Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  Naturally, he caught cold.

  And his mother, brisk and censorious, orbited his bed day and night as if all the doctors and serving girls on earth had been carried off by the plague. She forced beef broth on him every fifteen minutes, deluged him with syrups and tonics, scalded him with mentholated vapors and hot water bottles. “It all comes of womanizing,” she scolded, wiping his nose with a camphor-scented handkerchief.

  “Womanizing? I wasn‘t—”

  “Well, what do you call it then? Certainly not courting in any sense of the word as I know it, not with a young woman your own mother has never laid eyes on in her life.”

  “But I just met her—”

  “And another thing—I’ve been asking around this past week and I’m told that your Miss Katherine Dexter is a cold fish if there ever was one, the sort of spoiled young woman who wouldn’t even give a proper tip to her own mother’s maid. She’s entirely scientific, is what I hear, practically an atheist, like this odious Englishman with his descent of man and his monkeys and all the rest of it, and she had no more idea of worshiping the Lord than a naked aborigine.”

  Stanley breathed vapors and swallowed broth, watching the leaves shrivel and fall outside his window and listening to the lake slap mournfully at the shingle, and every day he wrote Katherine a letter, sometimes as long as twenty or thirty pages, and every day he had one of the servants take it down to the post office. He didn’t have an opportunity to gaze in the mirror much—his mother insisted he stay in bed—but as he lay there brooding he began to see how ridiculous he must look in Katherine’s eyes. He felt he had to explain himself to her, and the beginning of any credible explanation had to take into account his shortcomings—if he wanted to be honest with her. And he did want to be honest. He had to be. Because this was no mere flirtation or passing fancy—this was the whole world and everything in it.

  One of his shorter letters, which ran to fifteen pages, painstakingly indited in an unrestrained flood tide of tottering consonants and tail-lashing vowels, began like this, without date or salutation: I know you know I am as useless as a stone in your path, and no one is more conscious of that than I, a man who has never accomplished a thing in all his twenty-nine years, a blot on society, a parasite who never earns a cent by the sweat of his brow but feeds off the poor and oppressed in the name of “Capitalism.” I have no talent for anything, I’ve never cultivated my mind, I’m consumed by degrading thoughts all the day long and half the nights, too, and live in a putrid scum of sin. I cannot blame you for refusing me. In fact, I applaud you and urge you to prefer Butler Ames or any other man over me, because I esteem you above all women and want only the best for you. Life to me is as dull as the grave and I live only to beg and pray for your happiness. You are all and everything to me and I hope you will believe me when I tell you I am not fit to lick the dirt from your shoes, if any dirt would ever adhere to them, which I doubt...

  He realized he’d gone a bit overboard, but then once he fixated on something he just couldn’t seem to let it go, and his letters became more and more slavish and self-denigrating until even Fu Manchu would have seemed wholesome compared to the Stanley Stanley exposed.

  Katherine’s replies were brief and never alluded to his letters, not in the slightest. She wrote of the weather, her mother’s latest contretemps with a milliner or maître d‘, the gustatory habits of the checkered garter snake. She didn’t specifically prohibit him from visiting (though she reminded him of how deeply absorbed she was in her studies), and so he saw his opportunity and took the train for Boston as soon as his mother let him out of bed. The first time—in early October—he stayed on for a week, and then, at the end of November, for two weeks more. He was rewarded for his perseverance by Mrs. Dexter—“Please, Stanley, call me Josephine”—who sat with him in the parlor every night through both of his visits, regaling him with reminiscences of her youth as he worked his way dutifully through the soggy fish-paste sandwiches and poppy seed cakes and pot after pot of undrinkable tea. But it was worth it, because Katherine seemed genuinely pleased to see him, shining like a seal and flush with her accumulation of knowledge, and when she could squeeze a social hour or two into her schedule, she permitted him to take her out to the theater or a concert.

  At Christmas, she came to Chicago to stay with a girlfriend while her mother was in Europe, and Stanley was elated. He and Nettie had retreated to Rush Street when the weather turned bitter in the Adirondacks, and though he hadn’t felt up to going back to work yet he’d begun sketching again and had done half a dozen portraits of Katherine in a brown wash over chalk and brown ink—all from a single photograph she’d given him. Of course, he was no good as an artist and had no right to attempt a portrait of her—it would take a Pintoricchio or a Cellini to do justice to her—but still he thought he’d managed to capture something she might find interesting and he’d been wrestling with the idea of another visit to Boston to present her with one of the sketches. Or maybe two of them. Or all six. He could barely restrain himself, bombarding her with flowers and telegrams, sick with the thought that Butler Ames or some other oily competitor was getting the jump on him and yet not wanting to seem overeager, when he got her letter informing him that she was coming to Chicago on the nineteenth to visit Nona Martin, of the upholstering Martins, and he melted away in a sizzle of anticipation like a pat of butter in a hot pan.

  When the train arrived, Stanley was waiting at the station with his chauffeur and his new car, a Packard equipped with a tonneau cover for the passenger seat. He was standing there like a sentinel when she stepped down from the train, his arms laden with flowers, three boxes of candy and the most recent of the portraits, wrapped in brown paper. The train was fifteen minutes late and he’d been practicing his smile so long his gums had dried out and somehow managed to stick to the inner lining of his mouth, so he had a bit of trouble with the speech he’d rehearsed. “Katherine,” he cried, taking her hand in an awkward fumble of flowers and candy while the chauffeur negotiated the transfer of her luggage from the porter, “I can’t begin to tell you how much this means to me, your coming here to Chicago—your visit, I mean—because this is the high point of my miserable, foul, utterly worthless existence, and I. I—”

  She was wearing a fur coat and the smell of the body-heated air caught in its grip was intoxicating. She lifted the veil of her hat to reveal a smile and two glad and glowing eyes. “Stanley!” she exclaimed. “What a surprise! It’s so thoughtful of you to come meet me, but you didn’t have to go out of your way, really you didn’t.” And then she let out a kind of squeal and fell into the arms of a girl in a fox coat with hair the color of old rope and Stanley felt as if he’d been rejected all over again. But no, this was Nona Martin and she was pleased to meet him—Katherine had told her so much about him—and pleased too to accept a ride in his motorcar.

  Stanley was lit up like a bonfire, electrified—Katherine has told me so much about you—ashe squeezed in beside the girls, struggling all the while with the framed sketch in its heavy brown wrapping. Katherine was right there, right there beside him, and he could smell her perfume and the sweet mint of her breath. “For you,” he said, handing her the portrait in a confusion of wrists and elbows and the constricting bulk of coats and mufflers and gloves, “I—I hope you won’t be, well, I hope you—I mean, I, uh, I took the liberty of drawing, uh, you—”

  She smiled her secret thin-lipped smile, tore away the paper and held the portrait high up to the light as the car banged away over the streets like a roller coaster and all three of them had to hold onto their hats. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and she turned the smile on him now and showed him her teeth, the teeth he loved, and the other girl came into the picture suddenly, her wide grinning seraphic face looming over Katherine’s shoulder, and she was cooing praise too. And Stanley? Well, it was winter in Chicago, the sun weak as milk, the wind howling, ice everywhere, but it was high summer inside of him and all the boats beating across the lake in full sail
.

  Even then, though, even as he sailed through the streets on the fresh breeze that was Katherine, the heavy seas were building. His mother wasn’t going to let him go without a fight, and when Katherine and Miss Martin came to dinner two nights later, the storm broke in all its fury. Nettie had insisted on a formal eight-course dinner and a guest list of eighteen, including Favill and Bentley and their wives, Cyrus Jr. and his wife, Missy Hammond, Anita (who’d been a widow going on eight years now) and an assortment of dried-up female religious fanatics in their sixties and seventies who hadn’t found anything pleasant to say to anyone since the Battle of Bull Run. She sat at the head of the table, while Cyrus took up the honorary position at the far end, and she seated Katherine across from Stanley and as close to herself as she could bear—that is, with a buffer of one crabbed Presbyterian mummy on her immediate right and another on her left.

  The soup had barely touched the table when she cleared her throat to get Katherine’s attention and said, in a voice that was meant to carry all the way down to Cyrus’s end of the table, “And so, Miss Dexter, perhaps, as a scientist, you’d like to give us your opinion of Mr. Charles Darwin and his perversion of everything God tells us in the Bible?”

  Katherine looked into Stanley’s eyes a moment and he could see the steel there, case-hardened and inflexible, before she turned to his mother, looking past Mrs. Tuggle, the mummy on her right. “My training has been in the sciences, yes, Mrs. McCormick, and I do tend to take a scientific view of phenomena beyond our ken, but I must remind you that Darwin’s theories are only that: theories.”

  There was a silence. Every conversation had died. Anita was staring, Cyrus Jr. fussing with his shirt studs. Favill smirked. The mummies faintly nodded their wizened heads.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” Nettie had knitted her hands in front of her, as if she were praying for strength. “Do you believe in all this sacrilegious bunk or don’t you?”

  Katherine sighed. Lifted the water glass to her lips, took a sip and then set it down again, in perfect control. “Since you ask, Mrs. McCormick, I have to say that I do believe in Darwin’s theories as to the origin of our species through evolution. I find his arguments utterly convincing.”

  Stanley was about to say something, anything, a comment on the weather or the soup or the way the electric lights were holding up, just to throw his mother off the scent, but she was too quick for him.

  “And this Negro music the young seem so eager to dance to, this ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and all the rest of it, I suppose you find this sort of thing proper, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much time for dancing, Mrs. McCormick,” Katherine said, and she glanced up and down the length of the table before coming back to her again. “I’m very busy with my studies.”

  “Yes,” Nettie said, all but spitting it out, “so I’m told. Snakes, isn’t it?”

  The following afternoon, in a bleak cold rinsed-out light that made the whole city look as if it had been sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan, Stanley and his mother escorted Katherine to Harold’s place in the landau—Nettie wouldn’t dream of setting foot in a motorcar—and had a tense lunch with Harold and Edith. The verbal sparring resumed over fricasseed chicken, boiled onions, beef tongue and ice cream, and continued through the farewells and out into the carriage. Stanley was at a loss. He should have been ebullient, irrepressible, kicking up his heels and shouting hosannas, because here were the two people he cared most about in the world, together at last, but instead he felt as if he’d gone into battle, a bewildered infantryman caught between opposing generals. “And your family, Katherine? I hear your father has passed on,” Nettie said, “and your mother never entertains,” and Katherine came back with, “Tell me about your other daughter, the older one—Mary Virginia?”

  They’d just turned into Rush Street when Nettie suddenly rapped at the window and ordered the carriage to a stop. Perplexed, the driver climbed down and came to the window. “Ma‘am?” he said, showing his teeth in a nervous little grin.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Home, ma‘am. Six-seventy-five Rush Street.”

  “Rush Street? Have you lost you senses? We have a guest with us, and she needs to be transported all the way back out to Astor Street, to the Martin residence.”

  “But Mother,” Stanley was saying, “I told Stevens to drop you first, since we’re so close—I mean, there’s no need for you to—”

  “Drop me? Whatever are you talking about? We’ve invited Miss Dexter, and we shall see her home. Really, Stanley, I’m surprised at you—where are your manners?”

  “No, I, well—I was going to, well, see Miss Dexter home myself, after I, after we—”

  “Nonsense.”

  Katherine held her peace. Stevens stood there in the cold, the horses stamping and shuddering, the wind sending a fusillade of leaves and papers down the street in a sudden blast. Stanley was seated between the two women, and he didn’t dare look at Katherine, not on this battleground, not now. “I was only thinking of you, Mother, what with your heart condition and knowing how hard it is on your legs and the circulation to your, well, your feet, to, to sit cooped up like this, and I just, well, I just thought you’d be more comfortable at home.”

  He watched his mother’s face tighten a notch and then suddenly let go, like an overwound spring. “All right,” she sighed, and now she was the invalid, the dying matriarch (who would, paradoxically, live another eighteen years in perfect health), too sick and enervated to fight. “It’s very thoughtful of you, Stanley. Drive on, Stevens,” she ordered in a diminished voice. And she was patient, biting her tongue until they’d arrived and Stanley was helping her up the walk and into the vestibule of the house while Katherine sat wrapped in her furs in the coach and watched her own breath crystallize in the stinging air. Then, just as the door shut behind them and Stanley was helping her off with her coat, his mother murmured, “Yes, Stanley, you’re right—and you’re such a dear to think of your poor old mother. Obviously, Stevens can see Miss Dexter home on his own and there’s no need at all for us to bother, with the weather so bitter—and that wind. It could even snow, that’s what they’re saying.”

  “But, but”—Stanley was holding his mother’s coat out away from him as if it were the pelt of some animal he’d just bludgeoned and skinned—“I wanted to, that is I intended to take Katherine, I mean, Miss Dexter—to see her, I mean, home, that is—”

  His mother turned a trembling face to him and took hold of his arm. “I won’t hear of it.”

  “But no, no, you don’t understand. Katherine’s waiting for me.”

  “Nonsense. You’re staying right here. You’ll catch your death out in that wind, and besides, it’s not proper you being all alone with her like that without a chaperone. Oh, maybe these modern girls think nothing of it, but believe you me, I, for one, won’t stand for it.”

  Before he could think, Stanley had jerked his arm away. The blood was in his face, and he could hear the tick of the steam radiators and the faint sound of carolers off down the street somewhere. “I’m going,” he said, “and don’t try to stop me.”

  His mother’s eyes boiled. Her face was like the third act of a tragedy. She swung an imaginary sword and cleaved the head from his body. “What,” she said, “you defy me?”

  Stanley clenched his jaw. “Yes.”

  And then they were struggling, actually wrestling at the doorway in plain sight of Katherine, his mother clutching at his arm as if she were drowning amid the crashing waves she herself had summoned up, and Stanley tore his arm away again, and he didn’t want to hurt her, not physically or emotionally, but when he broke loose she collapsed to the floor with a sob that sucked all the air out of him. It was the moment of truth. The moment he’d been awaiting for thirty years. He drew himself up, squared his shoulders and cinched the muffler tight against his throat. “I’m going now,” he said.

  Katherine was waiting for him. Her eyes never left him
as he emerged from the house, strode up the walk and climbed back into the carriage. He felt heroic, felt he could do anything—climb the Himalayas, beat back invading hordes, mush dogs across the frozen tundra. “Katherine,” he said, and she rustled beside him, her face turned to his, the carriage moving now and the rest of the afternoon and the city and everything in it left to them and them alone, “Katherine, I just wanted to, to—”

  “Yes?” Her voice was lush and murmurous, floating up to meet his out of the depths of the gently swaying compartment. A fading watery light flickered at the windows. Stanley dreamed he was in a submarine, rising up and up, insulated from everything.

  “Well, to tell you—”

  “Yes?”

  “About Debs, Debs and what he said in the paper the other—the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I‘ve—” but he couldn’t go on. Not really. Not anymore.

  In February, in Boston, they became secretly engaged. Stanley had come down by train and set himself up with rooms at the Copley Plaza just after Groundhog Day. After a week of hemming and hawing and discoursing on Jack London’s childhood, labor unions, black lung disease and the will he’d executed leaving all his moneys and possessions to be divided equally among the 14,000 McCormick workers, he put another hypothetical proposal to her and she amazed and exalted him by accepting. But only on the condition that they keep the engagement confidential till the end of the term, because the papers were sure to take it up—BOSTON SOCIALITE TO WED M‘CORMICK HEIR—and it would just be too much of a distraction in light of her thesis and exams. They had a celebratory dinner with Josephine, who swore to keep their secret and delivered a breathless monologue on the cruciality—Was that a word? of preserving the Dexter line, not to mention the Moores and McCormicks—And who were his mother’s people?—and how she hoped Katherine wouldn’t stop at four or five children, what with the threat of disease in the world today, and did Stanley know how they’d lost Katherine’s brother, the sweetest boy there ever was?