by T. C. Boyle
Katherine was thirty-two, a newlywed who might as well have been a widow. Stanley was beyond her now, locked away in the prison of his excoriated mind, but she was hopeful of a cure, always hopeful, and she wasn’t about to be cowed by anyone. She swooped in low over the plate of fresh orange and pineapple slices that lay like a gauntlet on the low table between them and cut Bentley off in the middle of an unpunctuated sentence. “So what you’re saying, in crude terms, is that you want to buy me off—is that it?”
Bentley had been leaning forward in his seat and idly rubbing at the place on his right calf where the garter was cutting into his flesh, but now he jerked upright like one of those mechanical bell-ringers carved into a village clock in the Tyrol. Before she’d finished he was sputtering and blustering for all he was worth. “Not at all, not at all,” he was saying, and he just had to spring up and pace round the room, protesting and expostulating and waving his hands like flags of truce. “It was just that the family thought that under the circumstances it would be more convenient for you if perhaps the marriage were terminated—or annulled, we could arrange that, no problem there—and of course the first thing we thought of was your comfort and accommodation, and please forgive me if I feel obliged, through my legal training, to attach a specific sum to such considerations....”
She wasn’t going to let them get to her, no matter how exhausted she was or how much her head ached and her nose dripped. And she wasn’t going to be talked down to like one of the empty-headed heiresses and overfed widows they’d grown sleek on, and she knew the type, weak as watered milk, running round in a dither till the big strong lawyer and the big strong doctor took charge of all their little trials and tribulations. “What about my marriage vows?” she said, making sure to enunciate each word even as she pressed the handkerchief to her recalcitrant nose. “In sickness and in health, Mr. Bentley. What do you say to that?”
There was a silence. For once, Bentley had nothing to say—at least not immediately. She looked beyond him, out the open window to the veranda and the sea and the strange brown-girded islands across the channel. “My husband needs me,” she said, “now more than ever. Did that ever occur to you?”
This was Favill’s cue. He uncrossed his legs and planted his big feet firmly on the carpet, as if he were getting ready to spring at her. “But that’s just the point, Katherine. He doesn’t need you, not according to Dr. Meyer—or your own Dr. Hamilton either. Women upset him. They disturb him. And if it wasn’t for ... ,” he trailed off suggestively, watching her out of eyes the color of chopped liver.
“For what?” Suddenly her blood was up. It had been a long, frustrating day, the culmination of a frustrating week, month, year. She’d been obliged to breakfast that morning with her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sane sister, Anita, and the atmosphere had been so acidic that everything tasted like grapefruit and vinegar, and then she’d spent the forenoon with the new chauffeur grinding along an endless labyrinth of dusty roads in one of the two Packard motorcars the McCormicks insisted on Stanley’s having, trying to find the celebrated Montecito hot springs, where even now her mother was soaking her arthritic joints while Katherine was left alone here to fend off the McCormick hounds. “Go ahead,” she demanded, “say it: if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be like this. Isn’t that what you mean?”
Favill never took his eyes off her. He never so much as blinked. He didn’t give a damn for her and her Dexter heritage that went back to the founding of the Colonies and six centuries in England before that or the fact that she had her own fortune and could buy and sell any ten Indian chiefs—all he cared about was the McCormicks, parvenus one generation removed from the backwoods of Virginia, people who couldn’t even have licked her father’s boots. “More or less,” he said.
“No reason to be uncivil, Henry,” Bentley clucked, circling round them like the referee at a boxing match. He put his hands on the back of the chair in which he’d been sitting a moment before and leaned forward with an air of false intimacy, a lawyer right down to his socks. “No reason at all,” he said, addressing Katherine now. “But if you’ll forgive me, we have reason to believe that—how shall I say this?—that given Stanley’s mental and physical condition during the period of your connubial relations, the marriage was never, well—” He threw his hands in the air, like a Puritan at a peep show. “You’ve been trained in the sciences, Katherine. I think you know what I mean, from a biological standpoint, if not a legal one.”
So that was what this was all about.
She felt very tired all of a sudden, tired and defeated. The bastards. The unfeeling, unthinking, meretricious, sheet-sniffing bastards. They’d gone snooping after every last shameful shred of bile and gossip, interrogating chambermaids and butlers, extracting testimony from her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sisters and brothers and the team of psychiatrists they’d had swarming all over him since his breakdown, and they thought they had something on her, thought they could shame and bully her and beat her down. But they were wrong. She wouldn’t crack, she wouldn’t. She sat there like a pillar, though she hurt all the way through to the marrow and a hundred nights came back to her in a shattering rush and the look on Stanley’s face and his fright and rage and the unyielding impregnable fortress of his outraged flesh and impacted mind. She sat there and fought the itch in the back of her throat and the seepage in her sinuses. They wouldn’t dare talk to her like this if her mother were here. Or her father. But her mother was soaking her bones in a hot tin tub of mineral water in the middle of a dusty eucalyptus grove somewhere in the hills, and her father was eighteen years dead, another disappointment.
All right, she decided, if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way it would be. She stood. Rose so quickly that Favill had to spring from the chair like a bouncing ball to avoid being stranded there. Bentley looked deeply pained—or perhaps it was just constipation. “Did you—?” he began, exchanging a look with Favill. “Or rather, do you need some time to consider our proposal, because we’re perfectly willing, that is, we, I—”
Still she said nothing. She just stood there, her heart pounding, the hat clamped to her head like a war bonnet, staring them to shame. “I won’t bother showing you the door,” she said finally, and she couldn’t control the edge in her voice. “And you tell the McCormicks there’s no price in blood or money or all the kings’ ransoms in the world that could ever sway me, not one iota. I’ll be married to Stanley when you’re all in your graves, and he’s going to get well, he is, do you hear me? Do you?”
The next disappointment was Hamilton. Though he’d been tiptoeing around her, doing his whispery, smooth-talking, eye-flipping best to avoid putting her out in any way, shambling and shuffling and all but kissing the ground she walked on, he’d yet to relent on the one issue that mattered most: allowing her access to her husband. If she could only see Stanley, even for an hour, she knew she could help bring him out of it. The very sight of her would spark him, it would have to—for all anybody knew, he might think she’d deserted him. And even if his response was, well, difficult, at least it would be something, at least he’d know she was there still and that somebody besides his lantern-jawed nurses cared about him. Stanley had been at Riven Rock for just over a month now—and she’d given Hamilton that month, willingly, though she could hardly sleep for worry and felt like one of the walking dead dragging herself around the corridors of her mother’s house on Commonwealth Avenue and she hadn’t been to the theater or the symphony or even out to dinner—and now she wanted to exercise her rights and prerogatives as a wife, and not coincidentally as the patroness who signed the doctor’s checks and underwrote his ape colony. She’d waited long enough, she’d been patient, she’d listened to every excuse in the book and a whole codicil more. The time had come. Tonight—and she was determined in this—she would see Stanley.
But first, as the sun settled in to slather the sea and baste the pale walls and exotic trees till everything seemed to glow and drip with a thick oleag
inous light, Katherine went in to draw a bath and cleanse herself of Bentley and Favill and the lingering taint of the McCormicks. She knew they resented her, her mother-in-law in particular, as stifling and selfish a woman as ever walked the earth, but it was a shock to realize how deeply they must have despised her to unleash the dogs and set them on her without a second thought—and on her first day in Santa Barbara, no less. That hurt. On top of her headaches and her cold and everything else. She wasn’t looking for acceptance—she couldn’t have cared less about the McCormicks and their pathetic little circle—or even warmth, but civility, that much she expected. What did they think she was, some passing whim of Stanley’s? Another McCormick conquest—or purchase? Did they think they were the only ones pacing the floor at all hours of the night and so keyed up they couldn’t even keep a piece of toast on their stomach? She’d been there with him when he broke down. She’d seen the eyes recoil in his head, watched him punish the walls and the furniture and all the dumb objects that fell across his path. She was the one who’d had to listen to his ravings and lock the door of her bedroom and hide in the closet till she thought she was going to suffocate, she was the one who’d run from the house as if it was on fire. And where were the McCormicks then?
Standing there in the hotel bathroom, listening to the water thunder into the big porcelain tub while the brainless sun pressed at the windows and some alien bird croaked from the cover of the palms as if it were half dead and hoping something would come along and finish it off, she felt like crying all over again. She’d never felt so sick and miserable in her life, not even when they’d denied her admission to MIT and made her crawl on her belly through four years of basic science classes the boys had got in high school as a matter of course. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even decent. Favill she could understand—at least he was a real man, long-boned, big-shouldered, with an Ottawa chief’s blood in his veins and the power to crush his adversaries in a fair fight, but Bentley, Bentley was a worm, a creeping spineless thing that made its living in the gut of something greater, or at least larger. She had no respect for either of them, but even less for Bentley, if that was possible. He wasn’t even a man.
She studied her image in the mirror, staring into her own eyes till the moment passed. It was a trick she’d learned as a girl, a way of focusing her anger when they tried to beat her down, and they always tried to beat her down—boys, men, insinuating lawyers, smug administrators and hypocritical teachers alike. She remembered the chess club she’d organized at school in Chicago before her father died and they moved to Boston. It was a good school, the finest the city had to offer, catering to the children of the moneyed class and with no expense spared for teachers, books and facilities, but to Katherine’s mind the best thing about it was that the sexes weren’t segregated. Boys and girls sat side by side in the classroom, given equal access to the best that was known and thought in the world and encouraged to compete as equals. And when Katherine started up the club, her teacher, Mr. Gregson, an extremely old young man with a wispy two-pointed beard and the faraway look of a high-wire artist, encouraged her. At first. But she soon played herself out of competition with the other girls, who were only marginally interested in the game to begin with, and into the realm of the boys. And the boys played as if this game of war were war in fact and never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it. The club lasted two and a half weeks and Katherine took on all comers, the line of boys waiting to be the first of their fraternity to beat the girl sometimes four and five deep. But then all of a sudden Mr. Gregson discovered an obscure prohibition against board games buried deep in the school code, and the club was disbanded.
Steam rose. The water hissed and rumbled. She felt the cool of the tiles beneath her feet and the faintest touch of the steam against her skin, and it calmed her. She bent over the sink and shook out her hair. Loose and unpinned, it was an avalanche of hair, uncontainable, the hair of a wildwoman, an Amazon, and she threw back her head and teased it with her stiff fingers till it was wilder still. She wiped a palm across the glass and stood back for a better look. She saw a naked young woman with flaring eyes and aboriginal hair, strung tight as a bow with the calisthenics she sweated through each and every morning of her life, as fierce and hard and pure as any athlete, though the whole world saw her as nothing more than an ornament, another empty head for the milliner to decorate, one more useless mouth for chattering about the weather and plucking hors d‘oeuvres from the tip of a toothpick. But she wasn’t just another socialite, she was Katherine Dexter McCormick, and she was inflexible, She wouldn’t break—she wouldn’t even bend. She’d fought her way through the Institute against an all-male faculty and a ninety-nine-percent-male student body that howled in unison over the idea of a female in the sciences, and she would fight her way through this too. The McCormicks. They were poor, primitive people. Not worth another thought.
She pulled open the door. “Louisa!” she called, poking her head into the hall while the steam wrapped its fingers round her ankles and the water uncoiled from the faucet with a roar.
The maid came running. A brisk skinny girl from a pious family in Brookline who must have thought California the anteroom to heaven judging from the look on her face, she scurried across the room with a stack of towels three feet thick. Katherine took the towels from her, and she didn’t attempt to cover her nakedness, not at all. Louisa looked away.
“Lay out my blue skirt—the crepon—and the velvet waist. And my pearls—the choker, that is.” She paused, the towels clutched to her, the sun across the room now, in flood, the steam escaping in wisps. “What’s the matter with you? Louisa?”
The girl looked up and away again. “Ma‘am?”
“You don’t have to be shy with me. Surely you’ve seen a woman’s body before—or maybe you haven’t. Louisa?”
Again the look, whipped and defeated, as if the human body were an offense, and suddenly Katherine was thinking of a girl she knew in Switzerland when she was sixteen—Liselle, of the square hands and muscular tongue, the first tongue besides her own Katherine had ever held in her mouth. “Ma‘am?” the maid repeated, and still she wouldn’t look, suddenly fascinated by something on the floor just to the left of where Katherine was standing.
“Nothing,” Katherine said, “it’s nothing. That’ll be all.”
At five that evening, the sun still looming unnaturally over the shrubbery and the hidden bird tirelessly reiterating its grief, the car came for Katherine and her mother. Katherine wasn’t ready yet, though she’d had all afternoon to prepare herself, and when the front desk called to say that the chauffeur had arrived, she was seated at the vanity, pinning her hair up in a severe coil and clamping her black velvetta hat over it like a lid. Her nose had stopped running—and she wondered vaguely if she wasn’t allergic to some indigenous California pollen—but her headache was with her still, lingering just behind the orbits of her eyes like a low-rumbling thundercloud ready to burst at any minute. More than anything, she felt like going to bed.
Her mother, on the other hand, was jaunty and energetic, having poached herself for three hours and more in the gently effervescing waters of the spa, and every time Katherine glanced up from the mirror she saw her bustling round behind her in a new hat, a hat that to Katherine’s mind had been better left in its box. Permanently. And then buried in a time capsule as an artifact of the civilization that had been blindly building toward this millinery apotheosis since the time of the Babylonians. The hat—a Gainesboro in turquoise and black with so many feathers protruding at odd angles you would have thought a pair of mallards was mating atop her mother’s head—was all wrong. Josephine was dressed in black, her shade of choice since widowhood had overtaken her eighteen years ago, and while Katherine had no quarrel with her mother’s injecting a little color into her apparel, this wasn’t the time for
it. Or the place. Who could guess what Stanley would be like—or what his reaction to such a hat would be? And Katherine couldn’t help recalling the time, just three weeks into their honeymoon, when he’d flown into a rage and demolished seventeen of her mother’s most cherished hats, and half of them purchased in Paris.
But she was having enough trouble with her own outfit, which she’d changed a dozen times now, to worry about her mother’s. She’d finally settled on a dove-gray suit of Venetian wool, though the climate was a bit warm for it, over a high-collared silk shirtwaist in plain white. She didn’t want to wear anything provocative, given Stanley’s excitability, but then there was no need to look like a matron either, and she’d spent a good part of the afternoon crossing and recrossing the strip of carpet between the mirror and the closet, trying on this combination or that and quizzing her mother and Louisa until she was satisfied. Stanley had always liked her in gray, or at least she thought she remembered him claiming he did, and she hoped there would be something there, some spark of recollection that would help bring him back to the world.