T. Boyle - Riven Rock

When the dust cleared, it was found that most of the older buildings in town were destroyed or severely damaged — the Fithian Building, the Mortimer Cook Building, St. Francis Hospital, the Potter Theater, the Diblee Mansion on the mesa to the south of town, the old Spanish Mission itself — and that three people had been killed (two of them when a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank crashed through the roof of the Arlington Hotel) and more than fifty injured. President Coolidge ordered the USS Arkansas up from San Diego to give medical aid and detach a squadron of marines to patrol the streets against looters.

Telephone lines were down, of course, and it was past five before O‘Kane was able to get news of Riven Rock. He could picture the whole place in ruins — there was no way in the world that rigid rock structure could have survived such a shaking — and he thought about Mr. McCormick, sure, but it was Giovannella he was most worried for. Giovannella, who’d been in command of the kitchen four years now without incident, Giovannella, his sworn enemy who shrugged off his every advance and yet threw up the children to him constantly — yes, children: the infant girl she gave birth to in the summer of 1920 was named Edwina and had the same glaucous Dingle Bay eyes as little Guido. He loved her. He worshiped her. Mooned at her from the kitchen doorstep (he was forbidden to set foot inside), wrote her impassioned letters (which she never opened), begged her to — yes — marry him. That Giovannella. Giovannella Dimucci Capolupo, the most stubborn woman on God’s green earth, mother of his children, the love of his life—“You had your chance, Eddie,” she said, “and you wasted it”—he was worried for her.

He was battling a blaze in a lunchroom down near the foot of State Street with an army of boys and men and soot-blackened women in kerchiefs — the bucket brigade, up from the sea, hand over hand — when he saw O‘Mara limping up the street toward him. “O’Mara!” he shouted, dropping the bucket at his feet and rushing across the shattered pavement to grab the man by the narrow wedge of his shoulders. “What happened out there? Is anybody hurt?”

O‘Mara gave him a distant look, as if he didn’t recognize him, but that was because of his wandering eyes, which you never could pin down. “The garage collapsed,” he said, shaking out a cigarette and putting a match to it, “and all the cars got crushed. Fucking destroyed, every one of them.”

“And the house?”

“Still standing. There’s nobody hurt but Caesar Bisordi’s wife out in the cottages — the roof fell in on her — and I’m the one Hull sent into town to fetch a doctor, as if I could find one in all this mess.”

O‘Kane turned directly away from him and started out on foot, and all those paradisiacal hills and beaches were turned hellish, fires everywhere, cars wrapped around trees and standing up to their skirts in ditches, and everything so absolutely hushed and silent you would have thought the word had gone deaf. He reached Riven Rock by six-thirty and found Mr. McCormick, preternaturally excited, out on the lawn in the company of Mart and Dr. Brush and one of the huskier laborers, surveying the damage. “Eddie!” he cried out when he saw O’Kane coming up the drive, “we’ve had a terrible big pounding here, worse than anything you ever saw. It — it blew out all the windows and look there at where the stone facing came loose….” He paused to catch his breath. “But you — you’re naked, Eddie. And you’ve got no hat—”

“I’m all right, Mr. McCormick, don’t you worry about me — I’m just glad to see you’re safe and well. It was pretty bad down there,” addressing them all now. “You should see It — the city’s pretty well destroyed, streetcars lying on their sides, houses tumbled into the street, fires everywhere. And dust — Jesus, I had to clamp a rag over my mouth to keep from choking on it. I got here as soon as I could — and I had to walk the whole way.”

Brush began to bluster out some nonsense about the milk cows and roosters sounding the alarm just before the tremor hit, and everyone began talking at once. O‘Kane turned to Mart. “How’s Giovannella?” he asked, but before Mart could answer, Mr. McCormick came right up to them, looming and twitching. “And you’re, you’re bleeding — you know that, Eddie? You — you’re naked and you-you’re bleeding—”

“It’s nothing,” O‘Kane said, and he looked into his employer’s face and smelled the rankness of his breath and saw the frenzy building in his eyes and gave Mart a nod: this was when he was most likely to bolt.

“Eddie, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding—”

“She’s okay,” Mart said, stepping back a pace to avoid Mr. McCormick and giving O‘Kane a look that could have meant anything. “She’s in the kitchen.”

“Yes,” Brush boomed, closing in on them with his arms spread wide just as Mr. McCormick shied away, “the house stood up pretty nicely, considering the magnitude of this thing — they’re saying it’s the worst earthquake since the one that hit Tokyo two years back or even the ought-six quake in San Francisco, for the main and simple… but go ahead, Eddie, go on in there and get yourself cleaned up and see to the cook. We didn’t want to bring her out here, of course,” he said, lowering his voice, “because of Mr. McCormick — and don’t worry about him, we’ve got Mr. Vitalio here to see to his needs.” He glanced up to where Mr. McCormick was now pacing up and down the sward in front of the house, as agitated as he’d been over the gopher, and then he glanced at the laborer, a big black-haired wop with muscles you could see through his shirt. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Vitalio?”

The wop glanced uneasily at Mr. McCormick’s manic figure, as if he was expected to wrestle him to the ground at any moment — which he might well have to do before the day was out — and then he turned back to Dr. Brush and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s right,” he said.

“Okay, then”—O‘Kane was already turning away—“I’m going to go in and see about Giovannella.”

But before he could escape, Brush caught him by the arm. “Oh, Eddie, I almost forgot: we might have to move Mr. McCormick into the theater building — just till we have somebody come out to see whether the house is safe or not — and I’ll want you to stay here tonight, for the main and simple reason that it’ll help calm him and we can’t really expect to see Nick or Patrick anytime soon, can we?”

O‘Kane just nodded, and then he broke away, trotted up the drive and went round back of the house and into the kitchen. The place was shadowy and dark — the lights were out, of course — and there was litter everywhere. All the pots and pans had come down from their hooks, the cabinet drawers had disgorged their contents and jerked themselves out onto the floor, the stove was shoved out from the wall and the big meat locker in the back was tilted crazily against the doorframe. “Giovannella?” he called. “Giovannella? Are you there?”

At first there was no response, and he waded into the gloom, kicking aside saucepans, cheese graters and broken crockery, glass everywhere. “Giov? You here?”

Just then an aftershock hit the place with a sudden wallop, as if the earth were a long raveling whip and the house and kitchen riding on the business end of it. Things fell. Plaster sifted down. There was a clatter and a boom and then everything was still again. That was when Giovannella cried out — and it wasn’t a shriek of terror or a plea or a cry for help so much as a curse of frustration and rage.

He found her in the broom closet, trembling, her eyes climbing out of her head, and her clothes — apron, dress, stockings, shoes, all of it — steaming and wet with what he at first took to be blood. His heart froze. She looked up at him, her legs folded under her, her clothes saturated not with blood, he saw now — and smelled, smelled it too — but marinara sauce, and every emotion was concentrated in her eyes. “Eddie,” she said. Just that: “Eddie.”