T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“I was an altar boy.”

“Good. Then you’ll appreciate this. Freud said it of a female hysteric whose husband”—he lowered his voice, out of Mrs. McCormick’s hearing—“was impotent. And I’d say it fits Mrs. McCormick to a T.”

“Yes?”

The doctor lowered his voice still further. “‘Penis normalis, dosim repetatur.’ ”

stanley knew what was going on he might have been sick but he wasn’t retarded and he wasn’t blind or deaf either and it was the women the women yet again because they weren’t content to sit at lunch with him or make conversation over iced tea in the cabana don’t you think it’s just outrageous what the french have done to the hemline this year no they weren’t satisfied that he was a gentleman bred by his mother and held himself just so and made the smallest talk and didn’t punish them and give them what they needed and deserved and wanted no they had to come to him in the night ghostly and white in their skin with their wet tongueless mouths and the smell of their heat a bitch in heat like a bitch in heat and take hold of him down there where he was most vulnerable and how he hated that because there was nothing nothing nothing he hated more than that and the Judges had warned him and lashed him and beaten and pummeled him and yet here it was all over again and she didn’t even have a name but she wasn’t katherine oh no not katherine never katherine he was sure of that because she was some slut and whore and degraded filthy streetwalking prostitute who could have her way with him any way she liked and he’d almost felt it almost almost thrust back at her and showed her what it was to be a man a real man a he-man like his father the president and his brother the president and harold the vice president with his two wives like a pasha and his monkey glands and his beautiful little adorable little child woman daughter muriel… almost …

but almost wasn’t all the way home almost didn’t win the race or drive the ball over the fence or invent the reaper out of nothing or the stingaree either which was gods reaper lurking there in the water and who knew better that it was there and what it liked to do and was likely to do than katherine who was the scientist after all the biologist who would sing out the latin names of every animal and plant and bounding squirrel with the breeze of the car in her face her beautiful face katherine dexter and he thought about that and brooded and picked over it all through the day of the stingaree and the day it melted into because she’d done it because she wanted to see him dead and drowned because she wanted to be a widow like mrs.jane two of them widows because she wanted his money and he could see right through her because dr kempf the free associator and inkblot man —“Tell me, Stanley, when I say ‘boxer dog,’ what do you think of?” —had taught him to control himself just as if he were wearing the harness again an invisible harness no straps or wires or restraints but that was the end of katherine no more katherine no sir never again not after that stinking filthy animal of a whore and what was her scientific name he’d like to know she’d brought into his very bedroom to debase and humiliate him while nick and par breathed in the dark and yes he’d heard them there and felt them but no more no more and never again make me a baby stanley make me a baby…

Katherine couldn’t know what her husband was thinking — she never knew what he was thinking, even when he was sitting there on the carpet they brought to the beach discussing the Malemute Kid with Muriel and fastidiously nibbling round the edges of a smoked salmon sandwich Giovannella had prepared at first light. All she knew was that he’d come so far, come all the way back to who he was, her Stanley, Stanley of the retiring mien and shining eye, and now he’d fallen away from her again — and she would be damned twice over if she was going to be cut out of his life this time. That was why she’d hired Newton Baker, her old friend and colleague from the War days and the Women’s Committee of the National Defense Council, to petition the Santa Barbara Superior Court for sole guardianship of her husband:

IN THE MATTER OF THE GUARDIAN SHIP OF THE PERSON OF STANLEY MCCORMICK, AN INCOMPETENT PERSON:

No. 7146

PETITION FOR REMOVAL OF CERTAIN GUARDIANS

TO THE HONORABLE, THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF SANTA BARBARA:

COMES NOW KATHERINE DEXTER MCCORMICK, AND RESPECTFULLY SHOWS:

That Kempf was alienating the affections of her husband on behalf of Cyrus and Anita and refusing him the endocrine treatment that could well provide a cure for him, and that she, as Stanley’s wife, knew better than his brother and sister what was good and proper for him and was better able to provide it without their interference. That all they cared about was keeping the McCormick fortune intact. That she, Katherine, his wife, had through all these splayed and tottering years managed her husband’s estate despite their automatic two-to-one vote against her on any matter of real importance, as for example spending ten thousand dollars a month on a psychiatrist who believed that psychoanlysis could repair rotten teeth, and she wanted redress and wanted it now.

Jane backed her. And her mother too. And though she hated the publicity and dreaded the thought of what the papers would do with this, she could hardly wait to take the stand and give them all a piece of her mind. And why? Because of Stanley, nothing more. Stanley was all that mattered — and her guilt for having neglected him over the course of the years, all her loyalty notwithstanding, because she had neglected him and she’d allowed herself to be badgered and pigeonholed by the Favills and Bentleys and Hamiltons of the world and now by Anita and Cyrus. But she wouldn’t give in. Not anymore. Because she alone knew how wrenching and terrifying it was to lose Stanley the first time, the time he floundered and splashed and finally went down, and no one there to throw him a lifeline, no one but her….

It all came to a head after their return from Maine, the ongoing and unrelieved nightmare that was Maine, in the fall of 1905. Everything she’d tried — patience and understanding, firmness, reason, love — was a failure, that was clear, and Stanley was caught in a downward spiral that threatened to suck her under too. “Sexual hypochondriachal neurasthenia and incipient dementia praecox” was Dr. Trudeau’s chilling assessment, and all she could do was try to insulate Stanley against anything that might cause him undue stress — his mother, in particular, the Reaper Works, and, sad to say, marital relations. She’d pushed him too far, moved too quickly, and now she had to draw back and assuage and nurture him all over again.

On their first day back in Boston — the twenty-first of November — they went down to the harbor to meet her mother, who was just then returning from an extended stay at Prangins. The day was gloomy and cold, with a scent of rain on the air and a low scrolling sky stuffed full of gray clouds that unfurled in procession out over the sea. The liner was just docking as the driver let them down from the carriage and they hurried up to the gate that gave on to the pier, hardly noticing the others in the crowd or the man in a cap and loden jacket trimmed with gold piping standing to one side of the entrance. Katherine was intent on her mother and on Stanley, who’d been stiff and incommunicative all morning, and never gave the man a second glance, never dreaming that they needed passes to enter the dock area and that this man was stationed there in an official capacity to check those very passes.