T. Boyle - Riven Rock

How he made it through that day O‘Kane would never know.

He cleaned himself up as best he could in the bathroom he’d formerly shared with Mart and that Mart now shared with Elsie Reardon, avoiding Pat — and Nick — altogether. Roscoe was mum. They didn’t even know O‘Kane was there, had no reason to suspect he wasn’t at home awaiting his morning ride and his daily regimen of laving and force-feeding Mr. McCormick (daily, that is, but for Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when Dr. Hamilton sat with their employer and benefactor and the door remained shut except to admit a pair of wops with mops). Mart had heard his brothers’ version of the previous night’s events, but he didn’t seem eager to leap to judgment — as ready, in his bigheaded, dilatory way, to lay blame at Nick’s door as at O’Kane’s. And O‘Kane spent most of the day reprising his own version aloud, hoping to get Mart in his camp, water thicker than blood and all that, and trying to erase the memory of Giovannella and how unutterably stupid he’d been to stir that kettle up again, love or no love. What he refused to think of or even admit to the murky periphery of his consciousness for the smallest splinter of a second, was the problem that made all others seem as insignificant as the exact phrasing of the legend that would one day appear on his tombstone: Rosaleen.

He telephoned her at eight that morning and poured a heavy gelatin of lies into the mouthpiece, telling her of the way the car had broken down so completely they couldn’t even get it to roll if they pushed it and how Mr. McCormick had come to life in a sudden frenzy and beaten him about the head and face and she should see his lip and how finally he was forced to spend a forlorn and monastic night sharing a bed with Mart who of course snored the whole time. Rosaleen was silent on the other end of the line and he could picture her in Old Man Rowlings’s cramped parlor, Old Man Rowlings fuming somewhere in the background, Rosaleen chewing her lip in that way she had, her eyes teeming in her head, one slow foot perched on the bridge of the other. “I’ll be home tonight after work,” he said. “Okay?”

Her voice rolled back to him like the big black ball in the bowling alley, uncertain, untrue, and yet clattering all the same: “Yeah, Eddie. Okay.”

And then it was evening. And then he went home.

She was waiting for him at the front door, Eddie Jr. propped up on her hip like a shield, and he thought of the heavy leathern shield Cuchulain used to wield and all the fierce blood of their warrior ancestors seething in Rosaleen’s veins, and she was holding a broom too — a broom she didn’t even know the proper use of — to complete the picture. He opened the gate and came up the walk and though his head ached still and his lip stung and the side of his face throbbed and he was as beaten-down and exhausted as he’d ever been in his life, he knew there was something wrong with that picture, something radically wrong, and he was immediately on his guard. “Hello, honey,” he called, and the greeting had a hollow ring to it, desperate and false. She said nothing in response, but her lip curled back from her teeth and he saw that she was making an effort to restrain it, whatever it was, till he was in the house and the door was shut behind him.

“Liar,” she snarled as he brushed past her and into the ashpit of the parlor.

How did she know?

What did she know?

His brain, dormant with exhaustion, churned to sudden life — there was nothing for him now but to face his accuser and parry every fresh accusation with a fresh lie. “What?” he said, all innocence. “What are you talking about?”

Her face was twisted, the face of one of the doctor’s hominoids suffering through an experiment, all hate and murder and bloodlust. “You were downtown at Huff’s last night, drunk as a pig. Zinnia Linnear saw you.”

“She needs glasses.”

“Don’t lie to me, you son of a fucking bitch.”

“I swear it, I spent the night at Riven Rock. Look. Look at my face, why don’t you? Huh? You see that? Mr. McCormick did that to me and I spent the night like a choirboy in Mart’s bed with Mart snoring like a sawmill, I swear to God—”

She wasn’t mollified, not in the least — she had something else, he knew it, something she was holding in reserve, roll out the caissons and let it fly. The baby, riding her hip, reached out to him. “Da-da,” he said. “Da-da.”

“You were with a woman,” she said, and her voice was pitched low, the first premonitory rumble of the inchoate storm. “A dago.”

He tried to avoid her, duck away, hide, tried to change the subject, clear the air, give her a chance to calm herself and absorb the thick palliative of his lies, but she wouldn’t have it. Everywhere he turned, she was there, the baby her shield, her voice the high agitated hoot of a seabird: “Who was she? Huh? Some whore you found under a rock? Did you lay her? Did you?” He went into the bedroom to change his shirt, a man who’d been at work for two solid days and sweating under the arms with the strain of providing for his family and could he expect a moment’s peace in his own home, the home he worked twelve hours a day to pay for? No. No, he couldn’t. She was there in the bedroom, hooting, and when he pushed himself up to escape to the kitchen and reach behind the icebox for the solace of the all-but-empty bottle she kept sequestered there and he was never to know of in all its shame and hypocrisy, he lifted it to his lips to a barrage of hoots—“Who was she? Who?”—until finally he could take it no more, and no man could, not if he was blind, deaf and paralyzed.

He didn’t mean to get violent. He didn’t want to. He hadn’t planned on it. It made him feel bad. But it was just like the time in Waverley, her face a puffed-up ball presenting itself to him over and over again, and he a spiker at the net, and yet it was different too, radically different, because the baby was there, attached to her hip and yowling as if he’d been orphaned already. He loved that baby and he didn’t want to hurt it— him, Eddie Jr., his son — and he loved Rosaleen too, he did, but she kept coming at him, the white moon of her face, the big stitched ball, and when finally he did hit it, that surging swollen sphere of a hateful twisted little interrogatory wife’s face, when his patience was exhausted, when Job’s patience would have been exhausted, when all the popes and martyrs would have rattled their holy desiccated bones and screamed for murder, it was more a matter of reflex than anything else. Once, he hit her once, once only. And he made sure, in the way of a thoughtful man putting down a horse or a favorite dog, to hit her hard enough and squarely enough to prevent even the remotest possibility of a rebound.

That was in May, when Mr. McCormick was declared incompetent and Giovannella began showing up at Riven Rock again at all hours of the day and night, and Rosaleen, the smallest crook stamped into the bridge of her nose like a question mark turned back on itself and her eyes rimmed in black like a night raider‘s, packed her bags and took the baby with his bruised thigh and walked out the door to the streetcar and took the streetcar to the train, but for O’Kane the events came so fast and furious he could hardly be sure of the year, let alone the month. And how was Rosaleen? everyone wanted to know, especially people like Elsie Reardon. And the baby? They were fine, O‘Kane insisted, and he relied on memory to supply the fresh details about little Eddie’s puerile raptures and adorable doings, but he ached inside, ached till he had to get drunk most nights of the week and cry himself to sleep in the calmed waters of the big wooden ark of a bed he’d bought to float and sustain his bliss, and for a month he was bereft, and for a month he fabricated and prevaricated and spun his complex weave of wishful thinking and feathery invention before admitting to all and sundry that Rosaleen had gone home to Massachusetts to nurse her ailing mother. And father. And her brother with the bone cancer and the sixteen children.