T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Just as I suspected.” Josephine said, striding briskly through the door and out into the resplendent halls of the Potter Hotel, her skirts crepitating, the wings of her hat flapping in the breeze she generated. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And then they were in the car, arranging veils, leathers and various rugs to keep the dust off, while the chauffeur, a tense little man with a bristling sunburned neck and a pair of sunburned ears that stood straight out from his head, wrestled the steering wheel and fought the gear lever with brisk angry jerks of his shoulders. Katherine and her mother were perched in back of him on the leather banquette seat, as exposed to the elements as they would have been in a buggy, and after the first mile or so, when they turned from the wide boulevard that ran parallel to the beach in order to circumvent an inlet called “The Salt Pond,” Josephine began to complain. “I don’t see how anyone could ever get used to these rattling machines,” she shouted over the stuttering roar of the motor. “The smell of them — and the noise. Give me a nice quiet brougham and an even-tempered mare any day.”

“Yes, mother,” Katherine replied through her gauze veil, “and I suppose horses don’t smell at all — or scatter manure across every road from here to Maine and back.” She was beginning to enjoy herself for the first time since she’d arrived, her headache receding, her nose drying up, and the air new-made from the sea and pregnant with the scent of a million flowers, citrus blossoms, Pittosporum undulatum, jasmine. The place wasn’t really so bad at all — she’d pictured the Wild West, men in serapes and drooping mustaches, women in mantillas, an utter void — but the Potter had surprised her (it really was a first-class hotel, the equal of anything you’d find in the East), as had the charming adobes and grand Italian villas she glimpsed through the stands of eucalyptus. There was a surprising air of culture and civility about the place, and there was no denying its natural beauty, with its sea vistas and the dark stain of its mountains against an infinite cloudless sky. It was like a tropical Newport, a conflation of the Riviera and Palm Beach. Or better yet, the Land of the Lotos Eaters, “In which it seemed always afternoon.”

For once, she thought, the McCormicks had been right. (And oh, how they’d campaigned to bring Stanley west, Nettie crouching nightly over the idea like some beast with its kill, dragging it up and down the length of the drawing room in her clamped and unyielding jaws while Bentley and Favill beat the sacrificial drums and sister Anita wailed the ritual lament.) Now that she was here, now that she was actually in the car and on her way to Riven Rock, the sun leaping through the trees ahead of her and the scented breeze kissing the veil to her lips, Katherine could feel the rightness of it. This was what Stanley needed. This was it. This was the place that would make him well.

“I just don’t understand this craze for motoring,” her mother observed in a casual shriek. “It’s so — oh, I don’t know — debilitating. And I don’t doubt for a minute that all that driving contributed to poor Stanley’s decline.” The car lurched to the left to avoid a wagon rut, righted itself, and then immediately pounded over a section of road that was like a cheese grater. “I know I’ll be a nervous case myself if I have to do much more of this — and to think he did it willingly, as some sort of hobby—”

This was a rather galling reference to Stanley’s passion for motorcars — a passion Katherine had never shared, but which she felt compelled to defend out of wifely loyalty. “That’s perfectly absurd, mother, and you know it. If anything,” she shouted, “driving calmed him.”

Stanley had been one of the first in the country to have an automobile, as people were calling them now, and he always insisted on driving himself, the chauffeur accompanying him solely as a hedge against mechanical emergencies. In fact — and her mother knew it as well as she did — if it weren’t for motoring, she and Stanley might never have met. Almost five years ago now, in the summer of her final year at the Institute, she’d gone to a resort in Beverly with a group of mostly young people — Betty Johnston and her brother Morris, Pamela Huff, the Tretonnes — to sleep late, swim and ride and play tennis and forget all about the circulatory systems of reptiles and the thesis looming over her head. They were playing croquet on the main lawn one afternoon when Stanley suddenly appeared, striding over the hill and through the cluster of wickets in goggles and a greatcoat so thick with dust he looked as if he’d been dipped in flour preparatory to some cannibal feast. And what was he doing there to miraculously recognize her from the dancing class they’d attended together at the age of thirteen and twelve respectively all those years ago in Chicago and to charm her with that sweet recollection and a hundred other things? He was motoring. Across country. Or at least that part of it that lay between the Adirondacks and Boston.

Katherine couldn’t help but smile at the memory, but then, as the chauffeur guided them back along the route they’d taken to the hot springs and into the umbrageous environs of Montecito, she began to wonder why her mother had brought up Stanley’s driving — was it only to provoke her? To widen the gulf between her and her husband? To weigh in on the side of annulment, divorce, a settlement? She stole a glance at her mother’s flapping form, the mad hat, the streaming veil and the smug ghostly expression, and she knew.

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear?” her mother screamed.

“You haven’t been talking to Mr. Bentley, have you? Or Mr. Favill, maybe? ”

No response. The engine whined and chewed away at itself; a pair of ugly glittering birds heaved up and out of the roadway, leaving a long wet pounded strip of meat behind them. “Turkey vultures,” Katherine whispered to herself, “Cathartes aura,” and it was automatic with her to classify everything that moved. She peered at her mother’s face through the clinging wraith of the veil and felt her heart sink. The headache was back. Her sinuses were in flood. She felt betrayed. “Have you?” she cried into the wind.

“I’m sorry,” her mother shouted, leaning forward and cupping her hands to her mouth, “I didn’t hear you. Dear.”

“Yes, you did,” Katherine shouted back. “You met with them, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

But all her mother would say, as the chauffeur jerked his shoulders and the car twitched and shimmied and plunged into one pothole after another, was, “Very pleasant gentlemen, both of them.”

After that, they drove on in silence, the dusty roads of Santa Barbara giving way to the dusty cartpaths of Montecito, “the Millionaires’ Eden,” as the newspapers had it, the place where robber barons, industrialists and breakfast food magnates alike came to escape the snow and potter around their grandiose estates in a botanical delirium of banana trees, limes, kumquats and alligator pears. Katherine was predisposed to hate the place — Why did the McCormicks always have to pull the strings? What was so bad about Waverley and Massachusetts? Had no one ever gotten well there? — and now, her mood spoiled again, she settled in to loathe it in earnest. There was beauty everywhere she looked, intense, physical, immediate, but her eyes were veiled and it was a cloying beauty, destructive and hateful, the sort of beauty that masked the snake and the scorpion — and the McCormicks. Even when the chauffeur turned off Hot Springs and onto Riven Rock Road and they passed through the main gate and the big stone fairy castle of a house stood before her, the house of the Beast bristling with roses, Stanley’s house, she made herself feel nothing.