Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  O‘Kane was spooked. He walked by Wilson’s and the shutters were down and a black wreath hanging on the door, and from the front door at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s he could see the sheet of paper taped to the window of the winery: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The streets were deserted. Menhoff’s was like a tomb. And Fetzer’s Drugstore sold out of gauze masks in fifteen minutes. But how did you catch the ’flu in the first place? From other people. And how did they catch it? From other people. And the first one, the very first case—how did he catch it? Mart was of the opinion that it was a judgment of God, “because of the War and all,” and Nick said it was demobilization that was spreading it. Mrs. Fitzmaurice put it down to uncleanliness, and no use discussing it further—you didn’t see anybody in her house coming down with it, did you? O‘Kane took a pint of whiskey up to his room each night and lay on the bed and brooded, and when New Year’s Eve rolled around he went out and celebrated with a crowd that was so scared they had to drain every bottle in sight just to reassure themselves.

  At Riven Rock, they were relatively lucky. Only Mart and one of Sam Wah’s kitchen boys—a moonfaced kid known only as Wing—came down sick. Mart was laid up for a week and a half in the back room at his brother Pat’s house, and Pat’s wife Mildred wrapped him in cold towels to bring down the fever and poured hot chicken broth down his throat when he broke out in shivers. Wing died. That was a terrible thing—he was just a boy, Wing, with a quick smile, a thin trailing braid of hair like Paul Revere’s in the old lithographs and not a word of English—and it hit everybody hard, but none harder than Katherine. Not on Wing’s account—she didn’t even know him except as a name in the accounts-payable column in the weekly pay ledger—but on Mr. McCormick’s. The infection was in the house, not out in the fields or festering in the gutters and saloons, but right here at Riven Rock. It had struck Mart and Wing. It could strike her husband.

  The thought seemed to galvanize her. She postponed her return to Washington for the duration of the epidemic, and for the first week, when the fear was fresh and new, she burst through the doors at Riven Rock each morning at eight, Mrs. Roessing, two maids and Dr. Urvater, one of the local sawbones, in tow. All of them were wearing gauze masks—“The ‘flu is spread pneumonically,” she kept saying, “as much or more than by direct contact”—and she insisted that the whole staff, including a champing and furious Sam Wah, wear masks as well. And while Dr. Urvater depressed Mr. McCormick’s tongue and looked into his ears and chatted amicably with Dr. Hoch about cheeses and leder-hosen and such, Katherine swept through the lower rooms in a flurry of servants and a powerfully salubrious odor of disinfectant. Every surface was wiped down with a solution of bleach or carbolic acid, and the doorknobs, bannisters, telephones and light switches were swabbed hourly. She was a scientist. She was an Ice Queen. And the ’flu had better take notice.

  For his part, O‘Kane did as he was told. He wore a gauze mask, looked suitably grave and made a show of turning doorknobs with a bleach-soaked cloth in hand, but the minute Katherine left for the day or he ascended the stairs and entered Mr. McCormick’s sanctum, he peeled off the mask and tucked it in his pocket. He’d never seen anything like this epidemic—every time you turned around you heard about somebody else dropping down dead—and it scared him, it did, but to his mind Katherine was taking things a bit far. He had no fears for himself—he had his father’s constitution and nothing could touch him, unless it came out of a bottle, and there was no degree of luck in the world that could save you from that—but he was afraid for Mr. McCormick, even if he did think the masks and disinfectant were just a lot of female hysteria. The rest of the staff shared his fears, though nobody wanted to talk about it. Mr. McCormick might have been crazy as a bedbug, but he was the rock and foundation of the place, and if he fell, how many would fall with him?

  Their employer and benefactor seemed fine, though—hale and hearty and in the peak of health. On doctor’s orders (and Katherine‘s, working behind the scenes) he wasn’t allowed out for his walks or even to go to the theater building until all this blew over, and that made him a touch irritable. He took to wearing his gauze mask atop his head, like a child’s party hat, and he toyed with Dr. Urvater over the tongue depressor and the thermometer, clamping down like a bulldog and refusing to let go until Dr. Hoch pushed himself up from the couch and intervened. Every day he talked with Katherine on the phone, she in the downstairs parlor with her carbolic acid and he a floor above her, and that seemed to have an exciting effect on him, but as far as O’Kane could see he didn’t develop so much as a sniffle, let alone the ‘flu.

  “I think she’s going way overboard,” Nick said one morning as he and O‘Kane were waiting for Mr. McCormick to finish up his shower bath. He was filling in for Mart on the day shift, while Pat sat alone with Mr. McCormick through the nights. “Rubbing down the god-damned doorknobs, for Christ’s sake. But better too much too soon than too little too late, that’s my motto.”

  “I know what you mean,” O‘Kane said, standing at the door to the shower room, just out of reach of the spray. Mr. McCormick was crouched naked over the wet tiles, meticulously soaping his toes, and O’Kane was reflecting on how he’d spent more of his adult life looking at Mr. McCormick in the nude than at any woman, and that included Giovannella and his long-lost wife. “We’d be in hot water if anything happened to him. I’ll be all right once I get in on this citrus ranch I was telling you about—Jim Isringhausen’s only looking to line up a couple more investors—but if I wasn’t working here, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d hate to have to go back to mopping up shit and blood on the violent ward.”

  “Amen.” Nick let out a sigh. He was leaning back against the tile wall, droplets of condensation forming on his eyebrows and the fine pickets of hair that stood guard above the dome of his forehead. He was blocky and big, still muscular but running to fat in his haunches and around the middle because all he and Pat ever did was sit by Mr. McCormick’s bed all through the night and then sleep when everybody else was up and about. And he wasn’t getting any younger. “Yeah, I’d be in a fix if anything happened to Mr. McCormick, and so would Pat and Mart. Of course, not everybody would be so bad off if he went and kicked the bucket.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” he said, a sly look creeping across his face, “her, for instance. You know: your sweetheart.”

  “Katherine?”

  He nodded, watching for a reaction. “Makes you wonder why she’s playing Florence Nightingale around here, doesn’t it? If he was to go, she’d be the one to get everything, the houses and the cars and more millions than you could count. And no more crazy husband.”

  Nick had a point, but it only confirmed what O‘Kane had maintained all along—Katherine really cared about her husband’s welfare, and it wasn’t just an act, say what you would about her. And he wondered about that and what it meant, especially when he thought about Dolores Isringhausen and how she treated her husband—or Rosaleen, or even Glovannella and her little shoemaker. Women were conniving and false, and he’d always believed that—all of them, except his mother, that is, and maybe the Virgin Mary. And every marriage was a war for dominance—who loved who and who loved who the most—a war in which women always had the upper hand, always scheming, always waiting for the chance to stab you in the back. But not Katherine. Not the Ice Queen. She had her husband right where she wanted him—in a gilded cage—and no sick canary ever got better care.

  “By the way,” Nick said, and Mr. McCormick had begun to sing to himself now, a tuneless low-pitched moan that could have been anything from a highbrow symphony to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “did you hear about the wop shoemaker? You know, the one with the little wife, you, uh—” and he let his hands round out the phrase.

  “What about him?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “No, what?”

  “He’s dead. Two, three days ago. Ernestine told me because she went to get her boots resoled and there’s a wreath
on the door of the place and all these Guineas beating their breasts and hollering in the street. It’s a shame, it really is, and I don’t think any of us are safe anymore—not till this thing burns itself out or it gets all of us, every last one, and then we won’t have nothing to worry about, will we?”

  O‘Kane had Roscoe drop him off in front of Capolupo’s Shoe Repair as soon as he got off his shift, but the place was closed and shuttered and there was no answer at the door to the apartment above. He rattled the doorknob a few times, pounded halfheartedly at the windowframe, and then, for lack of a better plan, sat down to wait. He’d worked overtime to help cover for Mart, and it was late—quarter past nine—and he couldn’t imagine where Giovannella would be, unless they hadn’t buried the shoemaker yet and there was some sort of Guinea wake going on someplace. He leaned back, wishing he’d thought to pick up a pint of something or even a bottle of wine, and pulled the collar of his jacket round his throat. It was cold, cold for Santa Barbara anyway, probably down in the mid-forties. He listened to the night, the sick bleat of a boat horn carrying across the water from the harbor, the ticking rattle of a car’s exhaust, a cat or maybe a rat discovering something of interest in the alley below, and all the while he thought about Giovannella and what he would say to her. And just thinking about her and how she’d be free now to come to him anytime, day or night, and no excuses or explanations for anybody, was enough to spark all sorts of erotic scenarios in his head, and he saw her climbing atop him, her lips puffed with pleasure, nipples hard and dark against her dark skin, it’s like riding a horse, Eddie, come on, horsie, come on—

  He couldn’t marry her, of course, and she knew that—it would be bigamy, even though she was trotting around town with his green-eyed son in a pair of kneepants and you’d have to be blind not to know it was his son and nobody else‘s—but for half an hour or so he thought how it might be to take up housekeeping with her somewhere far enough away so nobody would know the difference. They could get a place in Carpenteria, seven miles to the south and right on the ocean, with that sweet breeze fanning the palms and everything so small and quiet, and just claim they were man and wife, and who was going to dispute it? But then he’d have to get a car, and renting a house—that would be something, like moving in with Rosaleen and Old Man Rowlings all over again, the baby squalling, shit strewn from one end of the place to the other...

  At ten-thirty, chilled through and thoroughly disgusted with himself—and with Giovannella and even Guido for having the bad grace to die off and stir the pot like this—O‘Kane pushed himself up and went back along the hushed and empty streets to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The place was dark, but for the light in the entrance hall, and he let himself in with exaggerated caution, wondering vaguely if there was anything left in the emergency bottle he kept on the floor behind the bureau—and he was picturing it, actualizing that amber bottle in his mind—when he saw that there was a package for him on the table in the hall.

  It was small, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and with a slight heft to it, more than paper would carry anyway. Dirty white tape was double- and triple-wrapped around the outside of it and he could see the imprint of a thumb under a loop of tape and a few stray hairs trapped beside it in the film of glue. He recognized the handwriting immediately : Rosaleen’s. For a moment he hesitated, turning the thing over in his hand. This couldn’t be what it felt like—a gift, a belated Christmas gift, maybe from Eddie Jr.—no, it couldn’t be. If Rosaleen had anything to do with it, it was going to be the sort of thing he’d be better off looking at tomorrow, in the light of day, when Giovannella wasn’t so much in his mind.

  He shifted the package from one hand to the other, looking off down the length of the dark parlor with its spidery plants and dim furniture and the rugs that had been beaten to within an inch of their lives. What the hell, he thought, and he sat in the stiff chair in the hallway and tore the thing open. The tape slipped away from his fingers, the paper fell to the floor. And now he was even more bewildered than he’d been a moment ago: here was the jackknife he’d sent to Eddie Jr., come right back to his hand like a boomerang. But wait, there was more, a message, a note curled up like a dead leaf inside the husk of tape and wrapping paper and inscribed in the smudged semiliterate scrawl that spoke so eloquently of Rosaleen’s innermost being:Deere Eddie:

  I cannot live a lie anymore. I never wrote you in sept. but the spannish flue hit here and our son died of it. He was burried in the St. Columbanus cemetary and I never told your mother or anybody heres the Jack nife back he would of loved it.

  Yours, etc Rosaleen

  He didn’t have a chance to react, because at that moment somebody began tapping insistently at the window set in the front door. (And how was he supposed to react anyway—fall to his knees, tear his hair out, bemoan his fate to the heavens? The sad truth was that he’d never known his son. A stranger had died someplace, that was all, and so what if he had Eddie O‘Kane’s eyes and his walk and the look of him when he smiled or brooded or skinned his knee and came running to his mother with the tears wet on his face? So what?)

  The tapping grew louder—chink-chink-chink-chink—and he dropped the letter and drifted stupidly toward the door. There was a face pressed to the glass in the dark of the night, the image of his own wondering face superimposed over it. It took him a minute, because he was thinking of ghosts, of the disinterred spirits of little deserted bare-legged boys dead of the epidemic ‘flu and come back to haunt him, and then he realized who it was tapping with a coin at the brittle glass and not a thought to Mrs. Fitzmaurice sleeping the wakeful sleep of the eternally vigilant at the end of the hall: it was Giovannella.

  She was saying something, mouthing the words behind the glass to the accompaniment of a series of frantic gestures. She had to see him—she wanted to—did he know?

  He opened the door and there she was, brushing past him and into the hallway with her broad beautiful face and her eyes that knew everything about him, and Guido, little Guido, his only surviving son, thrown over her shoulder like something she’d picked up at the market, like so many pounds of pork roast or beef brisket. As soon as he’d closed the door she whirled round on him and clutched at his neck with her free hand, crushing her mouth to his, and it was theatrical and wild and it brought his attention into the sharpest of focus. “He’s dead,” she hissed, throwing back her head to look him in the eye. “He’s dead of the ‘flu.”

  He put a finger to his lips. Mrs. Fitzmaurice would be pricking up her ears, past ten o‘clock at night and a strange woman in the house, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, who was raging and furious and sexless as a boot. “Shhhh!” he warned, half-expecting to see the landlady stationed behind him in her declamatory nightgown that fell to the floor and beyond. “I know.”

  She pressed into him again, held him tight, little Guido sandwiched between them, the heat of her and her odor like no other woman‘s, cloves, garlic, vanilla, onions frying to sweetness in the pan. “I’m scared, Eddie,” she whispered. “Guido... I ... I nursed him, and he died burning up with the fever and so sad and pathetic he couldn’t open his mouth to say a word to me or even the priest, no last words, no nothing ... and the smell of him—it was horrible, like he was all eaten up inside and nothing left of him but shit.” She was trembling, a vein pulsing at the base of her throat, the hair fallen loose under the brim of her hat and slicing into her eyes. “I’m afraid I might’ve ... or little Guido, Eddie, our son. They say you can catch it just by walking past somebody on the street, and you have to understand, Eddie, I nursed him, I nursed Guido.”

  Her eyes were two revolving pits, two trenches draining everything out of her face, and she wouldn’t let go of him. He was scared too. First Eddie Jr. and now this—what if she did catch it? What if she died, like Wilson and Mrs. Goux and Wing? What then? He looked over his shoulder, down the hallway to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s door, everything soft and indistinct in the dim light of the lamp. “You’re young and strong,” he heard himself saying. “If you
get it, you’ll shake it off. Like Mart. Did I tell you about Mart?”

  “I’m a widow, Eddie,” she said.

  He nodded. She was a widow. Widowhood. Viduity. That was the state she was in, a sorry state, twenty-eight years old and bereft, and with a son to raise.

  “We can be together now.”

  He nodded again, but he didn’t know why. He wanted to tell her about Eddie Jr., about the regret that was ripening inside him till it was about to turn black and become something else, something rotten and despairing, something cold, something hard. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. And he tried to pull away from her—just to breathe—but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Looking down, looking at her feet in a pair of dusty old high-buttoned shoes some customer must have left behind at the shop: “I heard. But listen, let’s go outside and talk so Mrs. Fitzmaurice—”

  “I don’t want to go outside. I want to be here. With you. Look,” she said, backing off a step and stripping the child away from her shoulder so he could see the fat infantile face staring sleepily into his own, “your son, Eddie. He’s your son and you’re my husband. Don’t you understand ? I’m a widow. Don’t you know what that means?”

  “I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”

  He watched the lines gather in her forehead while her eyes narrowed and her mouth drew itself tight. “I spit on your marriage,” she said, swinging wildly away from him, and he was afraid she was going to knock over one of the darkened lamps, afraid she was going to wake the house, stir up Mrs. Fitzmaurice, turn everything in his life upside down.

  He told her to shut up, to shut the fuck up.

  She told him to go to hell.

  And who was that now? Somebody at the head of the stairs—was it Maloney?—and an angry voice looping down at them like a lariat. “Keep it down, will ya? People are tryin’ to sleep up here.”