by T. C. Boyle
Outside the window, the palms rattled oppressively in a sudden breeze off the ocean, and the irritating bird, whatever it was, discovered an excruciating new pitch for its deathsquawk—raw, raw, raw—and when her mother stumped across the room for the hundredth time in her ridiculous hat, Katherine wanted to scream. She was a bundle of nerves, and why wouldn’t she be? Fighting off the McCormicks and their dogs, traveling better than three thousand miles over one set of jolting rails after another till every muscle in her body felt as if it had been beaten with a whisk, her whole life thrown into turmoil by Stanley’s wild-eyed tantrums and the catatonia that turned him into a living statue. She hadn’t seen him in over six months now, and she felt as tentative and expectant as she had on her wedding night.
She was still fussing in the mirror—her hair wasn’t right, and she wasn’t sure about the hat either—when the front desk rang a second time to remind them that their driver was in the lobby. “Come on, dear,” Josephine urged, suddenly looming in the mirror behind her, “we mustn’t keep poor Stanley waiting—that is, if we do actually get to see him this time.” Exasperated, Katherine rose from the stool and fumbled for her wrap and her purse and the chocolates and magazines she meant to bring for Stanley, and her mother, hovering at her elbow, began a soliloquy on the theme of disappointment and all the little false alarms they’d had in Waverley and how she couldn’t stand to see her daughter moping around and looking so absolutely heartbroken all the time and how they shouldn’t get their hopes up too high because there was no telling how poor Stanley was adjusting to his new surroundings, if one was able to speak of his adjusting at all.
Poor Stanley. That was how her mother had always referred to him, even before his breakdown, even when he was as handsome and fit and well-spoken as any man who’d ever stepped across the threshold of the high narrow-shouldered house on Commonwealth Avenue, as if she could detect the fragility at the core of him like a diviner descrying water in the bones of the earth. “I don’t know, mother,” Katherine said, turning to her as the maid held the door for them, “I really don’t know. But Dr. Hamilton promised in his last letter ... that is, he didn’t actually promise, but he was optimistic that the change would do Stanley good, not to mention finally being settled in a healthful climate, and I really don’t see any reason—”
“Just as I suspected.” Josephine said, striding briskly through the door and out into the resplendent halls of the Potter Hotel, her skirts crepitating, the wings of her hat flapping in the breeze she generated. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
And then they were in the car, arranging veils, leathers and various rugs to keep the dust off, while the chauffeur, a tense little man with a bristling sunburned neck and a pair of sunburned ears that stood straight out from his head, wrestled the steering wheel and fought the gear lever with brisk angry jerks of his shoulders. Katherine and her mother were perched in back of him on the leather banquette seat, as exposed to the elements as they would have been in a buggy, and after the first mile or so, when they turned from the wide boulevard that ran parallel to the beach in order to circumvent an inlet called “The Salt Pond,” Josephine began to complain. “I don’t see how anyone could ever get used to these rattling machines,” she shouted over the stuttering roar of the motor. “The smell of them—and the noise. Give me a nice quiet brougham and an even-tempered mare any day.”
“Yes, mother,” Katherine replied through her gauze veil, “and I suppose horses don’t smell at all—or scatter manure across every road from here to Maine and back.” She was beginning to enjoy herself for the first time since she’d arrived, her headache receding, her nose drying up, and the air new-made from the sea and pregnant with the scent of a million flowers, citrus blossoms, Pittosporum undulatum, jasmine. The place wasn’t really so bad at all—she’d pictured the Wild West, men in serapes and drooping mustaches, women in mantillas, an utter void—but the Potter had surprised her (it really was a first-class hotel, the equal of anything you’d find in the East), as had the charming adobes and grand Italian villas she glimpsed through the stands of eucalyptus. There was a surprising air of culture and civility about the place, and there was no denying its natural beauty, with its sea vistas and the dark stain of its mountains against an infinite cloudless sky. It was like a tropical Newport, a conflation of the Riviera and Palm Beach. Or better yet, the Land of the Lotos Eaters, “In which it seemed always afternoon.”
For once, she thought, the McCormicks had been right. (And oh, how they’d campaigned to bring Stanley west, Nettie crouching nightly over the idea like some beast with its kill, dragging it up and down the length of the drawing room in her clamped and unyielding jaws while Bentley and Favill beat the sacrificial drums and sister Anita wailed the ritual lament.) Now that she was here, now that she was actually in the car and on her way to Riven Rock, the sun leaping through the trees ahead of her and the scented breeze kissing the veil to her lips, Katherine could feel the rightness of it. This was what Stanley needed. This was it. This was the place that would make him well.
“I just don’t understand this craze for motoring,” her mother observed in a casual shriek. “It’s so—oh, I don’t know—debilitating. And I don’t doubt for a minute that all that driving contributed to poor Stanley’s decline.” The car lurched to the left to avoid a wagon rut, righted itself, and then immediately pounded over a section of road that was like a cheese grater. “I know I’ll be a nervous case myself if I have to do much more of this—and to think he did it willingly, as some sort of hobby—”
This was a rather galling reference to Stanley’s passion for motorcars—a passion Katherine had never shared, but which she felt compelled to defend out of wifely loyalty. “That’s perfectly absurd, mother, and you know it. If anything,” she shouted, “driving calmed him.”
Stanley had been one of the first in the country to have an automobile, as people were calling them now, and he always insisted on driving himself, the chauffeur accompanying him solely as a hedge against mechanical emergencies. In fact—and her mother knew it as well as she did—if it weren’t for motoring, she and Stanley might never have met. Almost five years ago now, in the summer of her final year at the Institute, she’d gone to a resort in Beverly with a group of mostly young people—Betty Johnston and her brother Morris, Pamela Huff, the Tretonnes—to sleep late, swim and ride and play tennis and forget all about the circulatory systems of reptiles and the thesis looming over her head. They were playing croquet on the main lawn one afternoon when Stanley suddenly appeared, striding over the hill and through the cluster of wickets in goggles and a greatcoat so thick with dust he looked as if he’d been dipped in flour preparatory to some cannibal feast. And what was he doing there to miraculously recognize her from the dancing class they’d attended together at the age of thirteen and twelve respectively all those years ago in Chicago and to charm her with that sweet recollection and a hundred other things? He was motoring. Across country. Or at least that part of it that lay between the Adirondacks and Boston.
Katherine couldn’t help but smile at the memory, but then, as the chauffeur guided them back along the route they’d taken to the hot springs and into the umbrageous environs of Montecito, she began to wonder why her mother had brought up Stanley’s driving—was it only to provoke her? To widen the gulf between her and her husband? To weigh in on the side of annulment, divorce, a settlement? She stole a glance at her mother’s flapping form, the mad hat, the streaming veil and the smug ghostly expression, and she knew.
“Mother?”
“Yes, dear?” her mother screamed.
“You haven’t been talking to Mr. Bentley, have you? Or Mr. Favill, maybe? ”
No response. The engine whined and chewed away at itself; a pair of ugly glittering birds heaved up and out of the roadway, leaving a long wet pounded strip of meat behind them. “Turkey vultures,” Katherine whispered to herself, “Cathartes aura,” and it was automatic with her to classify everything that moved. She
peered at her mother’s face through the clinging wraith of the veil and felt her heart sink. The headache was back. Her sinuses were in flood. She felt betrayed. “Have you?” she cried into the wind.
“I’m sorry,” her mother shouted, leaning forward and cupping her hands to her mouth, “I didn’t hear you. Dear.”
“Yes, you did,” Katherine shouted back. “You met with them, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
But all her mother would say, as the chauffeur jerked his shoulders and the car twitched and shimmied and plunged into one pothole after another, was, “Very pleasant gentlemen, both of them.”
After that, they drove on in silence, the dusty roads of Santa Barbara giving way to the dusty cartpaths of Montecito, “the Millionaires’ Eden,” as the newspapers had it, the place where robber barons, industrialists and breakfast food magnates alike came to escape the snow and potter around their grandiose estates in a botanical delirium of banana trees, limes, kumquats and alligator pears. Katherine was predisposed to hate the place—Why did the McCormicks always have to pull the strings? What was so bad about Waverley and Massachusetts? Had no one ever gotten well there?—and now, her mood spoiled again, she settled in to loathe it in earnest. There was beauty everywhere she looked, intense, physical, immediate, but her eyes were veiled and it was a cloying beauty, destructive and hateful, the sort of beauty that masked the snake and the scorpion—and the McCormicks. Even when the chauffeur turned off Hot Springs and onto Riven Rock Road and they passed through the main gate and the big stone fairy castle of a house stood before her, the house of the Beast bristling with roses, Stanley’s house, she made herself feel nothing.
Then the engine coughed and died with a final tubercular wheeze, and the silence washed over them like a benediction. Josephine was the first to free herself of her veil, which she’d pinned jauntily to the towering precipice of her hat. Leaning over the side of the car to shake out the dust and kick the rug from her legs in the same motion, she observed drily that the house was a bit ostentatious, wasn’t it?
It was. Of course it was. What else would you expect of the McCormicks? Katherine unpinned her own veil and patted her hair back in place while the little chauffeur—Roscoe something-or-other—scrambled out to help her down. But she wasn’t ready yet—she would take her own good time—and she sat there a moment gazing up at the windows opaque with sun and wondering if Stanley were behind one of them, if he were gazing out at her even then. The thought made her self-conscious, and her hands fluttered involuntarily to her hair again.
The history of the house, as she knew it, was as sad as anything she could conceive of. Her mother-in-law had built it as a refuge for Mary Virginia in the late nineties, a private sanatorium with one patient—out of sight, out of mind—and they couldn’t have picked a spot farther from Chicago society unless they’d gone up to the Alaska Territory or put her on a boat for the Solomon Islands. It was a place where Mary Virginia could be alone with her doctor, her nurses, the scullery maids, cooks and washerwomen and the horde of Sicilian gardeners who’d transformed the property from a sleepy orange grove with a clapboard farm-house plunked down in the middle of it to a proper estate with proper grounds that wouldn’t have been out of place in Grosse Pointe or Scars-dale. Nettie had hired the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge to design the house—two stories, in the style of the Spanish missions, with rounded arches and a tower at one end—and she’d got a noted botanist, Dr. Francisco Franceschi, to oversee the landscaping, with its 150 specimens of daphnes imported from Japan, the nine-hole golf course and all the rest. And that was sad. Because the McCormicks felt if they sank enough money into the place they could salve their consciences, breathe easy, close the chapter on their sad mad daughter and sister.
But it got even sadder than that, because Stanley was here then, sweet-tempered, vigorous, witty, a twenty-one-year-old Princeton grad with a sweet shy smile and eyes that fastened on you till you felt there was no one else alive in the world. He’d come with his mother to give her support and help with the arrangements. But simply to help wasn’t enough for Stanley—he was a perfectionist, a zealot, mad for detail. He met daily with Dr. Franceschi, quizzed the stone masons and arborists, pored over the plans with the young architect Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge had hired to oversee construction, moving a wall here, adding a nook or courtyard there, and a window, always a window. He was the one who’d suggested moving the patient’s quarters from the ground floor to the second story—for the views—and he’d designed the rooms himself, right down to the molding of the windows and doorframes and the tiles in the bath.
That was what hit her now, the irony of it, and that was saddest of all: poor Stanley had been designing his own prison and he never knew it. No one did. He had all the promise in the world—member of half a dozen clubs at college, editor of the school paper, chairman of the Casino committee, tennis prodigy, scholar, painter, athlete, poet, the McCormick wealth at his fingertips and every possibility alive to him—and when Mary Virginia was moved to Arkansas to be with her new doctor, no one suspected that Riven Rock would be anything other than a happy place, a winter resort, one of half a dozen McCormick homes scattered round the country. But Stanley still had promise. He did. Bucketloads of it. He was a young man yet and he had plenty of time to get on with his life and do something in the world—if he could just get well again. That was the first step. That was what mattered, and all the lawyers and doctors and quibbling McCormicks in the world didn’t have a thing to do with it.
Katherine still hadn’t moved. The sun melted into the windows, the sky yawned, the stillness was absolute. Her mother was down on the pavement now, feathers everywhere, a whole aviary’s worth, gazing up at her with the clear-eyed, analytic look Katherine remembered from her girlhood and the odd case of tonsillitis or indigestion it was meant to ferret out. The chauffeur, so wiry and intense behind the wheel, seemed to have died on his feet as he stood there poised to help her down from the floating step of the Packard. “Katherine?” Josephine was saying. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she heard herself say.
“Because if you’re not,” Josephine went on, “we don’t have to do this at all, not today, not when you’re still so worn out and exhausted from your trip—”
Then she was on her feet, towering above them, moving forward to descend from the car while the windows exploded with light and the chauffeur’s clawlike hand suddenly appeared on the periphery to offer support, and she watched her own tight-laced foot as it hovered in the air over the terra incognita of her husband’s private asylum. “I told you I’m all right,” she said, and there it was again, that hint of asperity and exasperation, “—didn’t I?”
Her mother shut up then, clamping her lips together and setting her jaw in her best imitation of pique, too giddy with California and her mineral soak to harbor any real resentment and too concerned about the delicacy of “the Stanley situation,” as she’d begun to call it, to push any further. In silence, trailed by the chauffeur and walking as stiffly as two strangers looking for their seats at the opera, Katherine and her mother went up the walk, mounted the great stone slabs of the front steps and rang the bell. O‘Kane appeared at the door even before the tympanic echoes of the bell had died away in a series of dull reverberations that seemed to take refuge in the huge clay pots that stood on either side of the entrance. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d been expecting someone else altogether. Or no one at all. “Good evening,” he managed to sputter, holding the door for them and trying his best to compose his face around a smile.
“Good evening,” Katherine returned, but brusquely, in the way of getting it over with, and she didn’t acknowledge his smile with one of her own—she was too wrought up for smiling, too sad and angry and pessimistic, and O‘Kane’s awkwardness irritated her. What did it mean? That they hadn’t been expected? But that was absurd—someone had to have dispatched the car, and at breakfast her mother-in-law had gone on ad naus
eam about the charms of Riven Rock and how much everyone was looking forward to her seeing and approving of it. Or was it Hamilton? Was he going to flip his eyes and tell her that Stanley had taken a turn for the worse and she couldn’t see him, her own husband, in his own house, after waiting day by miserable day through six night-marish months and traveling all this bone-rattling, sinus-pounding, headache-forging way?
“Oh, Mr. O‘Kane,” her mother shrieked behind her, “so nice to see you again—and how are you finding California? Missing your wife, I’ll bet? Hm? Yes?”
Katherine wanted to strangle her. She wanted to wheel round on her and shout, “Shut up, mother, just shut up!” and even before she had a chance to see what crimes against taste Stanley’s own small-town philistine of a mother had committed with regard to the furnishings, she found herself snapping at O‘Kane. “Where’s my husband?” she demanded, striding into the room with half a mind to begin trying doors at random.
O‘Kane slammed the front door on the chauffeur and sprinted to her even as Nick Thompson rose from a chair at the foot of the stairs to intercept her. “Is he upstairs, is that it?” she demanded of the blunted eyes and napiform head of the elder Thompson. There seemed to be pottery everywhere, shelves of it—urns, bowls, vases, cups—and all of it a dull earthen brown. The place was hideous—It looked like a Spanish bordello, like a bullring, and she had a sudden urge to smash every last clay pot and Andalusian gewgaw in a frenzy of noise and dust and shattering because she knew in that moment they were going to stop her from going up those stairs, saw it in their eyes and the way they slung their shoulders at her and braced themselves as if she were one of the madwomen they’d kept locked away at McLean in a shit-bespattered cell.