T. Boyle - Riven Rock

When she received Kempf’s telegram and then spoke with him via long distance, she was in Boston, at her mother‘s, seeing to the affairs that had piled up in her absence, and Jane had gone on to Philadelphia to look after her own concerns. Katherine called her that night with the news, and they arranged to leave for Santa Barbara two weeks hence — just after the Thanksgiving holiday. Katherine engaged a private car for the two of them and when the train made its Philadelphia stop Jane was there with her hair all aflame and her face opening like the petals of a flower. “I don’t believe it,” she said, once they were settled and she had an illicit drink and a cigarette in her hand and the station had begun to move and the tracks took them in a rush through the artificial canyons of the city. “Do you?”

Katherine gave her a wry look, took the cigarette from the embrasure of her fingers and drew deeply on it. “What choice do I have?” she said, exhaling.

The servants were shuffling around, getting things settled, and the train, lurching around a long bellying curve, began to pick up speed. The lights flickered. Jane sipped her iced gin — good Bombay gin smuggled in amongst the prophylactic devices — stretched her legs and kicked off her heels. “Twenty years,” she murmured. “It’s going to be like seeing someone raised from the dead.”

Roscoe was waiting for them at the station in Los Angeles, and by the time they made the long drive up the coast to Santa Barbara it was dark and they were both exhausted, and so they decided to wait till morning before going out to Riven Rock. They dined quietly in their cottage at the El Mirasol, just across the street from the place where Katherine would eventually build a house for herself, replete with a gymnasium for Stanley, and then she telephoned the estate.

Butters answered, and she could hear him calling up the stairs to Nick so that Nick could have Stanley pick up the extension. She heard a click, and then Nick’s voice, saw-edged and abraded: “Mrs. McCormick, ma‘am? It’ll be just a minute. He’s been sitting up late tonight, waiting for you — he’s very excited — and he’s just been doing his, you know, his ablutions and his teeth… Oh, but wait, here he is—”

“Katherine?”

“Hello, Stanley: it’s good to hear your voice.”

“You too.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

“Me too.”

“It’s going to be such — it’s been such a long time. I feel like a girl on a first date. I’m so excited. And I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear of your progress with Dr. Kempf. He tells me you’re your old self again.”

A pause. “I have my slippers on.”

“Yes, so Nick told me — you’re getting ready for bed. I hope we didn’t keep you up, the train was late getting in and then with the long drive and whatnot we both just felt, Jane and I, that tomorrow, when everyone’s fresh, would be better for the big event.”

“One is you and one is me.”

“Hm? What do you mean?”

“The slippers. Two souls: Katherine and Stanley. Two soles, two souls — get it?”

She gave a laugh, not so much because she was amused but because she was bewildered and because this was Stanley, Stanley working through the convolutions of his mind. “Yes,” she said, “yes, yes, I do — that’s very good. Two souls.” A pause. The fraught silence of the wires. “Well,” she sighed, “I won’t keep you. Till tomorrow, then?”

A hiss, a sound as of two wooden blocks rhythmically pounded, and then Stanley’s voice, full of grain and sand and silt, so far from her he might have been on the moon: “Tomorrow.”

Katherine was a bundle of nerves as the car took her out to Montecito the next morning, her stomach sinking through the floor, her skin horripilated and her breathing shallow. It was the way she felt just before she had to give a speech, stretched taut as a rubber band and then snapped back into place again. She lit a cigarette, set it down in the ashtray, and then lit another. Palms flashed by the windows and she didn’t even see them, let alone attempt to categorize them. But Jane was there. And Jane took her hand and leaned across the seat to give her a kiss on the corner of the mouth. “It’ll be all right, Kat,” she breathed. “You’ll see.”

Then they were skirting the high stone wall that hemmed in the property, and Roscoe, gray-haired now but as jumpy and energetic as ever, turned the wheel sharply and let it slide back through his fingers again, and they swung into the familiar drive. That was when Katherine came to attention. She couldn’t help herself. She saw where Hull and his crew had been busy among the rhododendrons and saw that the ground cover needed cutting back at the edge of the drive. And there, the house, rising up out of the dense landscape like a stone monolith, like a fortress, like a prison.

“Well,” she said, turning her face to Jane, “wish me luck,” and while Jane waited in the car with a magazine and Roscoe stood motionless at the buffed and flashing door, she stepped out into the drive and went up the broad stone steps at the front of the house. The door opened as if by magic and there was Butters, rigid as a corpse, saying, “Morning, madame, and welcome back,” through the stiffest of formal grins. The entrance hall was the same, a severe high deep-ended room softened with tropical plants, tapestries and the statuary she’d bought in Italy for Stanley’s edification and enjoyment; on the wall of the staircase going up to her husband’s quarters hung the two Monets and the Manet they’d selected together, on their honeymoon. The door closed soundlessly behind her, and then Butters, his face like a shying horse‘s, all pinched in the nostril and wild in the eye, said, “I will inform Mr. McCormick that you’re here, madame.” She stood there, in her hat and gloves and furs, and watched the ghostly form of the butler recede up the stairway.

She found herself pacing: three steps this way, three steps that. Should she wait for him in the library? The drawing room? Or here, here where she could see him coming down the stairs — and more importantly, he could see her — and they could gain those extra seconds to prepare themselves separately for what was to come? She pulled off first one glove, then the other — Stanley would want to take her hand and draw her to him for a kiss, and it wouldn’t do to offer him a glove as if he were just anyone she’d happened to meet on the street. There. That was better. She held her hands out before her, fingers spread wide, to examine them, steady hands, attractive hands still, her nails done just that morning, the wedding ring in place, right where Stanley had put it twenty-three years ago. And there, glittering on her wrist, the tourmaline bracelet, for equally sentimental reasons.

Her heart raced. Would he find her attractive still? She was a girl the last time he’d seen her, or a young woman of thirty-two, nearly the age of Christ when they nailed him to the cross, and she wasn’t a young woman any longer. She was fifty-two years old. Fifty-two and still well-preserved for all the passage of the years. Jane thought so, and her mother too. She still had her skin and her eyes — and her hair was dark yet, for the most part. The hairdresser at the hotel had helped — she just hoped Stanley wouldn’t notice. Of course, he’d gone gray himself. At least he appeared to be gray the last time she’d seen him, but that was through the flat distorting lens of her binoculars.

There was a noise from the landing above, and her heart stopped. The clank of the iron door, a murmur of voices, male voices, deep and true. She moved toward the foot of the staircase to intercept him, to get the very first look at him at the top of the stairs… and there they were, three of them, three forms, and then the ghost that was the butler. Stanley was in the middle — ashen, towering, his hair streaked silver and white — and O‘Kane was on one side of him, tight to his shoulder, and Martin on the other. They came down the stairs that way, three abreast, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, as if this were some sort of military maneuver, each step a hurdle, halfway down now, O’Kane’s left arm locked against Stanley’s right, Martin’s right against his left, their hands clenching his sleeves in the long jacket of his cuffs.