T. Boyle - Riven Rock

They were out in front of the hotel, the whole party, drinking champagne from an iced bucket and playing an endlessly dilatory game of croquet, and they looked up as one at the solemn figure cutting across the lawn on his way from the stable where he’d garaged his motorcar.

“Good God, what was that?” Ambler Tretonne cried after Stanley had passed from hearing. Ambler was thirty-two, with a broad bland face and puckered lips that gave him the look of one of those fishes that puffs itself up when it’s hauled from the water, and he stood a full three inches shorter than Katherine. When he’d married Patricia five years earlier, his father’s paper mills came into happy conjunction with her father’s chain of daily newspapers.

“An intrepid motorist, no doubt,” Butler Ames returned, hanging over a bright varnished ball and lifting his witty face to the group. “Back from a hard day of scaring cows out of their hoofs.”

And Katherine? She didn’t recognize him, not then, not at first, but how could she? She was twelve when she’d seen Stanley last, a child, and now she was twenty-eight years old, fully grown and mature, the only graduate of Miss Hershey’s School who wasn’t married, widowed or dead.

But Stanley recognized her. He entered the dining room at 7:00 P.M. sharp, dressed in evening clothes, his face tanned and teeth flashing, a head taller than anyone in the room, and when he looked up from the menu he caught her eye where she was sitting in the far corner with Butler Ames and the rest, and every time she glanced up after that his pale blue eyes were fixed on her. After dinner, when everyone under the age of seventy had retired to the ballroom for ices, dessert, drinks and dancing, he tracked her down with the aid of Morris Johnston, Betty’s brother. She’d just danced a rag with Bulter Ames and was catching her breath, a little giddy with the glass of wine he’d persuaded her to take, when something in Butler’s face made her look up.

Morris was standing there with this hulking tall man, a man matched to her own height, which Butler Ames, at five foot six, most emphatically was not, and the man — Stanley — was smiling a secret, mysterious sort of smile, as if he’d just solved an intricate puzzle. “I know you,” he said, even before Morris made the introductions. “Didn’t you used to live in Chicago?”

Stanley joined their party, and though Butler Ames blustered, cajoled and wisecracked without pause as the band played on, took a breather and played on again, it was as if he didn’t exist except as a minor irritation on the periphery of her consciousness, like an insect, Culex pipiens pipiens. She was lost in reminiscence, transported all the way back to her girlhood in Chicago, when her father was alive, and her brother, and there was nothing at all the matter with the world that a good grade on an exam or a few dancing lessons wouldn’t cure. Stanley’s mind was astonishing. He remembered every detail of those lessons, right down to the names and addresses of nearly all the boys and half the girls, and he remembered the day Monsieur LaBonte had paired them all off according to height, the day they’d first met.

“My God,” she said, “that was sixteen years ago. Can you believe it?”

“It snowed that afternoon,” he said. “Six inches.”

“I’m amazed at your memory, I really am.”

He smiled, that was all, and here was the shy Stanley revealed, self-deprecating, self-effacing, never one to advertise himself. He might have said, “Yes, and I graduated with honors from Princeton and now I run the Reaper Works along with my brothers,” or “I have every reason to remember — how could I forget you?” That was the line Butler Ames would have taken. Or any of the other heavy-breathing young bachelors who seemed to close in on her like a swarm of gnats whenever she left her books and went out into society. But Stanley was different. With Stanley there was no pretense, no pressure, no aggression. And he listened, he listened to her rather than himself, and the more they talked the more she felt the tug of memory pulling her down link by link into a shifting pool of nostalgia, her father’s face there before her, the lake at twilight, Prairie Avenue piled high with drifts, a big gray carthorse collapsing in its traces while her father tried to hurry her past.

Before long, she and Stanley were huddled by themselves, the width of the table between them and the rest of the party, all of whom, excluded from reminiscences of the LaBonte Dancing Academy, Bumpy Swift and George Pullman, picked up the general conversation and carried it elsewhere. “And what do you make of the Beaneaters this season?” she heard Morris ask at one point, and Butler’s answer, “Give me the American League any day.” And then, out of nowhere, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism and Socialism?” Stanley asked, and the rest of the night fell away into some hidden crevice in the smooth continuum of time. When she looked up again, the band had vanished, the ballroom was empty and all the others had gone off to bed.

That was how Stanley courted her — with socialism, unionism, progressivism, reform — instead of flowers and banter and meaningful glances. He sought her out first thing in the morning, even before she’d had a chance to come down to breakfast, and he launched into a polemic against inherited wealth, greedy capitalists like his father who took the means of production to themselves and robbed the workers of their labor, spoke of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and Marx as if he’d known them personally, and yes, he’d broken down in tears over How the Other Half Lives and hoped one day to convert the new International Harvester Company to a fully cooperative enterprise, as he’d done with his ranch in New Mexico. They played tennis together, swam, he took her boating, and all the while they debated the issues of the day until she felt as if some great shining light were opening up inside her.

By the third day, she couldn’t help telegraphing her mother to tell her about him, about Stanley Robert McCormick, heir to the McCormick fortune, a tall physical man from Chicago who wasn’t afraid of the intellectual side of things, right-thinking, sweetly shy, worth all the Butler Ameses of the world put together. And her mother, who’d been nagging her for the past six months to think of what she was going to do when she graduated MIT next year at the age of twenty-nine, already old for marriage and the very last hope of the Dexter line, telegraphed back within the hour: MAKE ME A HAPPY WOMAN.

But that was all a long time ago, an Ice Age ago, and now the best she could do was watch her handsome husband through a pair of binoculars like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare creature in the wild — that, and make sure he had every comfort, every material thing money could buy to ease his trials, and the best treatment available to bring about his cure. And even if she couldn’t be with him for Christmas, she was determined to scour every shop and every catalogue and bury him in an avalanche of presents so that his doctor, handing each one over, would announce, like a benediction, This one’s from Katherine.

And she was doing just that one morning after her mother arrived, directing O‘Kane and LaSource to carry in great towering armloads of foil-wrapped gifts and arrange them under the tree in Stanley’s quarters, when Julius suddenly appeared out of nowhere to clamber through the open door and into the back seat of the car. Her first thought was to shoo him away — it was two days before Christmas and she was anxious to get back to the hotel and relax with her mother over a cup of eggnog and a concert of Christmas carols in the courtyard where poinsettias grew up out of the ground in a red blaze that mocked the pitiful hothouse plants they had to make do with in Boston — but then she looked at him there, one leg folded over the other, his eyes lit with expectation, and changed her mind. Suddenly she was whimsical. The beautiful and intellectual Katherine Dexter McCormick, hard-nosed suffragist, brilliant organizer, manager of all Stanley’s properties and her own too, the woman who never let herself go, looked at that strange pleading hunched-up figure of male dejection sunk into the leather seat and felt silly, lighthearted, girlish. It was Christmas. Julius was in the car. What a lark it would be to show him off to everyone in the hotel. After all, if you could have tropical palms, birds of paradise and poinsettias in December, you could have a tropical ape too. Maybe she’d even see if she could find him a Father Christmas outfit — and a fluffy white beard.