by T. C. Boyle
“Come on,” he whispered, “let’s talk about it outside.”
“No. Right here. Right now.”
He rolled his eyes. He was tired. He was angry. He was disappointed. “What do you want from me? You want me to move you into a new brick house tonight, with new curtains and furniture brand-new from the store with the paper wrapping still on it? Is that what you want?”
She stood there immovable, black widow’s weeds, the black veil caught like drift on the crown of her hat, the child fat and imperturbable and staring at him out of his own eyes.
“Come on,” he coaxed, “let’s go over to Pat’s and talk things out where we can be comfortable, and we can, you know.... I want you,” he said.
“I want you too, Eddie.” And she moved into him and pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, a fierce furious sting of a kiss, all the madness and irrationality of her concentrated in the wet heat of her mouth and lips and tongue, and he knew it would be all right, all right for both of them, if he could just take her up to his room and make love to her, ravish her, fuck her.
She pulled away and gave him a long analytic look, as if she were seeing him from a new perspective, all distance and shadow. The muscles at the corners of her mouth flexed in the faintest of smiles.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“I’m pregnant.
Well, and it was déjà vu, wasn’t it? Simple arithmetic: one child subtracted, one child added. All he could say was, “Not again?”
She nodded. Saturated him with her eyes. Behind her, blighting both walls of the narrow hallway, were the dim greasy slabs of the oil paintings Mrs. Fitzmaurice had rendered herself, kittens and puppies frolicking in an unrecognizable world of bludgeoning brushstrokes and colliding colors. She shifted the child from one shoulder to the other.
“Jesus,” he said, and it was a curse, harsh and harshly aspirated.
Her voice fell off the edge and disappeared: “I want you to take care of me.”
This was his moment, this was the hour of his redemption, the time to cash in his three o‘clock luck though it was past eleven at night, and he could have taken her in his arms and whispered, Yes, yes, of course I will, but instead he gave her a sick smile and said, “Whose baby is it?”
“Whose—?” The question seemed to stagger her, and suddenly the weight of the child on her shoulder, little Guido Capolupo O‘Kane, seemed insupportable, and she began fumbling behind her as if for some place to set him down. It took her a minute, but then she came back to herself, straightening up, arching her back so that her breasts thrust out and her chin lifted six inches out of her collar. “Guido’s,” she said, “it’s Guido‘s,” and then she found the doorknob and let in the night for just an instant before the door clicked shut behind her.
And handsome Eddie O‘Kane, who’d failed every test put to him, and wasn’t rich and wasn’t free and had to bow and scrape to Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick and her demented husband and chase after every skirt that came down the street? What did he need? That was easy. Simple. Simplest thing in the world.
He needed a drink.
7.
PRANGINS
The Dexter château stood on a hill just outside Geneva, at Prangins, in the village of Nyon. It was a turreted stone structure of some twenty rooms surrounded by orchards and formal gardens and with a great lolling tongue of lawn that stretched all the way down to the shore of the lake, where Josephine kept a pair of rowboats and a forty-foot ketch. No one knew exactly how old the place was, but portions of it were said to date from the time of the Crusades, after which it was built up and fortified by successive generations of noble and not so noble men. Voltaire had once lived there, and in 1815 it was acquired by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who made use of a secret tunnel in the cellar to slip off into the night when his existence became a liability to too many people. The property was surrounded by a formidable wall and high, arching iron gates, and when Katherine broke off her engagement to Stanley, she fled across the Atlantic and closed the gates behind her.
She needed time to think. Time to settle her own nerves, and never mind Stanleys—he’d meant to hit her with that vase, he had, right up until the last minute. He could have scarred her for life, killed her—and for what? What had she done to deserve it? She’d lost her patience maybe and she’d been short with him, but only because he was so obsessive and gloomy, making mountains of molehills all the time, afraid of her touch, afraid of what was happening between them, afraid of love. All that she could understand and forgive, but violence was inexcusable, unthinkable, and the truly awful thing was what it said about Stanley in his darkest soul.
The first day at Prangins all she did was sleep, and when Madame Fleury, the housekeeper, poked her stricken face in the door inquiring if madame wanted anything to eat, Katherine told her to go away. At dusk, she thought she ought to get up, but she didn‘t—she just lay there, sunk into the pillows, holding herself very still. She watched the darkness congeal in the corners and fan out over the floor, and then she was asleep again, the night a void, black and silent, no wind, not a murmur from the lake. In the morning, she woke to the sound of birds and the shifting light playing off the water, the floating aqueous light of her girlhood when she would spend half the day rowing out into the lake till she was beyond the sight of shore, and for the first thirty seconds she didn’t think of Stanley. She was at Prangins, behind the walls, behind the gate, secure and safe and with nothing to do but read and walk and row and all the time in the world to do it, and what was so bad about that? Suddenly she was hungry, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since she’d got off the train from Paris, her stomach in turmoil, in revolt, but growling now in the most placable and ordinary way. She rang for the housekeeper and had breakfast sent up, a good Swiss breakfast of fresh eggs and cheeses and wafer-thin slices of Black Forest ham with rolls hot from the oven and fresh cream for her coffee, and she ate it all in a kind of dream, sitting at the window and gazing out over the lake.
She forced herself to get dressed and to greet the servants, most of whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a year, and then she went down to the lake and took one of the rowboats out. There was a breeze with a scent of snow blowing off the mountains, but the sun was warm and she relished the feel of the oars in her hands, the spume, the rocking of the boat, each stroke taking her farther from all the complexities of her life, from Stanley and wedding gowns and arborio rice by the bushel—and the specter of babies, that too. What had he shouted over the clamor of the crowd and the mindless blast of the ship’s horn? I can have children!
That was sweet. It was. And she did want a baby, not only for Stanley’s sake and her mother’s and to honor the memory of her father and all the Dexters before him, but for the most personal and selfish of reasons : it was her privilege and her will. As a woman. As an independent woman of independent means. For twenty-nine years she’d developed her mind and body, and to what end? To make her choice, her own free choice, without regard to convention or expectation or the demands of the world of men, to be married or not to be married, to have a child or not, to study the biological sciences at the Institute or scale Mount Everest, and she’d chosen Stanley, nobody else. Strapping, shy, artistic Stanley, athletic Stanley, manly Stanley. He was her biological destiny, her husband, her mate, and they would come together in the dark and he would impregnate her—that was the way it was supposed to be, that was what she’d wanted. She thought about that, tugging at the oars and feeling her blood quicken, savoring the flex and release of the muscles in her shoulders and back, and pictured herself in a white nightdress in a field of white flowers, pregnant and glowing like the Madonna of the Rose Bush. It was frightening, beyond her control—beautiful and heady and frightening.
But Stanley was in Chicago, where he belonged and where he had to stay until he got a grip on himself. She’d been gentle with him—he had to understand that she needed to get away by herself, and though the engagement was off
icially broken, the ring returned and the caterers and the florists and their minions called off, there was hope still, if he would only give her time. Gentle, but firm. She didn’t tell him when she was leaving or where she meant to go, but only that he shouldn’t attempt to follow her, no matter what. He had to respect that. And if he did, and if he improved his outlook and settled his nerves and she had a chance to calm herself too, then maybe, just maybe, there was hope for them yet.
By noon—or what she took to be noon from the position of the sun stuck in the clouds overhead—she was hungry again, and that was a good sign. She didn’t have anything with her, not so much as an apple or pear, and she let herself drift a while, cradled by the waves, the smell of the wind and the water playing on her senses till the hunger was a physical ache, and then she made for an inn on the Geneva shore and sat in a vast dining room and had lunch over a newspaper and a pot of tea while a punctilious waiter with drooping mustaches fussed over her. She had the soup, a salad, roast duck with potatoes and vegetable, and she lingered over dessert, reading a paragraph at a time from the paper spread out before her and then lifting her head to gaze out on the lake in reverie. When finally she climbed back into the rowboat with the aid of an overly solicitous concierge and the frowning waiter (Wouldn’t madame prefer a taxi? One of the boys could return the boat in the morning—“Cela ne pose pas de problème”), the sky had closed up like a fist and a light drizzle hung suspended in the air. She thanked them for their concern, but really, she said, she’d prefer the exercise. Clucking and protesting, the concierge held an umbrella out over her head as she settled herself on the thwart, and then watched in disbelief as she shoved off nimbly and swung the bow around into the vague drifting belly of the mist. The visibility was poor, and she might have been in real danger, but she stuck close to shore and rowed until she was no longer aware she was rowing, until there was nothing left in the universe but her arms and the boat and the lake.
Two weeks passed. She saw no one. She swam, walked, rowed, read French novels, helped the cook plan the menu and even took up the needlepoint her mother had abandoned the previous fall, and she wasn’t bored, not yet, but getting healthier and steadier and calmer as each day fell into the next. She was sitting at breakfast one morning, absorbed in a Maupassant tale—the one about the plump little courtesan and the coach full of hypocrites-when Madame Fleury informed her that there was a man at the gate inquiring after her.
“A man?”
“Oui, Madame. He says he knows you. He won’t go away.”
And what was this, a little spark? Hope, fear, anger: it couldn’t be. “Did he give you his card? A name?”
The housekeeper was a plain, angular woman in her forties, an adept at driving all expression from her face and suppressing any hint of emotion in her voice; the house could be in flames and she would knock quietly at the door to ask if madame would be needing anything. Her mouth tightened just perceptibly round her words: “He refused, madame. But we haven’t opened the gate, and Jean Claude is keeping an eye on him.”
Katherine set down her teacup. Her heart was pounding. “Well, is he from the village then? Is he a tradesman, a gentleman, a goatherd?”
The housekeeper gave a shrug, and it was a Gallic shrug, respectful only to the degree that was necessary, while managing at the same time to convey not only impatience but a deep disillusionment with the question. She pursed her lips. “Jean Claude says he has a motorcar.”
And then she was up from the table, no time to think, no time to manage her hair or grab a hat or worry about what she was wearing, and down the stone steps and out into the circular drive, the gravel skewing awkwardly beneath her feet, all the way to the gate, breathless, sure it was a false alarm, some Oxford boy on his Grand Tour come to inquire about the history and architecture of the place, a motoring enthusiast experiencing mechanical difficulties, a friend of her mother‘s, some busybody from the village... but she was wrong. Because it was Stanley, Stanley standing there at the gate like some apparition exhaled from the earth and given form in that instant. His hands were gripping the bars on either side of him as if to hold him upright, his shoulders were slumped, his head bowed penitentially.
“Stanley!” she called, trying not to run, aiming for poise and composure, but after a moment she couldn’t feel her feet at all and she was running despite herself. He was frozen, welded to the bars—he didn’t move, wouldn’t lift his head or raise his eyes. Jean Claude, the gatekeeper, gave her an odd look, and he seemed ready to rush forward and prevent whatever it was that was about to happen.
She was there, at the gate, her hands clutching his, and she was looking up into his flat suffering face through the iron grid. She uttered his name again, “Stanley,” and then she didn’t know what to say and still he wouldn’t look at her, his head hanging, shoulders bunched, the hair in his eyes, utterly abject, the whipping boy come back for his punishment. Everything stopped then, the earth impaled on its axis, the sun caught in its track, the breezes stilled, Jean Claude’s face the face of a photograph, until finally it came to her and she knew what to say, and it was almost as if she were speaking with her mother’s voice or Miss Hershey’s from all those years ago when she sat in the schoolroom and learned French, deportment and the finer points of etiquette with the other wide-eyed and nubile Back Bay girls: “How nice of you to come.”
The wedding was in September, and because it took place in Europe and because it was cursorily announced and precipitately arranged, the American newspapers had a field day with it: SECRET M‘CORMICK NUPTIALS; SOCIALITE WEDS M’CORMICK HEIR IN SWISS RETREAT; M‘CORMICK-DEXTER WEDDING SHROUDED IN SECRECY. Actually, there were two ceremonies—a civil ceremony before a magistrate in Geneva and a private celebration at Prangins presided over by a French cleric of indeterminate affiliation whom Nettie suspected of being a Unitarian or even a Universalist. She’d booked passage as soon as Stanley had wired her that a date had been set, and she campaigned from the beginning for a church wedding there in the very birthplace of Presbyterianism—anything else would have been sacrilege, anything else would have cut her to the quick, torn her heart out and trampled on it—but it was Katherine’s wedding, Katherine’s château, and Katherine had hegemony over Stanley now, and no matter how fiercely Nettie fought, right up until the nasal clod of a Frenchman pronounced them man and wife, she was doomed to failure. Stanley had made his choice, his leap, and it was like leaping from one forbidding precipice to another, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She made an uneasy peace with Josephine, who at least conducted herself like a lady and showed a remarkable degree of taste in the charm of the statuary and gardens at Prangins, but Nettie would never forgive her daughter, the scientist, the unholy little snit who’d stolen away her last and youngest, and even as the Frenchman was intoning, “Je vous declare maintenant mari et femme,” she stood behind Stanley hissing, “Godless, Godless.” And thank the Lord she’d brought Cyrus Jr. along to sustain her or she might have fainted dead away right there (neither Anita nor Harold would dignify the proceedings with their presence, and that was what it amounted to, though Anita had her child to look after and in Harold’s case, well, someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on the business). She did cry though, as mothers are wont to do on such occasions, but her tears were of an entirely different order from Josephine‘s, who whimpered like a deprived three-year-old throughout the course of both ceremonies, if you could call them that—no, her tears were tears of rage and hate. If she could have struck Katherine dead right where she stood in her Gaston gown with its pearls and lace and the ridiculous puffed pancake of a hat she wore high up off the crown of her head so that she was nearly as tall as Stanley when you added it all up, heels, hat, chignon and veil, she would have, so help her God, she would have.
And how did the bride feel? For her part, Katherine was satisfied. Or more than satisfied—she was ebullient, triumphant, the battle over and the citadel taken, and she was gracious in victor
y. And in love too, having leapt the same chasm as Stanley, and there was no more anxiety, no more fear of the free fall and crash: he was her husband and she was his wife. She was content. Without reservations. As sure as she’d ever been of anything in her life. And what had made it all right and chased away her last remaining doubts was Stanley himself, prostrate before her on that early summer morning outside the château gates.
He was so contrite and pitiable, pale as a corpse, two weeks’ worth of sleepless nights staring out of his eyes, every fiber of him yearning for her. He couldn’t defend himself or explain how he’d gotten there or why or what his presence portended for them both—he was overwhelmed by his feelings, that was it, as simple as that. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. And she didn’t have to hear him say it or read it in a perfumed letter because she could see it in his eyes and his face and the way he held himself in a kind of hopeless and penitential despair : she’d warned him not to come and he’d disobeyed her. That melted her, that melted her right there, and she brought him in and fed him bonbons and madeleines and she showed him round the place, all twenty rooms, riding up off the balls of her feet as if she were lighter than air and barely able to keep herself tethered, and then they were out on the lake and rowing, and she knew there was nothing more she needed in all the world than to have Stanley at her side.
Yes, and now they were married, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, not Nettie or her odious little rat of a lawyer—Foville or Favril or whatever his name was—or the walking broomstick that was Cyrus, so stiff and formal and tripping over his boarding school manners, as tactless as a shoe-shine boy. But what did that matter to her? She hadn’t married the McCormick family, she’d married Stanley, and now the rest of her life was about to begin. She waited, breathless, a little flushed with the champagne she’d drunk, while the party broke up and her mother ushered the guests out into the reception hall and Stanley stood grinning and pale beside her. All the guests were going into Geneva for the night, and Josephine too—“I want you to have the place to yourself, sweet,” she’d said, “just you and Stanley and the servants”—and in the morning they’d embark on their honeymoon, first to Paris for a month, to shop and stroll through the galleries, to visit Cartier & Fils and Tervisier & Dautant, and it would be one grand party, even if Nettie insisted on coming along—and Josephine. And she laughed to herself, a private trilling little chime of a bride’s laugh, wondering if two mothers on one honeymoon would somehow manage to cancel each other out.