Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  And Katherine? She didn’t recognize him, not then, not at first, but how could she? She was twelve when she’d seen Stanley last, a child, and now she was twenty-eight years old, fully grown and mature, the only graduate of Miss Hershey’s School who wasn’t married, widowed or dead.

  But Stanley recognized her. He entered the dining room at 7:00 P.M. sharp, dressed in evening clothes, his face tanned and teeth flashing, a head taller than anyone in the room, and when he looked up from the menu he caught her eye where she was sitting in the far corner with Butler Ames and the rest, and every time she glanced up after that his pale blue eyes were fixed on her. After dinner, when everyone under the age of seventy had retired to the ballroom for ices, dessert, drinks and dancing, he tracked her down with the aid of Morris Johnston, Betty’s brother. She’d just danced a rag with Bulter Ames and was catching her breath, a little giddy with the glass of wine he’d persuaded her to take, when something in Butler’s face made her look up.

  Morris was standing there with this hulking tall man, a man matched to her own height, which Butler Ames, at five foot six, most emphatically was not, and the man—Stanley—was smiling a secret, mysterious sort of smile, as if he’d just solved an intricate puzzle. “I know you,” he said, even before Morris made the introductions. “Didn’t you used to live in Chicago?”

  Stanley joined their party, and though Butler Ames blustered, cajoled and wisecracked without pause as the band played on, took a breather and played on again, it was as if he didn’t exist except as a minor irritation on the periphery of her consciousness, like an insect, Culex pipiens pipiens. She was lost in reminiscence, transported all the way back to her girlhood in Chicago, when her father was alive, and her brother, and there was nothing at all the matter with the world that a good grade on an exam or a few dancing lessons wouldn’t cure. Stanley’s mind was astonishing. He remembered every detail of those lessons, right down to the names and addresses of nearly all the boys and half the girls, and he remembered the day Monsieur LaBonte had paired them all off according to height, the day they’d first met.

  “My God,” she said, “that was sixteen years ago. Can you believe it?”

  “It snowed that afternoon,” he said. “Six inches.”

  “I’m amazed at your memory, I really am.”

  He smiled, that was all, and here was the shy Stanley revealed, self-deprecating, self-effacing, never one to advertise himself. He might have said, “Yes, and I graduated with honors from Princeton and now I run the Reaper Works along with my brothers,” or “I have every reason to remember—how could I forget you?” That was the line Butler Ames would have taken. Or any of the other heavy-breathing young bachelors who seemed to close in on her like a swarm of gnats whenever she left her books and went out into society. But Stanley was different. With Stanley there was no pretense, no pressure, no aggression. And he listened, he listened to her rather than himself, and the more they talked the more she felt the tug of memory pulling her down link by link into a shifting pool of nostalgia, her father’s face there before her, the lake at twilight, Prairie Avenue piled high with drifts, a big gray carthorse collapsing in its traces while her father tried to hurry her past.

  Before long, she and Stanley were huddled by themselves, the width of the table between them and the rest of the party, all of whom, excluded from reminiscences of the LaBonte Dancing Academy, Bumpy Swift and George Pullman, picked up the general conversation and carried it elsewhere. “And what do you make of the Beaneaters this season?” she heard Morris ask at one point, and Butler’s answer, “Give me the American League any day.” And then, out of nowhere, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism and Socialism?” Stanley asked, and the rest of the night fell away into some hidden crevice in the smooth continuum of time. When she looked up again, the band had vanished, the ballroom was empty and all the others had gone off to bed.

  That was how Stanley courted her—with socialism, unionism, progressivism, reform—instead of flowers and banter and meaningful glances. He sought her out first thing in the morning, even before she’d had a chance to come down to breakfast, and he launched into a polemic against inherited wealth, greedy capitalists like his father who took the means of production to themselves and robbed the workers of their labor, spoke of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and Marx as if he’d known them personally, and yes, he’d broken down in tears over How the Other Half Lives and hoped one day to convert the new International Harvester Company to a fully cooperative enterprise, as he’d done with his ranch in New Mexico. They played tennis together, swam, he took her boating, and all the while they debated the issues of the day until she felt as if some great shining light were opening up inside her.

  By the third day, she couldn’t help telegraphing her mother to tell her about him, about Stanley Robert McCormick, heir to the McCormick fortune, a tall physical man from Chicago who wasn’t afraid of the intellectual side of things, right-thinking, sweetly shy, worth all the Butler Ameses of the world put together. And her mother, who’d been nagging her for the past six months to think of what she was going to do when she graduated MIT next year at the age of twenty-nine, already old for marriage and the very last hope of the Dexter line, telegraphed back within the hour: MAKE ME A HAPPY WOMAN.

  But that was all a long time ago, an Ice Age ago, and now the best she could do was watch her handsome husband through a pair of binoculars like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare creature in the wild—that, and make sure he had every comfort, every material thing money could buy to ease his trials, and the best treatment available to bring about his cure. And even if she couldn’t be with him for Christmas, she was determined to scour every shop and every catalogue and bury him in an avalanche of presents so that his doctor, handing each one over, would announce, like a benediction, This one’s from Katherine.

  And she was doing just that one morning after her mother arrived, directing O‘Kane and LaSource to carry in great towering armloads of foil-wrapped gifts and arrange them under the tree in Stanley’s quarters, when Julius suddenly appeared out of nowhere to clamber through the open door and into the back seat of the car. Her first thought was to shoo him away—it was two days before Christmas and she was anxious to get back to the hotel and relax with her mother over a cup of eggnog and a concert of Christmas carols in the courtyard where poinsettias grew up out of the ground in a red blaze that mocked the pitiful hothouse plants they had to make do with in Boston—but then she looked at him there, one leg folded over the other, his eyes lit with expectation, and changed her mind. Suddenly she was whimsical. The beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, hard-nosed suffragist, brilliant organizer, manager of all Stanley’s properties and her own too, the woman who never let herself go, looked at that strange pleading hunched-up figure of male dejection sunk into the leather seat and felt silly, lighthearted, girlish. It was Christmas. Julius was in the car. What a lark it would be to show him off to everyone in the hotel. After all, if you could have tropical palms, birds of paradise and poinsettias in December, you could have a tropical ape too. Maybe she’d even see if she could find him a Father Christmas outfit—and a fluffy white beard.

  She had to open the windows, not so much as to allow Julius to snake out a long-fingered hand and snatch at the roadside vegetation or the odd bicyclist, but enough to dissipate the very intense and peculiar odor he carried with him. For the most part he behaved himself, cooing softly, licking the windows with a dark spatulate tongue, surprising her fingers with his own—he liked to hold hands, like a child—and she fell into a reverie as the trees slid by and the sun spread a blanket of warmth over the interior of the car. She was thinking about Hamilton and the hope he’d held out to her—Stanley had improved, he’d definitely turned the corner, and he, the doctor, was full of optimism for the future, perhaps even to the extent of allowing her a Christmas visit next year, if not sooner—but she was puzzling too over something he’d said just yesterday.

  It was the m
iddle of the afternoon and she’d just started up the hill with her binoculars when he scurried out the back door of the house and fell into step with her. “About this new man coming in after the New Year,” he began, “I just wanted to say—”

  “What new man?”

  “Do you mean to say Dr. Meyer hasn’t apprised you of the situation?”

  “Why no—he hasn’t said a word.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, well, you know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me here and I’ll always be grateful for it—in terms of the hominoid colony, I mean—but my researches have gone about as far as they can, I think, and they’ve been enormously successful and enlightening and I really do feel I can write them up and make a significant contribution to our knowledge of human sexuality ... Well, what I’m trying to say is that the new man is a fellow who’s been working quite closely with Dr. Meyer at the Pathological Institute, an excellent man by the name of Brush, Dr. Nathaniel Brush—”

  “But Gilbert, you’re not thinking of leaving us, are you? With my husband improving so? It would, it would be a blow to him, to us all—”

  But Hamilton, turning away so she couldn’t see the telltale quirk of his eyes, evaded the question. “He’ll be working with me for a while, to get him acquainted with Mr. McCormick and our day-to-day operations here, all under the direction of Dr. Meyer, of course, and really, I have the utmost confidence in Nat Brush, I do—”

  She came out of her reverie when Julius suddenly presented her with a hat, a lady’s hat, replete with pins and feathers and a small but unmistakable quantity of well-tended brunette hair, torn out by the roots. One minute she was gazing out the window, brooding over Hamilton’s evasiveness, and the next she was staring down at the unfamiliar hat in her lap. It took her a moment, and then suddenly she was craning her neck to peer out the back window and pounding on the glass partition all in the same motion. Roscoe brought the car smartly around—it was new, one of the matching pair of Pierce Arrow sedans she’d ordered for Stanley in the wake of her weekend at Lavinia Littlejohn‘s—and they backtracked to where they found a hatless and irate young woman stopped astride her bicycle in front of a clump of cabbage palm. Katherine got out of the car, the hat held out before her in offering, mortified, absolutely mortified, and she was apologizing even before she’d crossed the road.

  The young woman, a pale welt of anger stamped between her eyes, began cursing her in Italian, and she was pretty, very pretty and young, a girl really, and where had she seen her before?

  “Scusi, scusi,” Katherine was saying in a hush, spreading her hands wide in extenuation. “I’m so sorry, I feel terrible. You see, it was”—and she gestured at the car—“it was our pet, Julius. He’s an ape, you see, and I know I shouldn’t have had the window open, but—”

  “I don’t want nothing from you,” the girl spat, glaring, and she snatched her hat back and furiously jammed it down over her ears, the bicycle all the while clutched between her legs.

  “I—realty, can I offer you something, for the inconvenience? The price of a new hat? A lift to town, perhaps?”

  The girl made a rude gesture, thumb under chin, and brushed at the air with flapping hands, as if scattering insects. “Get away from me, lady,” she snarled, and then repeated herself: “I don’t want nothing from you.” She shoved forward in an angry, unsteady glide, her feet pounding at the pedals, and then she was gone.

  That should have been Katherine’s warning right there, and if she’d been thinking she would have turned round and gone straight back to the house to divest herself of one very importunate ape, but she wasn’t thinking, and she didn’t go back. “You naughty boy,” she scolded, shaking a finger at him as she climbed back into the car, and he looked so contrite, burying his face in his hands and hunching his shoulders in submission, that she hesitated. He cowered there in the corner of the seat, emitting a series of soft high-pitched sounds that might have been the whimpers of a baby fussing in a distant room, and Katherine marveled at how human and tractable he really was: he’d been naughty, and he was sorry for it. She leaned forward and tapped on the glass to get Roscoe’s attention. “Drive on,” she commanded.

  It was a mistake. Oh, Julius was a model ape for the rest of the drive, holding hands with her and peering out the window with a docile, almost studious look, but when the car pulled up in front of the Potter, with its promenading guests, snapping pennants and all-around bustle of activity, he began to show signs of excitement. In particular, he kept swelling and deflating the naked leathery sacks of his jowls as if they were bellows or a set of bagpipes, and his eyes began to race round in their sockets. As the doorman approached, he was banging the crown of his bald head against the window, over and over, till the car had begun to rock with the motion.

  “Now, Julius, take my hand and behave yourself,” Katherine said, as the door pulled back and Roscoe helped her down onto the pavement. Uncoiled, Julius sprang down in a sudden flash of bright orange fur, and all eyes were on them. People stopped in mid-stride. A pair of bicyclists skidded to a halt. The doorman gaped. But Katherine, smiling serenely, held tight to Julius’s hand and ambled up the walk as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary, and that was part of the joke, of course it was, to stroll right on into the hotel lobby as if she were on the arm of her husband. And it was all right, faces breaking out in surprise and delight after the initial shock, Katherine soaring, humming a Christmas tune to herself—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”—until they reached the revolving glass doors.

  She was able to lead Julius in, breaking her grip on his hand just as the transparent compartments separated them, but then Julius balked. Perhaps it was the novelty of the situation, the oddness of inhabiting that little glassed-in wedge of space, or maybe it was fear and bewilderment, but Julius suddenly put on the brakes and stopped the door fast. Katherine was trapped, as were an elderly woman she recognized from the breakfast room and a man in a bowler hat and corkscrew mustache who seemed to have skinned his nose on the panel in front of him. They looked first to her, and then to Julius, who stood there resolute, his massive arms locked against the glass on either side in all their rippling splendor. “Julius!” she cried, her voice magnified in that vitreous cubicle till it screamed in her own ears, “now you stop that this instant!” And she leaned forward with all her weight, the old lady and the bowler-hatted gentleman taking her cue and simultaneously flinging themselves against the glass walls in front of them.

  The door wouldn’t budge, not a fraction of an inch. But the fifth partition was open to the lobby, and one of the bellhops, a powerfully built young man, stepped into the breach, and with a mighty effort, coordinated with the renewed impetus of Katherine and her fellow hostages, succeeded in moving the doors just enough to trap himself as well. Julius lifted his upper lip and grinned at her like a horse. He licked the glass. Cooed. But nothing would move him. And no matter how furiously the young bellhop and the man with the skinned nose exerted themselves, the door remained fixed in position, as immovable as if it had been welded to the floor.

  A crowd gathered. Someone called the fire department. Katherine had never been more embarrassed in her life, both men and the old lady looking daggers at her, the rest of the pullulating world, from floor-sweeps to jeunesse dorée, studying her as if she were a sideshow attraction, elbows nudging ribs, smirks spreading across faces, silent quips exchanged by bug-eyed strangers in the walled-off vacuum of the lobby. She took it for half an hour—half an hour at least—the firemen there with their useless pry bars, Julius the equal of all comers, and then she broke down, and she didn’t care who was watching or where her dignity had fled.

  “Julius!” she screamed, pounding at the glass like a madwoman, “you stop this now! You stop it!” She sobbed. She raged. She backed up and kicked savagely at that grinning intransigent unreasoning glassed-in hominoidal face till she broke a heel and fell reeling to the little wedge of tiled floor beneath her. ‘

  Julius did a strange t
hing then. He dropped his arms, just for an instant, just long enough to part the fringe of orange hair concealing his genitalia and expose himself, right there, inches from her face, the long dark organ in its nest, the meaty bald testicles, the maleness at the center of his being, and then, before anyone could act, he shot out both hands again to catch the glass on either side of him and hold it fast in his indomitable grip.

  2.

  FOR THE MAIN AND SIMPLE REASON

  It was in 1916, in the spring, that Dr. Brush took over for Dr. Hamilton. O‘Kane remembered the day not only for what it represented to Mr. McCormick and the whole enterprise of Riven Rock—a changing of the guard, no less, and this far along—but for the heavy fog that lay over the place late into the day, and no chance of clearing. It was a transformative fog, thick and surreal, and it closed everything in like the backdrop to a bad dream so that he half expected to see ghosts and goblins materializing from the gloom along with Rosaleen and his father and the walleyed kid who’d rubbed his nose in the dirt when he was six and afraid of everything.

  He was sitting with Mart and Mr. McCormick in the upper parlor, just after lunch—and Mr. McCormick had eaten very nicely, thank you, allowing the napkin to be tucked into his collar without a fuss and using his spoon with a wonderful adroitness on the peas, potatoes and meat loaf—when there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs and they all three glanced up in unison to see a huge puffing seabeast of a man laboring up the steps under the weight of the cigar clenched between his teeth. O‘Kane’s first impulse was to laugh out loud, but he restrained himself. It was too much, it really was—the man was a dead ringer for William Howard Taft, right down to the pinniped mustache and the fifty-six-inch waistline. And after Hamilton, with his Rooseveltian spectacles, O’Kane was beginning to see a pattern developing here—he supposed the next one, if there was a next one, would look like Wilson, all joint and bone and sour schoolmastery lips. Was this some sort of private joke Dr. Meyer was pulling on them—Dr. Adolph Meyer, that is, who looked just exactly like what he was, a Kraut headshrinker with a gray-streaked headshrinker’s beard and a sense of humor buried so deep not even the Second Coming could have exhumed it?