Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  “Shit.” Nick sat straight up in the chair and cranked his head round to give O‘Kane an outraged look.

  “What? He’s older now—he’s settled down. He can be with women—he should be. As long as he’s monitored.”

  “Didn’t we—all of us—say that years ago? And we’re not getting paid half what the mint in Washington prints up each month either,” Nick growled, his voice scraping bottom. “I still say you go down to one of these hootch parlors on De la Guerra or Ortega Street and find him a willing little piece once a week and let him take out his urges like any other man. It’s all that spunk clogging his brain.” And he laughed, a fat rich braying laugh that made O‘Kane want to get up out of the chair and poke him in the face a few times, good cheer or no.

  “Well, he jacks off enough, doesn’t he?” Pat said, rolling his cup between his hands; he was standing by the fire now, one elbow resting on the holly-strewn mantel, his face flushed with the drink. “I don’t look at you and Mart’s reports, but I’d say he’s going at it four or five times a week on our shift—and Lord help us if we don’t note down every little wad for Dr. Kempf, who in my opinion is half a pervert himself.”

  O‘Kane wasn’t listening. He was thinking about that—Mr. McCormick with a woman—and whether they’d get to watch. He’d have to be restrained, of course, and the woman would have to know her business—and no syph or clap, thank you, or they’d all wind up losing their jobs.

  “I think they’re lesbians,” Nick said.

  “Who?”

  “Your sweetheart Katherine and what’s her name, Mrs. Russ. You know, Eddie, cunt-lappers.”

  Well, sure. He’d suspected as much himself, way out on the periphery of his mind, but he wouldn’t dignify Nick with a response. And so what if she was, which he doubted. It was better than going off and getting herself involved with a man—that was adultery—and she must still have had the itch, even if she was getting up in years, practically the prototypical old maid in her dowdy long skirts and outsized hats... but what he would have given just to touch her when she was younger, and he thought of that day in Hamilton’s office when she bowed her head and let the tears come. And why was she crying? Because she couldn’t see her husband. Well now she could, now that it was too late to matter.

  He got up out of the chair, the fire jumping off Nick’s big face and hands and winking metallically from the strings of decorations. “Anybody for another?”

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, Giovannella was still busy with the dough—enough to make Guinea loaves and hot muffins for the twenty-two regular staff who had to be fed twice a day and a little extra to sell on the side and maybe take home to her mother and father. And her children. Never forget the children. They were her shield and her badge and the whole reason she was alive on the earth and pounding away at a corpselike lump of dough in the grand environs of the McCormick kitchen. And she was pounding, hammering away at the dough with both fists as if it were something she’d just stunned and wanted to make sure of.

  O‘Kane eased into the kitchen. Ever since their rapprochement during the earthquake two years back she’d tolerated his presence in the kitchen, but he could never tell when she’d lash out at him, not only verbally, but with any instrument, blunt or sharp, that came to hand, their entire history together bubbling and simmering in the stewpot of her eternally resentful peasant’s brain, from the time she was seventeen and a virgin and he’d seduced her, right on up to this morning, this afternoon and this evening. If Mr. McCormick had his problems with women, so did he, so did Eddie O’Kane, and they started and ended here, right here in this kitchen.

  “You still at it?” she said, pounding the dough. The maid, a girl of twenty with no chin and an overripe nose but with a spread and bloom to her that more than made up for it, started slopping a mop around. It was quitting time. The kitchen was still redolent of dinner, a roast of pork with rosemary, brown gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans, with apple turnovers for dessert.

  “It’s Christmas,” he said.

  She looked up from the dough, just her eyes, and her eyes were little pre-prepared doses of poison. “With you, it’s always Christmas.”

  He sidled up to the chopping board, where he’d left his cloven fruit and the bottle, keeping a wary eye out for any sudden movement. She wasn’t his wife, Giovannella, though he’d given in and in so many words asked her to be after the night of the marinara sauce and the big bed in the deserted and still subsiding house, but she carped and caviled at him as if she was. And that was strange too, utterly inexplicable, because that was what she’d wanted all along—for him to marry her—and then when he came for her and they were in bed and they’d had that sweetness and pleasure all over again, she’d refused him. “No, Eddie,” she’d said, the house crepitating round them, the dark an infestation, a dog howling in duress somewhere off in the shattered distance, “I can’t marry you—you’re already married, remember? Isn’t that what you told me? And besides, I couldn’t expect you, a man like you, to raise another man’s children, could I?”

  “Just one more,” he said. “For good cheer. You want one?”

  Nothing, not even a glance.

  “How about you, Mary? You want one?”

  “Get out of my kitchen,” Giovannella said. Her voice was low and dangerous and the blood had gone to her ears, her beautiful coffee-and-cream ears with the wisps of black hair tucked behind them and the puckered holes punched in the flesh for the gypsy earrings she sometimes wore. He loved those earrings. He loved those ears. And he was feeling sentimental and vague, full of affection for the world and everything in it, and for her, especially for her, for Giovannella.

  She stepped away from the breadboard and picked up the first thing she saw—a flour sifter, peeling green paint over the naked tin, a sprinkling of white dust.

  “What?” O‘Kane protested. “Come on, Giov. It’s only a little drink. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

  “Get-out-of-my-kitchen,” she said, raising the sifter ominously.

  “You’d think I was a criminal or something.”

  “You are,” she said, and there it was, that edge in her voice, as if she were about to cry or scream. “You are a criminal. Worse—you selfish stinking big prick of a man!”

  He ignored her, slicing lemons, squeezing oranges, his elbows busy, the knife moving in his hand. He was angry suddenly, the generous all-embracing mood boiling off into the air like vapor. Who did she think she was? He’d had the run of the house since she was a girl in her mother’s kitchen. “Besides,” he said over his shoulder, “Nick and Pat want one. They’re up there waiting for me—and lest you forget, I’m stranded here myself. You want me to look like an idiot and go back up there empty-handed?”

  He would have said more, working himself into a state of real rhetorical fervor, but for the fact that the sifter suddenly ricocheted off the back of his head, and here she was, coming at him with a wooden spatula the size of a bricklayer’s tool, cursing in Italian.

  The tin had gouged his head, and it was bleeding, he was sure of it, and though he had absolutely nothing to regret or retract and was just spreading a little Christmas cheer and not even drunk yet, he couldn’t help catching her by the wrist, the right wrist, just by way of defending himself. The left was another proposition all together. He’d caught the hand with the spatula, but she’d snaked away from him, as if they were doing a tarantella, everything a whirl, and snatched up a big wooden implement that looked like a mace, and already she’d managed to connect with two savage over-the-shoulder blows to his left forearm, and why, why was she doing this?

  He always felt bad when he had to hit a woman—he felt like a dog, he did—but if she was going to get familiar with him (and over what?), then he was going to get familiar with her. A pot clattered to the floor. Mary, hand to mouth, vanished. They danced away from the stove, his fingers still hooked round her wrist, the mace flailing, the breath exploding from her clamped lips in short ugly bursts—uhh-u
hh-uhh—and he just got tired of it, very tired, tired of the senselessness and her barometric moods and the way she went after him all the time, and he slapped her. Just once. But it had enough force behind it so that when he simultaneously released her arm she went hurtling back against the breadboard with a sharp annunciatory crack as of a stick being snapped in two, everything sailing out into the bright kitchen void and the pale laid-out corpse of the dough upended unceremoniously on the floor.

  There was no sequel. Nothing at all. No apologies or recriminations, no battle rejoined or tears shed. Because at that moment—Giovannella slapped, the dough ruined, O‘Kane half-drunk and outraged and cursing and swollen up to the full height and breadth of him—there came a sudden single excoriating cry that froze them both in place: “Mama!” O’Kane looked to the door, the open door, and there stood little Guido, eleven years old and already thick in the shoulders, and what was in his eyes besides shock and terror and rage? Three o‘clock. Three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Lunch was a success, everyone agreed. O‘Kane lingered in the dining room with Katherine, Dr. Kempf and Mrs. Roessing while Mart escorted Mr. McCormick up to bed for his postprandial nap, and the feeling of relief and self-congratulation was palpable. It was as if they’d all gone through a war together, or a battle at least, and now here they were, all intact and no casualties. “Well, Katherine, Jane, didn’t I tell you?” Kempf crowed, stirring a lump of sugar into the black pool of his coffee.

  O‘Kane was stationed at the door, hands in pockets. He’d been about to retreat, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, when Kempf signaled him with his eyes. He knew what his role was. Moral support. The nurse in evidence.

  Katherine was glowing. Her lips were pursed with pleasure and she sipped at her coffee as if it were an infusion of new blood and new life. “It was wonderful, it really was. Stanley was so ... so much like his old self.”

  And what was so wonderful? That she’d sat down to a meal with her husband for the first time since 1906 and he hadn’t attacked her, dumped the soup over his head or jumped out the window? Small victories, O‘Kane was thinking. But it was a start, one step at a time, just like when they’d had to teach him to walk all over again. It had happened. It was a fact.

  “What did you think, Jane?”

  Mrs. Roessing must have been in her mid-forties, by O‘Kane’s calculation, but she looked ten years younger, what with her makeup and her clothes and her bright red marcelled hair. She gave Katherine a look, all eyes and teeth. “Well, I can’t really say I’m an authority on the subject, since I never knew Stanley’s old self, but his new one, at least as I saw him here today, was absolutely charming, don’t you think, Dr. Kempf?”

  The doctor drew himself up, the neat slightly puffed pale little hands, the painted hair and shimmering skull. He was a puppeteer, a ventriloquist, the mad scientist showing off his creature, Svengali with his Trilby. “My word for it exactly,” he said with a polished grin. “Charming.”

  O‘Kane had been amazed himself, especially after the previous afternoon’s performance—Mr. McCormick had been a model of behavior, exactly like the man he’d golfed with at McLean, genial, courtly, haunted by neither demons nor judges. He’d been up and about when O’Kane arrived, full of smiles and little jokes, and he was very precise and efficient with his shower bath—he didn’t squat on the tiles to soap his toes or rub himself raw with the towel. And he whistled, actually whistled in the shower, like a man on his way to work, “Beautiful Dreamer” echoing off the walls, followed by a spirited rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” He breakfasted with perfect comportment and good humor, joking over the toughness of the ham (which wasn’t really tough at all, if you had a knife and fork to hand, which he didn‘t, and he was acknowledging the absurdity of his predicament in his own sly way) and teasing Mart over his expanding girth (“Excuse me, Mart, but is that a life preserver you’re wearing under your jacket?”).

  After breakfast, he took a stroll to the theater building and back, and then twice round the house, and he walked very nicely, not bothering with the cracks between the flagstones and hardly dragging his leg at all. Then there was his daily two-hour session with Dr. Kempf, from which he often emerged very upset and confused, sometimes speechless, sometimes with tears in his eyes or in a rage, but not today. Today he was perfectly composed, smiling even.

  She was seated in the grand entrance hall, dressed all in gray, and O‘Kane could see she’d put some time and thought into her outfit—she looked good, very good, better than she had yesterday or a year ago even. Mrs. Roessing was a middle-aged flapper in ultramarine and a silver wraparound hat, and those very fine and shapely legs exposed all the way up to her thighs in white silk stockings you could have licked right off her. O’Kane stood there like part of the decor.

  “Katherine,” Mr. McCormick said in a pleasant, muted voice, coming right up to her and taking her hand, which he bent to kiss, glove and all. And then, grinning till you’d think his face would split open, he turned to Mrs. Roessing. “And this must be, must be”—and here he lost himself a moment, understandably, twenty years and all that leg, and O‘Kane braced himself for the worst—“Jane,” he said finally, all the air gone out of him. Amazingly, he took her hand too, and bent to kiss it as if he were playing a part in a movie.

  Butters took the ladies’ wraps, Mart slunk out from behind the statue, and after a few inconsequential remarks about the weather—And how lucky you are, Stanley, to have this heavenly climate year-round and you should just see Philadelphia this time of year, snow up to, well, snow up to here—the whole party made its halting way into the dining room. The table could seat eighteen in comfort, but Butters had instructed Mary to set four places at the far end of it, Mr. McCormick to sit at the head of the table, as he was the host, his wife on his right-hand side, Dr. Kempf on his left, and Mrs. Roessing to the doctor’s left. Mart and O‘Kane were to stand guard and watch them eat.

  Essential to all this was Giovannella, stalking round the kitchen with her left arm in a sling—no, it wasn’t broken, only sprained—her eyes breeding rage while Mary and one of the houseboys scuttered round like scared rabbits. O‘Kane had brought her flowers and a box of candy, and he’d actually crawled through the kitchen door on his hands and knees at eight-thirty A.M. to beg her forgiveness, but she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t even look at him, and that was the end of that, at least for now. Butters would be serving at table, and they would start with caviar, large gray grain caviar from Volga sturgeon, served on little glass plates set down airily between the big yellow Arezzo dinner plates, and wine, real wine, decanted from an enigmatic green bottle.

  There was soup—minestrone, one of Giovannella’s specialities—followed by financières aux truffes from Diehl‘s, a salad and Italian food for the main course, very Continental. Mr. McCormick’s veal had been cut up for him in the kitchen, so as not to cause him any embarrassment vis-à-vis the six silver spoons of varying size laid out at his place, and O’Kane had been instructed to particularly watch that he didn’t snatch up a knife or fork from one of his fellow diners’ settings. They chatted. Ate. Sipped at their wine. O‘Kane watched, his back to the wall, and he felt the prickings of his salivary glands and the tumultuous rumblings of his stomach—this was when he hated his job most, this was when he felt his place, one more servant in a sea of them.

  Mrs. Roessing praised the grounds—Had Stanley really had as much of a hand in laying them out as she’d heard?

  Dr. Kempf: “Yes, Stanley, go ahead.”

  Mr. McCormick: “I, well, I—yes.”

  Mrs. Roessing (leaning in to show off the jewels at her throat): “It’s such a talent, landscaping, I mean—I just wish I had it. Really, my place in Philadelphia is going to the dogs, if you know what I mean.”

  Katherine: “Stanley’s always been clever that way—with drawings and architecture too. Haven’t you, Stanley?”

  Dr. Kempf: “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

  Mr.
McCormick: “My mother ... she always said I was, but then she wouldn’t... And I stud-studied in Paris, sketching, I mean, with Monsieur Julien. At his studios.”

  Dr. Kempf (by way of explanation): “Julien was very big at the turn of the century, practically doyen of the Paris art world—Stanley produced some very unique sketches under him, didn’t you, Stanley?”

  Mr. McCormick: “I, well, yes. In pencil and charcoal too. I sketched the Pont-Neuf neuf times. But no nudes, never any nudes. And what do you think of that, Mrs., Mrs. Jane?”

  Mrs. Roessing: “Marvelous. Simply marvelous.”

  It went on like that for two hours, through the successive courses, the desserts, the fruits and now, finally, the coffee. “And what’s your assessment, Dr. Kempf,” Katherine asked all of a sudden, and a chill had come over her, the Ice Queen showing her face. “Can we expect more of this self-awareness and lucidity? Or is this a sort of act you’ve trained Stanley up to perform, like a dog jumping through a hoop?”

  Kempf set down his cup, bowed his head, rubbed his eyes and shot a look at O‘Kane, all in the space of a second. “I did talk to him, yes. Yesterday he was afraid of you, afraid you wouldn’t recognize him—or love him still. We went over that this morning and we agreed that there was nothing to be afraid of, that you were his wife and would always love him. You see, the idea is to reeducate him, resocialize him, and introducing him into social situations, particularly in the company of women, is essential. In fact, I’m thinking of hiring on a female nurse.”

  This took O‘Kane by surprise. Women, yes, but a female nurse? Upstairs? Locked in with him?

  Katherine said nothing to this. The specter of the female nurse hung in the air a moment, just short of materializing, and then it dissolved. Mrs. Roessing asked for the cream. Kempf looked as if he were about to say something, but held his tongue.