“It’s good to see you again, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, turning back to him, but she didn’t smile and she didn’t hold out her hand. She nodded brusquely to her companion. “Mr. O’Kane, Mrs. Roessing. Jane, Mr. O‘Kane.”
O‘Kane gave them each a tight little grin, the sort of grin the hyena might give the lion while backing away from a carcass on the ancestral plains. He was feeling woozy. Sam Wah must have poured half a gallon of rum into that punch — and God knew what else.
“Have a seat, Mr. O‘Kane,” Katherine said, and she was pacing back and forth now.
He did as he was told, lowering himself gingerly to the very edge of the wing chair opposite Mrs. Roessing.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m back,” Katherine said, “and that I plan to be here for the next two weeks, seeing to estate matters, and that Jane — Mrs. Roessing — will be assisting me. Then I’ve got to get back to Washington and don’t know when I’ll return. Now: how is my husband — in your opinion? Any change?”
“He’s more or less the same.”
“And what does that mean? No improvement at all?”
O‘Kane was ready to tell her what she wanted to hear, that her husband was advancing like a star pupil, making a nimble run at sanity, needing only time and money and the ministrations of girls, women and bearded hags to make him whole again, but the alcohol tripped him up. “A little,” he shrugged. “We’ve let him have a carpet in the upper parlor again, and he’s been very good about it. And he’s been running quite a bit — for his exercise.”
“Running?” She paused in mid-step, her eyes slicing into him.
“Yes. He seems to want to run lately — when we accompany him on his daily walk, Mart and me, that is. And we took him for a drive a few weeks back, and he seemed to enjoy it.”
“And that’s it? That’s the extent of his improvement as you see it — running? Well let me tell you, I’ve just got off the phone with him and he seems as confused as ever — or more so. And irritating”—this for the redhead, with a nod and a martyred look. “Stanley can be irritating.”
“With all due respect, Mrs.”—he almost slipped and called her Katherine—“Mrs. McCormick, and I’m no doctor, but I do feel your presence excites him and he’s not himself, not at all—”
Another look for Mrs. Roessing. “Yes, that’s what every male doctor and every male nurse has been telling me for twelve years and more now. ”
Katherine surprised him then — shocked him, actually. Suddenly she had a cigarette in her hand, as if she’d conjured it out of thin air, and she crossed the room to Mrs. Roessing and asked her for a light in a low hum that said all sorts of things to him. He watched in silence as the two women bent their heads together and Katherine lit her cigarette from the smoldering tip of Mrs. Roessing’s.
“And Dr. Hoch,” Katherine said, exhaling. “His health, I mean — he’s holding up? Spending time each day with my husband?”
O‘Kane looked from one woman to the other. He hadn’t even heard the question. Katherine was smoking. He’d never dreamed — not her. She might have been Queen of the Ice Queens, but she was a lady, a lady above all — and ladies didn’t smoke. But then he’d suspected all along that this sort of thing went hand-in-hand with marching in the streets and emancipation and all the rest of it. Radicals, that’s what they were. Pants wearers. She-men.
“Mr. O‘Kane?”
“Hm?”
Katherine’s face was like an ax. It chopped at him in the screaming light. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
He tried to put on one of his faces, Eddie O‘Kane of the silver tongue, one of the world’s great liars. “Noooo,” he protested. “I, just — I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all.”
That brought the redhead to her feet, those fine legs flexing, the holly-green dress in a frenzy of motion. The two exchanged a look. “You haven’t been running a fever, have you?” It was Mrs. Roessing talking now, and she had one of those elemental voices that gets inside you to the point where you want to confess to anything. “A kind of grippe of the lower stomach? Runs?”
O‘Kane was confused. His face was hot. Both women loomed over him. “I — no. No, it’s not that, it’s, uh — my head. My head aches, that’s all. Just a bit, the tiniest bit.”
“The chauffeur — Roscoe — he was ill, wasn’t he?
O‘Kane nodded.
“The grippe?”
“That’s right.”
Katherine spoke up again now, and her face was so pale you would have thought she’d been embalmed. “And my husband? He, he hasn’t been sick—?”
And that was how O‘Kane, drunk on Chinese Christmas punch and caught between two fraught and ashen women, learned that the Spanish influenza, which was to kill twice as many people worldwide as the War itself, had arrived in Santa Barbara.
One of the first to go was Mrs. Goux, the thick-ankled woman from the winery who trundled up and down the street each morning with an air of invincibility, trailing children and parcels and one very dirty white dog. She left behind a distraught husband and a grief-addled brood of seven, all of them howling from the upstairs windows that gave onto State Street across from Mrs. Fitzmaurice‘s, and that was depressing enough, but before anybody could catch their breath the husband and four of the children died writhing in their blankets with temperatures of a hundred and a six. Then it was Wilson, the greengrocer, a man in his thirties with the shoulders of a fullback and great meaty biceps who’d never been sick a day in his life. He told his wife he was feeling a little dyspeptic the day after Christmas and she chalked it up to overindulgence, plain and simple, and wouldn’t hear a word of the hysteria boiling up around her — not until he died two days later, that is. Their eldest son came down with it next — he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen — and Wilson’s brother Chas, who ran the ice company, and Chas’s wife, and they were all three of them dead and laid out by the New Year.
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.