T. Boyle - Riven Rock

They made it up the next day and he loved her over and over again, in every way he could dream or devise, and she clawed at his back and begged him to be a man, a husband, and stay inside her till he gave her a baby, but he wouldn’t and they fought over that. Sated, panting, slick with sweat, they lay side by side on the quilt beneath the trees, silent as enemies, until she sat up and dressed herself and left without a word. Then he made himself scarce for a couple of days and he didn’t see her. He took the precaution of putting a lock on the window, and he felt bad about it, but he couldn’t have Dr. Hamilton catch her climbing into his room. Or Katherine — what if she found out? He went into town to Nick’s place to celebrate Ernestine’s birthday and drank enough beer to float a ship and never once whispered Giovannella’s name to himself. She wasn’t around in the daytime anymore — Mrs. Fioccola was back in the kitchen now and Giovannella had no business at Riven Rock — and her only recourse was to come lurking round at night and throw pebbles at the windowpanes. The pebbles came like hail. The window rattled furiously in its iron frame. Dogs barked in the night, and twice the servants came frothing out of their cottages and chased phantoms round the courtyard. And how did O‘Kane feel? He felt irritated. He didn’t need this. She was like a madwoman, like a harpy, and all he’d wanted was a girl, all he’d wanted was innocence, softness, the gentle yielding of love.

A week went by, and O‘Kane took to walking into town at night, five miles there and five miles back, avoiding the Italians who gathered after supper on the big rock in the orchard with their checkers and squeezebox and grappa; he sat up till one and two in the morning with Nick and Pat and the softly snoring husk of their employer, shunning his room till he was so shot through with exhaustion he could shun it no longer. To his relief, there were no more pebbles, no more alarums in the night. Giovannella was gone. It was over. And he was just trying to adjust to the sad reality of that fact, feeling a little wistful and blue, when on a clear flower-spangled Saturday morning, Baldessare Dimucci and his eldest son, Pietro, trundled up the long stone drive in their manure cart and parked in front of the garage. Elsie Reardon came to get him. “There’s two men want to see you, Eddie,” she said, peering in through the bars to Mr. McCormick’s quarters. “Two wops.”

When Hamilton summoned him to the library that evening after his shift, O‘Kane didn’t think anything of it — usually the doctor wanted to compare notes on Mr. McCormick’s progress, or lack of it, either that or talk his ear off about Julius’s bowel movements or Gertie and how many times she’d been mounted by Jocko while Mutt looked on. But as soon as he stepped into the room and saw Mrs. McCormick and her mother sitting there like hanging judges and the doctor drawing a face about half a mile long, he knew he was in for it. Even before Katherine said, “Good evening, Mr. O’Kane, please take a seat,” in her iciest voice and the mother flashed him a quick fading smile out of habit and the doctor cleared his throat ostentatiously and let the light glare off his spectacles so you couldn’t see his eyes flipping, O‘Kane was thinking of how to explain away the little contretemps in the courtyard, dredging up mitigating circumstances and constructing an unassailable wall of half-truths, plausible fictions and unvarnished lies.

Over the years, in his relations with women — and those relations had been extensive, prodigious even — he’d learned that it was always best to deny everything. And so he’d attempted to do with Dimucci père and fils, but the Dimuccis, choleric and quick to act, the end product of centuries of blood feuds and immutable codes of peasant honor, would have none of it. “Eddie,” the old man cried out so that every blessed soul within a thousand yards could hear him, “you ruin-a my daughter Giovannella and now you got marry,” while the son, five-foot-nothing and with a face like a fox caught in a leg snare, glared violence and hate. They wouldn’t listen to reason. O‘Kane tried to tell them they weren’t in Sicily anymore, that this was a free country and that Giovannella was a grown woman and as guilty as he — guiltier, for the way she strutted around the kitchen and pouted her lips over every little thing and let her breasts hang loose like ripe fruit in a sack — but when he got to the part about ripe fruit Pietro came for him and, regrettably, he had to pin him to the wall of the house like a butterfly on a mounting board.

He felt bad about that. He was no monster. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. In all the time he’d been with Rosaleen he’d only slipped from the straight and narrow two times, not counting Giovannella, and then only when she was so big with the baby she couldn’t satisfy him — or wouldn’t. She refused to use her mouth or even her hand, and she was downright peevish about it, as if he’d asked her to shoot the pope or sell her soul to the devil or something. And both times, sure enough, some Judas betrayed him — he suspected it was her oldest brother, Liam, who always had his nose in somebody’s business, or her schoolfriend, Irene Norman, who worked at Bisby’s Lunchroom and chewed over every piece of gossip in town three times a day — and Rosaleen had raised holy hell, as if she needed anything to set her off. He denied everything. Told her whoever was filling her head with all that crap was a small, mean-spirited person who wasn’t worth giving a thought to, but Rosaleen screeched her lungs raw all the same and dented every pot and pan in the house. “Admit it!” she demanded, screaming. “Admit it,” she whispered after a night of lying awake beside him and sobbing, “admit it and I’ll forgive you,” but he knew better than that, knew he’d hear about Eulalie Tucker and Bartholemew Pierson’s wife Lizzie every minute of every hour of every day of his life if he breathed a word.

But now, in the library, surrounded by the rich and many-hued spines of the hundreds of beautiful leatherbound books Katherine had stocked on the teakwood shelves in the past weeks against the day of her husband’s recovery, he felt at a loss. How much did they know? How much did it matter? Was he their nigger slave, to be whipped and reprimanded and hounded over every little detail of his private life? That was what he was thinking as he took his seat and tried to look at Katherine without blinking or staring down at his shoes. There was a moment of excruciating silence, during which he heard the call of a monkey echoing forlornly over the grounds. “Yes?” he said finally, taking the initiative. “Can I be of help?”

Katherine stiffened. She was dressed in velvet, in the royal shade of maroon Monsignor O‘Rourke used to don for Lent and Advent, with a matching hat and plume of aigrettes. Her posture, as always, was flawless, knees and feet pressed together and neatly aligned, her back held so rigidly it was concave, her chin thrust forward and her lips clamped tight. “You certainly can,” she said, and her eyes gave him no respite. “Perhaps, Mr. O’Kane, you could offer an explanation of this incident — or rather, this affair — with the peasant girl.”

He tried to hold her eyes, tried to project innocence, humility, a ready willingness to do all he could to clear up what was at worst a simple misunderstanding, but he couldn’t. Her eyes were like whistling bullets, explosions in the dark. He looked to the mother, but she was off in a dream of her own, and then to Hamilton, but he was mimicking Katherine. “Well,” he said, trying on his winningest smile, the one his mother claimed could restart the hearts of the dead, raising his eyes to meet hers and grinning, grinning, “it’s all innocence is what it is, a school-girl crush, that’s all. You see, the girl in question was filling in here temporarily in the kitchen while Mrs.—”