T. Boyle - Riven Rock

— 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 charges 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.