T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Dear Eddie:

The son is shinning I bot a new pair of short pance for Eddie Juner thank you for the money. He is so cut & I want you every nite so much to stick your thing in me I’m like a starving woman with someboddy cooking bakon in the air so pleese Eddie send for the tikets becoz Mildred Thompson and Ernestine and the boys all left tow weeks ago & I miss you

Yours in Love & Lust, Rosaleen

He could hear her voice and see her in a jerky series of poses, mainly sexual, that was as flickery and fleeting as one of Edison’s motion pictures, and that softened him. But then he took another look at the looping backward scrawl of her cursive and the spelling that never got past the third-grade level and wondered what had ever possessed him to marry her. When she told him she was pregnant back in September, the two of them walking home hand-in-hand from Brophy’s Bar & Grill, the sky full of stars and her lips swollen like sponges and so sweet he might have been licking the lid of a jar of honey, he should have run and never looked back, should have bolted for Alaska, Siberia, anyplace. But he didn’t. He married her. Stood at the altar and swore before God and Father Daugherty to live with her for the rest of his life. Yes. But she was in Waverley, returned to the bosom of her family, back with her father and mother and her fat-faced semimoronic brothers, and he was here, in California, without a care in the world. And how could you argue with that?

Mart was in the dining room, hunched over his plate and chewing with a mindless stolidity, when O‘Kane came in for breakfast. The doctor and Mrs. Hamilton weren’t up yet. They were staying in one of the guest rooms in the east wing, with their squally little baby, until they could find a suitable house in the neighborhood. The servants were fed in the servants’ hall, to the rear of the house, and Mr. McCormick was fed by his nurses, through a tube, at nine o’clock on the dot. So on this particular morning, with the palest whitest ghostliest sun suspended in an ether of mist that washed away the background till the whole house might have been a ship at sea, it was just Mart and O‘Kane at breakfast. “Top of the morning to you, Mart,” O’Kane crowed, tipping back the cover of the serving tray while the housemaid, a sexless spinster in her forties by the name of Elsie Reardon, fluttered around him with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice in one hand and a gleaming silver coffee urn in the other.

Mart grunted a reply. He’d washed his hair, which he combed forward to soften the great gleaming lump of his forehead, and the hair, dangling wetly, had the effect of a bit of packing material pasted atop a lightbulb. There was egg on his chin.

“I don’t know how you stand it,” O‘Kane sighed, sinking into the chair across from him. “I mean, being a bachelor out here in the middle of nowhere when your brothers are at home getting theirs every night and even Dr. Hamilton’s got his wife with him… and the wops, they’re out there in those cottages screwing like dogs. I can’t stand it. I’m going crazy here.”

Mart looked interested. He set down his fork, dabbed at his chin with the napkin. Elsie poured coffee with a scandalized face, then stumped out of the room. “What about Rose?”

O‘Kane shrugged. “I’m talking about now, today, tonight. I’m used to having it, you know? Of course, look who I’m talking to — you probably never had a good screw in your life, am I right?”

Mart protested, but weakly, and O‘Kane saw the truth hit home.

“It’s like this ham”—and he held up the pink slab of it on the tines of his fork, crisp from the pan and iridescent with smoke-cured grease. “If Elsie didn’t give you any tomorrow, you wouldn’t think much of it. But if two days went by, three, a week — you know what I mean? And sex — well, that’s a real bodily necessity, just like food and water and moving your bowels—”

“And whiskey,” Mart put in with a sly smile. “Don’t forget whiskey.”

O‘Kane grinned back. “What do you say we talk Roscoe into going into town tonight?”

And then it was the morning routine. Say goodnight to Nick and Pat, who were just coming off their shift, and hello to Mr. McCormick, bent up double like a pretzel in his bed; then it was strip off Mr. McCormick’s nightgown and swab up the mess he’d left on the sheets, pack the whole business up for the laundress and give Mr. McCormick his shower bath, and all the while O‘Kane thinking about Robert Ogilvie, director of the Peachtree Asylum in Stone Mountain, Georgia, who suspended all his catatonics on a rack in a big metal tub, day and night, and just changed the water when it got mucked up. No stains, no smells, no laundry — just a plug and a faucet. Now that was progress.

“He’s not looking real good this morning,” O‘Kane observed when they first walked into the room and stood over the fouled bed and saw the position Mr. McCormick had got himself into.

Mart was oblivious. He merely bobbed his big head with the hair dried round it in a fringe and stared down at their employer as if he were a piece of furniture. “I’ve seen him worse.”

Sometime during the night Mr. McCormick had hunched himself up like a fetus in the womb, and he’d managed to lock one foot behind the other in a way that looked uncomfortable, painful even — the sort of thing you’d expect from a swami or contortionist. He was breathing hard, his ribs heaving as if he’d just come back from a ten-mile run, and his eyes were open and staring and his hands locked together in an unbreakable clasp, but he didn’t respond to them at all. They had no choice but to lift him out of bed as he was, a hand each under his armpit and buttock, and haul him over to the shower bath where the water would take some of the crust off him and they could get at the rest of it with a bar of Palm Olive soap and the scrub brushes, and it wasn’t any different from any other day, but for the pose he was in. Still and all, it was a strange sensation to have to drag a man around like that, a grown naked man worth nobody knew how many millions and as lifeless as a side of beef hanging from a meathook. Only his eyes were alive, and they didn’t register much — the quickest jump to the needles of water in the shower bath or the light bulging at the windows and then back to nothing.

It was eerie. Unsettling. No matter how often O‘Kane experienced it or how many patients he’d seen like this — and he’d bathed them one after another at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, twenty at a time, hosing them down afterward like hogs in a pen — it still affected him. How could anybody live like that? Be like that? And what did it take for the mechanism to break down, for the normal to become abnormal, for a man like Mr. McCormick, who had everything and more, to lose even the faculty of knowing it?

“I wish he’d come out of it, Mart,” he said after they’d set him down on his side under the spray of the shower bath. “Even if he got violent again — anything.”

“Are you kidding?” Mart rubbed the spot over his left eye where their employer had slugged him on the train. Steam rose from the floor. Water hissed against the tiles. Mr. McCormick, his skin glistening and the hair a dark skullcap pressed to his temples and creeping up the back of his neck, began to grunt softly.

“Think about it, Mart — he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it. I mean, I’ve been so blind drunk I didn’t know where I was and I’ve slept in an alley once and one time I woke up on the beach with a bunch of crabs scuttling all over me, but I knew right away I was Eddie O‘Kane.”

Mart didn’t seem to grasp the point. He just stared down at the hunched-up shape on the naked tiles and began to shake his head. “I wish he’d stay like this forever, nice and quiet.” And then he lowered his voice, because you could never tell what Mr. McCormick was thinking or what he might retain. “If he gets well he won’t need us anymore, that’s for sure — and then where would we be?”