T. Boyle - Riven Rock

The doctor, owlish and quizzical: “Oh?”

‘She — she won’t be coming till the night before, or the day, that is, the day before Christmas. Too busy, she says. War business, you know, mopping up. The — the suffrage movement. She’s in Washington.“

“Ah, what a shame,” Dr. Hoch said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He hadn’t been feeling well himself lately, and he looked it, pale and shrunk into his collar, his face wrinkled and sectioned like a piece of fruit left out to dry in the sun. There was pain in his eyes, a cloudy scrim of it, and the dullness of resignation. He’d confided to O‘Kane that he’d taken the job at Riven Rock for health reasons — the Pathological Institute had become too much for him, and the climate here, amongst the celebrated Santa Barbara spas, was bound to do him good. But it wasn’t doing him much good as far as O’Kane could see — his beard had gone from gray to white inside of a year and the only thing you saw in his face was the scar, which seemed to grow more intense and luminous as the rest of his flesh shrank away from it. Amazingly, he was two years younger than Meyer, but anyone would have taken him for Meyer’s father. Or grandfather even. And another thing — he wasn’t a Kraut, but a Swiss, and so was Meyer, though they both talked Kraut, and he’d explained to O‘Kane that German was the language of his part of Switzerland, near Basel, and that some Swiss spoke French and others Italian. O’Kane had just shaken his head: every day you learn something new.

Mr. McCormick was still sunk into the easy chair, Katherine’s letter draped across his chest, his legs splayed and his eyes sucked back into his head. He’d been agitated all morning, and now he was looking unhinged, every sort of disturbing emotion playing across his face. O‘Kane braced himself.

“A shame,” Hoch repeated, “but at least you can look forward maybe to speak with her on the phone just at Christmas and then you will share the intimacy of her voice, no?”

“She’s a bitch!” Mr. McCormick snapped, leaping out of the chair with a wild recoil of legs and arms, and he rushed up to the doctor and stood trembling over him as he tore the letter to pieces and let the pieces rain down on the doctor’s white, bowed head. “I hate her!” he raged. “I want to kill her!”

“Yes, yes, well,” Dr. Hoch murmured, never moving a muscle, “we all have our disappointments, but I’m sure you will feel very much different when she is here in this house and you are speaking with her on the telephone apparatus. But now, well”—and he clapped his hands together feebly—“I’m not feeling so very good as I might and I was thinking maybe we all go for a ride, what do you think, Mr. McCormick? All of us together — Mr. O‘Kane, Mr. Thompson, you and me? For the change of scenery, yes? What do you say?”

Mr. McCormick’s face changed in that instant. He looked to O‘Kane and Mart and then back to the doctor with an enthusiast’s grin. He liked his ride, but in Dr. Brush’s time — and now Hochs — the rides were few and far between, because they were dangerous and a whole lot of bother for everyone concerned. Mr. McCormick, of course, had to be watched every second, wedged between O’Kane on the one side and Mart on the other, while the doctor, be it Hamilton, Brush or Hoch, was obliged to sit up front with Roscoe.

“Yes,” Mr. McCormick said, grinning wide round his decaying teeth — he hated dentists with an unreasoning passion and put up such a fight the doctors had all but given up on having his teeth treated — yes, I think I’d like that. I’d like that very much. For a, a change, sure. I’ll order Roscoe to bring one of the cars round. And we can take a lunch in paper sacks — can’t we?“

Mr. McCormick always took a while getting himself from one place to another — it was one of his quirks — and both O‘Kane and Mart had to help him choose the proper hat, gloves and overcoat and reassure him that he looked fine, absolutely fine and splendid, and that the weather outside wasn’t really anything to concern himself over. “It’s not like we’re in Waverley anymore,” O’Kane joked, and then he and Mart had him at the barred door to his quarters, and the keys turning in the locks.

There was no trouble, not on the stairs anyway, and Mr. McCormick, who’d just last month turned forty-four in a big fraternal celebration in the theater building, was looking every bit the lord of the manor with the hair silvering at his temples and a slate-colored felt hat that brought out the keenness of his eyes. He stood up straight for a change, with his shoulders squared and his head held high, and he didn’t drag his right foot or stop in the middle of the stairway and back up two steps for every one he went down — one of his favorite tricks. No, he was the soul of propriety until Torkelson, the butler, opened the front door for him, and then he was off, slipping out of O‘Kane’s grip like a Houdini and darting right past Roscoe and the waiting car.

This was nothing new. Probably half the time he got out of the house for his walks or the trip over to the theater building for a concert or movie, he’d break into a run and O‘Kane and Mart would have to run along with him, as if they all three were training for the marathon. Dr. Hamilton had felt that the running would do Mr. McCormick “a world of good” and that the staff should give him his head, so long as he didn’t break for the bushes or attempt to leave the property. Brush didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, and Hoch, in his Kraut — or Swiss — enthusiasm for physical suffering, concurred with Hamilton’s feelings on the subject. And so Mr. McCormick ran, and O’Kane ran with him — which at least had the unforeseen benefit of burning the whiskey out of his pores.

On this morning, though, Mr. McCormick got the jump on both him and Mart, and by the time they got around the car he was streaking up the drive, at least fifty yards ahead of them. “Wait up, Mr. McCormick! O‘Kane shouted, his temples already feeling as if they were about to explode. ”What about our drive?“

If Mr. McCormick heard him, he gave no sign. He just kept on, running in a flat-out sprint, running as if all his judges and demons were flocking after him, and he didn’t head for the main gate but instead surprised O‘Kane by lurching to his left, plunging deeper into the property. The road that way led to the stone garage that was set back away from the house in a grove of trees, and then it branched off to the west toward Ashley Road and the far side of the property. O’Kane chugged along, Mart at his side. “The son of a bitch,” he cursed. “Why today of all days? My head feels as big as a balloon.”

Mart, whose head was as big as a balloon, just grunted, trotting along in his dogged, top-heavy way. “He’s heading toward the Ashley gate,” he observed in a wheezing pant, and O‘Kane looked up to see their employer wheeling again to his left and disappearing up the long snaking drive that bisected the estate. And that got his heart pounding, because that was where the nearest house was, Mira Vista, and there were women there now, imperious pampered overfed society women — women like Katherine.

O‘Kane gave it all he had, but he wasn’t worth much that morning, and he would have been the first to admit it. Sam Wah’s salvatory eggs were coming up in his throat like a plug, like something evil he was giving birth to, and his legs had begun to go numb from the hip sockets down when he became aware of a rumble and squeal at his back and turned to watch Roscoe motor on by in a farting blast of fumes, Dr. Hoch wired into the seat beside him with his beard flapping in the breeze through the open window. O’Kane kept going, though Mart had fallen by the wayside. He followed the dwindling rear panel of the big Pierce car until the gate appeared down a stretch of concrete road all hemmed in by trees and the car began to get larger again. A moment later he was there, choking for breath, feeling just exactly like the victim of an Indian uprising with six or seven arrows neatly stitched into his lungs, his groin and his liver.