T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Katherine? Are you with us?”

She looked up from her tea and the room was there in all its solidity and permanence, the smell of wet hair, women’s hair, and of cake and woodsmoke and beef broth, and she was back in the present and flashing Jane Roessing a triumphal smile. “Just tired,” she said. “Or not tired exactly — more the way I feel after a long walk in the woods. Relaxed. Calm. And yet exhilarated too.”

“Wordsworthian?”

Katherine laughed. “Sure, emotion recollected in tranquility and all that. But I feel more like Lucy Stone or Alice Paul at the moment.” She slid over on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her.

Jane folded her skirts under her and sat lightly in the spot indicated. She was from Philadelphia, about Katherine’s age, and had married a man considerably older, a manufacturer of some sort who’d been a champion of women’s rights — when he died, eight years ago, he left her everything. Ever since, she’d put all her energy and resources into the Movement, traveling around the country and helping to organize local chapters, and in the spring she’d been in Washington with Inez Milholland for the great protest march. They had dozens of friends in common, but for one reason or another Katherine had never met her till the previous evening at Mrs. Littlejohn’s dinner reception. She’d liked her right away. Jane was a dynamo, one of those bustling energetic women who seem to be so much taller than they actually are, always alert, always amused, bobbing and weaving through Mrs. Littlejohn’s parlor under a mass of rust-colored hair that stood up buoyantly from her scalp no matter the pressure of hat, comb or pin. Her eyes were the faintest palest most delicate shade of green, like a Song dynasty vase, and she always managed to look self-possessed and wise — not in the way of accumulated wisdom, not necessarily, but in the way of the prankster, the class clown, the girl with the sharpest tongue in school.

“Carrie showed me the newspaper piece,” she said, reaching for her hair with both hands as if to gather it all in, section by section, as if she were winnowing a bush for berries. “It was really quite touching, I thought — the parts about you, I mean.” She paused. Let her green gaze sweep the room and then come back again. “You must have suffered.”

Katherine bowed her head. It was the first expression of sympathy she’d heard in years and it made her want to weep aloud, beat her breast, lay her head in the lap of the woman beside her and sob till all the hurt and antipathy of the McCormicks and their minions was drained from her, all the fierceness of the struggle with Stanley and his keepers and the burden of Riven Rock, the desolation of being a wife without a husband, forever the odd one out at this gathering or that. ( Mrs. McCormick, they called her, Mrs. McCormick, shall I haila cab for you? and what a joke that was.) She couldn’t respond. She tried, but nothing came out.

Jane was sitting right beside her now and she could smell the exotic rich dampness of the roots of her hair and feel the warmth of the thigh pressed to hers and somehow Jane’s arm was resting on her shoulder and Jane was rocking her, ever so gently, till all she could think of was the skiff she’d had as a girl on Lake Michigan and the softest of breezes that would come all the way from Minnesota or Canada just to set it atremble, just to rock her.

“Listen,” Jane murmured, turning her face to her, and all the other women in that room might as well have been on another planet for all Katherine was aware of them, “I know what you’re going through, I do. When Fred died I was only twenty-five, with no children and both my parents gone, and his family treated me like some sort of criminal, like I was the one who’d given him heart disease and no matter that he was nearly sixty and had had two heart attacks already. To them I was an outsider and nothing more, and when the will was read that room was like a pot boiling over, and if looks could kill—”

Jane gave her a final pat, shifted away from her and bent forward to dig through her purse. Katherine was stunned. It was as if this woman beside her had read her deepest thoughts, as if they’d inherited the same set of unfeeling moneygrubbing in-laws, as if… but that was enough. Her husband was alive still, and there would come a day when he recovered and they were perfectly happy, like any other couple.

“Sorry to get so maudlin.” Jane had straightened up and eased back into the chair and she held something now in her hand, something that glittered in the light of the fire. It was a cigarette case, Katherine saw, silver, with Jane’s initials — J.B.R. — inlaid in gold across the facing. “Do you smoke?” Jane asked in the most casual voice in the world.

“Smoke?” Katherine had barely recovered herself. “You must be joking.”

“No, not at all,” and Katherine watched the unfolding ritual with fascination, the neatly sprung case, the tamped cigarette, the flare of the match and finally the long slow inhalation that drew tight the flesh of Jane’s throat as if she were taking in the very breath of life itself. “How is it,” Jane began, the blue vapor escaping her lips and nostrils in pale wisps, its odor sweet and harsh at the same time, like the smell of leaves burning in the gutter, “how is it that men can smoke in public and women can’t?”

“Well,” and Katherine looked round to see that every woman in the room was making an effort not to stare, “it’s just not done, not in our set anyway. Maybe among seamstresses and such—”

Jane lifted her eyebrows. “And in Paris?”

“That’s entirely different.”

“Oh?” And there was that sly look, the look of the girl who circumvented all the rules and sent clever notes up and down the aisles when the teacher’s back was turned. “You know”—exhaling again—“I think the thing that most irritates me about the whole little dominion of men and their precious vote and their property rights and all the rest is how illogical it is, how smug and self-serving, using our sex against us—‘Oh, it’s not ladylike to smoke.’ Well, is it ladylike to vote, wear trousers, mount a bicycle? Is it ladylike to pay property taxes like any other citizen and stand by at election time and watch some illiterate from Ballyshannon step up to the ballot box — or worse, sell his vote for two shots of rye whiskey? Hm?”

The buzz of conversation had died momentarily in the wake of Jane’s putting fire to that little tube of compacted leaves and bringing it to her lips, but now it started up again, a whole clamor of voices.

“Look, it’s clearing,” someone observed.

“Oh, is it?”

“Yes, look over there, out over the water.”

“Just in time for fireworks — we will have fireworks, won’t we, Lavinia?”

Katherine tried to compose herself. Why was she so upset? She’d been in the presence of woman smokers more times than she could count — in Paris, Geneva, Vienna. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said finally, focusing on those mocking green eyes, “but the vote is one thing — even the issue of trousers or bicycles or the ridiculous practice of riding sidesaddle — and yet a personal habit that many, male and female, might find objectionable—”

“Have you ever tried one?”

Was she blushing? Thirty-eight years old and blushing like a schoolgirl? She was remembering those summers in Switzerland, at Prangins, and Lisette. “Well, to tell the truth,” and suddenly she was giggling, “yes, yes I have.”

Without a word, Jane snapped open the silver case and held it out to her, and Katherine accepted it, chose a cigarette and leaned forward for the flare of the match and the first harsh-sweet insuck of smoke. She inhaled. Looked into Jane’s eyes. And almost immediately she coughed, smoke everywhere, spewing from her like a chimney, and she coughed and coughed again. And then they were both giggling and fanning and ducking their heads against a roil of smoke, Jane adding hers to the mix, a whole tornado of smoke, a Vesuvius, and some of the others were crowding round the sofa, their eyes bright with the triumph of the day and the sense of recklessness that came with it, of knocking down the barriers, throwing open the floodgates and no turning back. “May I have one?” Carrie asked, and they all laughed at that, but then Carrie did take one, the ritual reenacted, the silver case and the white orderly row of cigarettes, the two women’s heads coming together as one over the gift of the sacramental fire, and Maybelle Harrison had one and pretty soon everybody in the room was coughing and laughing and laughing and coughing.