T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Katherine cut him off. She took that rigid coatrack of her perfect back and perfect shoulders and leaned so far forward he thought she was going to splinter and crack. “You do understand, Mr. O‘Kane, that I am in charge here now?” she said, and he was quick to note the edge of impatience in her voice.

This was no time for improvisation — she was the conductor and he was the orchestra. “Yes, ma‘am,” he said, and meant it. In the past months she’d redecorated the house, removing the gloomy Spanish paintings, heavy black furniture and pottery to the attic above the garage and replacing it with seascapes and western scenes, modern chairs and sofas with square edges and low backs, draperies that gave back the light and made the place look less like a West Coast version of McLean and more like the home of an important and consummately sane man with just the slightest, most temporary indisposition. She’d hired a new head gardener, a landscape architect and half a dozen new wops and Mexicans. And though the McCormicks still owned the house and Mr. McCormick paid a monthly rental back to his mother, all decisions, no matter how trivial, went through Katherine. She was in charge. There was no doubt about it.

“Good,” she said, “because I want you to keep that in mind when you hear what I’m about to say.”

O‘Kane glanced round the room. The doctor shifted uneasily in his chair; the old lady smiled faintly.

“I’ve spoken with the parties involved, Mr. O‘Kane — in Italian, so as to be absolutely certain of the facts — and I find your behavior reprehensible. You’ve trifled with this young girl’s affections, Mr. O’Kane, and worse, you’ve taken advantage of her. Ruined her, as they say. Do you think a female is just an object, Mr. O‘Kane, a bit of flesh put on this earth to satisfy your lusts? Is that what you think?”

O‘Kane’s head was bowed, but he was fuming. He didn’t give a damn who she was, she had no right — he was no stave — he was free to—“No,” he said.

There was a pause. The lights glinted on the spines of the books, the crystal on the sideboard. The old lady, Katherine’s mother, seemed to be humming to herself.

“Now Dr. Hamilton tells me you’re an excellent nurse,” Katherine went on, her voice strung tight, “and I know personally how devoted you are to my husband, but believe me, if it weren’t for that I’d dismiss you on the spot. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said, and he was croaking, croaking like a frog, like something you’d step on and squash.

“Because as long as you work for Mr. McCormick you are his representative in the community and you will conduct yourself as befits his unimpeachable moral standards or you will find yourself looking for employment elsewhere. Not to mention the fact, which is perhaps the saddest feature of this whole affair, that you are a married man. You’ve taken holy vows, Mr. O‘Kane, before God and man, and there is no earthly excuse for abjuring them. You disappoint me, you really do.”

O‘Kane had nothing to say. The bitch. The meddling snooty Back Bay bitch. How dare she dress him down like some schoolboy? How dare she? But he kept quiet because of the orange trees and Mr. McCormick and the best chance he had. He’d show her. Someday. Someday he would.

“There’s one more thing,” she said, relaxing finally into the embrace of the chair, though her feet remained nailed to the floor. “I’ve purchased two second-class tickets in your wife’s name. I will expect her here by the end of next week.”

The second woman Stanley McCormick ever saw in a natural state was a French streetwalker by the name of Mireille Sancerre who wore undergarments of such an intense shade of red she was like a field of poppies suddenly revealed beneath the muted lights of her room. “Do you like maybe to watch?” she asked coyly as he lay paralyzed on her patchouli-scented sheets and saw the flaccid silky things fall from her to expose the whiteness at the center of her, the whiteness he expected and dreaded and lusted for. He was twenty years old, four months out of Princeton and a neophyte in the art studios of Monsieur Julien on the rue de Clichy in Montmartre. His brother Harold, who’d graduated with him in June, had just married Edith Rockefeller, and his mother, feeling Stanley’s loss, had taken him on a tour of Italy and the antiquities of Europe as a way of distracting him. They got along beautifully, Stanley and his mother, savoring the chance to be alone together after the separation of college, but they quarreled over Stanley’s plan to stay on in Paris for a few months and study sketching. To Nettie’s mind, the most corrupt and iniquitous city in Europe was hardly the place for her youngest child to take up residence on his own for the first time in his life, while Stanley argued that Paris was the cynosure and sine qua non of the art world and protested that he might never have such an opportunity again.

“Mother,” he cried, his face working and his eyes like mad hornets buzzing round his head as he stalked back and forth across the gilded expanse of their suite at the Elysée Palace Hotel, “it’s the chance of a lifetime, my one opportunity to study with a French master before I go home to Chicago and step back into the harness. I’m only twenty. I’ll be at the Reaper Works until I die.”

Nettie, enthroned in her chair, lips drawn tight: “No.”

“But mother, why? Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I done well at college and made you proud? Better than Harold — a hundred times better. I’m just asking for this one little thing.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No. And that’s final. You know perfectly well the temptations a young man of high character would be assaulted with daily in a city like this, a place I’ve always felt was full of foreigners of the very lowest repute, what with their obscene and sacrilegious views and their mocking attitude toward the moral and reflective life, and don’t you think for a minute I haven’t seen these pig-eyed Frenchmen smirking at us behind our backs…. And what of your health? Have you thought about that? Who’s going to nurse you if that Egyptian fever comes back again — you’re still frail from that, you know, and your color is nothing short of ghastly. Hm? I don’t hear you, Stanley.”

He had no answer to that, though he felt his color was fine, a little blanched and pallid, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. He’d been pacing and now he stopped in front of the sitting room mirror and saw a face he barely recognized, staring eyes and collapsed cheeks, a gauntness that frightened him — he did need to gain back some of the weight he’d lost in his bout with typhus, he admitted it, but where better to do it than in the gustatory capital of the world?

“And your nervous condition — what about that?” his mother persisted. “No, I couldn’t leave you here, never — Id be prostrate with worry the whole way back. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

No, Stanley wouldn’t want that, and he knew all about the severity of her heart condition and how much she needed him and how it would absolutely rend her to be without him even for a day, let alone two months or more, especially now, of all times, when Harold and Anita were gone and she had to go back to that big empty house all by herself and be alone with the servants, but for the first time in his life he stood up to her. For two weeks he gave her no peace, not a minute’s worth, imploring, importuning, beating his breast, brooding and glowering and slamming doors till even the servants were in a state, and finally, against her better judgment, she relented. She found him a suite of very suitable rooms with a Mrs. Adela van Pele, a pious Presbyterian lady in her late middle age from Muncie, Indiana, who ran an irreproachable establishment in Buttes-Chaumont while her husband, the celebrated evangelist Mies van Pele, converted headhunters along the Rajang River in Borneo, and she had a long talk with Monsieur Julien, who assured her that her son would sketch only the most suitable subjects — that is, still lifes and landscapes, as opposed to anything even remotely corporeal. Satisfied, but weeping and tearing at her hair nonetheless, Nettie took passage home — alone. And it was on the very night of his mother’s departure — on the way back from seeing her off, in fact — that Stanley, the blood singing in his ears, encountered Mireille Sancerre.