T. Boyle - Riven Rock

O‘Kane made his move then, trying to slip up the stairs while she was distracted, but even as he took the first tentative step he watched her face change—“No, she thundered, ”damn you, no; I’ve never… Jane is just a friend“ —as she swung round to slam the receiver down on its hook and let the full furious weight of her gaze settle on him. He snapped his head round — he hadn’t seen her, didn’t even know she was back, he was just a nurse doing his duty — and he felt his legs attack the stairs in a series of quick powerful thrusts. And it almost worked, almost, because he was halfway up the staircase and the iron grid of the upper parlor door in sight when her voice, strained and distinctly unladylike, caught up with him. ”Mr. O’Kane,“ she called. ”Mr. O‘Kane, will you come here a minute, please?“

Slouching, hands thrust deep in his pockets, O‘Kane descended the stairs, crossed the entrance hall and passed within six inches of Torkelson where he stood pasted to the wall outside the library door (he could see the pores in the man’s face opening up like the craters of the moon and the fleshless nub of his butler’s nose, and he swore to himself if Torkelson so much as lifted his lip in anything even vaguely resembling a smirk he was going to slug him, if not now, then later). Torkelson never moved. He drifted away on O’Kane’s periphery and then O‘Kane was in the library, conscious of the peculiar odor of the books — calfskin and dust, the astringent ink and neutral paper — and of something else too, something unexpected: cigarette smoke. Katherine was brilliant, glaring, incinerated in light. She gave him a curt nod, stepped round him and called out, “You can go now, Torkelson,” before pulling the door shut.

O‘Kane’s senses were dulled. He felt as if he were wading through hip-deep water. He stood there stupidly, all the saturated neurons of his brain shutting down one by one, until he finally noticed that he and Katherine weren’t alone. There was another woman present, a redhead in a holly-green dress short enough to show off her legs from the knees down — very good legs, in fact, and O’Kane couldn’t help noticing. She was sitting in a wing chair against a wall of books and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder.

“It’s good to see you again, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, turning back to him, but she didn’t smile and she didn’t hold out her hand. She nodded brusquely to her companion. “Mr. O’Kane, Mrs. Roessing. Jane, Mr. O‘Kane.”

O‘Kane gave them each a tight little grin, the sort of grin the hyena might give the lion while backing away from a carcass on the ancestral plains. He was feeling woozy. Sam Wah must have poured half a gallon of rum into that punch — and God knew what else.

“Have a seat, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, and she was pacing back and forth now.

He did as he was told, lowering himself gingerly to the very edge of the wing chair opposite Mrs. Roessing.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m back,” Katherine said, “and that I plan to be here for the next two weeks, seeing to estate matters, and that Jane — Mrs. Roessing — will be assisting me. Then I’ve got to get back to Washington and don’t know when I’ll return. Now: how is my husband — in your opinion? Any change?”

“He’s more or less the same.”

“And what does that mean? No improvement at all?”

O‘Kane was ready to tell her what she wanted to hear, that her husband was advancing like a star pupil, making a nimble run at sanity, needing only time and money and the ministrations of girls, women and bearded hags to make him whole again, but the alcohol tripped him up. “A little,” he shrugged. “We’ve let him have a carpet in the upper parlor again, and he’s been very good about it. And he’s been running quite a bit — for his exercise.”

“Running?” She paused in mid-step, her eyes slicing into him.

“Yes. He seems to want to run lately — when we accompany him on his daily walk, Mart and me, that is. And we took him for a drive a few weeks back, and he seemed to enjoy it.”

“And that’s it? That’s the extent of his improvement as you see it — running? Well let me tell you, I’ve just got off the phone with him and he seems as confused as ever — or more so. And irritating”—this for the redhead, with a nod and a martyred look. “Stanley can be irritating.”

“With all due respect, Mrs.”—he almost slipped and called her Katherine—“Mrs. McCormick, and I’m no doctor, but I do feel your presence excites him and he’s not himself, not at all—”

Another look for Mrs. Roessing. “Yes, that’s what every male doctor and every male nurse has been telling me for twelve years and more now. ”

Katherine surprised him then — shocked him, actually. Suddenly she had a cigarette in her hand, as if she’d conjured it out of thin air, and she crossed the room to Mrs. Roessing and asked her for a light in a low hum that said all sorts of things to him. He watched in silence as the two women bent their heads together and Katherine lit her cigarette from the smoldering tip of Mrs. Roessing’s.

“And Dr. Hoch,” Katherine said, exhaling. “His health, I mean — he’s holding up? Spending time each day with my husband?”

O‘Kane looked from one woman to the other. He hadn’t even heard the question. Katherine was smoking. He’d never dreamed — not her. She might have been Queen of the Ice Queens, but she was a lady, a lady above all — and ladies didn’t smoke. But then he’d suspected all along that this sort of thing went hand-in-hand with marching in the streets and emancipation and all the rest of it. Radicals, that’s what they were. Pants wearers. She-men.

“Mr. O‘Kane?”

“Hm?”

Katherine’s face was like an ax. It chopped at him in the screaming light. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

He tried to put on one of his faces, Eddie O‘Kane of the silver tongue, one of the world’s great liars. “Noooo,” he protested. “I, just — I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all.”

That brought the redhead to her feet, those fine legs flexing, the holly-green dress in a frenzy of motion. The two exchanged a look. “You haven’t been running a fever, have you?” It was Mrs. Roessing talking now, and she had one of those elemental voices that gets inside you to the point where you want to confess to anything. “A kind of grippe of the lower stomach? Runs?”

O‘Kane was confused. His face was hot. Both women loomed over him. “I — no. No, it’s not that, it’s, uh — my head. My head aches, that’s all. Just a bit, the tiniest bit.”

“The chauffeur — Roscoe — he was ill, wasn’t he?

O‘Kane nodded.

“The grippe?”

“That’s right.”

Katherine spoke up again now, and her face was so pale you would have thought she’d been embalmed. “And my husband? He, he hasn’t been sick—?”

And that was how O‘Kane, drunk on Chinese Christmas punch and caught between two fraught and ashen women, learned that the Spanish influenza, which was to kill twice as many people worldwide as the War itself, had arrived in Santa Barbara.

One of the first to go was Mrs. Goux, the thick-ankled woman from the winery who trundled up and down the street each morning with an air of invincibility, trailing children and parcels and one very dirty white dog. She left behind a distraught husband and a grief-addled brood of seven, all of them howling from the upstairs windows that gave onto State Street across from Mrs. Fitzmaurice‘s, and that was depressing enough, but before anybody could catch their breath the husband and four of the children died writhing in their blankets with temperatures of a hundred and a six. Then it was Wilson, the greengrocer, a man in his thirties with the shoulders of a fullback and great meaty biceps who’d never been sick a day in his life. He told his wife he was feeling a little dyspeptic the day after Christmas and she chalked it up to overindulgence, plain and simple, and wouldn’t hear a word of the hysteria boiling up around her — not until he died two days later, that is. Their eldest son came down with it next — he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen — and Wilson’s brother Chas, who ran the ice company, and Chas’s wife, and they were all three of them dead and laid out by the New Year.