T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Deutsche Schule,” Stanley repeated. “Das Bettchen. Der Tisch. Ich bin gut. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

Katherine moved across the room and tried to separate her husband from the German teacher, who’d gone white and begun to breathe rapidly and shallowly, as if he were having some sort of attack. She laid a hand on Stanley’s arm and said, as casually as she could, “You must be exhausted, both of you. Here, sit down, won’t you, Mr. Schneerman?”

Stanley was in a sweat; he neither moved nor relaxed his grip. The German teacher looked as if he were about to faint.

“How about a nice cup of tea, Stanley?” she said. “We can sit here with Mr. Schneerman and have a chat about your lessons — perhaps he’ll even give us some tips as to our pronunciation of some of the more difficult configurations, the umlauts and such. Would you like that, Stanley? Hm?” She turned to the German teacher. “Mr. Schneerman?”

“Yah,” the little man said. “Yah, sure. We have a lesson now.”

Still nothing. Stanley seemed to be in some sort of trance, his eyes fixed on the lamp across the room, his hand so tightly clamped to the German teacher’s arm she could see the tendons standing out like wires beneath his skin. She was afraid suddenly. Very afraid. What if he hurt the man? What if he had one of his tantrums? It was then that she hit on the expedient of asking Stanley’s help with the furniture — as a gentleman coming to the aid of a lady, and that was the true and invincible core of him, she knew it, civility, decency and goodness. “Stanley,” she said, “would you help me move this end table so we can settle Mr. Schneerman here by the fireplace?” And she bent to remove the lamp, doily and bric-a-brac from the table, then lifted it with some effort and held it out before him in two trembling hands.

Stanley’s eyes came back into focus. He gave her that searching, bewildered look and then automatically dropped the German teacher’s arm and took the table from her. Immediately, the little man backed away from him, ducked his head and shot out the door, Katherine on his heels. “Just a minute, Stanley,” she called over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back.”

She caught up with Mr. Schneerman at the front door. “Please,” she begged, and she thought she was going to cry, “please let me explain. It’s my husband, he—”

The little man spun round to finish the sentence for her: “—he should be locked up. The man is a menace. I have in my mind to sue, that is what!” If he’d been meek and cowed in the parlor, he was self-possessed now, storming at her, all the fear and embarrassment of the situation released in a rush of anger. “You, you people!” he cried, and he might have gone further but for the fact that Stanley appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs, the end table still cradled in his arms. “Where did you say you wanted this, Katherine?” Stanley called, and the man shrank into himself all over again, flung open the door and disappeared into the night.

Clearly the situation had become impossible. There was no fooling herself anymore — Stanley had become a danger to himself and to others and he needed to be watched around the clock, watched and protected. She wasn’t equal to it, she knew that, and the charade of domestic life had to end, at least for the present. Stanley needed help — professional help, institutional help — and he needed it now.

She was able to calm him that night by having him rearrange all the furniture in the parlor, even the heaviest pieces, which he was capable of handling without the slightest evidence of strain. He worked at it with the obsessive attention to detail he brought to any task, shifting a chair an inch here or an inch there, over and over, till he got it right, but after an hour or so he began to flag, moving automatically now, until finally, at her suggestion, he took a seat by the fire. The maid brought up a light supper and Katherine put him to bed. When she looked in on him an hour later, he was in a deep sleep, the covers pulled up to his chin, his face as relaxed and still and beautiful as if it had been carved of marble.

When her mother came home, they sat up over biscuits and hot chocolate and discussed the situation. “Oh, I liked him well enough before he changed,” Josephine said, pursing her lips as she dipped a biscuit into her chocolate. “That’s the way it is with marriage sometimes — once they’ve got you they lose all respect for you. The things he said to me in this house, well, I just hope I don’t have to hear anything like that again as long as I live. To think I’d be called a stupid old woman in my own parlor — and by my own son-in-law!”

“He’s sick, mother,” Katherine said. “Very sick. He needs help.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Look at his family. His sister. His mother. They’re all of them three steps from the madhouse, and if he keeps on like this, I must say I’m going to very much regret your having married him.”

The room was very still. But for the hiss of the coals in the fireplace and the low persistent ticking of the clock there wasn’t a sound. Katherine cradled the cup in her hands. She was thinking of her wedding night, of the scene on the boat, of Maine, of Doctors Putnam and Trudeau and the sick pale terrified face of that poor little German teacher. She looked up at her mother, at the paintings on the walls, the furniture, the draperies. There she was, her mother’s daughter, safe in the familiar room, surrounded by the shapes and colors of the life she’d led up till now, but it seemed different somehow, barren and cold as some Arctic landscape.,

“Mama,” she said, reverting to the diminutive she hadn’t used since she was a child. “Mama, I’m afraid of him.”

At first, when O‘Kane saw the four men standing there in the alley out back of Menhoff’s, he didn’t think anything of it — there were always men there, milling around in the shadows and perpetuating various half-truths and outright lies while passing one of the fifths of hooch Cody sold on the sly. He wasn’t even especially surprised when he recognized one of them as Giovannella’s father, Baldy Dimucci, and another as her brother Pietro, the runt he’d had that minor disagreement with a lifetime ago in the driveway at Riven Rock. Pietro was now in his forties, and there wasn’t much more to him than there’d been twenty years ago — he was scrawny as a chicken, not as dark as Giovannella, but with her shining hair and fathomless eyes. O‘Kane had run into him any number of times over the years — out on State Street, in Montecito Village, in the drive of the Dimucci house when it was raining and Roscoe gave Giovannella a ride home before taking him and Mart on into town — and though he couldn’t say he liked the man, there was no animosity between them, not that he knew of. They typically exchanged a few words, mainly of the hello-how-are-you-fine variety, and went on about their business. But here he was, out in the alley with his father and two other guys, big guys, O’Kane saw now, big guys with ax handles clutched in their big sweating fists.

O‘Kane had been drinking with the projectionist from the Granada, a whole long night of drinking, and it had been so long since his little altercation with Giovannella — a year or more now — that he’d forgotten all about it. Up until now, that is. “Hi, Baldy,” he said, but his feet couldn’t seem to work up the volition to usher him on past this little Dago confabulation. “Nice night,” he added uncertainly.

Baldy was an old man now, with a potbelly and a fringe of white hair that stood straight up off the crown of his head like a nimbus of feathers. “You’re the bad man, Eddie,” he said. “You’re the very bad man.”