by T. C. Boyle
She took Stanley’s hand in hers as the guests—there were only fifty or so, the most intimate group—began to make their exit. It was eight-thirty P.M. on September 15, 1904, and the day hung in tatters over the lake while the hall rang with laughter and good wishes and the intoxication of all that had happened and all that was to come. Stanley’s fingers were entwined in hers. Her peignoir—ivory silk with a border of Belgian lace the color of vanilla ice cream, Stanley’s favorite—was laid out on the big canopied bed in the Bonaparte suite upstairs. “Good night,” she said to one guest after another, “good night, and thank you so much,” while Stanley stood erect beside her, his right arm extended, shaking hands, grinning like a child, a lover, a Hindu ecstatic, his every word measured and apportioned and the current of anticipation almost sizzling in his fingertips. She could feel it. She could.
And then there was the whole adventure of going to bed, the dismissal of the servants, the separate dressing rooms and baths, the shy smiles, the endearments, the bed itself. Katherine took her time, brushing out her hair, sick with joy, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin at the moment of release. She rubbed lotion into her face and hands, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and when she laid her dressing gown beside the wedding dress on the loveseat and stepped out of her undergarments, she felt a thrill go through her that was like nothing she’d ever experienced, a chill and a fever at the same time, the blood exploding in her veins like gunpowder. And then the nightgown. She lifted her arms, short of breath all of a sudden, and let the silk run down her like water. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d squeezed Stanley’s arm and pecked a kiss to his cheek at the door to his dressing room. The hour was at hand.
She slipped into the bedroom on naked feet, the warm sheath of silk gathering at her breasts and hips and flowing gently across her abdomen. Two candles were burning ceremonially on either side of the bed—her mother’s idea—and there were flowers everywhere, a whole jungle of them, the air thick as wax with their scent. She could hardly breathe for excitement, and was that Stanley? There, beneath the covers—that shadow on the bed? No, it wasn‘t, and her fingers told her what her eyes hadn’t been able to: the bed was empty. The room was empty. And Stanley’s door was shut. “Stanley?” she called, and when she got no answer she tried again, a little louder this time, and she realized she could scream at the top of her lungs if she wanted to and there was nobody to hear her, not even the servants. That made her feel strange. It made her feel bold, randy, made her feel like a wife. “Stanley?
Not a sound.
She tried the handle of his door: it was locked. She tapped at the door and called again. “Stanley?”
This time, from deep in the room beyond, there came a muffled reply, a grunt of acknowledgment so strained and distant it might have been coming from Bonaparte’s secret tunnel in the bowels of the house. “I’m ready,” she said, her lips pressed to the door. “I’m ready foryou.”
Another grunt, nearer this time, and the sounds of movement, followed by a profound and brooding silence. And what was the matter? It took her a moment, and then a smile came to her lips. He was shy, that was all, shy as a maiden, and wasn’t that sweet? She didn’t want a Butler Ames or a Casaubon to initiate her into the pleasures of married life, she wanted this, she wanted Stanley, a neophyte like herself who would go slowly and allow her to discover the delights of Eros in mutual exploration, in partnership, in marriage, and no cast of lovers and whores and lusty widows looking over her shoulder. All right. She would give him time. “I’ll be waiting for you in bed,” she whispered. “Should I put out the candles‘?”
And now his voice, right there, on the other side of the door: “No, it‘s—yes, yes, do that and I’ll be—I’ll be just a minute, some things I have to, yes, of course—”
She drifted back to the bed, her respiration easing from a gallop to a canter, and leaned forward to cup her hand behind first one candle and then the other, puffing darkness into the room. The sheets welcomed her, the night gentle, stars framed in the window that looked out over the lake, and she’d pulled open the curtains for that at least, sidereal light, compass points to steer by. She fanned out her hair on the pillow and lay there on her back, waiting. What did she think of? Everything. Everything that had happened to her in her entire life, and she saw every face, every incident, heard every word replayed, and the stars shifted, and still Stanley’s door remained closed. How much time had passed? Had she fallen asleep? She got out of bed, the carpet a continent beneath her feet and now the cold stone sea of the floor, and she was at the door again and no whisper from her lips this time, nothing, not a word. The handle turned with a click under the pressure of her fingers and she swung open the door.
Stanley’s face, pale as the moon, stared up at her in alarm from the secretary in the far corner of the room. He was seated before it in a stiff-backed chair, hunched over the leaf on his elbows amid a confusion of papers, envelopes, pens and pencils. He didn’t attempt a smile.
“Stanley, what in the world are you doing?” she said in a kind of amazement that verged on stupefaction, and why did she feel so naked and vulnerable suddenly, the negligee clinging to her in all the wrong places and her husband’s startled eyes just beginning to grapple with the image of her? She noticed the clock then, up on the mantelpiece, an ancient block of carved wood and Swiss works that marked the hour with a dull rasp instead of a chime. She was further amazed. “It’s nearly four in the morning,” she said, and there was exasperation in her tone, wifely impatience, disbelief, shock even.
“I, well,” he began, and she saw that he was still in his tuxedo and tails, the top hat sprawled casually on the desk beside him, “—you know, work, correspondence, that sort of thing. I am still, well, comptroller of the Harvester Company, though you’d never think it, and I—well, and there’re the thank-you notes, because so many people have—and Harold, I needed to write Harold and tell him about the day, about us, I mean.”
She was dumbstruck. “But Stanley, darling, this is our wedding night....”
The light of the lamp, which he’d propped up on the near corner of the desk, split his face in two. He turned away from her to scribble something on the sheet of paper before him and he was stiff and bristling, the pen gouging at the paper till the nib gave way and he reached irritably for another. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t going to respond.
“Darling, Stanley,” she said, “can’t it wait? At least till morning?” And she crossed the room to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He made no movement, not even a twitch, but kept on writing till he thought to shield the paper with his hand. “Stanley, come on now, be reasonable,” she said, her voice soft and murmurous, and she ruffled the hair at the back of his neck.
He turned his face to her now, both hands nested over the paper on the desk so that she couldn’t see what he was writing, and what was this—secrets? Secrets on their wedding night? “I, I—” he began and trailed off. He seemed half asleep, drugged, mesmerized.
She let her hand roam over his shoulders. “Come on,” she murmured, “it’s time to come to bed. With me. With me, Stanley.”
“Yes,” he said, staring up at her out of a fixed and wary eye, “yes—I—I know that, and I want to, I do, but you see, if you just give me a minute, that’s all I need, a minute more, just to finish up, I‘ll, well, that is—”
What could she say? She was stunned and hurt. This was her wedding night, this was what she’d been looking forward to all her life, wasn’t it? What was wrong? Was it her? Was he rejecting her? Having second thoughts? She’d known he was shy, certainly, and that was one of the traits that endeared him to her, but this went beyond the bounds of any modesty or reticence she could possibly conceive of—he hadn’t even undressed yet. It was as if he had no intention of it, as if this night, of all nights in their lives, wasn’t consecrated, as if she hadn’t been waiting for him in the next room through all the lingering unfathomable hours. And then it came to her in a slow seep of und
erstanding as she stood there rubbing his clenched shoulders and he averted his face and screened the letter from her: he was afraid of her. Afraid of his own wife. Afraid of the sheets, the bed, the complicated mechanics of love. He was suffering, she could see that, suffering for love of her, and it softened her.
“All right,” she said finally, bending forward to brush the crown of his head with a kiss, wondering what to say, how to phrase it, how far she dared go, “but I don’t see how you can be thinking of business and correspondence at a time like this.”
He wouldn’t look at her. She felt him stiffen under the touch of her hand where it lingered on his shoulder.
“All right,” she sighed, “if you must, if your business means that much to you, but promise me you’ll come to bed in a minute, won’t you? Just a minute?” She brought her face close to his, the light of the lamp harsh and radiant, but he turned his head away and delivered his extorted promise to the tabletop.
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
In the morning she changed the bed herself, before the chambermaid had a chance to poke her nose in the door—no bloody sheets to display here, no flag of virginity, not even the good clean wholesome impress of two bodies lying entwined as one. She bundled up the sheets and stuffed them into the fireplace atop a pyre of pine kindling and split oak, where they made a quick and furious blaze before settling into ropy clots of ash. Stanley had fallen asleep at the desk and he was sleeping still when she awoke at eight to a heavy fuliginous light that spread like a stain over the lake until the sky was as dark as it had been just before dawn, when she’d first awakened. By nine, it was raining.
Katherine lay there prostrate on the stripped mattress, gazing out through the bed curtains at the water lashing the windows, afraid to move. She was hungry, famished—she’d hardly eaten a thing the day before for sheer excitement—but she was also afraid to ring for breakfast because then everybody would know, all servants notorious for their gossip and none more so than the frenchified Swiss, who always moved about the place as if they were on loan from an empress and missed absolutely nothing. But what to do? Her mother would arrive soon enough, every possible question in her eyes, and then Stanley’s mother would follow, just in time for a light luncheon before the whole rampant entourage entrained for Paris and the Elysée Palace Hotel.
Finally, as the clock in the next room struck ten with the faintest repeated rasp, she tiptoed to the door and peered in. Stanley was asleep still, head down, elbows splayed, a basket full of crumpled paper at his feet. He was snoring, a wheeze and stertor that animated the papers scattered round him, and she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a man snoring since her father died—he used to fall asleep in the library after dinner, the newspaper slipping from his lap, a cup of hot malted milk cooling on the table beside him. She found the scene oddly touching, Stanley snoring there at the open secretary, his cheek pressed to the leaf while his lips fluttered and the long lashes of his eyelids meshed like a doll‘s, but she had to wake him all the same—it wouldn’t do for the servants to find him like this.
She thought of shaking him and calling his name in a protracted whisper—“Stanley, Stanley, wake up”—as she expected she would on ten thousand mornings to come, but when she was actually in the room, actually approaching his splayed and sleeping form, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. And why not? Because he would be embarrassed, mortified, caught in a lie, and she didn’t want to see the look on his face, the pain and bewilderment in his eyes and the shame—she didn’t want to be the one to remind him of the futile negligee and the lonely bed. So she took the easy way out—she retreated to the door and slammed it three times in succession before darting out of the bedroom, into the hall, and down the stairs to breakfast.
Eyebrows were raised. The servants crept around the halls like undertakers, Madame Fleury choking on her own suspended breath, her eyes oozing and doleful. And where, they wondered, was the master of the house, the king and patriarch and deflowerer of virgins? Sleeping late. He wasn’t to be disturbed. And of course this revelation was in itself cause for eyebrows to be raised still further. Katherine ignored them. She ordered breakfast, watched the rain, and ate, one small bite at a time.
Stanley appeared at noon, looking confused. He’d bathed and changed into a charcoal gray suit with a stiff formal collar and tie. Katherine, already dressed in the outfit she would wear to Paris on the train, was in the parlor, seated at the window with a book she was pretending to read. “Ah, well,” Stanley said, poking his head in the door like a child playing a prank, “so there you, well, are. I just, well—”and then he was in the room, tall and solemn, his shoulders thrown back and something—a neatly folded slip of paper—making its way from one hand to the other and back again. He rocked on his heels. Smacked his lips. Opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t quite seem to close it around the words he wanted.
“Good morning,” Katherine said. “Or should I say, ‘Good afternoon’?”
He didn’t seem to know how to respond. He merely stood there, just inside the door, watching her out of hooded eyes.
“Did you sleep well?” She didn’t want to be acerbic, didn’t want to provoke him, but she couldn’t seen to help herself. She was angry. She was. And humiliated too.
“I—well—I, I’m sorry, I, you know-work ... and then, before I knew it—”and he threw his hands in the air in a gesture of helplessness, the neatly folded slip of paper going along for the ride.
Katherine felt the blood rush to her face. He was just standing there like a block of wood, like an oaf, his hands dangling, a fleck of shaving cream stuck to the underside of his chin. “Well?” she demanded. “Don’t I deserve a kiss?”—and she wanted to add, “at least,” but held back.
Suddenly he was in motion, striding across the great cavernous stone room with its faded tapestries and the wall of long narrow windows giving onto the gray void of the lake, and he didn’t look tender, not at all—he looked determined, dutiful, martial almost. He bent to her stiffly as she raised her chin and compressed her lips, and stiffly, he kissed her—on the cheek, no less. She rose from the chair to take him in her arms, but he backed off a step, every mortal ounce of him working and twitching, and what was this? He was thrusting the paper at her, a crisply folded sheet of stationery with the McCormick monogram embossed in the corner.
“Katherine,” he said, “I wanted—last night, I—here, forcing the paper into her hand, his smile high and tight, feasting on her with his eyes. ”Go ahead,“ he said. ”Open it. Read it.“
She unfolded the paper and held it up to the light, standing there beside him on the morning after her wedding night with the rain beating at the windows and the servants lurking in the halls. It was a will. Four lines, signed and dated, and nothing more.
I, Stanley Robert McCormick, being of sound mind and body, do hereby consign all my monies, assets and real property, in toto, to my wife, Katherine Dexter McCormick, in the event of my death.
She didn’t know what to say. It was so unexpected, so odd—and so morbid too. Was this what he’d been writing? Was this what he’d hidden from her the night before? “Stanley,” she murmured, and she couldn’t seem to find her voice, “you didn’t have to do this—there’s plenty of time to think of such things, years and years...”
He was beaming, all his teeth on display and his eyes lit like hundred-watt bulbs. “It’s a surprise,” he said. “That’s what I—last night—it wasn’t business, not all of it, you see, because—because I was, well, I was thinking of you—”
And now she didn’t have to say anything, and neither did he. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself to him, one flesh, and lifted her face to his and found his lips. And they were like that, in that very pose, the first real kiss of their married life and every sentimental emotion charging through them, through them both, when Katherine’s mother swept in the door, all feathers and perfume and brisk commanding energy, and Stanley’s mother right behind h
er. “And will you look at this,” Josephine crowed, “look at the lovebirds!”
PART III
Dr. Kempf’s Time
1.
BENIGN STUPORS
O‘Kane was sprawled on a circular patch of lawn in the middle of the daphne garden, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, and all three of them were lathered in sweat and breathing hard. Mr. McCormick had been especially frisky on his walk that morning, leading them on a chase from one end of the grounds to the other, elbows pumping and nostrils flared, his eyes fixed on some invisible lure in the distance. Up they went, all the way to the top of the estate with its inhuman rise in elevation and vertiginous views of the Channel, and then they turned round and charged back down again, Mr. McCormick leading the way with his lunatic strides, feinting this way and that, till they’d circled the house three times and finally come to rest here, among the daphnes. Mart was lying prone on a stone bench near the fountain, inanimate but for his tortured breathing, and Mr. McCormick himself was stretched out on the lawn and staring up into the granular sky, his jacket balled up beneath his head to serve as a pillow. It was absolutely still, not a breeze, not a sound. The sun all but crushed them with its weight.