Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  Mr. McCormick: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”

  The doctors exchanged a glance. The one with the bandaged nose craned his neck to look out the window, as if to be sure the sun was still there and shining.

  Mr. McCormick: “Be-betrayed by his daughters.”

  The Bandaged Doctor: “Who?”

  Mr. McCormick: “Lear.”

  The Heavyset Doctor: “Leer?”

  Mr. McCormick: “First name of King.”

  The Lean Doctor: “Oh, yes, I see. Of course. Lear. Do you, uh, think much about Shakespeare then, Mr. McCormick—I take it you’re an aficionado?”

  Mr. McCormick (his face working): “Kath-Katherine ...”

  The Lean Doctor: “Katherine?”

  The Bandaged Doctor: “His wife.”

  The Lean Doctor (puzzled, drawing at his chin with two lean fingers): “Your wife reads Shakespeare?”

  Mr. McCormick said nothing to this, and though he was alert and struggling with his facial muscles and rapping his long fingers on the twin pyramids of his knees, he had very little to say to their subsequent inquiries, which ranged from his knowledge of the Peloponnesian War to the Declaration of Independence, American banking customs, the mechanism of the reaper and his feelings about Dr. Kempf, women and dentists, to his recognition of various celebrated individuals in the public eye, both by name and likeness: Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Calvin Coolidge, Sacco and Vanzetti. If it was a test—and O‘Kane knew that it was—then Mr. McCormick had flunked it badly. There was only one point at which he rose to something like coherence, and that was right at the end, when the distinguished doctors had filled their notebooks and begun to shoot glances at one another out of the corners of their eyes. The Lean Doctor said “Riven Rock” and Mr. McCormick looked up alertly.

  The Lean Doctor: “Tell us about your home, if you would, Mr. McCormick, about Riven Rock—how did it get its name?”

  Mr. McCormick (sunshine at first, and then increasing clouds): “I—well—it’s because of a rock, you see, and I—well, my mother, she—and then I came and saw it and it was, well, it was—”

  There was a long hiatus, all three doctors leaning forward, the day drawing down, Mart snoring lightly from the vicinity of the couch, Nurse Gleason silently dusting the plants, and then Mr. McCormick, his face finally settling on a broad winning ear-to-ear grin, at last spoke up. “It beats me,” he said.

  As a family man, O‘Kane wasn’t exactly an overnight success. His experience of children was limited and sad, infinitely sad, and he was used to the peace and sterility of Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s rooming house (reconstructed after the quake to look exactly as it had before, or even more so). He was used to the speaks too and to eating at the drugstore or not eating at all if he didn’t feel like it and to doing any damn thing he pleased any time he pleased. And now, in the spring and early summer, he found himself living amongst the olive-pressing garlic-chewing Valpolicella-quaffing turmoil of the Dimucci household, a place rife with screaming barefooted children, dogs, pigs, chickens and Italians. Baldy had fixed up one of the outbuildings for Marta and her husband, and when they’d moved to their own place downtown on Milpas Street, he let the unsteady O’Kane and his new family move in temporarily—“Just,” he said, “till Eddie can get back on his feet.” and there wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice.

  Edwina turned nine in June and Guido would be thirteen in October, too old to be fooled by anything O‘Kane tried to do to ingratiate himself, though they took the candy and games and dolls and penknives he pressed on them readily enough. He wasn’t their father, not in their eyes—their father was Guido Capolupo, and he was dead, like the saints in heaven. With Giovannella it was different. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice for her, giving up his body and soul both—not to mention committing bigamy—and she came each night to worship at his altar. In the beginning, before he could walk without the aid of crutches, she gave him sponge baths in bed, spoon-fed him to keep his strength up, every stray drop of soup or sauce lovingly blotted from his chin with a carefully folded napkin, and once he was getting around again, she spent hours massaging his cramped muscles or depressing the skin around the cast on his leg and gently blowing into the aperture to relieve his itching. She made love to him with all the fierceness of possession and when they were done and sweating and still breathing hard she would straddle him and run her hands through his hair again and again. “You’re mine now, Eddie,” she would say, her lips puffed and swollen with all they’d done, “all mine.”

  He couldn’t say that he forgave the Dimuccis (not exactly—he was no pacifist and he would as soon crush Pietro as look at him), but he accepted the rightness of what had happened and he was content, or at least he thought he was. But once he was back at work and putting in his twelve hours a day at Riven Rock, free of the chaos of the Dimucci dominion and the incessant demands of the children—Read me a story; Fix this;You don’t like me, I know it; You’re not my father anyway—he knew the time had come to move on. The first order of business was a car. Baldy had been dropping him off at Riven Rock in the morning and Roscoe swinging by in the evening, and that was all right—or no, it was intolerable—and he scanned the want ads till he found a ten-year-old Maxwell just like the one Dolores Isringhausen used to drive, only older and slower and noisier, the spark of life in its greasy automotive heart all but extinguished. Roscoe helped him get it going, tuned it up for him and drove him down to State Street to invest in a new set of tires.

  Two weeks later he and Giovannella found a place for rent in Summerland, just to the east of Montecito and an easy drive both to her parents’ house and Riven Rock. It was a bungalow, with a low creased roof that climbed way out over the front porch and two palm trees set into the ground on either side of it like flagpoles. You could see the ocean from the far right-hand corner of the porch, and best of all, there was a private citrus grove out in the backyard, three grapefruit trees, two oranges and a Meyer lemon. O‘Kane stood out in the street and took six snapshots of the house—dead-on and not a soul in the picture—to send home to his mother.

  He was fit enough to carry Giovannella over the threshold and play husband and wife with her through one whole afternoon, evening and night while the kids made their grandparents’ lives miserable and the pelicans sailed across the patch of sky defined by the bedroom window and the sound of the old man next door watering his roses invited them to slide down into the dreamless embrace of sleep. Baldy dropped off the children late the next morning and Giovannella made bruschetta and spaghetti and the house grew smaller and noisier till O‘Kane felt he needed to get out for a drive—“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be back in a couple hours”—and he found himself at Riven Rock, Sunday afternoon, his day off, shooting the bull about one thing and another with Roscoe out in the reconstructed garage.

  “How does he seem to you?” Roscoe said, leaning into the front fender of one of the new Pierce Arrows with a chamois cloth. “Because as far as I can see he’s getting more and more worked up about this trial business, which from what I hear isn’t even scheduled yet.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s a trial, exactly. There’s no jury or anything like that, just a judge. From what Kempf says, anyway.”

  “What’s the difference? The point is, Mr. McCormick thinks she wants to take everything away from him, and that’s why he’s been so jumpy lately, just like years ago when we first started to take him out for his drives and he’d think every other tree was going to fall on the car. You know what he did the other night? He came out here with Nick and Pat—and why they let him out is a mystery to me—and he spent I don’t how many hours rearranging the back seat because it wasn’t comfortable enough ... here, take a look, see for yourself what he did.” The panels of the rear door grabbed the light and then released it and there was Mr. McCormick’s handiwork, the seat pried right out of its frame and meticulously customized with fifteen or twenty pillows appropriated from the couches in the main house.

  “Sh
e already has,” O‘Kane said, leaning in for a closer look, “—he just doesn’t know it.”

  “What?” What’re you talking about?“ Roscoe was wringing the wet cloth over a bucket, the sun painting two long white oblongs on the concrete floor where the bay doors stood open.

  “Yeah, that’s a real mess,” O‘Kane said, straightening up, “but no real harm done—at least he didn’t carve up the upholstery like last time.” He paused to pinch the crown of his hat and run a spit-dampened finger over the crease of the brim. “I mean Katherine, Mrs. McCormick. She already has everything—she got that back in ought-nine when she had him declared incompetent.”

  Roscoe turned back to the car, the pliant wet cloth swallowing up the beads of water as he flagged it across the fender. “Then what’s she want now? Aside from Kempf’s head on a platter, which I think’s a crying shame, I really do....”

  O‘Kane gave it some thought, watching the chauffeur with his quick elbows and jerky movements, the little monkey cap and his flapping crimson ears, his body heaving out over the hood and the reflected glory of the deep-buffed blue-black steel. “Him,” he said after a while. “She wants him.”

  One hand braced, the other moving in a clean, circular sweep, Roscoe glancing over his shoulder. “Kempf?”

  “No, not Kempf—her husband.”

  “Hmpf,” Roscoe grunted, rubbing now, really digging into the moving cloth. “Why doesn’t she get herself a lapdog instead?”

  The year ticked by, the summer soft and compliant, and then came the fall, spread like margarine across the corrugated sea and all the way out to the soft and melting islands. On a rainy Thursday afternoon at the end of November, O‘Kane put on a clean shirt and his best suit and went down to the county courthouse to testify at the trial, Katherine’s lawyer—Mr. Baker—raking him over the coals of Mr. McCormick’s condition, one searing step at at time. Has there been any improvement, in your view, Mr. O’Kane, over the very lengthy course of your service—coming up on twenty-two years now, isn’t it?—and did Dr. Kempf do this and did he do that? The attorney for the McCormicks—Mr. Lawler—seemed to wrap himself over O‘Kane’s shoulders like a warm sweater on a cold evening. Wasn’t it a fact, Mr. O’Kane? and Isn’t it so? and Wouldn’t you say that Mr. McCormick was much improved as evidenced by his association with women—even to the extent of employing a female nurse? And hadn’t the previous physicians been merely custodial with regard to Mr. McCormick’s care—that is, all but useless?

  Together, they called eighteen doctors to the stand, including Dr. Meyer, Dr. Brush, Dr. Hamilton (his hair gray now and his eyes spinning out of control) and most of the headshrinkers and pulse-takers who’d tramped through the house over the course of the past eighteen months, and they called Dr. Kempf and Mr. Cyrus McCormick, and Mr. Harold and Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, Nurse Gleason, Nick and Pat and Mart, and eventually even the Ice Queen and Mrs. Roessing. O‘Kane caught only two days of it, his testimony split between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and then he pushed through the crowd of reporters in the courthouse hallway and drove himself back to Riven Rock and Mr. McCormick.

  The proceedings had been going on for a week and a half when O‘Kane arrived at the estate one morning to find a letter waiting for him on the table in the entrance hall. His name had been typed neatly across the front of the envelope—EDWARD JAMES O’KANE, RIVEN ROCK, MONTECITO, CALIFORNIA—and in the upper left-hand corner, in raised black letters, was Jim Isringhausen’s name, over the legend ISRING-HAUSEN & CLAUSEN, STOCKS, BONDS, REAL ESTATE. Mr. McCormick was sleeping still, but Nick and Pat would be anxious to leave—and today, since Mart was due to testify, it would be only O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason upstairs—so O’Kane brought the letter with him and waited till the Thompson brothers had departed and Mr. McCormick was up and preoccupied with folding and refolding his toilet paper before he slit open the envelope.

  Inside was a check drawn on the Chase Bank in New York. It was made out to him, Edward James O‘Kane, and it was in the amount of $3,500. A note was attached to it with a paper clip, and O’Kane found that his hand was trembling as he shook out the single sheet of white bond and began to read: November 24, 1929

  Dear Eddie:

  Enclosed please find my check in the amount of $3,500, your share in the proceeds of the sale of our Goleta property. The orange trees never prospered as we’d hoped, but I and my partners were able recently to sell the property to a housing contractor, at a small profit.

  But Eddie, I want to tell you that this is nothing compared to what you can make in stocks and bonds. Don’t pay the slightest attention to all these scare stories in the newspapers, men jumping out windows and etc., because the big stocks, the Blue Chips, have never been a better bargain. American Can, Anaconda Copper, Montgomery Ward, United Carbide and Carbon, Westinghouse E. & M., these stocks are sure to rise through the roof on the next buying surge, and believe me, the Great Bull Market isn’t dead yet, not by a long shot.

  Enclosed for your convenience is a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Just put that check inside and send it on back here, and I guarantee you I’ll triple that $500 profit of yours in six months’ time or my name isn’t

  Jim Isringhausen

  O‘Kane had to take a minute to catch his breath. Married and a father, with a bungalow and a car, and now this, smiling Eddie O’Kane’s three o‘clock luck come home to roost for good. And what Giovannella wouldn’t do to get her hands on that check—three thousand five hundred dollars, and the five hundred of it pure profit, for doing nothing more than sitting on his hands. And what was Mart’s share in that, for the hundred he’d invested? Something like what, seventeen dollars? And of course he’d give it to him, right out of his own pocket, unless... well, unless he reinvested it for him, and nobody the wiser. No one knew about this check but him and here was the envelope to seal it up and send it right back to make another thousand dollars profit by June. Sure. And hadn’t Jim Isringhausen steered him right the first time?

  It was at that moment, O‘Kane contemplating his future as a Wall Street savant and the letter stretched taut in his amazed hands, that Mr. McCormick emerged from his bathroom and strode into the parlor, naked as the day he was born. But he wasn’t simply naked, he was naked and erect and advancing on Nurse Gleason, who despite her rigorous asexuality was nonetheless, technically, a woman. O’Kane had been expecting something like this ever since the day she walked through the door, and though she was tough, Nurse Gleason, hard as nails, he doubted she was anything like a match for Mr. McCormick, and so he hastily stuffed letter and check into his breast pocket and jumped up to intervene. “Mr. McCormick,” he called out to distract him, “you’ve forgotten your clothes.”

  O‘Kane had long since recovered from his injuries, but the right knee was still a bit tricky and recalcitrant and he did walk with a pronounced limp, as the doctor had predicted, the right foot forever half a step behind the left. It ached when it rained, and sometimes when it wasn’t raining too, and he had a hell of a time keeping up with Mr. McCormick when their morning walk turned into a footrace. Still, he was reasonably fit for a forty-six-year-old former athlete, and he was able to intercept Mr. McCormick just as Mr. McCormick, his arms spread wide, had managed to back Nurse Gleason up against the barred window beside the sofa. O’Kane came in swiftly from the rear and got him in a headlock while Nurse Gleason shooed at his stiff red member as if it had a mind and life of its own, which apparently it did.

  Immediately, the frenzy came into Mr. McCormick’s shoulders and he took O‘Kane for a wild ride round the room, a four-legged jig, furniture flying and Mr. McCormick pulling the air in through his nostrils in deep whinnying snorts. “No, no, no, no! ” he cried, his usual refrain, trying all the while to throw O’Kane off his back and work his jaws round to bite the inside of his arm. Two minutes, three, they kept whirling and grunting, both of them, O‘Kane gasping out truncated pleas and reproaches, Nurse Gleason maneuvering on the periphery, till finally they b
oth tumbled onto the couch, O’Kane never relaxing his grip and Mr. McCormick’s erection pointing staight up in the air. It was then that Nurse Gleason moved in, her face like a big granite block crashing down on them both, and she performed an old nurse’s trick with a hard repeated fillip of thumb and index finger that wilted Mr. McCormick’s erection like a flower starved of water.

  No one was hurt, nothing broken that couldn’t be fixed, and when Mr. McCormick, gone lax and sheepish, promised to behave himself, O‘Kane let him go. And that was it, that was the end of it. Bowing his head and mumbling an apology, he limped off into the bedroom, dragging his right foot, and a moment later O’Kane got up and went into the room to help him dress.

  Nothing was said about the incident, and Mr. McCormick did a creditable job with the breakfast Giovannella sent up, but he was fretting over something, that much was evident. He kept repeating himself, something about Dr. Kempf, but wouldn’t respond when O‘Kane questioned him, and after breakfast he began to pace up and down the room, jerking his head and arms out to one side as if he were trying to pull an invisible garment over his head. This went on for an hour or so, and then he came over and sat beside O’Kane on the couch, a flux of emotions playing across his face. “Ed-Eddie,” he said, “I—I want to, because they’re taking Riven Rock and Doctor—Doctor Kempf too, I—” And he broke off, looked O‘Kane dead in the eye and lowered his voice. “Eddie,” he said, all trace of a stammer gone, “I want to get out of here. Let me out of here. Use your keys. Please. Use your keys.”

  O‘Kane had been looking over his letter again, electrified with the idea of it—sure the market was going to go up, sure it would—and he’d just sealed the check in the envelope when his employer stopped pacing and sat down beside him. They were two millionaires sitting there—or one millionaire and a millionaire in potentio, because with Jim Isringhausen the sky was the limit. “You know I can’t do that, Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said.