Katherine was thirty-two, a newlywed who might as well have been a widow. Stanley was beyond her now, locked away in the prison of his excoriated mind, but she was hopeful of a cure, always hopeful, and she wasn’t about to be cowed by anyone. She swooped in low over the plate of fresh orange and pineapple slices that lay like a gauntlet on the low table between them and cut Bentley off in the middle of an unpunctuated sentence. “So what you’re saying, in crude terms, is that you want to buy me off — is that it?”
Bentley had been leaning forward in his seat and idly rubbing at the place on his right calf where the garter was cutting into his flesh, but now he jerked upright like one of those mechanical bell-ringers carved into a village clock in the Tyrol. Before she’d finished he was sputtering and blustering for all he was worth. “Not at all, not at all,” he was saying, and he just had to spring up and pace round the room, protesting and expostulating and waving his hands like flags of truce. “It was just that the family thought that under the circumstances it would be more convenient for you if perhaps the marriage were terminated — or annulled, we could arrange that, no problem there — and of course the first thing we thought of was your comfort and accommodation, and please forgive me if I feel obliged, through my legal training, to attach a specific sum to such considerations….”
She wasn’t going to let them get to her, no matter how exhausted she was or how much her head ached and her nose dripped. And she wasn’t going to be talked down to like one of the empty-headed heiresses and overfed widows they’d grown sleek on, and she knew the type, weak as watered milk, running round in a dither till the big strong lawyer and the big strong doctor took charge of all their little trials and tribulations. “What about my marriage vows?” she said, making sure to enunciate each word even as she pressed the handkerchief to her recalcitrant nose. “In sickness and in health, Mr. Bentley. What do you say to that?”
There was a silence. For once, Bentley had nothing to say — at least not immediately. She looked beyond him, out the open window to the veranda and the sea and the strange brown-girded islands across the channel. “My husband needs me,” she said, “now more than ever. Did that ever occur to you?”
This was Favill’s cue. He uncrossed his legs and planted his big feet firmly on the carpet, as if he were getting ready to spring at her. “But that’s just the point, Katherine. He doesn’t need you, not according to Dr. Meyer — or your own Dr. Hamilton either. Women upset him. They disturb him. And if it wasn’t for…,” he trailed off suggestively, watching her out of eyes the color of chopped liver.
“For what?” Suddenly her blood was up. It had been a long, frustrating day, the culmination of a frustrating week, month, year. She’d been obliged to breakfast that morning with her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sane sister, Anita, and the atmosphere had been so acidic that everything tasted like grapefruit and vinegar, and then she’d spent the forenoon with the new chauffeur grinding along an endless labyrinth of dusty roads in one of the two Packard motorcars the McCormicks insisted on Stanley’s having, trying to find the celebrated Montecito hot springs, where even now her mother was soaking her arthritic joints while Katherine was left alone here to fend off the McCormick hounds. “Go ahead,” she demanded, “say it: if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be like this. Isn’t that what you mean?”
Favill never took his eyes off her. He never so much as blinked. He didn’t give a damn for her and her Dexter heritage that went back to the founding of the Colonies and six centuries in England before that or the fact that she had her own fortune and could buy and sell any ten Indian chiefs — all he cared about was the McCormicks, parvenus one generation removed from the backwoods of Virginia, people who couldn’t even have licked her father’s boots. “More or less,” he said.
“No reason to be uncivil, Henry,” Bentley clucked, circling round them like the referee at a boxing match. He put his hands on the back of the chair in which he’d been sitting a moment before and leaned forward with an air of false intimacy, a lawyer right down to his socks. “No reason at all,” he said, addressing Katherine now. “But if you’ll forgive me, we have reason to believe that — how shall I say this? — that given Stanley’s mental and physical condition during the period of your connubial relations, the marriage was never, well—” He threw his hands in the air, like a Puritan at a peep show. “You’ve been trained in the sciences, Katherine. I think you know what I mean, from a biological standpoint, if not a legal one.”
So that was what this was all about.
She felt very tired all of a sudden, tired and defeated. The bastards. The unfeeling, unthinking, meretricious, sheet-sniffing bastards. They’d gone snooping after every last shameful shred of bile and gossip, interrogating chambermaids and butlers, extracting testimony from her mother-in-law and Stanley’s sisters and brothers and the team of psychiatrists they’d had swarming all over him since his breakdown, and they thought they had something on her, thought they could shame and bully her and beat her down. But they were wrong. She wouldn’t crack, she wouldn’t. She sat there like a pillar, though she hurt all the way through to the marrow and a hundred nights came back to her in a shattering rush and the look on Stanley’s face and his fright and rage and the unyielding impregnable fortress of his outraged flesh and impacted mind. She sat there and fought the itch in the back of her throat and the seepage in her sinuses. They wouldn’t dare talk to her like this if her mother were here. Or her father. But her mother was soaking her bones in a hot tin tub of mineral water in the middle of a dusty eucalyptus grove somewhere in the hills, and her father was eighteen years dead, another disappointment.
All right, she decided, if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way it would be. She stood. Rose so quickly that Favill had to spring from the chair like a bouncing ball to avoid being stranded there. Bentley looked deeply pained — or perhaps it was just constipation. “Did you—?” he began, exchanging a look with Favill. “Or rather, do you need some time to consider our proposal, because we’re perfectly willing, that is, we, I—”
Still she said nothing. She just stood there, her heart pounding, the hat clamped to her head like a war bonnet, staring them to shame. “I won’t bother showing you the door,” she said finally, and she couldn’t control the edge in her voice. “And you tell the McCormicks there’s no price in blood or money or all the kings’ ransoms in the world that could ever sway me, not one iota. I’ll be married to Stanley when you’re all in your graves, and he’s going to get well, he is, do you hear me? Do you?”
The next disappointment was Hamilton. Though he’d been tiptoeing around her, doing his whispery, smooth-talking, eye-flipping best to avoid putting her out in any way, shambling and shuffling and all but kissing the ground she walked on, he’d yet to relent on the one issue that mattered most: allowing her access to her husband. If she could only see Stanley, even for an hour, she knew she could help bring him out of it. The very sight of her would spark him, it would have to — for all anybody knew, he might think she’d deserted him. And even if his response was, well, difficult, at least it would be something, at least he’d know she was there still and that somebody besides his lantern-jawed nurses cared about him. Stanley had been at Riven Rock for just over a month now — and she’d given Hamilton that month, willingly, though she could hardly sleep for worry and felt like one of the walking dead dragging herself around the corridors of her mother’s house on Commonwealth Avenue and she hadn’t been to the theater or the symphony or even out to dinner — and now she wanted to exercise her rights and prerogatives as a wife, and not coincidentally as the patroness who signed the doctor’s checks and underwrote his ape colony. She’d waited long enough, she’d been patient, she’d listened to every excuse in the book and a whole codicil more. The time had come. Tonight — and she was determined in this — she would see Stanley.