Riven Rock Part 14

O'Kane was ready to tell her what she wanted to hear, that her husband was advancing like a star pupil, making a nimble run at sanity, needing only time and money and the ministrations of girls, women and bearded hags to make him whole again, but the alcohol tripped him up. "A little," he shrugged. "We've let him have a carpet in the upper parlor again, and he's been very good about it. And he's been running quite a bit-for his exercise."

"Running?" She paused in mid-step, her eyes slicing into him.

"Yes. He seems to want to run lately-when we accompany him on his daily walk, Mart and me, that is. And we took him for a drive a few weeks back, and he seemed to enjoy it."

"And that's it? That's the extent of his improvement as you see it-running ? Well let me tell you, I've just got off the phone with him and he seems as confused as ever-or more so. And irritating"-this for the redhead, with a nod and a martyred look. "Stanley can can be irritating." be irritating."

"With all due respect, Mrs."-he almost slipped and called her Katherine-"Mrs. McCormick, and I'm no doctor, but I do feel your presence excites him and he's not himself, not at all-"

Another look for Mrs. Roessing. "Yes, that's what every male doctor and every male nurse has been telling me for twelve years and more now. "

Katherine surprised him then-shocked him, actually. Suddenly she had a cigarette in her hand, as if she'd conjured it out of thin air, and she crossed the room to Mrs. Roessing and asked her for a light in a low hum that said all sorts of things to him. He watched in silence as the two women bent their heads together and Katherine lit her cigarette from the smoldering tip of Mrs. Roessing's.

"And Dr. Hoch," Katherine said, exhaling. "His health, I mean-he's holding up? Spending time each day with my husband?"

O'Kane looked from one woman to the other. He hadn't even heard the question. Katherine was smoking. He'd never dreamed-not her. She might have been Queen of the Ice Queens, but she was a lady, a lady above all-and ladies didn't smoke. But then he'd suspected all along that this sort of thing went hand-in-hand with marching in the streets and emanc.i.p.ation and all the rest of it. Radicals, that's what they were. Pants wearers. She-men.

"Mr. O'Kane?"

"Hm?"

Katherine's face was like an ax. It chopped at him in the screaming light. "You haven't been drinking, have you?"

He tried to put on one of his faces, Eddie O'Kane of the silver tongue, one of the world's great liars. "Noooo," he protested. "I, just-I haven't been feeling well, that's all."

That brought the redhead to her feet, those fine legs flexing, the holly-green dress in a frenzy of motion. The two exchanged a look. "You haven't been running a fever, have you?" It was Mrs. Roessing talking now, and she had one of those elemental voices that gets inside you to the point where you want to confess to anything. "A kind of grippe of the lower stomach? Runs?"

O'Kane was confused. His face was hot. Both women loomed over him. "I-no. No, it's not that, it's, uh-my head. My head aches, that's all. Just a bit, the tiniest bit."

"The chauffeur-Roscoe-he was ill, wasn't he?

O'Kane nodded.

"The grippe?"

"That's right."

Katherine spoke up again now, and her face was so pale you would have thought she'd been embalmed. "And my husband? He, he hasn't been sick-?"

And that was how O'Kane, drunk on Chinese Christmas punch and caught between two fraught and ashen women, learned that the Spanish influenza, which was to kill twice as many people worldwide as the War itself, had arrived in Santa Barbara.

One of the first to go was Mrs. Goux, the thick-ankled woman from the winery who trundled up and down the street each morning with an air of invincibility, trailing children and parcels and one very dirty white dog. She left behind a distraught husband and a grief-addled brood of seven, all of them howling from the upstairs windows that gave onto State Street across from Mrs. Fitzmaurice's, and that was depressing enough, but before anybody could catch their breath the husband and four of the children died writhing in their blankets with temperatures of a hundred and a six. Then it was Wilson, the greengrocer, a man in his thirties with the shoulders of a fullback and great meaty biceps who'd never been sick a day in his life. He told his wife he was feeling a little dyspeptic the day after Christmas and she chalked it up to overindulgence, plain and simple, and wouldn't hear a word of the hysteria boiling up around her-not until he died two days later, that is. Their eldest son came down with it next-he couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen-and Wilson's brother Chas, who ran the ice company, and Chas's wife, and they were all three of them dead and laid out by the New Year.

O'Kane was spooked. He walked by Wilson's and the shutters were down and a black wreath hanging on the door, and from the front door at Mrs. Fitzmaurice's he could see the sheet of paper taped to the window of the winery: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The streets were deserted. Menhoff's was like a tomb. And Fetzer's Drugstore sold out of gauze masks in fifteen minutes. But how did you catch the 'flu in the first place? From other people. And how did they catch it? From other people. And the first one, the very first case-how did he catch it? Mart was of the opinion that it was a judgment of G.o.d, "because of the War and all," and Nick said it was demobilization that was spreading it. Mrs. Fitzmaurice put it down to uncleanliness, and no use discussing it further-you didn't see anybody in her house coming down with it, did you? O'Kane took a pint of whiskey up to his room each night and lay on the bed and brooded, and when New Year's Eve rolled around he went out and celebrated with a crowd that was so scared they had to drain every bottle in sight just to rea.s.sure themselves.

At Riven Rock, they were relatively lucky. Only Mart and one of Sam Wah's kitchen boys-a moonfaced kid known only as Wing-came down sick. Mart was laid up for a week and a half in the back room at his brother Pat's house, and Pat's wife Mildred wrapped him in cold towels to bring down the fever and poured hot chicken broth down his throat when he broke out in shivers. Wing died. That was a terrible thing-he was just a boy, Wing, with a quick smile, a thin trailing braid of hair like Paul Revere's in the old lithographs and not a word of English-and it hit everybody hard, but none harder than Katherine. Not on Wing's account-she didn't even know him except as a name in the accounts-payable column in the weekly pay ledger-but on Mr. McCormick's. The infection was in the house, not out in the fields or festering in the gutters and saloons, but right here at Riven Rock. It had struck Mart and Wing. It could strike her husband.

The thought seemed to galvanize her. She postponed her return to Washington for the duration of the epidemic, and for the first week, when the fear was fresh and new, she burst through the doors at Riven Rock each morning at eight, Mrs. Roessing, two maids and Dr. Urvater, one of the local sawbones, in tow. All of them were wearing gauze masks-"The 'flu is spread pneumonically," she kept saying, "as much or more than by direct contact"-and she insisted that the whole staff, including a champing and furious Sam Wah, wear masks as well. And while Dr. Urvater depressed Mr. McCormick's tongue and looked into his ears and chatted amicably with Dr. Hoch about cheeses and leder-hosen and such, Katherine swept through the lower rooms in a flurry of servants and a powerfully salubrious odor of disinfectant. Every surface was wiped down with a solution of bleach or carbolic acid, and the doork.n.o.bs, bannisters, telephones and light switches were swabbed hourly. She was a scientist. She was an Ice Queen. And the 'flu had better take notice.

For his part, O'Kane did as he was told. He wore a gauze mask, looked suitably grave and made a show of turning doork.n.o.bs with a bleach-soaked cloth in hand, but the minute Katherine left for the day or he ascended the stairs and entered Mr. McCormick's sanctum, he peeled off the mask and tucked it in his pocket. He'd never seen anything like this epidemic-every time you turned around you heard about somebody else dropping down dead-and it scared him, it did, but to his mind Katherine was taking things a bit far. He had no fears for himself-he had his father's const.i.tution and nothing could touch him, unless it came out of a bottle, and there was no degree of luck in the world that could save you from that-but he was afraid for Mr. McCormick, even if he did think the masks and disinfectant were just a lot of female hysteria. The rest of the staff shared his fears, though n.o.body wanted to talk about it. Mr. McCormick might have been crazy as a bedbug, but he was the rock and foundation of the place, and if he fell, how many would fall with him?

Their employer and benefactor seemed fine, though-hale and hearty and in the peak of health. On doctor's orders (and Katherine's, working behind the scenes) he wasn't allowed out for his walks or even to go to the theater building until all this blew over, and that made him a touch irritable. He took to wearing his gauze mask atop his head, like a child's party hat, and he toyed with Dr. Urvater over the tongue depressor and the thermometer, clamping down like a bulldog and refusing to let go until Dr. Hoch pushed himself up from the couch and intervened. Every day he talked with Katherine on the phone, she in the downstairs parlor with her carbolic acid and he a floor above her, and that seemed to have an exciting effect on him, but as far as O'Kane could see he didn't develop so much as a sniffle, let alone the 'flu.

"I think she's going way overboard," Nick said one morning as he and O'Kane were waiting for Mr. McCormick to finish up his shower bath. He was filling in for Mart on the day shift, while Pat sat alone with Mr. McCormick through the nights. "Rubbing down the G.o.d-d.a.m.ned doork.n.o.bs, for Christ's sake. But better too much too soon than too little too late, that's my motto."

"I know what you mean," O'Kane said, standing at the door to the shower room, just out of reach of the spray. Mr. McCormick was crouched naked over the wet tiles, meticulously soaping his toes, and O'Kane was reflecting on how he'd spent more of his adult life looking at Mr. McCormick in the nude than at any woman, and that included Giovannella and his long-lost wife. "We'd be in hot water if anything happened to him. I'll be all right once I get in on this citrus ranch I was telling you about-Jim Isringhausen's only looking to line up a couple more investors-but if I wasn't working here, I don't know what I'd do. I'd hate to have to go back to mopping up s.h.i.t and blood on the violent ward."

"Amen." Nick let out a sigh. He was leaning back against the tile wall, droplets of condensation forming on his eyebrows and the fine pickets of hair that stood guard above the dome of his forehead. He was blocky and big, still muscular but running to fat in his haunches and around the middle because all he and Pat ever did was sit by Mr. McCormick's bed all through the night and then sleep when everybody else was up and about. And he wasn't getting any younger. "Yeah, I'd be in a fix if anything happened to Mr. McCormick, and so would Pat and Mart. Of course, not everybody would be so bad off if he went and kicked the bucket."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," he said, a sly look creeping across his face, "her, for instance. You know: your sweetheart."

"Katherine?"

He nodded, watching for a reaction. "Makes you wonder why she's playing Florence Nightingale around here, doesn't it? If he was to go, she'd be the one to get everything, the houses and the cars and more millions than you could count. And no more crazy husband."

Nick had a point, but it only confirmed what O'Kane had maintained all along-Katherine really cared about her husband's welfare, and it wasn't just an act, say what you would about her. And he wondered about that and what it meant, especially when he thought about Dolores Isringhausen and how she treated her husband-or Rosaleen, or even Glovannella and her little shoemaker. Women were conniving and false, and he'd always believed that-all of them, except his mother, that is, and maybe the Virgin Mary. And every marriage was a war for dominance-who loved who and who loved who the most-a war in which women always had the upper hand, always scheming, always waiting for the chance to stab you in the back. But not Katherine. Not the Ice Queen. She had her husband right where she wanted him-in a gilded cage-and no sick canary ever got better care.

"By the way," Nick said, and Mr. McCormick had begun to sing to himself now, a tuneless low-pitched moan that could have been anything from a highbrow symphony to "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "did you hear about the wop shoemaker? You know, the one with the little wife, you, uh-" and he let his hands round out the phrase.

"What about him?"

"You didn't hear?"

"No, what?"

"He's dead. Two, three days ago. Ernestine told me because she went to get her boots resoled and there's a wreath on the door of the place and all these Guineas beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hollering in the street. It's a shame, it really is, and I don't think any of us are safe anymore-not till this thing burns itself out or it gets all of us, every last one, and then we won't have nothing to worry about, will we?"

O'Kane had Roscoe drop him off in front of Capolupo's Shoe Repair as soon as he got off his shift, but the place was closed and shuttered and there was no answer at the door to the apartment above. He rattled the doork.n.o.b a few times, pounded halfheartedly at the windowframe, and then, for lack of a better plan, sat down to wait. He'd worked overtime to help cover for Mart, and it was late-quarter past nine-and he couldn't imagine where Giovannella would be, unless they hadn't buried the shoemaker yet and there was some sort of Guinea wake going on someplace. He leaned back, wishing he'd thought to pick up a pint of something or even a bottle of wine, and pulled the collar of his jacket round his throat. It was cold, cold for Santa Barbara anyway, probably down in the mid-forties. He listened to the night, the sick bleat of a boat horn carrying across the water from the harbor, the ticking rattle of a car's exhaust, a cat or maybe a rat discovering something of interest in the alley below, and all the while he thought about Giovannella and what he would say to her. And just thinking about her and how she'd be free now to come to him anytime, day or night, and no excuses or explanations for anybody, was enough to spark all sorts of erotic scenarios in his head, and he saw her climbing atop him, her lips puffed with pleasure, nipples hard and dark against her dark skin, it's like riding a horse, Eddie, come on, horsie, come on- He couldn't marry her, of course, and she knew that-it would be bigamy, even though she was trotting around town with his green-eyed son in a pair of kneepants and you'd have to be blind not to know it was his son and n.o.body else's-but for half an hour or so he thought how it might be to take up housekeeping with her somewhere far enough away so n.o.body would know the difference. They could get a place in Carpenteria, seven miles to the south and right on the ocean, with that sweet breeze fanning the palms and everything so small and quiet, and just claim they were man and wife, and who was going to dispute it? But then he'd have to get a car, and renting a house-that would be something, like moving in with Rosaleen and Old Man Rowlings all over again, the baby squalling, s.h.i.t strewn from one end of the place to the other...

At ten-thirty, chilled through and thoroughly disgusted with himself-and with Giovannella and even Guido for having the bad grace to die off and stir the pot like this-O'Kane pushed himself up and went back along the hushed and empty streets to Mrs. Fitzmaurice's. The place was dark, but for the light in the entrance hall, and he let himself in with exaggerated caution, wondering vaguely if there was anything left in the emergency bottle he kept on the floor behind the bureau-and he was picturing it, actualizing that amber bottle in his mind-when he saw that there was a package for him on the table in the hall.

It was small, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and with a slight heft to it, more than paper would carry anyway. Dirty white tape was double- and triple-wrapped around the outside of it and he could see the imprint of a thumb under a loop of tape and a few stray hairs trapped beside it in the film of glue. He recognized the handwriting immediately : Rosaleen's. For a moment he hesitated, turning the thing over in his hand. This couldn't be what it felt like-a gift, a belated Christmas gift, maybe from Eddie Jr.-no, it couldn't be. If Rosaleen had anything to do with it, it was going to be the sort of thing he'd be better off looking at tomorrow, in the light of day, when Giovannella wasn't so much in his mind.

He shifted the package from one hand to the other, looking off down the length of the dark parlor with its spidery plants and dim furniture and the rugs that had been beaten to within an inch of their lives. What the h.e.l.l, he thought, and he sat in the stiff chair in the hallway and tore the thing open. The tape slipped away from his fingers, the paper fell to the floor. And now he was even more bewildered than he'd been a moment ago: here was the jackknife he'd sent to Eddie Jr., come right back to his hand like a boomerang. But wait, there was more, a message, a note curled up like a dead leaf inside the husk of tape and wrapping paper and inscribed in the smudged semiliterate scrawl that spoke so eloquently of Rosaleen's innermost being: Deere Eddie: I cannot live a lie anymore. I never wrote you in sept. but the spannish flue hit here and our son died of it. He was burried in the St. Columba.n.u.s cemetary and I never told your mother or anybody heres the Jack nife back he would of loved it.

Yours, etc Rosaleen He didn't have a chance to react, because at that moment somebody began tapping insistently at the window set in the front door. (And how was he supposed to react anyway-fall to his knees, tear his hair out, bemoan his fate to the heavens? The sad truth was that he'd never known his son. A stranger had died someplace, that was all, and so what if he had Eddie O'Kane's eyes and his walk and the look of him when he smiled or brooded or skinned his knee and came running to his mother with the tears wet on his face? So what?) The tapping grew louder-c.h.i.n.k-c.h.i.n.k-c.h.i.n.k-c.h.i.n.k-and he dropped the letter and drifted stupidly toward the door. There was a face pressed to the gla.s.s in the dark of the night, the image of his own wondering face superimposed over it. It took him a minute, because he was thinking of ghosts, of the disinterred spirits of little deserted bare-legged boys dead of the epidemic 'flu and come back to haunt him, and then he realized who it was tapping with a coin at the brittle gla.s.s and not a thought to Mrs. Fitzmaurice sleeping the wakeful sleep of the eternally vigilant at the end of the hall: it was Giovannella.

She was saying something, mouthing the words behind the gla.s.s to the accompaniment of a series of frantic gestures. She had to see him-she wanted to-did he know?

He opened the door and there she was, brushing past him and into the hallway with her broad beautiful face and her eyes that knew everything about him, and Guido, little Guido, his only surviving son, thrown over her shoulder like something she'd picked up at the market, like so many pounds of pork roast or beef brisket. As soon as he'd closed the door she whirled round on him and clutched at his neck with her free hand, crushing her mouth to his, and it was theatrical and wild and it brought his attention into the sharpest of focus. "He's dead," she hissed, throwing back her head to look him in the eye. "He's dead of the 'flu."

He put a finger to his lips. Mrs. Fitzmaurice would be p.r.i.c.king up her ears, past ten o'clock at night and a strange woman in the house, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, who was raging and furious and s.e.xless as a boot. "Shhhh!" he warned, half-expecting to see the landlady stationed behind him in her declamatory nightgown that fell to the floor and beyond. "I know."

She pressed into him again, held him tight, little Guido sandwiched between them, the heat of her and her odor like no other woman's, cloves, garlic, vanilla, onions frying to sweetness in the pan. "I'm scared, Eddie," she whispered. "Guido... I ... I nursed him, and he died burning up with the fever and so sad and pathetic he couldn't open his mouth to say a word to me or even the priest, no last words, no nothing ... and the smell of him-it was horrible, like he was all eaten up inside and nothing left of him but s.h.i.t." She was trembling, a vein pulsing at the base of her throat, the hair fallen loose under the brim of her hat and slicing into her eyes. "I'm afraid I might've ... or little Guido, Eddie, our son. They say you can catch it just by walking past somebody on the street, and you have to understand, Eddie, I nursed him, I nursed Guido."

Her eyes were two revolving pits, two trenches draining everything out of her face, and she wouldn't let go of him. He was scared too. First Eddie Jr. and now this-what if she did catch it? What if she died, like Wilson and Mrs. Goux and Wing? What then? He looked over his shoulder, down the hallway to Mrs. Fitzmaurice's door, everything soft and indistinct in the dim light of the lamp. "You're young and strong," he heard himself saying. "If you get it, you'll shake it off. Like Mart. Did I tell you about Mart?"

"I'm a widow, Eddie," she said.

He nodded. She was a widow. Widowhood. Viduity. That was the state she was in, a sorry state, twenty-eight years old and bereft, and with a son to raise.

"We can be together now."

He nodded again, but he didn't know why. He wanted to tell her about Eddie Jr., about the regret that was ripening inside him till it was about to turn black and become something else, something rotten and despairing, something cold, something hard. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn't. And he tried to pull away from her-just to breathe-but she wouldn't let go.

"Did you hear what I said?"

Looking down, looking at her feet in a pair of dusty old high-b.u.t.toned shoes some customer must have left behind at the shop: "I heard. But listen, let's go outside and talk so Mrs. Fitzmaurice-"

"I don't want to go outside. I want to be here. With you. Look," she said, backing off a step and stripping the child away from her shoulder so he could see the fat infantile face staring sleepily into his own, "your son, Eddie. He's your son and you're my husband. Don't you understand ? I'm a widow. Don't you know what that means?"

"I'm married," he said. "You know that."

He watched the lines gather in her forehead while her eyes narrowed and her mouth drew itself tight. "I spit on your marriage," she said, swinging wildly away from him, and he was afraid she was going to knock over one of the darkened lamps, afraid she was going to wake the house, stir up Mrs. Fitzmaurice, turn everything in his life upside down.

He told her to shut up, to shut the f.u.c.k up.

She told him to go to h.e.l.l.

And who was that now? Somebody at the head of the stairs-was it Maloney?-and an angry voice looping down at them like a lariat. "Keep it down, will ya? People are tryin' to sleep up here."

"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, f.u.c.k her.

She pulled away and gave him a long a.n.a.lytic 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 deja 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 doork.n.o.b 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 sc.r.a.pe 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.

PRANGINS.

The Dexter chateau 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 sh.o.r.e 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 n.o.ble and not so n.o.ble 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 sh.o.r.e, 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! 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 Inst.i.tute or scale Mount Everest, and she'd chosen Stanley, n.o.body 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 officially 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 sh.o.r.e 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 probleme"), 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Maupa.s.sant 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."