T. Boyle - Riven Rock

People were moving past them on the platform, society types, the rich come to soak themselves in the hot springs and suck up all the fat rich things the hotels had to offer, and all at once he felt self-conscious. An old lady with a matching pair of spoiled little apricot-colored dogs stopped to gape at them as if they were a couple of spaghetti twisters just off the boat and he was embarrassed, he was, and he just wanted to get this over with, get past the awkwardness and take her home.

And then, without warning, she began to cry and he felt his teeth clench. She gasped out his name—“Eddie! Oh, Eddies‘—and it was a war cry, an accusation, a spear thrust right through him and pulled out again. He let go of her and she looked off into the distance, biting her lip, before wearily lifting her free arm to dab at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, a new dress, pale ocher, the color of the last leaf left on the elm tree at the very end of the fall, blanched and twisting in the wind.

“Four months, Eddie,” she said, trailing off in a series of truncated sobs that were like hiccoughs, erp, erp, erp. Her eyes incinerated him. She snatched in a breath. “My father cursed you every day, but I knew you wouldn’t desert me, Eddie, I knew it.” And all at once she was thrusting the baby at him like a hastily wrapped gift, the child that used to be a baby, with his forcemeat legs and the look caught between fright and wonder as if he didn’t recognize his own father even and where was the reward in that? O‘Kane couldn’t take him, not yet, and held up his hands to show how inadequate they were.

“Look how big he’s gotten,” she demanded in a high strained chirp of a voice, “did you ever think he’d be so big?” This was succeeded by a whole lexicon of baby talk as she bobbed her tearful angry hopeful face up and down like a toy on a string and touched her nose to Eddie Jr.’s and let him dangle finally from one gloved hand until his feet touched the pavement in his scuffed white doll’s shoes and he stood there grinning and triumphant.

“ ‘Oose ’ittle man is he, huh? Huh?” Rosaleen cooed and the people flitted by and the cars pulled up at the curb and O‘Kane stood erect in the glow of the late afternoon sun, at a loss, his hands hanging limp at his sides, half a wondering smile on his face.

Roscoe was waiting for them at the far end of the platform, the car at their disposal, courtesy of Katherine and Dr. Hamilton, who’d given O‘Kane the afternoon off. Roscoe squared his chauffeur’s cap on his head, very formal, very impressive, and gave O’Kane a hand with the luggage while Rosaleen and the baby settled themselves in the rear seat, and then they were off, up the gradual incline that was State Street and into the trembling blue lap of the mountains that hung over the town like a pall of smoke. “Such a grand car,” Rosaleen purred, but she wasn’t smiling, not yet, “and you know it’s my first ride ever, don’t you?” He stole a peek at her under the inflexible arch of her hat, his brown colleen, his wife, and kissed the corner of her mouth as tenderly as he knew how until she turned to him and kissed him back, just a peck, with lips as cold as the stones of the sea.

She was pleased with the apartment, he could see that, though she fussed around the place for half an hour, saying things like “Oh, Eddie, you call this a sofa, and those curtains, and what an unusual bed — is that lacquer on it or what?” and quietly disparaging the view, as if there were another ocean and another set of islands he could have presented her with, but it was for form’s sake, for the sake of establishing their roles, or reestablishing them, she in the house and he at Riven Rock earning a handsome wage as an essential cog in the McCormick machine. Through it all, the baby was a saint, nothing less. He crawled around the front room a bit, putting things in his mouth and pulling them out again all glistening with drool, and then he fell into a sleep that was like a coma, not so much as a snort or whimper out of him. By then the sun was almost gone, the sitting room walls lit like the inside of a peach, everything rosy, everything fine — but for the one thing, the most important thing.

Rosaleen was in the kitchen, poking her head in the cabinets, inspecting the icebox. She’d seen everything twice already and O‘Kane was beginning to think she was avoiding him. It had been four months. She was hurt and angry, and she had a right to be. He stood at the window, awkward in the silence, handsome Eddie O’Kane with the three o‘clock luck in his eye and never at a loss for words, and here he didn’t know what to say, how to begin it — with an apology, an excuse, a plea? Or maybe he should just move into her and touch her, this exciting stranger hovering over the kitchen sink. “Are you hungry?” he finally asked.

She drifted into the room then, slow and insouciant, and gave him the full benefit of her eyes. “I’m famished, Eddie,” she said, and her voice had the same effect on him as that first sure sip of whiskey on a night when the barroom is lit like the reaches of heaven and nothing is impossible, “famished,” she said. “For you.”

And so it went, Eddie O‘Kane and the bliss of domesticity. Elsie Reardon moved into the room he vacated in the servants’ quarters and Roscoe came for him every morning at 7:30 after dropping off Nick and Pat. Mart wasn’t too pleased, having to spend the first hour of his day sitting alone with Mr. McCormick in that interval when the shifts changed, and maybe he was a little jealous too, used to having O’Kane to himself and hungering after his own bride and his own life but so shy and tongue-tied he’d die in his tracks if a girl so much as looked at him. Katherine and her mother packed up and went back east at the end of October, Dr. Hamilton procured another dozen monkeys from God knew where, and Julius, the big orange ape, lacking any other apes to mount, sniff and soak with urine at the doctor’s pleasure, was given the run of the place, appearing as if by legerdemain on the roof of the garage one minute and in the kitchen the next, his feet drawn up under him on a three-legged stool and a perspiring glass of milk clamped firmly in his spidery hand. And at home, in the three-room apartment they rented from a retired munitions salesman by the name of Rowlings who lived upstairs and watched every move they made, Rosaleen, who was no housekeeper at all, tried her best to move the piles of rubbish from one corner of the place to another and spent a good hour every evening immolating a piece of meat on the new Acme Sterling Steel Range in the kitchen.

Before long it was winter, iceless and snowless, sunshine pouring down like liquid gold, hissing rains that stood the earth on its head and rattled the boulders in Hot Springs Creek like the teeth of a boxer’s jaw and every leaf of every tree green as the Garden of Eden. O‘Kane sent his mother pictures of the palms and the winter flowers and she wrote him that nobody in the neighborhood could believe it, weather like that, and what a bitter winter it was at home, his cousin Kevin down with a lung disorder and the doctors baffled and Uncle Billy suffering with the ague, but she was fine, if you discounted the sciatica that was like the devil’s own pitchfork thrust into her every fifteen seconds, night and day, and his father, knock on wood, was as strong as the day he retired from the ring, preserved as he was in alcohol like a fish in a jar, and not so much as a sniffle. O’Kane had no complaints about the weather — he didn’t miss the snow a bit, not even at Christmas — but as the days wore on, Rosaleen began to get under his skin.

The apartment was too small, for one thing, though it had seemed plenty big enough the day he’d rented it, and the baby was always underfoot, walking now, into everything, howling all night like a cat skinned alive and filling his diapers like the very genius of shit. His favorite trick was picking through the trash, which Rose never emptied, and whenever he was quiet for more than five minutes at a time you’d be sure to find him crouching behind the sofa with a half-gnawed bone or an orange gone white with mold. And that was a funny thing, the oranges. When O‘Kane was a boy, they were five cents each, the price of a beer, and he saw them at Christmas only, and only then if he was lucky. And now he was drowning in them, oranges like an avalanche, a nickel a basket, and he didn’t even like the flavor of them anymore, too cloying, almost poisonously sweet, and with all that juice running down your chin and gumming up your fingers.