T. Boyle - Riven Rock

He caught up with her in front of Diehl’s Grocery, a place that catered to the carriage trade of Montecito — O‘Mara smoked hams from Ireland in the window, jars of curry and chutney from India, pears in crème de menthe, the sort of place that had no business with O’Kane or he with it. But there was a line of limousines parked out front, one of them Mr. McCormick‘s, which meant that Roscoe was around somewhere, and Sam Wah stalking the aisles inside, inspecting ginger root from Canton and curls of candied melon from Cambodia. Giovannella was standing at the window, her back to the street, staring at a perfectly stacked pyramid of tangerines. He saw her face reflected in the glass, her lips puffed with emotion, eyes like open wounds, and felt something give inside him. “Giovannella,” he said, “listen to me — can’t we talk?”

In the smallest voice: “I don’t want to talk to you, Eddie.”

Sam Wah’s face suddenly loomed up in the window, caught between two pink-and-brown hams, and Sam smiled a gap-toothed smile and O‘Kane waved, and then, whether the whole world was watching or not, he took Giovannella by the elbow and led her down the alley and into the next street over. They walked in silence, out of the commercial district and into a residential area, neat houses with deep-set porches and roses climbing up trellises. They found a place to sit on the knee-high roots of a big Moreton Bay fig tree that spread out over an empty lot like ten trees all grafted together. There was no one around. He took her hand and she gave him a sidelong look that seemed to have some conciliation in it, but with Giovannella you never could tell. Sometimes when she looked her softest she was about to explode, and when she exploded she could do anything, throw herself in front of a streetcar, jump off a building, rake your eyes out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that, what I said back there on the street.”

“Eddie,” she said, surrender, forgiveness and reproach all in two syllables and one tone, and she took hold of him with a strength and intensity that was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time and kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth, again and again, crushing him, tearing at him, till finally he had to put his hands on her shoulders and come up for air.

“I’m not going to have my son raised by some wop shoemaker, that’s all,” he said.

That only made her hold on tighter. She was a woman drowning in the surf and he the lifeguard sent to rescue her, her nails like claws, every muscle straining to drag him down, and she wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him get his face clear, no neutral zone here, no calling for time out, her lips his lips, her nose his, her eyes and her breath. “Oh, yeah?” she said, and her voice was dangerous. “And what about the son you already have — whos raising him? Huh? You tell me. Who’s raising him, Eddie?”

Rosaleen was raising him, and if she had some man in her life, he didn’t know about it. He sent her money, when he remembered, and she sent him silence in return. No letters, no photographs, no nothing. But if he pictured her, and he did once in awhile, lingering over a beer when nobody was around, a mournful tune playing on the victrola, he pictured her alone and waiting, a photo of handsome Eddie O‘Kane on the wall above her bed.

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

A breeze came up and scoured the ground, scraps of paper suddenly pasted to the roots of the tree, branches groaning overhead. Still she clung to him, her breath hot in his face, the smell of her skin, soap, perfume. “You’re my husband, Eddie,” she whispered, “you’re the one. Be a man. Take me away someplace, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Or back home to Boston, I don’t care, I’ll go anywhere with you.”

“This is my home. Mr. McCormick—”

“Mr. McCormick. Don’t tell me about Mr. McCormick.” She pushed away from him, her eyes dilated and huge, hair falling loose at her nape and whipping round her shoulders. “It’s only a job, Eddie — you can get a job anywhere, a big strong man like you, an American born here and with an education too. Where’s your three o‘clock luck you’re always telling me about? Trust it. Trust me.”

But the curtain had fallen in his mind. The play was over. “You’ll have to get rid of it.”

“Never.”

“I’ll arrange it. I’ll ask around. He — whatever his name is — he’ll never have to know. Nobody will.”

Suddenly, and he didn’t know quite how it happened, they were boxing. Or she was boxing and he was just trying to fend off her blows. They struggled to their knees, then their feet. She swung at him, just like Rosaleen. “I hate you,” she sputtered, gasping, swinging, her voice dead calm between one ratcheting breath and the next. “It’s murder you’re talking about, you son… of a bitch, murder of an… innocent soul… How can you even… think of it, and you a… Catholic?”

She stopped swinging then and stood there rigid, but he kept his hands up, just in case. He glanced round to see if anybody was watching, but the lot was deserted. Her eyes were wet. She made a noise deep in her throat and he thought she was going to start crying on him, but she snapped back her head in a sudden fierce motion and spat down the front of his shirt, a glistening ball of Italian sputum that hung there like a jewel on a string. “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” she demanded, and still she wasn’t shouting. “You stinker,” she hissed. “You pig. Don’t you have a heart?”

Well, he did. He did have a heart, but he wasn’t going to start a war with all of Sicily and he sure as hell wasn’t going to have somebody named Guido Capolupo raising his own flesh and blood, and so as soon as Giovannella had turned her back on him and fled across the lot in her stiff-legged skirt-hampered trot, he went up to Menhoff’s to see what he could do about it. He figured he would have a beer and a whiskey to ease the throbbing in his head and the sourness of his gut — though he didn’t need the stuff, not really, not like his old man — and maybe make some discreet inquiries, that was all.

Menhoff’s was pretty lively that afternoon, and that helped him get over his initial shock, glad-handing people, putting on a face — he even shot a couple games of pool. But for all that he was in another world, aching all the way down from his grinding molars to the marrow of his bones, and why use chalk on the cue when he could powder it with the dust of his own teeth? He’d been planning a picnic at the beach with a girl he’d met at a party the week before, but he knew he couldn’t go through with it now, and he rang her up and begged off in a blizzard of promises and lies. Giovannella was right — abortion was a dirty business, as foul a sin as there was. And he was a Catholic still, though he didn’t go to Mass anymore, except for Christmas and Easter, and he believed God was watching him and judging him and holding him in contempt even as he sat there at the bar and lifted a beer to his lips. But what was the alternative? He tried to picture himself in San Francisco, a place he knew only from postcards, Giovannella swelling up till her navel was extruded and her tits were like balloons and her legs lost their shape, and what then? Living in sin. A baby that was a bastard in the eyes of the church and society too. And then another baby. And another.

He’d been with Mr. McCormick eight years now, longer than he’d been at the Boston Asylum and McLean put together, and he was making good money, and putting some of it in the bank against the day he struck out on his own, and whether it was in oranges or oil or even one of these new service businesses sprung up in the wake of the automobile, he didn’t know anymore. But he wasn’t about to leave Mr. McCormick. It was a question of loyalty — he wanted to see him improve, he did; in a way he’d staked his life on it — and even with Hamilton leaving and this new man, Brush, coming in, he knew he was going to be at Riven Rock for a good long while yet. But Giovannella. Giovannella, Giovannella, Giovannella. He could just let it go, turn his back on her and let the shoemaker raise a little O‘Kane like one of those hapless sparrows the cowbird preys on, shoving its egg right in on top of the nest and nobody the wiser. He could. But it would hurt, and he’d already had enough hurt from Rosaleen and Eddie Jr.