T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Stanley!” she called, trying not to run, aiming for poise and composure, but after a moment she couldn’t feel her feet at all and she was running despite herself. He was frozen, welded to the bars — he didn’t move, wouldn’t lift his head or raise his eyes. Jean Claude, the gatekeeper, gave her an odd look, and he seemed ready to rush forward and prevent whatever it was that was about to happen.

She was there, at the gate, her hands clutching his, and she was looking up into his flat suffering face through the iron grid. She uttered his name again, “Stanley,” and then she didn’t know what to say and still he wouldn’t look at her, his head hanging, shoulders bunched, the hair in his eyes, utterly abject, the whipping boy come back for his punishment. Everything stopped then, the earth impaled on its axis, the sun caught in its track, the breezes stilled, Jean Claude’s face the face of a photograph, until finally it came to her and she knew what to say, and it was almost as if she were speaking with her mother’s voice or Miss Hershey’s from all those years ago when she sat in the schoolroom and learned French, deportment and the finer points of etiquette with the other wide-eyed and nubile Back Bay girls: “How nice of you to come.”

The wedding was in September, and because it took place in Europe and because it was cursorily announced and precipitately arranged, the American newspapers had a field day with it: SECRET M‘CORMICK NUPTIALS; SOCIALITE WEDS M’CORMICK HEIR IN SWISS RETREAT; M‘CORMICK-DEXTER WEDDING SHROUDED IN SECRECY. Actually, there were two ceremonies — a civil ceremony before a magistrate in Geneva and a private celebration at Prangins presided over by a French cleric of indeterminate affiliation whom Nettie suspected of being a Unitarian or even a Universalist. She’d booked passage as soon as Stanley had wired her that a date had been set, and she campaigned from the beginning for a church wedding there in the very birthplace of Presbyterianism — anything else would have been sacrilege, anything else would have cut her to the quick, torn her heart out and trampled on it — but it was Katherine’s wedding, Katherine’s château, and Katherine had hegemony over Stanley now, and no matter how fiercely Nettie fought, right up until the nasal clod of a Frenchman pronounced them man and wife, she was doomed to failure. Stanley had made his choice, his leap, and it was like leaping from one forbidding precipice to another, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She made an uneasy peace with Josephine, who at least conducted herself like a lady and showed a remarkable degree of taste in the charm of the statuary and gardens at Prangins, but Nettie would never forgive her daughter, the scientist, the unholy little snit who’d stolen away her last and youngest, and even as the Frenchman was intoning, “Je vous declare maintenant mari et femme,” she stood behind Stanley hissing, “Godless, Godless.” And thank the Lord she’d brought Cyrus Jr. along to sustain her or she might have fainted dead away right there (neither Anita nor Harold would dignify the proceedings with their presence, and that was what it amounted to, though Anita had her child to look after and in Harold’s case, well, someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on the business). She did cry though, as mothers are wont to do on such occasions, but her tears were of an entirely different order from Josephine‘s, who whimpered like a deprived three-year-old throughout the course of both ceremonies, if you could call them that — no, her tears were tears of rage and hate. If she could have struck Katherine dead right where she stood in her Gaston gown with its pearls and lace and the ridiculous puffed pancake of a hat she wore high up off the crown of her head so that she was nearly as tall as Stanley when you added it all up, heels, hat, chignon and veil, she would have, so help her God, she would have.

And how did the bride feel? For her part, Katherine was satisfied. Or more than satisfied — she was ebullient, triumphant, the battle over and the citadel taken, and she was gracious in victory. And in love too, having leapt the same chasm as Stanley, and there was no more anxiety, no more fear of the free fall and crash: he was her husband and she was his wife. She was content. Without reservations. As sure as she’d ever been of anything in her life. And what had made it all right and chased away her last remaining doubts was Stanley himself, prostrate before her on that early summer morning outside the château gates.

He was so contrite and pitiable, pale as a corpse, two weeks’ worth of sleepless nights staring out of his eyes, every fiber of him yearning for her. He couldn’t defend himself or explain how he’d gotten there or why or what his presence portended for them both — he was overwhelmed by his feelings, that was it, as simple as that. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. And she didn’t have to hear him say it or read it in a perfumed letter because she could see it in his eyes and his face and the way he held himself in a kind of hopeless and penitential despair: she’d warned him not to come and he’d disobeyed her. That melted her, that melted her right there, and she brought him in and fed him bonbons and madeleines and she showed him round the place, all twenty rooms, riding up off the balls of her feet as if she were lighter than air and barely able to keep herself tethered, and then they were out on the lake and rowing, and she knew there was nothing more she needed in all the world than to have Stanley at her side.

Yes, and now they were married, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, not Nettie or her odious little rat of a lawyer — Foville or Favril or whatever his name was — or the walking broomstick that was Cyrus, so stiff and formal and tripping over his boarding school manners, as tactless as a shoe-shine boy. But what did that matter to her? She hadn’t married the McCormick family, she’d married Stanley, and now the rest of her life was about to begin. She waited, breathless, a little flushed with the champagne she’d drunk, while the party broke up and her mother ushered the guests out into the reception hall and Stanley stood grinning and pale beside her. All the guests were going into Geneva for the night, and Josephine too—“I want you to have the place to yourself, sweet,” she’d said, “just you and Stanley and the servants”—and in the morning they’d embark on their honeymoon, first to Paris for a month, to shop and stroll through the galleries, to visit Cartier & Fils and Tervisier & Dautant, and it would be one grand party, even if Nettie insisted on coming along — and Josephine. And she laughed to herself, a private trilling little chime of a bride’s laugh, wondering if two mothers on one honeymoon would somehow manage to cancel each other out.

She took Stanley’s hand in hers as the guests — there were only fifty or so, the most intimate group — began to make their exit. It was eight-thirty P.M. on September 15, 1904, and the day hung in tatters over the lake while the hall rang with laughter and good wishes and the intoxication of all that had happened and all that was to come. Stanley’s fingers were entwined in hers. Her peignoir — ivory silk with a border of Belgian lace the color of vanilla ice cream, Stanley’s favorite — was laid out on the big canopied bed in the Bonaparte suite upstairs. “Good night,” she said to one guest after another, “good night, and thank you so much,” while Stanley stood erect beside her, his right arm extended, shaking hands, grinning like a child, a lover, a Hindu ecstatic, his every word measured and apportioned and the current of anticipation almost sizzling in his fingertips. She could feel it. She could.

And then there was the whole adventure of going to bed, the dismissal of the servants, the separate dressing rooms and baths, the shy smiles, the endearments, the bed itself. Katherine took her time, brushing out her hair, sick with joy, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin at the moment of release. She rubbed lotion into her face and hands, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and when she laid her dressing gown beside the wedding dress on the loveseat and stepped out of her undergarments, she felt a thrill go through her that was like nothing she’d ever experienced, a chill and a fever at the same time, the blood exploding in her veins like gunpowder. And then the nightgown. She lifted her arms, short of breath all of a sudden, and let the silk run down her like water. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d squeezed Stanley’s arm and pecked a kiss to his cheek at the door to his dressing room. The hour was at hand.