T. Boyle - Riven Rock

All right. So. He shook himself, buttoned up, flushed. And then, and it was almost as if he were suffering from some sort of tic himself like poor Mrs. Brush, he felt his right hand contract and the picture was crumpled and lying there in the urinal alongside the scrawled-over envelope. He never got another one. And he never heard another word about divorce either.

With Giovannella it was different. And worse. A whole lot worse. She’d defied him, of course, and after she pulled the slick red spike out of his palm and they stopped right there to consider the phenomenon of his blood sprouting and flowering in that white pocket where just an instant before there’d been no blood at all, she never said a word, not I’m sorry or Forgive me or Did I hurt you? No, she just tore up the slip of paper with Dolores Isringhausen’s doctor’s name on it and threw it in his face, and he was clutching his hand and cursing by then, cursing her with every bit of filth he could think of, and Jesus in Heaven his hand hurt. “Whore!” he shouted. “Bitch!” You fucking Guinea bitch!“ But her body was rigid and her face was iron and she clutched that gleaming spike of steel in her white-knuckled fist till he was sure she meant to drive it right on through his heart, and he backed out the door and went on down the rickety stairs, cursing in a steady automatic way and wondering where he could find a doctor himself — and on Sunday no less.

She wouldn’t see him after that. And he wanted her, wanted her as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life, and not to wrangle and fight over husbands or babies or San Francisco or anything else, but to love her, strip her naked, splay her out on the bed and crush her in his arms and love her till there was no breath left in her. But she spurned him. He crept up to the apartment above the shoe repair shop and she shut the door in his face; he waylaid her in the street when she went out to the market and she walked right by him as if she’d never laid eyes on him before in her life. When he grabbed for her elbow—“Please, Giovannella,” and he was begging, “just listen to me, just for a minute”—she snatched it away, stalking up the street with her quick chopping strides and her shoulders so stiff and compacted they might have been bound up with wire.

But what really tortured him was watching her grow bigger, day by day, week by week. Every Sunday afternoon she strolled up and down the street on the arm of Guido, the amazing Italian dwarf who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds with his boots on, and she made sure to pass right by the front window of the rooming house and all the saloons of Spanishtown — and Cody Menhoff’s too, just for good measure. At first you couldn’t tell, nobody could, because the baby was the size of a skinned rat and it wasn’t a baby at all, it wasn’t even human, but by the end of June she was showing and by mid-July she looked as if she were smuggling melons under her skirt. He would follow her sometimes, half-drunk and feuding with himself, and he would watch as people stopped to congratulate her, the men smiling paternally, the women reaching out to pat the swollen talisman of her belly, and all the while Guido the shoemaker grinning and flushed with his simpleminded pride. O‘Kane felt left out. He felt evil. He felt angry.

The baby was born at the end of October. O‘Kane heard of it through Baldy Dimucci, who was passing around cigars as if he were the proud father himself, and no hard feelings over what had happened eight years ago — and more recently too. Or were there? The old man had sought him out as he came down to lunch in the kitchen of the big house one sun-kissed afternoon just before Halloween. O’Kane had seen the truck in the drive that morning (no more donkey carts for Baldy: he’d prospered, owner of a thriving nursery business now and a new Ford truck too) and had wondered about it, but he didn’t make the connection with Giovannella and the baby till Baldy came through the kitchen door, unsteady on his feet and reeking of red wine and cigar smoke. “Hey, Eddie,” he said, while Sam Wah scowled over the stove and O‘Kane spooned up soup, “you hear the good-a news?”

“Good news? No, what is it?”

Baldy advanced on him, his face crazy with furrows, eyes lit with wine, a big garlic-eating grin. “Giovannella,” he said, and he wasn’t as drunk as he let on, “Giovannella and-a my son the law, they have their baby.”

O‘Kane just blinked. He didn’t ask what sex it was or if its hair was blond and one of its green Irish eyes imprinted with a lucky hazel clock, because he already knew, and the knowledge made him feel sick and dizzy, as if the ground had dipped beneath him. So he didn’t say anything, didn’t offer congratulations or best wishes to the new mother-he just blinked.

“Here,” Baldy said, standing over him in his best suit of clothes and the wine stains on his shirt, “have a cigar.”

O‘Kane went straight to her apartment after work, but he didn’t dare go up because there was a whole red-wine-spilling, accordion-playing, pasta-boiling wop hullabaloo going on up there and people all over the stairs, boisterous and laughing out loud. And when he did manage to sneak up two days later, the door was answered not by Giovannella but by a big square monument of a woman who shared a nose and eyes with her and nothing more. This was the mother, and no mistaking it. She said something in Italian and he tried to see past her into the familiar room, but she filled the whole picture all by herself and she knitted her black eyebrows and repeated whatever it was she’d said on pulling open the door and finding him there on the landing with his mouth hanging open. “Giovannella,” he said, the only word of Italian he knew, but the woman didn’t look to be all that impressed. One trembling blue-veined maternal hand went to the cross at her throat, as if to ward off some creeping evil, while the other gripped the edge of the door to bar his way, and in the instant before she slammed the door in his face with a violence that rocked the whole rotten stairway right down to its rotten supports, he heard the baby cry out, a single searing screech that resounded in his ears like an indictment.

The day he finally did get a look at Giovannella’s baby — his son, another son, and he a stranger to both of them — was the day Dolores Isringhausen came back from New York to open up her villa for the winter. It was a Saturday, and when he got off his shift there was a note waiting for him in the front hall at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The envelope was a pale violet color, scented with her perfume, and all it said on the front was “Eddie.” He tore it open right there, standing in the hallway and old Walter Hogan watching him out of bloodshot eyes. “Got in last night,” he read, “and I’m already bored. Call me.” She hadn’t even bothered to sign her name.

He called her and her voice purred inside him till it felt as if all his nerve endings had sprouted fine little hairs, and he pictured her as he’d last seen her, in a Japanese robe with nothing underneath. “It’s Eddie,” he’d said, and she came right back at him with that cat-clawing whisper: “What took you so long?” They made a date for supper, and he kicked himself for not having a car to squire her around in. He didn’t like her driving — it was wrong somehow. It made him feel funny, as if he was half a man or a cripple or something, and he didn’t want anyone to see him sitting there like a dope in the passenger’s seat and a woman behind the wheel. The thing was, he didn’t need a car, not with Roscoe ferrying him to and from Riven Rock six days a week and everything in downtown Santa Barbara an easy walk or a seven-cent streetcar ride. He was saving his money, because he didn’t intend to be a nurse forever, and a car was just a drain, when you figured up the cost of gasoline, tires, repairs, and how many times had he seen Roscoe up to his ears in grease? But tonight he could sure use one — anything, even a Tin Lizzie that’d crank your arm off — just to pull up in Dolores’s drive and toot the horn a couple of times, and he felt cheap and low and thought he ought to stroll up to Menhoff’s to raise his spirits a bit.