T. Boyle - Riven Rock

The room was warm, secure, wrapped up in its particularity, suspended in time. Katherine waited till the maid had set down the things and left. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,” she whispered, and she wanted to kiss the side of his face, the bulge of his jaw, the place at the corner of his right eye where a lock of hair dangled like a thread of the richest tapestry, “because you have me now.”

In June, their engagement was officially announced, and the papers in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago all ran stories trumpeting their wealth, family connections and accomplishments, and a dozen smaller papers, including the Princeton Tiger, printed prominent notices. Stanley was described as “the Harvester Heir” in most of these accounts, a “motoring enthusiast” and “amateur artist,” and Katherine was, simply, “the Boston socialite and scientific graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The Boston Post decreed their engagement “a betrothal of the highest expectation and promise” and the Transcript was moved to pronounce it “the match of the year.”

Josephine was in her glory, fielding telegrams, canvassing caterers, bakers and florists and prattling her way across the Back Bay through one parlor after another. Nettie was less pleased. Her letters — separate letters — to Stanley and Katherine seemed to accept the betrothal as a fait accompli, but she made no bones about her disapproval of the match, especially in her letter to Katherine, in which she questioned her future daughter-in-law’s morals, education (there was too much of it), taste in millinery and footwear, dietary habits, religiosity and commitment to her last and most precious child. The word “love” never came up. As for Stanley, he seemed to be in permanent transit between Chicago and Boston, his nerves on edge, obsessing over the smallest details—“What sort of rice should we provide for the guests to shower us with, arborio or Texas long-grain?”—and every once in a while, dashing into the men’s room at the station or coming through the doors at the Copley Plaza, he began to think he was seeing that dog again in the glass. But he tried to brush it off — not to worry, the smallest of things — and instead concentrated on collecting all the announcements from the various newspapers and mounting them on red construction paper as a memento for Katherine. They set a date in the fall, the bride’s favorite season.

It was then, just when everything seemed to be going forward and all the major hurdles had been leapt, that things began to break down. Suddenly Stanley was having palpitations — he couldn’t seem to stop jittering, bouncing up off his feet, shaking out his fingers till they rattled like castanets, twisting his neck and gyrating his head in response to some frenetic inner rhythm — and all he could talk about was Mary Virginia. Mary Virginia and his genitals, that is.

He came bobbing and jittering into the house on Commonwealth Avenue early one morning two weeks or so after the engagement had been announced, his eyes fluttering, his face in flux, talking so fast no one could understand him. He frightened the maid, upset the cook and chased Josephine’s cat all the way up into the rafters of the attic in an excess of zeal. Katherine, who’d been dressing in her room, came out into the hall to see what the commotion was, and she watched Stanley dart past her up the stairs in pursuit of the cat, never even giving her a glance. When she caught up with him on the steps to the attic, he couldn’t seem to explain himself — he was afflicted with logorrhea, the words tripping over one another and piling up end to end, and he was going on and on about something she couldn’t quite catch, aside from the frequent repetition of his sister’s name. She’d never seen him like this — his eyes bugging out, his hair a mess, every cell and fiber of him rushing hell-bent down the tracks like a runaway freight train — and she was frightened. She managed to get him outside, out in the sunshine and fresh air, to try to walk it out of him, whatever it was.

They walked the length of Commonwealth Avenue, from the Public Garden to Hereford Square and back — or actually, it was more of a jog than a walk, Stanley setting an accelerated, stiff-kneed pace and Katherine clinging to his arm and struggling to keep up. The whole while Stanley kept shaking and trembling and running on about Mary Virginia and her illness and some sort of mysterious “whiteness,” as if she were lost in a blizzard somewhere instead of quietly ensconced with her nurse and doctor on a grand and faultless estate in Arkansas. It wasn’t till they’d passed the house for the second time, Stanley wet through with perspiration and the neighbors giving them looks that ranged from shock to alarm to amusement, that Katherine began to discern what he was driving at.

Leaping along, straining to look up into his face, her breathing labored and her mood beginning to fray, she managed to gasp out a little speech. “There’s no mental illness in my family, Stanley,” she wheezed on an insuck of breath. “On my mother’s or my father’s side, so the chances are very remote that our children will suffer, if that’s what’s worrying you, and it is, isn’t it?”

“She’s sick,” he said, never breaking stride. “Very sick.”

“Yes,” she gasped, “I know, and it’s right of you to bring it up now that we’re going to be married, but I really don‘t — can’t we stop here, just for a minute?”

It was as if she’d waved a flag in front of him or given a sudden jerk at a leash — he stopped as abruptly as he’d started, his feet jammed together, one arm clasped in hers, sweat standing out on his brow and his hat soaked under the brim in a dark expanding crescent. “It’s not just that,” he said, and he was talking not to her but to the ground beneath their feet. “It’s my genitals.”

“Your what?” They were stopped on the walk in front of a yard full of roses. Bees dug into the blossoms. The perfume of the flowers wafted out into the street. Everything had such an air of calm and normalcy — except Stanley. Stanley was making faces and staring down at his shoes. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except that two smart young women suddenly emerged from the yard under a trellis of white and yellow roses and gave them a long look before brusquely stepping around them.

“My genitals,” Stanley repeated.

Katherine studied him a moment, his nostrils like two holes drilled in his head, his eyes locked on the ground and every other part of him jerking into motion and relaxing again in a long continuous shudder. She waited till the women were out of earshot. “Yes,” she said. “All right. What about them?”

“I — well — I — what I mean is, maybe they’ve been… damaged.”

“Damaged? ”

“From, you know, from my habits —”

She was a patient woman. And she loved him. But this wasn’t the sort of romance she’d dreamed about, this wasn’t being swept off her feet and wooed with tender intimacies and anticipatory pleasures — this was psychodrama, this was crazy. It was hot and she was perspiring and she’d meant to go out with her mother and look at some lace for her trousseau, and now here she was making a spectacle of herself in the middle of the street and Stanley carrying on over nothing — yet again. She was fed up. The furrow she was unaware of crept into the gap between her eyebrows. “If you’re so worried,” she said, “then why don’t you go see a doctor,” and she turned and stalked off down the street without him.

He called her from his hotel later in the day to tell her he was taking her advice and catching the next train to Chicago to see a specialist and that he’d return at the end of the week and she shouldn’t worry. But by nightfall he was back on her doorstep, Bridget in hysterics, her mother’s face drawn up tight in a knot, and Stanley acting as oddly as he had that morning — or even more oddly. He’d boarded the train and gone as far as New London, he said, still talking as if a howling mob were at his heels and this was the last speech of his life, but then he’d got to thinking about their situation and had changed trains and come back because there were a few things that just couldn’t wait a week — or even another day.