T. Boyle - Riven Rock

The Lean Doctor: “Good afternoon, Mr. McCormick. I’m Dr. Orbison, and this is Dr. Barker and Dr. Williams. We’ve come to chat a bit, if that’s convenient.

True to form, Mr. McCormick said nothing, but his face spoke volumes to O‘Kane. He positioned himself on the arm of the sofa, propped up on one crutch, ready to fling himself forward at the first sign of trouble.

The Lean Doctor (settling himself into one of the three folding chairs set up in anticipation of this visit, while his colleagues followed suit): “Well, pleasant day, isn’t it?”

Mr. McCormick: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”

The doctors exchanged a glance. The one with the bandaged nose craned his neck to look out the window, as if to be sure the sun was still there and shining.

Mr. McCormick: “Be-betrayed by his daughters.”

The Bandaged Doctor: “Who?”

Mr. McCormick: “Lear.”

The Heavyset Doctor: “Leer?”

Mr. McCormick: “First name of King.”

The Lean Doctor: “Oh, yes, I see. Of course. Lear. Do you, uh, think much about Shakespeare then, Mr. McCormick — I take it you’re an aficionado?”

Mr. McCormick (his face working): “Kath-Katherine…”

The Lean Doctor: “Katherine?”

The Bandaged Doctor: “His wife.”

The Lean Doctor (puzzled, drawing at his chin with two lean fingers): “Your wife reads Shakespeare?”

Mr. McCormick said nothing to this, and though he was alert and struggling with his facial muscles and rapping his long fingers on the twin pyramids of his knees, he had very little to say to their subsequent inquiries, which ranged from his knowledge of the Peloponnesian War to the Declaration of Independence, American banking customs, the mechanism of the reaper and his feelings about Dr. Kempf, women and dentists, to his recognition of various celebrated individuals in the public eye, both by name and likeness: Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Calvin Coolidge, Sacco and Vanzetti. If it was a test — and O‘Kane knew that it was — then Mr. McCormick had flunked it badly. There was only one point at which he rose to something like coherence, and that was right at the end, when the distinguished doctors had filled their notebooks and begun to shoot glances at one another out of the corners of their eyes. The Lean Doctor said “Riven Rock” and Mr. McCormick looked up alertly.

The Lean Doctor: “Tell us about your home, if you would, Mr. McCormick, about Riven Rock — how did it get its name?”

Mr. McCormick (sunshine at first, and then increasing clouds): “I — well — it’s because of a rock, you see, and I — well, my mother, she — and then I came and saw it and it was, well, it was—”

There was a long hiatus, all three doctors leaning forward, the day drawing down, Mart snoring lightly from the vicinity of the couch, Nurse Gleason silently dusting the plants, and then Mr. McCormick, his face finally settling on a broad winning ear-to-ear grin, at last spoke up. “It beats me,” he said.

As a family man, O‘Kane wasn’t exactly an overnight success. His experience of children was limited and sad, infinitely sad, and he was used to the peace and sterility of Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s rooming house (reconstructed after the quake to look exactly as it had before, or even more so). He was used to the speaks too and to eating at the drugstore or not eating at all if he didn’t feel like it and to doing any damn thing he pleased any time he pleased. And now, in the spring and early summer, he found himself living amongst the olive-pressing garlic-chewing Valpolicella-quaffing turmoil of the Dimucci household, a place rife with screaming barefooted children, dogs, pigs, chickens and Italians. Baldy had fixed up one of the outbuildings for Marta and her husband, and when they’d moved to their own place downtown on Milpas Street, he let the unsteady O’Kane and his new family move in temporarily—“Just,” he said, “till Eddie can get back on his feet.” and there wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice.

Edwina turned nine in June and Guido would be thirteen in October, too old to be fooled by anything O‘Kane tried to do to ingratiate himself, though they took the candy and games and dolls and penknives he pressed on them readily enough. He wasn’t their father, not in their eyes — their father was Guido Capolupo, and he was dead, like the saints in heaven. With Giovannella it was different. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice for her, giving up his body and soul both — not to mention committing bigamy — and she came each night to worship at his altar. In the beginning, before he could walk without the aid of crutches, she gave him sponge baths in bed, spoon-fed him to keep his strength up, every stray drop of soup or sauce lovingly blotted from his chin with a carefully folded napkin, and once he was getting around again, she spent hours massaging his cramped muscles or depressing the skin around the cast on his leg and gently blowing into the aperture to relieve his itching. She made love to him with all the fierceness of possession and when they were done and sweating and still breathing hard she would straddle him and run her hands through his hair again and again. “You’re mine now, Eddie,” she would say, her lips puffed and swollen with all they’d done, “all mine.”

He couldn’t say that he forgave the Dimuccis (not exactly — he was no pacifist and he would as soon crush Pietro as look at him), but he accepted the rightness of what had happened and he was content, or at least he thought he was. But once he was back at work and putting in his twelve hours a day at Riven Rock, free of the chaos of the Dimucci dominion and the incessant demands of the children— Read me a story; Fix this;You don’t like me, I know it; You’re not my father anyway — he knew the time had come to move on. The first order of business was a car. Baldy had been dropping him off at Riven Rock in the morning and Roscoe swinging by in the evening, and that was all right — or no, it was intolerable — and he scanned the want ads till he found a ten-year-old Maxwell just like the one Dolores Isringhausen used to drive, only older and slower and noisier, the spark of life in its greasy automotive heart all but extinguished. Roscoe helped him get it going, tuned it up for him and drove him down to State Street to invest in a new set of tires.

Two weeks later he and Giovannella found a place for rent in Summerland, just to the east of Montecito and an easy drive both to her parents’ house and Riven Rock. It was a bungalow, with a low creased roof that climbed way out over the front porch and two palm trees set into the ground on either side of it like flagpoles. You could see the ocean from the far right-hand corner of the porch, and best of all, there was a private citrus grove out in the backyard, three grapefruit trees, two oranges and a Meyer lemon. O‘Kane stood out in the street and took six snapshots of the house — dead-on and not a soul in the picture — to send home to his mother.

He was fit enough to carry Giovannella over the threshold and play husband and wife with her through one whole afternoon, evening and night while the kids made their grandparents’ lives miserable and the pelicans sailed across the patch of sky defined by the bedroom window and the sound of the old man next door watering his roses invited them to slide down into the dreamless embrace of sleep. Baldy dropped off the children late the next morning and Giovannella made bruschetta and spaghetti and the house grew smaller and noisier till O‘Kane felt he needed to get out for a drive—“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be back in a couple hours”—and he found himself at Riven Rock, Sunday afternoon, his day off, shooting the bull about one thing and another with Roscoe out in the reconstructed garage.