T. Boyle - Riven Rock

A moment later, the shower ran dry. Mr. McCormick darted a wild glance over his shoulder at the doctor and then at O‘Kane — Here it comes, O’Kane thought, tensing himself — but Mr. McCormick did nothing more than shift his haunches on the wet tiles so that he could reach up and try the controls. He twisted the knobs several times and then, in a sort of crabwalk, moved first to his left and then to his right to try the controls of the other two spigots. He was a long time about it, and when he was finally satisfied that the water had been cut off, he found the exact spot where he’d been situated before the interruption and continued soaping himself as if nothing were the matter.

Dr. Brush, for his part, was saying things like “All right, now, Mr. McCormick, very good, and I suppose we’ll just have to move on, won’t we?” and “Now, isn’t that an improvement? Honestly now?” He stood there optimistically over the slumped form of their employer, his toes grasping the floor like fingers, the yellow slicker dripping, the short hairs at his nape curling up like duck’s feathers with the moisture. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t heeding him. In fact, Mr. McCormick was expressing his displeasure with the whole business by applying the dwindling bar of Palm Olive as if it were a cat o’ nine tails, and when it was gone, he reached for another.

“Well, then,” Dr. Brush confided to O‘Kane later that day, “it’s a contest of wills, and we’ll just see how far the patient is prepared to go before he sees the wisdom of employing himself more efficiently.”

The next morning, the doctor was back, only this time there was but one bar of soap in the dish and the shower was curtailed after ten minutes. Again, Dr. Brush made all sorts of optimistic assertions about time and energy saving and the value of discipline, but Mr. McCormick never wavered from his routine. He soaped himself for a full hour after the shower was stopped and appeared for breakfast with greenish white streaks of Palm Olive decorating his cheeks and brow, as if he were an Indian chieftain painted for war. And then the next day after that, the shower was cut to five minutes and only powdered soap was provided, but still Mr. McCormick persisted, as O‘Kane knew he would. When the water was stopped, Mr. McCormick rubbed himself all over with the powdered soap till it dissolved in a yellowish scum and hardened like varnish all over his body.

The climax came on the fourth day.

Dr. Brush ordered that no soap be provided, and he appeared as usual, jocular and energetic, reasoning with Mr. McCormick as if he were a child — or at the very least one of the aments at the Lunatic Hospital. “Now can’t you see,” he said, his voice flattened and distorted by the pounding of the water till the water was cut off by signal five minutes later, “that you’re being unreasonable, Mr. McCormick — or no, not unreasonable, but inefficient? Think if we were running the Reaper Works on this sort of schedule, eh? Now, of course, your soap will be restored to you as soon as you, well, begin to, that is, for the main and simple—”

Mr. McCormick bathed without soap and he didn’t seem to miss it, not on the surface anyway, but he sat there under the dry shower for a good hour and a half, and when he got up he reached for his towel, though he was long since dry himself. No matter. He took up that towel like a penitent’s scourge and whipped it back and forth across his body till the skin was so chafed it began to bleed and he had to be dissuaded by force. The next morning he never even bothered to turn the shower on, but simply took up the towel as if he were already wet and rubbed himself furiously in all the chafed places till they began to bleed again, and it was only after a struggle that took the combined force of O‘Kane, Mart and Dr. Brush to overcome him, that he desisted.

And so it went for a week, till Mr. McCormick was a walking scab from head to toe and Dr. Brush finally gave up his vision of efficiency. In fact, he gave up any notion of interfering with Mr. McCormick at all, either through adjusting his schedule or drawing him into therapeutic conversation, and after that, for the year or so before he was called away to military duty among the shell-shocked veterans of the Western Front, he really seemed content to just — float along.

Well, that was all right with O‘Kane: he had his own problems. As the fall of 1916 bled into the winter of 1917 and the War drew closer, his skirmishes with Rosaleen and Giovannella seemed to intensify till he was in full retreat, capable of nothing more than a feeble rearguard action. At least with Rosaleen the battles were fought through the U.S. Postal Service and at a distance of three thousand and some-odd miles. He hadn’t heard from her in two years, and then suddenly she was dunning him for money, letters raining down on him in a windswept storm of demands, complaints and threats. And what did she want? She wanted shoes for Eddie Jr., who was the “spiting immidge of his father” and going to be nine soon, and a new Sunday suit for him too, so he’d look his best for her wedding to Homer Quammen, and did he remember Homer? And by the way, she was filing papers for divorce and she felt he owed her something for that too, and he shouldn’t think for a minute that her remarrying would in any way lift his obligation to support Eddie Jr., especially since Homer was as “pore as a church moose.

He sent her the money, forty dollars in all, though he resented it because he was putting away every spare nickel against a land deal Dolores Isringhausen’s brother-in-law was letting him in on, and he never heard a word of thanks or good-bye or anything else. The letters stopped coming though, so he assumed she’d got the money, and by the time he did finally hear from her he’d forgotten all about it. It was in December, sometime around Christmas — he remembered it was the holiday season because Katherine was back in town, piling the upper parlor hip-deep in presents and wreaths and strings of popcorn and such and generally raising hell with Brush and Stribling, the estate manager — and he’d just got back from his shift with a thought to wheedling a sandwich out of Mrs. Fitzmaurice and then going out for a drink at Menhoff‘s, when he noticed a smudged white envelope laid out on the table in the entry hall for him. He recognized Rosaleen’s cramped subhuman scrawl across the face of it — Edw. O’Kane, Esq., C/O Mrs. Morris Fitzmaurice, 196 State Street, Santa Barbara, California — and tucked it in his breast pocket.

Later, sitting at a table at Menhoff‘s, he was searching his pockets for a light to offer the girl from the Five & Dime when he discovered it there. He lit the girl’s cigarette — her name was Daisy and she had a pair of breasts on her that made him want to faint away and die for the love of them — and then he excused himself to go to the men’s, where he stood over the urinal and tore the letter open, killing two birds with one stone. Inside, there was a photograph and nothing more, not even a line. He held it up to the light with his free hand. The photo was blurred and obscure, as if the whole world had shifted in the interval between the click of the shutter and the fixing of the image, and it showed a wisp of a kid in short pants, new shoes and a jacket and tie, smiling bravely against a backdrop of naked trees and a hedge all stripped of its leaves. O‘Kane looked closer. Squinted. Maneuvered the slick surface to catch the light. And saw the face of his son there shining out of the gloom, Eddie Jr., his own flesh and blood, and he would have known that face anywhere.

Sure. Sure he would.

He stood at the urinal till he lost track of time, just staring into the shining face of that picture, and he felt as bad as he’d ever felt, bad and worthless and of no more account than a vagrant bum in an alley. His son was growing up without him. His mother and father didn’t even know their own grandson, his sisters didn’t know their nephew. Nobody knew him, nobody but Rosaleen — and Homer Quammen. God, how that hurt. She might as well have sent him a bomb in the mail, raked him with shrapnel, flayed his flesh. He thought he was going to cry, he really thought he was going to break down and cry for the first time since he was a kid himself, the sour smell of piss in his nostrils, mold in the drains, the air so heavy and brown it was like mustard gas rolling in over the trenches, but then he heard the ripple and thump of the piano from the front room and came back to himself. Daisy was out there waiting for him, Daisy with all her petals on display and ripe for the picking.