T. Boyle - Riven Rock

But he was tired. And he did think he would take an amble and stretch his legs if nobody needed him, and maybe he’d have more than one cup of coffee — he definitely meant to be awake for Buffalo. He folded his hands behind his head, arched his back and stretched again. He hadn’t slept well the past two nights — last night because of the excitement of finally being underway, the rails beating time with his racing heart till he began to think he was part of a drum corps, rat-tat-tat and high-stepping it down the dusty road all the way to Cali-forn-eye-ay. The night before that he was with Rosaleen, their last night together under the roof of the cute little walkup on Chestnut Street that had somehow managed to become a stone round his neck, a big hollowed-out stone full of furniture and baby things and pots and pans and doilies cinched tight round his windpipe and the water rising fast. But it was their last night and she was sweet and wet and pulled him to her with a fierceness that made his blood rise again and again till they were at it all night long. They’d forgotten their differences and made up beforehand and they’d had a nice dinner she fixed of lamb chops and new potatoes with the mint jelly he liked, the baby hot and soft in his lap and sleeping away like a little saint. Who’re you going to choose, and he’d put it to her point-blank, your husband or yourfather? And she’d given him that melting coy down-arching big-eyed look and said, You, Eddie, you, and that was it. She was going to come out in a month or so, with Nick and Pat’s wives and little ones, courtesy of the McCormicks — once everything was settled. And that was all right. He guessed.

The train reared under his feet and he was a kid on skis again, coming down the big hill out back of the glue factory, and then he caught his balance and called out to Nick, “Think I’ll stretch my legs and maybe get a cup of coffee — anybody want anything?”

Nick was in a mood. He didn’t like traveling. He’d traveled once all the way from Washington, D.C., to Boston, for his father’s funeral — and it wasn’t in any private car, either, as he’d reminded them a hundred times already — and by the time he got there his father was six feet deep in the ground and his mother’s heart was permanently broken — and then she went and died three months later. And if it wasn’t for Pat and Mart and his looking out for them to get ahead in life, he wouldn’t be traveling now. He never even bothered to turn his head, and O‘Kane had to repeat himself before Pat finally looked up from his cards and said, “No, no thanks, Eddie — nothing for me.”

O‘Kane stood there a moment, the car rolling and bucking under his feet, the chandeliers swaying to some phantom breeze and the scenery racing along on both sides as if it would never catch up — which it wouldn’t, of course, because they were leaving it all behind, everything, and a whole lot more to come — and then he decided he’d better look in on Mart and the doctor and see if they wanted anything. He’d learned to take smaller steps than usual, adjusting to the movement of the car, but he was awkward on his feet and he wound up shuffling down the long tongue of red carpet like a drunk on his way to bed. He slammed off the wall just outside the doctor’s compartment, but the door was closed and there was no sound from within, so he continued on past till he got to the last compartment on the left, Mr. McCormick‘s, and stuck his head inside the door.

Mart was sitting there beside the bed, the gaslamp glowing, a book spread open in his lap. The book was one of Mr. McCormick‘s — a fat handsome volume called The Sea Wolf, one of two dozen or so pressed on them by Mrs. McCormick just before they left Boston. She’d appeared on the platform fifteen minutes after they’d carried her husband aboard and got him settled in his compartment, and O’Kane was the one she collared, though Pat and Mart were right there beside him in a welter of baggage and porters and the two coffin-sized steamer trunks marked HAMILTON they had to wrestle aboard. “Mr. O‘Kane,” she called, hurrying up the platform in a dress the color of Catawba grapes, her little weasel-faced chauffeur at her side.

O‘Kane was struck dumb. He hadn’t laid eyes on her since that morning at McLean, and here she was, calling out his name in a public place, her face warm and animated, her ankles chopping at her skirts and showing off the dark ribbed stockings and buckled pumps as if there were nothing more natural in the world. She glided effortlessly through the crush of people, and he was surprised to see how tall she was, taller than he’d remembered — five-eight or five-nine even, and that was subtracting an inch for the heels. O’Kane’s smile was slow-growing, stealthy almost, and before he could compose himself she was standing right there before him in her wide-brimmed hat and the clocked veil and her Catawba-colored gloves. He was an idiot. An oaf. He didn’t say hello. He said “Yes?” instead, as if he were a clerk in a shoe store.

The chauffeur gave him a look. O‘Kane had disliked him on sight the first time they’d met — or been thrust into one another’s company. He was a little man, even smaller than he’d first appeared, especially in contrast to Mrs. McCormick — Katherine, that is. He was wearing one of those monkey caps, and his arms were laden with brown-paper parcels.

“I was afraid we’d miss you,” she breathed, aspirating each syllable to show that she really had been hurrying. She was flushed — or was it his imagination? And if it was, why would he want her to be flushed? It was nothing to him. Her eyes locked on his and he tried not to flinch. “I was with my mother all the way out in Brookline and we just rushed the whole way… but it was — is my husband all right? Is he comfortable?”

“Oh, yes,” O‘Kane assured her, “we carried him in not fifteen minutes ago and we’ve got Nick right there locked in the compartment with him, but of course he’s blocked still and not really all that aware of his surroundings….”

She had nothing to say to this. Though she hadn’t been allowed to see him, she must have known perfectly well the sort of state her husband was in. O‘Kane had seen it before, too many times to count. With this sort of catatonia a patient would seize up to the point where he wouldn’t walk or eat and he became totally mute, as if he’d never acquired the power of speech. Sometimes he would freeze in a single attitude like a living sculpture, and then, without warning, break loose in all sorts of violent contortions, as if all that pent-up energy and fear and fury had suddenly burst like a blister inside him. For the past month they’d been force-feeding Mr. McCormick, the tube down his throat, the mush in the tube, and either he or Nick or one of the other nurses working the patient’s throat to make sure he was swallowing and not asphyxiating on his food. There was a young girl of eighteen at the Boston Lunatic Asylum who died that way, the food all fouled up in the passage to her lungs, and O’Kane remembered one old man scalded to death when they lowered his rigid form into a bath nobody had bothered to check and he was so far gone he never flinched or cried out or anything.

She looked down at her feet and then raised her head and looked past O‘Kane to where Pat and Mart were struggling to hoist one of the doctor’s trunks up into the car. “I’ve brought some things for him,” she said, and that was the signal for the chauffeur to disburden himself, unceremoniously dumping the packages in O’Kane’s arms. There were six of them, and they couldn’t have been heavier if they were stuffed with gold bullion. “Books, mostly,” she said, “but I’ve included two boxes of the chocolates he likes, the foil-wrapped ones from Schrafft‘s, and some stationery in case he — well, if he should feel up to writing. And I do expect that if my husband hasn’t improved enough to read to himself, then certainly you and the other nurses will sit by him and read aloud. You can’t imagine the difference it would make.”