by T. C. Boyle
Without a word, Jane snapped open the silver case and held it out to her, and Katherine accepted it, chose a cigarette and leaned forward for the flare of the match and the first harsh-sweet insuck of smoke. She inhaled. Looked into Jane’s eyes. And almost immediately she coughed, smoke everywhere, spewing from her like a chimney, and she coughed and coughed again. And then they were both giggling and fanning and ducking their heads against a roil of smoke, Jane adding hers to the mix, a whole tornado of smoke, a Vesuvius, and some of the others were crowding round the sofa, their eyes bright with the triumph of the day and the sense of recklessness that came with it, of knocking down the barriers, throwing open the floodgates and no turning back. “May I have one?” Carrie asked, and they all laughed at that, but then Carrie did take one, the ritual reenacted, the silver case and the white orderly row of cigarettes, the two women’s heads coming together as one over the gift of the sacramental fire, and Maybelle Harrison had one and pretty soon everybody in the room was coughing and laughing and laughing and coughing.
It was then that the first rocket went off at the end of the Littlejohn pier, a flash of light against the silhouette of a quick hunched-over skeleton of a man who might have been the gardener or the chauffeur or the rumored Mr. Littlejohn himself. Up it went, trailing sparks, to burst in a bloom of fire over the churning somber waters as everyone rushed to the window and applauded. “You know,” Jane said, catching Katherine by the elbow as the next rocket hurtled straight up into the air with a crash of artificial thunder, “it’s really not as bad as you might think.”
Katherine was puzzled. “What?”
The smirk, the eyes, the beautiful unconquerable snaking tendrils of hair. “Being widowed so young.”
And then another rocket went up, and another.
In December, Katherine returned to California. It had been a busy year—hectic—what with the women’s parade in March, the summer’s rallies, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Budapest (which Carrie had asked her to chair), and she hadn’t been to Riven Rock since last year at this time, for Christmas. She felt bad about that, awful really, and there were nights when she awoke in her anonymous hotel room in Washington or Cleveland or San Francisco, not even sure of what city she was in, and she could have sworn she heard Stanley’s voice calling out to her. She wasn’t one to neglect her duties. And as long as Stanley was alive, he was her duty, her first duty, in sickness and in health.
And he’d improved, he had, in this year of 1913, in a way the annual reports Hamilton prepared for the guardians and the court couldn’t begin to do justice to. The reports were always so terse—“There occurred some mental clearness, then delirious excitement, after which he became dull”—no more than a line or two to justify a whole year in a man’s life. But she wrote Stanley once a week, unfailingly, no matter where she was or how pressing the demands on her time, and he’d been able to write back on several occasions—and that alone told her more than any sterile report. Of course, his penmanship was still a bit convoluted, little curlicues and all sorts of baroque decorations adorning his consonants and what appeared to be miniature faces peering out from the confines of his vowels, and his subjects—the weather, the garden, the food—were rather more limited than she’d care to see, but at least he was writing. He was taking his meals at table now too, and though he was restricted to a single spoon, he was eating with some sense of decorum, or so Hamilton had informed her in his most recent letter, and he was taking an interest in the newspaper, sometimes even reading it aloud to his nurses. The sinking of the Titanic the previous year had especially excited his imagination and for some months after the tragedy all he could apparently talk of was the death of John Jacob Astor after he’d so gallantly secured his young wife in the last remaining lifeboat.
On her first day back, she took the car out to Riven Rock as soon as she’d breakfasted. She was alone this time, her mother unable to join her for another two weeks yet (“I’ve got a hundred loose ends to tie up here, Katherine, for heaven’s sake, presents to buy yet for your uncle, the servants, all the Moores and Mrs. Belknap too, and I just don’t know when I’ll ever get my head above water even for a minute—”). She tried to keep her feelings under control as the car came up the long winding drive under the canopy of overarching branches, thinking of Stanley, poor sweet misunderstood Stanley, and knowing there was still no chance at all of getting to see him, even for a minute—it was too disturbing for him, Hamilton said. Far too disturbing. After Stanley’s near-disastrous escape, all women had been banished from the house, even the maids, who’d been replaced by a rotating team of local men, including two Chinese Sam Wah had recruited as sous-chef and dishwasher respectively. Dr. Hamilton felt it too dangerous to have any woman in the house, both for them and Stanley, even if he never saw them. The knowledge that they were there was enough to set him off, the faintest echo of a feminine voice, even a scent—and yes, victims of mental disorders did have extraordinary sensory perceptions, keen as an animal’s in some cases. Or so the doctor claimed.
In any case, Katherine entered that womanless fortress at nine A.M. on a day as soft as a hand on your cheek, the third of December and it might as well have been June. She was met at the door by Torkelson, the new butler, a man who seemed utterly undistinguished, as bland and unprepossessing as a sentient doormat, and then she was in the library with Mr. O‘Kane, the first woman to enter that room since she’d left it a year ago. Dr. Hamilton, she was promised, would arrive shortly from his house on lower Hot Springs Road—she hadn’t been expected quite so early.
“So, Mr. O‘Kane,” she said, glancing round to take inventory of the room with an eye to further improvements, and already she was shuffling through a stack of papers left out on the secretary for her. “And how have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been well, ma‘am,” he replied, “very well indeed,” and when she glanced up he looked down at his shoes. He was certainly a good-looking man, what with his rugged build and fair hair, the way he held himself, and now that he was into his thirties—or was he twenty-nine? —he had a finish about him that was very pleasing. And he was bright too, for a nurse, but of course that was part of the problem with this whole unfortunate situation—bright and presentable as he might have been, he was no sort of companion for her husband, who was a gentleman and used to the company and stimulus of other gentlemen. Dr. Hamilton was acceptable, to a degree—at least he was educated—but the Thompsons, good-hearted and well-meaning through they were, couldn’t have been Stanley’s mental equals when he was six. And how could he hope to improve if this was the only company he kept?
“I’m very gratified to hear that,” she said, leaning into the corner of the desk now and working through the papers a second time—bills, receipts, a report from Mr. Stribling on the various improvement projects going forward on the grounds. “And how’s your wife?”
A silence. She looked up.
“Still back in Massachusetts, ma‘am—nursing her sick mother. And father. And her brother, poor man, who’s got cancer of the brain.”
Katherine pursed her lips and then couldn’t suppress a cold little smile. “That’s a lot of nursing.”
“It is, yes.”
“Four years’ worth, by my count.”
O‘Kane said nothing. Outside the sun was brightening in gradual increments, like a gas lamp slowly screwed up till the room was filled with light.
“And your son?” Katherine asked.
“I haven’t seen him, devoting all my time to Mr. McCormick, as I’m sure you’re aware, but I’m told he’s doing well, a regular little tiger, he is.”
“Oh?” Katherine was irritated. The man was a womanizer, a Lothario, as insensitive to a woman’s thoughts and feelings as he might have been to a trained seal‘s, thinking of one thing only, as if sexual attraction were the end rather than the beginning of a relationship, and it was shameful the way he’d deserted his wife and child and then had the gall to lie about it. Nursing
her mother, indeed.
O‘Kane was standing at the door, waiting to be dismissed. He hadn’t moved an inch since she’d entered the room. “Well, Mrs. McCormick, I’ll tell you,” he said, looking up now to engage her eyes, bold as brass, “to be truthful, sometimes you enter a matrimonial state with the best of intentions all round, and things just don’t seem to work out.” He paused. “You know what I mean?”
That stung—and she was in no mood—and she might have said something she would later regret, was right on the verge of it, when there was a rap at the door and they both turned, expecting Hamilton. The door pushed slowly open, and it wasn’t the doctor standing there in the doorway, not at all—it was Julius, the big orange ape. Katherine was so surprised she let out a gasp, and in the next moment she was laughing, as much at herself as at this gangling pouchy hunched-over thing shuffling into the room like an animated bedspread. Julius. She’d forgotten all about him.
He crossed the room on his knuckles, skittering lightly over the carpet without seeming to touch it, using his feet less for locomotion than as a sort of rudder. Ignoring O‘Kane, he came straight to Katherine, gazing up at her out of eyes the color of sunlit mud and tugging gently at her skirts with one long leathery hand. He made a soft cooing or grunting sound and announced his presence olfactorily as well, bringing with him his own little pocket of redolence. He stood nearly five feet tall, weighed one hundred eighty pounds and had an armspan of seven and a half feet, and if he’d wanted to he could have traversed Montecito without ever touching ground, relying on brachiation alone. And right now he had hold of her hand and was sniffing it as if it were the rarest of treasures, a look of simian transport on his face.
“He’s a nasty stinking smelly beast,” O‘Kane observed, “and I for one wouldn’t be giving him the run of the place, that’s for sure—but then it’s not for me to say, is it?”
Katherine paid him no mind. Julius was amusing, he was delightful, and now he was kissing her hand like some country swain, a tickle of whiskers, the warmth of his lips, and she was thinking how much she liked animals, dogs, cats, horses, apes, even snakes and bats and such, the whole reason she’d gone into biology in the first place. And when was the last time she’d had a pet?
“Julius!” she cried, utterly charmed, “you’re tickling me!” And then she looked at O‘Kane, trying to keep a straight face. “Dr. Hamilton writes that my husband and Julius are quite inseparable—”
O‘Kane winced as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. He shuffled his feet and addressed a point just over her left shoulder. “That’s Dr. Hamilton’s doing, not mine, and as I say, I don’t think it’s a healthy or even a decent thing—”
“But why? He seems quite tame. And if he helps my husband show an interest in things, if he stimulates him in any way, that’s got to be positive. Surely you wouldn’t object to a dog or a cat or some more conventional pet, would you, Mr. O‘Kane? And an ape is so much more intelligent—”
Julius dropped her hand and mounted the swivel chair in a single fluid motion, spinning once, all the way round, and then, as if resisting the temptation to twirl himself as a child would, he tucked his legs under the desk and made a pretense of looking through the papers, for all the world like some jowly potbellied old banker at his desk.
O‘Kane seemed on edge, and she remembered the day Hamilton had got his first two rhesus monkeys from the ship’s captain and the look on O’Kane’s face when they came flying out of the trees. He was afraid, that was all, frightened of a creature as placid and harmless as poor Julius—but of course, being typically male, he would never admit it. Even now, she noticed, he kept his distance—and you didn’t see Julius going up to kiss his hand. “No,” he said, “it’s not that,” and he was fumbling for his words. “A pet would be fine, and I’ve seen improvement in patients of all types with a little dog, for instance, but... Julius is ... he seems to be a bad influence on Mr. McCormick—”
“A bad influence?”
“He—well, Mr. McCormick sometimes apes Julius’s behavior, if you’ll forgive the expression, and not the other way round.”
Katherine lifted her eyebrows. Julius was playing with the paper-weight, a glass ball the size of a fist, balancing it on the tip of his flattened nose and then inserting it in his mouth like some petrified fruit.
“I mean, for instance, when we take Mr. McCormick for a drive in one of the cars, to calm him, you know, and provide the stimulus of a change of scene, Julius always comes along, and if Julius, say, presses his face to the glass, well then so does Mr. McCormick, and it’s just not—”
“Dignified?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean—it’s not dignified.”
Julius had cocked his head and begun to make a series of muted lip-smacking noises and soft disembodied cooings that sounded like a ventriloquist’s rendition of a flock of doves taking sudden flight, and he fixed his eyes apprehensively on the door, which stood open still. Katherine turned to look, and so did O‘Kane. She heard footsteps in the hall then and in the next moment Dr. Hamilton appeared in the doorway, spectacles flashing and a wide welcoming grin on his face, but when she turned round again, Julius had vanished.
Over the course of the next two weeks, Katherine made the trip out to the estate every day, seeing to the multifarious issues, large and small, that had accumulated in her absence, and every day, at three, she secreted herself in the bushes on the knoll to the west of the house and watched as O‘Kane and Mart led Stanley out onto the sunporch for a bit of air and exercise. She felt faintly ridiculous about the whole business—a woman of her age and position crouching in the shrubbery like a bird-watcher or a Peeping Susan—and depressed too, the misery of her situation brought home to her every time a wasp settled on her hat or the voices of the gardeners rose from below. What was she doing? What was wrong with her? Other women went to the theater on their husband’s arm, chatted with him over meals, felt his solid presence in bed beside them, had children and grandchildren and a house full of warmth, and the closest she could get to Stanley was through a pair of ground lenses magnified to a power of 460 feet at 1,000 yards.
But there he was now, wandering round the sunporch like a refugee, dragging his right leg behind him and hunching his shoulders as if carrying some great weight there. She twisted the focus on the binoculars and was struck anew by how old Stanley looked—he would be forty next year, and you wouldn’t have guessed he was a day under fifty. And how thin. Certainly some of that was attributable to the long period during which he’d had to be tube-fed and the tasteless mush he’d been forced to consume, but now that he was eating on his own she would have thought he’d put some weight back on. Of course, it was difficult to tell at this distance, but it seemed he’d got some of his color back, and that was something anyway. And the look in his eyes—it was so much more like the old Stanley, the Stanley she’d fallen in love with, the man who had such an irresistible presence, so forceful and passionate, and yet shy and vulnerable too.
There—that look—that was how she remembered him, that was it exactly. He was saying something to O‘Kane, waving his arms in his excitement, his eyes tightly focused, marshaling arguments, making his point. All in an instant he’d come to life, as if some hidden key had been turned inside him. That was how he was that first year, the year when he’d swept her off her feet, the year when she went to bed each night whispering “Stanley Robert McCormick” over and over, like a prayer, until she fell into the chasm of sleep.
He’d come to Beverly like an apparition, like a winged god sent to combat the twin forces of boredom and Butler Ames, who’d been pursuing her so singlemindedly over the course of the past month you would have thought he’d forfeit his inheritance if he wasn’t married by the fifteenth of September. It was a gay party, and she welcomed that because it was the antithesis of her life at the Institute and the senior paper (“Fatigue of the Cardiac Muscles in Reptiles”) she’d be returning to in all too short a time, but it was frivolous too, a
nd after the first week, deadly dull. Every day was a lithograph of the one before. There was tennis in the morning, swimming and rowing in the afternoon, déjeuner sur l‘herbe, croquet, word games, dancing and music in the evening, and Butler Ames straining to be witty the whole time, quoting the same tired lines from Swinburne or Wilde night after night while Pamela Huff and Betty Johnston and Ambler and Patricia Tretonne sat there and grinned as if they’d never heard them before. It was a rest, yes, but there was a whole seething world out there, a world of child labor, disenfranchised women, tenements and factories, and there wasn’t a person in that whole resort, from the overfed guests to the women who scrubbed the floors and the men who boiled up the lobsters, who’d ever even heard of Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis or Frank Norris. Except Stanley. And when he glided across that sunlit lawn with his great loping strides, leather helmet and goggles dangling from one bright scissoring hand, she was ready for him.
They were out in front of the hotel, the whole party, drinking champagne from an iced bucket and playing an endlessly dilatory game of croquet, and they looked up as one at the solemn figure cutting across the lawn on his way from the stable where he’d garaged his motorcar.
“Good God, what was that?” Ambler Tretonne cried after Stanley had passed from hearing. Ambler was thirty-two, with a broad bland face and puckered lips that gave him the look of one of those fishes that puffs itself up when it’s hauled from the water, and he stood a full three inches shorter than Katherine. When he’d married Patricia five years earlier, his father’s paper mills came into happy conjunction with her father’s chain of daily newspapers.
“An intrepid motorist, no doubt,” Butler Ames returned, hanging over a bright varnished ball and lifting his witty face to the group. “Back from a hard day of scaring cows out of their hoofs.”