T. Boyle - Riven Rock

She came hurtling in from the hallway in a black shift that was like an undergarment, her arms naked, her feet bare, her hair kinked and wild and beating at her face like a flail, and all on the crest of that first rising shriek. Everyone in the room, even Mama the all-powerful, was frozen in place — or no, not frozen but melted down like silica and then quick-cooled to the fragile inanimacy of glass. But that first heart-seizing shriek was nothing more than a preface, an overture, a promise of what was to come. The next cry, protracted and operatic, crescendoing in a series of gut-wrenching whoops that sounded as if some animal were being eviscerated and eaten alive, scoured the walls and the ceiling and polished those glass faces and glassy eyes till nothing existed but Mary Virginia McCormick, the fount and apotheosis of grief.

Unimpeded, all but unrecognizable, her mouth open in a rictus of screaming and her limbs jerking and twitching with the exaltation of some uncontainable force, she darted across the rug and through the pall of smoked sausage and embalmer’s perfume, past the mourners and undertaker’s assistants and the members of her own family, vaulted the rail and plunged into the coffin as if she were diving into a swimming pool. “It’s me!” she cried, thrashing at what was left of the Reaper King till it seemed to Stanley’s stricken eyes that the corpse had come to life in a hideous rehearsal of his worst fears. No one moved. No one breathed. “Papa,” she sobbed, “it’s me, Mary Virginia,” and her hands were right there, right in the thick of it, wrapped tight round the rigid throat and reanimated beard. “Don’t you recognize me?”

It was a shame, everyone agreed, because Mary Virginia was the beauty of the family, a roll of the genetic dice that comes round only once in a generation. And she was as talented as she was pretty, good with languages and clever at drawing, an accomplished pianist who played with the subtlety and compassion of a woman twice her age and all the courage and ferocity of a man. She was twenty-three and unmarried at the time of her father’s death, though there had been no lack of suitors, her physical attractions enhanced as they were by the allure of her father’s fortune. In the two years since her coming out, there had been three offers for her hand. Her mother — Nettie Fowler McCormick, a real force in Chicago society and a matchmaker nonpareil — had convoked a family council on each of the three occasions, and each time, though the aspirants were well connected and had money of their own, Papa had to take them aside and gravely decline on his daughter’s behalf. And that was a shame, a real shame. But the McCormicks were scrupulous to the point of rigidity, and they felt they had no choice but to let the young men in question understand just what they were letting themselves in for.

The sad truth was that Mary Virginia was sick, sick in a way that didn’t show, not right away and not on the surface. Hers was a sickness that seemed to deepen as she grew into it, stretching and elongating to accommodate her like the skin of an anaconda. Ever since her thirteenth birthday she’d become increasingly distant, detached from the world of people, things and obligations, as if some essential thread had been cut in her mind. There were times when she didn’t seem to recognize her parents, the governess, her own sisters and brothers. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t talk. For hours at a time she crouched over her bruised knees, praying frantically, hysterically, chanting the name of God the Father until it was like a curse. Other times she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, dashing from room to room in a panic, blue in the face, choking for air when there was air all around her. And then she couldn’t sleep, sometimes for days, for weeks, and it would terrify Nettie to creep into her room at two or three in the morning and see her lying there rigid, staring into the crown of some private universe, awake but no more conscious of her mother than if she were blind and deaf.

At fifteen she came to life again, resurrected, hyperkinetic, throwing sparks from her fingers and laughing openmouthed at the great ongoing joke of the world, her every motion arrested and then accelerated and accelerated again till she rushed aimlessly from one room to another in a spastic herky-jerky trot that was like a cruel parody of poor Missy’s affliction. Where before she’d been without affect, wiped clean of emotion, now suddenly she became as passionate as a lover with Nettie, her own mother, clinging frantically to her at bedtime, protracting a goodnight kiss till it was a torture. She walked in her sleep, talked gibberish, scared off her schoolmates. And then, just after her sixteenth birthday, she began to mutilate herself.

It was one of the nurses, a French girl by the name of Marie Lherbette, who first reported it. Nettie was in the drawing room nestled in a Louis XVI chair across from an eager, well-fed young man whose passage to China she had agreed to pay on behalf of the Presbyterian Missionary Society. On the low table between them stood a tray of finger sandwiches and a pot of tea draped in a cozy crocheted by her grandmother in the early days of the century. The young man was making a complicated point about the Asiatic mind and the woeful lack of a Christianizing influence in so ancient but corrupt a culture, when Marie Lherbette knocked and entered the room with a low bow.

“Yes?” Nettie said. “What is it, Marie?”

The nurse looked down at her feet. She was twenty, pretty enough in her own way, and dutiful, but to Nettie’s mind too much imbued with, well, Frenchness, to be entirely trustworthy. “If madame please, may I have a word in private?”

“Now? Can’t you see that I’m occupied? ”

“There is”—the nurse searched for the word—“gravity in what I must tell you.”

Gravity? Nettie took one look at the nurse’s face and then rose and excused herself to the young man. A moment later she was following the nurse up the stairs to the children’s rooms. “What is it?” she demanded. “Is it Anita? Mary Virginia?”

“Miss Mary Virginia,” the nurse whispered over her shoulder, hurrying up the stairs and down the hall with quick nervous thrusts of her feet. Nettie struggled to keep up, her skirts tugging at her knees and clinging obstinately to her ankles, the carpet hissing beneath her, the furniture turned to stone. And then they were through the door and into her daughter’s room, and Nettie saw Mary Virginia stretched out on the bed in her insomniac’s trance, naked but for a pair of socks, saw the perfect bloody handprints on the flowered wallpaper and the long glistening runnels that trailed away from her private place and down her inner thighs as if some animal had been at her.

They took her to the McLean Hospital in Waverley, Massachusetts, where she was prodded, pinched, weighed, measured, auscultated, analyzed and interrogated by the biggest men in the field of psychiatry the McCormick money could attract — which is to say, all of them. Unfortunately, none of the experts could agree. One felt her problem was neurasthenia, another, delusional insanity, and yet another, dementia praecox. They wanted to keep her for observation — and for her own protection. She hadn’t bloodied herself again, except for two barely noticeable puncture marks she’d worked into her right underarm with a pen nib, but during the trip from Chicago in the private Pullman car, she’d begun to hold passionate conversations with phantoms out of thin air, and twice she’d attempted to throw herself from the train. Fortunately, Cyrus Jr. was there to restrain her, but Nettie was crucified with the burden of it.

Six weeks, the doctors said. At least. And so, reduced nearly to prostration herself, what with Mary Virginia’s collapse, Papa’s illness and her little ones pining for her in Chicago, Nettie decided to rent a house in Waverley and send for Harold and Stanley. It was one of Stanley’s earliest memories. Missy Hammond and their French nurse, Marie, were going to take him and Harold on a vacation trip for six whole weeks — and did he know how long six weeks were? And how many days were in a week? And what the first letter of the alphabet was? Yes. And they were going to go on the choo-choo train all the way across the great state of Illinois, through Indiana — could he say Indiana? — and Pennsylvania and New York to Massachusetts, where Mama and Big Sister were. Big Sister was sick, very sick, but she would be better soon and then they would all come home.