T. Boyle - Riven Rock

O‘Kane was spooked. He walked by Wilson’s and the shutters were down and a black wreath hanging on the door, and from the front door at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s he could see the sheet of paper taped to the window of the winery: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The streets were deserted. Menhoff’s was like a tomb. And Fetzer’s Drugstore sold out of gauze masks in fifteen minutes. But how did you catch the ’flu in the first place? From other people. And how did they catch it? From other people. And the first one, the very first case — how did he catch it? Mart was of the opinion that it was a judgment of God, “because of the War and all,” and Nick said it was demobilization that was spreading it. Mrs. Fitzmaurice put it down to uncleanliness, and no use discussing it further — you didn’t see anybody in her house coming down with it, did you? O‘Kane took a pint of whiskey up to his room each night and lay on the bed and brooded, and when New Year’s Eve rolled around he went out and celebrated with a crowd that was so scared they had to drain every bottle in sight just to reassure themselves.

At Riven Rock, they were relatively lucky. Only Mart and one of Sam Wah’s kitchen boys — a moonfaced kid known only as Wing — came down sick. Mart was laid up for a week and a half in the back room at his brother Pat’s house, and Pat’s wife Mildred wrapped him in cold towels to bring down the fever and poured hot chicken broth down his throat when he broke out in shivers. Wing died. That was a terrible thing — he was just a boy, Wing, with a quick smile, a thin trailing braid of hair like Paul Revere’s in the old lithographs and not a word of English — and it hit everybody hard, but none harder than Katherine. Not on Wing’s account — she didn’t even know him except as a name in the accounts-payable column in the weekly pay ledger — but on Mr. McCormick’s. The infection was in the house, not out in the fields or festering in the gutters and saloons, but right here at Riven Rock. It had struck Mart and Wing. It could strike her husband.

The thought seemed to galvanize her. She postponed her return to Washington for the duration of the epidemic, and for the first week, when the fear was fresh and new, she burst through the doors at Riven Rock each morning at eight, Mrs. Roessing, two maids and Dr. Urvater, one of the local sawbones, in tow. All of them were wearing gauze masks—“The ‘flu is spread pneumonically,” she kept saying, “as much or more than by direct contact”—and she insisted that the whole staff, including a champing and furious Sam Wah, wear masks as well. And while Dr. Urvater depressed Mr. McCormick’s tongue and looked into his ears and chatted amicably with Dr. Hoch about cheeses and leder-hosen and such, Katherine swept through the lower rooms in a flurry of servants and a powerfully salubrious odor of disinfectant. Every surface was wiped down with a solution of bleach or carbolic acid, and the doorknobs, bannisters, telephones and light switches were swabbed hourly. She was a scientist. She was an Ice Queen. And the ’flu had better take notice.

For his part, O‘Kane did as he was told. He wore a gauze mask, looked suitably grave and made a show of turning doorknobs with a bleach-soaked cloth in hand, but the minute Katherine left for the day or he ascended the stairs and entered Mr. McCormick’s sanctum, he peeled off the mask and tucked it in his pocket. He’d never seen anything like this epidemic — every time you turned around you heard about somebody else dropping down dead — and it scared him, it did, but to his mind Katherine was taking things a bit far. He had no fears for himself — he had his father’s constitution and nothing could touch him, unless it came out of a bottle, and there was no degree of luck in the world that could save you from that — but he was afraid for Mr. McCormick, even if he did think the masks and disinfectant were just a lot of female hysteria. The rest of the staff shared his fears, though nobody wanted to talk about it. Mr. McCormick might have been crazy as a bedbug, but he was the rock and foundation of the place, and if he fell, how many would fall with him?

Their employer and benefactor seemed fine, though — hale and hearty and in the peak of health. On doctor’s orders (and Katherine‘s, working behind the scenes) he wasn’t allowed out for his walks or even to go to the theater building until all this blew over, and that made him a touch irritable. He took to wearing his gauze mask atop his head, like a child’s party hat, and he toyed with Dr. Urvater over the tongue depressor and the thermometer, clamping down like a bulldog and refusing to let go until Dr. Hoch pushed himself up from the couch and intervened. Every day he talked with Katherine on the phone, she in the downstairs parlor with her carbolic acid and he a floor above her, and that seemed to have an exciting effect on him, but as far as O’Kane could see he didn’t develop so much as a sniffle, let alone the ‘flu.

“I think she’s going way overboard,” Nick said one morning as he and O‘Kane were waiting for Mr. McCormick to finish up his shower bath. He was filling in for Mart on the day shift, while Pat sat alone with Mr. McCormick through the nights. “Rubbing down the god-damned doorknobs, for Christ’s sake. But better too much too soon than too little too late, that’s my motto.”

“I know what you mean,” O‘Kane said, standing at the door to the shower room, just out of reach of the spray. Mr. McCormick was crouched naked over the wet tiles, meticulously soaping his toes, and O’Kane was reflecting on how he’d spent more of his adult life looking at Mr. McCormick in the nude than at any woman, and that included Giovannella and his long-lost wife. “We’d be in hot water if anything happened to him. I’ll be all right once I get in on this citrus ranch I was telling you about — Jim Isringhausen’s only looking to line up a couple more investors — but if I wasn’t working here, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d hate to have to go back to mopping up shit and blood on the violent ward.”

“Amen.” Nick let out a sigh. He was leaning back against the tile wall, droplets of condensation forming on his eyebrows and the fine pickets of hair that stood guard above the dome of his forehead. He was blocky and big, still muscular but running to fat in his haunches and around the middle because all he and Pat ever did was sit by Mr. McCormick’s bed all through the night and then sleep when everybody else was up and about. And he wasn’t getting any younger. “Yeah, I’d be in a fix if anything happened to Mr. McCormick, and so would Pat and Mart. Of course, not everybody would be so bad off if he went and kicked the bucket.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, a sly look creeping across his face, “her, for instance. You know: your sweetheart.”

“Katherine?”

He nodded, watching for a reaction. “Makes you wonder why she’s playing Florence Nightingale around here, doesn’t it? If he was to go, she’d be the one to get everything, the houses and the cars and more millions than you could count. And no more crazy husband.”

Nick had a point, but it only confirmed what O‘Kane had maintained all along — Katherine really cared about her husband’s welfare, and it wasn’t just an act, say what you would about her. And he wondered about that and what it meant, especially when he thought about Dolores Isringhausen and how she treated her husband — or Rosaleen, or even Glovannella and her little shoemaker. Women were conniving and false, and he’d always believed that — all of them, except his mother, that is, and maybe the Virgin Mary. And every marriage was a war for dominance — who loved who and who loved who the most — a war in which women always had the upper hand, always scheming, always waiting for the chance to stab you in the back. But not Katherine. Not the Ice Queen. She had her husband right where she wanted him — in a gilded cage — and no sick canary ever got better care.