by T. C. Boyle
“Mr. McCormick, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” O‘Kane had announced, Brush concealed behind a closet door on the landing, Mart looking on as placidly as if they were discussing a change in the luncheon menu.
Mr. McCormick glanced up quizzically from his cards. “B-bad n-news?” he echoed in a kind of bray.
O‘Kane steeled himself. “I’ll come right to the point, sir: your mother’s died. Last night. Peacefully. In her sleep.” He paused. “She was eighty-eight.”
For a long while Mr. McCormick merely sat there, looking up at him out of a neutral face, the last card arrested in his hand. He cleared his throat as if he were about to say something, then turned back to the table before him and laid the card at the head of one of the four neatly aligned rows. After a while he glanced up again, and he had a sly secretive look on his face, as if he’d just gotten away with something. “I won’t be going to the funeral,” he said.
Outwardly, he showed nothing, but you could see he was grieving, as he had for Dr. Hoch, and O‘Kane kept waiting for some sort of manic episode, especially when the news of Mr. Harold McCormick’s divorce broke. The first O’Kane heard of it was when he came into work one morning and all Mr. McCormick could talk about was the subject of divorce—divorce in all its legal, historical and anthropological ramifications, how so-and-so had divorced his wife of thirty years and what King Henry the Eighth had done and how the Trobriand Islanders would kill and eat their wives on divorcing them and offer the choicest morsels to their in-laws, if savages could be said to have in-laws, and how did he, Eddie, feel about the subject? He’d been divorced, hadn’t he? From what-was-her-name, Rosaleen?
O‘Kane had to admit that he hadn’t.
That stopped Mr. McCormick cold. They were outside at the time-they’d just come back from hurtling aimlessly round the property at a pace that varied from a jog to a sprint—and Mr. McCormick blinked at him in incredulity. “You mean you—all these years—and she, she—all by herself? Or maybe, maybe even with, with other men?”
Mart, still heaving for breath, was looking on. They were at the front door and Butters was there, his nose in the air, holding the door stiffly open for them. “I, uh, I guess I never told you—remember when she had to leave to go back and nurse her mother? And her brother, the one that had brain cancer?”
Mr. McCormick gave him a blank look. He probably didn’t recall much from those days. In fact, O‘Kane was amazed that he’d remembered Rosaleen’s name.
“Well,” O‘Kane said, painting the picture with his hands, “sad to say but she caught the brain cancer from him and died. So I’m a widower, really. A widower—that’s what I am.”
Mr. McCormick seemed satisfied with the explanation, but when they got back upstairs and settled into the parlor, he became agitated all over again. “Here,” he said, “here, look at this,” and he thrust a pile of newspaper clippings into O‘Kane’s lap, clippings that hadn’t actually been clipped, since he wasn’t allowed access to scissors, but which he’d painstakingly creased and torn out of the papers.
The first headline read HARVESTER PRES TO DIVORCE ROCKE- FELLERHEIR, and there were half a dozen more of that ilk. It seemed that Harold, who was now president of International Harvester since Cyrus Jr. had retired, was divorcing Edith, to whom he’d been married for twenty-six years. She’d spent the last eight years in Switzerland as a devotee and disciple of Karl Jung and his school of psychoanalysis, and Harold, who was the playboy of the family, fond of fancy clothes, expensive cars, airplanes and women, had fallen for the Polish diva, Ganna Walska. A dark and fleshy beauty, Madame Walska was once widowed and twice divorced at thirty, and she was twenty years Harold’s junior. And she couldn’t sing, not a note—or not enough to keep people from stampeding for the exits, anyway.
After O‘Kane had read through the articles and handed them to Mart for his perusal, he looked up into Mr. McCormick’s expectant face and shrugged. “It happens sometimes, Mr. McCormick,” he said, “you know that. It’s nothing to get excited about.”
“No, no,” he said, rapid-fire, and the floor turned to magma suddenly and he had to hop from foot to foot, “no, no, you don‘t, don’t understand. He’s the president, he’s the president, and he could, I could—Katherine. I could divorce Katherine.”
The idea remained fixed in Mr. McCormick’s brain for some time, and when he wasn’t debating its finer points in a high ragged voice, he was brooding over it in a chasm of silence. If Harold could divorce, then so could he. But if he got divorced, then he wouldn’t have Katherine, and if he didn’t have Katherine who would be his wife and run his affairs for him? And he loved Katherine, didn’t he? Even if she was running around with other men and that Mrs. Roessing? On and on it went, round and round, like a dog chasing its tail.
Meanwhile, Harold’s situation only got worse. Because after his divorce was granted and Edith got custody of the children and the better part of their joint property, including their Lake Forest mansion, the Villa Turicum, which she would convert into a “Mecca for devotees of psychoanalysis,” Ganna Walska turned around and married an American millionaire by the name of Alexander Smith Cochran. Harold was devastated and the press howled with delight. But then, a year later, Madame Walska jettisoned Alexander Smith Cochran and married Harold, but only on condition that he finance her operatic tour of America, replete with the finest choruses, orchestras, costumes and staging money could buy. Again the press howled in derision and howled so vociferously and at such length that Harold was forced to step down as president of the Harvester Company in the wake of the scandal.
All this Mr. McCormick seemed to absorb with a growing sense of despair and gloom till the day came when he wouldn’t get out of bed. O‘Kane arrived to find Dr. Brush and Mart trying to reason with him. Wouldn’t he like to get up now and have a nice shower bath? No, he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t he like breakfast? No. A drive? A movie? A concert with Mr. Eldred? No, no and no. Well, and what seemed to be the problem? He wouldn’t say. But after Dr. Brush and Mart had gone out in the hallway to consult, Mr. McCormick reached into the breast pocket of his blue silk pajamas and handed O’Kane a newspaper clipping folded so rigorously and so repeatedly it had been reduced to the size of a matchbook. “Go ahead,” he said. “G-go ahead, Eddie—read it. Out loud.”
O‘Kane unfolded the pellet of newsprint, smoothed out the wrinkles on the table, and began to read:EX-HARVESTER PRES TO HAVE MONKEY GLAND TRANSPLANT
Mr. Harold McCormick, former president of International Harvester, whose sudden marriage last year to the Polish chanteuse, Madame Ganna Walska, rocked the company and scandalized the nation, has gone into hospital in Chicago for urologic surgery. His surgeon, Dr. V P. Lespinasse, known as “the dean of gland transplantation,” is said to be experimenting with the use of monkey glands to improve Mr. McCormick’s chances of fathering children with his young wife. Madame Walska had no comment, except to say that her husband was “insatiable in his search for the realization of the physical demands of marriage—insatiable because they were unattainable for him anymore.”
When he looked up, Mr. McCormick was wearing the strangest expression on his face, as if he’d just pulled himself up onto solid ice only to have it give way and plunge him back into the dark chilling waters all over again. “Monkeys,” he said bitterly, “why does it always have to be monkeys?”
And then there was the earthquake.
It struck just before seven on June 29, 1925, and it flipped O‘Kane up into the air above his bed, where he’d been sleeping off the effects of several boilermakers and a woman whose name he couldn’t remember, turned him over and dropped him back down again as neatly as an omelet flipped in a pan. Everything in his field of vision was alive, just like in his hallucinations the last time he’d given up drinking, but this was no hallucination. The painting over the bed came down on him, impaling one of the gamboling kittens on the bedpost, the wardrobe skittered across the room and toppled with a crash, plaster rained down, and stil
l everything shook and danced and jittered as if the floor was electrified. It was exactly like being on a train coming into the station and the engineer hauling too hard on the brakes.
After pulling on his pants and shoes, O‘Kane rushed headlong into the hall, where dust infested the air and the banister on the landing had given way in a conspiracy of splintered wood. Below, in Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s immaculate parlor, a welter of bricks and lath lay scattered over the carpet, and he could see where the building next door had poked its elbow through the wall. Like the hero he was, O’Kane assisted all the ladies out into the street and then spent the next ten hours running from one place to another, rescuing a child here, battling flames there, mad with the adrenal rush of it, soot-blackened and bleeding and hatless and shirtless, galvanized in the moment.
When the dust cleared, it was found that most of the older buildings in town were destroyed or severely damaged—the Fithian Building, the Mortimer Cook Building, St. Francis Hospital, the Potter Theater, the Diblee Mansion on the mesa to the south of town, the old Spanish Mission itself—and that three people had been killed (two of them when a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank crashed through the roof of the Arlington Hotel) and more than fifty injured. President Coolidge ordered the USS Arkansas up from San Diego to give medical aid and detach a squadron of marines to patrol the streets against looters.
Telephone lines were down, of course, and it was past five before O‘Kane was able to get news of Riven Rock. He could picture the whole place in ruins—there was no way in the world that rigid rock structure could have survived such a shaking—and he thought about Mr. McCormick, sure, but it was Giovannella he was most worried for. Giovannella, who’d been in command of the kitchen four years now without incident, Giovannella, his sworn enemy who shrugged off his every advance and yet threw up the children to him constantly—yes, children: the infant girl she gave birth to in the summer of 1920 was named Edwina and had the same glaucous Dingle Bay eyes as little Guido. He loved her. He worshiped her. Mooned at her from the kitchen doorstep (he was forbidden to set foot inside), wrote her impassioned letters (which she never opened), begged her to—yes—marry him. That Giovannella. Giovannella Dimucci Capolupo, the most stubborn woman on God’s green earth, mother of his children, the love of his life—“You had your chance, Eddie,” she said, “and you wasted it”—he was worried for her.
He was battling a blaze in a lunchroom down near the foot of State Street with an army of boys and men and soot-blackened women in kerchiefs—the bucket brigade, up from the sea, hand over hand—when he saw O‘Mara limping up the street toward him. “O’Mara!” he shouted, dropping the bucket at his feet and rushing across the shattered pavement to grab the man by the narrow wedge of his shoulders. “What happened out there? Is anybody hurt?”
O‘Mara gave him a distant look, as if he didn’t recognize him, but that was because of his wandering eyes, which you never could pin down. “The garage collapsed,” he said, shaking out a cigarette and putting a match to it, “and all the cars got crushed. Fucking destroyed, every one of them.”
“And the house?”
“Still standing. There’s nobody hurt but Caesar Bisordi’s wife out in the cottages—the roof fell in on her—and I’m the one Hull sent into town to fetch a doctor, as if I could find one in all this mess.”
O‘Kane turned directly away from him and started out on foot, and all those paradisiacal hills and beaches were turned hellish, fires everywhere, cars wrapped around trees and standing up to their skirts in ditches, and everything so absolutely hushed and silent you would have thought the word had gone deaf. He reached Riven Rock by six-thirty and found Mr. McCormick, preternaturally excited, out on the lawn in the company of Mart and Dr. Brush and one of the huskier laborers, surveying the damage. “Eddie!” he cried out when he saw O’Kane coming up the drive, “we’ve had a terrible big pounding here, worse than anything you ever saw. It—it blew out all the windows and look there at where the stone facing came loose....” He paused to catch his breath. “But you—you’re naked, Eddie. And you’ve got no hat—”
“I’m all right, Mr. McCormick, don’t you worry about me—I’m just glad to see you’re safe and well. It was pretty bad down there,” addressing them all now. “You should see It—the city’s pretty well destroyed, streetcars lying on their sides, houses tumbled into the street, fires everywhere. And dust—Jesus, I had to clamp a rag over my mouth to keep from choking on it. I got here as soon as I could—and I had to walk the whole way.”
Brush began to bluster out some nonsense about the milk cows and roosters sounding the alarm just before the tremor hit, and everyone began talking at once. O‘Kane turned to Mart. “How’s Giovannella?” he asked, but before Mart could answer, Mr. McCormick came right up to them, looming and twitching. “And you’re, you’re bleeding—you know that, Eddie? You—you’re naked and you-you’re bleeding—”
“It’s nothing,” O‘Kane said, and he looked into his employer’s face and smelled the rankness of his breath and saw the frenzy building in his eyes and gave Mart a nod: this was when he was most likely to bolt.
“Eddie, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding—”
“She’s okay,” Mart said, stepping back a pace to avoid Mr. McCormick and giving O‘Kane a look that could have meant anything. “She’s in the kitchen.”
“Yes,” Brush boomed, closing in on them with his arms spread wide just as Mr. McCormick shied away, “the house stood up pretty nicely, considering the magnitude of this thing—they’re saying it’s the worst earthquake since the one that hit Tokyo two years back or even the ought-six quake in San Francisco, for the main and simple ... but go ahead, Eddie, go on in there and get yourself cleaned up and see to the cook. We didn’t want to bring her out here, of course,” he said, lowering his voice, “because of Mr. McCormick—and don’t worry about him, we’ve got Mr. Vitalio here to see to his needs.” He glanced up to where Mr. McCormick was now pacing up and down the sward in front of the house, as agitated as he’d been over the gopher, and then he glanced at the laborer, a big black-haired wop with muscles you could see through his shirt. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Vitalio?”
The wop glanced uneasily at Mr. McCormick’s manic figure, as if he was expected to wrestle him to the ground at any moment—which he might well have to do before the day was out—and then he turned back to Dr. Brush and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s right,” he said.
“Okay, then”—O‘Kane was already turning away—“I’m going to go in and see about Giovannella.”
But before he could escape, Brush caught him by the arm. “Oh, Eddie, I almost forgot: we might have to move Mr. McCormick into the theater building—just till we have somebody come out to see whether the house is safe or not—and I’ll want you to stay here tonight, for the main and simple reason that it’ll help calm him and we can’t really expect to see Nick or Patrick anytime soon, can we?”
O‘Kane just nodded, and then he broke away, trotted up the drive and went round back of the house and into the kitchen. The place was shadowy and dark—the lights were out, of course—and there was litter everywhere. All the pots and pans had come down from their hooks, the cabinet drawers had disgorged their contents and jerked themselves out onto the floor, the stove was shoved out from the wall and the big meat locker in the back was tilted crazily against the doorframe. “Giovannella?” he called. “Giovannella? Are you there?”
At first there was no response, and he waded into the gloom, kicking aside saucepans, cheese graters and broken crockery, glass everywhere. “Giov? You here?”
Just then an aftershock hit the place with a sudden wallop, as if the earth were a long raveling whip and the house and kitchen riding on the business end of it. Things fell. Plaster sifted down. There was a clatter and a boom and then everything was still again. That was when Giovannella cried out—and it wasn’t a shriek of terror or a plea or a cry for help so much as a curse of frustration and rage.
He found her in the broom closet, trembling, her eyes climbing out of her head, and her clothes—apron, dress, stockings, shoes, all of it—steaming and wet with what he at first took to be blood. His heart froze. She looked up at him, her legs folded under her, her clothes saturated not with blood, he saw now—and smelled, smelled it too—but marinara sauce, and every emotion was concentrated in her eyes. “Eddie,” she said. Just that: “Eddie.”
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, his chest and arms filthy, a crust of blood like a badge over his right nipple; she was crumpled in the closet, as wet and redolent as a meatball. She’d cleaned up the kitchen three times already, working like a slave, like a maniac, and three times the after-shocks had brought everything down again, including the big pot of sauce she was making to feed everybody, because there was nothing, nothing to eat, and the poor people in the cottages with their stoves collapsed and their iceboxes smashed, what were they going to do? He saw it all in an instant, and if he needed the details to complete the picture, he would get them later, when night had fallen and there was no light but for the kerosene lanterns and Mr. McCormick was settled in the theater building and everybody on the estate had eaten sandwiches with fresh-squeezed orange juice and he took her deep into the big deserted stone house and found a bed and lay in it with her till the light came and he never wanted to get up again.
As for Mr. McCormick, he adapted readily enough to the theater building while repairs went on in the main house (after a short but violent period of adjustment, that is), but all the spirit seemed to have gone out of him when the earth stopped shaking. There was no novelty anymore, nothing new, and he sank back into the morass of his hopeless and stultified mind, so that by the time Dr. Kempf came to redeem him he’d regressed so far that O‘Kane and Mart had to drag him into the shower bath each morning, force the deadweight of his limbs into his clothes and spoon-feed him at the table. And that was no pleasure at all.
