T. Boyle - Riven Rock

But Rosaleen. She was so insipid, stupid as a clam, nattering on about sewing and patterns and what was prettier the blue or the yellow till sometimes he wanted to jump up from the table and choke the breath out of her. And her housekeeping — or lack of it. She was as filthy and disorganized as her whey-faced mother and her tuberous brothers, dirty Irish, shanty Irish, not fit to kiss the hem of his mother’s dress and you never saw so much as a speck of dust in the O‘Kane household, no matter how poor they might have been. She was putting on weight again too, and that drove him to distraction, because every time he looked at her, the fat settling into her hips and thighs and ballooning her breasts till she could barely straighten up, he was sure she’d gone and got pregnant again. And that he couldn’t abide. Not at his age, not when he had his whole life ahead of him still. Maybe it wasn’t right, but the way he felt, the burden of just one kid more would put him in the asylum himself — they’d have to chain him to Mr. McCormick and they could rave at each other and piss their pants side by side. Well, and not to put too fine a point on it, as his father would say, it was inevitable that he began to stray, just a bit, from the nest.

First it was two nights a week, Friday and Saturday, and who could blame him for that? And he did take Rose with him now and again, when they could get the girl from down the street to mind little Eddie, and he had to spoil his own evening and watch her get drunk as a sow and listen to the incessant nagging whine of her voice every time he lifted a glass to his lips—“Eddie, don’t you think that’s enough now,” and “Let’s go home, Eddie, I’m bored,” and “How can you stand this place?” The two nights stretched to three and then four and he began to run with some of the boys at Cody Menhoff’s. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, they’d have a shot and a beer at every place in town and then all pile into a car and drive up over San Marcos Pass and all the way out to Mattei’s Tavern in Los Olivos and he wouldn’t come home till three in the morning, stinking, absolutely stinking. That took the smile off Rose’s face, all right. She’d pounce on him like a harpy and their wars would rage all over the apartment and out onto the front porch, furniture flying, the baby squalling, Old Man Rowlings punctuating every shout and cry with an outraged thump from above.

Spring began in February and lasted through the end of May and it was a glorious time, the vegetable world in riot, every breeze a barge-load of spices. Saturday afternoons he’d take Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. to the park or hop the streetcar down to the beach, where he’d lie flat on the sand with a beer propped on his chest and stare up into the sky while his face and limbs turned brown as a wop’s. The Ice Queen — Katherine — returned in May and she never said a word to him about Rosaleen or Eddie Jr., just hello and good-bye and how did my husband look and what did he eat today, stiff as ever, winter on two feet, and she took her lawyers with her down to the Santa Barbara Municipal Courthouse and had her husband declared incompetent.

O‘Kane first heard about it one night when he couldn’t get home after work — Roscoe was running Mrs. McCormick across town to some fancy-dress party and wouldn’t be back till late. The last thing he wanted was to stick around the place, and Rosaleen was sure to give him hell over it, the meal ruined and she slaving over the stove since three and all the rest of it, but he had no choice unless he wanted to walk — and he didn’t. He was able to cajole a plate of home fries and ham out of the Chink cook — and he would have killed for a beer or even a glass of wine, but there was nothing in the house and Sal and the rest of the McCormick wops had been pretty cool to him ever since the Dimucci business — so he took the plate and a glass of buttermilk upstairs to see if maybe Nick wanted to play a couple of hands of poker to while away the time.

Nick was sitting behind the barred door to the upstairs parlor with a newspaper spread out on the footstool before him, and Pat was leaning back in a chair just outside the open door to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom. “Can’t get home to the hearth,” O‘Kane said, setting down his plate so he could dig out his keys and swing open the heavy iron door, “so I figured I’d stop round and see what the night nurses are up to. Anybody for a hand of poker?”

Nick didn’t think so. Not right then, anyway. Pat stirred himself, glanced over his shoulder at Mr. McCormick, who was apparently asleep, though you could hardly tell because he’d been so blocked and lifeless lately, and said that yeah, he might play a hand or two.

“By the way,” Nick said in a casual rumble, “did you see this in the paper?”

O‘Kane had started across the room, thinking to set plate and glass down on the sideboard while he pulled out the card table, and he stopped now, arrested in mid-stride. “What?”

“This. Right here.”

O‘Kane stood there like an altar boy with the collection plate held out stiffly before him, except it was ham and potatoes on the plate and not a heap of pocket-worried coins, and he was no altar boy, not anymore. He looked over Nick’s shoulder to where Nick’s thick stump of a finger was pointing, and there it was, the cold truth about the Ice Queen, in 6-point type:

M‘CORMICK GUARDIANSHIP TO WIFE

Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick, wife of Stanley Robert McCormick of Riven Rock in Montecito, petitioned today in Superior Court to have her husband declared an incompetent person. Mr. McCormick, youngest son of the late Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, has suffered from mental illness since shortly after his marriage to Mrs. McCormick in 1904. The Honorable Baily M. Melchior, Superior Court Judge, appointed Mrs. McCormick, along with Henry B. Favill and Cyrus Bentley, both of Chicago, as joint guardians.

“So what do you think of your poor heartbroken wife now, Eddie—‘She loves him and she wants to be with him,’ isn’t that what you said?” Nick was squinting up at him from eyes set deep in the big calabash of his head. He was running a finger along the lapel of his jacket and smirking as if he’d just won a bet at long odds. From across the room, Pat let out with a strangled little bark of a laugh.

O‘Kane shrugged. “There’s no love lost between her and me,” he said, and he was thinking of the lecture her Imperial Highness had given him on trifling with a girl’s affections, as if she would have the vaguest notion of what went on between a man and a woman, and that still rankled, because no woman was going to tell him what to do, especially when it came to his own private affairs. “I’m in this for Mr. McCormick’s sake, and I wouldn’t walk across the street for her, if you want to know the truth.”

“That comes as a surprise to me,” Nick rumbled, still with that mocking tone, his eyes glistening, cat and mouse. “You were the one had the crush on her — and not so long ago at that. Am I right, Pat?”

The plate was going cold in his hand. Outside, beyond the windows, the sky was darkening. It was getting late, and he knew Rosaleen would be working herself up, pans burning on the stove, garbage up to her ankles, the baby squatting behind the couch with some scrap of offal in his mouth and she taking a hard angry pull at the bottle she kept hidden away in back of the icebox where nobody would think to look. He thought of ringing up Old Man Rowlings and having him give her a message, but then why bother? She’d be riding her broom by now anyway. He gave Pat a look and then turned back to Nick with another shrug. “Let’s just say my eyes have been opened.”

Nick was turned halfway round in his chair, neckless and massive, his shoulders looking as if they’d been inflated with a pneumatic pump. “Right from the start I told you she was a gold digger, didn’t I?”