T. Boyle - Riven Rock

All that hurt. And it should never have happened. He knew who to blame — himself, of course, a man who just wasn’t ready yet for the yoke of marriage and family. And Katherine. Mrs. McCormick. The Ice Queen. If she hadn’t stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong none of this would have happened. He could have gotten Giovannella — or whoever — out of his system and waited till the time was right, until he was ready, really ready, and then maybe things would have been different.

Once the month was out, he settled up with Old Man Rowlings and took a room in a boardinghouse not far from the train station and within easy walking distance of Menhoff‘s, O’Reilly’s and the hole-in-,the-wall bars of Spanishtown. The furniture he sold off to whoever wanted it, and wouldn’t you know that Zinnia Linnear, like some sort of veiny blue vulture, was first in line for the oversized bed, the bureau and the set of mostly chipped secondhand china. There were fireworks off Stearns Wharf that Fourth of July and what must have been three hundred boats, each with a kerosene lantern, spread across the glowing water like the stars come down from the sky. O‘Kane remembered that Fourth of July in particular, not simply for the concatenation of unlucky events leading up to it, but because Giovannella was there with him at the end of the wharf, her wide glowing uncandled face lit again and again by the trailing streamers of red, white and blue.

It was sometime around then — July, maybe August — that Mr. McCormick came back to life again. He got up out of bed one morning and stepped into the shower bath like any other man, ordered up his breakfast and asked for the newspaper. O‘Kane was stunned, and even Mart, who was slow to register surprise (or any other emotion, for that matter), seemed impressed. In fact, the two of them just stood there speechless as Mr. McCormick, dressed in his pajamas and robe, seated himself at the table in the upper parlor and buttered his toast with the brisk assiduous movements of a man sitting down to breakfast before leaving for the office. It was an entirely normal scene, prosaic even, if you discount the fact that he had to use a spoon to butter his toast, Dr. Hamilton having proscribed all sharp-edged implements in the aftermath of the fork incident. When Mr. McCormick finished spooning up his eggs, nice as you please, patted his lips delicately with the napkin, stretched and took the newspaper, O’Kane sent Mart for Dr. Hamilton — the doctor had to see this.

Hamilton came on the run, dashing through the entrance hall and taking the steps two at a time, and he was still breathing in short muted gasps as he smoothed back his hair and straightened his tie on the landing outside the barred door to the upper parlor. He tried his best to achieve a casual saunter, as if he’d just happened by, but he couldn’t seem to control his feet, skipping through every third step or so as he crossed the room. O‘Kane watched him slowly circle the patient, eyes flipping behind the lenses of his pince-nez, lips silently moving as if rehearsing a speech; Mr. McCormick, absorbed in the paper, which he held up rigidly only inches from his face, didn’t seem to notice him. And then, very tentatively, as if afraid of breaking the spell, Hamilton tried to draw Mr. McCormick into conversation. “Good morning, Mr. McCormick,” he said in his customary whisper, “you’re looking well.”

There was no response.

“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands together in a brisk, businesslike way and moving into the periphery of Mr. McCormick’s vision, quite close to him now, “it certainly is a glorious sunshiny day, isn’t it?”

Still no response.

“And to see you looking so well on such a glorious day — that gives us all pleasure, doesn’t it, Edward? Martin? And sir, Mr. McCormick, I can only presume you’re feeling better? A pause. ”Am I right?“

Very slowly, as if he were an actor in a farce parting the curtains to reveal the painted smile on his face, Mr. McCormick lowered the newspaper to uncover first his hairline, then his brow, his eyes, his nose, and finally, with a flourish, the broad radiant beaming dimple-cheeked grin spread wide across the lower part of his face. Mr. McCormick was grinning, grinning to beat the band, and you could see the light in his eyes as they came into focus and settled warmly on the reciprocally grinning visage of Dr. Hamilton. “And who might you be?” he asked in the most gratuitous and amenable tones.

The doctor couldn’t help himself. He let his eyes have their way three times in rapid succession — blip, blip, blip — worked his shoulders as if to shrug off some invisible beast clinging to his jacket and hissing in his ear, and said, “Why, Mr. McCormick, it’s me, Dr. Hamilton, Gilbert — your physician.” He spread his arms. “And look, your old friends, Edward O‘Kane and Martin Thompson. But how are you feeling?”

The grin held. O‘Kane was grinning too now — and so was Mart. All four of them were stretching their facial muscles to the limit, goodwill abounding, and you would have thought they’d just heard the best joke in the world. “What is this place?” Mr. McCormick asked then, and no trace of hesitation in his voice, no stuttering or verbigeration at all.

Dr. Hamilton turned to O‘Kane and Mart as if this were the drollest thing he’d ever heard, then came back to Mr. McCormick, all the while rubbing his hands and flipping his eyes in a paroxysm of nervous energy — and grinning, grinning as if it were the conventional way of wearing a face. “Why, it’s Riven Rock, Mr. McCormick — in California. The place you designed for your sister, Mary Virginia — surely you remember that. Such a beautiful place. And so comfortable. Did you encounter any particular difficulties in the design?”

“I–I—” and now the old hesitation, the scattered eyes, at once lost and receding, but still the grin held. “I–I don’t recall… but I–I must have been ill, isn’t that, that right?”

Hamilton, trying for gravity, the grin banished: “Yes, that’s right, Mr. McCormick, you’ve been ill. But look at you now, alert and aglow with health and happiness…. Do you recall your illness, its nature, anything at all about it?”

Mr. McCormick turned to O‘Kane then and winked an eye — actually winked, like an old crony in a bar. “Yes,” he said, and the grin widened still further. “A c-cold, wasn’t it?”

The change lasted three days. Mr. McCormick got himself up each morning, shower-bathed (and sometimes for as long as two hours at a time), took his breakfast, read the paper. He conversed, joked even. And though he was very tired, exhausted from his long travail, he was able to move about without too much difficulty, favoring the right leg and walking with a tottering deliberation, as if he were on a tightrope over a howling precipice. He needed help in dressing still, easily frustrated — baffled, even — over the proper way to slip into a shirt or jacket and repeatedly trying to slide both feet into a single pantleg. But still, everyone was heartened, O‘Kane especially. Mr. McCormick was coming out of it. Finally. At long last.

As it turned out, though — and this was sad, hopes raised and hopes dashed — O‘Kane was merely indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Those three days of lucidity, those three days of dramatic and visible improvement, of the lifting of the veil, of release, only adumbrated Mr. McCormick’s worst crisis since his breakdown. No one could have foreseen it. Not even Dr. Hamilton, who fired off a telegram to Katherine, now back in Boston, trumpeting the news of the change in her husband’s condition. Or she, who wired him back the minute she received it: HE WAS EATING? STOP DRESSING HIMSELF? STOP READING THE NEWSPAPER? STOP COULD SHE SEE HIM? STOP NOW? Optimistic, all his diagnostic sails flapping in a fresh breeze of hope and speculation — but cautious, ever cautious — the doctor wired her back to say: NOT YET STOP.