For the next hour, as the sun roved overhead and they shifted from one foot to another, the five of them stood there watching Mr. McCormick at his work. He"d made his way through the oleanders and across the gravel walkway beyond and into another flower bed, this one of impatiens, fragile gawky things that drooped and fell over if you looked at them twice, and all the while Stribling saying things like "It"s no use, Mr. McCormick, he"s got a burrow a hundred yards across at least" and "There"s literally scores of the things out there and even if you get this one another one"ll move right back in-trapping"s the thing, I tell you."
Finally, and they were well into the third hour by now, Mr. McCormick got up from the convoluted trench he"d managed to gouge out of the earth with his two bare hands and a stick of oleander, and looked Stribling in the face, no more than two feet from him. Bleeding in half a dozen places, his hair hanging in his eyes, their employer was all but unrecognizable behind a film of sweat and filth. "And what am I paying you for?" he suddenly snapped, pushing up against Stribling with his chest thrust out and spitting the words in his face. And then, trembling and gritting his teeth, he jerked his head round on the Irishman. "And you?" he said. "What am I paying you for? To stand around and, and watch? Dig, I tell you!" he shouted, his voice rheumy and dangerous all of a sudden. "Dig! Dig or you"ll-you"ll be looking for another j-job! Both of you !"
Stribling gave Brush a sour look, but turned away from Mr. McCormick without a word and leaned into his shovel, and so did the Irishman. Dr. Brush, who"d kept up a steady stream of bl.u.s.ter and remonstrance for the better part of this ongoing charade, suddenly started in on a new tack, a.s.suring Mr. McCormick that the task was in good hands now and that that was all the more reason to head back to the house and clean up-yes, and see what Sam Wah could put together for a late lunch. Because Mr. McCormick must be hungry after all that prodigious exercise, just the sort of thing to build an appet.i.te, for the main and simple reason that the body needed fuel, didn"t it?
But Mr. McCormick merely stood there, filthy and bleeding, watching the men dig. Stribling kept his head down, and he dug steadily, but O"Kane could see that he was concentrating on the doomed flower bed, trying to cut his losses and confine the scope of the excavation. It was past three and both Stribling and his a.s.sistant were up to their hips in a trench you could have flooded and rowed a boat across when Mr. McCormick folded his arms and said, "That"s it. That"s enough."
They all looked up hopefully, all five of them, Stribling and the Irishman in a sweat, Brush all bl.u.s.tered out, Mart half comatose and O"Kane bored to tears and desperate for a drink.
"You can bury him now," Mr. McCormick said.
They all looked at one another. It was O"Kane who finally spoke up. "Who-the gopher?"
Mr. McCormick slowly shook his head and looked up at the sky. "Dr. H-Hoch, "he said.
When the year turned-"19 into "20, that is-O"Kane"s worst fears about the Katherines of the world were confirmed. Riding in on the skirts of Petticoat Rule, the Drys and the Bible-thumpers got the Volstead Act pa.s.sed, prohibiting "the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors," and before women even got their vote (a proposition about which O"Kane was dubious to begin with) he was denied his G.o.d-given right to drink himself into a stupor-even in the privacy of his own antiseptic room. January 18, 1920: that was the day of infamy. The day of doom. The day every last shred of joy went out of his life. He watched in shock and disbelief as the saloons of Spanishtown boarded up their doors and the Women"s Christian Temperance Union paraded through the streets, pouring out good whiskey in the gutter. Menhoff"s was still open, but only as a restaurant, and Cody would serve you a beer with your steak if you were foolish enough to ask for one-near beer, .5 percent alcohol, less than you"d find in a can of sauerkraut.
Oh, O"Kane had stocked up, of course, stashing six cases of beer and two of rye whiskey under his bed and secreting the odd bottle of bourbon in his wardrobe and ten pints of sloe gin in the steamer trunk he kept in Mrs. Fitzmaurice"s attic-he even buried half a dozen jugs of wine just inside the front gate at Riven Rock-but he was bereft without the conviviality of the saloons. So what if he"d spent half his adult life considering various positions on G.o.d, immortality and Ford transmissions as expressed by one drunken halfwit or another? What else was there to do? He tried reading. He bought himself a Victrola. Rain beat at the windows and every day brought news of some fool going blind and deaf drinking antifreeze or rubbing atcohot-and how about that fireman in Pennsylvania who bought up all the lilac hair tonic in town and drowned in a sea of his own vomit? O"Kane went steadily through his stock, mostly alone, but sometimes in the company of Mart or Pat or one of the lost souls who used to inhabit the front room at Menhoff"s, and as the bottles turned up empty, he felt like a condemned man marking off the days until his execution.
Into this vale of tears stepped Jim Isringhausen.
Jim came out in February to open up his brother"s place and make his move on one thousand acres of prime flat well-watered citrus land in Goleta, four miles to the north of Santa Barbara. Demand was up since the War ended and people back East were just going crazy for oranges, lemons, tangerines, limes, grapefruits, k.u.mquats, you name it, and what they were getting from Florida was a drop in the bucket compared to what California could produce. Now was the time to get in on it before every used car salesman and soda jerk with a hundred bucks in his pocket got wind of it, not to mention the big conglomerates. And he came to O"Kane first, because O"Kane had been with him from the beginning on this, and he"d been patient, sitting on his hands for two years now while Jim consolidated his holdings and lined up investors, and Jim appreciated that, he did.
He told O"Kane all this on their way out to inspect the property on a day of biblical splendor, the sea leaping, the mountains chiseled, the sun hanging in the blue-veined sky like a big Valencia orange. Jim was looking good. He was wearing a checked sport jacket and white duck trousers, spats over his shoes, and his hair was frozen to his head with French pomade and his mustache so neat and refined it was barely there. The car was new, a yellow Mercer roadster with blood-red wire wheels and a fold-down canvas top. The wind was in their faces. Everything flashed and winked in the brilliant California light. Jim Isringhausen pa.s.sed O"Kane a silver flask and O"Kane drank deep of ambrosia-Scotch whiskey, the real stuff, smoke and peat and the very baaing of the sheep all in one swallow, whiskey like you couldn"t find anymore and maybe never would again.
"So what did you say you"ve got to put up," Jim said, gently disengaging the flask from O"Kane"s reluctant fingers and putting it to his own lips, "-three thousand?"
The wind beat at O"Kane"s hair, the sun warmed his face. He squinted his eyes and felt the hope come up in him again, a breath of it, anyway. "Just about. Twenty-nine and something."
Jim turned to him with the flask. He had the look of a priest on his face, all sympathy and concern. "That"s not your whole life savings, is it? Because I wouldn"t want to put you under any strain here-I mean, this is as close to a sure thing as you"ll find on this green earth, but nothing"s a hundred percent, you know that, don"t you?"
O"Kane shrugged. He lifted the flask to his lips, casual as a millionaire. "No," he lied, "I"ve got some put away still."
He was no idiot. He knew what Jim was saying: there was risk involved. But there was risk involved in anything, in walking across the street, gulping your food, looking into a woman"s eyes on a Sat.u.r.day night. This was his chance, and he was going to take it-all he needed to see was a row of orange trees, and he was in.
"All right," Jim said, "call it three then-if you can round it off between now and next Tuesday, which is when we close the deal. At two hundred an acre, we need to raise twenty thousand dollars down against the bank loan and another thousand in reserve to hire a bunch of wops to water the trees and pick the fruit. Three"ll get you thirty shares, at a hundred per. Sound good, pardner?"
"Sure," O"Kane said.
Jim put both hands on the wheel as they swept too fast into a turn banked the wrong way; the wind sheared at them, there was a delicious jolt and Jim downshifted and hit the gas on the straightaway that suddenly opened up before them. "By the way," he said, "Dolores sends her love."
O"Kane chewed over this bit of information as the flask came back to his hand and they swung off the pavement and onto a snaking dirt road that bloomed with dust and insects and flying bits of chaff. Dolores Dolores sends her love. Well, fine-O"Kane hadn"t seen or heard from her in two years, not since her husband came back from the War. He"d asked Jim about that, trying to sound casual, and Jim had told him they were over in Europe, reconstructing a villa someplace in Italy-not that it mattered two figs to O"Kane one way or the other. Women were a thing of the past for him. He"d given up. After Rosaleen and poor Eddie Jr.-and Giovannella. sends her love. Well, fine-O"Kane hadn"t seen or heard from her in two years, not since her husband came back from the War. He"d asked Jim about that, trying to sound casual, and Jim had told him they were over in Europe, reconstructing a villa someplace in Italy-not that it mattered two figs to O"Kane one way or the other. Women were a thing of the past for him. He"d given up. After Rosaleen and poor Eddie Jr.-and Giovannella.
He hadn"t seen her either, the widow Capolupo. He heard she"d moved back in with her parents, pregnant with a dead man"s baby-or so she claimed. And he hadn"t heard whether she"d given birth to a wop or half a wop, and he just didn"t care, not anymore. If he could make his fortune here, in oranges, and get out from under the McCormicks and set himself up someplace-in San Francisco maybe, or Los Angeles-well then he might just possibly think about finding some young girl of twenty with some grace and style about her and settle into his forties with something to show for his life. But right now he didn"t need the complications. Or the heartache either.
The car swung round a bend and all at once they were in the groves, running along between rows of orange trees, glossy copper-green leaves and the oranges hanging fat and sweet in every one, as if this were Christmas, endless Christmas, and every tree decorated just for them. Jim pulled over at the end of one of the long tapering rows, where the trees suddenly gave out and the open fields began, yellow mustard up to your armpits and some kind of hairy blue flowers struggling through the weeds and a riot of every possible thing reaching up out of the dirt-everything but oranges, that is. "Well," Jim said, throwing out his arms, "what do you think?"
O"Kane looked over his shoulder at the ranks of una.s.sailable trees, and then out into the field. Jim"s white trousers were stained with flecks of yellowish mud. There were gopher mounds everywhere, and at least now O"Kane knew what they were. "I don"t know," he said. "What am I supposed to think?"
"I guess it"s kind of hard to picture," Jim said, wading out into the undergrowth, "but once we get this cleared out of here and give these trees some attention-"
"What trees? You mean"-a gesture for the grove behind them-"those aren"t the trees right there?"
Jim Isringhausen was bent over something in the deep gra.s.s. "Here, look," he said.
O"Kane saw a sapling no thicker than his finger, four feet tall maybe, with a puff of vegetation at the top of it. And then he saw the others, the smallest stunted flags of copper-green leaves poking out here and there from the mora.s.s of weeds. "That"s an orange tree?" he said, and even as he said it he understood how elusive a thing a man"s fortune could be.
Jim Isringhausen had straightened up, holding his hands out in front of him as he rubbed the dirt from them. "Yep," he said, "that"s it. And before you know it these little beauties"ll be producing like their big sisters behind you."
O"Kane just stared at the place Jim had cleared in the weeds and the leafy stalk of nothing stuck in the middle of it like an arrow shot down out of the sky. Then he looked over his shoulder again, at the deep-green wash of leaves and the oranges hanging uncountable in the interlocking grid of branches that went on as far as he could see. "It"s going to take a while," he said finally.
Jim didn"t deny it. "Yeah," he said, working his heel against the running board to dislodge a clot of mud from his gleaming tan shoe. "But not as long as you think."
After that, things began to go downhill, a long steady slide that was so gradual O"Kane wasn"t even aware of it, not at first. It was as if everything in his ken-Mr. McCormick, Dr. Brush, Riven Rock, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, the h.o.a.rded whiskey and beer and Mart and Pat and the accrued weight of all those saved and salvaged dollars-was on an incline and the top end of it tipping up higher and higher every day. O"Kane gave Jim Isringhausen his life"s savings-and talked Mart into putting up a hundred and some odd dollars too, to round off the investment at an even three thousand. He"d stood in that overgrown field and looked at those sorry twigs and saw the whole thing unfold, the gophers ravaging the roots, the well run dry, Jim Isringhausen back in New York enthroned in some townhouse like J. Pierpont Morgan, the weeds dead and parched and fallen away to the faintest skeletons of what they were and the orange trees as barren and dead under the summer sun as the grainy yellow dirt itself. But he didn"t care. It was a chance, that was all. The worst chance, maybe, but he was tired of waiting, cored out with it, exhausted, worn down, reckless and mad and seething with self-hate and the blackest kind of fatalistic despair: throw a nickel in the ocean and see if it makes a splash.
He drank beer with the whiskey and when that ran out he drank the bourbon. He was sick in the mornings and his throat was dry through the afternoons, his sinuses clogged, his head throbbing. He drank the sloe gin and it tasted like some sort of liquefied tooth powder, and then he dug up the wine and drank that. There were bootleggers in town now, weasel-faced desperadoes who drove up from Mexico with tequila and mescal and Pedro Domecq brandy, but it was eight dollars a bottle, nine, ten, and what the local entrepreneurs were making out in the canyons was a quarter the price, even if it was just about undrinkable. What they called whiskey was grain alcohol diluted with tap water, colored with caramel and flavored with prune juice, and "Scotch" was all of the above with a dose of creosote added for taste and texture. It was like drinking strychnine, battery acid, toilet cleanser, but it did the trick, and O"Kane resorted to it, a loyal customer, a daily customer, a customer whose hands shook as he tried to unfold the money and slip it into the palm of Bill McCandless from Lompoc or Charley Waterhouse from Carpinteria or Farmer Caty from G.o.d knew where. They ran the stills-they made the s.h.i.t-and handsome Eddie O"Kane took it back to his room and drank it. Oh, once in a while he"d go up to Menhoff"s and order a hamburger sandwich and a ginger ale and sit there drinking ginger ale after ginger ale till the bottle in his back pocket was empty and somebody had to help him out the door, but mainly he just went to his room and stared at the walls.
And what walls they were. Mrs. Fitzmaurice had interred them beneath a thick fibrous covering of the cheapest grade of wallpaper applied with liberal quant.i.ties of glue over what must have been plaster, also liberally applied. These were not sheer walls, not by any means-they plunged, leapt, bulged, threw up a cordillera here, sank into the depths of a laguna there. The wallpaper pattern was meant to represent some sort of tubular flower, endlessly repeated in blue, violet and chartreuse, and if O"Kane stared at it long enough, the flowers first became bells, then sausages, and finally, if he"d had enough Lompoc swill, severed heads, elongated in the most horrible and unnatural way. There wasn"t much furniture to obstruct his view-a washstand, bed, wardrobe, chair and table-but that was all right with O"Kane. He had the opportunity to contemplate furniture all day long at Riven Rock, room after room of it, the finest money could buy. He didn"t need to bring it home with him-and he didn"t need the enc.u.mbrance either. Possessions were for the rich, and he wasn"t rich and never would be-not unless Jim Isringhausen pulled off some sort of miracle.
Mrs. Fitzmaurice had graced his room with her chef d"oeuvre, an ambitious four-foot-long-by-two-foot-high canvas that daringly intermixed puppies and kittens both in what seemed at first glance to be a demonic battle over the remains of a disemboweled kitten, but on closer inspection proved to be an innocent tug-of-war over a ball of yarn. This inspirational piece had pride of place on the wall over the bed, where O"Kane had to twist his neck to study it while lying there drinking and listening to the only record he had (a distant, hissingly ethereal rendition of "Semper Fidelis" that sounded as if it had been recorded in the locker room at Notre Dame). One wall was broken up by a window, another by the door; the third was an uninterrupted medley of bell-like and sausagelike flowers. His fellow boarders-there were eight of them, all in various stages of unhope and decay-strenuously avoided him, except at meals, when a certain degree of contact and even conversation was inevitable, but he began skipping meals and avoiding them in the hallways even before they had a chance to avoid him.
So it went, through the winter, into the spring and the parched, citrus-wilting summer. O"Kane began to miss the odd day at work when the ersatz whiskey or Scotch or "Genuine Holland Genever" was especially bad and hit him so hard even the fillings of his teeth ached, and he didn"t like to do that, miss work, and he knew it was the beginning of the end of everything he"d ever struggled and hoped for, but he just couldn"t seem to muster the energy to care. And no one else seemed to care either. Brush was on the way out, even a blind man could see that. He"d stopped putting in regular hours altogether, and half the time when he did show up it was no more than a h.e.l.lo and good-bye for Mr. McCormick before he puffed and bl.u.s.tered his way out to the theater house and buried himself in his office. Mart was as thickheaded as ever, oblivious to everything, and Nick and Pat were putting on weight till they looked like twin bulldogs, asleep on their feet. And Katherine, the presiding genius of the place, was nowhere to be seen. She was a name in a newspaper clipping, Mrs. Stanley McCormick, running around the country with a bunch of birth control fanatics and blood-sucking feminists-now that women had got the vote and voted down drinking, they wanted to do away with babies too. And sure, why not-let the stork fly down out of heaven with them so women could spend all their free time smoking and griping and wearing pants.
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 b.u.t.ters, 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.smate."
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 a.s.sertions.
"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 rea.s.surance 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 pa.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts."
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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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.
All right. Sure. So he laid off for a while. He wouldn"t go near the stuff, not if you stabbed him with a sharp stick and drove him into a cage and forced it down his throat. Of course, it was just that swill, that was the problem, the impurities and such-he was lucky he wasn"t blinded or rendered impotent or insane. He hadn"t really seen the Judges-it was just the booze, the bad stuff, a bad batch. But he laid off all the same and he got to work every day, and though his guts were full of hot magma and he couldn"t s.h.i.t to save his life and his head was like an eggsh.e.l.l in a vise and his legs so heavy he could hardly stand up, he began, very gradually, to experience the world as it really was, without a crutch, without a filter.
The first thing he noticed, shivering and sweating at the same time as he vomited in the toilet at the end of the hall and f.u.c.king Maloney who he was going to kill and dismember and maybe boil and eat banging on the door in his boorish inconsideration and impatience, was that he"d begun to get his sense of smell back. It was amazing: he lived in a world of odors. p.i.s.s suddenly reeked under his shoes. His socks were vaporous, his underwear yeasty. The hallway outside his door smelled as if somebody had died in it just prior to being immured in the walls. He could smell Mrs. Fitzmaurice"s facial unguent from where he lay in bed, all the way down the stairs and around the corner and through the door to her sad and solitary widow"s room. And he could smell her sadness too, the smell of disuse, old flesh, a body mewed up and wasted. There was a car parked out front and it had gasoline in the tank and he could smell the gasoline. And food: onions, lard, beef, canned beans, some sort of spice-what was it? Basil? Yes, basil. He hadn"t smelled basil in years-hadn"t smelled anything for that matter-and it brought tears to his eyes.
Next thing he knew, he had an appet.i.te.
First the smell, and then the hunger. He started getting up for breakfast, sitting around the table at Mrs. Fitzmaurice"s with his fellow boarders, flapjacks like stones, porridge like stones before they petrify, syrup like squeezed stones, but he ate it, ate it all and cleaned his plate with a sop of bread. At ten-thirty every morning, instead of taking a booze break, he ambled down to the kitchen and sweet-talked Sam Wah into frying him a beefsteak or a piece of liver with onions, and at lunchtime he sat there across from Mr. McCormick in the very lap of one of the judges and b.u.t.tered up his bread and dug into his soup as if he hadn"t eaten in a week. He took dinner at Menhoff"s because he was too late getting home for Mrs. Fitzmaurice, and she"d never charged him, except for Sat.u.r.days and Sundays, and when he drank a bottle of ginger ale he studied the label with a wistful smile: "Reminding you of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the contents of this bottle is sold to you on the understanding that it will not be used or mixed with alcoholic liquor."
His suits, which had hung slack on him, began to fit again. He took pains with his hair and his teeth and made sure he washed under the arms every morning, and a month later, after swearing off Charley Waterhouse, Bill McCandless, and even Cody Menhoff, who was now selling a finer cla.s.s of homemade gin under the table and the county sheriff looking the other way, O"Kane found he"d recovered something else too: his libido. He woke each morning with a tire iron between his legs, and when he strolled down the block to wait for Roscoe to pick him up he leered at every female between the ages of twelve and sixty and tipped his hat so many times he wore out the brim. He needed a woman. And he thought of little else through the rest of that week and into the next, the terrible quandary of where to find one burning in his brain every time he dropped the needle on his Sousa record, unlocked the barred door to the upstairs parlor or set off cross-country with Mart and Mr. McCormick on one of their mad runs. Listening to those faint trumpets, tubas and sousaphones, jogging along behind Mr. McCormick, he turned the problem over in his mind: women, the sort of women he was seeking, were gathered thick as pigeons over c.o.c.ktails in the speakeasies that had sprung up around town, but to get to them he"d have to drink a c.o.c.ktail too, and one c.o.c.ktail would lead to another till he was past caring and lost his appet.i.te and his sense of smell and began to see Mr. McCormick"s judges sitting there before him in all their undeniable corporeality.
It was in this state, goatish and disgruntled but alive to every sensory current of the world, that O"Kane came up the stairs at Riven Rock one morning to find Mr. McCormick extended as far as he could reach through the bars of the upper parlor door with both his hands locked round the throat of Sam Wah, the cook. Sam"s face was an ugly color, bloated and dark as a bruise, and though his hands were in turn clamped to Mr. McCormick"s wrists, he was barely struggling, his feet half-lifted from the floor, his eyes beginning to film over. And Mart? Where was he? Unconscious on the floor behind Mr. McCormick, a glistening bright carnation of blood blooming out of the comer of his mouth.
O"Kane lost no time-he was up the stairs in a trice, methodically attacking Mr. McCormick"s forearms, not a word exchanged between them, nothing but grunts and curses and the fierce hissing insuck of breath, until Mr. McCormick released the cook and the cook fell to the floor like a sack of old clothes. But Mr. McCormick wasn"t done yet, not by any means. As soon as O"Kane forced his hands away, Mr. McCormick seized O"Kane by both arms and drew him violently up against the rack of the bars, and while that struggle went on, Sam Wah rose shakily to his feet, ma.s.saged his throat with an angry trembling hand and launched into a high-pitched litany of Chinese complaint. O"Kane finally got a purchase on Mr. McCormick and they paused, locked in a stalemate, each gripping the other"s arms through the inflexible iron bars.
"You no like, I no cook!" Sam Wah shouted, dancing round the landing and shaking his fist. "Mistah Cormah, you got no right!"
O"Kane, casting a quick glance beyond his employer"s seething face, saw the breakfast things scattered across the room behind him, and gathered that Mr. McCormick had objected to the way the cook had prepared his eggs.
"You got no right take my neck like this, Mistah Cormah!" Sam Wah was livid. He stripped the ap.r.o.n from his chest, balled it up and flung it on the floor beside the toque that had fallen there at some earlier stage of the altercation. "Mistah Cormah, I got tell you, after fo"teen year, I quit!"
His grip rigid in O"Kane"s, Mr. McCormick just stood there on the other side of the bars, and he never even blinked, never said a word, but his jaw was set and there was something in his eyes that said he would never let go, the bruised defiance of a very spoiled little rich boy who would die before he would admit he was wrong.
The upshot of all this was a revolution in the culinary life of Riven Rock. Brush, who really didn"t want to be bothered, consulted with b.u.t.ters and the nurses and whoever else would listen to him, and discovered that male cooks were few and far between-not to mention the male kitchen help Sam Wah took with him when he departed. As a stopgap, they promoted a Mexican gardener who claimed to have been a cook at a restaurant in Veracruz before the revolution. He lasted three days, during which the house was filled with strange and disquieting odors. Every meal he prepared seemed to consist of some sort of glutinous bean and rice paste wrapped in a thin bread-like substance no one could identify, and all of it so everlastingly and excoriatingly hot it was like pouring flaming kerosene down your throat. Mr. McCormick became very disturbed and spent the whole of every morning shut away in-his toilet, trousers down around his ankles, folding and refolding his toilet paper while he awaited the next intestinal emergency.
Next they tried a fleshless sun-blasted old man who used to run a chuckwagon for sheepherders in the Goleta foothills, but all he knew how to cook was mutton, and after a week of that-boiled, fried, frica.s.seed, roasted and baked in a clay pit till it was mummified-they took to calling in orders at Diehl"s Grocery, three meals a day. Finally, deeply frustrated and in high dudgeon, Dr. Brush took O"Kane aside one afternoon and asked him what he thought of hiring a woman-just to do the cooking and the kitchen work.
"A woman?" O"Kane repeated, as if they were speaking of some alien species, and he was thinking of Elsie Reardon and the other female maids they"d had in the early days. It seemed so long ago. So long it was as if the prohibition against women had been written in stone and brought down from the mountaintop.
"Yes," Brush shouted, and he was impatient with all this, resentful of having to act as estate manager and majordomo of the house as well, when it was clearly his duty as a trained psychiatrist to devote himself to higher things, for the main and simple reason that that was what he"d been trained and hired to do. He gave O"Kane an exasperated look. "Mr. McCormick has been, well, calmer lately," he said, "aside of course from the unfortunate incident with the cook, that is, and if we give strict orders that the woman is not to leave the kitchen under any circ.u.mstances and keep a sharp and vigilant eye on the patient, well, I don"t see any reason why we can"t, well, employ a female here. It"s clear we can"t go on like this."
O"Kane watched him a moment, trying to gauge the extent of the doctor"s agitation, and then he shrugged. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"
And so it was that he came into the house the next morning to a smell of sauces and spices and fresh baked bread so intoxicating he thought he would faint with the antic.i.p.ation of it, real food-Italian, it smelled like-and not the unvarying and nameless crud Mrs. Fitzmaurice served up at the boardinghouse. He let himself in upstairs and carefully locked the door behind him, a woman in the house again and this no time to be lax or forgetful, and found Mart reading to Mr. McCormick out of a book of Shakespeare"s plays. They both looked tranquil and they both turned their heads to smile at him as he swung away from the door and came into the room. "Good morning, Mart, Mr. McCormick," he said, and he could feel it himself, a change come over them, a charm, the benediction of food.
"M-morning, Eddie," Mr. McCormick said in a high cheery voice. Mart, whose busted lip had healed nicely by this time, looked up from the book and grunted out a greeting.
"Smells good," O"Kane said, and the odor, redolent of sausage, garlic and pomodoros, had risen from the kitchen to invest the upper floor.
"Yeah," Mart said, wagging his big head and grinning. They all three of them involuntarily swallowed.
"So who"s the new cook?" O"Kane asked, sliding in beside Mart on the sofa.
Mart glanced at Mr. McCormick; Mr. McCormick"s eyes glistened. He had a look on his face, something new-n.o.body had to tell him there was a woman downstairs. "I don"t know," Mart said. "Some widow, I think. A wop.
O"Kane lifted his eyebrows. Something was wrong here, and he felt it all the way down in his gut where all of that spaghetti and ravioli and lasagna was destined to go. It couldn"t be. There were a thousand widows in the country, war widows, old ladies in black shuffling along the sidewalks, women whose husbands had died at sea, in auto wrecks and train derailments, of heart failure and cancer, and sure they had to support themselves, even if they were old and feeble. Still, he found himself getting to his feet and looking round the room in a daze. "Will you excuse me, Mr. McCormick?" he said. "I just need to go downstairs a minute-I forgot something."
And then he was on the staircase, the sweet rising odor of marinara sauce and fresh-baked bread stronger and stronger as he made his way down the steps, into the servants" hall and through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Steam rose round him, parting in wisps and wraiths with the stimulus of the fanning doors, all the burners of the stove were on high and the hot liquid bubbling and hissing in the big cast-iron pots, and there was a figure there, a familiar figure, a figure he knew as well as any on earth, a bit fuller maybe, a shade older, but it was her and no denying it: Giovannella. Giovannella.
"Hiya, Eddie," she said, turning a cold unsmiling face to him, indifferent as the wind, "long time, no see."
LA LUNE DE MIEL.
The day after their wedding Stanley and Katherine went on to Paris along with their mothers and servants and six hundred pounds of luggage, and the honeymoon began in earnest. Unfortunately, Stanley seemed to experience some difficulty in putting his affairs in order and finding the ideal spot in his steamer trunk for his socks, handkerchiefs and underwear, and they missed their train and were late getting in. It was a disappointment for Katherine, who"d been looking forward to an evening on the town, not simply for her own sake, but for Stanley"s-she was hoping the change of scene would distract him so he wouldn"t be so preoccupied when finally, inevitably, at the shining climax of the evening, they found themselves in bed together. But it wasn"t to be.
Everyone had been packed and waiting, the servants solicitous, the bags stowed away, the carriage out front in the circular drive, and Stanley nowhere to be found. It was raining still, and the raw wet earth of the flower beds gave off a dank odor of the sifting and winowing of the centuries. Earthworms-Lumbricus terretris-sprawled across the walk, and how many of those blind blameless creatures had Katherine dissected under the direction of one bearded professor or another? She"d been out to the carriage twice already to see to things, stepping carefully round the pale bleached corpses of the worms, and now she stood in the vestibule with her mother, adjusting her hat in a rising storm of excitement, eager to be on her way, to begin the adventure, to leave the stone towers and the placid lake behind and get on with her life as Mrs. Stanley McCormick. Nettie was already settled in the carriage and Jean Claude was stationed at the door with a black spreading umbrella, awaiting their pleasure. "Whatever can be keeping Stanley?" her mother wondered aloud, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the clock in the hall behind them.
Katherine smoothed her gloves, peered through the windows at the rain melting into the pavement and plucking relentlessly at the black canvas top of the carriage, and then laid a hand on her mother"s arm. "You go ahead, mother," she said. "I"ll go up and see what"s keeping him-we won"t be a minute."
She found Stanley in his room, pacing back and forth between an open trunk and two eviscerated suitcases. He had something bundled in his arms, some sort of garment-longjohns-and there were notebooks, pens, sketch pads, socks, ties and shaving things arranged on the bed in neat little piles, a novel he"d left out to read on the train, his tennis racket and bathing costume. "Stanley, darling," she said, standing there at the door in her hat and coat, "what are you doing? Don"t you know everyone"s waiting? We"ll miss the train."
His color was high and a lock of his hair had fallen loose. "I-well, it"s my underwear, you see, because I can"t just go off on a day with weather like this and not think about it, especially the temperature differential in Paris and what it"ll be like on the train, and so I just, well, I needed time to sort things out and decide-"
"Your underwear?" She was stunned. "Stanley, the train is leaving in forty-five minutes. If we don"t go right this instant we"re going to miss it. This is no time to worry about underwear."
"No, no, no," he said, gesturing, the limp garments draped over both arms, "you don"t understand. You see, I order my longjohns specially from Dunhill & Porter in London, and they come in eight gradations of weight so as to meet every possible contingency, from, from, well snow snow to the sunshiniest day in August, when, of course, one wouldn"t want to suffocate-and he let out a strange hollow yelp of a laugh. "Don"t you see?" he said, bending now to the steamer trunk and patiently folding the garments in his arms. She could see that he was laughing still, chuckling to himself and shaking his head. "She wants me to freeze-" he said, addressing the depths of the trunk, "-my own w-wife." to the sunshiniest day in August, when, of course, one wouldn"t want to suffocate-and he let out a strange hollow yelp of a laugh. "Don"t you see?" he said, bending now to the steamer trunk and patiently folding the garments in his arms. She could see that he was laughing still, chuckling to himself and shaking his head. "She wants me to freeze-" he said, addressing the depths of the trunk, "-my own w-wife."
She crossed the room to him, murmuring, "Here, let me help," but he stiffened and turned away from her. "Stanley," she said, "please. It"s not cold at all-it must be fifty-five or sixty degrees out there-and they"re sure to be having Indian summer weather in Paris this time of year...."
He paid her no mind, but kept folding and unfolding his underwear and carrying it from one bag to another, and no sooner did he settle on a place for it than he pulled it back out and started the whole process all over again.
"We"re going to miss the train," she said. "Stanley. Are you listening to me? We"re going We"re going to miss the to miss the train." train."
His eyes went suddenly to hers and there was a pleading look in them, a look that both begged for help and rejected it at the same time. "I can"t," he said. "I"m, I"m not ready. I can"t."
Her mother"s voice came up the stairwell then, tremulous and interrogatory: "Katherine?"
"Leave it," Katherine urged. "Leave it for the servants to send on. We"ll buy you new things as soon as we get in, better things, Parisian things, and all this will be on the next train if you need it. Come on," she said, taking him by the arm, "come on, Stanley, we"ve got to go."
He wasn"t violent, he wasn"t rough, he wasn"t pettish or peevish, but he was immovable all the same. He looked down at her from his height, looked at her hand urgent on his arm, and said, simply, "No." Then he pulled away from her and crossed the room to his suitcase, trailing the vacant legs of his longjohns behind him like pennants.
Suddenly she was angry. "Stanley!" she snapped, and she couldn"t help herself, honeymoon or no honeymoon. She stamped her foot; her voice shot up a register. "You stop this now!" she shouted, and here she was, shrill as a fishwife on the second day of her marriage, but her patience was at an end and the train was rolling into the station and she wanted to go, to go now, and no more frittering or vacillating or neurotic displays.
She was about to stalk across the room and take his arm again when she started at a sound behind her and turned around, expecting her mother. It wasn"t her mother. It was Stanley"s mother, Nettie, the ogre herself, the rain beaded on her hat and caught in a fine sparkling mist on the collar of her fur coat. Her jaw was wet and her mouth barely moved as she spoke. "I"ll handle this," she said.