Rodney Whitaker - The Summer of Katya

I followed her out onto the terrace, and we sat overlooking the tangled garden. She sat with her ankles lightly crossed and her knees together, the graceful line of her body contrasting strangely with her costume.

How to start? What to say? I found myself slipping into the cautious, controlled, rather patronizing style of communication I had learned at the asylum at Passy. Hoping to discover how much she was aware of events around her, I began, “How’s your father?”

She glanced at me quickly, mistrust in her eyes. “You were coming from my father’s room when I found you in the hall. You know perfectly well that he’s dead.”

I nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. How did he die?”

“My dear fellow, I would have imagined that a man of medical training, even one so inexperienced as you, could deduce that he shot himself… took the gentleman’s way out.”

“Out of what?”

“When he found you in the garden, he—” She stopped suddenly in midphrase and stared at me, confusion and doubt welling up in her eyes. When she spoke again, the guttural tone was gone. It was Katya’s voice. “I don’t understand… you were… weren’t you…?” She touched her brow with her fingertips.

“I was shot, yes, but only wounded. Nothing serious.”

“Only wounded? Yes, but…” She was adrift from reality, her expression vague. “Yes, but… I…”

“You say your father found me in the garden,” I prompted. “But it was he who shot me, wasn’t it?”

“Papa? How could you believe that? Papa was so gentle. He could never harm anyone.”

“Listen—” I yearned to reach out and take her hand to reassure her, but I couldn’t tell where she was in the vague terrain between herself and her persona as Paul, and Paul would have recoiled from my touch. I soon learned to read the slight but dramatic indications of her shift from one personality to the other: the husky lowering of the voice, the shallowing of the eyes, the tensing of the mouth into Paul’s habitually disdainful expression. But at this moment I had to guess which one I was talking to. “Listen… Paul? Yesterday you told me about what happened in Paris. Tell me about that again please.”

She put the pistol in her lap and looked out across the garden, her eyes distant, her voice flat. “I probably didn’t tell you the truth yesterday… not the whole truth, anyway.”

That “probably” signaled to me that she had retreated back into Paul, but lacked his memory of events. There was a cunning quality to her negotiations between beings.

“Well, tell me the whole truth now. Begin in Paris, shortly before you moved here to Salies.”

Her eyes hardened, her nostrils dilated slightly, and when she spoke her voice had returned to that forced rasp that chilled my spine. “Oh, it began before that, old boy. Long before that. It began when poor Katya was a young girl just entering womanhood. When she was still the awkward and coltish Hortense.”

I had a flash of insight. “When she was fifteen and a half?”

“Yes. Just fifteen and a half.” She looked at me and smiled thinly. “I take it you’re thinking about her ghost?”

“Yes, I was. What happened to Katya when she was fifteen and a half?”

She frowned, seeming to recoil from the memory. “It’s not a pleasant thing to think about. It’s an ugly… shameful…”

My intuition told me that Katya would not be able to recount the event, whatever it was. I would have to learn it through Paul. “Please tell about it… Paul.”

She was silent for a time; then she began to speak, her eyes fixed on the middle distance, out across the ragged garden. “I had a friend visiting for a month that summer—a handsome rogue of a fellow several years older than I who was introducing me to the delights of gambling and other civilized dissipations. We were out on the town almost every night, if not playing cards, then putting the street walkers of St. Denis into… amusing situations. It was all typical of young men of my class. Wild oats and all that. Good dirty fun.

“It was this fellow’s practice to pay a kind of teasing court to Katya, as men in their twenties will do with teenaged girls, delighting in their shyness and awkwardness. They used to chat over dinner or take little strolls in the garden. As you might expect, she was both pleased and flattered by his attentions. He was a dashing rake, and she was poised—teetering, really—between adolescence and young womanhood. I never thought much of it. Indeed, I joined in the game, teasing her about her little infatuation, the way a brother will.

“There was a cruel streak in that man, one that came out in his treatment of the St. Denis girls. But it never occurred to me to worry about his behavior with Katya. After all, we were gentlemen of the same class, and Katya was my sister. Of course, she wasn’t Katya then. She was still Hortense. The shy, blushing Hortense…” Her eyes lowered and she seemed to drift into reverie.

After a moment of silence, I said, “And?”

Her hands were folded on her lap over the pistol, and she dug the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other. “He… he raped her.” Her eyes searched mine frantically, seeming to ask if such a horrible thing were possible. “He raped Hortense. He raped Hortense!”

I had anticipated that with a growing dread, but my stomach went cold at the words, uttered with such a tone of desperate pity for the long-dead Hortense. I wanted to hold her, to console her; but I pressed on, hoping to cleanse her mind of the terror by making her talk about, confront it, expose the wound to the healing effects of understanding. I was careful to keep my voice neutral and atonic when I prompted, “Yes. He raped Hortense.”

She took several deep, calming breaths, and her voice was gruff again when she spoke. “This fellow and I came home that night, late as usual, but somewhat drunker than usual. I fell into my bed and was dead to the world in a minute. He must have slipped out of his room and tapped at her door. He suggested that they take a stroll in the garden under the moonlight. It was a soft, beautiful night, and she was as full of the gossamer excitement of romance as any adolescent girl. No doubt there was a thrill of daring to sneak out and walk with a man in a moonlit garden.” Katya smiled and glanced at me almost coyly, her eyes round with impish mischief as she caught her lower lip between her teeth and lifted her shoulders. “I was embarrassed and flustered about my appearance. My nightgown was one of those long shapeless flannel things—not at all feminine. And my hair had been taken down for bed and was all tangled and…” She touched her hair, and her expression faded from animated excitement to uncertainty and fear….

For an instant, and for the only time, I had met Hortense. The gentle ghost in the garden.

… Her expression faded as her fingers recoiled from the feeling of hair that was cropped and plastered down with water. Clouds of confusion crossed her eyes. Then her jaw muscles tensed and she spoke again in Paul’s voice. “I told you there was a streak of cruelty in the man. Hurting the St. Denis prostitutes was a part of his pleasure. And furthermore he was drunk. He… he threw Hortense down into the mud of a flowerbed, and he beat her with his fists… he beat her!… her lips were broken… and he hit her in the stomach… hard… again and again!”

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful.”

“…He pressed his fingers against her eyes! And he told her that if she screamed he would push her eyes out—like grapes popping out of their skins—that’s what he whispered in her ear—like grapes popping out of the skin! He pressed so hard she could see flashes of light! And the pain! Then he… Then he…!”