Kate stopped. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t her sister’s fault. She put her head down on the cold table. “I’m just—” But what was she, exactly?
“I’ll make tea,” Laura said.
“I’d rather have coffee.” Kate’s head ached and her thoughts oozed inside her skull.
“We’ll never sleep if we have coffee.”
“We’re not going to sleep no matter what.” The Merchant Marine!
Laura took down the percolator and began to scoop out the coffee grounds. It was calming, watching her move around the room with her familiar, gliding, water-bird movements. Kate unbuttoned her overcoat and threw it over a chair. She unlaced her sopping shoes and peeled off her stockings. “Well,” she said, “at least everyone is all right.” Not dead, she meant.
Laura wheeled around, the aluminum percolator glittering in her hand like a medieval weapon. “All right?” she repeated, alight with fury. “Who’s all right? Mother is beside herself. God knows what Charlie is enduring, and with his asthma! He couldn’t possibly know what he was letting himself in for. And I’m supposed to get married at Christmas! I will, too, don’t think I won’t. If anyone thinks a stupid stunt like this could stop me.”
Oh, you had to admire Laura. At eight she had spit at a boy on the street who’d called Charlie a sissy. At twelve, ice skating alone on the pond, she had sprained her ankle and hobbled all the way home, her face gray with pain. At fifteen, when their father went to France, she learned how to drive because their mother couldn’t. How Kate had loved speeding along beside the bay with her sister, their hair blowing, sea gulls keeping pace high in the blue sky. “What will happen to Mother?” Kate asked. “Will she agree to move in with you and Thomas?”
“With me and Thomas?” Laura stared at her, her eyes glittering like her ring.
“She can’t live alone, can she?” Kate said. “The way she is?”
“No, of course she can’t!”
“Then I don’t see—”
But suddenly she did see.
“No,” she said. “I won’t. I absolutely won’t.”
“You have to,” Laura said.
“Anyway,” Kate said, “you can’t get married without Charlie.”
Laura banged the percolator onto the stove. “He knows when the wedding is,” she said.
There’s something wrong with me, Kate thought. Amiss, askew. She had the wrong thoughts, wanted the wrong things. A cuckoo in the nest, an ugly duckling. What had made her like this? Every time she tried to think about it, a fog rose up. It was like at the end of a movie when darkness closes in from the edges of the screen until the kiss of the reunited lovers, or the iron bars of the jail cell where the criminal is imprisoned, or the endless field of long grass waving is blacked out.
Marriage, of course, had always been their mother’s ambition for her girls. For Charlie, too, but not in the same way. But anyone could see what happened when you married: life became a thicket of china patterns and babies. Kate wanted—desperately—to go to college.
Her mother, ladling soup into bowls at this very table, had said: “It’s a waste of money.”
“Waste?” Kate had repeated. “A waste?” All those years of learning: to just stop, that would be the waste! It was as though you brought a child up to the age of five and then, just when it had learned to dress itself, you smothered it.
“People go to school until they finish,” her mother said. “Then they’re done.”
“I’m not done,” Kate said. “I’m not finished.”
“Bring these bowls to the table, please.”
Kate flounced to the stove.
“Use a cloth,” her mother warned. “They’re hot.”
But Kate carried the bowls in her naked hands.
The clock chimed six, and Laura and Charlie appeared. “What’s going on?” Laura asked, looking back and forth between her mother and sister.
“If you don’t let me go, I’ll die!” Kate said. Her heart would seize up like a poorly maintained engine and give out.
“College is not for women!” Her mother was shouting now, although before their father died, she had prided herself on never shouting. “Women who go to college end up as marginal people! What would you be fit for then?”
Kate stared at her mother, who would rather her daughter die than become a marginal person. A person people like herself wouldn’t want to know.
“Honestly, Mother,” Laura said. “I don’t see how Kate can get any odder than she already is. Thomas says he doesn’t know how the two of us can have come from the same womb.”
“Sit down!” their mother said. “Eat your soup. Charlie, take some butter for your bread.” But Charlie, though physically sitting on his chair, his curls untidy and his old shirt frayed at the cuffs though there were perfectly good shirts neatly folded in his bureau drawer, had absented himself in every way that mattered. Mrs. Croft turned back to Kate. “I don’t know why you want to torture me!” she said.
“I don’t!” Kate cried. “I just—”
“Spoiled!” her mother interrupted. “We spoiled you, your father and I! All of you children. Telling ourselves spanking was barbaric. Telling ourselves a child’s individuality ought to be cultivated.” It was true; they had done that.
“No,” Laura soothed. “No, Mama. You were wonderful parents.”
“Please let me go,” Kate begged.
“Why not let her?” Laura said. “Otherwise she’ll be living here forever!”
“Nonsense,” their mother said. “Kate has many talents. And she’s not unattractive. There are plenty of men who might …”
Kate could not speak. She felt flayed, boiled. Her flesh clung to her like a cloak of maggots. She wished she could burn away to nothing—blow away to nowhere. Better still, to be the fire, to be the wind! Sunlight, hurricane, earthquake. Pure thought. “Father would have let me go!”
“If your father were here right now, you wouldn’t dare speak to me that way!” her mother shouted.
“I wouldn’t have to, because he would take my side!”
But in fact, she didn’t know if he would have or not. She might have the gift of patience; she might see clearly. But she was still a girl.
“Ungrateful!” their mother raged. “Even when you were a baby, you were like that. Screaming when anyone picked you up! Turning your head when I tried to feed you! Refusing to sleep!”
“I was a baby!” Kate cried. “You can’t hold that against me!”
Her mother picked Kate’s spoon out of her bowl and flung it across the kitchen. Soup sprayed onto the floor and up the clean white walls. “When your husband is killed in a war he had no business in, you can talk to me about what’s fair,” she said.
That summer, with high school behind her and the empty future stretching out to the horizon, Kate began to have trouble sleeping. At night she lay like a stone listening to the old house creak and sigh, feeling the air settling over her like a shroud. One morning, the air in her bedroom was so thick it was impossible to get up. Outside the door, footsteps pattered, doors banged, people called up and down the stairs. A while later, someone began playing a Chopin mazurka on the piano. Every note jangled her brain, and she pulled herself under the covers like a turtle. She hugged her knees and rocked, a hard bundle of darkness in the darkness.
Sometime later, the door banged open and her mother, coming in with a duster and seeing a body in the bed, shrieked, then recovered herself and threw the covers back. “What’s wrong with you, Kathleen? Are you sick?”
“I’m tired,” Kate said scratchily, tugging the sheet back up. “I didn’t sleep well.”
Her mother’s cold hand clapped down on her clammy brow. “You’re pale as a ghost.” No need to say out loud what she was thinking: If only your father were here.
“I’m fine. I just need to sleep.”
But she could not sleep. For a day and a night she lay staring at the inside of her eyelids, wide awake.
On the third day, her mother called Dr. Lawrence, who had been a friend and colleague of Kate’s father. He came to the house and examined her, taking her pulse and listening to her heart, frowning thoughtfully. “She’s all right, Abby,” he said to Mrs. Croft, standing just outside the door where Kate could hear every word. He prescribed licorice powder and a boiled diet. “It sometimes happens to girls at this age. Perhaps there’s a young man involved.”
“A young man!” Mrs. Croft scoffed. “This one won’t give the time of day to young men. She wants to go to college, she says!”
“College?” The doctor and her mother were moving away down the hall, their voices growing fainter.
Kate could hear the stairs groan, the high, distraught timbre of her mother’s voice, but she could not make out the words. Then nothing: just the frantic whirring of the cicadas in the trees outside her window, and a car passing by on the avenue, and the distant rhythmic chanting of a jump-rope song.
Sometime later, her mother banged back into the room. “I’ve written to Cornell University,” she said. “You can enroll in the agricultural school for nothing. But don’t go blaming me if it doesn’t work out!”
Kate stared up at her mother. Her hair was streaked with white like a badger’s fur, and her skin was gray. A button on her black dress hung by a thread. “When do I leave?” Kate said.
The morning after Kate’s late-night arrival, there was a family conference: Kate, Laura, their mother, and Thomas. The stated purpose was to decide what to do, though this apparently meant different things to different people. Mrs. Croft wanted to discuss how to “rescue” Charlie—how to get him home. Laura and Thomas, who understood that this was impossible, wanted to discuss logistics moving forward. Kate, who agreed with them, wanted to discuss logistics, too, but her idea of what should happen next was not at all like theirs. Kate liked Thomas well enough, but it felt wrong to have him taking part in an intimate family conversation: wrong to have him sitting on the gold brocade sofa, where Charlie should have been. Not to mention their father.
Mrs. Croft was wearing black, as she had in the early days of her widowhood. Her hair, already whiter than it had been when Kate had left last summer, was pulled severely back from her gaunt face. The bruised circles under her eyes were the size of silver dollars. She clutched Charlie’s letter in her hand, smoothed it on her black bombazine lap, peered at it through her smeared pince-nez on its silver chain. “If we could find out what ship he was on, maybe I could write to the captain and tell him to send him home.” She looked around at her remaining children with an eager, baffled, bruised-looking face. “Why would he do a thing like this?” she cried. “He was happy. He had friends. Everyone always loved Charlie! He was such a sweet, affectionate boy. Ladies would stop me on the street when I had him out in his carriage to tell me what a beautiful baby he was.”
“You never know what people are really thinking,” Thomas said soothingly. He was a tallish, nice-enough-looking young man in a well-cut suit. Sharp-eyed, with flat, slicked, brilliantined hair. Not as handsome as most of Laura’s boyfriends had been, but richer. “People aren’t rational, you know, never mind what Adam Smith said. In my experience, it’s always an expensive mistake to think they are. The question is, what do we do now?”
In the silence that followed this statement of the obvious, the ticking of the gilded mantel clock was audible for a long time.
“You couldn’t expect Charlie to stay at home forever,” Laura said. “Decisions would have to have been made sooner or later.”
“Decisions?” said Mrs. Croft. “What decisions?”
“The house is awfully big,” Thomas said.
“Not to mention expensive to maintain,” Laura said.
“The house?” their mother echoed, blinking. “This is the house where you were born.”
“The best thing,” Thomas said, “is to take professional advice. For example, we might consult Mr. Ewing.” Mr. Ewing was the family lawyer. “I’m sure if we called him, he would come see you tomorrow.”
“I need to go back to Ithaca tomorrow,” Kate said. She spoke loudly in case anyone planned to try to ignore her. “I can’t miss school.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” their mother said.
“This is important,” Laura said. “Don’t think you can avoid—”
“I can’t fall behind,” Kate interrupted. “Exams are coming up.”
“But,” their mother said. “Now that Charlie … Surely you see that everything has changed.”
“No!” Kate said. “I don’t see that at all!”
The bones of her mother’s face seemed to burn under the putty-colored skin. “I won’t pay,” she said. “I won’t pay for it anymore.”
“You don’t need to pay for it!” Kate cried. “It’s free!”
“Not your housing. Not your board!”
Kate stood up from the sofa where her father used to lie on Sunday afternoons, the newspaper over his face. “You promised me,” she said.
“Unnatural!” her mother cried. “Unnatural child!” In her black dress, the gauntness of her face sharpening her nose and chin, she looked more like a witch than ever. Kate could see her standing over her cauldron in the kitchen so many years ago, stirring and stirring the dark red brew.
She was halfway up the stairs when Laura caught up to her, caught her by the arm. “Mother is just upset,” she said. “You know she doesn’t mean it. If you’ll just stay, a little while. A couple of days—a week at most! We can work something out. Maybe you can transfer to a college in the city. Thomas and I could help with the tuition.”
Her sister’s hand was a rubbery vise, a tentacle sucking her down. Kate yanked herself free, almost tumbling backward down the steps.
“Careful!” Laura cried. “Why do you always have to act like a wild animal!” She loomed over Kate in her good wool dress and heavy dark hair, her smell thick and yeasty under her lilac perfume.
Kate pressed herself against the balusters. The air seemed as devoid of oxygen as though all the plants on the shivering planet had withered away. She thought of the greenhouse, of the leafy coleus plants in their tranquil rows, vigorously alchemizing CO2. “Keep your money,” she said.
CHAPTER 8
At the station, Kate discovered barely enough money in her purse to buy a ticket. Her mother’s monthly bank deposit, due next week, couldn’t be expected now. The heat on the train was out of order. The passengers huddled in their seats as they lurched north, stamping their feet like horses, their breath hanging in clouds.
At the boardinghouse, there was a note from Thatch. It had been printed in pencil on graph paper in small letters:
Dear Kate,
Where did you go? Dr. Krause was angry that you missed lab yesterday. I can’t believe you’d be foolish enough to run away just because you were mad about something that doesn’t mean anything. Dr. Krause asked me what happened to you, and I said you must be sick. He said would I make sure you know that he wants to see you in his office.
You owe me for lying, because I don’t think you really are sick, any more than he does.
Yours truly,
John Thatcher (Thatch)
Could Thatch really think she had skipped lab because she found out he was getting paid? The idea made her sad, and then it made her angry. She crumpled up the note and tossed it away.
In the morning, she was waiting in the hallway outside Dr. Krause’s office when he arrived in his heavy overcoat and Russian fur hat, his beard dripping as the frozen condensation of his breath began to thaw. “You missed lab, Miss Croft,” he said, rattling his keys. “Which, as you know, meets only once a week.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “There was a family emergency.”
Dr. Krause
unlocked the door and went stiffly in. She followed, standing to the side while he removed his coat, unwound his scarf, and pulled off his leather gloves, huffing and coughing. When at last he sat down behind his desk, she sat, too, on the edge of a well-worn Cornell insignia chair piled with scientific journals. Dr. Krause picked up his pipe and banged it out into a green glass ashtray. “I gave you a position as a research assistant, Miss Croft. I did not report you to anybody for moving into a storage room in Roberts Hall. Do you understand that these things were not nothing?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You want me to believe you are serious, yet you do not come to my lab, which you know is an essential part of class. The most essential part!” The ends of his spittle-flecked lips sagged. “A family emergency, you say. Somebody died?”
“No.”
He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he began again in the same monotonous, haranguing tone. “I overlooked a lot when I gave you that position,” he said. “Most people, you know, would not even have considered giving a job like that to a girl. Do you know the reason? Because young women don’t take this work seriously! That’s why.” He shook the empty pipe at her.
“I do take it seriously,” Kate said. “I do.” There was a liverish stain on the lapel of his jacket, and his beard looked more disheveled than she remembered.
“I could change my mind about that job,” he said “There are lots of other students I could give it to. Reliable students. Serious students!”
Job, he said. But you got paid for a job.
Out the window, the white campus sparkled under the snow: light, fine snow that lay like a great puffy cloud over the lawns and roofs. Narrow paths crisscrossed the campus in an intricate pattern, connecting buildings. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it, and trees held their white-clad branches high. The world on this hill overlooking the Cayuga Valley felt clean and new and bracing. She could not bear to leave it. “It won’t happen again,” she said.
“John Thatcher said you were sick. Well: people do get sick. But they could send a message.”
In the Field Page 6