five

At first nothing happened. The boy—his name was Courtlin, which had been his mother’s mother’s maiden name, or something, she did not know or care—came to visit her and they sat on the screened-in porch drinking iced tea and eating oatmeal cookies her mother had brought on a tray. This tray had also conveyed to them a pair of daisies bobbing in a bud vase, the sort of bright touch that made Katherine think of a hospital room, but she was so uninterested in Courtlin she couldn’t even be embarrassed in front of him. She had considered telling him that she didn’t want to see him anymore, but her best idea for an explanation involved her summer reading list. It had also occurred to her that she might have a need for him. Still, Courtlin bored her so much it made her furious, and this wasn’t safe. She would be rude, he would be puzzled, he would ask stupid questions, and eventually her mother would notice. Katherine could never gracefully deflect her mother’s attention, once it was roused. When her mother challenged her she always made things as bad as she could, declaring herself guilty of every crime, even ones she hadn’t been accused of. “Courtlin, I’ve got to talk to you about something,” she murmured when she heard her mother’s footsteps mounting the staircase and moving down the second-story corridor. The radio was mooning away in the kitchen. They had an oscillating fan trained on them, nodding and rattling unsteadily. Each time it rotated as far as it could left or right it clicked loudly and stuck there, shaking with increased desperation, and just when she was sure it was finally broken, it unstuck and began turning back. It was driving her crazy. “Courtlin.” He leaned forward and looked intently at her hands, which were permanently wrapped around her sweating glass of tea. “I’m worried and I want to tell you about it. I have all this summer reading for school and I can’t get it done.”

“Is it hard for you to concentrate, Katherine?”

“No, it’s not that. I love to read.” She not only couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t sleep. And hadn’t had an appetite in days. She cast her eyes dubiously toward the second floor. “My mother thinks I read too much. She’s always shooing me out of the house.”

“But you should read.”

“I know. I want to go to college, like you.” Here she managed to look at him, but he seemed so sincerely interested in what she was saying that she had to look away again. “That sort of thing isn’t so important to my mother. She wants me to go out with boys and have fun. I mean she wants me to go out with you. She likes you. Don’t talk to her about this.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. I like your mother, too.” Here he glanced, dubiously, in the direction of the second floor. She often noticed him unconsciously mimicking her mannerisms. He was that dull. She loathed him. “But it’s wrong that she discourages your reading,” he went on. “She ought to encourage it. You’re so smart, Katherine. Now, I mean it”—she was shrugging irritably—“and you will go to college, and you’ll be a standout. I’ve always just assumed that you would.” Courtlin was the sort of student whose good grades were thanks to his solemn conviction in the sanctity of education. His intelligence was thoroughly average, but he was a diligent, undoubting workhorse. His father was a Sewanee professor, after all. There would have been great shame in not doing well. He was taking the whole issue far more seriously than she’d anticipated. Now it looked as though they were going to have to talk about it all day.

“I guess what it means,” she said, feeling cruel, “is that I won’t be able to see you as much. I can’t let myself. I’ve gotten so far behind.”

“That makes sense.” He looked miserably at her inaccessible hands, still fiercely guarding her tea glass. After a moment he added, as if he’d managed to convince himself, “We sure have been lollygagging around this summer. I’ve got to get cracking on an engineering project my prof up at school suggested I do. I’ve been moved into honors engineering for the fall, did I tell you? I almost didn’t want to do it, it’s going to be so much more work. So I think you’re absolutely right. And we can help each other out, and keep each other in line.” This speech was so unbearably pathetic that she was forced to reply, “I was hoping you’d say that. We should still have as much fun as we can, when I’m not reading.”

Courtlin now seemed cheered by this new, shared seriousness in their relationship. “I should have insisted on it. I noticed you’re still carrying Mansfield Park around. It seems like you’ve been slogging away at that one since May.”

“It’s boring,” she snapped.

“I’m sure there’s something worthwhile about it, or your teacher wouldn’t have assigned it. I’ve never read it myself. I’ll bet I’ve read other books on your list, though. I’m an engineering major but I’m sure I could help you out some. We have to take a lot of English classes at school no matter what field we’re in. I think that’s one of the really fine things about my school, that they won’t let you take too narrow a focus.” By God, she was bored. “What do you figure you’ll major in, Katherine? You must have something in mind.”

“English,” she said.

She pretended to read Shakespeare, carrying a volume of something or other everywhere like a totem of seriousness, the way she had carried a diary when she was nine or ten years old, in a great ostentation of secrecy. Courtlin would drop by, just to say hello, just to see how she was getting along, at obviously regular intervals meant to seem casual—every three days, every four days—and when he did she was always prepared, clutching one of her father’s slim, pale blue Penguin volumes as if she yearned to be left alone with it. She watched him watching her hands. She began to notice things about his body that repulsed her. She had never noticed his body before, not when they had walked hand in hand to the swimming hole, brushing bare limbs, modestly stripping to suits. Not even when he had kissed her. Then she only noticed the slight milky taste of his mouth, and accepted it. She had never kissed anyone else. But now her attention was riveted and unforgiving, and although Courtlin was serviceably handsome in all the usual ways he seemed unfinished, incompetent, afflicted with possible spasms. His hands fidgeted together. His limbs threatened to cease coordinated movement. His skin gave off an eager, oily sheen. He had become nothing but an oppressive, embarrassing body, and her impatience was equally physical. She wanted to pummel him. She would feel her angry flush surging up and steaming off her ears.

This prickliness was more than Glee could take. “That sour face will stick,” she told Katherine, when they were alone. She was taking the tactic of criticizing Katherine very generally. Glee knew better than to tell Katherine precisely how she was wrong. That would only determine her further. “Miss Mood,” she said, at the stubborn little wall Katherine’s book made in front of her face. When this produced no results, Glee told rambling stories about the grown unmarried daughters of old friends. “I was actually stunned when I saw her. She used to be such a striking girl, and so sharp and fun, and now she’s gotten—well, stocky. That’s the only word for it. Ever since that boy she liked went and married someone else. Do you remember that, Kitty?” Katherine flinched here but kept her calm silence, chewing a straw as she read. “He was a cute boy, but she was standoffish. She thought she had him in the bag. I guess she didn’t.” Glee was exasperated with Katherine’s coldness toward Courtlin. She wasn’t going to have him scared off by moody vanity and selfishness.

Finally she said, one day, “Charles Addison’s coming to dinner.”

Katherine lay her book down and took it up again quickly.

“It’s just family dinner as usual. I asked Courtlin, too. He’s practically a member of this family. And I just adore his mother.”

“Why don’t you ask his mother, then,” Katherine said.

Glee bristled. “I wish you would behave with a little bit of dignity. You’re a fourteen-year-old girl and you act like a six-year-old brat. Your behavior humiliates me.”

“I don’t see why you’d be humiliated.”

“I don’t see how I couldn’t be. The way you run hot and cold with him. I taught you to act better than that.”

“At least I’m not leading him on.”

“What in the world is that supposed to mean? You’re toying with him. You act superior and it’s ugly, if you’d like to know the truth.”

“I’m not toying with him, I’m doing the opposite. He won’t let me alone.”

“Katherine. You are going steady with Courtlin.” She said it as if it were an accusation, or a criminal sentence.

“I am not.”

“You’re not! Then what exactly has been going on all summer?”

“Am I in trouble for not being nice enough to him, or for being too nice?”

“I expect you to act appropriately.”

“Oh, appropriately!” Katherine shouted. “Appropriately!”

“Are you going with Courtlin or not?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I’m letting you run around with this boy doing just what you please, you’d better know.”

“All right,” she said, looking away.

“All right, what?”

“All right I’m going with him.”

“Then act like it.”

There was glacial silence between them for the rest of the week, but on Friday afternoon, the day of the dinner, Glee met Katherine coming downstairs, freshly bathed. Katherine had retrieved the silver razor and shaved carefully beneath her arms and from her ankles to the tops of her knees. She had sat in the bath so long that her fingers were pruned, but she was pink from the steam and smelled of soap and pressed cotton and orange-blossom water. She had pulled her damp hair down in front of her eyes between two scissored fingers, and cut bangs. She was wearing the gingham sundress. When Katherine saw her mother she paused warily, two steps up, and they studied each other. Glee gave her a rueful smile.

“Baby,” she said. “You look sweet.” She went and lay a hand against Katherine’s cheek.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Katherine whispered.

“No, no. Don’t you dare cry.” Glee pecked her forehead and stood back, looking her up and down. “You’ve gotten so pretty for him, don’t you spoil it and cry.”

By the time Charles Addison arrived, Katherine and Courtlin were locked to their usual seats on the porch, in the agitated blast of the oscillating fan. She saw him bound up and go rippling past the dense mesh of the porch screen, raising an arm to wave, and then he was in the foyer shouting cleverly with her parents, being made a cocktail, talking about why he was late. Katherine felt a dewy moustache on her upper lip. She lay one finger against it, cautiously. She had powdered her face. When she put the finger into her mouth she tasted talcum and salt. “I used to mow Professor Addison’s lawn,” Courtlin was musing. “I wonder if he remembers me. That was ages ago.” Courtlin had interpreted the dinner invitation as reconfirming his importance to Katherine. She listened to the talk from the front room—“…ran into LaMont on the way up and he had a court…” “…well we’re privileged…” “…don’t let her Charlie she’ll murder—”

Then the screen door slammed back on its hinges and Addison stepped onto the porch with an old-fashioned held out in front of him, as if he meant to make a toast. He took a sip from it and smiled at them, benevolently and vaguely, and then his eyebrows shot up in a show of great surprise. “Is that Courtlin Jones?”

Courtlin was already on his feet, grinning. “Hi, Professor Addison.” They shook hands vigorously and Courtlin dipped his head up and down like a dim-witted bird. “I didn’t think you would recognize me.”

“Nonsense! Well met, sir.” Courtlin basked in this mocking attention. “And how is your father? When is he going to emerge from his learned seclusion?”

The two men sat down together to discuss Courtlin’s father’s recent experiments, and Courtlin’s inevitable triumph in the engineering field, and the wisdom of studying the sciences versus the absurdity of studying the arts. Addison sat with his feet apart, leaning forward on his knees, jangling his drink emphatically in his hands, and soon Courtlin’s feet were planted firmly apart and he was leaning with his elbows on his knees and his chin sticking out and a furrow of absorption on his forehead. Katherine’s father came out with a drink for Courtlin, which he took with abashed ceremony, as if he were unworthy of it. He held it, as Addison did, out in the heroic expanse between his knees. Katherine hoped he would get drunk and do something stupid, but he hardly touched his lips to the glass. The drink seemed to have increased his anxiety about acting properly. At one point Addison said, “I’m more and more convinced that Katherine will ignore our best advice and study literature,” and a snort of laughter burst forth from Courtlin and left him looking helpless and frightened. A few minutes later Katherine rose, as if she meant to be inconspicuous, and resolutely walked off the porch. Courtlin’s eyes followed her, but Addison did not seem to notice.

In the kitchen she slouched against the door to the pantry and watched her mother and Mrs. Jackson, the colored woman who sometimes came to clean their house or assist with a dinner, zigzag anxiously around each other. She had to be asked to move several times before her mother told her to go back to the porch. “Be my hostess, sweet pea,” Glee snapped. “You’re underfoot.”

“I want a drink.”

“Save it, Katherine.” Glee yanked open the oven door and Katherine barely had time to hop out of the way. As she retreated Mrs. Jackson gave her a sympathetic smile she made a point of ignoring.

She went upstairs to the washroom and locked the door behind her. Fortressed there, she turned on the tap and the light and put her face close to the mirror. When she reached up to fluff her bangs her hand trembled. Glaring into her own eyes, she felt a terrible pang of self-consciousness suddenly, of being “Katherine,” and the more acute the awareness grew, the more distant and estranged she felt from it. She couldn’t feel like herself. She thought of the ghostly filaments that sometimes drifted through her vision; whenever she looked straight at one it would leap out of sight.

Then she turned off the tap and snapped off the light and stood there in the soap-and-laundry-scented dusk of the washroom. Once the strangeness of not promptly leaving the room had dissipated she felt as though she could stand there forever, with an empty mind, not doing anything. At last she pulled the door open, unfurling her free arm extravagantly above her head. The second-story hallway was dim and attentive. She stalked down the stairs and made a grand entrance into the empty dining room. She leaned knowingly against the sideboard and lifted her chin at various angles. Then the kitchen door swung open and her mother told her to bring everyone to the table.

During supper she tried not to look at him. He was seated to her right, her mother to her left at one end facing her father at the other; Courtlin was alone on the opposite side. The table was not very large—Glee had left the leaves out—but in spite of this Courtlin looked lost. Glee had put him there after a long consideration of arrangements, and given that she and Joe always sat at opposite ends, the seating question had essentially amounted to deciding who would sit beside Katherine, and who would face her. Glee’s sole purpose was to cultivate Katherine and Courtlin. Charles Addison had always been a frequent dinner guest, and although Glee relied on him to be her partner in flirtation, to arouse and gratify her and make her undiminished attractiveness meaningful, she took his comfort for granted and wasn’t overly concerned with his needs. Her first thought had been to seat Katherine and Courtlin beside each other, leaving Charles on the other side alone. In recent years, with Katherine the only child left at home, they obviously sat one on each side when Charles came to dinner, and the addition of Courtlin to Katherine’s side would underscore his role with her, both current and presumed. Soon enough, though, Glee realized that the seating of Katherine and Courtlin next to each other required a preexisting sympathy between them that for the time being didn’t exist. It would be more to the point to have them looking at each other, with the space of the table between them. There was nothing like a little obstacle to make a boy newly appealing. Courtlin’s affections seemed assured, but Glee wanted to keep him in place and patient while she ironed out Katherine’s moods, and the sight of Katherine on the stairs that afternoon, looking so tentative and so pretty—she was startlingly pretty, Glee thought, and this thought had a biting edge to it she shook off impatiently—had seemed to reconfirm her decision.

Now she regretted it. Courtlin was foundering. It was her annoyance with him as much as her sympathy that roused her to action. She began to lavish him with attention and affectionate teasing. “You’d better get to work, Mr. Jones. I only invited you here for your appetite. These two selfish men always have too many cocktails before supper and then they don’t eat. I get no appreciation at all from them.”

“You’re only saying that because the attention I pay to your cooking is so ardent it verges on the improper,” Charles said, and Glee abandoned Courtlin for just long enough to laugh beautifully at her husband’s best friend. She caught an unpleasant glimpse of her daughter staring down at her plate, looking stupid.

It was a terrible supper for Katherine. The unmoored feeling that had struck her in the washroom emerged again, unbidden. She desperately willed it away. Beginning to wonder what it meant that she was behind her eyes, within her skin, feeling the fall of her hair on her cheek, seemed like an irreversible disaster. Even at the age of fourteen she saw no glamour in going insane. Charles Addison was sitting beside her. Once, she knocked elbows with him, and submitted to the blush spreading over her face with suicidal resignation. She didn’t care how thorough her humiliation was, as long as it was gotten over with. But instead of attacking her with ridicule, or being snared by the force field of her agitation, he only briefly apologized, and returned to his conversation.

After dinner they decided to have dessert on the porch, to catch the rising evening cool. It was just before eight. Like everyone who lived in Sewanee, they had the advantage of the mountainside. Set into a slope, the house and its porch looked through the tops of trees toward the west, where the sun was beginning to set. A breeze stirred, and the light flashed unevenly through the leaves. The light was distilled and intense, and beneath it the white siding of the house turned gold, and every face seemed rarefied and flawless. Glee had taken Courtlin’s arm to lead him outside, but there she stopped short. “I’ve let Mrs. Jackson go home,” she remarked.

“Let me serve dessert,” Charles said, standing up again. “I won’t ruin it. Go on and sit down, Glee.”

“Let Katherine do it,” Glee said. She squeezed Courtlin’s arm confidentially.

“She refuses to be parted from you, Jones!” As Katherine went back inside she could hear her father continuing to tease Courtlin about his success with the two Monroe women. This was his favorite way of showing off to men. He inevitably claimed that Charles Addison and his wife wanted to be alone. “I can tell when I’m not wanted,” he’d say, pretending to leave the room permanently. He considered it a testament to his self-confidence that he relished this joke. “I don’t envy you, Courtlin,” he was saying. “These Monroe women are pretty exacting. I’d be sorry to unload one on you if I wasn’t so glad to get rid of her.”

Addison had followed her into the kitchen. She reached for an apron and tied it too tightly around her waist before turning to face him, as if she were arming herself. “I’m all right,” she said. “You don’t need to help me.”

“I’m not interested in helping you. I’m animated by selfishness. I have been smelling this pie since I got here—” He took the pie server and slit a vent in the pie’s crust. A weak ribbon of steam issued out.

“Don’t,” Katherine said, batting a hand through the air at him.

“I think it needs more time to set. It’ll run if you cut it now.”

“I haven’t got time.”

“We have time,” he said.

She had taken up and put down the pie knife repeatedly, and now when she tried to extract it again from a jumble of cooking tools in the drawer they flew up in a mass and crashed everywhere. A spoon skittered across the floor. Addison bent for it, and handed it to her, and she threw it into the sink and turned away again. But she didn’t cut the pie. She simply stared at it. She felt his gaze on her back, calm and amused and unswerving.

“I had no idea that you were enjoying the attentions of Courtlin Jones,” he said. “That’s brave of him. You must be exhausting.”

“I don’t ‘enjoy’ his ‘attentions.’”

“Are they unenjoyable? Or isn’t he attentive enough?”

“Both,” she said, and then angrily, feeling tricked, “I don’t want them to be any more. I mean, any more than they are.”

“You don’t enjoy them.”

“No.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“He seems very devoted to you. And you require devotion.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

She still faced the pie, which sat steaming, innocently, with decreasing strength, out of the small rupture in its crust. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. “You’ve ruined the pie.” Her hands were fumble-thumbed, the way they always were first thing in the morning, when she could hardly wrap her fist around a cup, or when she laughed so hard that her limbs became helpless and numb. Why was that? she wondered irrelevantly. Why was it your hands got so clumsy? She had the impulse to ask him. She took up the knife again, nearly flipping it into her face. He sprang up behind to help her, and was reaching around as the knife clattered into the drawer. His body just grazed hers. She looked at his hands holding on to the counter on either side of her. The baking had filled the kitchen with heat. Her hair clung to her cheek, but she did not have room to move and brush it away. The ends of her bangs caught in her lashes, and she regretted them fiercely. They were obviously fresh, and uneven. She had cut them for the sake of doing something to her hair, but she should have let it alone, and bound it back from her face like a sober, self-possessed woman would have.

His hand guided hers back to the knife and together they pressed it cautiously through the pie’s crust and cut a slice. Then he set the knife and her hand down and performed the delicate maneuver of easing the slice out and onto a plate. He settled it skillfully. The filling ran a little, and they watched to see how far it would go.

“We ought to get married,” he said. “We’ll be terrific when it comes to the cake-cutting. Shall we do another?”

“Yes,” she said. They cut another slice, and then another; he rotated the tin with his left hand as they cut, and kept her right hand lightly cradled in his, as her body was cradled in his body. She could feel his whole length, almost too warm, and the slight, calm pressure of his knee at the backs of her thighs, and when she unclenched them he moved tightly against her. The mumble of voices from the porch unbraided and she heard each one separately: her mother’s sharp banter and her father’s large, unselfconscious laugh and Courtlin’s nervous one. No one seemed to miss them.

He said, “But you must want to marry Courtlin.” He set the knife down again, and her hand with it. “I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps you’re already engaged.”

She laughed sharply. “No.”

“There are unofficial engagements. Sometimes a girl engages herself without realizing.”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Are you sure?” He stepped away from her and when she turned he looked almost shy. She took heart.

“I’m sure,” she said.

She waited: a night, a day, another night, another day. That evening she dropped into bed without thinking of anything, her mind’s voice struck dumb with exhaustion, and the next morning rose just after dawn, as if summoned to a sober duty. She bathed out of the sink from the thinnest, quietest stream of water the tap could emit. She put her wet hair in a braid and curled the tail to lie against her shoulder. Every action presented another opportunity for hush. She didn’t think of it as stealth. Stealth was a guilty word. She took her breakfast onto the porch and looked over her reading list, as the sun climbed and the wet, fragrant cool of early morning burned away. A hiss of insects filled the air. She heard her mother stirring upstairs and was in the kitchen rinsing her breakfast things when her mother came down. “I’m going to the library,” she announced. Her mother did not seem interested in the reading list which Katherine was holding up as proof of her intentions. Glee had a hangover, and had only gotten up out of fear that Joe might get up first and bang things in the kitchen. In a better frame of mind she might have found it strange that Katherine was already dressed, but at the moment she was only irritated that Katherine, having gotten up, hadn’t thought to make coffee. She pushed past her daughter and stood bleakly contemplating the icebox. In her robe and stocking feet Glee was a diminished, disorderly figure. Katherine gazed at her a moment before recovering herself and hurrying out of the house.

The walk was familiar. She had been to Charles Addison’s home countless times at every conscious age of her life, just as she had been over the lines of his face and the patterns of his clothes with the same thorough, impassive attention that she had applied to everything as a child. Now she found herself in possession of a wealth of information. There was the round pink stone by the road that she used to balance on. Here was the walkway. She could anticipate the flagstone that would wobble. She had never taken any interest in these things before, which made them seem that much more meaningful: the imaginary houndstooth jigsaw puzzles in his jacket, sulky hopscotch on the flagstones while her parents took too long to say good-bye. It was a complicated inheritance that had devolved on her by degrees, unperceived. When she rang his bell she knew how it would sound, buried deep in the house.

He greeted her very politely, with a facile remark about pleasant surprises, but she was prepared for this. She breezed past him, waving her reading list, on her way to his sitting room. She knew he had a pile of books there, and she was going to see if he had any she needed, and then she was going to borrow them.

“Aren’t the library copies sufficient?” he wondered, following her.

“I’d like to use yours.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll bet you write things in your books when you read them. My father’s always saying you’re a brilliant man, so I figure if I have your copies with all your scribblings explaining everything I’ll be ahead of everybody when I get back to school.”

“Oh, yes. Well armed to meet the challenges of, what must it be? Seventh grade?”

“Ninth grade. My first year of high school.” She was looking up and down his bookshelves now, her body awash in nervous sweat. Her hands were held calmly behind her.

“God help me,” he said. Perhaps he meant her to hear him. “I’m very sorry to tell you that I never write in my books. Books are by definition complete and inviolable. I would never dream of maculating one.”

“What does that mean?”

“Immaculate: spotless. Macula: mark. Maculare: to mark, stain, dirty. It’s a word of which the Catholic church is very fond. Don’t they teach you any Latin in the seventh grade?”

“French,” she said. “Je ne te crois pas du tout.” Her heart was pounding as she pulled a volume off the shelf. He came and peered over her shoulder at her selection. One of her hands still hovered at her back and as he hooked a finger into it she turned around and let the book fall open, exposing a random page, completely scrawled over. He wrote in every book he touched, on almost every page; there was not a volume in his home that wasn’t covered by his marks.

“You lied,” she said, as he bent down to kiss her. He didn’t lift her up in his arms. His hands didn’t touch her. His lips seemed decisive and dry, and then his tongue darted suspiciously into her mouth and she felt the shock between her legs, and tasted tobacco. Her neck began to cramp, straining to reach him. When she faltered he drew away.

She said, helplessly, “You taste like tobacco.”

“You’ve been watching me smoke all your life,” he replied, as if he were tired of her childish objections.

She continued dating Courtlin, but there was a change. She was warmer toward him, more sympathetic. Glee noticed a reassuring tenderness: when the couple sat murmuring together on the porch, when Katherine walked Courtlin to the foot of her front steps to say good-bye for the night. She had always just sat on the porch staring vaguely ahead of her while Courtlin had to let himself out, as if she were some kind of rajah, Glee thought bitterly, as if she were an arrogant prince. Now she was gentle, and interested. She questioned Courtlin about his engineering project, and remembered his responses, so that over time she was able to make meaningful comments about his progress, and offer solid advice when he ran into obstacles. She seemed alert and solicitous. She began to incorporate information about Courtlin into her dinner conversation with her parents: Courtlin’s father’s plan to take a sabbatical, Courtlin’s efforts to get a new roommate. The old one was slovenly. Glee found herself in the unfamiliar position of seeing her criticisms heeded instead of ignored, and it unbalanced her, leaving her afflicted with the objectless annoyance that had previously been her daughter’s prerogative.

Katherine now took the initiative in arranging dates with Courtlin, and she would inform Glee of the results with a guilelessness Glee found unnerving. We are going to walk up to Cross Point and have sandwiches, Katherine would singsong, or, We are going to study together in the library. She seemed slightly tousled and unguarded at all times, and as if her compulsion to report even the most mundane details—cold turkey and mayonnaise on white bread, the lovely stained glass in the reading room—were the effect of having been roused from a satiating sleep.

About half of these dates did exist; and when on them she was, as under the watchful eyes of her mother when home, gently forthcoming and rosily chaste. The other half of the time she had not made arrangements with Courtlin at all, and on these occasions she went to Addison’s house and spent her afternoon having sex in his bed, on his floor, folded over his furniture, whatever way that he wanted, in adherence to his dictates. Her relationship with Courtlin, though it appeared newly placid, and pleasing to her, was no more physical than it had ever been. Courtlin neither touched her body nor saw it, because they did not go swimming anymore. She did not want to tan, she said.

Does he touch you here? Addison would ask, placing a finger in the hollow of her collarbone; and when she said no, What about here? and Here? until the finger had wetly slipped into her. Then he would murmur, You sucked me up, didn’t you, hungry girl. And she would say, Yes.

She became an elaborate liar. They were speeding toward the end of the summer, and although two weeks remained, there was no way to make any of those fourteen days contain anything other than the lengthening shadow of Labor Day. She refused a promise ring from Courtlin, on the grounds that even a seemingly harmless token might put a constraint on their mutual trust. “And besides that, I’m awfully young,” she said. She suggested they keep taking things slowly; taking things slowly had worked well so far. Courtlin couldn’t deny this. But he was starting to think it would be very hard, going back up to school. He declared that he might really miss her. He wanted a photograph of her. When she chided him for being melancholy he claimed, in a rare moment of wicked humor, that he only wanted it to show off to the guys. Of course this wasn’t true. He would share the precious photograph with no one, or perhaps just one very good buddy. He imagined the photograph safeguarded in a silver gilt frame, perched on his desk, and softly communing with him during long, loyal hours of study. The uncharacteristic joke was an indication of how acutely he wanted this picture, for he feared she would sense his abject condition and respond as the old, irritable Katherine would have. But no such photograph as Courtlin had in mind, of the hazy, head-and-shoulders, string-of-pearls variety, that gets made when a girl graduates high school, yet existed, and she was able to refuse him this, too. She couldn’t stomach his mooning over a picture of her. Her rudeness nearly reared up again, but she quelled it with the thought that Courtlin’s corniness was always as laughable as it was maddening. What emerged from this internal struggle was an understanding chuckle and a pat on the hand. “You can write me,” she said.

She might have been sorry for her treatment of Courtlin if it wasn’t being repaid twice over. With Charles Addison she was the supplicant, and the more ground she lost the more desperate her methods became. She made reckless and dishonest declarations. They had a joke about the approaching interval of autumn, winter, and spring: they called it the Dark Ages. She had thought up the name, but it was Charles who had made it a joke. It was no joke to Katherine. She didn’t worry about missing him. She had become too used to thinking of her life as a stormy passage of suffering and forbearance, and within this scheme a separation from him was inevitable and perhaps necessary. But the prospect of losing his interest entirely was incapacitating. She had no loss in her life to compare it to. Like any incomprehensible possibility, this one sabotaged even what was assured. When he came to undress her she flinched, and when he tried to console her she flared at him. She was contrary and unreasonable, and would persist in this way as if it were her only hope of self-preservation, until he exploded. “What have I got here?” he shouted one day. “A sniveling baby! A sticky, ugly crybaby!”

“I am ugly!” she shrieked in return. Because the fundamental disparity between them could not be discussed, their arguments lacked substance and logic, and could only escalate in absurdity until both of them were exhausted. The idea of striking a woman disgusted Addison, but at times like this he longed to strike her. He would wonder aloud whether they wouldn’t both be happier “not doing this,” although he realized that she was spurred to fury solely by the fear he would abandon her. “You wanted to be treated like a woman, didn’t you,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you what you wanted.” She thought of her mother’s recriminations: Whose fault is that. Act your age.

As the slope of late August grew steeper, the air became full of contention. One night her parents got drunk and fought viciously. Katherine balled up and wrapped her head in a pillow. The next morning she went downstairs very late, full of resentment and fear, but her mother was all bustle: she and Joe were going to go to Chattanooga for dinner and dancing, and they were going to spend the night in a hotel. Katherine could take care of herself, couldn’t she? Katherine took this as a gift of fate, a chance to redeem the doomed remnant of summer, and she determined to extract something memorable. Like Courtlin, she wanted reassurances and keepsakes. But Addison didn’t greet the opportunity with the gratitude she had. The liberties of spending the night lay on the far side of a line he did not want to cross. A furtive, sweaty afternoon, one ear always kept cocked for the outside chance of the doorbell, was one thing; there was nothing essentially good about it, but it was what he was comfortable with. Having a freshly shampooed, cotton-nightie-clad girl sprawling under his covers, undoubtedly anticipating intertwined sleep, morning sunshine, and lingering breakfast, was quite another. His annoyance was not lost on her. When he finally quit his desk, where he had grimly remained in a pool of lamplight until almost one in the morning, she was sleepless and rigid. They tried to make love and failed. It was without a hint of disappointment or disturbance that he suggested they might be more comfortable sleeping apart, and as he made up his bed on the library sofa her helpless, vengeful crying only made him angrier, and he went and closed the two doors between them.

The next morning he was bothered by the memory. He stole upstairs and found her sleeping peacefully, a fistful of blanket pulled up to her cheek. He undressed and slipped into the bed beside her, pressing his erection against her hot, oblivious thigh, and when she began to stir he pushed her nightdress up past her breasts and forced himself into her. Even asleep she was wet, and in his excitement he thrust at her viciously, and rubbed his chest back and forth over her small breasts as if he wanted to erase them; her eyes had flown open and she gasped raggedly as he started to come. He yanked himself out and the burst of semen scattered over her stomach and along the shallow cleft of her sternum. One droplet landed on her cheek. “Darling,” he said. He wet his fingers and smeared the come onto a nipple; then he pinched it, hard. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes, turning her face away from him. He pulled the nightdress down again, flattening it against her wet skin with his palms.

When she thought about the end of the summer she tried to imagine that his desire for her would be sharpened by absence, but even then, she knew this wouldn’t be true. She began lying to him out of fear. She said she felt sick with guilt, which was true. And she said she was thinking of telling her mother. This was not true, but her longing to confess and to be reassured was visible, and he believed the threat, and threatened in return. She only grew more vague about her plans for disclosure. He tried solicitude. My sweetie, he said. My darling. Please. He scooped her up in his arms; it felt like holding a wet cat. His heart burst briefly within him, like the hollow, disconnected report of a gun. Her tears were always just below the surface, like her rudeness when she was with Courtlin. She was endlessly fighting these things. You’ll forget me, she managed, and he laughed at her. I won’t, he said. On her second-to-last day she finally asked him to write her. She had put it off because the question carried a weight of finality she didn’t feel equal to, but now it could no longer wait. They had made love that afternoon without tears or accusations and he was in an expansive mood. It struck him as very sweet that she wanted him to write, and he thought it would amuse him, as well. He did not see the prospective correspondence as a crucial condition of life, any more than he saw the liaison as one, but he submitted to her restrictions: that he must type his envelopes, and make the return address Courtlin’s address, in Sewanee. That a Sewanee postmark from Courtlin in the middle of the college term might be suspicious couldn’t be helped. There was an element of risk in everything, she concluded, and at that moment he adored her for the great solemnity with which she had thought out her postal deception. Of course I’ll write, sweetheart, he said.

She returned to New Orleans and began high school, hardly seeing what she did. She made occasional, oracular utterances in class that were never quite appropriate. She received three letters from Courtlin, each of which she read thoroughly, answered, and then threw away. She didn’t remember what they said, or what she replied. Then at last she got a letter from Addison, in response to her voluminous two: it was a single sheet of notepaper. “Semester well underway…students who think that they don’t need to read…hope you all are well, got a call from your dad trying to lure me down with tantalizing news of refurbished golf courses, he forgets that I can’t stand the game. Best—C.” She was stunned, and her answer, written as it was from a distance, and with nothing to lose, was raw. She mailed it more out of a desire to do damage to herself than to him.

His reply was chastened, angry, and swift, covering two tightly packed sheets, front and back. In spite of its greater length it still arrived in the same small, elegant, heavy-stock sort of envelope as the first letter had. Both the envelope and the typewriting on it had the look of adult writing things, completely different from the handwritten drugstore envelopes that were also arriving from Courtlin, and after a moment of hesitation Glee opened it. “I took you seriously and perhaps I was taken in. We agreed you’re not a child. Didn’t we? I took you seriously when I took you into my house and took you into my bed. If you think I habitually find myself making love to exacting fourteen-year-old girls you are pitifully wrong. You exhaust me, you make me furious and you exhaust me. I’m sorry—”

When Katherine tried to speak Glee cut her off. “Oh, Katherine,” she wailed. “What can you tell me?” It was not a question. Watching her mother’s despair Katherine felt her own begin to rise around her. She was left alone with her disaster. She sat on the floor and sobbed. She tried to curl against Glee’s legs and Glee took her by the shoulder and shoved her away. What can you tell me? Katherine couldn’t tell her anything. But later, when she was alone, she dismantled the razor—it had accumulated the melancholy, reproachful air of an object left by someone who had died—and sliced experimentally into the flesh below her wrist. Her attempts were half-hearted. She cut against the direction of the veins, and blood beaded up slowly. She wanted Glee to burst in on her, horrified, but Glee was shut in her own room, and that end of the house made a quiet, impregnable island. Katherine wore long sleeves until the thin wounds healed, although it was too warm, but this went unremarked. She lived out the rest of that year in her parents’ home like a barely tolerated guest. She couldn’t comfort herself with a sense of being persecuted. Her awareness of having been wrong, and worse, of having been stupid, was far too acute. She could have answered the fatal letter but she didn’t. She understood now that she did not have a confederate in Charles. He answered her silence with silence. If her father suspected what lay at the root of the estrangement between his wife and his daughter, he chose not to pursue it. He considered it a crisis between women, and kept his distance.

The following spring Glee made a series of emergency phone calls to the girls’ camp Katherine had attended from the ages of six until ten. At ten she had refused to return, citing as her reasons the camp’s corniness, the enforcement of the group sensibility, and the grating immaturity of all her fellow campers. Glee had considered herself lucky enough to have kept Katherine at the camp those four summers. She had attended the same camp—it had gone from being a society fad, in her mother’s time, to being a sentimental tradition in her own—until the age of eight, when she had also rebelled against the almost vatic preoccupation of Camp Cumberland with ponies and wildflower chains and Sir Walter Scott. Very little about the camp had changed since that time, which was the source of its appeal for women like Glee, who had felt it stultifying as children and now found it indispensable as mothers. Glee secured a place for Katherine and Katherine wordlessly embroidered her name scores of times into blouses and culottes and panties and even her socks. Once she had begun measuring off an arm’s length of silk yarn at a time and stitching awkward, blocky K MONROES, she couldn’t stop. After sitting a week hunched over increasingly precise and small labelings, nothing remained to be done, and she packed her suitcase and was put on a bus.

Returning to Cumberland at the age of fifteen, she had to ingratiate herself with girls of her age who had been together there every summer without interruption: devout lifetime campers who were now torn between the heady anticipation of graduation to counselor in the following year and the melancholy of bidding their childhoods good-bye. Katherine could not convincingly participate in the camp’s frothy rituals of truth-or-dare and secret-sharing and sylvan moonlit swims, although she tried hard, out of bottomless loneliness and the humiliation of being disliked. But she was disliked. She was accused, groundlessly, of stealing, and although her furious denial frightened off all future accusers, it also deepened the aversion to her that both the campers of her age and the counselors, one year above but a universe away, seemed to share. A few of the very little girls idolized her because she was pretty, but their loyalty further embarrassed her. “Do you have a boyfriend, Katherine?” they would ask shyly. There were always two or three of them together, little girls who were frightened of water and trees, with legs like fragile stalks, smears of sunburn on their cheeks. They often asked to brush her hair, or practice braids on it. One of them was fumbling in her hair now, while she was trying to read. “No,” she said. “You’re all supposed to be canoeing.”

“Do you have a crush on a boy?” they wondered, hoping the answer was no, that she was all theirs.

“No,” she said sternly. And back in high school that fall she found that sternness had settled into her face, the way that sharpness settles into a girl’s features or depth into her eyes, maturing her suddenly. Katherine became a beautiful, conspicuous girl who was subtly avoided, for no clear reason thought of in the same way as the boy whose father’s suicide had been in the papers, or the girl who was going to be a nun, all of them anachronistically in high school, too old, too traveled, too private. A cool space hung around Katherine, and nobody entered it. Her attention seemed absorbed by a distant, ambiguous scene.

The following summer was better. In spite of her stormy reentry into camp life she was graduated to counselor along with the rest of the sixteen-year-olds. She carried the weight of responsibility more gracefully than she had the imperative to think things were fun. She gained a modest share of privacy. She was put into the littlest girls’ cabin along with another girl who had been one of her principal tormentors. Katherine felt a pang of misery but said nothing. The other girl took her cue, and they divided the duties of the cabin fairly between themselves. They did not become friends. Katherine never made good friends with anyone, but the status of counselor could better accommodate friendlessness. A counselor was a grown-up, and a grown-up might be friendless by choice. Katherine was seen as a bookish girl. She took charge of the camp mailroom, a role that everyone agreed suited her. She became deeply attached to the paraphernalia of her small postal shack, with its great screenless window and a splintering plank for a counter, and these were the things she remembered for years: the damp, crumbling sponge in its cup to wet stamps, and the worn blue inkpad, like a moth-eaten theater seat. And the faraway shrieking of girls, and the sweat on her arm making stains when she leaned on her notebook.

She did not see Charles Addison. He no longer visited her family in New Orleans, and she no longer spent her summers in Sewanee. Her parents didn’t go themselves, her last two years of high school. A great deal was changing. Her father was sporadically ill, and her mother had the tired, harassed look of a woman who was fighting off fear. But in her role as camp postmistress, and out of the poverty of her long days looking after homesick little girls, Katherine tentatively initiated another correspondence. She felt inured to further heartbreak. If he did not respond, this would complicate her unhappiness, but it wasn’t likely to increase it. And then he did respond. “Dear Katherine,” it stated simply. “I have thought of you, and missed you.”

After that she regularly sent him long letters, about camp life, about her family, about the social mechanics of high school, and the more time that passed the funnier, the less stilted and groping, her letters became. She had turned out to be a skilled correspondent. “You can really set a scene,” he wrote once. “I float out of my chair. I don’t even remember, for a time, that I’m here in drear old Sewanee. You almost make me embarrassed to try and write back.” But he always did, and they began to be friends, in the delicately courteous way that she now understood would not have been possible if their affair had continued. Sometimes she felt too old, that she had suffered final disappointments and lowered expectations too soon. When she had first been separated from him she had missed him physically, with an ache in her stomach that left her sleepless and unable to eat. All that time her mind had been dead. It wasn’t until later, when her body in some measure recovered, that she began to miss him with a philosophical fury and despair that she eventually recognized as having been borrowed from books. By the time she realized this, she no longer missed him. Now she couldn’t recover the unsuspecting eagerness that had yielded so much pain. She was afraid she might never be that girl again. This didn’t mean she no longer loved him. It was a question she would never satisfactorily resolve. If it was love, it was a calmer, deeper, less desperate emotion than she had previously thought love should be. It could recognize ambiguity. She did not know if he loved her, but she knew he had set her apart, and that he allowed certain quiet impulses of his to speak to her. He often said he loved things about her; he never uttered the shorter, more elemental phrase.

When she left home for college her father drove her to the New Orleans airport and mutely embraced her, then pushed her away, as if he thought the display wasn’t pleasant for her and shouldn’t be long endured. His eyes were wet as he walked back to his car, and he looked oddly stunned, holding them wide open so that he wouldn’t shed tears. He had never been particularly affectionate toward his only daughter. Now she felt a great stroke of pain for betraying him. She wondered if he knew what she had done. Her mother had stopped speaking to her with such finality that Katherine imagined Glee wouldn’t waste words discussing her, either. When she arrived at Smith she was the only girl without bed linens, pillows, or towels. Every other girl’s mother had packed her the equivalent of a hope chest, marrying her daughter off to college.

She tried to marry college too, but she couldn’t, and after one year she left it. She did not go home. Her father continued to send her money, and—although she treated each instance as an anomaly, an impulsive, inappropriate gift that would not be repeated—Charles sent her cash as well. She had moved even further east, following the purposeful tide of the girls who had graduated that spring, to Boston. “I like to think of you tearing all over the town,” he wrote once. There would be a fifty-dollar bill dropped into the envelope like an afterthought, not even concealed in the folds of the letter. She couldn’t vent her fury by ripping it to pieces or crumpling it up—it was always stiff and new—and so she would stand clutching it, trembling, and then she would go and spend it quickly and vengefully on something she did not need. She did not tear all over the town, and that flippant phrase came to ache like a reproach. Boston was as esoteric and forbidding as the church of a religion she knew nothing about, and although she waited with her own beating faith for some change to be worked within her as she walked along its river, or sat in its park, she only felt less and less able to pass as a Bostonian. Charles never came to see her. He easily could have, and she harbored elaborate daydreams of the freedom they would have together if he did, the freedom of strangers in a strange place, like invisibility. But she didn’t ask him to visit, and because she never asked, there was never a clear disappointment, and she couldn’t frame a grievance.

She had two jobs in Boston. First she worked as a coat girl in a posh supper club. She mastered the complexities of the art easily but could not keep an open, agreeable look on her face and was fired. Next she worked in the typing pool of a venerable law firm, a mind-numbing, frightening job that made her long to be fired, but she was never even noticed, no matter how unproductive she was, and she finally quit. She couldn’t afford to stay in Boston and live the way she wanted to, which was alone. That May, a girl she’d met at her boardinghouse took her along on a job hunt through a string of hotels on the coast, and she discovered the world of summer work.

Then her father wrote, asking if she would ever be able to drop by Sewanee, and do a few things to the house. It had stood empty for almost five years. The note contained only that request, but the impracticality of the request suggested something more, and her desire to interpret it as a kind gesture, an invitation, made her response skittish and unintentionally cold. She could not travel at all before September: she would be working. She did say, “I’m not sure where I’ll be in the fall.” And then another careful note from her father: “September’s soon enough. It would be a load off my mind if you went and looked after that place. Get the squirrels out of the attic, and have the foundation checked for settling,” and then a long list of other things he insisted she do, to save the house from dereliction, and his accountant’s address, for the bills. “Do it as a favor to your old man. I don’t get around very well anymore,” he concluded, releasing her from having to thank him. The house was a gift.

The next four months passed with an easy, well-oiled inevitability that was the closest thing she had known to routine in a very long time. The extent of her gratitude surprised her. For all her terror of boredom it turned out that she was a creature of habit, and that she craved the familiar and secure. While her life had been a turmoil of uncertain rent and packing boxes and diffuse, constant panic she hadn’t realized how lonely she was. She bought a car and drove to Sewanee, arriving in the middle of September. The key was underneath the mat, where it had always been, where keys always are, corroded by rust. It still worked. After throwing all the windows open she went upstairs to her old room and lay awkwardly across the bed, as if it were a bed in a motel and might be full of pestilence or strangeness. Then she cried herself to sleep. In the morning she decided to spend the winter.

He was taking his afternoon walk when he spotted the car. Although he didn’t admit it to himself at that moment, he knew it was hers. The walk involved a similar self-deception. He always passed that house, on his rambling circuits along the deeply shadowed roads. Most of the homes on the mountain were just barely betrayed by a drive winding into the trees, but the Monroe house stood past a deep bend, at the top of a cleared slope, with its drive curving up the hill toward it. As he strode by he would glance at the house long enough to register that its windows were unbroken, its lawn mowed by a boy he paid himself. Just looking after it, as anyone would. Not awaiting anything. He rounded the bend and stopped. The car was sitting there in the drive, its top down. It seemed to hum with recent activity. He stood a long time, admiring it. The day was clear and hot but when the breeze picked up he could feel the coolness of autumn. Looking to the house he saw the main door standing open, behind the screen.

“My God,” he said, when she came padding down the dusky hall, barefoot, in a worn-out cotton dress he recognized. “There you are.” She was brown as a nut from the summer, her hair cropped. A dusting rag hung from one hand. She stopped short of the door and stood uncertainly, gazing at him through the screen.

“I was going to come and see you,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. She coughed, and wiped the back of a grimy hand across her forehead. “I’ve been cleaning. It’s dusty as a tomb in here. For goodness’ sake, come in.” He pushed the door open just as she came moving toward it, and they bumped each other and laughed, and in his confusion he caught her by the waist, meaning only to brush her cheek with his lips, but she seemed to have grown so thin, and his arms closed around her. Beneath the dress her skin was damp from working. She slid an arm behind his neck, bringing his face close to hers with the back of her wrist, because her hands were dirty. The rag dropped to the floor. When they lurched into the wall she struck it hard, bruising her spine, looped her legs around his hips as he lifted and pinned her in place with his weight. She wanted to consume him, force him open with her tongue and remake him, the way her body felt reshaped by his pressure. The door still stood open beside them. “Wait,” she gasped, but she was gathered so tensely, unbearably craving the moment he punctured that pressure, and she wasn’t able to let go of him to close it.

Because she couldn’t decide she didn’t need him, she did the second-best thing and decided to proceed on the assumption she didn’t need him. Perhaps this was what kept him with her. Perhaps it was the idea that while he still had her, he had something of life. He was bitter. He felt unappreciated by his profession, and he drank too much. While she was becoming an adult he had reached the far side of middle age, and could no longer reason himself out of the sense he was a failure. And so he both cherished her for her youth and resented her. He would lash out at her without warning. “What is it?” he snapped. “That look of infinite, aggrieved dissatisfaction?” and if she claimed that there was nothing there, nothing, “It’s a source of endless shock and reassurance to me that you’re incapable of hiding your feelings.”

His dependence had never been like hers. He had begun their affair a finished person, fully formed and as incapable of self-doubt as he was of guilt. He could have died alone. He did not think she could ever become crucial to him, or decisive, as he had been to her. And yet she was a pleasure, sometimes badly needed. He knew he enjoyed her, and that when he saw something, or read something, or remembered something that was lovely or funny, he wanted to tell her. He had never felt the impulse to share anything with anyone. And so he did love her, in his way. He had always said he would treat her as if she were a woman and not a girl, in part because to him, this was a sign of his esteem for her. The trouble was she hadn’t known what being treated like a woman meant. It seemed to involve being tested, needled, provoked. Once she really was a grown woman she would feel him in her own arrogant gait and in the dismissiveness of her speech and wonder, as she had after he had made love to her for the first time, that everyone else didn’t see it as well, blazing on her like a rash. She always felt indebted to him, although she knew he’d exacted a price. He had worn her down, and what remained had grown hard. Her mind seemed to abbreviate itself. Her body was minimal, as if any flesh beyond the requisite betrayed indulgence. She was still thin and small-breasted. Her bones seemed too evident, as if to provoke the thought of breaking them, so that the thought would be admitted impossible. She was uninjurable. He went to fasten her dress and the expanse of skin diminished as the zipper’s V sealed shut beneath his hands; they arrived at her neck, and the tiny hook there, which he married to its mate. Now the small collar encircling her neck seemed unbroken. Her back was concealed, her shoulders bare, her arms poised in a temporary diamond as she held her hair out of his way. When his hands left her neck the hair fell. She crossed the room for her coat.