Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  “Well, something has happened. I’m sure of it. He won’t say, but I’ll get it out of him. You watch me. I just hope it won’t ...”

  “What?”

  Kempf let out a sigh. “I just hope it won’t compromise the progress we’ve made with his wife and the others—and you know, I’ve already hired on the new nurse. Mrs. Gleason. She worked under me at Saint Elizabeth’s.”

  And now O‘Kane was stammering, just like Mr. McCormick: “I don’t think—well, it’s not my place to say, but is it really advisable to bring a woman in—I mean, at this juncture? When he seems so disturbed? Over the stingaree, I mean.”

  Kempf’s face fell open like a book, only it was an unreadable book—a psychology text, written in German. “Why, yes,” he said, “of course. That’s the whole idea. To show him that women are no different from you and me, from men, that is, and that they’re as natural a part of living in the world as trees, flowers, gophers and psychologists. The more women we introduce him to, the more—”

  He was interrupted by a knock at the door. It pushed open partway and Butters’ face, flushed and startled-looking, appeared in the aperture. “Mrs. McCormick to see you, sir. And Mrs. Roessing.”

  Katherine stalked into the room then, her heels punishing the floorboards, Mrs. Roessing following languidly behind. “I just can’t stand it,” she announced, addressing Kempf, who’d stopped his pacing and was posed in front of the painting in the exact attitude of Charcot. “And frankly, Dr. Kempf, I don’t care what your opinion or advice is on the subject, but Jane and I have come to take my husband out to luncheon—a proper luncheon—at our hotel.”

  The doctor blanched. He looked like Valentino facing down a bull in Blood and Sand—sans the mustache and excess hair, of course. “I can’t allow it,” he said. “Not today, of all days.”

  Katherine was in a state, all her Back Bay debutante’s ire aroused, the crater visible between her pinched brows, her eyes incinerating all before her. She wouldn’t be denied, not this time—O‘Kane could see that, and he began to feel very uncomfortable indeed. “What you will or will not allow is beside the point, Edward,” she said, “because I’ll have you out of here in two shakes if you continue in this obstinate—”

  “Your fellow guardians may have something to say about that.”

  “Well, do you hear that?” Katherine huffed, looking to Mrs. Roessing for support; to her credit, Mrs. Roessing merely seemed embarrassed. “The insolence of the man. I’ll see Cyrus and Anita in court—and you too. It’s high time I had the guardianship of my own husband, and we’ve come this far, with our lovely beach parties and, and”—here she faltered, the voice gone thick in her throat—“and Muriel and all the rest, and I won’t see it spoiled now, I simply won’t.” She shot a look at O‘Kane, as if to see if he was going to offer any protest, and he dropped his eyes.

  “All right, Jane,” she said then, her voice brisk and businesslike, “let’s go fetch Stanley.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, Kempf giving O‘Kane a sour look as the two women slammed out the door and down the steps to the path that led to the main house, their shoulders squared, hats marching in regimental display, and then he said, “Come on, Eddie, we’d better get over there and see that Martin doesn’t open that door—or if he does, well, I won’t answer for it.”

  They weren’t more than two minutes behind the women, but by the time they reached the main house, with its door flung open wide and a faint cool breath of lemon oil and furniture wax emanating from somewhere deep inside, Katherine and Mrs. Roessing were already at the top of the stairs, on the landing, and Katherine was shrilly demanding that Martin open the door. Mr. McCormick was bent over the table in the upstairs parlor at the time, rocking back and forth and chanting his mantra—one slit—over and over, while he worked at drawing a continuous line down the center of a hundred or so sheets of the finest handmade cotton-rag sketching paper, front and back. He was still in his robe and pajamas, having refused to dress that morning, an act of insubordination Kempf overlooked because of Mr. McCormick’s highly discomposed state. O‘Kane was just coming up the stairs at this point, and all he was able to see at first was some sort of commotion, but Mart later filled him in on the details.

  The moment the women had appeared on the landing, Mr. McCormick snapped to attention. He stopped rocking, stopped chanting, threw down his pencil. “Martin,” Katherine demanded, “open this door at once. Jane and I are taking Mr. McCormick out for a proper lunch.”

  In the absence of Kempf and O‘Kane, Mart was slow to react, a farrago of conflicting loyalties—he knew perfectly well that Mr. McCormick wasn’t himself and he knew what had happened the night before and what it meant, and that opening the door would lead to trouble, he was sure of it. On the other hand, Mrs. McCormick was the ultimate authority here, the president, Congress and Supreme Court of Riven Rock all rolled in one. “I’m coming,” he said, though she could plainly see through the grid that he wasn’t, that he was delaying, pretending to fumble in his pockets for the keys, and she became impatient and began to rattle the bars. There she was, in her tailor-made clothes and half-a-melon hat, her slim gloved fingers wrapped round the impervious iron bars, tugging in impatience as if it were she who was locked in and her husband roaming free.

  The bars rattling, his wife’s fingers and her white throat, the petulant crease over the bridge of her nose, the pique of her eyes and the set of her hat: suddenly Mr. McCormick came to life. In two bounds he was at the door, and though she drew back instinctively and Mrs. Roessing cried out and Mart rumbled up out of the chair, Katherine was caught. Mr. McCormick had her by both wrists, all the incensed, aroused, preternatural strength of him, his rotten teeth and his close and personal odor, and he drew her to him, Sam Wah all over again, and then snatched a hand to her throat, clamped it there like a staple, forcing her head back, and he was whinnying in his excitement: “A kiss! A kiss!”

  O‘Kane was the one who broke his grip and then he was pinioned there in Katherine’s place, Mr. McCormick like the tar baby, stuck fast now to his wrists, Katherine staggering back from the door, the wreck of her bloodless face, Mrs. Roessing already wrapping her in her arms and Dr. Kempf’s voice gone high with agitation: “You see? You see what happens when you interfere?”

  And all of them—O‘Kane and Mart, Mrs. Roessing, Kempf and even the furiously tugging and whimpering Mr. McCormick—looked to her for a response. She held tight to Jane Roessing, her hat askew, the red marks of her husband’s fingers melting into the chalk of her throat. “I blame you for this,” she said finally, all threat and defiance, glaring at Kempf as if to incinerate him on the spot. “You’re alienating my husband’s affections, that’s all you’re doing with your, your precious psychoanalysis—and that’s just what the McCormicks want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  Kempf held his peace. Mr. McCormick dropped O‘Kane’s wrists and worked his arms back through the bars—he looked dubious and bewildered, as if he’d just gotten off a streetcar at the wrong stop. Mrs. Roessing reached up to straighten Katherine’s hat and mumured something to her, and then the two of them were receding down the staircase, their hats in retreat.

  “You know what’s wrong with that woman?” Kempf said as soon as she was out of hearing. Mr. McCormick stared wildly through the bars. Mart hovered helplessly in the background, undecided as to whether he should tackle their employer from behind and bind him up in the sheet restraints or just let it go and settle back into the personal hollow he’d eroded in the pillows of the couch over the course of the stultifying months and obliterative years.

  “No,” O‘Kane said, and he was interested to know, vitally interested, “no, what’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s a prescription I’d give her, really—one of Freud’s.” Kempf tugged at his sleeves and then brushed down his jacket with a flick of his fingers, as if to rid himself of the residue of what had just transpired. “Do you know Latin, Eddie?”

  “I was an a
ltar boy.”

  “Good. Then you’ll appreciate this. Freud said it of a female hysteric whose husband”—he lowered his voice, out of Mrs. McCormick’s hearing—“was impotent. And I’d say it fits Mrs. McCormick to a T.”

  “Yes?”

  The doctor lowered his voice still further. “‘Penis normalis, dosim repetatur.’ ”

  6.

  SICK, VERY SICK

  stanley knew what was going on he might have been sick but he wasn’t retarded and he wasn’t blind or deaf either and it was the women the women yet again because they weren’t content to sit at lunch with him or make conversation over iced tea in the cabana don’t you think it’s just outrageous what the french have done to the hemline this year no they weren’t satisfied that he was a gentleman bred by his mother and held himself just so and made the smallest talk and didn’t punish them and give them what they needed and deserved and wanted no they had to come to him in the night ghostly and white in their skin with their wet tongueless mouths and the smell of their heat a bitch in heat like a bitch in heat and take hold of him down there where he was most vulnerable and how he hated that because there was nothing nothing nothing he hated more than that and the Judges had warned him and lashed him and beaten and pummeled him and yet here it was all over again and she didn’t even have a name but she wasn’t katherine oh no not katherine never katherine he was sure of that because she was some slut and whore and degraded filthy streetwalking prostitute who could have her way with him any way she liked and he’d almost felt it almost almost thrust back at her and showed her what it was to be a man a real man a he-man like his father the president and his brother the president and harold the vice president with his two wives like a pasha and his monkey glands and his beautiful little adorable little child woman daughter muriel ... almost ...

  but almost wasn’t all the way home almost didn’t win the race or drive the ball over the fence or invent the reaper out of nothing or the stingaree either which was gods reaper lurking there in the water and who knew better that it was there and what it liked to do and was likely to do than katherine who was the scientist after all the biologist who would sing out the latin names of every animal and plant and bounding squirrel with the breeze of the car in her face her beautiful face katherine dexter and he thought about that and brooded and picked over it all through the day of the stingaree and the day it melted into because she’d done it because she wanted to see him dead and drowned because she wanted to be a widow like mrs.jane two of them widows because she wanted his money and he could see right through her because dr kempf the free associator and inkblot man—“Tell me, Stanley, when I say ‘boxer dog,’ what do you think of?” —had taught him to control himself just as if he were wearing the harness again an invisible harness no straps or wires or restraints but that was the end of katherine no more katherine no sir never again not after that stinking filthy animal of a whore and what was her scientific name he’d like to know she’d brought into his very bedroom to debase and humiliate him while nick and par breathed in the dark and yes he’d heard them there and felt them but no more no more and never again make me a baby stanley make me a baby ...

  Katherine couldn’t know what her husband was thinking—she never knew what he was thinking, even when he was sitting there on the carpet they brought to the beach discussing the Malemute Kid with Muriel and fastidiously nibbling round the edges of a smoked salmon sandwich Giovannella had prepared at first light. All she knew was that he’d come so far, come all the way back to who he was, her Stanley, Stanley of the retiring mien and shining eye, and now he’d fallen away from her again—and she would be damned twice over if she was going to be cut out of his life this time. That was why she’d hired Newton Baker, her old friend and colleague from the War days and the Women’s Committee of the National Defense Council, to petition the Santa Barbara Superior Court for sole guardianship of her husband:

  IN THE MATTER OF THE GUARDIAN SHIP OF THE PERSON OF STANLEY MCCORMICK, AN INCOMPETENT PERSON:

  No. 7146

  PETITION FOR REMOVAL OF CERTAIN GUARDIANS

  TO THE HONORABLE, THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF SANTA BARBARA:

  COMES NOW KATHERINE DEXTER MCCORMICK, AND RESPECTFULLY SHOWS:

  That Kempf was alienating the affections of her husband on behalf of Cyrus and Anita and refusing him the endocrine treatment that could well provide a cure for him, and that she, as Stanley’s wife, knew better than his brother and sister what was good and proper for him and was better able to provide it without their interference. That all they cared about was keeping the McCormick fortune intact. That she, Katherine, his wife, had through all these splayed and tottering years managed her husband’s estate despite their automatic two-to-one vote against her on any matter of real importance, as for example spending ten thousand dollars a month on a psychiatrist who believed that psychoanlysis could repair rotten teeth, and she wanted redress and wanted it now.

  Jane backed her. And her mother too. And though she hated the publicity and dreaded the thought of what the papers would do with this, she could hardly wait to take the stand and give them all a piece of her mind. And why? Because of Stanley, nothing more. Stanley was all that mattered—and her guilt for having neglected him over the course of the years, all her loyalty notwithstanding, because she had neglected him and she’d allowed herself to be badgered and pigeonholed by the Favills and Bentleys and Hamiltons of the world and now by Anita and Cyrus. But she wouldn’t give in. Not anymore. Because she alone knew how wrenching and terrifying it was to lose Stanley the first time, the time he floundered and splashed and finally went down, and no one there to throw him a lifeline, no one but her....

  It all came to a head after their return from Maine, the ongoing and unrelieved nightmare that was Maine, in the fall of 1905. Everything she’d tried—patience and understanding, firmness, reason, love—was a failure, that was clear, and Stanley was caught in a downward spiral that threatened to suck her under too. “Sexual hypochondriachal neurasthenia and incipient dementia praecox” was Dr. Trudeau’s chilling assessment, and all she could do was try to insulate Stanley against anything that might cause him undue stress—his mother, in particular, the Reaper Works, and, sad to say, marital relations. She’d pushed him too far, moved too quickly, and now she had to draw back and assuage and nurture him all over again.

  On their first day back in Boston—the twenty-first of November—they went down to the harbor to meet her mother, who was just then returning from an extended stay at Prangins. The day was gloomy and cold, with a scent of rain on the air and a low scrolling sky stuffed full of gray clouds that unfurled in procession out over the sea. The liner was just docking as the driver let them down from the carriage and they hurried up to the gate that gave on to the pier, hardly noticing the others in the crowd or the man in a cap and loden jacket trimmed with gold piping standing to one side of the entrance. Katherine was intent on her mother and on Stanley, who’d been stiff and incommunicative all morning, and never gave the man a second glance, never dreaming that they needed passes to enter the dock area and that this man was stationed there in an official capacity to check those very passes.

  There was a cry at their back, rude and insulting, and here came the man—an Italian, she believed, swarthy and black-eyed—rushing down the pier to intercept them. “Hey,” he shouted, addressing Stanley, “where the hell you think you’re going, mister?”

  Katherine felt the blood rush to her face. She could scarcely believe her ears. At the same time, her arm was looped through Stanley‘s, and she could feel him stiffen. He gave the approaching guard a wild look, and then the man was there, out of breath, and he reached out to seize Stanley by the arm.

  He couldn’t have known what he was doing. Because in that moment all Stanley’s frustrations came to the surface in a molten swelling rush—Maine, his mother, the farce of their honeymoon, his failure in bed—and he erupted. He shook the man off as if he
were an insect, sending him careening across the planks in a clutch of spinning limbs and flailing hands. And when the man picked himself up with a curse and came at him again, Stanley brought his umbrella into play, slashing away at his adversary’s face and head until the umbrella was nothing but rag and splinter and the dazed guard, blood wadded in his hair and bright down the front of his jacket, staggered off in retreat.

  They were both upset, both she and Stanley, and she held tight to his arm as they made their way through the awestruck crowd, which parted automatically at the sight of Stanley’s grim bloodless face and the shredded trophy that had been his umbrella. “The impudence of that man,” she said. “The first thing I’m going to do when we get home is write a letter to the steamer line—if they can’t hire a gentleman to accommodate the public then they shouldn’t hire anyone at all. You’re not hurt, are you?”

  He shook his head, his lips pressed tight.

  “Good,” she said, “thank heavens,” but she could feel him trembling and recoiling like a plucked string. They were almost at the boat now, the vast field of it blocking the horizon from view, the crowd closing ranks behind them. Was that her mother, up there, leaning over the rail and waving a handkerchief? No, no it wasn’t.

  “I can‘t,” Stanley said suddenly, pulling up short. “I—I’ve got to go back. They’ll have the police.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The man attacked you—there were witnesses. If anyone need fear the police, it’s him.”

  “No,” he said, trembling, and there was that look, the eyes sunk into his head and his lips jerking away from the skirts of his teeth and his teeth clamped and grinding. “They-they’ll put me in jail, I’ll be ruined. Bars,” he said, “iron bars,” and he pulled away from her in a single clonic spasm, turned his back on her and started up the pier in the direction of the gate.