T. Boyle - Riven Rock

But still, it was a real celebration, and with enough food prepared by the Dimucci girls and their mother and aunts to feed everybody twice and enough left over for all the millionaires and their starved-looking racehorses too, if they’d had the sense to show up and toast the true match of the year. O‘Kane got along pretty well on his crutches, and everybody said he looked as handsome as one of God’s angels, and Giovannella filled out her satin gown in a way no rumpless flapper could ever have. After the ceremony, after the toasts and the gnocchi and the intercostata di manzo and the palombacciaallo spiedo and the millifoglie and the wedding cake that was as tall as little Guido, Roscoe drove O’Kane and Giovannella up to San Luis Obispo and a three-day honeymoon in a blue-and-white clapboard inn by the sea. And then O‘Kane, moving well enough and with his seminal parts in an advanced state of relaxation, went back to work at Riven Rock.

Mr. McCormick was glad to see him. Very glad. Ecstatic even. The minute O‘Kane appeared on the landing outside the upper parlor door, his crutches extended like struts, Mr. McCormick sprang up off the sofa and rushed him. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” he cried, “I knew you’d be back, I knew it!” The keys turned in the locks, Mart hovering over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder, Nurse Gleason a frowning presence in the background. “Sure I’m back,” O’Kane said, and he was touched, genuinely touched, he was. “Just because I’m married you think I’d desert you? We’re in this together, aren’t we? Till you’re well again?”

Mr. McCormick didn’t say anything. He stood there inside the door and waited patiently as O‘Kane fumbled with his keys and the crutches and his arms that were stiff with the strain of doing two things at once; Mr. McCormick had something in his hand, a trophy of some sort, bronze, with an engraved inscription. It looked like a bugle with two bells.

“So what’s this?” O‘Kane asked, maneuvering through the door while Mart secured it.

Mr. McCormick gave him a big grin, rotten teeth, faraway eyes and all. “F-first prize in the orchid show. For — for our cymbidiums, the Riven Rock cymbidiums. Mr. Hull entered for me, and Kath-Katherine said it was a real coup. She, she—”

But that was it. The rest of the story, whatever it was, was locked up inside him and he couldn’t get it out. Normally O‘Kane would have coached him, the way Kempf did, but he’d just stepped through the door for the first time in three and a half months and Nurse Gleason was giving him a fishy eye and he didn’t know her from Adam yet and he just didn’t feel up to it. Instead, he stumped right by his employer, putting some good weight on the right leg now and walking through the crutches every other step, and settled himself at the table. Mr. McCormick was already at the bookshelf, making a place for the trophy amongst the eight others he’d won in previous years. He was a while at it, getting things just so, and from his posture and the attitude of his shoulders and the way he ducked his head and muttered to himself, O’Kane could see that his judges were very likely looking on and commenting on the arrangement.

Nurse Gleason, who’d nodded a curt hello at O‘Kane as he entered, passed between them now, making a show of straightening the cushions of the sofa and beating out and folding the pages of Mr. McCormick’s newspaper. She was a big-beamed, fish-faced pre-crone of a woman, fiftyish, and as close to being sexless as you could get — short of hermaphroditism, that is. Kempf’s thinking was that Mr. McCormick would be predisposed to accept her more readily than someone like poor what-was-her-name from McLean, the one with the locket between her breasts — or if not accept her, then at least refrain from any sort of sexual impropriety. O’Kane had heard she was a good clinical nurse who took no nonsense from anybody — she’d been at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for years, wielding nozzle and enema tube, before going on to Saint Elizabeths — and so far Mr. McCormick had tolerated her presence.

After twenty minutes or so, during which no one said a word, Mr. McCormick finally seemed satisfied with the relative positions of his trophies and came over to sit down across from O‘Kane at the table. O’Kane had a magazine spread out before him, but he wasn’t reading anything in particular, just leafing through the pages as if they were blank on both sides. He looked up and smiled. Mr. McCormick did not smile back. He seemed unusually tense and his face was running through a range of expressions, as if invisible fingers were tugging at the skin from every direction. “You’re looking well,” O‘Kane said automatically.

“I’m not.”

“Is something the matter? You want to tell me about it?”

Mr. McCormick looked away.

Nurse Gleason entered the dialogue then, her eyes very close-set and her lips puckered fishily. “He’s been out of sorts lately, because of the doctors.”

O‘Kane lifted his eyebrows.

“You know,” she said, “the trial and all. And I don’t blame the poor man, what with one after the other of them here poking and probing at him so he hasn’t had a minute’s peace these last two weeks.”

O‘Kane looked to Mart, but Mart, sunk into himself like some boneless thing washed up out of the sea, had nothing to add.

“They, they—” Mr. McCormick said suddenly, his face still going through its calisthenics, as if the muscles under the skin couldn’t decide on an appropriate response, “they want to take Riven Rock away from me, in the courts, Kath-Katherine and, and—”

“No, no, Mr. McCormick,” Nurse Gleason chided, interposing her bulk between them as she scurried over to lean into the table on one stumplike arm, “nobody’s going to take Riven Rock, that’s not it at all—”

Mr. McCormick never even glanced at her. “Shut up, cunt,” he snarled.

She flared then, Nurse Gleason, but only briefly, like a Fourth of July rocket sputtering on its pad. “I won’t have such language, I tell you,” she spat, leaning in closer, but then Mr. McCormick kicked back the chair and leapt to his feet and she faded back out of reach, her face flushed and crepuscular. O‘Kane, bad knee and all, came up out of his chair too and caught his employer by the wrist; for a moment both of them froze, looking first into each other’s eyes and then down at the intrusive hand on the trembling wrist. O’Kane let go. Mr. McCormick righted his chair, and after a moment’s fussing, sat back down. “It’s all right,” O‘Kane said, but clearly it wasn’t.

A trio of doctors appeared that afternoon, just after Mr. McCormick woke from his postluncheon nap. O‘Kane didn’t catch their names, not that it mattered — there was the lean one, the heavyset one and the one with the bandaged nose. Dr. Kempf wasn’t present, because they were examining Mr. McCormick with a view to supporting Katherine’s contention that psychoanalysis alone was not the proper treatment for her husband and was in fact having a deleterious effect on him. Other doctors would come on other days to examine him in support of Cyrus and Anita, who wanted to retain Kempf — look at the progress he’d made, women in the immediate environment and their brother as fit and rational as ever, or almost — and maintain their two-to-one advantage on the board of guardians. But these doctors were for Katherine, and they gathered solemnly in the upper parlor to await Mr. McCormick’s emergence from the bedroom.

Did they want anything? Nurse Gleason wanted to know, fishily solicitous. Tea? Coffee? A soft drink? She only had to ring for it, no trouble at all.

They didn’t think so.

When Mart led Mr. McCormick out into the main room, O‘Kane could see immediately that the meeting wasn’t going to be a propitious one. Mr. McCormick was actively engaged in a debate with his judges as he came through the door, and his face was still going through its permutations.