HAVING ARRANGED the lilacs, the last and the most beautiful of the season, in twin tall alabaster vases on the mantel in the dining room and having reminded her cook that today was Tuesday and, since she was therefore at home, an undetermined number might be present at tea, Katharine Congreve went up to her sitting room for her customary mid-afternoon hour of privacy, pausing in the door of the drawing room to enjoin her cousins to wear something pretty for Raoul St. Denis who was driving over with his parents from Bingham Bay.
The supple, slender, black-haired girls, sedulous copies of their mother as she had been at their age, looked up from the handkerchiefs they were hemstitching for Christmas presents and Honor, smiling, beginning with a happy laugh that candidly anticipated the meeting with the boy who had set them both off into dreams of love and of engagement rings, said, “We’ve talked of nothing else for hours. We’ve decided on the lavender shirred batistes. Do Southerners like lavender?” And then with a dramatic moan, suppliantly holding out her hand that still wore its silver thimble and addressing her sister, she cried, “But what good will it do us? He’s already in love with our old, old second cousin. Every man in the world is in love with Katharine C.” And returning for a moment to childhood, plunging with her whole heart into a new mood, she lay at length on the sofa, hung her head over the side of it and seriously asked, “Cousin Kate, when you were my age, did you long to walk on the ceiling?” Her twin said, “Honor is mad,” and neatly bit a thread.
Miss Congreve assured them that the lavender batiste dresses would be appropriate, admonished Honor not to let the blood rush to her head and Harriet to use her scissors and not her teeth to cut the thread and then proceeded up the curving stair, pleasurably observing a hummingbird as it gyred in the bittersweet that grew beside the window of the landing. Fair, not rare, this day in June was like all the days of all the summers and as she rose, step by step, up the spiraling stem of her beautiful house, serenity ripened in her face and she parted her lips in a fond smile, cherishing everything she surveyed and smelled and heard, the dimming medallions of the wallpaper and the Audubon prints that ascended the wall; the commingled fragrances of sunning foliage and old, oiled furniture and flowers everywhere, within the house and out, all bound together by the fresh salt breeze, a constant wraith in the curtains, a perpetual touch, feather-light and tentative, on the pages of open books and the tassels of velvet table covers; the multitudinous bird-song, the far-off bells of buoys.
She was not really contented anywhere except in Congreve House and she reflected on a wasted summer when she had gone to Puget Sound, unwillingly accompanying her mother who, as Progressive as Katharine was Conservative, had gone to attend a convention of formidable women and then had lingered on when she had found a whole colony of vigorous sympathizers in the innumerable causes to which she had dedicated herself: she was a Baconian, an anti-vivisectionist, an advocate of buttermilk and rat control. Except for that year and two others when she had cruised with John and Maeve on the Empress Katharine, she had come to Hawthorne from May until October since her infancy. But Congreve House, after thirty-eight years, still took her breath away and she never came up the avenue of maples without rejoicing in her immaculately proportioned and pedimented front door and the seven classic pillars of the façade. Large and white and regal, ensphered by orchards and gardens and acres of lawn, Congreve House had been built at the top of a monarchical hill and because its construction had been supervised by Katharine’s great-grandmother, a Huguenot from Charlottesville who had made few concessions to the North (there still existed in this otherwise homogeneous region a small settlement of Negroes, descended from her servants and bearing still her maiden name of Delessert), it had a Southern amplitude, a height and a depth and a spaciousness of rooms and prospects that recalled the airy generosity of the houses of Virginia. This long dead ancestress, whose hauteur was centralized in a stony hooked nose, looked forth from a journeyman portrait that hung in the library, appearing to be staring out of countenance the shelves of books confronting her that dealt with the War between the States.
The long, embrasured windows of the house commanded, at the back, a view of the wide blue lake ringed with thin pines that cast their Oriental images blackly over the waving water. From the drawing room and the dining room, one looked out on the green swirl of the tidal river, spangled with the silver wings of gulls and the white pouches of spinnakers. From the east windows and those on the west, Katharine looked toward meadows, magisterial and vast, two oval yellow seas bounded by black country lanes. Beyond the western meadow there was a dense blue forest where the sun could never penetrate and where there always hung a gun-blue haze between the trees, where, in certain places, there were dells as green as Ireland and the mossy earth was bejeweled with monkshood and bluebells.
Her friends and relatives granted that her house was splendid, was perfect of its kind, but the life in Hawthorne! They flung up their hands and cried, “You’re beyond me! It may be an ideal place for a waif of ten or an invalid of fourscore years and ten, but for an active woman in the prime of life! You owe it to yourself, Kate, to try Newport or the North Shore.” Her critics’ dismay was understandable enough in terms of themselves, for they were gregarious and uncontemplative and when, once in a blue moon, one of them made the long, uncomfortable journey to visit her, there usually arrived, soon afterward, an urgent telegram summoning him back; the pretext of business or of ailing uncles would not have deceived a child and, in a flutter of relief, the visitor scampered back as fast as he could to midday cocktails upon the humid sands of Bailey’s Beach.
Hawthorne had nothing at all to offer any generation except the oldest and the newest, no club, no proper swimming beach, no summer theater, no sailboat races. Katharine’s fellow summer colonists, as old as the hills, occupied (and had since they were children) vast, sprawling cottages that hovered on the outskirts of the demesne of Congreve House and which, with their gingerbread and their trailing porches and their purposeless stained-glass windows (a murky, morgue-like light entered Mrs. Wainright-Lowe’s dining room through the leaded bodies of Paul and Virginia) appeared unkempt like tasteless but kindly frumps in the entourage of a famous belle. The cottagers entertained in varnished drawing rooms, darkly paneled in chestnut, wherein were situated copses of wicker furniture upholstered in cretonne and round tables on which stood stereopticons and albums, quadrupedal jardinieres planted with oxalis, chipped alabaster figurines and all the other outmoded bits and pieces that were unpresentable in town but “good enough for the country.” In every house, since Katharine could remember, there had been a commingled smell of vanilla and of lemon oil which, like willow-ware tureens and cracked Waterford bud-vases, she would always associate with midsummer and septuagenarians.
Katharine had endeared herself to the halt and stooping citizenry because not only did she continue to return loyally each year but also intrepidly to withstand the inroads of what Mr. Barker, in spite of his worship of fast automobiles, petulantly called “these ultra-modern times.” The customs in Congreve House remained the same that they had been in her father’s day. She had conceded to electricity, to modern plumbing and the telephone but to no ungainly fads like radios or vacuum cleaners, canned soups or boisterous evenings of The Game. Her dinner parties were long and she dispensed with no formality (Hawthorne heard, more sorrowfully than angrily, that in Bingham Bay, the ladies did not withdraw and Miss Margaret Duff predicted, “Next thing you hear there’ll be mixed swimming parties au naturel”); at her occasional balls, usually outdoors on a platform festooned with crepe-paper lanterns, there was only waltzing and the music was slow to oblige stiff knees. The servant staff was smaller, the tennis courts had given way to an herb garden, new objects had been introduced into the rooms, but nothing else had changed upon this lordly hill since her father, whom she had idolized, had died.
In great peace, she mounted the stairs, slowly as she did every day, slowly and then even more slowly until, three steps from the top, she was nearly immobilized as if her feet themselves were reluctant to leave the deep grassy carpet and her hand to quit the wide white banister.
Confronted by the portrait of her father that hung at the head of the stairs, she did at last stop still, her daily habit, and renewed her memory of his black eyes whose vital brightness the paint had not obscured and his full, versatile mouth, one corner upturned and the other set implacably, and his strong bones, having in them a Hebraic aggressiveness or a Hellenic one, a validity and an inherent pride so that they flattered rather than were flattered by the moon-white skin that rose to perish in tight, coarse curls of blue-black hair. Her own face, deriving from his, had been softened to a female role, the colors modified (her eyes were gray and a cloudy pink suffused her cheeks), and the aspect transformed from that of a humanist, steadfastly ironic, to that of a leisured, tranquil woman. These fine long faces were civilized. They were the faces of people so endowed with control and tact and insight and second sight that the feelings that might in secret ravage the spirit could never take the battlements of the flesh; no undue passion would ever show in those prudent eyes or on those discreet and handsome lips. For there was no doubt here, no self-contempt, but only the imposing courage of sterling good looks and the protecting lucidity of charm. So compelling was the integrity and the impregnable, intelligent self-respect that as Katharine looked at the masterful painted face, her source and counterpart, euphoria at her good luck extended her height and the length of her narrow hands and narrow feet and she felt as heroically proportioned as the statue of Minerva that stood in a summerhouse at the end of the pergola which her father had had made as a present to her on her fifteenth birthday, astonishing everyone who had imagined that, like other girls, she would have preferred necklaces or frocks.
“The poor Humanist is dead,” she said and she said it in the same unaccented way she had done the first time she had said it when, finding that her father’s heart had stopped in his sleep, she had gone into Maeve Maxwell’s room and tugged her awake in the green light of early morning.
“Why did you go first to Maeve and not to me? I should have been the first to know, I was his wife.” Even now, years later when wifeliness had lost all its meaning for her, Katharine’s mother, a woman who insisted upon rights, upbraided her for this extraordinary defection and she could only repeat her apology and her explanation that she had been too bewildered to think clearly.
Who could ever understand or fail to condemn her that it had been essential to her own tears of grief that Maeve’s fall first? If there had been no Maeve, no uncertain poor relation, no orphaned cousin, there might have been no tears at all. “And that would have puzzled you far more, Mother,” she sometimes said in her imagination. For Katharine, who had never learned to demonstrate, could only imitate. She would never know, because of the timidity and the apologetic vagueness that obscured all of Maeve’s human relationships, whether she had taken in that calm, comic use of the epithet, “the Humanist,” spoken through a mouth that wore the same double expression this painted one did and she would never know, therefore, whether Maeve’s immediate and authentic tears had come from shock at the news of the tragedy or shame at the way it was announced. “Don’t cry,” Katharine had said and the articulation of the word had permitted her then to burst into bitter, hopeless tears and to arouse the household with the sobbed outcry as she flung open her mother’s bedroom door, “Father’s dead! Oh, my God, my father’s dead!”
When, later that morning, John Shipley had come to Congreve House for second breakfast, he had found his fiancée consoling Katharine, murmuring to her like a nurse or a mother, and he was touched at first only perfunctorily by the calamity but, on the other hand, was moved so deeply by Maeve’s goodness that he had said, “You are an angel,” before he had so much as offered a commiserating handclasp to Katharine; before he had composed himself to the atmosphere of sorrow, he had smiled, head over heels in love. Katharine’s bereavement had been double that day but she knew that neither John nor Maeve had seen in her careful face anything but the loss of her father. “My skeleton would not have pained me so if John Shipley, mine by rights of discovery, had called me an angel and given me those ingenuous, amorous looks.” She could not recall ever having cried again except occasionally in her sleep; then she would awaken from some irretrievable dream to find her pillow wet and her eyes streaming from a buried wretchedness.
She moved at last, turned all the way around to look down the stairwell and into the heart of a pale pink water lily in a milk-glass cuspidor on a table in the entrance hall. It must be replaced today, she thought, her affectionate husbandry overtaking her, and then a fresher memory flicked across her mind, of the quite unwarranted succès fou she had scored the week before when, telling Edmund St. Denis that this was, indeed, as he had suspected, a cuspidor, she had added, “But you see, I dignify the profane vessel with a pristine nymphaea.” This kind of lapidary speech, while once it had been a conscious affectation, was natural to her now, as natural as her daily carriage drive or as her Japanese fans for hot evenings and her Spanish shawls for cool ones. These eccentricities, having so long been her second nature, were no longer eccentricities and she was surprised when Edmund, whom she had not seen for fourteen years, had laughed, exclaimed, repeated the word “vessel” as if it were obsolete or superlatively witty, had, in the course of his applause, used the phrases “a sense of humour” and “from the sublime to the ridiculous.” He had seemed, in his torrential mirth, to be about to slap her on the back. He did slap his own soft thigh resoundingly. The tribute disappointed her; she had looked forward to the company of Edmund and his wife (a cipher, badly dressed, but oddly appealing) but she could not be at ease in the face of such voluble appreciation. Indeed, she was more than disappointed, she was affronted that a man she had nearly married could understand her so little: she had not meant to make a joke.
The boy, Raoul, had been embarrassed at his father’s exhibition just as Edmund himself, when he was young, had been embarrassed by his own father when Katharine, just after her father died and a year before Edmund married Madeleine, had visited him in Louisiana. General St. Denis, a professional gallant, shamelessly lecherous, had grossly flirted with her and so monopolized her, fascinated by what he called her “black abolitionist tricks and dodgements” (he referred to nothing more regional than a few New England expressions and an indifference to hominy grits) that his enraged and jealous son had been reduced to plotting ways to steal her away for himself. The older man had not seemed to belong to his perfect and patrician house just as Edmund must seem out of place there now.
It had been a strange, exotic land. Through the vast, rank grounds at Thibodaux, thirty peacocks had strutted, and there was a cage where a summerhouse should have been in which there spat and grimaced and bawled an old, indecent chimpanzee. She remembered, feeling faint, the heavy-headed flowers and the great ubiquitous insects and the hypnotic air that sucked like a parasite until the mind was benumbed. The large family dined sumptuously and excessively beneath a fan that whirled and whirred like a colossal crazed bug. They spoke in the French of the region, these violet-eyed and small-boned women going plump, and the loving, hedonistic men, red in the face from all their luxuries of food and drink and infidelities. They had seemed, all of them except Edmund, continually to flirt—with each other, with the household dogs and cats, with the servants—until all experience became with them no more than an elaborate structure of artifice. When it was not an interchange of double entendres, conversation had been occupied with the perverse nature that smothered the land, with the purple water hyacinths that choked the bayous, the plagues of river rats and termites, the fevers and the nameless affections of the Cajuns and the Negroes, the snakeskins cast on the verandas, the tree-toads in the magnolias, the crocodiles seen from pirogues in the hidden waterways. Ceaselessly, the warm rains fell, rotting and mildewing; she remembered how the backs of books had been swollen and soggy.
Katharine, bred to a thriftier landscape, had liked no part of it except the peacocks and, of course, young Edmund with whom she had almost persuaded herself, in this tropical air where the senses overpowered the logic and the will, to fall in love. Then she had believed that his mind had been like the scenery, rich and dark and teeming. Just back from a studious year of Sturm und Drang in a solemn Paris atelier, his mind, though it was not unusual, was passionate. But now, the exercises in copying Rembrandt’s drawings forgotten, the etching tools discarded, one would not know his mind from any other. Concerned so long with cotton gins and oil and the millions that fluffed and gushed from them to make for himself, his wife and his son what he was bound to call “the good life,” he seemed to have forgotten everything he had ever known. He could never, except in the flesh, revisit Paris. When she had spoken of it to him the other day, he had not the faintest recollection of the ape, did not remember that his name was Julius and that when he was in a friendly mood, he let his keeper put a baby-bonnet on his head. At the time, the two of them together had spent their mornings morbidly watching him. He had congratulated her on the excellence of her memory—as if that satiric beast could ever be forgotten!—and said, “I bet we did some fine philosophizing!” Invisibly she bridled at his ridicule of himself.
It was alarming and disarming and sad to see how like that Edmund the young St. Denis was, limber and tall and fair, his oval, olive face full of poetic and boyish solemnity that would go—oh, how rapidly it would go!—when he had reached the man’s estate of real-estate and fortune-building and surrender to the second best; when the skin-deep college education or the Wanderjahr had paled like the tan of a winter holiday and the mind was left to rust and blunt like a knife left out in the rain and instinct and reflex replaced imagination.
“Stop this. Stop this infantile tirade,” she counseled herself and set her hand against her heart, pounding with anger, and entered her sitting room, turning in its lock the ponderous brass key, vehemently as if she were shutting out a heated argument that had come to an impasse. Inexorably, like clockwork, this rage assaulted her each day, having its origin in something different every time but scaling swiftly to the same pinnacle of passionate and unforgivable disappointment. Sometimes it sprang from the recollection of an endearing mannerism that the boy Andrew had unconsciously acquired from his father who had acquired it from her father, sometimes from the timbre of the twins’ voices, indistinguishable from Maeve’s: and then, as the patroness of these three innocents whom she deeply loved, she travailed as she considered what they would become, tarnished with compromise, becalmed by convention.
At first she did not recall what had set the detonation off today and then she did: five minutes ago or ten, she had happened to look across the lawn at Andrew, limp in the hammock, looking, in attitude and countenance, so like John Shipley that she had desired all the clocks in all the world to stop just then at that point when John Shipley returned to her in the person of a boy of twelve. Progress, change, stereotype, dilution: “Their minds! What will become of their minds? Andrew’s, Raoul’s, Honor’s, Harriet’s?” On second thoughts, though, the girls would last as Maeve had lasted; like hers, their naïveté was imperishable.
The fever passed and to her reflection in the pier glass opposite, she said wryly, “It might be well to consider what is happening to your own mind, dear.” And gathering her selves together she went to her desk where with a blue quill pen she began, facing the problem, to write in her journal, a massive album of tooled Italian leather which contained the history of twenty-three years of her life, on India paper, in an ample hand. She wrote:
June 16
Last night the whippoorwills were tireless and I read late. It was a struggle to keep their flagellant cries from influencing the rhythm of Thomas Browne. The melancholy birds and the melancholy prose kept me awake when I longed to be oblivious of both. I think I shuddered and wailed aloud when I read that dour forecast of Judgement Day “when many that feared to die shall groan that they can die but once” and “when man shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments.” Finally, well past two o’clock, the heathen whippoorwills got the upper hand and I could not take in another word. So until I could sleep, I played a new kind of patience that Celia Heminway has taught me, long and intricate and perfectly suited to her invalidism and to my insomnia. I did not give up until I had once defeated Sol. Maddox’s lamp went on for a moment as I turned off mine and I watched him, wakeful with love, come out of the stable and go down to the garden with a lantern. The winter must be a sleepless grief to him when the snow and the ice implacably mask the rosary, exiling him. Mrs. Shea complains that he is sour and dumb. Poor, lonely, obsessed Maddox.
Poor, lonely, obsessed Katharine. For I am snatched by moments of hallucination when reality disgorges me like a cannon firing off a cannon ball and I am sent off into an upper air where there is no sound and my senses are destroyed by the awful, white, paining light. I know that it is only a matter of seconds but because there (wherever there may be) time does not exist, it is also eternity, unchanging, looking forward to no equinox, no winter, no spring, no night, no day. Upon a matter so indefinite, having no attendant symptoms, no preamble, no pattern of any kind, I can consult no one. What or whom do I serve? Solomon himself could not tell me. If there were vertigo along with it or a headache or a twitching of my nerves, I might go to a neurologist or even, though I should loathe so craven a capitulation to the vogue of half my friends, to a psychiatrist. Or if there were premonitions beforehand or visions during or afterward, if it resembled at all the déjà vu or a bad dream, I could speak to Beulah Smithwick and let her sixth sense explicate and extricate me. If fear or regret attended it or any other vaporing from a tangible cause, I could find the proper physic for myself. But there is no fear except the fear within the experience itself which is, to be sure, a fear of the utmost intensity: it is ideal and has no object that I can name. At the same time that I rise, ejected from the planet into the empyrean, I plummet through the core of the world.
I took this dangerous journey for the fifth time last night, embarking under the prosiest of circumstances, at Peg Duff’s when, after dinner, she was showing us her newest cactus, a huge globe with a gray hide and yellow spikes that curled like talons; at the top of it there was a sort of fontanel covered with a downy growth and I was seized with a frightful desire to stab into it with the paper knife that lay beside its tray. Above the table where she exhibits all these abominable armed bladders and bulbs, together with her Western gear, her tomahawk and arrowheads and a lariat that she declares once belonged to an illustrious cattle-rustler, she has with her infallibly bad taste hung two della Robbia reproductions, more simpering than most and, because the workmanship is so bad, more lifelike. The association between those plaster baby skulls and the organic, living cactus made my impulse monstrously immoral; but as I stepped back, unable to find a suitable comment to make, Mr. Barker, from all outward appearances a good and gentle man, explored the soft fungous top with the fingers of one hand while in his other, he balanced the sharp Scots dress dagger with which Peg slits open her morning mail. And he said, “Wonder what’s inside?” and Peg replied, “Know what you mean. Looks like baby hair.” In varying degrees, in different ways, I knew that all the others had been possessed as I had been, but this coincidence of our crime did not absolve me, and I was swept upward, outward and pressed down by … by what? Shall I call these moments “trances”? When it was finished and I had, so to say, come back into the room, something peculiar and irrelevant took place: I seemed to smell something hot and acrid and the smell seemed to proceed from the array of plants. I spoke of it, not sure a fire had not broken out somewhere. But no one else, though they all sniffed vigorously, caught the odour and Peg said, “Smelling the wide open spaces. Sun on the desert sands. Dunes, you know, like the Cape.” My suggestibility was remarked and then the subject was changed. I lasted the evening, played bridge and even concentrated well enough to win five dollars. But when I walked home alone through the fog, my legs were weak as if I had been through an exhausting physical ordeal; I felt that the straps of a tight harness had bruised my back. The first light had come before I fell asleep.
She closed the journal, returned her pen to its bowl of shot and went to her front windows from which, through the interstices of the Dutchman’s Pipe, she looked down at the languid figure of the boy in the hammock, his bare, shadow-dappled legs ivory against the crimson, his intelligent large head turned upward to the house. The look of John in him was embryonic for he was still a child, but nonetheless, it was there, beginning, a breathtaking, reminding vulnerability, a pure and open wound of youth. In the healing, he would change. Katharine who had never healed, had never changed, and but for her white hair, she was the same as she had been at nineteen when her lover married someone else, at seventeen when she had sworn to marry him.
At seventeen when, recognizing her first real love, she had gone to the summerhouse one night and prostrated herself before the figure of Minerva, the protectress assigned to her by her learning-loving father, and had vowed by a majestic galaxy of Roman gods and Christian saints (Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Aquinas and Augustine, heaven’s intellectuals) to marry John Shipley to whom, translating as she went, she read The Georgics at his request in payment for the bouquets he brought her; she had taken those naive offerings as symptoms of the absent-mindedness of his infatuation, for no garden in Hawthorne yielded anything like the flowers of Congreve House.
Unlike Edmund St. Denis, she did not make fun of that prefiguration of herself nor even of the melodrama of a passage in her journal that she remembered having written in the beginning of her rapture, “I thanked him for the flowers and could not help from putting him on tenterhooks by telling him he should take care what he puts in his nosegays for girls who have studied the language of flowers. And then I told him that when Maeve comes on Monday week, he will bring her nothing but red roses. He said, ‘I shall bring nothing but stinging nettles and deadly nightshade to anyone but you.’ This speech, though it was pretty, seemed to me headlong and I was relieved to have Papa come in just then to ask us to play croquet. But for all my precautions, I am devastated by the fellow. Papa believes that he will be another Bulfinch. I pray for that. I do not need to pray for his proposal because of that I’m certain, but I do beseech all the powers that be to make him an eminent architect.” (Another Bulfinch! Oh, Papa, for God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.)
It had not been more than a week later that Maeve Maxwell arrived, having spent the earlier part of the summer with Aunt Dora Congreve. Maeve, Katharine’s father’s ward since her infancy, had been brought up almost as Katharine’s sister; together they had gone to Miss Winsor’s and then had spent three years at a convent school in France. They bore a strong family resemblance (Hibernian but of the Protestant complexion) and it had been a natural error, in those days, to speak of them as “the Misses Congreve.” The Misses Congreve, rather than the “Misses Maxwell” since the latter name was not borne by such luminaries as the former and therefore did not spring so quickly to the tongue; Maeve, erroneously congratulated once on having so brilliant a father as George Congreve had flushed and answered, “I’m only his niece. Katharine’s the cream, I’m the skimmed milk.”
There was a sisterly, rather than a friendly bond between the girls, and the very fact that they were not sisters but were cousins made their intimacy circumspect and incomplete; Maeve could not forget that she was a burden thrust upon an uncle who had never liked his sister, and she was continually remorseful that the money that had been left her was insufficient to cover her needs of schooling and clothes. Her humility exasperated George Congreve and filled Katharine with such unbearable guilt that, fleeing from it into resentment, she was often coldly cruel. And like everything else, Maeve accepted the cruelty without a murmur.
But when she had come on that summer, Katharine was so much in love that she overflowed with love and welcomed Maeve with abounding grace and affection. She had not confided in her (it was a miracle that she had been able to hold her tongue since she could put her mind to nothing but John Shipley) but had described to her in full detail the Norman Gardiners’ young house-guest whom Maeve was bound, she said, to adore. He had gone sailing with his host, Dick Gardiner, and Maeve did not meet him until the evening of her birthday when a supper and dancing party was held in her honor.
There had been fireworks and dancing on a platform on the lawn; the whole natural world had seemed a background constructed for this one particular night in Katharine’s history to accent and deepen her triumphant blossoming. She had been so enthralled by the splendor of her father’s gardens, the perfection of the moon in the sky and the clownish paper moon in the tulip tree, the green flares of the fireflies and the sparkle of the violins, the jasmine petals floating in the Moselle Bowle in the cool, columned temple to Minerva, the bonhomie of all the young guests lustrous in the promise of their lives to come and, above all, by the joy of a moment when she met her father’s eyes and knew by the look in them, wholly altruistic, that he knew and approved and hoped for her that her young man would propose marriage to her on this spellbound night—she had been so secure in the clouds, so busy at her Spanish castles, so self-assured that, in the beginning, she had heard no dissonance in the hour’s unfolding melody.
There had been no doubt of it, Maeve, that night, had never been lovelier nor had her simplicity ever been more winning. Ignorant of the cause of it, she had turned toward Katharine’s ripe warmth like a leaf turning to the sun. In their bountiful mood, they had gaily worn identical frocks of rose-red mousseline de soie and had adorned their Psyche knots of black hair with garnet rosebuds; their beautiful slippers had been ivory satin overlaid with an Arabian design in silver threads, presents from Uncle Daniel Thornton who had enjoined the young ladies to save them until their coming out. But they had agreed they could not wait. Both pairs of slippers now stood in the bibelot cabinet in Katharine’s sitting room; they had been worn only that one time and the reason Katharine and Maeve gave each other was that, exquisite as they were, they did not fit. Nor did they ever wear those diaphanous dresses again; they hung still at the back of Katharine’s closet, smelling of ancient sachet.
Late on the evening of the ball, just before supper, the fireworks were announced and even then, Katharine had been too much interested in watching Adam and Maddox moving down into the meadow, suppley cleaving through the silvery grass, their arms laden with rockets and pinwheels, to see that Maeve and John, who had danced the last dance together, were standing beside her, hand in hand. A crimson girandole mounted with a hiss into the sky and fell, a fountain of blinding orange fire; the fine, showering colors were unreal and chemical, plangent pinks and purples, sharp blues and violent greens, and the rapidity with which the rockets vanished, leaving for only an instant afterward the image of their course and the echo of their explosion, so excited her that she had been lightheaded and tears had started to her eyes. As the last Catherine wheel revolved insanely on its separate planes of scarlet and green, sizzling and thundering as the wild spokes fired each other, Katharine, in an ecstasy, turned to face John Shipley. No longer than it took the Catherine wheel to spin itself to nothing and leave the summer sky to the stars did it take her to see that he could not, could never see her. So cold that her joints themselves were locked and frozen, so icy that her smile could not relax, she stared at them who, in their oblivion, stared at each other.
It had been a long, long, silent struggle in which, from the start, Katharine had had no chance, for her adversaries, blind and deaf to everything except each other’s eyes and voices, had not known that a struggle existed. Throughout that tortured summer and the next one after that, two mortal summers, delaying the formal announcement of their engagement because of some parental restriction imposed on John, they had bruised her; undetected, unsuspected, the cancer spread until its progress and its malevolent pain became the armature of her whole thought and conduct.
As if it had been yesterday, she remembered her demeaning anguish when, on idle afternoons, they begged her to read aloud to them The Georgics. (It was always The Georgics they asked for, though what did they care for the pruning of vines and the keeping of bees?) They sat the while demurely far apart, stealing glances and mouthing pet names. In the intoxication of their romance, furthered—even created—by this house, these grounds, this lake, this river that Katharine’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather provided them with, in this lavish, extravagant Roman holiday, they had had energy and lunacy to spare and had showered her with it. They had imagined that she had deliberately brought them together and to her, their ambassadress, had proposed that the three of them be a triumvirate for life. They had even gone one evening, after a moonlight horseback ride, into Mr. Congreve’s writing room off the library where he was reading Tibullus, and had asked him to draw up a document in Latin to testify to this intention. Katharine’s father had half turned from his desk and, angry at the interruption, said, “Are you drunk, Shipley? What sort of rambunctious romp is this?”
That night, when John had gone back to the Gardiners’ and Maeve had gone upstairs to bed, Katharine had returned to her father at his lucubrations and that time and only that time, they had spoken of Maeve’s intrusion. “Was it the real thing, Kathy?” he asked, and when she nodded, he stroked her hand and said, “Poor dear. I had hoped for you there’d be no compromise.” The oil in one of the canisters of his student lamp was low and the light expired behind the fluted green glass shade as they watched. At the coming of that half-darkness, Katharine gave up, sighed deeply, brought in another lamp from the library and, Spartan to commend herself to him, she said, “First things first, Papa,” and returned to his hand the pen he had set aside. It struck her, as she watched him poise the nib again over the margin of the page of poetry, that like her father, note-maker, student for study’s sake, she would never participate, that she would read astutely and never write, observe wholeheartedly and never paint, not teach, not marry God. Untalented and uncompromising, she would not commit herself: her life had seemed to her to stretch upward in a dark curve and as she ascended the stairs, she seemed to tread heavily through all the days of her future years.
Maeve’s wedding, in Hawthorne’s St. James’s church, had followed on the heels of George Congreve’s funeral at the same altar, and where his coffin had stood in the drawing room, there stood the bride and bridegroom, embowered in the finest of Maddox’s roses. The brevity of the interval, called indecent in the town, had been insisted upon by Katharine herself who had wanted all the business of Congreve House finished, for without her father as her champion she could not have endured much longer to look upon the lighthearted lovers. Maeve, having no relatives closer than the Congreves, could not be married anywhere else, and Uncle Daniel Thornton had come up from Newport, rather grumpily because he hated to be disturbed, to give her away. There had not, at least, been the indignity for Katharine of seeing her own father in this role. Her extremely busy mother who had had little in common with her husband (she had ordered her weeds with the same efficiency and good sense that she employed in replacing worn linens and in the same way put on her face the look of widowhood) and nothing at all in common with her daughter, had gone back to town as soon as she had buried her husband behind Minerva’s temple (“I want my bones to be alone,” he had said. “I’ll not be buried with a multitude. You must plant me under my own fig tree in my own backyard”) and dispatched her niece in a flurry of rice. She, Alma Congreve, had been too much concerned at the time with raising a private fund for an ex-sexton of Christ Church in Cambridge who had suffered a nervous breakdown, to think it odd or even interesting that the newlyweds, moved by Katharine’s great generosity in the midst of her bereavement, had determined that they would postpone their honeymoon until she could go with them almost a year later. Their insistence on preserving the fiction of the triumvirate had made her think, at first, that they suspected her disappointment; later on, when they were in Europe, she realized that to them it was not a fiction, for they continued to believe that she had made the match between them and with the greatest good humour continually and publicly thanked her.
Ten years later, Mrs. Congreve was once to remark in passing as she sat in her daughter’s Boston drawing room, knitting cardigans on the double quick to send to a Dublin temperance house, “It strikes me as unorthodox, to say the least, that you went abroad with Maeve and her husband so soon after their marriage. Wasn’t it actually their honeymoon?” But Katharine’s affirmative answer was lost on her mother whose questions were usually rhetorical and who went on with a rushing and detailed account of a charity bridge tournament she had attended the day before when, to her certain knowledge, a doctor of good repute had reneged twice and had not been caught out. She was too busy and too obtuse to realize that Katharine had been “keeping up appearances” for, like the honeymooners, she had never dreamed that her daughter was in love with John, whom she referred to, even now, as “Maeve’s husband” or as “Dick Gardiner’s friend.”
After they all had gone, leaving Katharine alone in Congreve House, through some miraculous, compensating providence, she had been stricken desperately with typhoid fever and it was then that her hair had turned to white. The faithful Maddox and the faithful Beulah Smithwick had attended her and when she was well enough to have a mirror brought to her, she had amazed them both with her delight in this transformation. Her calendar had not changed since that time; she remained, in looks and in interior complexion, the girl John Shipley had listened to as she read Vergil’s recommendations to agrarians on how to pass the winter.
2
A sigh like a sob shook her as she thought how, in the end, the patience of her charm and her rigid rejection of the second best had finally won her a Pyrrhic victory. For John Shipley, grappling in his forties for his twenties, had been fooled by his needless need and, as greedy as Ponce de Leon, imagining a source of rejuvenation, a new start, rebirth, a second chance with no strings attached, had returned to her. Except that he did not look upon it as a return; he believed he was seeing her for the first time and the bitterest pill of all the galling pills she had had to swallow was the knowledge that he had scarcely been aware of her those years ago but had only been impressed, snobbishly, by her situation as the only daughter of a remarkable man in a showplace of a house.
Now, though, he must divorce his wife, must marry Katharine, must—this is how he stated it—“save himself.” Must, ought, words dear to the Puritan tongue telling lies between its veiling teeth and coating the vile mendacities with an ethical vocabulary. “I must save myself no matter what!” It was not, as she had once imagined it would be, honey-sweet; it was sand in the mouth and under the nails to see his notion of his salvation thus debased; to see him yanked like a trussed and hobbled victim toward the destiny she herself had set for him when she was seventeen on a pallid summer night, when she had loved and desperately required him, and had pressed her hands against Minerva’s giant, marble sandaled feet; to see him cowed to incest and Maeve abandoned sordidly for “the other woman.”
Maeve had not guessed who the other woman was; conventional and more old-fashioned, in spite of everything, than Katharine, she pictured to herself a dancing girl who kept her husband away often at the sacred hour of tea, caused him to pick humbling quarrels, mantled the house with deceit and gloom. Pacing her bedroom floor she said to Katharine, her confidante, “I want to know and I cannot bear to know. I want her to be the very soul of vulgarity with bad perfume and ankle bracelets and at the same time it revolts me to think of my successor as a tart.” Katharine, warming her cold hands at Maeve’s hearth, consoled her cousin with a truism, “If she’s a tart, it won’t last,” but could find nothing to console herself for her hypocrisy, could not escape the memory of his insistent declaration that he must save himself, no matter what, and that only if she helped him could he succeed.
Their complicated history had begun most honestly and naturally with a conversation one afternoon when John had come to Katharine’s house for tea since Maeve was gone for the day on some errand of good will. He had brought with him a portfolio of sketches he had made the summer before of the houses in Gardner’s Crescent in Edinburgh; he had drawn the pleasing Augustan conceit well and she expressed her genuine delight in his deft eye. He was as pleased as a schoolboy, and eagerly and with impressive scholarship he talked to her of architecture as if he had only just begun his career and as if nothing could impede the fulfillment of his talent. On that innocent autumn afternoon, he had seemed to her as serious and as frank and charming as he had been in the very beginning and though she had felt a dim stirring of her old emotion, she had essentially been a generous friend, glad to see the renascence of his enthusiasm which, conversationally, at least, had seemed long ago to have died. For, early in his marriage, he had lived too much for his marriage and for his second love, his yacht, the Empress Katharine. Self-indulgent while he had the boat, incurably restless after the sale of her, he had never really worked at anything.
The sale of the Empress, seven years before, had been urged by his father, a commanding parent in a severe goatee who, being his son’s employer in a venerable family firm, had objected to the cruises that had begun in July and ended in September and had been conducted, so he said, “as if Ash Wednesday never followed Mardi Gras.” Ever since that time, John had gone each summer to Europe and these tours, even longer than the cruises, were called, a little fictitiously, “business trips,” but if the business involved in them led to no contracts, led, indeed, to nothing but the depletion of an expense account, their purpose was ostensibly so elevated that the elder Shipley, who had his soft spots, was satisfied; though he described himself as “a practical man, a mason, merely,” and was content to remodel department stores, he revered the artistic persuasion and he liked to think that his son was greatly gifted. “I think John’s got something,” he said. “I think he’s by way of being a pioneer.”
For many years John had been endeavouring to evolve what he called “an absolute design” for municipal buildings, but “pioneer” was a misnomer, for he was a revivalist and it was his ambition, before he died, to see a Palladian circus in every principal city of the United States. For an enterprise so daring and so elegant, it was natural that he require an annual refreshment of his memory in the classic cities of the continent. Therefore, for these seven years, he had gone abroad to look at Bath and Paris, Dublin and Edinburgh and Cheltenham, and while he was no closer than he had been before to the renovation, along the ingratiating lines of the eighteenth century, of the police courts, land offices, city halls and vehicle bureaus of Detroit, St. Louis and Bangor, he had an imposing collection of notes and sketches and his father, defending him against wags who claimed he spent his time golfing in Ballybunion and gambling in Monte Carlo, said, “These things take time.”
Maeve, in every particular a constant wife, faithfully accompanied him, though Katharine remembered that once on the eve of departure, as she sat surrounded by luggage tessellated with the stickers of hotels too numerous to count, she said, “I wish I could once go to the North Shore with my children. It’s sinful of me, I’m well aware, but there are times when perfection tires me.” For Katharine, the arrangement could not have been more felicitous; Congreve House was too big for her by herself, she loved the children and they loved her.
It had not occurred to her until their tea à deux on Brimmer Street when, in his stimulation, the color rose to his cheeks and his eyes grew lustrous, that he ever had done anything in Europe but play. And even then, she mistrusted the evidence; the sketches might be nothing more than the result of training and facility. Certainly she had never taken seriously his plan to revolutionize the business centers of America and behind his back, with friends and relatives, had laughed at him. No one scolded him for deluding himself; he could afford to; he was rich; and insulated by fatherly and wifely trust, he could go to his grave believing that he had worked hard toward a worth-while aim.
And he might have done so if, on the coppery October afternoon when Maeve had gone to Concord to serve tea at a charity bazaar, he had bought a drink for a tart in an ankle bracelet in the bar of the Touraine Hotel instead of coming to Katharine’s house and letting her see the drawings which he was taking home to file with all the others and then to forget. And so also might he have done if he had not, in the course of their subsequent impersonal talks, gradually begun to include himself in his talk, to speak of what he meant to do, then what he could do, then what he might have done, and then what he had not done. Suddenly the wasted years of his procrastination gaped open at his feet and in terror of the fading, academic blueprint of his life, he turned desperately to Katharine, persuading himself that she was the catalyst that would turn his whole world gold. But his terror had not burst just yet, it had unfolded slowly and had masqueraded as something else entirely; it had shown itself, through unresolved gestures, the warmer than cousinly greeting kisses, the pretexts for telephone calls and those for presents of flowers and books, it had shown itself to be the mild aberration of a man who knew he could rely upon his lady not to take him seriously. And she was reliable; she did not lose her head.
And finally, then, the terror worked itself out of the maze of his confusions and he had come running to her, begging her to tell him that it was not too late. (Too late for what? At the time she had not questioned but now she did. Too late to persuade the town fathers of Bridgeport to build a railroad station after the manner of Robert Adam?)
So they must save him, together, no matter what. But there was a matter: there was the matter of his children. She loved them warmly, especially the lonely boy who, last winter, had sometimes overcome his reticence and come to her for protection against the incubus that shambled through his parents’ house. Doctoring him with lies (“Your father’s badly overworked this year” and “Your mother’s heart is delicate, but they’ll both be as right as rain when they’ve come back from Europe”), she had felt, nevertheless, that in some intuitive, though still amorphous way, he knew and sensed in her drawing room that his father was a frequent visitor to it. It had been one afternoon when Andrew had come to call on her that she had suffered the first of the series of these seizures.
The day before, John had stood with his back to her, leaning his forehead on the mantel and running his fingers through his hair and had said, “I’m at the end of my rope, Kate. I can’t pretend any longer or I’ll be ready for an asylum. I’ll admit I didn’t bargain for this, I didn’t want it, I don’t want it now. But unless you help me, this is the end of me.” She had told him to be still, had told him to pour himself a drink and then go home and when he would do nothing but stand there, woebegone, she finally crossed the room to him and in the spendthrift luxury of their embrace, promised everything he asked of her. She promised that if, at the end of the summer, after a fair trial (there is so much self-justifying in adulterers, so much good sportsmanship among ladies and gentlemen in doing dirty) he could not reconcile himself to the continuation of his life with Maeve, she would cast her lot with his, sell Congreve House, leave Boston and go with him to “begin again” in some outpost of the earth.
Childishly and criminally, they had picked out on the globe the island of Mangareva at the bottom of the world. Now somberly contracted to revenge for her ancient wound (she was an honest woman with herself and did not beat around the bush: she was and had always been “in love” with John Shipley and she did not love him and she knew that at the moment of conjugal commitment, the state of being in love would be annulled and she would never be accessible to him again through any ruse) she could not sleep that night and at last she took a soporific, left over from an illness of some months before. As the medicine began to solace her and she began to descend circuitously and slowly like a leaf falling to earth in a demure breeze, she wished, not thinking of John or Maeve or of the children but only of herself, never to awaken. For the first time in her life, she thought of life’s alternative as delectable; with her whole heart she wished to die.
On the following afternoon, having observed that Andrew left his large schoolboy’s tea untouched (Maureen imagined that all growing lads were gluttonous and on the days he came, set forth a trencherman’s meal) she invited him to help her put together a jigsaw puzzle of the Taj Mahal. He was absorbed, head bent, his tongue between his teeth, his being concentrated on the restitution of a minaret. But when all the pieces were interlocked and the garish picture was smooth, Andrew did not smile in his characteristic shy, self-congratulatory way, did not seem to take any pleasure in his accomplishment. He turned away from the table and idly spun the globe and when it had stopped, he closed his eyes, pointing his finger at a spot in the azure matrix of the earth and opening his eyes again he read, “Mangareva. Who lives there?”
She recalled having heard from a psychiatrist at a dinner party that coincidence sometimes dogged the errant course of lunatics, and he had told her of a patient who, having escaped from his sanitarium, had gone to a distant city where he had never been before. Such was his sense of unreality that, requiring tangible proof that he existed, he had looked up his name, an ordinary one, in the telephone book in a public booth. And there it was, lightly underlined in pencil! Just as the man, terrified by a chimerical pursuer, tore out the page in the directory and went howling through the railway station, murderous with fear, until policemen came, so Katharine that afternoon, galvanized with guilt, had savagely spun the globe and screamed at the baffled child, “No one lives there! There’s no such place!” and had shaken his shoulders. When the hurricane ended, she had acted quickly, had won him back by saying, “That wretched, wicked Fanny Lyndon did Mangareva as a charade and everyone got it except me. You’re trying to humiliate me.” He had seemed to accept the explanation and had laughed and amiably teased her a little further. But she could not be sure, and she had not been sure of him since he had come to Congreve House; she had felt his large, speculative eyes on her and often, as if he had mesmerized her, she let fall allusions to his father that, if he did know, he must surely be storing up. Just now when she had looked out the window, she had thought he was watching her even though she was hidden by the broad-leaved vine.
Trying to hush her heart and her hammering pulses, she stared at a portrait of herself as a bibliophile, painted in the library, her hand upon a massive, gold-clasped book, her sidelong glance upon a cage of finches. It had been painted in that memorable and awful summer of Maeve’s birthday party, and until he died two years later, it had hung on the wall beside her father’s desk. She recalled that when it had been unveiled, the servants had gathered at the outskirts of the group of guests and Maddox had exclaimed, “That isn’t her!” Nor was it, for there was no strength in the face, only a retreating prettiness as shallow as a shell. She found herself irrelevantly curious to know how many days before the party the portrait had been finished and she opened her journal once again, leafing quickly through the early pages on which the ink had faded into brown. Two days, she learned, two days before the Catherine wheels lighted up the night and whirled, two days before she had been fixed upon her own Catherine wheel.
The figure was unwise: shutting her eyes against the insipid presentation of herself, she spun upon a wrenching rack and there came again that blinding, dumbing annihilation of reality. She did not know, as she had not known on the other occasions, how long the agony lasted nor did she know whether Honor’s voice, singing, restored her to her senses (she noted the accuracy of the phrase) or whether, like the pyrotechnic Catherine wheel, it had ceased of its own accord. As virginal and hyaline as the June day, the voice winged upward:
“Who is Kath’rine, what is she,
That all our swains commend her?”
The wristwatch at her waist said four o’clock and crossing again to the window just as the church bell began to ring, she pulled aside the vine and called to Andrew, asking him to row her out to get a water lily. She must find out, she thought, and in so doing, she must watch her tongue.
Now that her hour of solitude was finished, her mind grew practical. It dwelt upon the number of nasturtium sandwiches she would advise Mrs. Shea to make, on the warning that she must repeat to Beulah Smith-wick against scrimping on the sleeves of a blue linen blouse.
“Who is Andrew, what is he,
That all my acts imperil him?”
she softly sang. He is a child, she replied, who, like his father, will become a weak man. She sat down at her dressing table where stood a grove of silver-capped and gold-stoppered vessels filled with homemade creams and lotions for her china skin. My life is seeping out of me, she thought, the nightmare vitiates my charm. For a long moment she could not lift her hands that lay, palm down, upon the cool and silvery marble. But finally the life came back to them and she clasped them over her breakable heart and she said, “Lackamercy on us, this is none of I.”