T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Katherine was true to her word. Every day at one, through Christmas and the New Year, on through the soft stirring close of winter and the advent of the spring that was just like the winter, fall and summer that had preceded it, she and Mrs. Roessing came to have lunch with Mr. McCormick and to sit with him as late as five or six some afternoons, playing at cards or reading aloud to one another or simply sitting there in a swollen bubble of silence. O‘Kane was present for all of it, and so was Mart. Mr. McCormick’s improvement had been dramatic and he was making new strides every day, but he was still dangerous and unpredictable, still a threat to his guests and himself, and when he’d made his good-byes — always bowing and scraping and kissing the women’s outstretched hands in a drama of self-effacement and servility that made O’Kane queasy to watch — his nurses escorted him back upstairs to the barred windows and the iron door.

He had his bad days still, days when he would stagger out of Kempf’s office in the theater house with his eyes streaming and his lips drawn tight, and then he’d try to run or take out his anger on some innocent shrub the gardeners had been attentively nurturing and shaping for years. Once, when O‘Kane gave him a gentle nudge toward the house after he’d begun to stray, he bent down, pried up one of the flagstones and chased both him and Mart all round the lawn with the thing held up over his head like a weapon. Another time, for no reason at all, he kneed Mart in the privates and boxed O’Kane’s right ear so savagely it buzzed and twittered for days, like a dead telephone connection. “What’d you do that for, Mr. McCormick?” O‘Kane protested, clutching the side of his head while Mart blanched to the roots of his hair and sat himself awkwardly down in the daphne bed, right atop a gopher’s mound. “Be-because,” Mr. McCormick stammered, his face clenched like a fist, “because I–I hate, I hate—” He never finished the phrase. Not that day, anyway.

Still, he was improved, vastly improved, and being with women — seeing them, smelling their perfume, touching their hands with the driest fleeting caress of his lips — seemed to be working wonders for him. Katherine began to bring Mr. McCormick’s twenty-year-old niece, Muriel, with her on occasion, and at Dr. Kempf’s suggestion, they began to take Mr. McCormick on outings. At first they confined themselves to the estate, picnicking amongst the Indian mounds or taking advantage of the views from the upper reaches of the property, but before long — under supervision of Kempf, O‘Kane and Martin, of course — they began having beach parties. Katherine rented a cabana on one of the splendid south-facing beaches in Carpinteria where the waves broke in gentle synchronization and you could ride them in like a dolphin, the water as warm as a bath. It was comical to see Mr. McCormick in his bathing costume, his limbs pale as a Swede’s, crab-walking up to the quavering line of foam and seawrack and then dashing back like a grade-school boy as the water washed over his toes. Comical, but healthy. It stunned O‘Kane to think of it as he sat there on his beach towel, eyes riveted on Mr. McCormick while two men hired for the day hovered just beyond the breakers in a rowboat against the darker potentialities, but in all his years living here in the paradise of the world, Mr. McCormick had never once touched the ocean nor had it touched him.

It was a good time. A happy time. A time of hope. Everyone, even Nick, began to feel that something extraordinary was happening, and they were all of them almost afraid of speaking of it for fear of jinxing it. Mr. McCormick was experiencing life again, out of his cage, reintegrating himself into the grander scheme of things, particle by particle, and for his nurses, that promised — maybe, possibly, eventually — an end to their labors, and a reward. And who knew? — perhaps it would be a substantial reward, a lump sum, every punch and kick and smear on the sheets accruing interest over the unwieldy course of the years.

But it wasn’t to be. If McCormick’s constricted life had miraculously dilated during that amazing summer, opening and opening again as if there were no longer any limits, any judges, any fear or despair or self-loathing or sheer immitigable craziness, there came a day in September — and O‘Kane could name it — when things began to close in again. It started with the beach. An ordinary day, the sun high and white, Mr. McCormick in good spirits, the ocean rolling and rolling all the way out to the islands that were wrapped in a band of silver fog. There was the picnic luncheon. The cabana. Young Muriel was there, daughter of a Rockefeller and a McCormick, her legs browned from the sun and her hair turned golden, and Katherine and Mrs. Roessing too, the latter daring in a skirtless bathing suit. Everything seemed fine, until Mr. McCormick, waist-deep in the surf with O’Kane to one side of him and Mart to the other, suddenly cried out shrieking in a way that made you think of men murdered in a dark alley, slit throats, the bayonet in the gut. He was shrieking suddenly and hopping on one foot till he lost his balance and plunged his face into the water and the wet sand beneath, the surf relentless and O‘Kane and Mart dragging him out of the water by his arms.

What was the matter? What had happened? Was he all right? Was he hurt? Kempf, Katherine, Muriel, Mrs. Roessing, Mart, O‘Kane and even the two men from the boat all crowding round, and Mr. McCormick just clutching his foot and screaming. “The Judges!” he bawled. “I knew they’d get me, I knew it!” His hair hung in his eyes and his face was twisted and wet, the black of his throat and the jagged craters of his rotten teeth, sand like a hairshirt all over his prickled body. Later they discovered the cause — it was legitimate and real: he’d been lacerated by a stingaree — but that was the end of ocean bathing, and of the beach.

It was also the end of Mr. McCormick’s positive phase, because overnight he became mistrustful and paranoic again, and no amount of reasoning — the stingaree lives in the sea, it meant you no harm, it was an accident, these things happen — would convince him that the whole episode hadn’t been planned as a punishment for him. And he seemed, finally, to blame the women, their presence, for what had happened. If it weren’t for them he wouldn’t have been at the beach — were they trying to kill him, was that it? Was Katherine after his money? Did she want to see him dead? The next day he wouldn’t come to lunch, though Katherine and Mrs. Roessing were waiting in the dining room for him; O‘Kane and Mart were prepared to drag him down the stairs, but Kempf said no. When he wanted to see women again, he would. On his own terms. Give him time, Kempf said.

Two days went by. Three. A week. And still Mr. McCormick refused to come down those stairs, and when the rumor reached him one afternoon that Katherine was coming up, he threw one of his fits, replete with the smashed furniture and the deranged raving and the foam on his lips. Katherine had become impatient and began to nag at Kempf, in O‘Kane’s presence, threatening and storming like a madwoman in her own right: she was used to seeing her husband again, seeing him daily, and now she’d been cut off from him once more. It was intolerable. She’d have Kempf’s head — or his job at least, all ten thousand dollars a month’s worth.

It was then, right at the end of September, that the nurses decided to take matters into their own hands. “It’s a dirty shame,” Nick said one night when both O‘Kane and Mart had stayed behind their time because Roscoe was otherwise occupied and wouldn’t be back till nine. They all agreed. Mr. McCormick had come so far and now he was spiraling back, two full turns a day, and no one to reverse his direction. “What about what we discussed, back around Christmas of last year, remember, Eddie?” Nick said. “Getting him a woman, I mean. If his wife can’t do it for him, some — what would you call her? — some consulting nurse could. Right?”