T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Mary Virginia visited Rush Street only once a year from then on, always in the company of her doctor, a small thin-lipped woman with the figure of a man and great wide bulging eyes that so fascinated the boys they couldn’t look at her without giggling. These visits were brief — two or three days at a time that had Mama and Anita so wrought up and fearful you would have thought Mary Virginia was an anarchist with a ticking bomb, but in fact she was as docile as a cow and nearly as fat. She made her last visit to Chicago in 1892, for the Christmas holidays, descending on the house in a storm of servants, white-clad nurses and luggage. Stanley was no longer a boy. He’d begun his freshman year at Princeton that fall, involved with a thousand things and arduously growing into the six-foot-four-inch frame that left him towering over his classmates, and he hadn’t given a thought to his crazy big sister in months — she was gone, out of sight, an embarrassment to him and the family. But when he saw her that Christmas coming down the stairs like a somnambulist or sitting beside her mannish little doctor at the dinner table, he was shocked at the change in her. His big sister the beauty had been transformed into a clinging overweight spinster who would burst into tears if you stopped talking to her even for a minute.

She kept to her room mostly, and with the whirl of festivities, the parties, presents, songs and toasts, Stanley saw little of her. In fact, over the course of the three days she spent with them, he was alone with her only once — after lunch on the last day, when she suddenly looped her arm in his and asked him to take her out for a turn round the garden. It was raw and drizzling and her skirts would be ruined, but both Mama and the bug-eyed doctor gave him a look, and he went.

Stanley wasn’t good at small talk, but he chattered away at the swollen moon of her face, afraid to stop for fear of setting her off, and they went round the yard twice before she said a word. They were passing through the denuded arbor for the second time when all of a sudden she tugged violently at his arm and pulled herself close to him, face to face, as if they were dancing a minuet. She was trying to tell him something, but she stuttered now and drawled out her words till they were whole private symphonies of meaning — utterly unintelligible, even to her doctor. The drizzle beaded her lashes and brows and glistened on her hat. It was cold. He looked into her eyes and they were floodplains of madness. “St-Stanley,” she said, making an effort. “Little brother—”

She was puffy and white, soft as dough, and he knew how white she was underneath — saw it in a flash, the whole thing coming back to him in that instant — and while his mad hopeless fat-faced sister clutched at his arms and breathed in his face he felt himself growing hard in a sudden shock of shame and desire. And hate — hate too. What was she doing to him? What did she want from him? Couldn’t she just leave him alone? He tried to push her away but she held on, drawing him down till their faces were inches apart, her lips cracked and flushed with blood, her tongue moving against the roof of her mouth like some amphibious thing crawling up out of the mud. “St-Stanley,” she stuttered, fighting to get the words out through the tight weave of her sickness. “You-you’re my favorite, you are, you know why?”

He didn’t know why. His groin was throbbing. He was a member of the Guitar and Mandolin Club and the tennis team and he had a term paper to write on the poetry of Robert Herrick and in two days he’d be back on the train to New Jersey. There was a dog barking somewhere. He could smell beef and gravy on her breath.

“Because you… because you’re just like me.”

It was their second day out of Boston on the New York Central Line, and Massachusetts was already behind them — and half of New York too. O‘Kane studied the timetable and let the names of the stops whisper in his head: Albany, Schenectady, Herkimer, Utica, Syracuse. To him, these were exotic ports of call, every one of them, places he’d heard about for years but never thought he’d see — the cities whose names sat so lightly on the tongues of the drummers and other worldly types he encountered while shoveling up beans and egg salad at the lunch counter or sipping a whiskey in the hotel bar, all the while trying his level best not to seem as ignorant, circumscribed and provincial as he was. He’d got down at Albany and walked to the end of the platform and back, just so he could say he’d been there, but he really didn’t get much of a thrill out of it — the whole time he was afraid the train would suddenly lurch out of the station and leave him palpitating in the dust. And what was there to see, anyway? Tracks. Refuse. A dead pigeon with feet as rigid as window poles and half a dozen lumps of petrified human waste.

Schenectady, Utica and the rest he watched from the window, but he wanted to be awake and alert and ready to jump down when they pulled into Buffalo, where McKinley had breathed his last, and he wanted to see the Canadian border when they crossed over into Ontario for the run down to Detroit. His mother had given him a new Kodak to record the trip for her and he’d dutifully snapped away at the picturesque and the quotidian alike — the meandering stream, the lone horse in the field, the back end of a barn in need of paint — but it was Buffalo he meant to capture and preserve. That and Canada. And the West, of course.

Nick and Pat were at the far end of the car in a pair of red plush chairs, playing cards and smoking five-cent cigars, looking like nabobs on their way out to inspect the tea plantations. Dr. Hamilton was in his compartment, frowning over a leatherbound book that featured pen-and-ink drawings of apes in their natural habitat, and Mart was in the forward compartment, sitting with Mr. McCormick. And since Mr. McCormick was calm — catatonic, actually, his legs crooked at the knee, his eyes locked on the ceiling and his head frozen in the air six inches from the pillow — there was nothing for O‘Kane to do but stare out the window and wait for his turn to relieve Mart at Mr. McCormick’s bedside. He gazed out beyond the flickering ghost of his own reflection and into the neutral wash of the evening and saw the same scrim of trees, hills and creeks he’d been seeing for the last day and a half, scenery served up like something on a tray, too much scenery, a long unbroken visual glut. A town hurtled by like a hallucination, two streets, clothes on a line, a dog sniffing at something in a muddy yard. Then trees. The yawning gape of a farm. More trees.

O‘Kane pushed himself up and stretched. In the back of his mind was an inchoate notion of letting himself out of the car and wending his way up through the train to the diner, where he envisioned the Negro waiter pouring him a cup of black coffee and maybe serving up something sweet on the side, some vanilla ice cream with maybe a bit of that dry Canton ginger sprinkled on it or some Bent’s Biscuits or even a bite of cake. The Mayflower was the last in a train of fourteen cars, plus locomotive and tender, and because Dr. Hamilton felt it was too dangerous to risk bringing a cook along, they were taking all their meals in the dining car — as if Mr. McCormick could do anybody any harm in his present condition. Hamilton wouldn’t even allow a porter to come in and tidy up, and that was one more thing the nurses had to do, though O’Kane could hardly complain since he was the worst offender when it came to generating a private little midden of newspaper, used crockery and the like or forgetting where he’d dropped his socks and trousers in the cramped compartment he shared with Mart. But the food was good, the best he’d ever had, six courses for dinner with consommé to start and a selection of cheeses before the dessert and coffee, real first-class and no limit to the luxury of it. Of course, it ought to have been, for what the McCormicks were paying. Nick had told him they’d had to buy twenty first-class tickets all the way from Boston to Santa Barbara just for the privilege of hooking up a private car.