She bought the cloak for Felicity a week before the famous day, she said, kept it in a closet in our apartment (ours for the previous two months; but we were finished, for I’d wearied of her feigned illnesses, her absurd jealousies — over an actress who smiled at me at the theater, or a buxom waitress where we breakfasted — and her rage over these imagined dalliances. That rage would end as irrationally as it had begun: she on her knees asking forgiveness, I touching away her tears and reaffirming my loyalty with prolonged vaginal stroking). Melissa, having seen Felicity arrive in the hotel that morning, took cloak and mask to Felicity’s room, the proposed site of our ménage. She put the garments on a chair but saw no Felicity; nor was she in the bedroom. Melissa called out, “Your wardrobe mistress has arrived,” and from the bathroom came male and female voices, then Felicity’s voice saying she would see Melissa later.
“I left immediately,” Melissa said to me, “telling myself she was always something of a tart.”
“You didn’t hear any fear in her voice?”
“I suppose I should have.”
“Wasn’t that the bathtub rape in progress?”
“If he raped her. He said he raped me too, but I never set eyes on the man.”
“You never told me any of this.”
“She came to our door in that cloak, crying and carrying her clothes, hiding behind that mask. She cried rape and I let her in. She lied to you about the cloak, but how could she tell you what it was really for? Maybe she still hoped to charm you with it. Tarts are tarts. And yet how could I doubt her? She said he held a knife to her throat, that she even feared for my life when I was outside that bathroom door. I couldn’t tell you this.”
“Not even after her death, to get at the truth?”
“This is the truth!”
Melissa stood up and began to dress herself and I too stepped into my clothing, told her I was going back to Albany.
“You make it quite credible,” I said. “I don’t doubt any part of your story. But I’m absolutely certain you’re a virtuoso liar.”
Katrina’s Diary and the Bovine Poem, June 11, 1910
EDWARD ENTERED HIS home and from the hallway he called Katrina. The house replied with a stillness that plummeted him into gloom. He tossed his coat and hat on a chair and went to his library where Katrina would have left him a message, if she had been in a mood to communicate. He saw the letter from Melissa to Katrina, which lay unopened on his desk where Katrina had left it, along with two volumes of her diary for the years 1894 and 1908, their marking sashes emerging, presumably, from pages to be heeded. He pushed Melissa’s letter aside and opened the pages of Katrina’s mind.
The first diary: April 19, 1894
Mother sold her emerald last month. I’ve only now learned this. The house was in jeopardy and the emerald preserved it for at least four years. Father had far less than he let on, lost almost half a million in the panic of ’93, and gave more than anyone knew to Madame Baldwin. He came to Mother with his problem. Had he not given her the jewels? Were they not emblematic of lush times? But now, after the panic, the times have us in a precarious position. He did not mention Madame Baldwin. Mother yielded the emerald and kept his secrets, shoring up the facade of normalcy by forgoing travel to London and Paris for the year, limiting her shopping, and letting two of the lesser servants go. Of her truly valuable jewels only her black pearls and solitaire earrings remain, and, of course, her priceless tiara, which I covet.
Mother chaired her antisuffrage meeting today in our main parlor. Giles came, unable to resist Mother’s magnetism. Edward brought me, listened for ten minutes, amused, then left for the club. The room was filled with a hundred of Mother’s friends and peers, all so well educated, so certain of their position, so unified and uniformed in their spring bonnets against the amendment that would eliminate the word “male” from the State Constitution’s definition of suffrage. Mother was valiant, insisting an undesirable class of women would swiftly take advantage of the vote, that it is a man’s sphere for which women are unsuited. Could anyone, she inquired in her shrillest tone, imagine a proper woman serving in the militia, or on the police and fire departments? One wonders. But as B says: “I have no ambition. I am not base enough to hold a conviction.”
Giles, sweet Giles, ever the suitor. He persuaded me the antisuffrage papers the women were reading (“. . educated women would stay away from the polls. . present relations between men and women are all that could be desired. .”) were making me crimson with vexation, and he insisted we escape. We went to the dining room and sipped punch and he put down his cup and kissed me. “I want to embrace your unclothed body,” he said, his words squishing at me through the kiss. “I dream of your intimacy. I picture your head on my pillow. I don’t care a fig that you’re married. Edward is my valued friend and has nothing to do with this. I’ve loved you since we took dancing class together.” He tried to kiss me again but I twisted his ear. He yowled like a cat, yanked his head away and I left him by the punch bowl, sweet fool. Did Father treat Madame Baldwin this way? Probably so.
I have no desire for Giles, but the idea of a lover is taking hold. It has everything to do with resisting my age, for I will be thirty soon. I know how vain and foolish this is, but it is no less real for that. Also I must punish Edward for despoiling me. I sought it, yes, but he did it, as he should have, or I would not have married him. But I cannot forgive him. He does not yet understand the craft of dying. I wonder, shall I be truly beautiful all my life?
The second diary: October 17, 1908
Giles arrived this morning in a frenzy but would not say what was causing it. I made him tea to calm him, and it did. He asked for Edward and when I said he was in New York working on the production of his new play he responded, “As I thought. Are you separated?” I told him Edward and I had been moving apart with glacial slowness, and distance was having antithetical effects, a growing sense of peace, through solitude and the absence of an intolerable presence; but also a deepening fury at being abandoned, however justified the abandonment. I told him I loved Edward profoundly, that in his eyes was a melting tenderness I could find in no other man. Without a word Giles took a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. At the center was a well-drawn cartoon of a minotaur cavorting on a theater stage with two near-naked women with the heads of cows, while another and smaller minotaur with excessively large horns was watching from the theater’s front row. Beneath the cartoon were six lines of verse:
Your little wife’s gone to the city again
To dance on the stage with her partners in sin.
So she and the scribe and the actress will play
Their bovinish games in Gomorrah today,
The ladies disporting like September Morns,
While you sit at home cultivating your horns.
Of course the verse concerns Edward and Melissa Spencer, common gossip by this time, and I have ignored it. But the involvement of Felicity comes as a shock to Giles and a surprise to me; and I saw his frenzy return as a twitch in his left eye. He found the poem in his mailbox this morning. And during the night someone put a severed bull’s head on his porch. I wept for the shame of it, for all our shame. I felt extremely close to Giles at this moment, as if what was happening to us with such sudden force was a form of transcendence, thrusting us naked together into some underworld dungeon for abuse by obscene devils. Giles’s face was collapsed and flushed with tears, and I then decided to disrobe for him, rid myself of blouse, skirt, petticoat, knickers, shoes, stockings, all. I stood before him as he once said he wanted me, and his weeping ceased. I sat and let him study me, giving him not my body, but the part of my soul that lives in shadow. I told him not to touch me; nor had he betrayed any such plan. He stared at me and we didn’t speak, but I felt glorious, basking in the light of my dear friend’s wan smile. He stood up and took my chin in his right hand and kissed me just once, then said, “You are the vestal goddess of sublime pain.” I had banished his frenzy.