T. Boyle - Riven Rock

He ignored her, slicing lemons, squeezing oranges, his elbows busy, the knife moving in his hand. He was angry suddenly, the generous all-embracing mood boiling off into the air like vapor. Who did she think she was? He’d had the run of the house since she was a girl in her mother’s kitchen. “Besides,” he said over his shoulder, “Nick and Pat want one. They’re up there waiting for me — and lest you forget, I’m stranded here myself. You want me to look like an idiot and go back up there empty-handed?”

He would have said more, working himself into a state of real rhetorical fervor, but for the fact that the sifter suddenly ricocheted off the back of his head, and here she was, coming at him with a wooden spatula the size of a bricklayer’s tool, cursing in Italian.

The tin had gouged his head, and it was bleeding, he was sure of it, and though he had absolutely nothing to regret or retract and was just spreading a little Christmas cheer and not even drunk yet, he couldn’t help catching her by the wrist, the right wrist, just by way of defending himself. The left was another proposition all together. He’d caught the hand with the spatula, but she’d snaked away from him, as if they were doing a tarantella, everything a whirl, and snatched up a big wooden implement that looked like a mace, and already she’d managed to connect with two savage over-the-shoulder blows to his left forearm, and why, why was she doing this?

He always felt bad when he had to hit a woman — he felt like a dog, he did — but if she was going to get familiar with him (and over what?), then he was going to get familiar with her. A pot clattered to the floor. Mary, hand to mouth, vanished. They danced away from the stove, his fingers still hooked round her wrist, the mace flailing, the breath exploding from her clamped lips in short ugly bursts — uhh-uhh-uhh — and he just got tired of it, very tired, tired of the senselessness and her barometric moods and the way she went after him all the time, and he slapped her. Just once. But it had enough force behind it so that when he simultaneously released her arm she went hurtling back against the breadboard with a sharp annunciatory crack as of a stick being snapped in two, everything sailing out into the bright kitchen void and the pale laid-out corpse of the dough upended unceremoniously on the floor.

There was no sequel. Nothing at all. No apologies or recriminations, no battle rejoined or tears shed. Because at that moment — Giovannella slapped, the dough ruined, O‘Kane half-drunk and outraged and cursing and swollen up to the full height and breadth of him — there came a sudden single excoriating cry that froze them both in place: “Mama!” O’Kane looked to the door, the open door, and there stood little Guido, eleven years old and already thick in the shoulders, and what was in his eyes besides shock and terror and rage? Three o‘clock. Three o’clock in the afternoon.

Lunch was a success, everyone agreed. O‘Kane lingered in the dining room with Katherine, Dr. Kempf and Mrs. Roessing while Mart escorted Mr. McCormick up to bed for his postprandial nap, and the feeling of relief and self-congratulation was palpable. It was as if they’d all gone through a war together, or a battle at least, and now here they were, all intact and no casualties. “Well, Katherine, Jane, didn’t I tell you?” Kempf crowed, stirring a lump of sugar into the black pool of his coffee.

O‘Kane was stationed at the door, hands in pockets. He’d been about to retreat, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, when Kempf signaled him with his eyes. He knew what his role was. Moral support. The nurse in evidence.

Katherine was glowing. Her lips were pursed with pleasure and she sipped at her coffee as if it were an infusion of new blood and new life. “It was wonderful, it really was. Stanley was so… so much like his old self.”

And what was so wonderful? That she’d sat down to a meal with her husband for the first time since 1906 and he hadn’t attacked her, dumped the soup over his head or jumped out the window? Small victories, O‘Kane was thinking. But it was a start, one step at a time, just like when they’d had to teach him to walk all over again. It had happened. It was a fact.

“What did you think, Jane?”

Mrs. Roessing must have been in her mid-forties, by O‘Kane’s calculation, but she looked ten years younger, what with her makeup and her clothes and her bright red marcelled hair. She gave Katherine a look, all eyes and teeth. “Well, I can’t really say I’m an authority on the subject, since I never knew Stanley’s old self, but his new one, at least as I saw him here today, was absolutely charming, don’t you think, Dr. Kempf?”

The doctor drew himself up, the neat slightly puffed pale little hands, the painted hair and shimmering skull. He was a puppeteer, a ventriloquist, the mad scientist showing off his creature, Svengali with his Trilby. “My word for it exactly,” he said with a polished grin. “Charming.”

O‘Kane had been amazed himself, especially after the previous afternoon’s performance — Mr. McCormick had been a model of behavior, exactly like the man he’d golfed with at McLean, genial, courtly, haunted by neither demons nor judges. He’d been up and about when O’Kane arrived, full of smiles and little jokes, and he was very precise and efficient with his shower bath — he didn’t squat on the tiles to soap his toes or rub himself raw with the towel. And he whistled, actually whistled in the shower, like a man on his way to work, “Beautiful Dreamer” echoing off the walls, followed by a spirited rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” He breakfasted with perfect comportment and good humor, joking over the toughness of the ham (which wasn’t really tough at all, if you had a knife and fork to hand, which he didn‘t, and he was acknowledging the absurdity of his predicament in his own sly way) and teasing Mart over his expanding girth (“Excuse me, Mart, but is that a life preserver you’re wearing under your jacket?”).

After breakfast, he took a stroll to the theater building and back, and then twice round the house, and he walked very nicely, not bothering with the cracks between the flagstones and hardly dragging his leg at all. Then there was his daily two-hour session with Dr. Kempf, from which he often emerged very upset and confused, sometimes speechless, sometimes with tears in his eyes or in a rage, but not today. Today he was perfectly composed, smiling even.

She was seated in the grand entrance hall, dressed all in gray, and O‘Kane could see she’d put some time and thought into her outfit — she looked good, very good, better than she had yesterday or a year ago even. Mrs. Roessing was a middle-aged flapper in ultramarine and a silver wraparound hat, and those very fine and shapely legs exposed all the way up to her thighs in white silk stockings you could have licked right off her. O’Kane stood there like part of the decor.

“Katherine,” Mr. McCormick said in a pleasant, muted voice, coming right up to her and taking her hand, which he bent to kiss, glove and all. And then, grinning till you’d think his face would split open, he turned to Mrs. Roessing. “And this must be, must be”—and here he lost himself a moment, understandably, twenty years and all that leg, and O‘Kane braced himself for the worst— “Jane,” he said finally, all the air gone out of him. Amazingly, he took her hand too, and bent to kiss it as if he were playing a part in a movie.

Butters took the ladies’ wraps, Mart slunk out from behind the statue, and after a few inconsequential remarks about the weather — And how lucky you are, Stanley, to have this heavenly climate year-round and you should just see Philadelphia this time of year, snow up to, well, snow up to here — the whole party made its halting way into the dining room. The table could seat eighteen in comfort, but Butters had instructed Mary to set four places at the far end of it, Mr. McCormick to sit at the head of the table, as he was the host, his wife on his right-hand side, Dr. Kempf on his left, and Mrs. Roessing to the doctor’s left. Mart and O‘Kane were to stand guard and watch them eat.