by T. C. Boyle
On this morning, though, Mr. McCormick got the jump on both him and Mart, and by the time they got around the car he was streaking up the drive, at least fifty yards ahead of them. “Wait up, Mr. McCormick ! O‘Kane shouted, his temples already feeling as if they were about to explode. ”What about our drive?“
If Mr. McCormick heard him, he gave no sign. He just kept on, running in a flat-out sprint, running as if all his judges and demons were flocking after him, and he didn’t head for the main gate but instead surprised O‘Kane by lurching to his left, plunging deeper into the property. The road that way led to the stone garage that was set back away from the house in a grove of trees, and then it branched off to the west toward Ashley Road and the far side of the property. O’Kane chugged along, Mart at his side. “The son of a bitch,” he cursed. “Why today of all days? My head feels as big as a balloon.”
Mart, whose head wasas big as a balloon, just grunted, trotting along in his dogged, top-heavy way. “He’s heading toward the Ashley gate,” he observed in a wheezing pant, and O‘Kane looked up to see their employer wheeling again to his left and disappearing up the long snaking drive that bisected the estate. And that got his heart pounding, because that was where the nearest house was, Mira Vista, and there were women there now, imperious pampered overfed society women—women like Katherine.
O‘Kane gave it all he had, but he wasn’t worth much that morning, and he would have been the first to admit it. Sam Wah’s salvatory eggs were coming up in his throat like a plug, like something evil he was giving birth to, and his legs had begun to go numb from the hip sockets down when he became aware of a rumble and squeal at his back and turned to watch Roscoe motor on by in a farting blast of fumes, Dr. Hoch wired into the seat beside him with his beard flapping in the breeze through the open window. O’Kane kept going, though Mart had fallen by the wayside. He followed the dwindling rear panel of the big Pierce car until the gate appeared down a stretch of concrete road all hemmed in by trees and the car began to get larger again. A moment later he was there, choking for breath, feeling just exactly like the victim of an Indian uprising with six or seven arrows neatly stitched into his lungs, his groin and his liver.
Roscoe was still at the wheel, pale and washed out from his bout of the grippe, but Dr. Hoch was standing there at the open gate with Mr. McCormick, and Mr. McCormick didn’t even seem to be sweating. “What the—” O‘Kane panted, Ringing himself against the hood of the car for support. “What—?”
“Oh, Eddie,” Mr. McCormick said, his eyes gone away to hide in his head again. “Hi. I was just—I thought—well, we should go out this gate today, so I-I came to open it, because we should see the begonias, the new begonias—”
O‘Kane was stunned. He was obliterated. He had maybe nine breaths more to draw on this earth and then it was over. “Begonias’?” he wheezed.
Mr. McCormick gestured for him to turn round and look behind him. Bewildered, O‘Kane slowly pivoted and gazed back down the road that fled away into the distance and to the moving stain that was Martin Thompson limping there at the far end of it. And sure enough, there they were, a whole fresh-planted double row of them on either side of the pavement and stretching all the way back to Mart and beyond: begonias.
And then Christmas fell on them from the realms of space, the earth twisting round the sky and Aldebaran bright and persistent in the eastern sky, the season festive, the stuffed goose, the songs and drinks. Marshall Fields’ in Chicago sent out a decorated Christmas tree and foil-wrapped presents for the whole staff (which now numbered fourteen in the household and forty-seven on the grounds), along with the usual baubles and candies and tan-shelled Georgia pecans, and baskets of prime California navels that had traveled from the San Fernando Valley to Chicago and back to California again. Outside, on the front lawn, the big Monterey pine, as wide around at the base as two men fully outstretched till their fingertips met on either side, was festooned with multicolored lights and set ablaze in the night. O‘Kane sent his mother a sweater of virgin wool and a porcelain reproduction of the State of California flag for his father, and he sent Eddie, Jr. a jackknife care of his mother and not Rosaleen, who couldn’t be trusted with anything you didn’t tie round her neck with a note attached to it. And he found a filigreed bracelet in fourteen-carat white gold for Giovannella, who refused it on the grounds that Guido would want to know where it came from. “I’ll wear it only for you, Eddie,” she said. “When we’re alone. In bed.”
Katherine came and went in her customary storm of gifts, complaints and commands, but not before O‘Kane had the opportunity to listen in on her annual conversation with her husband—this time from her end of the line. It was the day before Christmas and she’d just arrived, late as usual, and that hurt Mr. McCormick to the quick and she didn’t even seem to notice. The windows were smeared with rain, it had been dark for an hour or so, and O’Kane was drunk, drunk on the job, and God help him if the Ice Queen were to pin him down with one of her endless interrogations and catch a whiff of it on his breath. He shouldn’t have been drinking, and he knew it, but it was Christmas and Sam Wah was brewing a wicked pungent rum punch with raisins and slivers of orange peel floating round the top of it and half the people on the estate were slipping in and out the back door stewed to the gills. And besides, he was depressed. It was his tenth Christmas in California, ten years of nursing and drinking and getting nowhere. He wasn’t rich yet or even close to it, he didn’t own an orange grove or an avocado ranch, his one son was an alien to him all the way across the country in Boston and the other one was named Guido—and why not get drunk?
Anyway, he was sneaking out of the kitchen and through the back hall to the central stairway after quaffing his sixth murderous cup of hot Chinese Christmas punch, when he heard Katherine’s voice and froze. It wasn’t as if he was surprised to see her—they’d all been tiptoeing around and looking over their shoulders since early that morning, even Hoch—but he was half hoping she wouldn’t come at all. She didn’t bring anybody a lick of happiness—just the opposite—and it was his opinion, shared by Nick, Pat and Mart, that Mr. McCormick would have been better off without her. The way he’d paced and fretted and worked away at himself with the soap that morning was just pathetic, as if he was afraid she could smell him over the line. He was so excited he hadn’t been able to eat his breakfast and pushed everything but the soup away at lunch, and he barely noticed the little gifts the employees had given him—Ernestine Thompson had knitted him a scarf from her and Nick, Mart gave him a pencil sharpener, and O‘Kane, in a symbolic gesture, presented him with a keychain inscribed with the legend WHEN ALL THE DOORS OPEN TO YOU. They were nothing more than tokens really, but in past years Mr. McCormick had made a big deal over them.
“What do you mean by that?” Katherine’s voice rose in anger. Edging out into the entrance hall, O‘Kane could see movement in the library beyond. It was Katherine, and her back was to him. She held the telephone in one stiff ice-sculpted hand, tilting her head forward to speak into the mouthpiece. Torkelson was stationed just outside the door like a cigar-store Indian, his face wiped clean of all interest or emotion, a butler to the core. He was staring right at O’Kane, but he never even blinked.
“I will not be talked to in that tone of voice, Stanley, I just won’t.... What did you say? Do you want me to hang this phone up right now? Do you? ... All right, now that’s better. Yes, I do love you, you know that—”
O‘Kane watched her shoulders, the movement of her wrist as she manipulated the receiver, the light gathered in her hair. He knew he should hightail it up the stairs before she turned and spotted him, but he didn’t. He was caught there, fascinated, like a boy in the woods watching the processes of nature unfold around him. There were birds in the trees, toads at his feet, snakes in the grass.
“Now Stanley—no, absolutely not. How many times do we have to go through this? I haven’t seen or heard of Butler Ames in God, ten years and more, and no, I haven’t been to dinner wit
h Secretary Baker.... I resent the implication, Stanley, and if you’re going to—no, absolutely not. Newton Baker is a friend, an old friend of the family, and as Secretary of War under President Wilson he naturally came to instruct us from time to time, and we—”
There was a silence and Katherine shifted her weight from one foot to the other and turned her profile to the open door. Her face was pale and blanched, but she was wearing makeup and red lipstick and she looked dramatic in the lamplight, like a stage actress awaiting her cue. She was listening, and O‘Kane could imagine the sort of disjointed and accusatory speech Mr. McCormick must have been delivering on the other end of the line, and he watched as she held the receiver out away from her ear and tried to compose herself.
“Don’t you say a word abut Jane Roessing—she’s a saint, do you hear me? ... That’s absolutely disgusting, Stanley, and I’m warning you, I am—really, I just don’t believe what I’m hearing. Everything is me, me, me—but did you ever stop to think what I’m going through?
“No, I’m not trying to upset you, I just want you to understand my position, to think for one minute what it must be like for me to have to go out in society without you on my arm, with no man at all, always the odd one out—
“Yes, I know you’re trying to get well. No. No, now I won’t listen to this, and you leave Jane out of it, she’s been a—I have nothing to hide. Yes, she is here. She’s come to keep me company at the hotel, and I promise you I won’t neglect you. I’ll be here every day for the next two weeks, and you just tell me what you need and I’ll—”
O‘Kane made his move then, trying to slip up the stairs while she was distracted, but even as he took the first tentative step he watched her face change—“No, she thundered, ”damn you, no; I’ve never ... Jane is just a friend“—as she swung round to slam the receiver down on its hook and let the full furious weight of her gaze settle on him. He snapped his head round—he hadn’t seen her, didn’t even know she was back, he was just a nurse doing his duty—and he felt his legs attack the stairs in a series of quick powerful thrusts. And it almost worked, almost, because he was halfway up the staircase and the iron grid of the upper parlor door in sight when her voice, strained and distinctly unladylike, caught up with him. ”Mr. O’Kane,“ she called. ”Mr. O‘Kane, will you come here a minute, please?“
Slouching, hands thrust deep in his pockets, O‘Kane descended the stairs, crossed the entrance hall and passed within six inches of Torkelson where he stood pasted to the wall outside the library door (he could see the pores in the man’s face opening up like the craters of the moon and the fleshless nub of his butler’s nose, and he swore to himself if Torkelson so much as lifted his lip in anything even vaguely resembling a smirk he was going to slug him, if not now, then later). Torkelson never moved. He drifted away on O’Kane’s periphery and then O‘Kane was in the library, conscious of the peculiar odor of the books—calfskin and dust, the astringent ink and neutral paper—and of something else too, something unexpected: cigarette smoke. Katherine was brilliant, glaring, incinerated in light. She gave him a curt nod, stepped round him and called out, “You can go now, Torkelson,” before pulling the door shut.
O‘Kane’s senses were dulled. He felt as if he were wading through hip-deep water. He stood there stupidly, all the saturated neurons of his brain shutting down one by one, until he finally noticed that he and Katherine weren’t alone. There was another woman present, a redhead in a holly-green dress short enough to show off her legs from the knees down—very good legs, in fact, and O’Kane couldn’t help noticing. She was sitting in a wing chair against a wall of books and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder.
“It’s good to see you again, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, turning back to him, but she didn’t smile and she didn’t hold out her hand. She nodded brusquely to her companion. “Mr. O’Kane, Mrs. Roessing. Jane, Mr. O‘Kane.”
O‘Kane gave them each a tight little grin, the sort of grin the hyena might give the lion while backing away from a carcass on the ancestral plains. He was feeling woozy. Sam Wah must have poured half a gallon of rum into that punch—and God knew what else.
“Have a seat, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, and she was pacing back and forth now.
He did as he was told, lowering himself gingerly to the very edge of the wing chair opposite Mrs. Roessing.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m back,” Katherine said, “and that I plan to be here for the next two weeks, seeing to estate matters, and that Jane—Mrs. Roessing—will be assisting me. Then I’ve got to get back to Washington and don’t know when I’ll return. Now: how is my husband—in your opinion? Any change?”
“He’s more or less the same.”
“And what does that mean? No improvement at all?”
O‘Kane was ready to tell her what she wanted to hear, that her husband was advancing like a star pupil, making a nimble run at sanity, needing only time and money and the ministrations of girls, women and bearded hags to make him whole again, but the alcohol tripped him up. “A little,” he shrugged. “We’ve let him have a carpet in the upper parlor again, and he’s been very good about it. And he’s been running quite a bit—for his exercise.”
“Running?” She paused in mid-step, her eyes slicing into him.
“Yes. He seems to want to run lately—when we accompany him on his daily walk, Mart and me, that is. And we took him for a drive a few weeks back, and he seemed to enjoy it.”
“And that’s it? That’s the extent of his improvement as you see it—running ? Well let me tell you, I’ve just got off the phone with him and he seems as confused as ever—or more so. And irritating”—this for the redhead, with a nod and a martyred look. “Stanley can be irritating.”
“With all due respect, Mrs.”—he almost slipped and called her Katherine—“Mrs. McCormick, and I’m no doctor, but I do feel your presence excites him and he’s not himself, not at all—”
Another look for Mrs. Roessing. “Yes, that’s what every male doctor and every male nurse has been telling me for twelve years and more now. ”
Katherine surprised him then—shocked him, actually. Suddenly she had a cigarette in her hand, as if she’d conjured it out of thin air, and she crossed the room to Mrs. Roessing and asked her for a light in a low hum that said all sorts of things to him. He watched in silence as the two women bent their heads together and Katherine lit her cigarette from the smoldering tip of Mrs. Roessing’s.
“And Dr. Hoch,” Katherine said, exhaling. “His health, I mean—he’s holding up? Spending time each day with my husband?”
O‘Kane looked from one woman to the other. He hadn’t even heard the question. Katherine was smoking. He’d never dreamed—not her. She might have been Queen of the Ice Queens, but she was a lady, a lady above all—and ladies didn’t smoke. But then he’d suspected all along that this sort of thing went hand-in-hand with marching in the streets and emancipation and all the rest of it. Radicals, that’s what they were. Pants wearers. She-men.
“Mr. O‘Kane?”
“Hm?”
Katherine’s face was like an ax. It chopped at him in the screaming light. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
He tried to put on one of his faces, Eddie O‘Kane of the silver tongue, one of the world’s great liars. “Noooo,” he protested. “I, just—I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all.”
That brought the redhead to her feet, those fine legs flexing, the holly-green dress in a frenzy of motion. The two exchanged a look. “You haven’t been running a fever, have you?” It was Mrs. Roessing talking now, and she had one of those elemental voices that gets inside you to the point where you want to confess to anything. “A kind of grippe of the lower stomach? Runs?”
O‘Kane was confused. His face was hot. Both women loomed over him. “I—no. No, it’s not that, it’s, uh—my head. My head aches, that’s all. Just a bit, the tiniest bit.”
“The chauffeur—Roscoe—he was ill, wasn’t he?
O‘Kane nodded.
“The grippe?”
“That’s right.”
Katherine spoke up again now, and her face was so pale you would have thought she’d been embalmed. “And my husband? He, he hasn’t been sick—?”
And that was how O‘Kane, drunk on Chinese Christmas punch and caught between two fraught and ashen women, learned that the Spanish influenza, which was to kill twice as many people worldwide as the War itself, had arrived in Santa Barbara.
One of the first to go was Mrs. Goux, the thick-ankled woman from the winery who trundled up and down the street each morning with an air of invincibility, trailing children and parcels and one very dirty white dog. She left behind a distraught husband and a grief-addled brood of seven, all of them howling from the upstairs windows that gave onto State Street across from Mrs. Fitzmaurice‘s, and that was depressing enough, but before anybody could catch their breath the husband and four of the children died writhing in their blankets with temperatures of a hundred and a six. Then it was Wilson, the greengrocer, a man in his thirties with the shoulders of a fullback and great meaty biceps who’d never been sick a day in his life. He told his wife he was feeling a little dyspeptic the day after Christmas and she chalked it up to overindulgence, plain and simple, and wouldn’t hear a word of the hysteria boiling up around her—not until he died two days later, that is. Their eldest son came down with it next—he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen—and Wilson’s brother Chas, who ran the ice company, and Chas’s wife, and they were all three of them dead and laid out by the New Year.