by T. C. Boyle
“Mama,” she said, reverting to the diminutive she hadn’t used since she was a child. “Mama, I’m afraid of him.”
7.
THREE O‘CLOCK
At first, when O‘Kane saw the four men standing there in the alley out back of Menhoff’s, he didn’t think anything of it—there were always men there, milling around in the shadows and perpetuating various half-truths and outright lies while passing one of the fifths of hooch Cody sold on the sly. He wasn’t even especially surprised when he recognized one of them as Giovannella’s father, Baldy Dimucci, and another as her brother Pietro, the runt he’d had that minor disagreement with a lifetime ago in the driveway at Riven Rock. Pietro was now in his forties, and there wasn’t much more to him than there’d been twenty years ago—he was scrawny as a chicken, not as dark as Giovannella, but with her shining hair and fathomless eyes. O‘Kane had run into him any number of times over the years—out on State Street, in Montecito Village, in the drive of the Dimucci house when it was raining and Roscoe gave Giovannella a ride home before taking him and Mart on into town—and though he couldn’t say he liked the man, there was no animosity between them, not that he knew of. They typically exchanged a few words, mainly of the hello-how-are-you-fine variety, and went on about their business. But here he was, out in the alley with his father and two other guys, big guys, O’Kane saw now, big guys with ax handles clutched in their big sweating fists.
O‘Kane had been drinking with the projectionist from the Granada, a whole long night of drinking, and it had been so long since his little altercation with Giovannella—a year or more now—that he’d forgotten all about it. Up until now, that is. “Hi, Baldy,” he said, but his feet couldn’t seem to work up the volition to usher him on past this little Dago confabulation. “Nice night,” he added uncertainly.
Baldy was an old man now, with a potbelly and a fringe of white hair that stood straight up off the crown of his head like a nimbus of feathers. “You’re the bad man, Eddie,” he said. “You’re the very bad man.”
O‘Kane wanted to deny it, wanted to hoot and caper and tease the old man’s hair right up off his head, but he was drunk and he knew what was coming. He knew it, but somehow he couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care.
“You hurt-a my daughter, Eddie, and now you gonna answer to me.”
That was when the two goons moved in close with the ax handles and started chopping away at the fragile tottering tree that was Eddie O‘Kane. He went down after the first couple of blows, and he stayed down, cradling his head, even as the tempered oak sought out his ribs and his knees and the tough little fist of bone at the base of his spine. The last thing he remembered was Pietro cursing him and the soft wet kiss of the spittle on his cheek.
He came out of it right at the end of his first day in the hospital, a smell of hot food, the rattle of a cart, a dapple of light on the ceiling as the sun sank out of sight. There were flowers on the table beside him—sent, he would later learn, by Katherine, the Ice Queen herself—and he was in a room that had two beds in it. He didn’t feel a whole lot of curiosity about who was occupying the other one—his head ached too much—but later, after the tide of nurses had ebbed, he saw that it was a child, a little boy, all wrapped up like King Tut and with his leg in a cast suspended from a hook over the bed. That was when O‘Kane began to wonder about the extent of the damage to his own bodily self, and he ran a reluctant hand—his left hand; the right was pinned fast to his chest—down one side of his rib cage and up the other. He felt pinched and constricted, as if he couldn’t fill his lungs and take a breath of air, and he knew that he was all wrapped up too, and he was wondering about that in a drifting remote sort of way—his ribs, they’d broken his ribs—and then he was running through the streets of the North End with some lady’s pocketbook in his hand and a whole horde of people chasing after him, and wasn’t Mr. McCormick one of them?
When he woke the next morning, there was a doctor standing over him, or at least he looked like a doctor, white jacket, clipboard and regulation smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Scrambled,” O‘Kane managed, and he tried to lift his head but couldn’t. “Three eggs in a pan.”
“It could be worse.” The doctor’s smile was eerily serene. “You’ll walk again—in three to six months—but you’ll very likely carry a limp the rest of your life. You’ve shattered your right patella and there’s a hairline fracture of the femur, just above it, in addition to a compound break of the tibia—the shinbone. You’ve got three broken ribs on the right side, a fractured wrist—also on that side—and oh yes, as you’ve no doubt noticed, your arm is in a cast too. The right ulna is fractured—your elbow, that is.” He paused. “Do you remember anything of the incident? The identity of your attackers, for instance? The police want to know if you can provide a description.”
O‘Kane looked into that fixed smile and tried on a smile of his own, albeit a weak and evanescent one. “No,” he said, “I don’t remember a thing.”
The next day they wheeled his bed out the door and all the way down the corridor to the admissions office: Mr. McCormick was on the line. “Hello? Ed-Eddie? Are you all—are you okay?”
“Sure,” O‘Kane said. “I’ll be up and about in no time.”
Mr. McCormick’s voice was high and excited, sticking on the consonants and ratcheting up over the vowels. “I w-wish I’d been there with you, to—to fight, I mean. I would have given them something to think about, you know I would—”
O‘Kane, miserable, broken in half, reaping his own sour harvest, tried nonetheless to placate him—it was his job, after all. “I know you would. But don’t worry, don’t worry about a thing.”
A pause. Mr. McCormick’s voice, pinched almost to nothing: “You-you‘ re coming back, Eddie, aren’t you? Back here with m-me and Mart? ”
What could he say? Of course he was coming back, coming back like a convict to his ball and chain every time he tries to lift his foot from the floor. It was sad to say, sadder even to admit, but Mr. McCormick was his life. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll be back.”
On the third day, Giovannella appeared. He was dozing at the time, drifting deliciously in and out of consciousness while the mother of the boy in the next bed read aloud from a book of children’s stories in a soothing soft mellifluous voice: “‘Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs, ...‘”
“Eddie?”
The story faltered, just the smallest pebble in the path of that smooth onrolling voice, and then it picked up again: “... and when Rabbit said, ”Honey or condensed milk with your bread?“ he was so excited that he said, ”Both“ ...‘ ”
“Eddie?”
He opened his eyes. The ceiling was there, right where he’d left it, and then a glint of the boy’s mother’s blondness combed out over her shoulders, and finally, Giovannella. Her face hovered over him, an anxious look, the ends of her hair so close he could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning. He smiled, one of the smiles his mother had no name for because it was spontaneous and true: how could he blame Giovannella? She’d provoked him, sure, but he had no right to touch her, never, and he’d had it coming to him for years now, a debt of violence accruing.
“I talked to my father,” she said, and he watched her eyes and her ringless fingers as she tucked the hair behind her ears. It was January of 1929 and she was thirty-eight years old, ripe in the bosom in a white blouse and yellow cardigan, her face getting rounder by the day and the flesh settling under her chin. “It’s going to be a small wedding, just the Dimuccis and the Fiocollas and maybe Mart, Pat and Nick, if you want—but in the church, with a white gown and rice and everything else.”
He didn’t know what to say, but he felt it, something stirring in the deep yearning root of him, inside, beneath the sixty yards of gauze and tape and the rock-hard plaster and the flesh that was as tender and yielding as a—as a bride’s. Or make that
a groom’s. He was going to marry Giovannella, adulterously and bigamously, and legitimate his two surviving children, Guido of the heavy O‘Kane shoulders and Edwina with the green eyes in her sweet vanilla face, and this was it, this was what he’d been waiting for all his life: his three o’clock luck. It wasn’t money or orange groves or a fleet of cars, but this woman hanging over him in a moment of grace and poignancy and the children waiting in the wings. Okay. All right. He was ready. He tried to nod his head and winced.
Giovannella was smiling down on him, the strong white teeth, the everted lips, the faint hairs trailing all the way down her temple to the hollow at the base of her jaw. “As soon as you can walk, of course,” she said, and her voice was every bit as sweet and assured and anodynic as that mother’s in the next chair over. “We don’t do anything till you can walk. Okay, Eddie?” He felt the soft pressure of her hand on his.
“Okay,” he said.
The wedding was in April, on a fine blue-scraped day with every flower in creation bursting all around them, and after the ceremony at Our Lady of the Sorrows, O‘Kane and Giovannella and Guido and Edwina and all the Dimuccis and Fiocollas and half the Italians in Santa Barbara (Italians, not wops, most definitely not wops anymore) piled into the McCormick automobiles and had their reception on the front lawn at Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick looking on from the high barred windows of his room. They’d hoped to have him right down there amongst the guests, but Kempf vetoed it—after the incident with Katherine, not to mention the complication of the professional girl, which Kempf had never found out about, thank God in His Heaven, Mr. McCormick had to be isolated from women again. Except for Nurse Gleason, that is, and she gave him a wide-enough berth, at least at first.
But still, it was a real celebration, and with enough food prepared by the Dimucci girls and their mother and aunts to feed everybody twice and enough left over for all the millionaires and their starved-looking racehorses too, if they’d had the sense to show up and toast the true match of the year. O‘Kane got along pretty well on his crutches, and everybody said he looked as handsome as one of God’s angels, and Giovannella filled out her satin gown in a way no rumpless flapper could ever have. After the ceremony, after the toasts and the gnocchi and the intercostata di manzoand the palombacciaallo spiedo and the millifoglie and the wedding cake that was as tall as little Guido, Roscoe drove O’Kane and Giovannella up to San Luis Obispo and a three-day honeymoon in a blue-and-white clapboard inn by the sea. And then O‘Kane, moving well enough and with his seminal parts in an advanced state of relaxation, went back to work at Riven Rock.
Mr. McCormick was glad to see him. Very glad. Ecstatic even. The minute O‘Kane appeared on the landing outside the upper parlor door, his crutches extended like struts, Mr. McCormick sprang up off the sofa and rushed him. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” he cried, “I knew you’d be back, I knew it!” The keys turned in the locks, Mart hovering over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder, Nurse Gleason a frowning presence in the background. “Sure I’m back,” O’Kane said, and he was touched, genuinely touched, he was. “Just because I’m married you think I’d desert you? We’re in this together, aren’t we? Till you’re well again?”
Mr. McCormick didn’t say anything. He stood there inside the door and waited patiently as O‘Kane fumbled with his keys and the crutches and his arms that were stiff with the strain of doing two things at once; Mr. McCormick had something in his hand, a trophy of some sort, bronze, with an engraved inscription. It looked like a bugle with two bells.
“So what’s this?” O‘Kane asked, maneuvering through the door while Mart secured it.
Mr. McCormick gave him a big grin, rotten teeth, faraway eyes and all. “F-first prize in the orchid show. For—for our cymbidiums, the Riven Rock cymbidiums. Mr. Hull entered for me, and Kath-Katherine said it was a real coup. She, she—”
But that was it. The rest of the story, whatever it was, was locked up inside him and he couldn’t get it out. Normally O‘Kane would have coached him, the way Kempf did, but he’d just stepped through the door for the first time in three and a half months and Nurse Gleason was giving him a fishy eye and he didn’t know her from Adam yet and he just didn’t feel up to it. Instead, he stumped right by his employer, putting some good weight on the right leg now and walking through the crutches every other step, and settled himself at the table. Mr. McCormick was already at the bookshelf, making a place for the trophy amongst the eight others he’d won in previous years. He was a while at it, getting things just so, and from his posture and the attitude of his shoulders and the way he ducked his head and muttered to himself, O’Kane could see that his judges were very likely looking on and commenting on the arrangement.
Nurse Gleason, who’d nodded a curt hello at O‘Kane as he entered, passed between them now, making a show of straightening the cushions of the sofa and beating out and folding the pages of Mr. McCormick’s newspaper. She was a big-beamed, fish-faced pre-crone of a woman, fiftyish, and as close to being sexless as you could get—short of hermaphroditism, that is. Kempf’s thinking was that Mr. McCormick would be predisposed to accept her more readily than someone like poor what-was-her-name from McLean, the one with the locket between her breasts—or if not accept her, then at least refrain from any sort of sexual impropriety. O’Kane had heard she was a good clinical nurse who took no nonsense from anybody—she’d been at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for years, wielding nozzle and enema tube, before going on to Saint Elizabeths—and so far Mr. McCormick had tolerated her presence.
After twenty minutes or so, during which no one said a word, Mr. McCormick finally seemed satisfied with the relative positions of his trophies and came over to sit down across from O‘Kane at the table. O’Kane had a magazine spread out before him, but he wasn’t reading anything in particular, just leafing through the pages as if they were blank on both sides. He looked up and smiled. Mr. McCormick did not smile back. He seemed unusually tense and his face was running through a range of expressions, as if invisible fingers were tugging at the skin from every direction. “You’re looking well,” O‘Kane said automatically.
“I’m not.”
“Is something the matter? You want to tell me about it?”
Mr. McCormick looked away.
Nurse Gleason entered the dialogue then, her eyes very close-set and her lips puckered fishily. “He’s been out of sorts lately, because of the doctors.”
O‘Kane lifted his eyebrows.
“You know,” she said, “the trial and all. And I don’t blame the poor man, what with one after the other of them here poking and probing at him so he hasn’t had a minute’s peace these last two weeks.”
O‘Kane looked to Mart, but Mart, sunk into himself like some boneless thing washed up out of the sea, had nothing to add.
“They, they—” Mr. McCormick said suddenly, his face still going through its calisthenics, as if the muscles under the skin couldn’t decide on an appropriate response, “they want to take Riven Rock away from me, in the courts, Kath-Katherine and, and—”
“No, no, Mr. McCormick,” Nurse Gleason chided, interposing her bulk between them as she scurried over to lean into the table on one stumplike arm, “nobody’s going to take Riven Rock, that’s not it at all—”
Mr. McCormick never even glanced at her. “Shut up, cunt,” he snarled.
She flared then, Nurse Gleason, but only briefly, like a Fourth of July rocket sputtering on its pad. “I won’t have such language, I tell you,” she spat, leaning in closer, but then Mr. McCormick kicked back the chair and leapt to his feet and she faded back out of reach, her face flushed and crepuscular. O‘Kane, bad knee and all, came up out of his chair too and caught his employer by the wrist; for a moment both of them froze, looking first into each other’s eyes and then down at the intrusive hand on the trembling wrist. O’Kane let go. Mr. McCormick righted his chair, and after a moment’s fussing, sat back down. “It’s all right,” O‘Kane said, but clearly it wasn’t.
A trio of doctor
s appeared that afternoon, just after Mr. McCormick woke from his postluncheon nap. O‘Kane didn’t catch their names, not that it mattered—there was the lean one, the heavyset one and the one with the bandaged nose. Dr. Kempf wasn’t present, because they were examining Mr. McCormick with a view to supporting Katherine’s contention that psychoanalysis alone was not the proper treatment for her husband and was in fact having a deleterious effect on him. Other doctors would come on other days to examine him in support of Cyrus and Anita, who wanted to retain Kempf—look at the progress he’d made, women in the immediate environment and their brother as fit and rational as ever, or almost—and maintain their two-to-one advantage on the board of guardians. But these doctors were for Katherine, and they gathered solemnly in the upper parlor to await Mr. McCormick’s emergence from the bedroom.
Did they want anything? Nurse Gleason wanted to know, fishily solicitous. Tea? Coffee? A soft drink? She only had to ring for it, no trouble at all.
They didn’t think so.
When Mart led Mr. McCormick out into the main room, O‘Kane could see immediately that the meeting wasn’t going to be a propitious one. Mr. McCormick was actively engaged in a debate with his judges as he came through the door, and his face was still going through its permutations.
The Lean Doctor: “Good afternoon, Mr. McCormick. I’m Dr. Orbison, and this is Dr. Barker and Dr. Williams. We’ve come to chat a bit, if that’s convenient.
True to form, Mr. McCormick said nothing, but his face spoke volumes to O‘Kane. He positioned himself on the arm of the sofa, propped up on one crutch, ready to fling himself forward at the first sign of trouble.
The Lean Doctor (settling himself into one of the three folding chairs set up in anticipation of this visit, while his colleagues followed suit): “Well, pleasant day, isn’t it?”