Riven Rock

EPILOGUE. 1947, World Without Walls

And so he died a prisoner, Stanley Robert McCormick, seventy-two years old and his hair white as bone, handsome, tall and bereft till the last. Nurse Gleason was gone, along with her stalwart charms, and Muriel gave up visiting for her own life, and though the new doctor — Dr. Russell — had a shining golden buttercup of a secretary and there was a dietician with two breasts roaming around somewhere in the depths of the house and the Italian woman, Eddie O‘Kane’s wife, cooked on in the kitchen, Stanley never got to touch any of them or hold them in his arms the way his mother had held him or the way Katherine had. She came to visit almost every day, Katherine, or every other day, because sometimes he didn’t want to see her, just refused, flatly and absolutely, and no one to make him say different, and she came haunting the streets all the way from her house in downtown Santa Barbara with the grand modern rooms and the gymnasium she’d built for him to use when he came visiting, but he never came visiting.

He couldn’t touch her either, because he’d been up in the Yukon Territory with Sitka Charley and the Malemute Kid and whole considerable teams of dogs and she wasn’t woman enough for him — no, she was an old lady, of the very properest and stiffest sort, and she sat and read to him from the paper and made him kiss her on the cheek every time she came and went. Then he became ill with pneumonia and all the florid faces and vivid formless things came back to him again and inhabited him and raised an unholy yowl of voices inside him, and the Judges were there too in their flapping black robes and no surcease. He was thirty-one years old when he was blocked the first time and he was worth six million dollars and he knew all about that because he was the comptroller and could add up two columns of figures as well as any man or mathematician alive. And when he died finally and was finally released into a world without walls or bars or restraints, he was worth thirty-four million and more, because it wasn’t his money they’d locked up — it was his body. And his mind.

Katherine inherited that money, all of it, and everything else too — the properties in Chicago that were minted of gold, the securities and stocks, Stanley’s eight grades of underwear and the house at Riven Rock with the bars on the windows and the eighty-seven acres with their views of the stunned and scoured islands and the nurses who were all through with nursing now. She sold the estate to pay the inheritance taxes and she took what was left to seed the causes and institutions she believed in — MIT, the League of Women Voters, the Santa Barbara Art Museum and Dr. Gregory Pincus, an old friend of Roy Hoskins, who developed a little yellow progesterone-based pill that would free women forever from sexual constraint. All that was to the good, but she lost the court case, despite what the newspapers said. Kempf was sent packing, that much she’d accomplished, but the McCormicks were still there in all their obstinacy and immovability and the judge had added three whisker-pulling male physicians to the board of guardians and all the wrangling went on and on. It was a partial victory, she supposed, but there was little consolation in that. Because she never did get the thing she wanted most — her husband — not until he was dead.

And by then it was too late.