by T. C. Boyle
Mr. Lawler rose to object. Judge Dehy, who seemed either to be asleep or in a state of suspended animation, made a show of rustling about in his seat before murmuring, “Objection overruled.”
Katherine turned her face to the judge, all the hurt stabbing at her eyes, the crime of it, the abuse, the indecency and injustice. She felt her voice quaver. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it.”
Then it was Lawler’s turn, and he couldn’t make her so much as flinch, though to a man like that no accusation was too scandalous or irresponsible, no scab too thin to pick, and he went after her with everything in his mercenary’s arsenal. He questioned her competency as a guardian, her scientific background, her attachment to “radical” causes, her friendship with Mrs. Roessing, but nothing, nothing could make her waver. It was “Yes, Mr. Lawler,” and “No, Mr. Lawler,” throughout the afternoon and into the next morning.
—And wasn’t it the case that her husband had improved dramatically and that it was Dr. Kempf who was responsible?
—No, she insisted, no it wasn’t. Her husband had simply settled down with age.
—But she wanted his money, didn’t she, to devote to her radical causes and Mrs. Margaret Sanger’s godless movement to prevent natural conception?
—No, she didn’t want money. She wanted control of her husband’s care because of the mess the McCormicks had made of it. She loved her husband. She wanted to see him well.
And then, eleven o‘clock in the morning and with Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his Indians and their fawning dog all lit with the glow of the day advancing beyond the windows, Oscar Lawler rested his arms on the rail of the witness box and drank her up with his hateful liver-complected eyes. There was dandruff on the shoulders of his brown suit, dandruff in his eyebrows; his nails were bitten to the quick. He was so close she could almost smell him. “Then you believe,” he said, his voice rich with irony, “in contradiction of your own attorney and his string of ’expert’ witnesses, that your husband is not hopelessly insane. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice nothing more than a whisper, “yes, I believe it,” but Newton Baker was rising to object or request an adjournment or dash outside to climb the flagpole and howl at the sky, but she wasn’t really there, not any longer. The phrase Lawler had used—the phrase Newt had used, just to make a point—came back at her, beating at her like a rising sea, hopelessly insane, hopelessly insane, till she felt herself letting go and she wasn’t in the courtroom anymore staring down at that chittering little rodent of a man in his litigious brown and his sleek lawyerly shoes... no, she was in Boston, twenty-three years ago, and it was the morning of the day Stanley went out of her orbit for good and ever.
The night had held, a dense fabric of the familiar and the usual, Stanley stretched out like a corpse across the bed in the guestroom, Katherine lying awake and staring into the darkness of her room down the hall. She awoke to the smell of bacon and came down to breakfast feeling as drained and exhausted as if she’d been up a hundred nights in a row: the German teacher had gotten away unharmed, but who was next and how would it end? Stanley was already up and dressed, seated at the table in the dining room with the newspaper folded neatly at his elbow and a pyramid of sausages, bacon, eggs and fried tomatoes all mounded up in the center of the plate before him. He looked, of all things, crisp—crisp and fresh in a new shirt, collar and cuffs, his face newly shaven, his hair still damp and fastidiously combed away from the sweep of his brow and the tight plumb-line of his parting. “Good morning, Stanley,” she murmured, and he glanced up quickly, frowned, and went back to his newspaper.
Josephine wasn’t down yet, and Katherine took the place across from her husband and rang for tea and a toasted muffin and jam. She didn’t have much of an appetite, not after what she’d been through the night before, but she’d always believed in exercise and vigor and the fuel to sustain it, and she felt she’d force herself to have something at least. The maid appeared, a little curtsy, face of stone, the door swinging once and then twice and here was sustenance set out before her. She buttered her muffin in silence, waiting for Stanley to take the lead, and then made a pass at the jam and poured a dollop of cream into her tea, stirring all the while. Her heart was pounding. She had to say something. “Looks to be a pleasant day,” she said, “for January, I mean. I just don’t think I can stand any more of this gloomy weather, and at least the sun’s shining for a change....” She trailed off.
Stanley looked up then, and his eyes seemed to be swollen, leaping right out of his head, as if there were a corpse nailed to the wall behind her. “I—Katherine,” he suddenly blurted, “about the, uh, the German teacher—”
“Yes?”
“I’ve decided not to study German, not—not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Maybe next month. Or the month after that. It—it’s my teeth, you see, I mean my tooth, you see, I—well, it aches and hurts me and I think, my mood yesterday—”
She softened. And she hoped, still and foolishly, because wouldn’t that be something if it was all just a kind of poisoning of the system and hadn’t she just yesterday remarked to her mother about his breath being tainted? “You poor thing,” she said. “Do you want me to have a look?”
“No.”
“Well, what about a dentist then? Shouldn’t you be seeing a dentist if it’s bothering you, especially in light of your nerves and the sort of thing that took place in this house last night?” And here she couldn’t stop herself. “Really, Stanley, I don’t mean to lecture but you can’t just go around brawling with people on the docks and, and kidnapping German teachers. It’s gone too far. It has. You need help, Stanley, professional help, and you’ve got to let me take you someplace where you can get the kind of care and rest you need ... just till your nerves are settled.” She tried on a smile. “Wouldn’t that be the best thing to do?”
He stood abruptly, in the same motion snatching a fistful of food from his plate and forcing it into his mouth. He was shaking his head back and forth automatically, his cheeks bulging, his eyes sinking all the way back down to nothing, pitiful starved eyes that seemed to beg for help and intervention, and she got up too and reached out to him.
The table lay between them, the cold eggs, the sausage and bacon subsiding in a pool of congealed fat. His jaws were working and yet he winced with every downward thrust. “My, my tooth,” he said, spewing bits of partially masticated food, “I—I’ve got to f-find a dentist—”
“I’ll call mother’s dentist—he’s really quite good and I’m sure, if it’s an emergency, he’d be—”
“No, no,” Stanley cried, still chewing, food down the front of his shirt now, “I—I have to go,” and he shot out the door, through the hall and down the stairs, where he snatched up his hat and overcoat before plunging into the cube of light that stood there in place of the front door.
All right, fine, she was thinking, trying to calm herself, trying to stop quaking and fuming every time he entered or left the room. He’d gone to the dentist to have a bad tooth seen to. What could be more normal or prosaic? She shook her head as if to clear it, squashed all her worries and presentiments, and went back up to bed.
When she woke it was past ten and she saw that she was going to be late for her appointment with Professor Durward, who was in the process of setting up a very intriguing set of experiments into the nature of simian sexuality with a young Harvard psychiatrist by the name of Hamilton. She was hoping to get some direction from him regarding her own future at the Institute—she very much wanted to work with larger animals, rats, rabbits, apes and monkeys, rather than the microbes or fruit flies everyone seemed to prefer. But she’d have to call and rescheduie—if she could even get through on the phone—or maybe she could make it after all, if she hurried.
In the end, she chose to take a cab to the Institute and she did manage to catch Professor Durward, who seemed to have forgotten all about her, and she stayed on through the afternoon and examined some of his charg
es with him—a shipment of twelve rhesus monkeys from India. They stared out at her from their cages in a dull yellow bundle of limbs and parodic faces, their toes and fingers so human-like as they gripped the wire or groomed themselves and their babies. There were two babies among them, she remembered, sparse clinging things that had been born on shipboard, or so Professor Durward claimed.
It was late in the afternoon by the time she got home, and she found Stanley waiting for her on the front steps, highly agitated. His collar was torn, there was a gash over his left eye and his lower lip was yellow and crusted. He’d had a fight with the dentist or the dentist’s receptionist or a man in the waiting room or the taxi driver who brought him there, she could see that in a minute, one of a thousand fights, fights that would go on till he was stopped. Or killed. She took one look at him and wanted to walk right on by, sick to death of him, ready to call it quits, send him back to his mother, anything, but the choice wasn’t in her hands, not this time.
The minute he saw her he leapt to his feet and grabbed her arm. “You—you can’t leave me like that,” he said, breathless, the veins swollen in his neck above the slashed collar. “Who was it,” he demanded, forcing her up the steps and against the slab of the door, “one of your boyfriends? But-Butler Ames? Huh? Tell me!”
“I’ve been at the Institute,” she said.
“Lies!” he spat. “All lies!”
She told him he was hurting her—and he was, the strength of him, his hand like a ligature right there above her elbow—but he just kept repeating “Who was it?” over and over again. Then she took her key out and they were in the hallway, fighting away from one another, the maid’s stricken face lost somewhere behind the plants, and then she was free of him and dashing up the stairs, his feet thundering behind. Up and up, no time to stop or reason, down the hallway and into her room, the door shut and bolted and him out there on the runner pounding and pounding. “Let me in!” he cried, and he was furious, pounding, “let me in!”
After a minute he stopped, and the fury had gone out of his voice. “Please,” he begged, “please let me in. I-I’ll be good, I will.” He was sobbing now, hot and cold, and where was the tap to turn it off, where was it? “I-I love you, Katherine. Don’t leave me.”
She clung to the door, and she found that she was crying too, a dry rasp of the throat and the water stinging her eyes. This was it, this was her life, this was her marriage, a madman in the hall and an inch-and-a-half thickness of mahogany between her and harm, yes, harm, because all of a sudden he’d begun to rage again, hammering the door with his shoulder, the bolt shivering, the frame heaving and protesting. “Go away!” she screamed.
There was no answer, not for the longest time, and she held her breath and listened, listened so hard she could hear the thoughts colliding in his head and the blood bolting through his veins, and then there was a sudden crash and the wood gave way where it was thinnest, right in the middle of the center panel, and she could see his face through the snarling hole, nothing but eyes, all eyes, seeking her out. “I’ll k-kill you, you bitch!” he roared.
She backed away from the door, all the way across the room to the bed, and he began shouting out to someone only he could see. “Jack!” he cried. “Jack London! Come on in, Jack, and we’ll both have her!”
That was when she retreated to the closet, the last place she could go, the key on the inside of the door and the door shut tight, and nothing but darkness now and fear, fear and hate, because he was what she was afraid of and that made her hate him beyond all forgiveness or consolation. Stanley. Stanley Robert McCormick, the madman, the lunatic, the nut, the sexual hypochondriacal neurasthenic. And that was what she was left with when they came and got him and they put him in the straitjacket and the sheet restraints and used all their outraged male muscle to hold him down.
But that wasn’t how she wanted to remember him, not now in the stairwell of the courthouse with the reporters shoving their faces at her and Newt Baker guiding her by that same abused elbow with a grip as gentle and tactful as it was firm. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t Stanley. No, she remembered him the way he was that night in Chicago, the ground frozen hard and his mother looming beside them in the carriage like some excrescence and demanding that they take Miss Dexter directly home: “Rush Street? Have you lost your senses?”
He’d fought for her. Stood up to his mother and made his choice. And when he came back to the carriage he was ten feet tall, her Stanley, all hers. A hush, the door pulled to, that intimate space all ordained, hot bricks for their feet under the fur robe, the pale light fading, the horses moving now through the richest haze of possibility. He was shy and awkward and he wanted to talk about Debs, “About Debs and what he said in the paper the other—the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I‘ve—”
He never got to finish the thought, as if it would have mattered, because Debs could only take you so far, and Debs didn’t matter now and he never would again. She put her hand on his chest and felt his heart living there beneath his coat, his jacket, his shirt. “Hush, Stanley,” she said, and she felt her face move toward his through the heavy atmosphere and complex gravity of love. “You don’t need to talk now,” she whispered, “not anymore. Just kiss me, Stanley. Kiss me.”
EPILOGUE
1947, World Without Walls
And so he died a prisoner, Stanley Robert McCormick, seventy-two years old and his hair white as bone, handsome, tall and bereft till the last. Nurse Gleason was gone, along with her stalwart charms, and Muriel gave up visiting for her own life, and though the new doctor—Dr. Russell—had a shining golden buttercup of a secretary and there was a dietician with two breasts roaming around somewhere in the depths of the house and the Italian woman, Eddie O‘Kane’s wife, cooked on in the kitchen, Stanley never got to touch any of them or hold them in his arms the way his mother had held him or the way Katherine had. She came to visit almost every day, Katherine, or every other day, because sometimes he didn’t want to see her, just refused, flatly and absolutely, and no one to make him say different, and she came haunting the streets all the way from her house in downtown Santa Barbara with the grand modern rooms and the gymnasium she’d built for him to use when he came visiting, but he never came visiting.
He couldn’t touch her either, because he’d been up in the Yukon Territory with Sitka Charley and the Malemute Kid and whole considerable teams of dogs and she wasn’t woman enough for him—no, she was an old lady, of the very properest and stiffest sort, and she sat and read to him from the paper and made him kiss her on the cheek every time she came and went. Then he became ill with pneumonia and all the florid faces and vivid formless things came back to him again and inhabited him and raised an unholy yowl of voices inside him, and the Judges were there too in their flapping black robes and no surcease. He was thirty-one years old when he was blocked the first time and he was worth six million dollars and he knew all about that because he was the comptroller and could add up two columns of figures as well as any man or mathematician alive. And when he died finally and was finally released into a world without walls or bars or restraints, he was worth thirty-four million and more, because it wasn’t his money they’d locked up—it was his body. And his mind.
Katherine inherited that money, all of it, and everything else too—the properties in Chicago that were minted of gold, the securities and stocks, Stanley’s eight grades of underwear and the house at Riven Rock with the bars on the windows and the eighty-seven acres with their views of the stunned and scoured islands and the nurses who were all through with nursing now. She sold the estate to pay the inheritance taxes and she took what was left to seed the causes and institutions she believed in—MIT, the League of Women Voters, the Santa Barbara Art Museum and Dr. Gregory Pincus, an old friend of Roy Hoskins, who developed a little yellow progesterone-based pill that would free women forever from sexual constraint. All that was to the good, but she lost the court case, despite what the newspapers said. Kempf was
sent packing, that much she’d accomplished, but the McCormicks were still there in all their obstinacy and immovability and the judge had added three whisker-pulling male physicians to the board of guardians and all the wrangling went on and on. It was a partial victory, she supposed, but there was little consolation in that. Because she never did get the thing she wanted most—her husband—not until he was dead.
And by then it was too late.
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
In fourteen smart, funny, and richly crafted works,
T. C. Boyle strips away the veneer of respectability
draped across the American psyche, and
exposes the comical truths beneath.
AFTER THE PLAGUE
These sixteen stories display an astonishing range, as Boyle zeroes in on everything from air rage to abortion doctors to the story of a 1920s Sicilian immigrant who constructs an amazing underground mansion in an effort to woo his sweetheart. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, these new stories find “one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers” (The New York Times) at the top of his form. ISBN 0-14-200141-4
BUDDING PROSPECTS
All Felix and his friends have to do is harvest a crop of Cannabis Sativa and half a million tax-free dollars will be theirs. But as their beloved buds wither under assault from ravenous scavengers, human caprice, and a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak, their dreams of easy money go up in smoke. “Consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny.”—The New York Times ISBN 0-14-029996-3