Riven Rock Part 5

In the spring of his second year at home, when the Parisian debacle had begun to fade from his memory (though the face of Mireille Sancerre would flower in his mind at the most inconvenient times, as when he was taking his final exam in Contracts or ordering half a dozen shirts from the wilting young brunette at Twombley's), he agreed to accompany his mother to Santa Barbara, to see to the arrangements for Mary Virginia's house there. The spring semester had just ended, and with his brother's collusion he was able to take a six-week leave from the Reaper Works. It was decided that somebody had to see mother through the ordeal of getting Mary Virginia settled once and for all, and since Anita had her young son to look after, and Cyrus Jr. and Harold were both too wrapped up in the business to take off just then (a very difficult time, what with the cutthroat compet.i.tion from Deering, Warder, Bushnell and Glessner and a battle raging over entry into the markets in India and French Indochina), Stanley was elected.

He didn't mind. Not at all. Though he took pains to conceal it, he wasn't really feeling himself-hadn't been for some time. It was his nerves, that and a certain intensification of his little compulsive habits, like washing his hands over and over till the skin was raw, or adding a column of figures fifteen or twenty times because each time he was afraid he'd made a mistake and each time confirmed that he hadn't but might have if he weren't so vigilant, or avoiding the letter R in his files because it was an evil letter, one that growled in his ears with unintelligible accusations and fierce trilling criticisms. He'd been working too hard. Putting too much pressure on himself to perform at the top of his law school cla.s.s and do the sort of job his mother expected of him at the Reaper Works. Let Cyrus and Harold stay behind-he was glad of the change. So glad he found himself whistling as he packed his bags, the very ones he'd brought back from France, and though he did get a bit bogged down over the question of what to bring and what to leave behind-he drew up long tapering lists on sc.r.a.ps of paper, bits of cardboard, anything that came to hand, and then promptly lost them-he did finally manage to get everything he needed into three steamer trunks and an array of suitcases and handbags so overstuffed they nearly prostrated a team of porters at the station. And on the morning they left, the sun so brilliant everything seemed lit from within, he felt like a subterranean released from the deepest pit.

The first day out, he did nothing but sit at the window with an unopened book in his lap. The country soothed his eyes and he watched the Chicago sun draw away west into Missouri and go to war with the clouds. He slept well and ate well (his mother had brought along a skeleton crew of servants, including the Norwegian cook), and by the third day he was so relaxed he began to feel restive. That was when Nettie suggested he take a look at the plans for Mary Virginia's house, to see what he thought, because she was wondering herself about the music room, whether it should be in the east or west wing, depending on the sunlight and Mary Virginia's inclination to play piano in the morning or evening, and if it would really matter all that much because of the plethora of sunshine in California anyway. What did he think?

Stanley took up the blueprints like a man s.n.a.t.c.hing a life jacket off the rail of a sinking ship. He spread them out on the table and studied them for hours, oblivious to everything, his mother, the servants, the yellow plains of Texas and the distant dusty cowboys on their distant dusty mounts. With a T square and a handful of freshly sharpened pencils, he began a detailed series of modifications, moving walls, drawing elevations where none had been provided, even sketching in shrubbery and the odd shadowy figure of Mary Virginia seated at the piano or strolling across the patio.

What did he think of the plans? That they were all wrong, that they were an insult, a product of nescient minds and ill-conceived notions. What did he think? That Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge should be dismissed for incompetence, that any fool off the street could have come up with a more practical and pleasing design and that the architects' man in Santa Barbara had d.a.m.ned well better bring his drawing board along. But all he said to his mother was, "If it's all right with you, I'd like to suggest some changes...."

They wound up staying nearly four months, taking rooms at the Arlington (the Potter, with its sea views, six hundred rooms and twenty-one thousand dollars' worth of custom-made china plate, wouldn't be completed until 1903), and in that time Stanley altered every least detail of the original plans, from the height of the doorways to the type of molding to be used in the servants' quarters. And he altered them daily, sometimes hourly, obsessed, fixated, stuck in a perfect groove of concentration. Inevitably, this caused some friction with the people who'd been engaged to do the actual building-Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge's architect quit within the month, as did the builder, and the architect's replacement, sent all the way from Boston, didn't last out the week. Stanley wasn't fazed. Nor was Nettie. She had faith in her son, and she was heartened to see him so concerned for his poor sister's welfare, pouring all his Fowler intensity into his blueprints and his beautiful orthogonal drawings and the elevations with their darling little puffs of shrubbery and people moving about the rooms-and it was was the Fowler coming out in him, the perfect image of her own father, which wasn't to deny the McCormicks anything, not at all, but she knew her boy. And the way he went after those architects and builders and even the Sicilian stonemasons-nothing escaped him. And if he was indecisive, well, that was a Fowler trait too, and it only meant that he was pa.s.sionately involved, putting himself to the test over and over again, questioning everything. the Fowler coming out in him, the perfect image of her own father, which wasn't to deny the McCormicks anything, not at all, but she knew her boy. And the way he went after those architects and builders and even the Sicilian stonemasons-nothing escaped him. And if he was indecisive, well, that was a Fowler trait too, and it only meant that he was pa.s.sionately involved, putting himself to the test over and over again, questioning everything.

In the way of these things, construction didn't begin in earnest until Nettie and Stanley returned to Chicago, when the most equanimous of the architects was able to move forward expeditiously and no questions asked. Stanley fell back into his former way of life-the courses in Torts and Accounting, the big open office high above the floor of the Reaper Works where the tyrannical R lurked amongst the files, dinner with his mother and whatever Chester, Grover or Cornelius she deemed suitable for him that evening-and he forgot all about Mary Virginia, the house of her confinement, California. But he did leave his mark on the place, not only in the elaborate schema of alterations that became the house itself, but in the most essential way of all: he named it.

When Nettie acquired the property it was known simply as "the Stafford place," after the man from whom she'd purchased it, O. A. Stafford, who'd had it from Colonel Greenberry W Williams, who had in turn purchased it from Jose Lugo and Antonio Gonzales, duenos duenos of the original Mexican land grant. People had begun referring to the property, which still featured Stafford's two-story frame house, his orange and olive groves and his succulent garden, as "the McCormick place." To Stanley's mind, this clearly wouldn't do. I. G. Waterman, who owned the adjoining estate, called his place "Mira Vista," and the Goulds, out on Olive Mill Road, had "La Favorita." Then there was "Piranhurst," "Riso Rivo," "The Terraces," "Cuesta Linda," "Arcady." If Mary Virginia's house and grounds were going to be in any way reflective of her cla.s.s and status, someone would have to come up with a suitable name, and while Cyrus, Harold and Anita went unwittingly about their business in Chicago and his mother spent more and more time sitting in the hotel gardens, Stanley began to fret over it. In fact, during the last month of his stay, the innominacy of the place became as much an obsession to him as the shoddy plans, and he stayed up late into the night sifting through Spanish and Italian dictionaries and poring over maps of Tuscany, Estremadura and Andalusia for inspiration. of the original Mexican land grant. People had begun referring to the property, which still featured Stafford's two-story frame house, his orange and olive groves and his succulent garden, as "the McCormick place." To Stanley's mind, this clearly wouldn't do. I. G. Waterman, who owned the adjoining estate, called his place "Mira Vista," and the Goulds, out on Olive Mill Road, had "La Favorita." Then there was "Piranhurst," "Riso Rivo," "The Terraces," "Cuesta Linda," "Arcady." If Mary Virginia's house and grounds were going to be in any way reflective of her cla.s.s and status, someone would have to come up with a suitable name, and while Cyrus, Harold and Anita went unwittingly about their business in Chicago and his mother spent more and more time sitting in the hotel gardens, Stanley began to fret over it. In fact, during the last month of his stay, the innominacy of the place became as much an obsession to him as the shoddy plans, and he stayed up late into the night sifting through Spanish and Italian dictionaries and poring over maps of Tuscany, Estremadura and Andalusia for inspiration.

And then, one afternoon in the final week of their California sojourn, it came to him. He was walking over the grounds with his mother and Dr. Franceschi, the landscape expert, elaborating his feelings regarding caryatids, statuary in general and the function of fountains in a coordinated environment of the artificial and the natural, when they emerged from a rough path into a meadow strewn with oaks all canted in one direction. The trees stood silhouetted against the mountains, heavy with sun, their branches thrust out like the arms of a party of skaters simultaneously losing their balance. It was October, the season of evaporative clarity, the sky receding all the way back to the hinges of the darkness beyond. b.u.t.terflies hung palely over the tall yellow gra.s.s. Birds called from the branches.

"What curious trees, Dr. Franceschi," Nettie said, shielding her eyes from the sun, "all leaning like that, as if someone had come along and tipped them."

Dr. Franceschi was a thin wisp of a man in his fifties, vegetally bearded, with quick hands and the dry darting eyes of the lizards that scurried underfoot and licked over the rocks. "It's the prevailing winds that do it," he said in a voice as breathy as a solo flute, "shearing down from the mountains. They call them sundowners-the winds, that is."

"What about that one over there?" Stanley said, pointing to a tree that defied the pattern, its trunk vertical and its branches as evenly s.p.a.ced as the tines of a fork. It was a hundred yards off, but he could see that there was a band of rock round the base of it, a petrified collar that seemed to hold it rigid.

"Oh, that, yes: I'd been meaning to show you that particular tree. It's quite a local curiosity."

And then they were crossing the open field, Nettie compact and busty, the jaunty horticulturist bouncing up off his toes like a balletomane, Stanley loping easily along with the great sweeping strides that made locomotion seem a form of gliding. As they drew closer, Stanley saw that the ma.s.sive slab of sandstone girding the tree was split in two, and that the tree seemed to be growing up out of the cleft. "Very curious," Dr. Franceschi was saying, "one of those anomalies of nature-you see, there was a time some years ago when an acorn fell from that tree there"-pointing-"or that one maybe, who knows, and found a pocket of sustenance atop this blasted lump of stone, and you couldn't find a less promising environment, believe me-"

But they were there now and Stanley had his amazed hands on the rock itself, a ma.s.sive thing, chest-high, big as a hea.r.s.e, rough to the touch and lingeringly warm with the radiation of the sun. It was the very stuff of the earth's bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn....

riven rock ...

that was the place where he was now and no one had to tell him that or whisper over him like he was a corpse already and with the reek of illicit s.e.x on their fingers like eddie had on his because eddie was down among the women he could hear and smell and feel in their tight-legged female immanence out in the yard and giggling in the cottages tiptoeing through the kitchen and oh mr. mccormick can never should never and will never know a thing about it a man like him that can't control his unnatural urges and i heard about a man like that once from my cousin nancy cooper in sacramento hung like a barnyard animal and he had a woman a negress that would come to him on foot six miles one way just so she couldfeelhim in her and if you believe nancy and i do it was just too much for her and she died underneath him of an excess of pleasure and apoplexy and he went right out and got himself another negress just like her only bigger ...

but let them whisper let them stand over him and say their prayers for the dead-"Think about it, Mart, he's Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn't even know it"-and violate his every orifice with their tubes and their hoses and lay him on his side inthe shower bath that was like the chinese water torture and what did they think he was eddie and mart and dr. gilbert van ta.s.sel monkeyman hamilton that they could rape him like that no covering no place to hide naked as a rat and why didn't they just leave him alone all of them his mother and katherine andcyrus the president and harold the vice president and anita too with her big swollen suety t.i.ts and her insinuatinghands like he was some sort ofpet or something some sort of baby ...

but it was his nerves and he wasblocked that wasall just a temporary condition not a thing like mary virginia his crazy bughouse sister with her white nightmare of a naked body and he would be up and about and better anyday now just like at mcleanthe first time but no he wouldn't no he wouldn't because what they didn't understand and appreciate not a one of them especially katherine who only wanted to climb atop him and make his p.e.n.i.s disappear inside her like mireille sancerre's fingers and wouldn't give him any peace not a second not a minute not an hour and she waslurking around somewhere even now he knew all about it with her binocularsand her sorrowful pitying face all drawn-up like a lemon-squeezer's poor stanley poor poor stanley what they didn't understand was that he couldn't move a muscle to save his life because the Judges wouldn't allow it they howled and shrieked in execration if he so much as shifted his tongue when s.e.x-stinking eddie forced that tube down his throat the Judges who wouldn't let him move and cried out his sins from every corner of the room sloth and depravity and s.e.xual deviation and comptrollership not the presidency or even the vice presidency and corruption in his heart and impotence with his wife and deceit of his mother the Judges shouting him down with their lips writhing like a spadeful of earthworms through the black gnarled ape's beards that covered their mouths and their screaming wet c.u.n.ts ...

but all night he lay there and all day it was tuesday wasn't it always tuesday and tuesday again and tuesday till all the months fell away like leaves from the trees and the years too and he prayed to the Judges to release him to commute his sentence time off for good behavior if only he could keep himself from sinning if only he could get back in the harness just once more just one more time ...

STANLEY OF THE APES.

When Rosaleen stepped down off the train, thinner and paler than he'd remembered, with the Irish bloom caught in her cheeks and her eyes like tidal pools filling and draining and filling again and little Eddie all grown up in her arms, O'Kane was helpless: he felt the surging oceanic tug of her-he couldn't resist it, didn't want to-and plunged in like a deep-sea diver. "Rose!" he called, spreading his arms for her, and he wanted to kiss her right there in public, wanted to have her on the platform, in the ferns, and how could he possibly wait till he got her back to the fresh-painted apartment on Micheltorena Street with the garden and birdbath out back and the big high-gunwaled boat of a bed Ernestine Thompson had helped him pick out? He was trembling. He was in love.

She didn't say a word. Just held him, the surprising strength of her arms, the baby alive between them like a living sacrament, golden hair and a navy blue sailor's suit, cooing and burbling and giving out a smell of new-made flesh, his flesh, Eddie O'Kane's.

"You look beautiful, Rose," he murmured, still attached to her but drawing back now for a quick glance of appraisal, "never more beautiful, even on the night I met you at Alice Dundee's." He was feeling sentimental, filled to the eyes with soggy emotion, like when they sang the old songs at Donnelly's, and he wanted to say more, wanted to whisper intimacies into the soft white sh.e.l.l of her ear and smell the shampoo in the curling wisps of hair that had fallen loose there, but he caught the eye of a sour-looking man in evening clothes and bit his tongue. This wasn't the place.

People were moving past them on the platform, society types, the rich come to soak themselves in the hot springs and suck up all the fat rich things the hotels had to offer, and all at once he felt self-conscious. An old lady with a matching pair of spoiled little apricot-colored dogs stopped to gape at them as if they were a couple of spaghetti twisters just off the boat and he was embarra.s.sed, he was, and he just wanted to get this over with, get past the awkwardness and take her home.

And then, without warning, she began to cry and he felt his teeth clench. She gasped out his name-"Eddie! Oh, Eddies'-and it was a war cry, an accusation, a spear thrust right through him and pulled out again. He let go of her and she looked off into the distance, biting her lip, before wearily lifting her free arm to dab at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, a new dress, pale ocher, the color of the last leaf left on the elm tree at the very end of the fall, blanched and twisting in the wind.

"Four months, Eddie," she said, trailing off in a series of truncated sobs that were like hiccoughs, erp, erp, erp. erp, erp, erp. Her eyes incinerated him. She s.n.a.t.c.hed in a breath. "My father cursed you every day, but I knew you wouldn't desert me, Eddie, I knew it." And all at once she was thrusting the baby at him like a hastily wrapped gift, the child that used to be a baby, with his forcemeat legs and the look caught between fright and wonder as if he didn't recognize his own father even and where was the reward in that? O'Kane couldn't take him, not yet, and held up his hands to show how inadequate they were. Her eyes incinerated him. She s.n.a.t.c.hed in a breath. "My father cursed you every day, but I knew you wouldn't desert me, Eddie, I knew it." And all at once she was thrusting the baby at him like a hastily wrapped gift, the child that used to be a baby, with his forcemeat legs and the look caught between fright and wonder as if he didn't recognize his own father even and where was the reward in that? O'Kane couldn't take him, not yet, and held up his hands to show how inadequate they were.

"Look how big he's gotten," she demanded in a high strained chirp of a voice, "did you ever think he'd be so big?" This was succeeded by a whole lexicon of baby talk as she bobbed her tearful angry hopeful face up and down like a toy on a string and touched her nose to Eddie Jr.'s and let him dangle finally from one gloved hand until his feet touched the pavement in his scuffed white doll's shoes and he stood there grinning and triumphant.

" 'Oose 'ittle man is he, huh? Huh?" Rosaleen cooed and the people flitted by and the cars pulled up at the curb and O'Kane stood erect in the glow of the late afternoon sun, at a loss, his hands hanging limp at his sides, half a wondering smile on his face.

Roscoe was waiting for them at the far end of the platform, the car at their disposal, courtesy of Katherine and Dr. Hamilton, who'd given O'Kane the afternoon off. Roscoe squared his chauffeur's cap on his head, very formal, very impressive, and gave O'Kane a hand with the luggage while Rosaleen and the baby settled themselves in the rear seat, and then they were off, up the gradual incline that was State Street and into the trembling blue lap of the mountains that hung over the town like a pall of smoke. "Such a grand car," Rosaleen purred, but she wasn't smiling, not yet, "and you know it's my first ride ever, don't you?" He stole a peek at her under the inflexible arch of her hat, his brown colleen, his wife, and kissed the corner of her mouth as tenderly as he knew how until she turned to him and kissed him back, just a peck, with lips as cold as the stones of the sea.

She was pleased with the apartment, he could see that, though she fussed around the place for half an hour, saying things like "Oh, Eddie, you call this a sofa, and those curtains, curtains, and what an unusual bed-is that lacquer on it or what?" and quietly disparaging the view, as if there were another ocean and another set of islands he could have presented her with, but it was for form's sake, for the sake of establishing their roles, or reestablishing them, she in the house and he at Riven Rock earning a handsome wage as an essential cog in the McCormick machine. Through it all, the baby was a saint, nothing less. He crawled around the front room a bit, putting things in his mouth and pulling them out again all glistening with drool, and then he fell into a sleep that was like a coma, not so much as a snort or whimper out of him. By then the sun was almost gone, the sitting room walls lit like the inside of a peach, everything rosy, everything fine-but for the one thing, the most important thing. and what an unusual bed-is that lacquer on it or what?" and quietly disparaging the view, as if there were another ocean and another set of islands he could have presented her with, but it was for form's sake, for the sake of establishing their roles, or reestablishing them, she in the house and he at Riven Rock earning a handsome wage as an essential cog in the McCormick machine. Through it all, the baby was a saint, nothing less. He crawled around the front room a bit, putting things in his mouth and pulling them out again all glistening with drool, and then he fell into a sleep that was like a coma, not so much as a snort or whimper out of him. By then the sun was almost gone, the sitting room walls lit like the inside of a peach, everything rosy, everything fine-but for the one thing, the most important thing.

Rosaleen was in the kitchen, poking her head in the cabinets, inspecting the icebox. She'd seen everything twice already and O'Kane was beginning to think she was avoiding him. It had been four months. She was hurt and angry, and she had a right to be. He stood at the window, awkward in the silence, handsome Eddie O'Kane with the three o'clock luck in his eye and never at a loss for words, and here he didn't know what to say, how to begin it-with an apology, an excuse, a plea? Or maybe he should just move into her and touch her, this exciting stranger hovering over the kitchen sink. "Are you hungry?" he finally asked.

She drifted into the room then, slow and insouciant, and gave him the full benefit of her eyes. "I'm famished, Eddie," she said, and her voice had the same effect on him as that first sure sip of whiskey on a night when the barroom is lit like the reaches of heaven and nothing is impossible, "famished," she said. "For you."

And so it went, Eddie O'Kane and the bliss of domesticity. Elsie Reardon moved into the room he vacated in the servants' quarters and Roscoe came for him every morning at 7:30 after dropping off Nick and Pat. Mart wasn't too pleased, having to spend the first hour of his day sitting alone with Mr. McCormick in that interval when the shifts changed, and maybe he was a little jealous too, used to having O'Kane to himself and hungering after his own bride and his own life but so shy and tongue-tied he'd die in his tracks if a girl so much as looked at him. Katherine and her mother packed up and went back east at the end of October, Dr. Hamilton procured another dozen monkeys from G.o.d knew where, and Julius, the big orange ape, lacking any other apes to mount, sniff and soak with urine at the doctor's pleasure, was given the run of the place, appearing as if by legerdemain on the roof of the garage one minute and in the kitchen the next, his feet drawn up under him on a three-legged stool and a perspiring gla.s.s of milk clamped firmly in his spidery hand. And at home, in the three-room apartment they rented from a retired munitions salesman by the name of Rowlings who lived upstairs and watched every move they made, Rosaleen, who was no housekeeper at all, tried her best to move the piles of rubbish from one corner of the place to another and spent a good hour every evening immolating a piece of meat on the new Acme Sterling Steel Range in the kitchen.

Before long it was winter, iceless and snowless, sunshine pouring down like liquid gold, hissing rains that stood the earth on its head and rattled the boulders in Hot Springs Creek like the teeth of a boxer's jaw and every leaf of every tree green as the Garden of Eden. O'Kane sent his mother pictures of the palms and the winter flowers and she wrote him that n.o.body in the neighborhood could believe it, weather like that, and what a bitter winter it was at home, his cousin Kevin down with a lung disorder and the doctors baffled and Uncle Billy suffering with the ague, but she was fine, if you discounted the sciatica that was like the devil's own pitchfork thrust into her every fifteen seconds, night and day, and his father, knock on wood, was as strong as the day he retired from the ring, preserved as he was in alcohol like a fish in a jar, and not so much as a sniffle. O'Kane had no complaints about the weather-he didn't miss the snow a bit, not even at Christmas-but as the days wore on, Rosaleen began to get under his skin.

The apartment was too small, for one thing, though it had seemed plenty big enough the day he'd rented it, and the baby was always underfoot, walking now, into everything, howling all night like a cat skinned alive and filling his diapers like the very genius of s.h.i.t. His favorite trick was picking through the trash, which Rose never emptied, and whenever he was quiet for more than five minutes at a time you'd be sure to find him crouching behind the sofa with a half-gnawed bone or an orange gone white with mold. And that was a funny thing, the oranges. When O'Kane was a boy, they were five cents each, the price of a beer, and he saw them at Christmas only, and only then if he was lucky. And now he was drowning in them, oranges like an avalanche, a nickel a basket, and he didn't even like the flavor of them anymore, too cloying, almost poisonously sweet, and with all that juice running down your chin and gumming up your fingers.

But Rosaleen. She was so insipid, stupid as a clam, nattering on about sewing and patterns and what was prettier the blue or the yellow till sometimes he wanted to jump up from the table and choke the breath out of her. And her housekeeping-or lack of it. She was as filthy and disorganized as her whey-faced mother and her tuberous brothers, dirty Irish, shanty Irish, not fit to kiss the hem of his mother's dress and you never saw so much as a speck of dust in the O'Kane household, no matter how poor they might have been. She was putting on weight again too, and that drove him to distraction, because every time he looked at her, the fat settling into her hips and thighs and ballooning her b.r.e.a.s.t.s till she could barely straighten up, he was sure she'd gone and got pregnant again. And that he couldn't abide. Not at his age, not when he had his whole life ahead of him still. Maybe it wasn't right, but the way he felt, the burden of just one kid more would put him in the asylum himself-they'd have to chain him to Mr. McCormick and they could rave at each other and p.i.s.s their pants side by side. Well, and not to put too fine a point on it, as his father would say, it was inevitable that he began to stray, just a bit, from the nest.

First it was two nights a week, Friday and Sat.u.r.day, and who could blame him for that? And he did take Rose with him now and again, when they could get the girl from down the street to mind little Eddie, and he had to spoil his own evening and watch her get drunk as a sow and listen to the incessant nagging whine of her voice every time he lifted a gla.s.s to his lips-"Eddie, don't you think that's enough now," and "Let's go home, Eddie, I'm bored," and "How can you stand this place?" The two nights stretched to three and then four and he began to run with some of the boys at Cody Menhoff's. Sometimes, just for the h.e.l.l of it, they'd have a shot and a beer at every place in town and then all pile into a car and drive up over San Marcos Pa.s.s and all the way out to Mattei's Tavern in Los Olivos and he wouldn't come home till three in the morning, stinking, absolutely stinking. That took the smile off Rose's face, all right. She'd pounce on him like a harpy and their wars would rage all over the apartment and out onto the front porch, furniture flying, the baby squalling, Old Man Rowlings punctuating every shout and cry with an outraged thump from above.

Spring began in February and lasted through the end of May and it was a glorious time, the vegetable world in riot, every breeze a barge-load of spices. Sat.u.r.day afternoons he'd take Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. to the park or hop the streetcar down to the beach, where he'd lie flat on the sand with a beer propped on his chest and stare up into the sky while his face and limbs turned brown as a wop's. The Ice Queen-Katherine-returned in May and she never said a word to him about Rosaleen or Eddie Jr., just h.e.l.lo and good-bye and how did my husband look and what did he eat today, stiff as ever, winter on two feet, and she took her lawyers with her down to the Santa Barbara Munic.i.p.al Courthouse and had her husband declared incompetent.

O'Kane first heard about it one night when he couldn't get home after work-Roscoe was running Mrs. McCormick across town to some fancy-dress party and wouldn't be back till late. The last thing he wanted was to stick around the place, and Rosaleen was sure to give him h.e.l.l over it, the meal ruined and she slaving over the stove since three and all the rest of it, but he had no choice unless he wanted to walk-and he didn't. He was able to cajole a plate of home fries and ham out of the c.h.i.n.k cook-and he would have killed for a beer or even a gla.s.s of wine, but there was nothing in the house and Sal and the rest of the McCormick wops had been pretty cool to him ever since the Dimucci business-so he took the plate and a gla.s.s of b.u.t.termilk upstairs to see if maybe Nick wanted to play a couple of hands of poker to while away the time.

Nick was sitting behind the barred door to the upstairs parlor with a newspaper spread out on the footstool before him, and Pat was leaning back in a chair just outside the open door to Mr. McCormick's bedroom. "Can't get home to the hearth," O'Kane said, setting down his plate so he could dig out his keys and swing open the heavy iron door, "so I figured I'd stop round and see what the night nurses are up to. Anybody for a hand of poker?"

Nick didn't think so. Not right then, anyway. Pat stirred himself, glanced over his shoulder at Mr. McCormick, who was apparently asleep, though you could hardly tell because he'd been so blocked and lifeless lately, and said that yeah, he might play a hand or two.

"By the way," Nick said in a casual rumble, "did you see this in the paper?"

O'Kane had started across the room, thinking to set plate and gla.s.s down on the sideboard while he pulled out the card table, and he stopped now, arrested in mid-stride. "What?"

"This. Right here."

O'Kane stood there like an altar boy with the collection plate held out stiffly before him, except it was ham and potatoes on the plate and not a heap of pocket-worried coins, and he was no altar boy, not anymore. He looked over Nick's shoulder to where Nick's thick stump of a finger was pointing, and there it was, the cold truth about the Ice Queen, in 6-point type: M'CORMICK GUARDIANSHIP TO WIFE

Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, wife of Stanley Robert McCormick of Riven Rock in Montecito, pet.i.tioned today in Superior Court to have her husband declared an incompetent person. Mr. McCormick, youngest son of the late Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, has suffered from mental illness since shortly after his marriage to Mrs. McCormick in 1904. The Honorable Baily M. Melchior, Superior Court Judge, appointed Mrs. McCormick, along with Henry B. Favill and Cyrus Bentley, both of Chicago, as joint guardians.

"So what do you think of your poor heartbroken wife now, Eddie-'She loves him and she wants to be with him,' isn't that what you said?" Nick was squinting up at him from eyes set deep in the big calabash of his head. He was running a finger along the lapel of his jacket and smirking as if he'd just won a bet at long odds. From across the room, Pat let out with a strangled little bark of a laugh.

O'Kane shrugged. "There's no love lost between her and me," he said, and he was thinking of the lecture her Imperial Highness had given him on trifling with a girl's affections, as if she would have the vaguest notion of what went on between a man and a woman, and that still rankled, because no woman was going to tell him what to do, especially when it came to his own private affairs. "I'm in this for Mr. McCormick's sake, and I wouldn't walk across the street for her, if you want to know the truth."

"That comes as a surprise to me," Nick rumbled, still with that mocking tone, his eyes glistening, cat and mouse. "You were the one had the crush on her-and not so long ago at that. Am I right, Pat?"

The plate was going cold in his hand. Outside, beyond the windows, the sky was darkening. It was getting late, and he knew Rosaleen would be working herself up, pans burning on the stove, garbage up to her ankles, the baby squatting behind the couch with some sc.r.a.p of offal in his mouth and she taking a hard angry pull at the bottle she kept hidden away in back of the icebox where n.o.body would think to look. He thought of ringing up Old Man Rowlings and having him give her a message, but then why bother? She'd be riding her broom by now anyway. He gave Pat a look and then turned back to Nick with another shrug. "Let's just say my eyes have been opened."

Nick was turned halfway round in his chair, neckless and ma.s.sive, his shoulders looking as if they'd been inflated with a pneumatic pump. "Right from the start I told you she was a gold digger, didn't I?"

"I'm not going to defend her, not anymore, but I still think you're wrong. If I'm not mistaken, she's got her own millions that her father left her-and that chateau in Switzerland and all the rest of it. So what does she need with his money?"

"Hah. You hear that, Pat? 'What does she need with his money?' Come on, Eddie, wake up. Did you ever in your life meet anybody thought they had enough money? You get that rich, you only want to get richer."

O'Kane still hadn't set the plate down-or the b.u.t.termilk either. He was beginning to feel like a waiter. And he was hungry too, but there was something here that needed to be settled-or at least thrashed out.

"And I'll tell you another thing," Nick said, and he dug a pre-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket and stuck it between his lips, "this right here"-tapping the newspaper-"really opens things up for your Mrs. Katherine McCormick."

"What do you mean?"

The flare of the match, a whiff of sulphur. "Don't you get it? He's incompetent and she's got hold of the will she had him make out the day after they got married-the one that leaves everything to her?-and now she can traipse all over the country and do whatever she d.a.m.n well pleases in any kind of society, because when they ask her 'So where's your husband?' she just dabs at her eyes and says, 'The poor man's locked away at Riven Rock with his nurses-and he's mad as a loon.' "

Pat let out another laugh. He'd come awake now, setting all four legs of the chair down on the floor and hunching forward, elbows propped up on the b.u.t.tress of his thighs. "So you think she'd be seeing other men then? Secretly, I mean?"

"Call a spade a spade, why don't you, Patrick." Nick let the smoke spew out of his nostrils, a blue haze settling in his lap and then rising, deflected, to irradiate his blunt features and the vast shining dome of his forehead. "You mean whoring around, don't you?"

"It's not right to talk about her like that and you know it," O'Kane heard himself say, and immediately regretted it. Here he was, defending her again.

"Not right?" Nick echoed. "Why not? You think just because she's a millionaire's wife she's any better than you? You think she doesn't itch between her legs like any other woman?"

It was a stimulating proposition, the Ice Queen in heat, but O'Kane never had the opportunity to pursue it. Because just then there was a movement in the room behind Pat, and when he looked up Mr. McCormick was standing in the doorway.

At first no one moved, and they might have been at the very last scene of a play, just before the lights go down. A long slow moment breathed by, the smallest sounds of the house magnified till every creak and rustle was like a scream. And then, very slowly and deliberately, O'Kane crossed to the sideboard and set down the plate and beside it the gla.s.s, freeing up his hands-just in case. "Mr. McCormick!" he cried, his voice animated with pleasure and surprise, as if he were greeting an old friend on the street, and he exchanged a glance with Pat, careful to make no sudden moves. "Good evening, sir. How are you feeling?"

Nick had folded up the newspaper, and though he hadn't got to his feet, you could see he was ready to spring if need be; Pat, inches from Mr. McCormick and all but impotent in the grip of the chair, looked up with quickened eyes. This was the first time Mr. McCormick had been out of bed in two weeks or more, and the first time in memory he'd got up without any prompting. He'd been violent on the last occasion, veering from a state of utter immobility to the frenzy of released energy that was like a balloon puffed and puffed till it exploded, and it had taken both O'Kane and Mart to subdue him. But now he merely stood there in his crisp blue pajamas, stooped and hunched over to the right where the muscles of his leg had gone slack from disuse. He didn't seem to have registered the question.

"You must be feeling better," O'Kane prompted. It was vital to engage him in conversation, the first step-he was waking up, coming out of it, coming back to the real world after his long sojourn in the other one.

Mr. McCormick looked right at him, no bugs, no demons, no eyes crawling up the walls. "I ... I ... is it lunchtime yet? I was wondering about lunch...." And then: "I've been sleeping, haven't I?"

For all his experience and all the cynicism it bred, O'Kane was exhilarated, on fire: Mr. McCormick was talking! Not only talking, but making sense-or nearly-and he wasn't lashing out, wasn't cursing and spitting and attacking his nurses as if they were the devil's minions. He was hungry, that was all, just like anybody else. In a flash O'Kane saw ahead to the weeks and months to come, the feeding tube discarded, Mr. McCormick dressing himself, using the toilet, joking again, Mr. McCormick reaching into his breast pocket, pulling out his checkbook, Let's see about that acreage you were interested in, Eddie ... Let's see about that acreage you were interested in, Eddie ...

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. McCormick," Nick offered from his chair in the corner of the room, and Pat, his face hung like a painting at the level of Mr. McCormick's waist, echoed the greeting.

"My wife," Mr. McCormick said, and it was as if they didn't exist, his eyes focused on some point in the distance, through the walls and across the grounds and all the way out to that fancy-dress party on Arrellaga Street. He shuffled into the room, unsteady on his feet, skating on gravel, his arms leaping to steady himself. "Katherine," he said, and the name seemed to surprise him, as if he hadn't spoken it, as if the syllables had somehow separated themselves from the air and spontaneously combined. He shuffled his feet. Started forward. Thought better of it. Stopped. Finally, moving with the wincing deliberation of a man walking across a bed of hot coals, he made the center of the room, his shoulders violently quaking. "Mother," he said, and he was looking straight into O'Kane's eyes now, "I must have fallen asleep...."

"Mr. McCormick!" O'Kane had no choice but to raise his voice, calling out to someone drowning at sea, the waves crashing, the rocks drawing nearer, and he couldn't let him go under again, he couldn't. "Mr. McCormick, sir. sir. Good Good evening! evening! Don't you want something to Don't you want something to eat? eat? Look, look here," gesturing to the plate on the sideboard and waving him on like a traffic cop, "don't you see what we've fixed you for dinner? Good Look, look here," gesturing to the plate on the sideboard and waving him on like a traffic cop, "don't you see what we've fixed you for dinner? Good ham, ham, it's delicious. Here, try a bite-you like it's delicious. Here, try a bite-you like ham, ham, you know you do." you know you do."

And there he was, pale as water, standing suddenly at the sideboard in his pajamas, barefooted, long-armed, slumped to one side like a poorly staked sapling, and he was eating, forcing the congealed lumps of potato into his mouth, his jaws working, eyes lit with accomplishment, normalcy, the first step....

But it wasn't to be.

The three of them watched in silence as he ate, jamming the food into his mouth with both hands, gulping and gnashing, licking his fingers and wiping his palms on the breast of his pajamas, and that was fine, a small miracle, until the demons took him and he swung violently round on them with O'Kane's fork clutched in his hand. Now he was hunted, brought to bay like an animal, the old fever in his eyes. "My wife!" he shouted, "I want my wife! Do you hear me?! Do you?!"

O'Kane's voice was a long swallow of syrup, the most reasonable and soothing voice in the world. "Mr. McCormick, it's me, Eddie O'Kane. And look, your friends Nick and Pat too. Your wife isn't here-you know that. You've been asleep, that's all. Dreaming. And here's your luncheon, nice, just the way you like it."

Mr. McCormick took a spastic slice at the air, wielding the fork like a dagger. His bare toes gripped the floor. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. "You," he sputtered. "They, they-Katherine. I want to fu-f.u.c.k her, I do, and you bring her here right now. D-do you hear me? Do you?"

How much of the conversation had he overheard? O'Kane was thinking about that as he signaled Pat with his eyes and began to inch forward, careful to keep his weight on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. You think she doesn't itch betweenherlegs like any other woman? You think she doesn't itch betweenherlegs like any other woman?

And then, just before he hurled the fork at O'Kane's face, smashed the plate and gla.s.s and tore the sideboard out from the wall preparatory to upending it on Pat's shins, Mr. McCormick dropped his voice and lulled them for just the fleetingest instant. "I want to fu-f.u.c.k her," he breathed, bowing his head, and he might have been a boy telling his mother what he wanted for his birthday-then, only then, did he explode.

The fork took a divot out of O'Kane's cheek, just below his right eye, and he could hear it rattling across the floor behind him as Pat sprang forward and Mr. McC-ormick, shaky on his feet but with the astonishing dexterity of the deranged and otherworldly, upended the sideboard and danced clear. There was a keening in the air now, a razor-edged hysterical singsong chant, "No, no, stay away, stay away," Mr. McCormick backing into the corner in a wrestler's crouch, O'Kane and Nick going in low to pull his legs out from under him.

It was a brief but savage struggle that twice saw Mr. McCormick break free and rush the barred door as if he could dart right on through it, but there was no key in the lock this time and they finally ran him to the ground in his bathroom, where he tried to hold the door against the combined weight of the three of them. The shame of it all was Nick. Nick lost his temper. Cursing, his eyes dark streaks in the livid pulp of his face, he was the first through the bathroom door, and he ignored all the rules-open hands only, no blows, use your legs and shoulders and try only to restrain the patient, not subdue him-standing back from Mr. McCormick and letting his fists fall like mallets, the thump of flesh on flesh, not the face, never the face, hitting their employer and benefactor repeatedly in the chest and abdomen until he went down on the tile floor. But that wasn't enough for Nick-he was possessed, mindless, as crazed as Katzakis or the Ap.r.o.n Man or Gunderson, the big Swede with the rolled dough for arms who killed and decapitated his wife and daughter and held six men at bay for over three hours till finally they had to chloroform him. Nick wouldn't stop. He kept pounding Mr. McCormick over and over again, though Mr. McCormick was bundled up on the floor with his hands over his head, crying "No, no, no!"

"Nick!" O'Kane roared, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the heavy arms as they rose and fell, and he felt it coming up in him himself, the uncontainable hormonal rush that makes every one of us a potential maniac. Before he knew what was happening he'd jerked Nick to his feet, spun him around and driven his fist into the soft dollop of flesh in the center of that shining sphere of an overcooked face.

"Eddie!" Pat was shouting, "Nick!" bodies everywhere, the footing treacherous, Mr. McCormick hunched up in the fetal position on the cold hard tiles but with one eye open, one glistening mad eye on the madness churning above him, Nick coming back at him now, at O'Kane, squaring off, shouting, "You son of a b.i.t.c.h I'll kill you!" and the fury of their voice magnified in that confined s.p.a.ce till the bathroom echoed like some private chamber of h.e.l.l.

All that was bad enough-the abuse of Mr. McCormick when he was defenseless and just coming out of his haze; the fight with Nick that dredged up all the mistrust and rancor that must have lain brooding between them like a copperhead with somebody's foot on its tail, though he never suspected and never would have admitted it if he had; the grim prospect of the championship bout awaiting him when he finally did get home to Rosaleen-but for O'Kane, on that unlucky night, it was just the beginning.

No sooner had Pat separated him and Nick than he turned and stalked out of the apartment, his knuckles raw, Nick raving at his back, Mr. McCormick all but comatose on the floor. "Go on, get out of here, you stinking son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Nick bellowed. "I don't know what the f.u.c.k you're doing here anyhow-you're on the day shift, jacka.s.s!" He went right on down the stairs and out the front door without a word to anybody, and then he was walking up the drive, engulfed by the night. The lights faded at his back and the darkness closed in on him, a smell of tidal flats on the air, the cold underbelly of the fog catching and tearing and spilling its guts in the treetops. He didn't think about it twice: he just started walking.

Five miles. His feet were blistered-he wasn't used to this anymore-he was bleeding from the cut under his eye where the fork had gouged him, and his upper lip was split and swollen. He raged against Nick the whole way, Nick who was thirty-four years old and resented O'Kane because O'Kane was younger, smarter, better looking, because O'Kane was head nurse and he wasn't. Well, f.u.c.k him. O'Kane had blackened one of his eyes for him and done some damage that wasn't so obvious maybe, but he would feel it tomorrow, that was for sure. He walked on, the anger tapering off inside him as the fog came down and the chill of the night took hold of him-and he was getting soft, as addicted to the sun as a lizard on a rock, and what would Boston be like now? Two cars went by, but they were going in the wrong direction. And then, to cap things off, he got to the foot of State Street five minutes after the last streetcar had left.

What he needed was a drink. Or two. But for some unfathomable reason-birth, death, the end of the universe and all things available to man-Cody Menhoff's was closed at 9:45 P.M. on a Thursday night in the middle of May with grown men expiring for the want of a drink, and he stood there dumbfounded at the locked door, licking the crusted-over scab on his lip, till he heard a shout from across the street. "Hey, partner," someone called to him, "you looking for a drink?"

He wound up in a saloon in Spanishtown, the seething hovel of mud-brick houses and ramshackle chicken coops where all the Mexicans and c.h.i.n.ks who worked the hotels lived and where you could always find a drink and a wh.o.r.e-not that he was looking for the latter, not especially. What he found himself doing was drinking dirty brown liquid out of a dirty brown cup with a character in a peaked cap and military mustaches who could have been Porfirio Diaz himself for all O'Kane knew. But he didn't care. He had no prejudices-spics, wops, c.h.i.n.ks, Krauts, Micks, it was all the same to him. Set up another round and let's chase it with a couple of those Mexican beers that smell like wet p.u.s.s.y and taste like they were strained through the crotch of somebody's union suit. Yeah, that's right, that's the one. Slainte! Slainte! How you say it? How you say it? Salud. Salud. Okay, Okay, salud! salud!

He was there an hour maybe, long enough to forget his split lip and the pain radiating from a place just above his left temple where Nick had twice caught him with a right hand that felt as if it had been launched from a cannon, and then he thought he might want to see some American faces for a while and wandered up the street to a place he'd been to once or twice before. It was festive inside. Full of life. He saw a raft of women's hats, pinned-up hair, men in shirtsleeves. The player piano was going and some drunk, a guy he thought he might have recognized from Menhoff's, was singing along and running his hands over the keys in pantomime: They heeded not his dying prayer They buried him there on the lone prairie In a little box just six by three And his bones now rot on the lone prairie He had a terrific voice, the drunk, very plaintive and evocative, and O'Kane asked him if he knew "Carrick Fergus" and he did but there was no roll for it so they had to settle for "The Streets of New York," which they ran through twice, O'Kane harmonizing, and then "Alexander's Ragtime Band." That made them thirsty, so they sat at a table and O'Kane ordered whiskey for them both and never mind the chaser, and he was just settling in and feeling expansive, telling the drunk-whose name was Joe something-about Mr. McCormick and how he'd finally woken up like Sleeping Beauty and how he, O'Kane, came to have this gash in his cheek and the split lip and aggravated temple, when he looked up and saw Giovannella Dimucci sitting across the room in the dining area with a man who had his arm around her shoulder and was leaning in to whisper something in her ear. But Giovannella wasn't looking at the man she was with. She was staring across the room. At O'Kane.

Who can say what a man feels at a time like that? What miswired connections suddenly fuse, what deadened paths and arterial causeways come roaring to life all in an instant? O'Kane pushed himself up from the chair without so much as a word to Joe something, who was in the middle of a disconnected monologue revolving around the loss of his hat, his wallet and his left shoe, and propelled himself across the crowded room in a kind of trance. His hips were tight, as compact as pistons, he could feel the heavy musculature of his legs grip and relax and grip again with each stride as he swung his shoulders out and back in a rhythmic autonomous strut, his heart beating strong and sure, everything in the sharpest focus. He wasn't looking at Giovannella or the man with her, or not at his face anyway-his eyes were locked on the arm that insinuated so many things, the arm he wanted to break in six places. It would have been no use pointing out to him that it was Giovannella's absolute and unfettered right to go where and with whom she pleased and that it was n.o.body's business but her own as to when and how that unwitting arm had come to drape itself so casually across her shoulder, no use at all. The die was cast. Words were useless.

O'Kane walked right up to the table and tore the arm off Giovannella's shoulder as he might have stripped a dead limb from a tree and found to his consternation that the arm was attached elsewhere. There was a question of sinew, bone, cartilage, and the initially startled and then outraged flaxen-haired and beefy farmboy in a pair of pale blue washed-out overalls who formed the trunk of this particular tree. "You can't do that," O'Kane said, meaning a whole range of things, and when the arm spontaneously tried to rea.s.sert itself he slapped it away and showed the farmboy the b.l.o.o.d.y divot under his eye and the aggravated temple and the lip that had gone yellow with pus, and the farmboy desisted. And still without looking at her, without so much as giving her a glance, O'Kane reached out unerringly and hoisted Giovannella to her feet. "We're getting out of here," he said, and he was fixing his lunatic glare on the farmboy's evil-eyed companion in the event he wanted his arm wrenched out of the socket too. And then, as if Giovannella might have harbored any doubt as to his meaning or intentions, he lowered his voice to a primal growl and gave the statement a sense of urgency: "Right now."

She wasn't happy. She fought him every step of the way, through the maze of tables, into the foyer and out the door into the deserted street. No one challenged him-they barely looked up from their beers-and just let the farmboy and his evil-eyed companion come after him, just let them. He dragged her half a block before she broke away from him, shifted her weight like a professional boxer and hit him with everything she had, and right where it was tenderest, right where Mr. McCormick's fork had opened up his flesh, so that it felt now, for the briefest sharpest instant, as if his whole face were slipping off the bone like a rubber mask. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" she screamed.

"Me?" He was outraged, stung to bitterness and enmity at the sheer unreasonableness of her response. Was she crazy? Was that it? "You were the one sitting in a dive like that with some jerk's arm around you like some common-"

She hit him again and was rearing back to unleash a complementary blow with the sharp little bundle of knuckles that was her left fist, when he caught her arm at the wrist. Quick as a bolt, she came back at him with the other hand, but he caught that one too. And he wasn't thinking, not at all, but somewhere inside him he registered the sensation of holding fast to those two frail and quick-blooded wrists that were like birds, sparrows s.n.a.t.c.hed out of the air and imprisoned in the grip of his unconquerable hands, and it was electric. It surged through him, and there was no power on earth that could stop him now. "Like some common wh.o.r.e," he said.

She spat at him. Kicked out with jackknifing knees. Cursed him in Italian first and then in English. It didn't matter. Not at all. Because he was supreme and he had hold of her wrists and he wasn't letting go, not right then, maybe not ever.

He led her down the street in an awkward dance, both of them shuffling sideways, till he found a place thick with trees at the far northern verge of the Potter Hotel grounds, and there was never any question of the outcome. For all the power of her charm and her black persuasive eyes and her body that was flawless and young and without stint of constraint, he was more charming and more persuasive-and more powerful. She had to understand that, and finally, after he'd been rough with her, maybe too rough with her, she did. She clung to him beneath the night-blooming bushes in the dark of the starless night, her skin naked to his, and sobbed for him, sobbed so hard he thought she would break in half, and then, only then, did he let go and feel the warmth infuse him as if his blood had been drained, and whiskey, hot burning Irish from the sainted sh.o.r.es, subst.i.tuted in its place. They lay there through the slow-rolling hours and they talked in low voices and kissed and let the fog come down like the breath of something so big and overwhelming they could never have conceived of it, and this time, when he pulled her to him, he didn't have to force her.