T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Then he saw her, and the procession halted. Three right legs were bent at the knee, three right feet arrested in their polished shoes. Stanley stopped and his eyes seemed to rivet her, nail her, drive holes right through her flesh and out the other side. He stopped. O‘Kane and Martin stopped. The three men regarded her, Stanley with a panicky look now, a look she knew from the days that led up to his breakdown, and O’Kane and Martin drained and white, their eyes seeking anything but hers. And then, as if it were all just a momentary hitch, all three looked to their feet and came on down the stairs.

They halted at the bottom, not three paces from her, one step more and then out onto the marble floor. Stanley was staring down at his shoes. “Stanley,” she said, “Stanley, darling. It’s all right. It’s me, Katherine. Your wife. I’ve come to see you.”

He lifted his eyes then, but his head was cocked to one side, as if he didn’t have the strength to raise it. “They,” he said, his voice unnatural and high, “they wo-won’t let me go. Eddie and Mart. They think… They’ve got my sleeves. My sleeves!”

Katherine wanted to touch him, lay a hand on his cheek, hold him in her arms and comfort him, poor Stanley, poor, poor Stanley. “Let him go,” she said.

Immediately, O‘Kane and Martin released their grip and took a step back from him, and there he was, all alone before her, his shoulders slumped, his hair slicked, his head canted to one side — and who was that, up there at the top of the stairs, watching from the shadows? Kempf. Of course. Kempf. Well, it was quite an intimate little gathering, wasn’t it? The husband and wife reunited in the presence of one butler, one psychiatrist and two apelike nurses. She tried again. “Stanley, Stanley, look at me,” and she moved forward to touch his arm.

It was then that he broke. Straight for the door. A scramble of his feet, fifty-three years old and you would have thought he was eighteen, the door a quick slice of light, O‘Kane and Martin leaping forward, and he was gone. Katherine was suddenly in motion herself, no time to think, out the gaping door and onto the front steps, and there he was, Stanley, her husband, leading the nurses twice round the drive in a burst of speed before making for the car, Roscoe locking the doors against him, Jane’s startled face, and then O’Kane had him in a bear hug and Stanley was whinnying “No, no, no, you don’t understand, you don‘t—”

Katherine came forward as if in a trance, no thought for Jane or herself or anyone else but Stanley, and Martin had joined the fray now, all three men flailing on the ground in a confusion of limbs, gravel crunching, dust attacking the air. She came forward, bludgeoned by her emotions, and stood over them until her husband was subdued and panting and the nurses working to improve their grips, one pinioning his shoulders, the other clamped to his legs. “Stanley,” she begged, pleading now, her eyes wet, everything confused and hurting, “it’s only me.”

He flashed his eyes at her then and jerked his head as far as O‘Kane’s straining limbs would allow. “I’ve—” he began, and there was wonder on his face, the wonder of discovery, epiphany, eureka, eureka, “I’ve seen your face,” he said. “I’ve seen your face!”

“No, you wouldn’t call it auspicious,” O‘Kane said. “Not exactly. But it’s a start, and I think Kempf deserves some credit.” He was in the upstairs parlor, the door secured, a fire snapping complacently in the marble fireplace, Mr. McCormick off in dreamland, and he was feeling expansive and generous, full of seasonal good cheer — not to mention rum — and as far as goggle-eyed Dr. Kempf was concerned, he’d been a skeptic and now he was a believer. Mr. McCormick had made enormous progress over the course of the past year and a half and what had happened out there in the drive this afternoon was nothing more than a minor setback, he was sure of it. The brothers Thompson, Nick and Pat, who’d come on duty an hour ago, were struggling with the concept. They weren’t convinced. Not at all.

“From what I hear, from Mart, anyway, the whole thing was a farce,” Nick rasped in his burnt-out voice that was like the last scrapings of the pot, irritating and metallic. “He just ran for the door, couldn’t even look her in the face. And Roscoe says he tried to get hold of the car, for Christ’s sake.”

Pat gave a low whistle. “Imagine him behind the wheel? What would it take to stop him — the whole Santa Barbara police force? The army? The navy? Hey, call out the marines!”

It was Christmas, or just about, and the place was bedecked, sprangled and festooned for the season, Mr. McCormick having been especially fixated on the decorations this year, and O‘Kane had lingered to have a cup or two of Christmas cheer with his colleagues (he was going to quit drinking, absolutely and finally, the day after New Year’s). He was also temporarily stranded, because Roscoe was out ferrying Mrs. McCormick and Mrs. Roessing around somewhere.

Nick was sunk into an overstuffed chair in front of the fire, his feet propped up on an ottoman, his hands nested over his stomach. Like Pat — and to a lesser extent, Mart — he’d accumulated flesh over the years, steadily and inexorably, but the funny thing was they’d all three finally achieved some sort of mysterious physical equilibrium, having grown into their heads like crocodiles. “I don’t know if auspicious or not auspicious is the word for it — to me it’s just more of the same, with or without Kempf.”

O‘Kane shrugged. He gazed round at the streamers and popcorn chains, the clumps of mistletoe and endlessly replicated effigies of Father Christmas and snowmen hanging like cobwebs from the ceiling. “At least he didn’t attack her.”

Pat snorted, burying his nose in his drink — a real drink, American style, mixed and heated in the kitchen by O‘Kane himself while Giovannella frowned over the dough for tomorrow’s bread and the scullery maid they’d hired to keep her company and deepen the presence of women in the house hummed a jazz tune and ran a wet cloth over the supper dishes. It was a toddy O’Kane was making, from a recipe his father had taught him — the only thing his father had taught him, besides a left jab maybe, followed by a swift right cross. Lemons, oranges, sugar, a stick of cinnamon, boiling water and what passed for rum these days. It had the right smell and it warmed you, though how much warming you needed when it was three hours past dark on the twelfth of December and still sixty-four degrees out was debatable.

O‘Kane could feel the rum like lead in his veins — he didn’t know how many he’d had thus far, but it was more than four, he was sure — and felt he’d better sit down. Nick and Pat seemed content to watch the fire, but the subject of Mr. McCormick’s initial meeting with his wife had been broached, and O’Kane wanted to chew it over a while. “It’ll get better,” he said. “Tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. No more talking on the phone — she’s due here tomorrow for lunch and she and Dr. Kempf both expect she’ll be eating it downstairs in the dining room with Mr. McCormick at her side.”

“I’d like to see it,” Nick said.

“Me too,” Pat put in.

“Kempf says she’s going to stay this time. Indefinitely.”

Nick sighed, bent to retrieve his cup from the floor and took a long ruminative sip. “She never gives up, that woman, does she? Twenty years she waits, and he bolts right by her like a runaway horse. Doesn’t she know it’s hopeless?”

“She’s looking old,” Pat said. “Like a little old lady. Like a widow. But that one with her, Mrs. Russ or whatever her name is, she’s a piece of something, isn’t she?”