“Nothing,” Katherine said, “it’s nothing. That’ll be all.”
At five that evening, the sun still looming unnaturally over the shrubbery and the hidden bird tirelessly reiterating its grief, the car came for Katherine and her mother. Katherine wasn’t ready yet, though she’d had all afternoon to prepare herself, and when the front desk called to say that the chauffeur had arrived, she was seated at the vanity, pinning her hair up in a severe coil and clamping her black velvetta hat over it like a lid. Her nose had stopped running — and she wondered vaguely if she wasn’t allergic to some indigenous California pollen — but her headache was with her still, lingering just behind the orbits of her eyes like a low-rumbling thundercloud ready to burst at any minute. More than anything, she felt like going to bed.
Her mother, on the other hand, was jaunty and energetic, having poached herself for three hours and more in the gently effervescing waters of the spa, and every time Katherine glanced up from the mirror she saw her bustling round behind her in a new hat, a hat that to Katherine’s mind had been better left in its box. Permanently. And then buried in a time capsule as an artifact of the civilization that had been blindly building toward this millinery apotheosis since the time of the Babylonians. The hat — a Gainesboro in turquoise and black with so many feathers protruding at odd angles you would have thought a pair of mallards was mating atop her mother’s head — was all wrong. Josephine was dressed in black, her shade of choice since widowhood had overtaken her eighteen years ago, and while Katherine had no quarrel with her mother’s injecting a little color into her apparel, this wasn’t the time for it. Or the place. Who could guess what Stanley would be like — or what his reaction to such a hat would be? And Katherine couldn’t help recalling the time, just three weeks into their honeymoon, when he’d flown into a rage and demolished seventeen of her mother’s most cherished hats, and half of them purchased in Paris.
But she was having enough trouble with her own outfit, which she’d changed a dozen times now, to worry about her mother’s. She’d finally settled on a dove-gray suit of Venetian wool, though the climate was a bit warm for it, over a high-collared silk shirtwaist in plain white. She didn’t want to wear anything provocative, given Stanley’s excitability, but then there was no need to look like a matron either, and she’d spent a good part of the afternoon crossing and recrossing the strip of carpet between the mirror and the closet, trying on this combination or that and quizzing her mother and Louisa until she was satisfied. Stanley had always liked her in gray, or at least she thought she remembered him claiming he did, and she hoped there would be something there, some spark of recollection that would help bring him back to the world.
Outside the window, the palms rattled oppressively in a sudden breeze off the ocean, and the irritating bird, whatever it was, discovered an excruciating new pitch for its deathsquawk—raw, raw, raw—and when her mother stumped across the room for the hundredth time in her ridiculous hat, Katherine wanted to scream. She was a bundle of nerves, and why wouldn’t she be? Fighting off the McCormicks and their dogs, traveling better than three thousand miles over one set of jolting rails after another till every muscle in her body felt as if it had been beaten with a whisk, her whole life thrown into turmoil by Stanley’s wild-eyed tantrums and the catatonia that turned him into a living statue. She hadn’t seen him in over six months now, and she felt as tentative and expectant as she had on her wedding night.
She was still fussing in the mirror — her hair wasn’t right, and she wasn’t sure about the hat either — when the front desk rang a second time to remind them that their driver was in the lobby. “Come on, dear,” Josephine urged, suddenly looming in the mirror behind her, “we mustn’t keep poor Stanley waiting — that is, if we do actually get to see him this time.” Exasperated, Katherine rose from the stool and fumbled for her wrap and her purse and the chocolates and magazines she meant to bring for Stanley, and her mother, hovering at her elbow, began a soliloquy on the theme of disappointment and all the little false alarms they’d had in Waverley and how she couldn’t stand to see her daughter moping around and looking so absolutely heartbroken all the time and how they shouldn’t get their hopes up too high because there was no telling how poor Stanley was adjusting to his new surroundings, if one was able to speak of his adjusting at all.
Poor Stanley. That was how her mother had always referred to him, even before his breakdown, even when he was as handsome and fit and well-spoken as any man who’d ever stepped across the threshold of the high narrow-shouldered house on Commonwealth Avenue, as if she could detect the fragility at the core of him like a diviner descrying water in the bones of the earth. “I don’t know, mother,” Katherine said, turning to her as the maid held the door for them, “I really don’t know. But Dr. Hamilton promised in his last letter… that is, he didn’t actually promise, but he was optimistic that the change would do Stanley good, not to mention finally being settled in a healthful climate, and I really don’t see any reason—”
“Just as I suspected.” Josephine said, striding briskly through the door and out into the resplendent halls of the Potter Hotel, her skirts crepitating, the wings of her hat flapping in the breeze she generated. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
And then they were in the car, arranging veils, leathers and various rugs to keep the dust off, while the chauffeur, a tense little man with a bristling sunburned neck and a pair of sunburned ears that stood straight out from his head, wrestled the steering wheel and fought the gear lever with brisk angry jerks of his shoulders. Katherine and her mother were perched in back of him on the leather banquette seat, as exposed to the elements as they would have been in a buggy, and after the first mile or so, when they turned from the wide boulevard that ran parallel to the beach in order to circumvent an inlet called “The Salt Pond,” Josephine began to complain. “I don’t see how anyone could ever get used to these rattling machines,” she shouted over the stuttering roar of the motor. “The smell of them — and the noise. Give me a nice quiet brougham and an even-tempered mare any day.”
“Yes, mother,” Katherine replied through her gauze veil, “and I suppose horses don’t smell at all — or scatter manure across every road from here to Maine and back.” She was beginning to enjoy herself for the first time since she’d arrived, her headache receding, her nose drying up, and the air new-made from the sea and pregnant with the scent of a million flowers, citrus blossoms, Pittosporum undulatum, jasmine. The place wasn’t really so bad at all — she’d pictured the Wild West, men in serapes and drooping mustaches, women in mantillas, an utter void — but the Potter had surprised her (it really was a first-class hotel, the equal of anything you’d find in the East), as had the charming adobes and grand Italian villas she glimpsed through the stands of eucalyptus. There was a surprising air of culture and civility about the place, and there was no denying its natural beauty, with its sea vistas and the dark stain of its mountains against an infinite cloudless sky. It was like a tropical Newport, a conflation of the Riviera and Palm Beach. Or better yet, the Land of the Lotos Eaters, “In which it seemed always afternoon.”
For once, she thought, the McCormicks had been right. (And oh, how they’d campaigned to bring Stanley west, Nettie crouching nightly over the idea like some beast with its kill, dragging it up and down the length of the drawing room in her clamped and unyielding jaws while Bentley and Favill beat the sacrificial drums and sister Anita wailed the ritual lament.) Now that she was here, now that she was actually in the car and on her way to Riven Rock, the sun leaping through the trees ahead of her and the scented breeze kissing the veil to her lips, Katherine could feel the rightness of it. This was what Stanley needed. This was it. This was the place that would make him well.