T. Boyle - Riven Rock

There was a real decline in the upkeep of the place, too — so much so that even O‘Kane noticed it through the scrim of his alcoholic haze. Torkelson was gone, lured away by one of the nonschizophrenic local millionaires, and the new man, ponderous, slow-moving, with a phony English accent and the ridiculous name of Butters, let the household staff get away with murder. There was dust everywhere, great roiling clouds of it rising from every chair you sat in, Mr. McCormick’s shirts were haphazardly laundered and indifferently ironed, the male housemaids spent half the day lolling around the kitchen with their feet up and you never saw a broom or feather duster in action anymore, let alone a mop. Outside, it was even worse. Stribling had given notice the day after the gopher incident and for lack of a better alternative, Brush had put the skinny Irishman in charge (O’Mara his name was, not O‘Hara, he was from Poughkeepsie, New York, and he didn’t know a cactus from a coconut), and everything went to hell in a handbasket. There were Italians asleep under the bushes in broad daylight, gophers eating their way through the gardens and plowing up the lawns, whole flower beds gone dead for lack of care, and no one seemed to notice, least of all Mr. McCormick — he just went on talking to his judges, reading aloud in half a dozen voices and veering off across the estate at a mad canter every time somebody opened the door and let him out.

It was late that fall, on a day of slanting sun and scouring winds that tossed the trees and twisted themselves around puffs of yellow dust, that O‘Kane, drunk on the job, broached the subject of his orange-grove investment with his employer. Mart was asleep on the sofa. Dr. Brush was in his office. There wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house but for the gasp and sigh of the wind. “Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said, setting down the book he’d been staring at for the past half hour without effect, “I’d be curious to know your opinion on something — an investment I’ve made with Jim Isringhausen. In citrus.”

“Who?” Mr. McCormick was moving round the table, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, arranging the chairs and table settings for lunch, a thing he particularly liked to do. Some days he’d spend as much as an hour or more positioning and repositioning the chairs, shifting plates, spoons, cups and saucers a quarter inch to the left or right, worrying over the napkins in their rings, endlessly rearranging the cut flowers in the vase in the center of the table. It was one of his rituals, one of the more innocuous ones, and all the doctors had encouraged him in it, even Brush — at least he was doing something.

“Jim Isringhausen,” O‘Kane repeated. “He says he used to know you at Princeton.”

Mr. McCormick had the look of a wading bird standing there over the table, some lean beaky thing studying to spear a frog or a minnow and gulp it down whole. His eyes went briefly to O‘Kane’s and then fell away again. “Never heard of him,” he said, realigning spoon and plate on the doctor’s side of the table, and then he said something under his breath to one of his judges. This wasn’t unusual, particularly at meal-times, and O’Kane thought nothing of it. Often Mr. McCormick would set extra places at the table, and when Dr. Brush questioned him about it, he would explain that they were reserved for the judges. Today there were only four places — for Mart, O‘Kane, Dr. Brush and their host — so it was safe to assume that the judges had already eaten.

“Sure you have,” O‘Kane heard himself say, a faint tocsin ringing somewhere in the back of his fuddled brain, “—Princeton, ’96. He was your classmate.”

Mr. McCormick commenced hopping from foot to foot again; this was another of his rituals, and it meant that the floor was on fire. When the floor wasn’t on fire it was made of glue, a very efficacious and unyielding glue, and he had to strain to lift his feet. But now he was hopping, and because he was hopping, he was too absorbed to respond to O‘Kane’s assertions.

“He lives in New York, O‘Kane went on, and he was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit desperate now, marshaling his facts till the weight of them would give him the reassurance he was looking for. ”He has something to do with the stock exchange, I think. And his brother, you know his brother — or you know of him. He has that grand big place out on Sycamore Canyon Road, the one we pass by on our drives sometimes?“

When Mr. McCormick still didn’t answer, O‘Kane, who was feeling very strange and out of sorts, as if he had a fever coming on — or a hangover and fever combined — sat brooding a moment, trying to recollect just what he did know about Jim Isringhausen, aside from the fact that his sister-in-law was a terrific lay. Not much. Not much at all. He worried it over a bit, then tried a new tack. “Mr. McCormick, when you were… well, before you came to Riven Rock, before you were married, I mean, I was just wondering how you felt about investing in real estate — in general, I mean.”

Mr. McCormick had hopped himself across the room to the window, where he stood holding a spoon up to the light, periodically breathing on it and then buffing it on his shirttail. He gave O‘Kane a blank look.

“Your properties. Your ranch in New Mexico. All those buildings in Chicago. Your house in Massachusetts.”

This was a real stumper, and it seemed to take Mr. McCormick back a ways. O‘Kane wasn’t really expecting an answer at this point, and he didn’t know what he was after anyway — sure Mr. McCormick was rich and grand, but he’d inherited his money and he was mad as a loon, and what did that make O’Kane for seeking advice of him?

Mr. McCormick hopped back to the table, left foot, right foot, left, left, right, and replaced the spoon. He stood fretting over the arrangement a moment and then turned a bloodless face to O‘Kane. “My, my wife m-manages all my p-property. I don’t, I don‘t”—long pause—“I don’t concern myself with that anymore.”

What had he expected? The voice of the oracle? Sound financial advice? A loan? O‘Kane sank deeper into his chair. Everything in the room seemed to be in motion, every atom bucking up against the next till the furniture and walls were frantic with activity, and he knew he needed a drink. He lurched to his feet, shook Mart awake and ducked into the toilet, where he lifted the ceramic lid of the reservoir and fished out a pint bottle of whatever it was Charley Waterhouse had sold him a case of the night before. O’Kane had decanted a quart of the stuff into two pint bottles for ease of transport and concealment, and now, visions of orange groves dying in his head, he raised the cool glass aperture to his puckered lips and kissed it long and hard, letting the fever flare up again till he didn’t know whether he was going to vomit or pass out — or both.

When he came back into the room, Mr. McCormick was remonstrating with somebody in the high querulous tone that meant he was about to have an episode, but it wasn’t Mart he was addressing. Mart was out again, slumped in a chair and snoring softly. No, Mr. McCormick was pleading with his judges—“I didn’t mean It — I didn’t want to — I never — Im ashamed, I am!”—and O‘Kane prepared himself for the worst. But this time, the worst was far worse than he could ever have imagined, because just before the walls started moving and the ceiling came alive with flickering eyes and snouts and a scramble of fur, the judges appeared in stiff congress over their plates, bearded and stern, three of them, three bearded scowling merciless men, and all their six merciless eyes fastened on him, smiling Eddie O’Kane, only he didn’t have any smile for this occasion, because he was in uncharted waters now and going down fast.