But first, as the sun settled in to slather the sea and baste the pale walls and exotic trees till everything seemed to glow and drip with a thick oleaginous light, Katherine went in to draw a bath and cleanse herself of Bentley and Favill and the lingering taint of the McCormicks. She knew they resented her, her mother-in-law in particular, as stifling and selfish a woman as ever walked the earth, but it was a shock to realize how deeply they must have despised her to unleash the dogs and set them on her without a second thought — and on her first day in Santa Barbara, no less. That hurt. On top of her headaches and her cold and everything else. She wasn’t looking for acceptance — she couldn’t have cared less about the McCormicks and their pathetic little circle — or even warmth, but civility, that much she expected. What did they think she was, some passing whim of Stanley’s? Another McCormick conquest — or purchase? Did they think they were the only ones pacing the floor at all hours of the night and so keyed up they couldn’t even keep a piece of toast on their stomach? She’d been there with him when he broke down. She’d seen the eyes recoil in his head, watched him punish the walls and the furniture and all the dumb objects that fell across his path. She was the one who’d had to listen to his ravings and lock the door of her bedroom and hide in the closet till she thought she was going to suffocate, she was the one who’d run from the house as if it was on fire. And where were the McCormicks then?
Standing there in the hotel bathroom, listening to the water thunder into the big porcelain tub while the brainless sun pressed at the windows and some alien bird croaked from the cover of the palms as if it were half dead and hoping something would come along and finish it off, she felt like crying all over again. She’d never felt so sick and miserable in her life, not even when they’d denied her admission to MIT and made her crawl on her belly through four years of basic science classes the boys had got in high school as a matter of course. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even decent. Favill she could understand — at least he was a real man, long-boned, big-shouldered, with an Ottawa chief’s blood in his veins and the power to crush his adversaries in a fair fight, but Bentley, Bentley was a worm, a creeping spineless thing that made its living in the gut of something greater, or at least larger. She had no respect for either of them, but even less for Bentley, if that was possible. He wasn’t even a man.
She studied her image in the mirror, staring into her own eyes till the moment passed. It was a trick she’d learned as a girl, a way of focusing her anger when they tried to beat her down, and they always tried to beat her down — boys, men, insinuating lawyers, smug administrators and hypocritical teachers alike. She remembered the chess club she’d organized at school in Chicago before her father died and they moved to Boston. It was a good school, the finest the city had to offer, catering to the children of the moneyed class and with no expense spared for teachers, books and facilities, but to Katherine’s mind the best thing about it was that the sexes weren’t segregated. Boys and girls sat side by side in the classroom, given equal access to the best that was known and thought in the world and encouraged to compete as equals. And when Katherine started up the club, her teacher, Mr. Gregson, an extremely old young man with a wispy two-pointed beard and the faraway look of a high-wire artist, encouraged her. At first. But she soon played herself out of competition with the other girls, who were only marginally interested in the game to begin with, and into the realm of the boys. And the boys played as if this game of war were war in fact and never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it. The club lasted two and a half weeks and Katherine took on all comers, the line of boys waiting to be the first of their fraternity to beat the girl sometimes four and five deep. But then all of a sudden Mr. Gregson discovered an obscure prohibition against board games buried deep in the school code, and the club was disbanded.
Steam rose. The water hissed and rumbled. She felt the cool of the tiles beneath her feet and the faintest touch of the steam against her skin, and it calmed her. She bent over the sink and shook out her hair. Loose and unpinned, it was an avalanche of hair, uncontainable, the hair of a wildwoman, an Amazon, and she threw back her head and teased it with her stiff fingers till it was wilder still. She wiped a palm across the glass and stood back for a better look. She saw a naked young woman with flaring eyes and aboriginal hair, strung tight as a bow with the calisthenics she sweated through each and every morning of her life, as fierce and hard and pure as any athlete, though the whole world saw her as nothing more than an ornament, another empty head for the milliner to decorate, one more useless mouth for chattering about the weather and plucking hors d‘oeuvres from the tip of a toothpick. But she wasn’t just another socialite, she was Katherine Dexter McCormick, and she was inflexible, She wouldn’t break — she wouldn’t even bend. She’d fought her way through the Institute against an all-male faculty and a ninety-nine-percent-male student body that howled in unison over the idea of a female in the sciences, and she would fight her way through this too. The McCormicks. They were poor, primitive people. Not worth another thought.
She pulled open the door. “Louisa!” she called, poking her head into the hall while the steam wrapped its fingers round her ankles and the water uncoiled from the faucet with a roar.
The maid came running. A brisk skinny girl from a pious family in Brookline who must have thought California the anteroom to heaven judging from the look on her face, she scurried across the room with a stack of towels three feet thick. Katherine took the towels from her, and she didn’t attempt to cover her nakedness, not at all. Louisa looked away.
“Lay out my blue skirt — the crepon — and the velvet waist. And my pearls — the choker, that is.” She paused, the towels clutched to her, the sun across the room now, in flood, the steam escaping in wisps. “What’s the matter with you? Louisa?”
The girl looked up and away again. “Ma‘am?”
“You don’t have to be shy with me. Surely you’ve seen a woman’s body before — or maybe you haven’t. Louisa?”
Again the look, whipped and defeated, as if the human body were an offense, and suddenly Katherine was thinking of a girl she knew in Switzerland when she was sixteen — Liselle, of the square hands and muscular tongue, the first tongue besides her own Katherine had ever held in her mouth. “Ma‘am?” the maid repeated, and still she wouldn’t look, suddenly fascinated by something on the floor just to the left of where Katherine was standing.