T. Boyle - Riven Rock

In the morning she changed the bed herself, before the chambermaid had a chance to poke her nose in the door — no bloody sheets to display here, no flag of virginity, not even the good clean wholesome impress of two bodies lying entwined as one. She bundled up the sheets and stuffed them into the fireplace atop a pyre of pine kindling and split oak, where they made a quick and furious blaze before settling into ropy clots of ash. Stanley had fallen asleep at the desk and he was sleeping still when she awoke at eight to a heavy fuliginous light that spread like a stain over the lake until the sky was as dark as it had been just before dawn, when she’d first awakened. By nine, it was raining.

Katherine lay there prostrate on the stripped mattress, gazing out through the bed curtains at the water lashing the windows, afraid to move. She was hungry, famished — she’d hardly eaten a thing the day before for sheer excitement — but she was also afraid to ring for breakfast because then everybody would know, all servants notorious for their gossip and none more so than the frenchified Swiss, who always moved about the place as if they were on loan from an empress and missed absolutely nothing. But what to do? Her mother would arrive soon enough, every possible question in her eyes, and then Stanley’s mother would follow, just in time for a light luncheon before the whole rampant entourage entrained for Paris and the Elysée Palace Hotel.

Finally, as the clock in the next room struck ten with the faintest repeated rasp, she tiptoed to the door and peered in. Stanley was asleep still, head down, elbows splayed, a basket full of crumpled paper at his feet. He was snoring, a wheeze and stertor that animated the papers scattered round him, and she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a man snoring since her father died — he used to fall asleep in the library after dinner, the newspaper slipping from his lap, a cup of hot malted milk cooling on the table beside him. She found the scene oddly touching, Stanley snoring there at the open secretary, his cheek pressed to the leaf while his lips fluttered and the long lashes of his eyelids meshed like a doll‘s, but she had to wake him all the same — it wouldn’t do for the servants to find him like this.

She thought of shaking him and calling his name in a protracted whisper—“Stanley, Stanley, wake up”—as she expected she would on ten thousand mornings to come, but when she was actually in the room, actually approaching his splayed and sleeping form, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. And why not? Because he would be embarrassed, mortified, caught in a lie, and she didn’t want to see the look on his face, the pain and bewilderment in his eyes and the shame — she didn’t want to be the one to remind him of the futile negligee and the lonely bed. So she took the easy way out — she retreated to the door and slammed it three times in succession before darting out of the bedroom, into the hall, and down the stairs to breakfast.

Eyebrows were raised. The servants crept around the halls like undertakers, Madame Fleury choking on her own suspended breath, her eyes oozing and doleful. And where, they wondered, was the master of the house, the king and patriarch and deflowerer of virgins? Sleeping late. He wasn’t to be disturbed. And of course this revelation was in itself cause for eyebrows to be raised still further. Katherine ignored them. She ordered breakfast, watched the rain, and ate, one small bite at a time.

Stanley appeared at noon, looking confused. He’d bathed and changed into a charcoal gray suit with a stiff formal collar and tie. Katherine, already dressed in the outfit she would wear to Paris on the train, was in the parlor, seated at the window with a book she was pretending to read. “Ah, well,” Stanley said, poking his head in the door like a child playing a prank, “so there you, well, are. I just, well—”and then he was in the room, tall and solemn, his shoulders thrown back and something — a neatly folded slip of paper — making its way from one hand to the other and back again. He rocked on his heels. Smacked his lips. Opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t quite seem to close it around the words he wanted.

“Good morning,” Katherine said. “Or should I say, ‘Good afternoon’?”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond. He merely stood there, just inside the door, watching her out of hooded eyes.

“Did you sleep well?” She didn’t want to be acerbic, didn’t want to provoke him, but she couldn’t seen to help herself. She was angry. She was. And humiliated too.

“I — well — I, I’m sorry, I, you know-work… and then, before I knew it—”and he threw his hands in the air in a gesture of helplessness, the neatly folded slip of paper going along for the ride.

Katherine felt the blood rush to her face. He was just standing there like a block of wood, like an oaf, his hands dangling, a fleck of shaving cream stuck to the underside of his chin. “Well?” she demanded. “Don’t I deserve a kiss?”—and she wanted to add, “at least,” but held back.

Suddenly he was in motion, striding across the great cavernous stone room with its faded tapestries and the wall of long narrow windows giving onto the gray void of the lake, and he didn’t look tender, not at all — he looked determined, dutiful, martial almost. He bent to her stiffly as she raised her chin and compressed her lips, and stiffly, he kissed her — on the cheek, no less. She rose from the chair to take him in her arms, but he backed off a step, every mortal ounce of him working and twitching, and what was this? He was thrusting the paper at her, a crisply folded sheet of stationery with the McCormick monogram embossed in the corner.

“Katherine,” he said, “I wanted — last night, I — here, forcing the paper into her hand, his smile high and tight, feasting on her with his eyes. ”Go ahead,“ he said. ”Open it. Read it.“

She unfolded the paper and held it up to the light, standing there beside him on the morning after her wedding night with the rain beating at the windows and the servants lurking in the halls. It was a will. Four lines, signed and dated, and nothing more.

I, Stanley Robert McCormick, being of sound mind and body, do hereby consign all my monies, assets and real property, in toto, to my wife, Katherine Dexter McCormick, in the event of my death.

She didn’t know what to say. It was so unexpected, so odd — and so morbid too. Was this what he’d been writing? Was this what he’d hidden from her the night before? “Stanley,” she murmured, and she couldn’t seem to find her voice, “you didn’t have to do this — there’s plenty of time to think of such things, years and years…”

He was beaming, all his teeth on display and his eyes lit like hundred-watt bulbs. “It’s a surprise,” he said. “That’s what I — last night — it wasn’t business, not all of it, you see, because — because I was, well, I was thinking of you—”

And now she didn’t have to say anything, and neither did he. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself to him, one flesh, and lifted her face to his and found his lips. And they were like that, in that very pose, the first real kiss of their married life and every sentimental emotion charging through them, through them both, when Katherine’s mother swept in the door, all feathers and perfume and brisk commanding energy, and Stanley’s mother right behind her. “And will you look at this,” Josephine crowed, “look at the lovebirds!”

O‘Kane was sprawled on a circular patch of lawn in the middle of the daphne garden, along with Mart and Mr. McCormick, and all three of them were lathered in sweat and breathing hard. Mr. McCormick had been especially frisky on his walk that morning, leading them on a chase from one end of the grounds to the other, elbows pumping and nostrils flared, his eyes fixed on some invisible lure in the distance. Up they went, all the way to the top of the estate with its inhuman rise in elevation and vertiginous views of the Channel, and then they turned round and charged back down again, Mr. McCormick leading the way with his lunatic strides, feinting this way and that, till they’d circled the house three times and finally come to rest here, among the daphnes. Mart was lying prone on a stone bench near the fountain, inanimate but for his tortured breathing, and Mr. McCormick himself was stretched out on the lawn and staring up into the granular sky, his jacket balled up beneath his head to serve as a pillow. It was absolutely still, not a breeze, not a sound. The sun all but crushed them with its weight.