggravated temple and the lip that had gone yellow with pus, and the farmboy desisted. And still without looking at her, without so much as giving her a glance, O‘Kane reached out unerringly and hoisted Giovannella to her feet. “We’re getting out of here,” he said, and he was fixing his lunatic glare on the farmboy’s evil-eyed companion in the event he wanted his arm wrenched out of the socket too. And then, as if Giovannella might have harbored any doubt as to his meaning or intentions, he lowered his voice to a primal growl and gave the statement a sense of urgency: “Right now.”
She wasn’t happy. She fought him every step of the way, through the maze of tables, into the foyer and out the door into the deserted street. No one challenged him—they barely looked up from their beers—and just let the farmboy and his evil-eyed companion come after him, just let them. He dragged her half a block before she broke away from him, shifted her weight like a professional boxer and hit him with everything she had, and right where it was tenderest, right where Mr. McCormick’s fork had opened up his flesh, so that it felt now, for the briefest sharpest instant, as if his whole face were slipping off the bone like a rubber mask. “You bastard!” she screamed.
“Me?” He was outraged, stung to bitterness and enmity at the sheer unreasonableness of her response. Was she crazy? Was that it? “You were the one sitting in a dive like that with some jerk’s arm around
you like some common—”
She hit him again and was rearing back to unleash a complementary blow with the sharp little bundle of knuckles that was her left fist, when he caught her arm at the wrist. Quick as a bolt, she came back at him with the other hand, but he caught that one too. And he wasn’t thinking, not at all, but somewhere inside him he registered the sensation of holding fast to those two frail and quick-blooded wrists that were like birds, sparrows snatched out of the air and imprisoned in the grip of his unconquerable hands, and it was electric. It surged through him, and there was no power on earth that could stop him now. “Like some common whore,” he said.
She spat at him. Kicked out with jackknifing knees. Cursed him in Italian first and then in English. It didn’t matter. Not at all. Because he was supreme and he had hold of her wrists and he wasn’t letting go, not right then, maybe not ever.
He led her down the street in an awkward dance, both of them shuffling sideways, till he found a place thick with trees at the far northern verge of the Potter Hotel grounds, and there was never any question of the outcome. For all the power of her charm and her black persuasive eyes and her body that was flawless and young and without stint of constraint, he was more charming and more persuasive—and more powerful. She had to understand that, and finally, after he’d been rough with her, maybe too rough with her, she did. She clung to him beneath the night-blooming bushes in the dark of the starless night, her skin naked to his, and sobbed for him, sobbed so hard he thought she would break in half, and then, only then, did he let go and feel the warmth infuse him as if his blood had been drained, and whiskey, hot burning Irish from the sainted shores, substituted in its place. They lay there through the slow-rolling hours and they talked in low voices and kissed and let the fog come down like the breath of something so big and overwhelming they could never have conceived of it, and this time, when he pulled her to him, he didn’t have to force her.
Ah, yes. Yes. But all idylls have to end, as well he knew, and all too often they end with clamminess and insect bites and an ache in the head. They end with the break of day, a prick of the fog turned to drizzle, the painful rasping of some misplaced bird. Giovannella looked at him out of the eyes of a bride and he knew he was in way over his head. “I promise,” he told her, “I swear,” and he bundled her in his arms, turned inside out with guilt and regret and fear and self-loathing—and yet, at the same time, he was swelling to the point of bursting with something else altogether, something that felt dangerously like ... well, love.
Head throbbing, his suit a mess, his face worse, he went into the hotel, while Giovannella waited shivering in the woods, and telephoned Roscoe. Roscoe was just getting up, just getting ready to have his breakfast in the kitchen of the big house while Sam Wah jabbered at him in Chink-English and Nick and Pat drank black coffee and prepared for the end of their shift and the ride home, after which he planned to pick up O‘Kane in front of the apartment on Micheltorena. O’Kane talked him out of that. O‘Kane called in his markers, reminding Roscoe of all he’d done for him over the course of the past months and of the brotherhood of their barroom binges in the days before Rosaleen arrived, and Roscoe agreed to forego breakfast and slip down to the Potter Hotel to take Giovannella out Olive Mill Road to the place where the gap showed in the oleanders—and take O’Kane to work.
How he made it through that day O‘Kane would never know.
He cleaned himself up as best he could in the bathroom he’d formerly shared with Mart and that Mart now shared with Elsie Reardon, avoiding Pat—and Nick—altogether. Roscoe was mum. They didn’t even know O‘Kane was there, had no reason to suspect he wasn’t at home awaiting his morning ride and his daily regimen of laving and force-feeding Mr. McCormick (daily, that is, but for Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when Dr. Hamilton sat with their employer and benefactor and the door remained shut except to admit a pair of wops with mops). Mart had heard his brothers’ version of the previous night’s events, but he didn’t seem eager to leap to judgment—as ready, in his bigheaded, dilatory way, to lay blame at Nick’s door as at O’Kane’s. And O‘Kane spent most of the day reprising his own version aloud, hoping to get Mart in his camp, water thicker than blood and all that, and trying to erase the memory of Giovannella and how unutterably stupid he’d been to stir that kettle up again, love or no love. What he refused to think of or even admit to the murky periphery of his consciousness for the smallest splinter of a second, was the problem that made all others seem as insignificant as the exact phrasing of the legend that would one day appear on his tombstone: Rosaleen.
He telephoned her at eight that morning and poured a heavy gelatin of lies into the mouthpiece, telling her of the way the car had broken down so completely they couldn’t even get it to roll if they pushed it and how Mr. McCormick had come to life in a sudden frenzy and beaten him about the head and face and she should see his lip and how finally he was forced to spend a forlorn and monastic night sharing a bed with Mart who of course snored the whole time. Rosaleen was silent on the other end of the line and he could picture her in Old Man Rowlings’s cramped parlor, Old Man Rowlings fuming somewhere in the background, Rosaleen chewing her lip in that way she had, her eyes teeming in her head, one slow foot perched on the bridge of the other. “I’ll be home tonight after work,” he said. “Okay?”
Her voice rolled back to him like the big black ball in the bowling alley, uncertain, untrue, and yet clattering all the same: “Yeah, Eddie. Okay.”
And then it was evening. And then he went home.
She was waiting for him at the front door, Eddie Jr. propped up on her hip like a shield, and he thought of the heavy leathern shield Cuchulain used to wield and all the fierce blood of their warrior ancestors seething in Rosaleen’s veins, and she was holding a broom too—a broom she didn’t even know the proper use of—to complete the picture. He opened the gate and came up the walk and though his head ached still and his lip stung and the side of his face throbbed and he was as beaten-down and exhausted as he’d ever been in his life, he knew there was something wrong with that picture, something radically wrong, and he was immediately on his guard. “Hello, honey,” he called, and the greeting had a hollow ring to it, desperate and false. She said nothing in response, but her lip curled back from her teeth and he saw that she was making an effort to restrain it, whatever it was, till he was in the house and the door was shut behind him.
“Liar,” she snarled as he brushed past her and into the ashpit of the parlor.
How did she know?
What did she know?
His brain, dormant with exhaustion, churned to sudden life—there was nothing for him now but to face his accuser and parry every fresh accusation with a fresh lie. “What?” he said, all innocence. “What are you talking about?”
Her face was twisted, the face of one of the doctor’s hominoids suffering through an experiment, all hate and murder and bloodlust. “You were downtown at Huff’s last night, drunk as a pig. Zinnia Linnear saw you.”
“She needs glasses.”
“Don’t lie to me, you son of a fucking bitch.”
“I swear it, I spent the night at Riven Rock. Look. Look at my face, why don’t you? Huh? You see that? Mr. McCormick did that to me and I spent the night like a choirboy in Mart’s bed with Mart snoring like a sawmill, I swear to God—”
She wasn’t mollified, not in the least—she had something else, he knew it, something she was holding in reserve, roll out the caissons and let it fly. The baby, riding her hip, reached out to him. “Da-da,” he said. “Da-da.”
“You were with a woman,” she said, and her voice was pitched low, the first premonitory rumble of the inchoate storm. “A dago.”
He tried to avoid her, duck away, hide, tried to change the subject, clear the air, give her a chance to calm herself and absorb the thick palliative of his lies, but she wouldn’t have it. Everywhere he turned, she was there, the baby her shield, her voice the high agitated hoot of a seabird: “Who was sh
e? Huh? Some whore you found under a rock? Did you lay her? Did you?” He went into the bedroom to change his shirt, a man who’d been at work for two solid days and sweating under the arms with the strain of providing for his family and could he expect a moment’s peace in his own home, the home he worked twelve hours a day to pay for? No. No, he couldn’t. She was there in the bedroom, hooting, and when he pushed himself up to escape to the kitchen and reach behind the icebox for the solace of the all-but-empty bottle she kept sequestered there and he was never to know of in all its shame and hypocrisy, he lifted it to his lips to a barrage of hoots—“Who was she? Who?”—until finally he could take it no more, and no man could, not if he was blind, deaf and paralyzed.
He didn’t mean to get violent. He didn’t want to. He hadn’t planned on it. It made him feel bad. But it was just like the time in Waverley, her face a puffed-up ball presenting itself to him over and over again, and he a spiker at the net, and yet it was different too, radically different, because the baby was there, attached to her hip and yowling as if he’d been orphaned already. He loved that baby and he didn’t want to hurt it—him, Eddie Jr., his son—and he loved Rosaleen too, he did, but she kept coming at him, the white moon of her face, the big stitched ball, and when finally he did hit it, that surging swollen sphere of a hateful twisted little interrogatory wife’s face, when his patience was exhausted, when Job’s patience would have been exhausted, when all the popes and martyrs would have rattled their holy desiccated bones and screamed for murder, it was more a matter of reflex than anything else. Once, he hit her once, once only. And he made sure, in the way of a thoughtful man putting down a horse or a favorite dog, to hit her hard enough and squarely enough to prevent even the remotest possibility of a rebound.