Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  “And what about his teeth?” Katherine suddenly demanded. She glanced at Mrs. Roessing. “And his body odor?”

  “He bathed just this morning, didn’t he, Eddie?” Kempf said, swinging round in his seat to address O‘Kane.

  “Yes, sir, he did, and very nicely too. He bathes every day, without fail.”

  “His teeth are another matter,” Kempf said, “and we’re all very concerned about their condition, but as you know, your husband has an aversion to dentists and it’s been difficult—” ‘

  “Body and mind,” Katherine said. “Mens sana in corpore sano.”

  “All things in time,” the doctor said. “The mind and body are one, as you suggest, and by treating the mind I am treating the body. You wait and see. As his mind becomes free of its impediments, his teeth will improve spontaneously. And then, if we still feel we need to consult a dentist, we’ll bring one in—once he’s well enough—just as we’ve brought you ladies in today.” He paused a moment to brood over his cup. “You should be gratified, Katherine, after Stanley’s performance today—and I hope you’ll give me a little credit for it.”

  “But that’s just it—it was a performance. I want my husband sane and sound, and I’m worn out with waiting. And I don’t see that psychoanalysis is the ne plus ultra—as you well know. I’ve been in contact with Dr. Roy Hoskins, of Harvard, and he’s had great success in cases like Stanley’s by correcting glandular irregularities and I see no reason why he shouldn’t be called in to examine my husband to see if there isn’t some somatic solution to all this. After all, you can’t deny that he shows certain features of hyperthyroidism—his height, the disproportionate length of his digits and other appendages, which on seeing him today seem to me to have grown, and quite noticeably, and I really feel—”

  Kempf cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand. “I couldn’t disagree more. Psychoanalysis got him into this room to sit down at table and conduct himself as a gentleman in the presence of ladies, and psychoanalysis will provide his cure—if we can speak of a cure at all in these cases. He is not a hyperpituitary case, and gland feeding will accomplish absolutely nothing, I assure you.”

  The Ice Queen wouldn’t let go of it. “It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it? I really wish you would at least consider—”

  “I’m sorry, Katherine,” Kempf said, bringing the cup to his lips and giving her a long steady look. “Though I take note of what you’re saying and I’m willing to try anything short of witchcraft to improve your husband’s condition, believe me, the analytic approach is the best one, and as long as I’m in charge you’ll have to let me make those decisions. He’s improving. You’ve seen the result of it today.”

  Katherine leaned into the table, both her elbows stabbing at the cloth so that it bunched up around them. “Yes,” she said acidly, “and I saw it yesterday.”

  “At least you’re seeing him,” Kempf shot back. “Isn’t that something? ”

  “Yes, yes it is, doctor—Edward,” she said. “But I expect more, much more. And I intend to stay right here in Santa Barbara for as long as it takes to see my husband’s health restored—both mental and physical. That’s my mission, that and nothing else.” She looked to Mrs. Roessing for approval, and Mrs. Roessing, smoke streaming from her nostrils over her pursed and pretty lips, gave her a wink.

  “What’s more,” Katherine went on, the Ice Queen, all buoyed up now and never satisfied, never, “let me remind you that I am the one who will make the final decisions here. All of them.”

  Katherine was true to her word. Every day at one, through Christmas and the New Year, on through the soft stirring close of winter and the advent of the spring that was just like the winter, fall and summer that had preceded it, she and Mrs. Roessing came to have lunch with Mr. McCormick and to sit with him as late as five or six some afternoons, playing at cards or reading aloud to one another or simply sitting there in a swollen bubble of silence. O‘Kane was present for all of it, and so was Mart. Mr. McCormick’s improvement had been dramatic and he was making new strides every day, but he was still dangerous and unpredictable, still a threat to his guests and himself, and when he’d made his good-byes—always bowing and scraping and kissing the women’s outstretched hands in a drama of self-effacement and servility that made O’Kane queasy to watch—his nurses escorted him back upstairs to the barred windows and the iron door.

  He had his bad days still, days when he would stagger out of Kempf’s office in the theater house with his eyes streaming and his lips drawn tight, and then he’d try to run or take out his anger on some innocent shrub the gardeners had been attentively nurturing and shaping for years. Once, when O‘Kane gave him a gentle nudge toward the house after he’d begun to stray, he bent down, pried up one of the flagstones and chased both him and Mart all round the lawn with the thing held up over his head like a weapon. Another time, for no reason at all, he kneed Mart in the privates and boxed O’Kane’s right ear so savagely it buzzed and twittered for days, like a dead telephone connection. “What’d you do that for, Mr. McCormick?” O‘Kane protested, clutching the side of his head while Mart blanched to the roots of his hair and sat himself awkwardly down in the daphne bed, right atop a gopher’s mound. “Be-because,” Mr. McCormick stammered, his face clenched like a fist, “because I—I hate, I hate—” He never finished the phrase. Not that day, anyway.

  Still, he was improved, vastly improved, and being with women—seeing them, smelling their perfume, touching their hands with the driest fleeting caress of his lips—seemed to be working wonders for him. Katherine began to bring Mr. McCormick’s twenty-year-old niece, Muriel, with her on occasion, and at Dr. Kempf’s suggestion, they began to take Mr. McCormick on outings. At first they confined themselves to the estate, picnicking amongst the Indian mounds or taking advantage of the views from the upper reaches of the property, but before long—under supervision of Kempf, O‘Kane and Martin, of course—they began having beach parties. Katherine rented a cabana on one of the splendid south-facing beaches in Carpinteria where the waves broke in gentle synchronization and you could ride them in like a dolphin, the water as warm as a bath. It was comical to see Mr. McCormick in his bathing costume, his limbs pale as a Swede’s, crab-walking up to the quavering line of foam and seawrack and then dashing back like a grade-school boy as the water washed over his toes. Comical, but healthy. It stunned O‘Kane to think of it as he sat there on his beach towel, eyes riveted on Mr. McCormick while two men hired for the day hovered just beyond the breakers in a rowboat against the darker potentialities, but in all his years living here in the paradise of the world, Mr. McCormick had never once touched the ocean nor had it touched him.

  It was a good time. A happy time. A time of hope. Everyone, even Nick, began to feel that something extraordinary was happening, and they were all of them almost afraid of speaking of it for fear of jinxing it. Mr. McCormick was experiencing life again, out of his cage, reintegrating himself into the grander scheme of things, particle by particle, and for his nurses, that promised—maybe, possibly, eventually—an end to their labors, and a reward. And who knew?—perhaps it would be a substantial reward, a lump sum, every punch and kick and smear on the sheets accruing interest over the unwieldy course of the years.

  But it wasn’t to be. If McCormick’s constricted life had miraculously dilated during that amazing summer, opening and opening again as if there were no longer any limits, any judges, any fear or despair or self-loathing or sheer immitigable craziness, there came a day in September—and O‘Kane could name it—when things began to close in again. It started with the beach. An ordinary day, the sun high and white, Mr. McCormick in good spirits, the ocean rolling and rolling all the way out to the islands that were wrapped in a band of silver fog. There was the picnic luncheon. The cabana. Young Muriel was there, daughter of a Rockefeller and a McCormick, her legs browned from the sun and her hair turned golden, and Katherine and Mrs. Roessing too, the latter daring in a skirtless bathing suit. Everyth
ing seemed fine, until Mr. McCormick, waist-deep in the surf with O’Kane to one side of him and Mart to the other, suddenly cried out shrieking in a way that made you think of men murdered in a dark alley, slit throats, the bayonet in the gut. He was shrieking suddenly and hopping on one foot till he lost his balance and plunged his face into the water and the wet sand beneath, the surf relentless and O‘Kane and Mart dragging him out of the water by his arms.

  What was the matter? What had happened? Was he all right? Was he hurt? Kempf, Katherine, Muriel, Mrs. Roessing, Mart, O‘Kane and even the two men from the boat all crowding round, and Mr. McCormick just clutching his foot and screaming. “The Judges!” he bawled. “I knew they’d get me, I knew it!” His hair hung in his eyes and his face was twisted and wet, the black of his throat and the jagged craters of his rotten teeth, sand like a hairshirt all over his prickled body. Later they discovered the cause—it was legitimate and real: he’d been lacerated by a stingaree—but that was the end of ocean bathing, and of the beach.

  It was also the end of Mr. McCormick’s positive phase, because overnight he became mistrustful and paranoic again, and no amount of reasoning—the stingaree lives in the sea, it meant you no harm, it was an accident, these things happen—would convince him that the whole episode hadn’t been planned as a punishment for him. And he seemed, finally, to blame the women, their presence, for what had happened. If it weren’t for them he wouldn’t have been at the beach—were they trying to kill him, was that it? Was Katherine after his money? Did she want to see him dead? The next day he wouldn’t come to lunch, though Katherine and Mrs. Roessing were waiting in the dining room for him; O‘Kane and Mart were prepared to drag him down the stairs, but Kempf said no. When he wanted to see women again, he would. On his own terms. Give him time, Kempf said.

  Two days went by. Three. A week. And still Mr. McCormick refused to come down those stairs, and when the rumor reached him one afternoon that Katherine was coming up, he threw one of his fits, replete with the smashed furniture and the deranged raving and the foam on his lips. Katherine had become impatient and began to nag at Kempf, in O‘Kane’s presence, threatening and storming like a madwoman in her own right: she was used to seeing her husband again, seeing him daily, and now she’d been cut off from him once more. It was intolerable. She’d have Kempf’s head—or his job at least, all ten thousand dollars a month’s worth.

  It was then, right at the end of September, that the nurses decided to take matters into their own hands. “It’s a dirty shame,” Nick said one night when both O‘Kane and Mart had stayed behind their time because Roscoe was otherwise occupied and wouldn’t be back till nine. They all agreed. Mr. McCormick had come so far and now he was spiraling back, two full turns a day, and no one to reverse his direction. “What about what we discussed, back around Christmas of last year, remember, Eddie?” Nick said. “Getting him a woman, I mean. If his wife can’t do it for him, some—what would you call her?—some consulting nurse could. Right?”

  O‘Kane was elected, because of his reputation with women—a reputation long since obscured by Giovannella and little Guido and Edwina and the business end of the bottle, but never mind that. He went down to Spanishtown the next night—and it had changed, squeezed and reduced by the grand new buildings going up in the wake of the earthquake—and asked around a few of the joints he knew. It was all underground, speakeasies, triple knock and codeword—“Clara Bow”; “Big Bill”; “Dixieland”—but anybody who knew anybody or anything could get in and no questions asked. He found her at the third place he tried, a cramped downstairs space so full of people, noise and smoke there was no room to breathe, let alone enjoy a drink of whatever shit they were selling behind the bar. O’Kane sampled a few anyway, leaning into the bar as if it were a bed, a pillow, Giovannella with her dress up and a smile on her face, and when he turned his head, there she was.

  She was sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room, people dancing and jostling all around her and nobody even giving her a second glance. She had a compressed, angry look about her, bad luck and worse news all the way round, and she was clutching a cigarette as if she were trying to strangle it. Smiling Eddie O‘Kane, pimp to the McCormicks, moved in. “Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

  She glared at him.

  He sat down.

  “Buy you a drink?” he offered. The music was furious, clarinet, piano, drums, people doing the shimmy and the Charleston, the very table shaking with the thump and roar of it.

  Her mouth softened. She’d been holding it very tightly, as if it might fall off her face and shatter if she wasn’t the carefulest girl in the world. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. “Sure,” she said, and her lips fell back in what she probably thought was a smile.

  They agreed on a price—it was dicey, real dicey, because all the way up the stairs, out the door and into the big blue-black Pierce Arrow limousine she thought she was going to bed with him, Eddie O‘Kane—but when he explained the situation to her somewhere between the Salt Pond and Hot Springs Road, she began to balk, especially seeing the car and its appurtenances and Roscoe up front in his monkey cap, and he had to double the price to keep her quiet. Twelve-thirty in the morning, the night watchman, the iron gates, the house like a chunk of the night cut away with a serrated knife and blackened in India ink. Lights on upstairs, though, and Nick and Pat waiting on tenterhooks. “He won’t hurt me, will he?”

  “No,” O‘Kane assured her, “no, he won’t hurt you. Besides, we’ve got him restrained.”

  Her voice, so thin and frightened it sickened him and he almost backed out of the thing right there: “Restrained?”

  O‘Kane didn’t know what to say. He led her up the big staircase and opened up the barred door himself, her thin cold elbow quailing under the grip of his hand, and she was trying to be brave, trying to get through with this, he could see that. “Jesus,” she whispered, turning her head to get a look at the bars as they passed through the doorway, and O’Kane held her there a minute while he turned the three separate keys in the three separate locks. And then, Nick and Pat gouging her with their eyes, she hesitated at the bedroom door and the thought of what lay behind it, the bed bolted to the floor and the barred windows and Mr. Stanley Robert McCormick, Reaper heir, lying there on his back, wrists and ankles bound up tight—double tight—to the bedposts. “You better give me the money,” she said, her eyes shrunk to pinpricks, the mouth a misshapen hole in the middle of her face. “Give it to me now.”

  Nick and Pat both watched, silent presences in a darkened room, no light but what the stars gave and the moon—it was their duty, after all—but O‘Kane couldn’t do it. He should have been exhilarated, should have felt good, should have rejoiced in Mr. McCormick’s happiness, the need and thrill and privilege of every man—sex, just sex—but instead he went out onto the upper patio and hung his head over the drain in the corner and threw up everything he’d drunk that night, and the taste of it, full of bile, was bitter and lingering, a sharp unallayable sting of the lips and tongue that was like the very kiss of despair.

  Kempf was perplexed. “I can’t understand it,” he said, getting up from behind his desk and pacing up and down while O‘Kane sat in a chair so comfortless and hard it might have been designed for the witness stand at the county courthouse. “We were making such progress, and now nothing: Pffft! I throw the usual bugbears up to him—his parents, his wife, the experience in Paris—and he won’t respond at all. Even free association’s a dud. I say ’boxer dog’ and he just stares at me. All he’ll say is ‘one slit, one slit,’ over and over again.” He knotted his hands behind his back, shaking his head, dapper and narrow-shouldered, with the bleeding eyes and precise hair of a screen idol. “I thought we were past all that.”

  O‘Kane didn’t respond. The doctor was talking to himself, really, as he did nearly every afternoon in the wake of his session with Mr. McCormick; O’Kane was merely a sounding board. Holding himself very rigid, hardly breathing,
he let his eyes crawl round the room. The decor wasn’t substantially different from that of the Hamilton and Brush eras, but for the fact that Hamilton’s neurological molds and Brush’s Hawaiian scenes were gone, replaced by a single massive reproduction of a painting that was affixed to the wall of Dr. Freud’s office in Vienna, or so Kempf claimed. “Le Leçon clinique du Dr. Charcot,” a plaque beside it read, and it showed a white-haired doctor—presumably Charcot—supporting a young hysteric by the waist while twenty bearded students looked on and her nurse stood ready to catch her should she fall. The woman was wearing a low-cut blouse that had slipped down over her shoulders, and though she was standing, she appeared to be unconscious—either that or faking it. The significance of it all escaped O‘Kane, except that the woman was a real looker and Charcot obviously had her in his power. So what was the attraction for Kempf—wish fulfillment?

  “That stingaree was a damned unfortunate thing,” Kempf mused, still pacing, “rotten luck and no two ways about it. But I thought Stanley was getting over it, I really did, and now he’s blocked again, no more sensible or responsive than a stone. Something has set him off, no doubt about it—you don’t know anything that might be troubling him, do you, Eddie?”

  O‘Kane, rigid, just his lips: “No, nothing at all.”

  “It’s funny,” Kempf said, pausing now in front of O‘Kane’s chair. He was looking down at him, furrowing his brow, squinting those rounded eyes till they were no more than slits. “Really odd. Nothing happened last night, did it? While you were here—or after? That you might’ve gotten wind of, that is?”

  “No, nothing.”

  The doctor made a feint with his hand, as if he were trying to snatch something out of the air. “I just thought that Nick or Pat might‘ve—”

  “No. Uh-uh. They didn’t say a word.”