by T. C. Boyle
That was in May, when Mr. McCormick was declared incompetent and Giovannella began showing up at Riven Rock again at all hours of the day and night, and Rosaleen, the smallest crook stamped into the bridge of her nose like a question mark turned back on itself and her eyes rimmed in black like a night raider‘s, packed her bags and took the baby with his bruised thigh and walked out the door to the streetcar and took the streetcar to the train, but for O’Kane the events came so fast and furious he could hardly be sure of the year, let alone the month. And how was Rosaleen? everyone wanted to know, especially people like Elsie Reardon. And the baby? They were fine, O‘Kane insisted, and he relied on memory to supply the fresh details about little Eddie’s puerile raptures and adorable doings, but he ached inside, ached till he had to get drunk most nights of the week and cry himself to sleep in the calmed waters of the big wooden ark of a bed he’d bought to float and sustain his bliss, and for a month he was bereft, and for a month he fabricated and prevaricated and spun his complex weave of wishful thinking and feathery invention before admitting to all and sundry that Rosaleen had gone home to Massachusetts to nurse her ailing mother. And father. And her brother with the bone cancer and the sixteen children.
All that hurt. And it should never have happened. He knew who to blame—himself, of course, a man who just wasn’t ready yet for the yoke of marriage and family. And Katherine. Mrs. McCormick. The Ice Queen. If she hadn’t stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong none of this would have happened. He could have gotten Giovannella—or whoever—out of his system and waited till the time was right, until he was ready, really ready, and then maybe things would have been different.
Once the month was out, he settled up with Old Man Rowlings and took a room in a boardinghouse not far from the train station and within easy walking distance of Menhoff‘s, O’Reilly’s and the hole-in- ,the-wall bars of Spanishtown. The furniture he sold off to whoever wanted it, and wouldn’t you know that Zinnia Linnear, like some sort of veiny blue vulture, was first in line for the oversized bed, the bureau and the set of mostly chipped secondhand china. There were fireworks off Stearns Wharf that Fourth of July and what must have been three hundred boats, each with a kerosene lantern, spread across the glowing water like the stars come down from the sky. O‘Kane remembered that Fourth of July in particular, not simply for the concatenation of unlucky events leading up to it, but because Giovannella was there with him at the end of the wharf, her wide glowing uncandled face lit again and again by the trailing streamers of red, white and blue.
It was sometime around then—July, maybe August—that Mr. McCormick came back to life again. He got up out of bed one morning and stepped into the shower bath like any other man, ordered up his breakfast and asked for the newspaper. O‘Kane was stunned, and even Mart, who was slow to register surprise (or any other emotion, for that matter), seemed impressed. In fact, the two of them just stood there speechless as Mr. McCormick, dressed in his pajamas and robe, seated himself at the table in the upper parlor and buttered his toast with the brisk assiduous movements of a man sitting down to breakfast before leaving for the office. It was an entirely normal scene, prosaic even, if you discount the fact that he had to use a spoon to butter his toast, Dr. Hamilton having proscribed all sharp-edged implements in the aftermath of the fork incident. When Mr. McCormick finished spooning up his eggs, nice as you please, patted his lips delicately with the napkin, stretched and took the newspaper, O’Kane sent Mart for Dr. Hamilton—the doctor had to see this.
Hamilton came on the run, dashing through the entrance hall and taking the steps two at a time, and he was still breathing in short muted gasps as he smoothed back his hair and straightened his tie on the landing outside the barred door to the upper parlor. He tried his best to achieve a casual saunter, as if he’d just happened by, but he couldn’t seem to control his feet, skipping through every third step or so as he crossed the room. O‘Kane watched him slowly circle the patient, eyes flipping behind the lenses of his pince-nez, lips silently moving as if rehearsing a speech; Mr. McCormick, absorbed in the paper, which he held up rigidly only inches from his face, didn’t seem to notice him. And then, very tentatively, as if afraid of breaking the spell, Hamilton tried to draw Mr. McCormick into conversation. “Good morning, Mr. McCormick,” he said in his customary whisper, “you’re looking well.”
There was no response.
“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands together in a brisk, businesslike way and moving into the periphery of Mr. McCormick’s vision, quite close to him now, “it certainly is a glorious sunshiny day, isn’t it?”
Still no response.
“And to see you looking so well on such a glorious day—that gives us all pleasure, doesn’t it, Edward? Martin? And sir, Mr. McCormick, I can only presume you’re feeling better? A pause. ”Am I right?“
Very slowly, as if he were an actor in a farce parting the curtains to reveal the painted smile on his face, Mr. McCormick lowered the newspaper to uncover first his hairline, then his brow, his eyes, his nose, and finally, with a flourish, the broad radiant beaming dimple-cheeked grin spread wide across the lower part of his face. Mr. McCormick was grinning, grinning to beat the band, and you could see the light in his eyes as they came into focus and settled warmly on the reciprocally grinning visage of Dr. Hamilton. “And who might you be?” he asked in the most gratuitous and amenable tones.
The doctor couldn’t help himself. He let his eyes have their way three times in rapid succession—blip, blip, blip—worked his shoulders as if to shrug off some invisible beast clinging to his jacket and hissing in his ear, and said, “Why, Mr. McCormick, it’s me, Dr. Hamilton, Gilbert—your physician.” He spread his arms. “And look, your old friends, Edward O‘Kane and Martin Thompson. But how are you feeling?”
The grin held. O‘Kane was grinning too now—and so was Mart. All four of them were stretching their facial muscles to the limit, goodwill abounding, and you would have thought they’d just heard the best joke in the world. “What is this place?” Mr. McCormick asked then, and no trace of hesitation in his voice, no stuttering or verbigeration at all.
Dr. Hamilton turned to O‘Kane and Mart as if this were the drollest thing he’d ever heard, then came back to Mr. McCormick, all the while rubbing his hands and flipping his eyes in a paroxysm of nervous energy—and grinning, grinning as if it were the conventional way of wearing a face. “Why, it’s Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick—in California. The place you designed for your sister, Mary Virginia—surely you remember that. Such a beautiful place. And so comfortable. Did you encounter any particular difficulties in the design?”
“I—I—” and now the old hesitation, the scattered eyes, at once lost and receding, but still the grin held. “I—I don’t recall... but I—I must have been ill, isn’t that, that right?”
Hamilton, trying for gravity, the grin banished: “Yes, that’s right, Mr. McCormick, you’ve been ill. But look at you now, alert and aglow with health and happiness.... Do you recall your illness, its nature, anything at all about it?”
Mr. McCormick turned to O‘Kane then and winked an eye—actually winked, like an old crony in a bar. “Yes,” he said, and the grin widened still further. “A c-cold, wasn’t it?”
The change lasted three days. Mr. McCormick got himself up each morning, shower-bathed (and sometimes for as long as two hours at a time), took his breakfast, read the paper. He conversed, joked even. And though he was very tired, exhausted from his long travail, he was able to move about without too much difficulty, favoring the right leg and walking with a tottering deliberation, as if he were on a tightrope over a howling precipice. He needed help in dressing still, easily frustrated—baffled, even—over the proper way to slip into a shirt or jacket and repeatedly trying to slide both feet into a single pantleg. But still, everyone was heartened, O‘Kane especially. Mr. McCormick was coming out of it. Finally. At long last.
As it turned out, though—and this was sad, hopes raised and hopes dashed�
��O‘Kane was merely indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Those three days of lucidity, those three days of dramatic and visible improvement, of the lifting of the veil, of release, only adumbrated Mr. McCormick’s worst crisis since his breakdown. No one could have foreseen it. Not even Dr. Hamilton, who fired off a telegram to Katherine, now back in Boston, trumpeting the news of the change in her husband’s condition. Or she, who wired him back the minute she received it: HE WAS EATING? STOP DRESSING HIMSELF? STOP READING THE NEWSPAPER? STOP COULD SHE SEE HIM? STOP NOW? Optimistic, all his diagnostic sails flapping in a fresh breeze of hope and speculation—but cautious, ever cautious—the doctor wired her back to say: NOT YET STOP.
And a good thing too. Because what happened during O‘Kane’s shift on the fourth day after Mr. McCormick awakened from the dead came as a shock, to put it mildly. O’Kane had never seen anything like it, and he thought he’d seen everything. No one was to blame, at least, and that came as a relief to all concerned, but if he were to scratch deep enough in the sediment of culpability, O‘Kane could have named a candidate—Katherine, Katherine yet again. She meant well, he would never deny that, but because she meant well—and because she was a snooping imperious castrating bitch of a woman the likes of which he could never have imagined even in his worst nightmare—she couldn’t help sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.
The problem this time was with the window in Mr. McCormick’s bathroom. Katherine couldn’t leave it alone. After she’d finished with the first floor of the house, consigning the McCormick furniture, pictures and pottery to the garage and remaking the place in her own image—when it was all done, from paint to draperies to rugs—she began to fixate on the second floor, the floor she’d never seen, the floor from which she was interdicted on Dr. Hamilton’s strictest orders. She studied it constantly—or at least the outer walls and windows and the tiled expanse of the sunporch—watching for a glimpse of her husband through a pair of opera glasses. Inevitably she found something to displease her, and in this case it was the bathroom window.
The bars disturbed her. They made the place look too much like a fortress—or an asylum. She consulted with Hamilton and then brought in a young architect and a crew of Italians who removed the perfectly serviceable standard one-inch-thick iron bars while Mr. McCormick lay tranced in his bedroom and replaced them with steel louvers. The louvers had been designed to ensure that a fully grown man of Mr. McCormick’s height and weight couldn’t work his arm through any of the apertures and make contact with the glass beyond it—and of course, they’d been constructed to a standard of strength and durability that would prevent their being bent or mutilated in any way that might afford Mr. McCormick an avenue of escape. What the architect hadn’t taken into account was the ingenuity of Mr. McCormick—or his strength. Especially when the fit was on him.
It was late on that fourth day, toward the end of O‘Kane and Martin’s shift, and the evening was settling in round the house, birds calling, the sun hanging on a string, the islands in bold relief against the twin mirrors of sea and sky. Mart was in the parlor, working on a crossword puzzle by way of improving his vocabulary, and Mr. McCormick had retired for a nap before dinner. O’Kane was seated in a chair across the room from Mart, his feet propped up on the windowsill, gazing into space. He was thinking about his room and the bland indigestible cud of grease and overcooked vegetable matter his landlady was likely to serve up for dinner—and his first drink, and Giovannella—when he heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering and falling like heavy rain to the pavement below.
He didn’t stop to wonder or think, vaulting out of the chair like a high-jumper and hurtling across the floor to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom, which he found empty, and then to the bathroom, which he found locked. Or not locked, exactly—there was no lock—but obstructed. Mr. McCormick seemed to have jammed something—something substantial—up under the doorknob. O‘Kane twisted the knob and applied his shoulder to the unyielding slab of the door, all the while tasting panic in the back of his throat, a harsh taste, precipitate and unforgiving. Mart was right behind him, thank God, and in the next instant there were two of them battering at the door, Mart standing back five paces and then flinging himself at the insensate oak with the singlemindedness of a steer in a chute. Once, twice, three times, and finally the door gave, splintering off its hinges and lurching forward into a barricade of furniture with a dull echoing thump. And where had the furniture come from? From the stripped and ransacked bedroom behind them. While they were lulled to distraction in the soothing plenitude of the late afternoon, decoding their crossword puzzles and gazing idly out the window, Mr. McCormick had silently dismantled his room and built a bulwark against the door to cover his escape.
Oh, yes: his escape. That was what this was all about—the barricaded door, the shattered glass, the imploded peace of the lazy languorous late afternoon in Paradise—as O‘Kane was to discover in the next moment. He scrambled up over the plane of the door, which was canted now at a forty-five-degree angle, just in time to see Mr. McCormick vanish through a ragged gap in the louvers that looked as if an artillery shell had passed through it but was in fact created by Mr. McCormick himself, using main strength, ingenuity, and a four-inch-thick length of cherrywood that had formerly served as a table leg. O’Kane cried out, his mind a seething stew of featureless thoughts, the three p’s tumbled together with Dr. Hamilton’s lectures on the train, Katherine’s denunciatory fury and the stark crazed pulse-pounding phrase “suicidal tendencies,” and he rushed to the window and thrust his head through the gap in horror, expecting anything, expecting the worst. What he saw was Mr. McCormick, eyes sunk deep in the mask of his face, fierce with concentration, clambering down the drainpipe with all the agility of a, well, of a hominoid.
By the time O‘Kane reached the ground floor, burst through the front door and tore round the corner of the house, Mr. McCormick had vanished. Why, he was thinking, why does this always have to happen on my shift? and then he was in motion, frantic, irrepressible, charging round the courtyard and shouting out for Roscoe, the gardeners, the household help and any stray Italians who might have been dicing garlic or nodding over a glass of wine in their tumbledown cottages, dogs barking, chickens flying, the whole place a hurricane of fear and alarm. “Mr. McCormick’s loose!” he bellowed, and here came Mart and Roscoe and a host of sweating dark men gripping hoes and hedge clippers. “Lock your women indoors,” he cried, “and all of you men fan out over the property—and if you find him, don’t try to approach him, just stand clear and send for me or Dr. Hamilton.”
They were systematically beating the bushes, describing an ever-widening circle around the house under O‘Kane’s command, when Dr. Hamilton appeared on the run, flashing through the trees from the direction of the apery in a white lab coat stippled with the various leavings of his monkeys and baboons, not to mention Julius the orangutan. He slashed through the kitchen garden, across the courtyard and right on up to O’Kane, who was searching the bushes around the daphne bed to the west of the house. “My God,” the doctor gasped, out of breath, his eyes whirling, and he repeated it over and over again, wheezing for breath, “my God, my God, my God.”
“He can’t have gone far,” O‘Kane said, “his legs won’t carry him. He’s not in condition.”
The doctor just stood there, a sharp wedge of the declining sun isolating the right side of his face, the tic replicating itself in his cheek now and at the corner of his mouth. “How?” he sputtered. “Who was—? When did-?”
“No more than ten minutes. We almost had him—he pried open the new louvers with a stick of wood.”
“Shit.” The doctor let out a string of curses, every trace of the therapeutic whisper gone out of his voice. “What’s the nearest estate—Mira Vista, isn’t it? Who’s there now—are there any women?” His face was a small thing, flushed and bloated beneath the tan he’d acquired in the company of his hominoids, his hair wet through with sweat, and sweat descending in a pro
bing and tentative way from his temples to trace the clenched lines of his jaw. “We’ve got to warn them. Notify the police. Call out the bloodhounds.”
“But he can’t have gone far—and he’s got almost ninety acres of his own to run around on ... but I was just concerned, if, well, there’s any possibility of what we discussed before, if he might try to—”
“You idiot,” the doctor shouted, and there was no vestige of control left in him, “you unutterable moron. What do you think? Why do you suppose we keep him locked up? He could be lying dead under any one of these damned bushes even now, and here we are standing around jawing about it. Action, that’s what we need, not a bunch of lame-brained questions and what-ifs. We’ve got to. got to—” and then he broke off abruptly and darted away in the direction of the garage.
Night fell, and still no sign of Mr. McCormick. On regaining his senses, Hamilton decided against involving the police for fear of possible repercussions, but all the neighbors within a one-mile radius were warned and all available men, including the Dimuccis, were called out to help with the search. The number of flashlights was limited—two from the house and one from Roscoe’s trove in the garage—and the laborers went poking through the brush with lanterns and torches held aloft, despite the risk of fire. Roscoe had gone for Nick and Pat and they joined the search too, but O‘Kane, smarting from the way Hamilton had assailed him and still carrying a lingering grudge against Nick, went off on his own with one of the flashlights.
It was the dry season, the tall grass of the fields parched till it turned from gold to white, the frogs thick along the two creeks that merged on the property, clamorous in their numbers, filling the darkness with the liquid pulse of their froggy loves and wars. O‘Kane followed Hot Springs Creek south to where it joined with Cold Stream and then traced that back north along the Indian ceremonial grounds the estate had swallowed up, thinking that Mr. McCormick might have been attracted to the water or the thick growth of reeds and scrub oak that shadowed the banks—he could have crouched there for a week and no one would have found him, and certainly not in the dark. The beam of the flashlight—a gadget O’Kane had never even seen till he came to Riven Rock—picked out the odd branch or boulder, flattening it to two-dimensionality as though it were pasted to the wall of darkness, and O‘Kane stumbled among the rocks of the streambed, blinded by the light. He kept his balance the first few times, but then a rock skittered out from under his feet and he pitched forward into the waterborne rubble, cradling the flashlight to his chest and skinning both knees in the process. He lay there recumbent a moment, thinking of rattlesnakes, evil-eyed and explosive, and gave up the streambed for the cultivated paths.