T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“My God, yes!”

“I thought he was going to die of a stroke right there—”

“He must have been seventy.”

“Seventy? He was a hundred if he was a day—”

“What? You didn’t recognize him? Methuselah’s grandfather?”

Laughter and applause.

“Let me tell you, if he was the only unregenerate male standing between us and the vote I would blow him over myself, just like this— poof!”

More laughter, percolating round the delicate china cups of beef tea and orange pekoe blend. The fire leapt and snapped, women sank into armchairs in a sisterhood of splayed limbs and neatly balanced cups and saucers, a faint scent of woodsmoke charged the air and everything seemed laminated with the intensity of a waking dream, the cut flowers glowing with an aniline light, the oil paintings hanging above their heads like halos, and as the kitchen staff piled a table high with cold cuts, toast points and caviar, plums and raspberries from the orchard, the storm beat deliciously at the windows and shook the floorboards beneath their feet. Katherine, the hair hanging wet in her face as she rubbed at it with a towel that smelled like sunshine on the grass, felt like a girl again — she might have been in the gymnasium at Miss Hershey’s School after calisthenics, the sweet aching odor of girls’ sweat in the air, hard-earned sweat, sweat that was the equal of any boy’s or man’s. She was glowing, melting. She was made of india rubber, molasses, pure maple syrup settling into a mold.

“Yes, yes, yes!” came a shriek from Maybelle Harrison, wife of the textile manufacturer, caught with a piece of toast arrested halfway to her parted lips. She was standing in front of the fire, tall as any Amazon, her hair wrapped in a great white terrycloth turban. “The crowning moment for me was during Katherine’s speech, and a stirring speech it was, Katherine, really first-rate ”—cheers and applause—“because that was when Maude Park suddenly disappeared beneath one of these enormous breakers and came up spouting like a porpoise—”

They were sisters, all of them, Maybelle Harrison cheek by jowl with Lettie Strang, governess to Mrs. Littlejohn’s granddaughters, Jane Roessing exchanging pleasantries with Delia Bumpus, late of the boardinghouse, and not a thought of class or social position. This was the spirit of the Movement, the spirit of women without men, the spirit of Lysistrata and Sappho, the very scene Katherine had dreamed of when she’d joined the nascent women’s club at MIT, striding through the door and into the embrace of three trembling doelike creatures as bewildered and uncertain as she and yet no less determined. She stretched luxuriously and cradled the hot cup in her hands, rain tapping at the windows, the flow of laughter and conversation ebbing and flooding round her, and thought, This is the way the world should be.

But it wasn‘t, and no one knew that better than she.

There was no sanctuary, no enchanted castle, no safe haven full of fine things and exulting women, not unless you built it yourself. And you didn’t build it yourself, you couldn‘t, not when you were fourteen and as dependent on your father as he was on his capricious God in His capricious heavens. Because that was how old she was, fourteen, when the world of men came crashing down on her, pillars, buttresses, scaffolding and all.

It was in the spring, a month or so after the chess club fiasco, and the carriage had just brought her home from school (there was no reason to stay late anymore, and Mr. Gregson couldn’t seem to look her in the face no matter what she did to please him, as if she were the one in the wrong). Her mother was out — at a tea someplace, or maybe it was a charity function — and her brother Samuel was away at Harvard. The house was unnaturally quiet, the servants in the kitchen, the cats asleep in the window. She was reading— Middlemarch, and she remembered the book to this day — puzzling over Dorothea Brooke and her thirst for learning that was so all-consuming as to allow her to throw herself away on a crabbed sexless old mummy like Casaubon, when there was a thump in the front hallway, as if someone had thrown open the door and tossed a sack of meal on the carpet. The cats raised their heads. Katherine set down her book. And there is was again, louder now, more distinct, as if a second sack had been flung against the wall and then rebounded off the first. Curious more than anything — all she could think of was her mother and a pair of shopboys with a new purchase that was too bulky to bring up the back stairway — she eased into her slippers and went to the door to investigate.

It wasn’t her mother. There were no shopboys, no sacks of meal, no china cabinets or ottomans wrapped in brown paper. When she pulled open the door to the hallway she saw her father there, leaning into the wall and clenching his teeth in a grimace of almost maniacal concentration, as if he were trying to push his way through the wainscoting; behind him, the outer door stood open to the soft haze of the sun and the branches of the budding trees along the street. “Father?” she said, more puzzled than alarmed — she’d never in her life known him to come home from the office before six. “Are you all right?”

He turned his face from the wall then and fastened his eyes on her, and it was the strangest thing but she couldn’t hear anything in that moment, not the noise of the traffic in the street or the shouts of the children on the lawn next door — it was as if she’d gone deaf. But then a single noise began to intrude on her consciousness, the harsh abrasive grinding of his teeth, bone on bone, as loud suddenly as the rumble of a gristmill. She started toward him, no time for thought or wonder or even fear, her arms outstretched to receive him, bundle him, protect him, and all at once the wall heaved and threw him out into the center of the hallway on legs that had gone dead, and he was lurching past her in a blind stagger, already reaching out with his useless hands for the door to the library.

This was her father, Wirt Dexter, one of the great jurisprudential minds of his time, son of the founder of Dexter, Michigan, grandson of John Adams’s secretary of the treasury, fifty-nine years old and never sick a day in his life, Daddy, Papa, Pater, the man around whom Katherine had molded her existence like a barnacle attached to a piling sunk deep in the seabed. He was fearless, unwavering, a defender of unpopular causes, the wide-shouldered softly smiling man who would tenderly cut up her meat with a few magical strokes when she was too little to chew and who sat up with her and a storybook when she couldn’t sleep. And now, drained of color, unable to speak, his teeth grinding like two stones and his legs locked at the knee, he staggered right past her as if she’d never existed.

How he managed to twist that door handle and slip inside the door and lock it against her, she would never know, but it was one of the bravest things she’d ever seen, an act of will so monumental it awed her to this day even as the hurt of it rose like bile in her throat. The door slammed. She found her voice. “Father!” she cried, pounding at the door. “Daddy, Daddy!”

“Go away! ” he growled, “damn you, get away! ” And then she heard him on the carpet, thrashing across the floor like a dog shot between the shoulders, the lamp crashing over and the servants there in the hallway with their frightened faces, Mrs. Muldoon and Nora and Olga, and no hope in all the world because he was dying, dying behind that locked door so as to spare her, his daughter, his Katherine.

They buried him, and a month later her mother informed her they’d be leaving Chicago as soon as she could make the arrangements. And where were they going? To Boston, to be near Samuel, who was the hope of the family now. And he was, Samuel, a great hope, a great man ab ovo, his father in miniature, hard-working, right-thinking, serious, magnetic, older and wiser at twenty-one than most men at thirty or even forty, as sure of his career in the public weal as any Dexter before him. Katherine was bereft. She didn’t know what to do. She was fourteen years old. She went to Boston with her mother — a provincial place, pinched and fastidious, choked in the stranglehold of society — and clung to the pillar of her handsome and accomplished older brother while the tide rose and the sea rushed in. And that was all right, the best she could do, until one afternoon four years later Samuel developed a sudden fever, broke out in a purple rash that made him look as if he’d been pounded all over with a hammer, and died before morning.