T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“No reason to be uncivil, Henry,” Bentley clucked, circling round them like the referee at a boxing match. He put his hands on the back of the chair in which he’d been sitting a moment before and leaned forward with an air of false intimacy, a lawyer right down to his socks. “No reason at all,” he said, addressing Katherine now. “But if you’ll forgive me, we have reason to believe that — how shall I say this? — that given Stanley’s mental and physical condition during the period of your connubial relations, the marriage was never, well—” He threw his hands in the air, like a Puritan at a peep show. “You’ve been trained in the sciences, Katherine. I think you know what I mean, from a biological standpoint, if not a legal one.”

So that was what this was all about.

She felt very tired all of a sudden, tired and defeated. The bastards. The unfeeling, unthinking, meretricious, sheet-sniffing bastards. They’d gone snooping after every last shameful shred of bile and gossip, interrogating chambermaids and butlers, extracting testimony from her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sisters and brothers and the team of psychiatrists they’d had swarming all over him since his breakdown, and they thought they had something on her, thought they could shame and bully her and beat her down. But they were wrong. She wouldn’t crack, she wouldn’t. She sat there like a pillar, though she hurt all the way through to the marrow and a hundred nights came back to her in a shattering rush and the look on Stanley’s face and his fright and rage and the unyielding impregnable fortress of his outraged flesh and impacted mind. She sat there and fought the itch in the back of her throat and the seepage in her sinuses. They wouldn’t dare talk to her like this if her mother were here. Or her father. But her mother was soaking her bones in a hot tin tub of mineral water in the middle of a dusty eucalyptus grove somewhere in the hills, and her father was eighteen years dead, another disappointment.

All right, she decided, if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way it would be. She stood. Rose so quickly that Favill had to spring from the chair like a bouncing ball to avoid being stranded there. Bentley looked deeply pained — or perhaps it was just constipation. “Did you—?” he began, exchanging a look with Favill. “Or rather, do you need some time to consider our proposal, because we’re perfectly willing, that is, we, I—”

Still she said nothing. She just stood there, her heart pounding, the hat clamped to her head like a war bonnet, staring them to shame. “I won’t bother showing you the door,” she said finally, and she couldn’t control the edge in her voice. “And you tell the McCormicks there’s no price in blood or money or all the kings’ ransoms in the world that could ever sway me, not one iota. I’ll be married to Stanley when you’re all in your graves, and he’s going to get well, he is, do you hear me? Do you?”

The next disappointment was Hamilton. Though he’d been tiptoeing around her, doing his whispery, smooth-talking, eye-flipping best to avoid putting her out in any way, shambling and shuffling and all but kissing the ground she walked on, he’d yet to relent on the one issue that mattered most: allowing her access to her husband. If she could only see Stanley, even for an hour, she knew she could help bring him out of it. The very sight of her would spark him, it would have to — for all anybody knew, he might think she’d deserted him. And even if his response was, well, difficult, at least it would be something, at least he’d know she was there still and that somebody besides his lantern-jawed nurses cared about him. Stanley had been at Riven Rock for just over a month now — and she’d given Hamilton that month, willingly, though she could hardly sleep for worry and felt like one of the walking dead dragging herself around the corridors of her mother’s house on Commonwealth Avenue and she hadn’t been to the theater or the symphony or even out to dinner — and now she wanted to exercise her rights and prerogatives as a wife, and not coincidentally as the patroness who signed the doctor’s checks and underwrote his ape colony. She’d waited long enough, she’d been patient, she’d listened to every excuse in the book and a whole codicil more. The time had come. Tonight — and she was determined in this — she would see Stanley.

But first, as the sun settled in to slather the sea and baste the pale walls and exotic trees till everything seemed to glow and drip with a thick oleaginous light, Katherine went in to draw a bath and cleanse herself of Bentley and Favill and the lingering taint of the McCormicks. She knew they resented her, her mother-in-law in particular, as stifling and selfish a woman as ever walked the earth, but it was a shock to realize how deeply they must have despised her to unleash the dogs and set them on her without a second thought — and on her first day in Santa Barbara, no less. That hurt. On top of her headaches and her cold and everything else. She wasn’t looking for acceptance — she couldn’t have cared less about the McCormicks and their pathetic little circle — or even warmth, but civility, that much she expected. What did they think she was, some passing whim of Stanley’s? Another McCormick conquest — or purchase? Did they think they were the only ones pacing the floor at all hours of the night and so keyed up they couldn’t even keep a piece of toast on their stomach? She’d been there with him when he broke down. She’d seen the eyes recoil in his head, watched him punish the walls and the furniture and all the dumb objects that fell across his path. She was the one who’d had to listen to his ravings and lock the door of her bedroom and hide in the closet till she thought she was going to suffocate, she was the one who’d run from the house as if it was on fire. And where were the McCormicks then?

Standing there in the hotel bathroom, listening to the water thunder into the big porcelain tub while the brainless sun pressed at the windows and some alien bird croaked from the cover of the palms as if it were half dead and hoping something would come along and finish it off, she felt like crying all over again. She’d never felt so sick and miserable in her life, not even when they’d denied her admission to MIT and made her crawl on her belly through four years of basic science classes the boys had got in high school as a matter of course. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even decent. Favill she could understand — at least he was a real man, long-boned, big-shouldered, with an Ottawa chief’s blood in his veins and the power to crush his adversaries in a fair fight, but Bentley, Bentley was a worm, a creeping spineless thing that made its living in the gut of something greater, or at least larger. She had no respect for either of them, but even less for Bentley, if that was possible. He wasn’t even a man.

She studied her image in the mirror, staring into her own eyes till the moment passed. It was a trick she’d learned as a girl, a way of focusing her anger when they tried to beat her down, and they always tried to beat her down — boys, men, insinuating lawyers, smug administrators and hypocritical teachers alike. She remembered the chess club she’d organized at school in Chicago before her father died and they moved to Boston. It was a good school, the finest the city had to offer, catering to the children of the moneyed class and with no expense spared for teachers, books and facilities, but to Katherine’s mind the best thing about it was that the sexes weren’t segregated. Boys and girls sat side by side in the classroom, given equal access to the best that was known and thought in the world and encouraged to compete as equals. And when Katherine started up the club, her teacher, Mr. Gregson, an extremely old young man with a wispy two-pointed beard and the faraway look of a high-wire artist, encouraged her. At first. But she soon played herself out of competition with the other girls, who were only marginally interested in the game to begin with, and into the realm of the boys. And the boys played as if this game of war were war in fact and never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it. The club lasted two and a half weeks and Katherine took on all comers, the line of boys waiting to be the first of their fraternity to beat the girl sometimes four and five deep. But then all of a sudden Mr. Gregson discovered an obscure prohibition against board games buried deep in the school code, and the club was disbanded.