The autumn brought an end to accidental encounters and unexpected distractions, all the things that Katherine welcomed but that were not any part of her life. The semester was no longer beginning, and the restless way in which everyone watched what the others were doing, and the exuberance with which they threw themselves into the novelty of hard work with one foot still stuck in the summertime, were all over. The air was pristine now, monastic and preoccupied. There was the subterranean hum of activity folding in on itself. It was a pattern she was accustomed to, one she even felt she thrived within, as her orbit grew increasingly far flung from Sewanee and she was more and more often alone. This time of year reduced life to the pith. In July she had met the vice chancellor’s wife on a path in the flower gardens, each of them walking alone, with the racket of insects around them, and they had greeted each other warmly and talked a long time, but in the way that two strangers might if they met in a country that was foreign to them both and discovered they spoke the same language. The summer was a place apart from the normal course of things. The vice chancellor’s wife was not her friend. If they saw each other now they would smile and nod, and keep moving. In the autumn Katherine stayed in her car more than ever, and when she left it she carried her keys in her hand, like a talisman.
Even her friendships with the hired women, the housemothers and housekeepers, were now brisk and pragmatic. Sometimes she still did stand at Mrs. Reston’s kitchen door, trading gossip that verged on the ribald, and laughing with her until it seemed that they were weeping. But mostly she moved between them, each domicile a solitary island, ferrying their occasional news back and forth, once in a long while driving them to the good stores in town, and on holidays to the bus stop, when they set out on their pilgrimages, to a sister somewhere, or a nephew. She tried to take their example, and stiffen her spine. Although she felt they must be lonely, they never betrayed it. Nor did they voice discontentment or speak harshly of people, although Katherine often felt there was something they all shared and all took for granted, a placid assertion they made, that they were glad to have staked out their lives on the unobserved edges of things, and that they had their attention half elsewhere. At other times she thought this might be an illusion. Mrs. Reston’s whole world did consist of the vice chancellor, and Mrs. Wade couldn’t sleep if a boy in her house missed his curfew. Even Katherine would feel faithfulness well up unbidden, at the sight of the dogwoods in bloom on the quad, or the chapel’s pale stone turning gold in the late afternoon, or one of the nameless, unowned, cosmopolitan dogs angling eagerly toward her, ears pricked, while her frightening love for this place pinioned her where she stood.
She took care to do things that could only be done at that time of the year. She ventured into her attic, too stifling in the summer to set foot in, and chased away the squirrels with a broom. She picked up turned leaves and stuck them in her heavy books, with leaves from other years, now brittle and forgotten. She attended evening lectures sometimes, feeling that if only she approached the lecturer—on Gothic architecture, on the poetry of Ireland, always an elderly, sage visitor who came a great distance to stay just one night—and posed a question like the questions she saw them ruminate with care, they would be able to speak easily to each other. But she only attended the lectures, and jotted things down on the program, her thoughts recorded as they burst forth in the stillness of the lecture hall, the lecturer’s voice like a single, rich note tolling over and over, and her mind, stirred by something, shooting silent fireworks within her skull.
More than anything she drove, watching the leaves turn, and the changes the season made. She was always shocked by the way in which autumn, after dropping constant hints of its nearness, still managed an ambush. She would come out from her house one cold morning and stop dead in her tracks. It was like striking a match to a kerosene lamp and then turning the key: the hills were suffused, with a light from within blasting forth. Looking along the ridge, after every trace of green was gone, she would realize how many shades there had been, each one now a slightly different red, the hill a single thing on the very point of falling to pieces, the trees flinging their dead branches to the ground where they broke explosively underfoot, and the air turning chill and carrying those noises, of tree death and the chattering of creatures, over miles and miles, unaltered. She would sense the shearing away of yet another year from beneath her feet. The passing of time somehow made itself felt the most powerfully during the autumn, in the way the season precisely repeated itself, and the years in between disappeared, each night the clouds lying black against an orange sky, and every autumn linked to the next to make one endless autumn through which her life shot, like an arrow.
Driving, she watched the low sun flashing through the trees. Or coming out into cleared land, one hill swung away while behind it another revolved, the crown of trees on its crest turning a new side to her, and in the gap of sky that widened in their midst a shred of cloud scooting across like a toy on a string. She would drive as far as Alabama, and turn around. She would wend her way north, and duck under the Kentucky border, but she never simply went up to Chicago, or St. Louis, or down to Birmingham. She was always driving back, in the evening, with the western light blinding her out of her rearview. The road that found Sewanee from the west passed down the center of a vast agricultural plain, so level it looked machine-made, lacking even slight dimples or humps where a tree might survive. The red dirt always seemed freshly turned. From here the mountains spanned the horizon ahead like a modest green hedge. Sewanee’s own mountain was hidden within this. One would never think, coming toward the place this way, that Sewanee’s mountain was a singular thing, circumscribed by what seemed from within like an impassable horizon. She often left town from the north and made a great, aimless loop west and back, one hundred miles without the least reason, finding the farm roads that lay along surveyors’ lines until she was here again, splitting the red waste and watching the green take on texture and depth, as the mountain closed in, and the road, as it always had, started to climb.
Katherine’s father had been at Sewanee—no one ever seemed to “go” or “attend,” it was someplace you always just were—and he liked to return for the summers. The mountains were full of grand yet squat, low-eaved, stone-floored summer houses, as cool as iceboxes. The houses were mostly full of well-heeled old women, faculty widows or society dames who went to the mountains in June because the weather was cool and the company good. Sewanee had always been a summertime retreat. No one remembered which had come first: the well-heeled old women or the striped picnic tents on the quad; a dance orchestra in the evenings sometimes, all the way down from Nashville; and good meals every day, barbecue at least every week, and cocktails all afternoon on the broad patio of the faculty club overlooking the gorge, with the boys from the kitchen tricked out in white jackets and gloves. It had been this way forever. Many of the houses now belonged to successful alumni whose affection for Sewanee, or sense of indebtedness to it, made them want to return every year. It was also true that Sewanee men lived in the South, where they had been born, and so Sewanee was a summer refuge from Birmingham, or Atlanta, or Jackson, that was not someplace like Provincetown, or Maine.
Joe Monroe was one of this group, but he also had other incentives. It gave him great pleasure each year to affect casual ostentation at what always, even in the absence of classmates, felt like a reunion. He wanted to demonstrate the extent of his worldly accomplishment in the setting most likely to emphasize it. At Sewanee he had been a charming but talentless student. Although he worked hard he was only ever average, and even that was largely because he’d had the good sense to cultivate the best-friendship of his first roommate, and to keep him as a roommate all four years. This arrangement had made Monroe secretly miserable. The roommate was famously brilliant, academically careless, slight, unathletic, pseudo-aristocratic, and strangely devastating to the girls. His name was Charles Addison, of Nashville, although once he’d arrived at Sewanee he never really left there again. After graduation he went to Princeton for his doctorate but returned to accept a position from his alma mater, which felt lucky to get him. They never changed their minds about this, and so Addison continued to be lionized at Sewanee long after the larger world of his profession had come to see him as a man who failed to live up to his potential, out of laziness, or arrogance, or both.
In the beginning there had also been a wife from up north, but her failure to adapt had earned her the indifference of everyone, including, it seemed, her husband, and when she vanished from the Sewanee social hothouse she wasn’t really missed. This development would have been disastrous for the careers and reputations of most men, but in Addison’s case it seemed attractively inevitable. Everyone assumed that he had driven her crazy with neglect and justifiable contempt. Addison had visited Katherine’s family on the odd holiday throughout her whole childhood, but it was years before she learned that he had ever been married. And he didn’t strike her as a man who thought he’d botched up his life. On the contrary, he seemed to enjoy his own company more than anyone else’s. He agreed with Katherine’s father’s view of him. Joe Monroe dated his own emergence as a possibility, as someone who might amount to something, from the moment at which he found himself accepted by Addison as a good enough companion and foil. In many ways the return to Sewanee was for the sake of seeing Addison, because Joe could continually assert the depth and longevity of the friendship, as well as his triumph. The way he saw it, he had gone forth into the world and made a lot of money, while Addison had lingered in the past. But it was this past against which Joe defined himself, and which in Katherine’s family set the standard for everything.
Katherine’s own attachment to Sewanee when she was a girl had only been slight, and the acquisition of a summer boyfriend in the year she turned fourteen—a chemistry professor’s son who went to college up East but came home for vacations—did not really increase it. The existence of the boyfriend had effected a much more noticeable change in Katherine’s mother, who began treating Katherine with a strange sort of prodding dissuasion, warning her not to play hard-to-get, or to cheapen herself. Glee began to say things like, “You’re too young to be serious,” but Katherine didn’t feel serious at all. It seemed to her that Glee was saying she was too old not to be serious. The truth was that Katherine spent most of her time with the boy doing nothing. Their options for physical transgression were never quite clear. While Katherine dwelt morbidly on the possibilities, the boy seemed content to go swimming. Sewanee had a river that cut a deep cleft through the grade of the mountainside, sometimes pausing to spread at the base of a steep waterfall. They both had the same favorite swimming place, a coincidence that might have been the sole cause of their courtship. They would walk there together, on a narrow path that was lumpy with tree roots, holding hands. They both wore sneakers and shorts with their suits underneath, and limp towels tossed over their shoulders. Sometimes the path grew so narrow they rotated sideways, still yoked, and then rotated back. But when they reached there she left him, and went off by herself. The riverbed at the head of the falls was a jutting stone shelf, and the water slid over its edge in an unbroken sheet. The falls were so constant they seemed motionless as they disappeared under the surface. When Katherine stretched out and let her ears fill with water the roaring of the falls turned into a noiseless vibration. She liked to pretend she was lying in bed, and tried to untrain her body from floating. She would feel her legs sinking and towing her hips along with them, until she was just an archipelago of new breasts and shoulders and face. She kept her eyes closed. Somewhere near the base of the waterfall the boy was scaling the rocks, or squinting at the prospects for fishing. In the afternoon, when the high cliffs cut off the sun and threw the pool into shadow, he would come to the bank nearest her, holding open a towel. There was an odd, delicate formality to their companionship. They had little to say to each other and little real desire to sneak off alone. The only thing she had to conceal from her mother was the very lack of something to conceal.
One day she came downstairs to the living room and found Charles Addison sitting there alone. “I’m waiting for your father,” he said. He looked her very frankly up and down. She was wearing a fitted gingham sundress, with spaghetti straps and darts. It was the sort of thing her mother insisted on putting her in for evening dates with the boy, and not the sort of thing she wore much otherwise, but she was wearing it now, and the womanly cut of its little-girl fabric suddenly struck her as lewd. She lowered herself onto the wicker ottoman across the room from Addison and looked around vaguely. She could feel her initial flush growing cool on her skin, and that strange, delayed bodily acuteness, as if she’d been running. Self-conscious, she raised an arm and scratched at her back between her shoulder blades. She knew it looked gawky and crude. “The bugs have been awful this summer,” she said. “Much worse than they usually are.”
“It was a rainy year. The ground is still marshy in spots. Pleasant breeding holes for bugs.”
“That’s revolting,” said Katherine, unconvincingly.
“Don’t be babyish.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” Addison remarked calmly. “I’ve noticed this about you. At a distance you’re unnervingly old for your age. I watch you when you don’t realize I’m watching, and you’re as old as the hills. Then I say the first word and you’re babyish.”
Katherine cast about for a reply but she could not find one.
“I suppose that’s the way your mother has taught you to act. The only girl in a bevy of boys. Have you had terrors from all of your brothers? I’ll bet you have.” He was smiling pleasantly. “My God, they must terrorize you.”
“No.” Katherine laughed. She liked her brothers, but they were a different breed. She liked the idea of being terrorized by them; it made her wish they had. But no, they had never done that.
“If I had a babyish baby sister of your description I would give her hell on earth. I would make her regret every breath that she took.”
“Oh, would you?” Katherine felt her nerve sharpening, growing alive to the challenge of him. “I’ll bet you would. You’re enough to make someone regret being born.” She had never had this sort of conversation. Suddenly uncertain, she reached again for the elusive itch, but it was not there. She deeply preoccupied herself with an imaginary discomfort, one arm hooked awkwardly over her head, and realized suddenly, with horror, the nervous prickling beneath her arms that was soft hair there, gathering sweat. Her mother had bought her a woman’s razor for her birthday, a heavy stainless-steel thing with an elaborately worked handle and tightly shingled blades, but its habitual use seemed absurd and she had put it away and forgotten it. The arm dropped.
“Come here,” Addison said.
Crossing the room, she had known; he had only taken her by the shoulders and turned her, and seated her on the edge of the sofa before him, and scratched her carefully between the thin gingham straps. Her hair hung thick and loose, an upper boundary, and below was the snug upper seam of her dress. It was a small compass. Her skin beneath her hair teemed unbearably, but his hand would not move there. “Where is it,” he said, searching slowly. Then his fingers paused. It was not a bite; it might have been no more than a slight interruption in the color of her skin, a mark that she would never see, or his attention gathering and disabled by its own weight. He suddenly pushed his hand up, raking over the teeming skin, into her hair. They heard the motor of a car and a door blithely slam, and she had risen and moved, like a sleepwalker, out of the room.
Inevitably, after the packing in New Orleans and then the driving and arriving and unpacking were accomplished, and the annual inventory of new symptoms of the house’s collapse had excited everybody, they would sink into listlessness. There was nothing to do in Sewanee. Every summer was a ritual of marking off great chunks of time: the time between breakfast and lunch, and from lunchtime to cocktails, the days between tea at the Struthers’ and that weekend’s barbecue, the number of hours between dinner and when it seemed all right to get into bed. There was something defeated and even unseemly about getting into bed while it was still light outside, but Katherine often did it anyway; unless her parents weren’t out on the porch, and then she would sit there with a candle, listening to night-bugs hurl themselves against the screens. For several years it had just been herself and her parents. All her brothers were now married or gone off to school, and although one had to spend one’s summer somewhere—she would hear her mother say this on the phone, in a tone of flirty wheedling that made Katherine cringe—none of them seemed to want to spend it in Sewanee. That she could not gather all four of her children beneath the same roof for the space of three months was sometimes regarded by Katherine’s mother as a personal failing, and sometimes as an affront. The remaining presence of her daughter did not seem to offer much solace. For ten years Glee had had nothing but boys, and her supposed incompetence with rambunctious boy babies was a topic she discussed enthusiastically and constantly. But when she finally got the daughter she’d often despaired for, she seemed slightly baffled. Katherine became the sole student of the commentary on How Things Were and How Katherine Should Be that Glee felt compelled to produce, and so Katherine grew up in the unflagging glare of her mother’s opinions. Glee’s vigilance widened the distance between them, and although each probably saw the other more than any other person, both felt only growing unease. They moved through the house trying not to cross paths, and when they did, sought to arrive swiftly at some minor topic of conversation, like the weather, or the right thing to wear to a party, or the weather’s effect on the party or even their clothing’s effect on the weather: “If you wear that it will rain,” Glee announced, as her daughter came lagging downstairs.
It never did, but it threatened to all afternoon. The party had decided to keep to the broad flagstone deck that pushed off from the rear of the president’s house, hanging over his fine sloping lawn. It seemed risky to venture much further. Everyone in the party was, for the most part, old, and for the most part female. Many of them were clustered around Charles Addison, laughing with what they seemed to feel was dangerous abandon. They were gasping and fanning themselves. Katherine watched her mother move across the flagstones, one hand regally proffered, and Addison seize it and pull her toward him through the crowd. He kissed her briskly on the mouth and then, making a mock show of recalling himself, on the hand. They laughed hard and exchanged witticisms. Katherine could not hear what they were saying but it didn’t matter, it always looked the same, that infuriatingly smug show-offiness of adults. Her father was back in New Orleans for a few days on business. Her mother didn’t take advantage of his absence so much as flaunt it, as if the very fact of her continued existence under such circumstances deserved special praise.
Katherine went to watch the kitchen boys husking sweet corn, ripping away at the tight layered leaves, and then fastidiously going to work on the squeaky silk threads. Eventually she found herself at the head of the flight of stone stairs that swept from the deck to the lawn. She began climbing down. The sky glowered and grumbled, noisily shifting its great weight like heavenly furniture. The rain was all around them. It only needed a catalyst, some first effort to give a stir to the air and send everything tumbling. She came off the steps onto the lawn and strode into its center. She imagined herself to be the unacknowledged focus of a collective, multifaceted attention: matronly disapproval, or maternal annoyance, or some other keen, distant disinterest. The weather was attending on her, too. Looking back she saw heads up there, bobbing eagerly, but from this distance she could not make out their eyes. For a while she trailed conspicuously to and fro on the otherwise empty lawn, like a lightning rod. Her dress was a yellow silk sheath. Her mother claimed that even water would stain it. She was still on the grass, hoping for telltale droplets, when shrieks and leaping flames from the deck drew her reluctantly back there.
The air was so pregnant with moisture that the coals wouldn’t light. The kitchen boys were dousing them with straight gasoline and throwing lit matches. A wall of fire would spring up with a whump, burn a minute or two, and then seem to evaporate. An acrid combat stench had filled the air. “You’re just burning off the gas you pour on. You’ve got to light the coals from underneath,” Addison was saying. He was ripping up the Chattanooga Tribune and stuffing crumpled balls of it between the coals. Several women cried out that he might burn himself. Louis, the head cook, tried batting Addison away with a pair of tongs. “Mister Charles,” he said. “Please.” It was another well-known eccentricity of Addison’s that he was friendly with the colored help. He often made an irritating display of shaking hands with the table-servers at university functions. He asked President Clate whether he didn’t have kindling in his house, and when the boy Clate sent in reemerged with an armload of logs Addison threw his paper in the air and sat back, to the delighted titters and remonstrances of his blue-haired attendants. “None of you people have the first idea how to start a fire. We need kindling. Don’t you know what that is?”
Louis said, “I’ll send some boys down, Mister Charles.”
“No, no, no. I’ll get it myself. I’ll need an able-bodied assistant, though. Someone who’s not afraid of rain.”
“I’ll go,” Katherine heard herself saying.
“Your dress, Katherine,” said her mother.
“You could let her pick up a twig every now and then. It might keep her from getting more spoiled. Hard labor?” he inquired of Katherine. “Do you think some hard labor might save you from becoming a thoroughly sickly and disagreeable young woman?”
Glee was still laughing, happy to be doing so, as she thought, at her daughter’s expense, as they made their way across the open lawn.
“I’m not ‘spoiled’ or ‘sickly,’” Katherine said as they walked.
“My God. I know you’re not.”
“I bet I could outrun you right now.”
“Even in the little dress and sandals?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bet you could. I’ll bet you could beat me senseless as well.”
“I might,” she began.
“You look lovely,” he said. Before she could reply he added, “You dress beautifully. In spite of what your mother says.”
“She likes the dress. It’s that she’s worried I’ll ruin it.”
“I’m sure you will.”
When the screen of trees behind them had grown thick and they no longer saw the house, she turned—she had been for so long, it seemed then, fourteen whole tedious years, moving within narrow grooves, over familiar surfaces, testing the very few things she had power to do and the very few ways she could do them. Even when she was alone she felt as if she was measuring up. But this had blown her off her small planet into a void and she couldn’t touch ground, she couldn’t do anything but what she was doing and so she turned to him, suddenly, leaning with her hands as if she were leaning for support against a tree, and he pushed her away. “Not now, we haven’t got time,” he said. He was on the ground, looking for twigs.
“Then why?” She fought against a sudden rush of tears. “Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted to see what you’d do, darling. I wanted to see if you’d do what you did.”
When they had gathered enough they went back through the trees without speaking. As they drew near the house her mother came down to meet them, laughing again, her glittering gaze fixed on Addison. Katherine’s dress had twigs and leaves stuck all over its front and it might have been snagged. “Charles Addison,” Glee chided, “look what you’ve done to my daughter….”