Riven Rock Part 12

Well. O'Kane was impressed-all that over a scar-but he thought nothing more of it as the summer faded into autumn and the War news dominated every conversation and Giovannella warmed and melted and gave way to him again, stealing out on Sat.u.r.day afternoons to linger with him on a mattress in the garage out back of Pat's house while the baby shook his rattle and pumped his legs and arms in the air. Meanwhile, the bearer of the scar, Dr. Hoch, was very patient with Mr. McCormick-none of this talking cure business-sitting with him throughout the day and into the night, putting in longer hours than O'Kane or Mart or anybody on the estate. Mostly he would just sit there with him, rumpled and avuncular, reading out an interesting bit from a book or magazine now and again, walking Mr. McCormick. to and from the theater building and accompanying him on his walks. Sometimes the two of them would sit for hours and not say a word, and other times Mr. McCormick would be positively verbose, going on and on about the reaper-"the Wonder of the Reaper," he called it, after some book about his father-and his two brothers and the crying need for social welfare and reform in this cold unforgiving world.

They talked of the War too, and that was a bit odd, from O'Kane's point of view anyway, because here were the American millionaire and the prototypical Hun sitting cheek by jowl, but they never came to blows over it or even raised their voices, not that O'Kane could recall. War news trickled through to them all winter, often several days late, through the Los Angeles, Chicago and Santa Barbara papers, and the papers brought news of Katherine too. She was in Washington throughout that year-1918-and the next, where she'd been handpicked by the president himself to sit on the National Defense Women's Committee, doing all sorts of things to prosecute the War, from putting women to work to selling Liberty Bonds and dreaming up those patriotic posters you saw everywhere. Every month or so she'd send Mr. McCormick detailed maps of the Western Front, showing the battle lines and trenches. He would pore over them for hours, commenting on places he'd visited on his honeymoon and sketching in all sorts of antic figures to represent armies, gun emplacements, and naval, horse and even air squadrons.

For a while there, especially through the summer and fall of 1918, the War became one of his pet obsessions, and he drew not only Dr. Hoch into it, but O'Kane himself. When the armies advanced or retreated he painstakingly erased his figures and symbols and moved the lines forward and backward and drew them in all over again. He a.n.a.lyzed the offensive at Amiens over and over, and he'd never been more lucid or articulate, not since his golfing days at McLean, and when the papers announced the American victory at St. Mihiel in September, he paraded around the upper parlor for hours, shaking his fists and uncannily imitating the whistle and crash of a bombardment while the rumpled little doctor sat on and watched with his scarred impa.s.sive face.

Katherine returned in December for the holidays, and that was when the business of the scar came up again. She was late in getting to California because of her duties with the Defense Committee, arriving just two days before Christmas. She seemed tired, worn about the edges, and as she stood in the theater building under a monumental wreath of holly and mistletoe handing out Christmas bonuses to the employees, she looked old. Or older. O'Kane watched her, always the lady, always perfect, always carved of the clearest coldest ice, and tried to tot up her age-she would have been, what, forty-one? Or forty-two? Well, for the first time it had begun to show-nothing extreme; she was hardly a hag yet-but there it was. Her clothes were as rich as ever, but they were yesterday's fashions, the heavy drapery of the suffragette and the matron, nothing at all like the skimpy satiny look of Dolores Isringhausen or the walking light that was Giovannella. She was getting old, but so was everybody else, even lucky Eddie O'Kane, who was going to be thirty-six come March. And he felt it most keenly when he came up to her and she took his hand and gave him his envelope and a smile that didn't mean a thing, not yea or nay, and he almost wished she'd come round cracking the whip again so they could all go back and start over, drenched in hope.

Anyway, the next day, the day before Christmas, she came to the house early in a flurry of presents and fruitcakes and rang up her husband from downstairs, to chat with him and extend her Christmas greetings. O'Kane was playing dominoes with Mart when the phone rang and the doctor got up to answer it. "It's for you, Mr. McCormick," he said, and his eyes were moist and wide. "It's your wife."

It took Mr. McCormick a minute to get up the steam and cross the room to where the doctor stood holding the telephone out to him, and when he did start across the floor he regressed into his two-steps-forward-one-step-back mode, hunching his shoulders and dragging down his face, his right leg suddenly dead and trailing behind him in a kind of wounded tango. When he finally did get to the phone, lift the receiver to his ear and bend to the mouthpiece, he didn't seem to have much to say other than a moist gulping swallow of a h.e.l.lo. She seemed to be doing all the talking. At least at first.

Dr. Hoch settled into an armchair at a discreet distance, and O0'Kane and Mart went on with their game, but all three were listening, of course they were-if not for therapeutic reasons, then for curiosity's sake; that, and to poke a hole, however small, in the tight fabric of their boredom.

Five minutes into the conversation, Mr. McCormick's voice suddenly came up in a froglike croak. "Did you see Dr. Hoch's scar?"

There was a silence while she responded, and if O'Kane strained to hear over the crackle of the fire and the ambient sounds of the house, he could just make out the faintest whisper on the other end of the line, and it was funny-she could have been halfway around the world for all the faintness of her voice, but here she was right downstairs. That must have been odd for Mr. McCormick, because he knew where she was as well as anybody. But then he was used to it, O'Kane figured. Sure. And what a thing to get used to-to have to get used to-tike the prisoner in solitary who falls in love with the mouse that shares his cell or the galley slave who comes to like the feel of the oar in his hand.

But now Mr. McCormick was saying something about cuts-his singsong chant, "one slit, one slit, one slit" creeping into it. "I can be cut too," he said. "Sh-shaving. In my throat. Ever think of that?"

She was saying something, the tiniest whisper of a mechanical squawk. The fire snapped. Mart stretched and something popped in his shoulders.

"You're in Washington!" Mr. McCormick suddenly shouted. "With me-men! You're in Washington all alone, ar-aren't you? I know you are, I know, and do you kn-know what Sc-s...o...b..e did to his wife, or-or almost did, because she was, was UNFAITHFUL?" And he roared out this last so that the doctor jumped and O'Kane had to fight himself to keep from getting up and pacing round the room.

She said something back, trying to calm him, Now, Stanley, you know better- "Do you know?" he roared.

Silence on the other end. Apparently she didn't.

And then, in a voice as calm as it was clear and un.o.bstructed, he was quoting, quoting a poem: s...o...b..e for wh.o.r.edom whips his wife and cries He'll slit her nose; but blubbering she replies, "Good sir, make no more cuts i' th' outward skin, One slit's enough to let adultery in."

He stood there poised over the phone a long moment, and whether Katherine was making any reply to this or not, O'Kane never knew, but he felt his heart turn over and his eyes were burning as if he'd got caustic soda in them. He hadn't given it much thought, Mr. McCormick locked away here in his tower and she out there in the world, but of course she was unfaithful to him, how could she not be, Ice Queen or no? It had been twelve years at least. And how could any woman go without it as long as that?

THE MATCH OF THE YEAR.

When Katherine refused him, all but laughing in his face on that rainy thick-bodied September night with the horses clopping stupidly through the streets and the clock thundering doom in his ears, Stanley got to his feet, made a curt bow and bolted for the door, deaf to her calls and pleas. "Stanley, what are you doing?" she cried, springing up in alarm. "I was just... I thought we were-she protested, hurrying after him, but he never hesitated, not even to retrieve his hat and coat, flinging himself down the stairs and out into the rain. "Stanley!" she called, her voice echoing down the stairway and out the open door. "Be reasonable! You've got to give me time!"

He never even heard her. He was running, the hair hanging wet in his face, his collar askew and his shirtfront soaked through to the skin, and he ran all the way back to the hotel, arms pumping, elbows flailing, eyes flashing white. Pedestrians fell away from him beneath the bonnets of their umbrellas like so many wilted toadstools, carriages swerved to avoid him as he slashed across the street, dogs barked at his heels. "Watch where you're going," someone growled and a police officer shouted out to him, but he paid no heed. He never felt the cobblestones beneath his feet or the raindrops on his face, didn't smell the wet richness of the old stones or the barnyard ferment of the horse dung in the gutters, didn't notice the way the night gathered around the streetlights as if to smother them.

She'd laughed at him. Refused even to take him seriously. Made a joke of the whole thing. But then why wouldn't she? He was a fool, ungainly, stupid, the least likely suitor in the world, not half the man Butler Ames was. What had he been thinking? A woman like Katherine could have her pick of all the men in the world, and why would he ever think she'd stoop to consider someone like him?

The clerk at the front desk gave him a startled look when he burst through the door in his wild-eyed, rain-soaked, hatless frenzy. "Are you all right, sir?" he asked, practically shouting, and the bellhop rounded the corner at a dead run. "Have you been injured? Should I call a doctor?"

"The bill," Stanley wheezed, and what had become of his voice? He pounded his breastbone with an urgent fist. "I want to, to settle up."

"Sir?" the clerk said, making a question of it, and then he took a closer look at Stanley's eyes and collar and the water dripping from his nose and chin, and changed his tone. "Yes, sir," he said, all servility and unctuous concern. "I have it right here. Mr. McCormick, isn't it?"

"I'll be wanting my motorcar brought round."

Again the clerk lapsed into amazement. He flashed a nervous look at the bellhop. "Sir?"

"My automobile. From the stables out back. I'll need it brought round, at, at once."

"But sir, it's nearly midnight and our motor man has gone off duty-I'm afraid no one here can operate the machine, sir, and besides, don't you know it's raining?"

Stanley was extracting bills from his wallet and laying them out in a neat row on the marble countertop. "Never mind," he said, "I'll fetch it myself. And please, just put this toward the bill, and, and keep the change."

"What about your luggage, sir?" The clerk was shouting at his retreating form, but Stanley never looked back.

The Mercedes wasn't equipped with a top, but that didn't faze Stanley. He draped a rug over his knees, wrapped himself in a tan duster, settled his saturated scalp beneath a wide-crowned felt hat and started off down the dark street in a roar of backfiring cylinders and ratcheting gears. The rain drove down in silver sheets and beat off the dash and the seats till there was a regular stream flowing between his feet and out over the running board. His hat collapsed and his goggles steamed up. The wind cut through him. And once he left the city, heading for the Adirondacks and his mother, the blackness closed over him and the thin stream of illumination from the headlamps was all but swallowed up in it. He couldn't see a thing.

Still, he kept going. He was in shock, so hurt and mortified he felt like a burnt-out cinder, immolated in shame, and he had no other thought than to make it home as quickly as he could. He hurtled through the night, spooking foxes, skunks and opossums and striking terror in the breast of every slumbering horse and stertorous cow within earshot, and through it all he was picturing the yellow pine camp on Saranac Lake with its six-foot-high fireplace and overstuffed couches and a hundred rustic nooks and niches where he could burrow deep and lick his festering wounds.

Katherine had rejected him. That was the fact of his life. It was his sorrow and his burden and it wet him through and hurled wind in his teeth and basted him in mud. Inevitably, though, as the night wore on and the car rocked and lurched its way through the storm, the thunder of the elements and the even, unbroken whine of the engine began to soothe him. Sure. He was making good time, conquering the night, alone and adventuring, and he got as far as Westborough before he took a wrong turn, blew out both front tires simultaneously and sank to the axles in an evil-smelling plastic mud that sucked the boots from his feet the minute he abandoned the car.

There were no lights anywhere. But he labored on, barefooted, and the night was hallucination enough for him. He followed one road to another and on to the next till it was dawn and still raining and a farm-house loomed up out of the gloom like an island at sea. The farmer obliged him by taking him back into town-which he'd somehow managed to circ.u.mvent by a good five miles during his nocturnal ramblings-and then wishing him the very best of everything as he stood shivering and shoeless on the platform at the Westborough train station. He caught the first train to Albany and hired a man and a coach to take him up to Saranac as he huddled sleepless on the cold leather seat, Katherine's face slipping in and out of his consciousness and a whole host of unattributed voices chanting in his ears till he had to put his hands up and force them shut.

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 pa.s.sing 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 sc.u.m 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 maitre 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 acc.u.mulation 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 compet.i.tor 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 antic.i.p.ation like a pat of b.u.t.ter 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 pa.s.senger 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 rehea.r.s.ed. "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 m.u.f.flers 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 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 a.s.sortment 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 G.o.d 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 gla.s.s 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 frica.s.seed 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 pa.s.sed 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? me? Whatever are you talking about? Whatever are you talking about? We've We've invited Miss Dexter, and invited Miss Dexter, and we we shall see her home. Really, Stanley, I'm surprised at you-where are your manners?" 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 m.u.f.fler 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- 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?

He did. And he hung his head and pulled mournfully at his cuffs and offered Josephine his handkerchief, but he was soaring, absolutely, no dogs in the mirror now. Katherine loved him. Incredibly. Improbably. Beyond all doubt or reason. He mooned at her across the table through the soup and fish courses and kept on mooning and beaming and winking till the dessert was in crumbs and the coffee cups drained, and after she'd pecked a goodnight kiss to the hollow of his right cheek, he phoned up an old friend from Princeton and went out to drink champagne into the small hours of the morning.

The next afternoon he was back at Katherine's door, pale and shaking, his head stuffed full of gauze and his eyes aching in their sockets. No one was home and the maid wouldn't let him in, so he sat on the stoop in a daze and watched a skin of ice thicken over a puddle in the street until Katherine came home and found him there. "I can't let you do this," he said, rising from the cold stone in a delirium of shame and self-abnegation.

She was in her furs and a scarf, the brim of her hat faintly rustling in a wind that came up the street from the Bay. "Do what?" she said. "What are you talking about? Her smile faded. "And what are you doing out here in this weather-do you want to catch your death?"

Slouching, miserable, c.r.a.pulous, chilled to the bone, his veins plugged with suet and his fingertips dead to all sensation, he could only croak out the words: "Marry me."

She puzzled a minute, her bag and books clutched tight in her arms, her eyes working, her hat brim fluttering, and then she decided he was joking. "Marry you?" she echoed, talking through a grin. "Are you asking me again? Or is that the imperative form of the verb?"

"No, I ... I didn't mean that. I mean, I can't let you do this to yourself, throw your life away, on, on someone like me."

She tried to make light of it, tried to slip her arm through his and lead him up the stairs, but he broke away, his face working. "Stanley?" she said. And then: "It's all right now. Calm down. Come on, let's discuss it inside where it's warm."

"No." He stood there shivering, fitfully clenching and unclenching his hands. There was ice in his mustache where his breath had condensed and frozen. "I don't deserve you. I'm no good. I've never-I won't ever... Didn't you read my letters?"

The wind picked up. Two men in overcoats with bowlers clamped manually to their heads went by on the opposite side of the street. Katherine looked uncertain all of a sudden. "I have a confession to make," she said, ducking her head and pulling at the fingers of her gloves. "I'm afraid I didn't read them, not all of them. They were beautifully written, I don't mean that... it's just that they were so, I don't know, depressing. Can you forgive me?"

Stanley was thunderstruck. He forgot everything, forgot where he was and what he was doing and why he'd come. "You didn't read them?"

In the smallest voice: "No."

A long moment pa.s.sed, both of them shivering, a couple in a silver-gray victoria giving them a queer look as they trundled past in a clatter of wheels, hoofs and bells. From down the street came the voices of children at play, shrill with excitement. "Well, you should read them," Stanley said, his face drawn and white. "Maybe then you'd... you'd change your mind."

She was firm, Katherine, unshakable and tough, and now she did loop her arm through his. "I'll never change my mind," she said. "Here"-all business now-"help me with my things, will you, please?" She handed him her books before he could protest and tugged him toward the door.

He tucked the books firmly under his arm and allowed himself to be led up the steps, where Katherine let her handbag dangle from her wrist and rang the bell rather than fumble for her key. "The letters," he said, and they weren't finished with the subject yet. "They-they're nothing, they barely scratch the surface. You don't know. You can't know. You see, I'm"-he turned his head sharply away from her-"I'm a s.e.xual degenerate."

"Stanley, really," she said, and the maid's footsteps were audible now, echoing down the hallway like gunshots. "You have to calm yourself-it can't be as bad as all that."