T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“How does he seem to you?” Roscoe said, leaning into the front fender of one of the new Pierce Arrows with a chamois cloth. “Because as far as I can see he’s getting more and more worked up about this trial business, which from what I hear isn’t even scheduled yet.”

“I’m not sure if it’s a trial, exactly. There’s no jury or anything like that, just a judge. From what Kempf says, anyway.”

“What’s the difference? The point is, Mr. McCormick thinks she wants to take everything away from him, and that’s why he’s been so jumpy lately, just like years ago when we first started to take him out for his drives and he’d think every other tree was going to fall on the car. You know what he did the other night? He came out here with Nick and Pat — and why they let him out is a mystery to me — and he spent I don’t how many hours rearranging the back seat because it wasn’t comfortable enough… here, take a look, see for yourself what he did.” The panels of the rear door grabbed the light and then released it and there was Mr. McCormick’s handiwork, the seat pried right out of its frame and meticulously customized with fifteen or twenty pillows appropriated from the couches in the main house.

“She already has,” O‘Kane said, leaning in for a closer look, “—he just doesn’t know it.”

“What?” What’re you talking about?“ Roscoe was wringing the wet cloth over a bucket, the sun painting two long white oblongs on the concrete floor where the bay doors stood open.

“Yeah, that’s a real mess,” O‘Kane said, straightening up, “but no real harm done — at least he didn’t carve up the upholstery like last time.” He paused to pinch the crown of his hat and run a spit-dampened finger over the crease of the brim. “I mean Katherine, Mrs. McCormick. She already has everything — she got that back in ought-nine when she had him declared incompetent.”

Roscoe turned back to the car, the pliant wet cloth swallowing up the beads of water as he flagged it across the fender. “Then what’s she want now? Aside from Kempf’s head on a platter, which I think’s a crying shame, I really do….”

O‘Kane gave it some thought, watching the chauffeur with his quick elbows and jerky movements, the little monkey cap and his flapping crimson ears, his body heaving out over the hood and the reflected glory of the deep-buffed blue-black steel. “Him,” he said after a while. “She wants him.”

One hand braced, the other moving in a clean, circular sweep, Roscoe glancing over his shoulder. “Kempf?”

“No, not Kempf — her husband.”

“Hmpf,” Roscoe grunted, rubbing now, really digging into the moving cloth. “Why doesn’t she get herself a lapdog instead?”

The year ticked by, the summer soft and compliant, and then came the fall, spread like margarine across the corrugated sea and all the way out to the soft and melting islands. On a rainy Thursday afternoon at the end of November, O‘Kane put on a clean shirt and his best suit and went down to the county courthouse to testify at the trial, Katherine’s lawyer — Mr. Baker — raking him over the coals of Mr. McCormick’s condition, one searing step at at time. Has there been any improvement, in your view, Mr. O’Kane, over the very lengthy course of your service — coming up on twenty-two years now, isn’t it? — and did Dr. Kempf do this and did he do that? The attorney for the McCormicks — Mr. Lawler — seemed to wrap himself over O‘Kane’s shoulders like a warm sweater on a cold evening. Wasn’t it a fact, Mr. O’Kane? and Isn’t it so? and Wouldn’t you say that Mr. McCormick was much improved as evidenced by his association with women — even to the extent of employing a female nurse? And hadn’t the previous physicians been merely custodial with regard to Mr. McCormick’s care — that is, all but useless?

Together, they called eighteen doctors to the stand, including Dr. Meyer, Dr. Brush, Dr. Hamilton (his hair gray now and his eyes spinning out of control) and most of the headshrinkers and pulse-takers who’d tramped through the house over the course of the past eighteen months, and they called Dr. Kempf and Mr. Cyrus McCormick, and Mr. Harold and Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, Nurse Gleason, Nick and Pat and Mart, and eventually even the Ice Queen and Mrs. Roessing. O‘Kane caught only two days of it, his testimony split between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and then he pushed through the crowd of reporters in the courthouse hallway and drove himself back to Riven Rock and Mr. McCormick.

The proceedings had been going on for a week and a half when O‘Kane arrived at the estate one morning to find a letter waiting for him on the table in the entrance hall. His name had been typed neatly across the front of the envelope — EDWARD JAMES O’KANE, RIVEN ROCK, MONTECITO, CALIFORNIA — and in the upper left-hand corner, in raised black letters, was Jim Isringhausen’s name, over the legend ISRING-HAUSEN & CLAUSEN, STOCKS, BONDS, REAL ESTATE. Mr. McCormick was sleeping still, but Nick and Pat would be anxious to leave — and today, since Mart was due to testify, it would be only O‘Kane and Nurse Gleason upstairs — so O’Kane brought the letter with him and waited till the Thompson brothers had departed and Mr. McCormick was up and preoccupied with folding and refolding his toilet paper before he slit open the envelope.

Inside was a check drawn on the Chase Bank in New York. It was made out to him, Edward James O‘Kane, and it was in the amount of $3,500. A note was attached to it with a paper clip, and O’Kane found that his hand was trembling as he shook out the single sheet of white bond and began to read:

November 24, 1929

Dear Eddie:

Enclosed please find my check in the amount of $3,500, your share in the proceeds of the sale of our Goleta property. The orange trees never prospered as we’d hoped, but I and my partners were able recently to sell the property to a housing contractor, at a small profit.

But Eddie, I want to tell you that this is nothing compared to what you can make in stocks and bonds. Don’t pay the slightest attention to all these scare stories in the newspapers, men jumping out windows and etc., because the big stocks, the Blue Chips, have never been a better bargain. American Can, Anaconda Copper, Montgomery Ward, United Carbide and Carbon, Westinghouse E. & M., these stocks are sure to rise through the roof on the next buying surge, and believe me, the Great Bull Market isn’t dead yet, not by a long shot.

Enclosed for your convenience is a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Just put that check inside and send it on back here, and I guarantee you I’ll triple that $500 profit of yours in six months’ time or my name isn’t

Jim Isringhausen

O‘Kane had to take a minute to catch his breath. Married and a father, with a bungalow and a car, and now this, smiling Eddie O’Kane’s three o‘clock luck come home to roost for good. And what Giovannella wouldn’t do to get her hands on that check— three thousand five hundred dollars, and the five hundred of it pure profit, for doing nothing more than sitting on his hands. And what was Mart’s share in that, for the hundred he’d invested? Something like what, seventeen dollars? And of course he’d give it to him, right out of his own pocket, unless… well, unless he reinvested it for him, and nobody the wiser. No one knew about this check but him and here was the envelope to seal it up and send it right back to make another thousand dollars profit by June. Sure. And hadn’t Jim Isringhausen steered him right the first time?

It was at that moment, O‘Kane contemplating his future as a Wall Street savant and the letter stretched taut in his amazed hands, that Mr. McCormick emerged from his bathroom and strode into the parlor, naked as the day he was born. But he wasn’t simply naked, he was naked and erect and advancing on Nurse Gleason, who despite her rigorous asexuality was nonetheless, technically, a woman. O’Kane had been expecting something like this ever since the day she walked through the door, and though she was tough, Nurse Gleason, hard as nails, he doubted she was anything like a match for Mr. McCormick, and so he hastily stuffed letter and check into his breast pocket and jumped up to intervene. “Mr. McCormick,” he called out to distract him, “you’ve forgotten your clothes.”