“I’m sorry,” he called, “I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty, I’ve been so busy lately with the Harvester business and the ranch and a thousand and one other things I just haven’t had time to, to—”
The ball was in the air, rising above the arc of his racquet as if it had a life of its own, and he served again, this time with a bit more muscle, and again she drove it right back, a wicked slashing shot into the far corner he just managed to return with a flailing backhand, and he felt a momentary thrill of satisfaction over that effort until she caught the ball at the net and put it away with a stroke as efficient as it was elegant. He admired that, he really did, a woman so athletic and fit, so nimble — she was like an Olympian, like Diana the huntress with her bow, only in this case the bow was a tennis racquet, and as he bent to retrieve the ball he congratulated himself on his evenhandedness and restraint, though of course he would have to assert himself before long, etiquette or no. “Love-thirty,” she called.
By the fourth game he was down three games to one and sweating so copiously you would have thought he’d been in for a swim with his clothes on. Katherine, on the other hand, was barely ruffled, as neat and composed as she’d been when she emerged from her room an hour ago. She was a master, it seemed, at putting the ball just out of his reach and whipping him from one end of the court to the other with a whole grab bag of trick shots, lobs, aggressive net play and stinging ground strokes. He began to strain, hammering his serves as if the object of the game was to put the ball right through the turf and bury it three feet deep in the ground, and of course, the harder he tried the wilder his shots became. He double-faulted, then double-faulted again. By the end of the first set, which she won, six games to one, he was panting just like a — well, a dog.
“Are you all right?” she asked. She was standing at the net, preparing to switch sides. There wasn’t a mark on her, not so much as a single bead of sweat, though it was a muggy morning, the temperature eighty already — at least.
“Oh, no, no — I — its just — well, I do admire the way you play. You’re really quite good.”
She gave him a mysterious smile, but she didn’t say a word.
Later, over breakfast on the patio, he sank into his chair and swatted gnats while she told him all about her career at the Institute, the circulatory systems of snakes and toads and her hopes for the emancipation of women. And how did he feel about it? Did he believe women should have the vote?
Well of course he did — he was right-thinking and progressive, wasn’t he? And he told her so, but he didn’t really elaborate, because he was exhausted, for one thing — all that motor travel, his frayed nerves, up all night, three sets of tennis — and because he was fixated at that moment on the way Katherine’s lips parted and closed and parted again to reveal her even white teeth and the animated pink tip of her tongue as she spoke, her eyes flashing, her knuckles drilling the table in declamatory fervor. He realized then, in that gnat-haunted moment with the sugary scent of new-mown grass on the air and his melon getting warm and his eggs cold, that he wanted to kiss those lips, touch that tongue with his own, and more, much more: he wanted her, all of‘her, right down to and including the problematic whiteness at the center of her. Katherine, he wanted Katherine. He wanted to marry her, that’s what he wanted, and the knowledge of it came to him in a moment of epiphany that made him shudder with the intensity of his longing and the nakedness of his need.
“Are you catching a chill?” she asked, scrutinizing him with her ice-blue gaze.
“No,” he said.
“And you’re not eating — don’t tell me you’re not hungry after all that exercise?”
This was the time to tell her how he felt, this was the time for sweet talk, for lovers’ banter, the time to say, How can mere food hope to sustain me when I have the vision of you to feast on? but he didn’t tell her that, he couldn‘t, and he fiddled with his fork a minute before lifting his eyes to hers. “When the masses have enough on their plates,” he said, “when the tenements have been torn down and good decent housing erected in their stead and on every table a leg of lamb and mint jelly, then I’ll eat.”
Two days later, Katherine was gone. Her vacation was over, the new semester beginning, her thesis beckoning. Before she left, she gave him a blue bow tie and a box of maple sugar candy molded in the shapes of squirrels, rabbits and Scotch terriers, and he gave her a copy of the Debs pamphlet and a first edition of Frank Norris’s The Pit. He’d begged her to stay, prostrating himself at her feet, all wrought-up with speeches about conditions in the textile mills, settlement houses and the immigrant poor, but he never mentioned love — it wasn’t in his power — and she had to go, he understood that. Still, he was devastated, and no sooner had she boarded the train than he was off for Boston in the Mercedes. He packed hurriedly, with none of the indecision that had plagued him in recent years, and he brought Morris Johnston along with him, both as a sympathetic ear he could fill with praises of Katherine and as a buffer against any subversive lavatory mirrors that might spring up like windmills in his path.
On arriving, he took rooms at a hotel near Katherine’s mother’s place on Commonwealth Avenue and began his siege. He sent flowers daily, whole greenhouses full, and he called each evening on the stroke of seven, his palms sweating, heart thumping, eyes crawling in his head. The maid greeted him with a sentimental smile, and Mrs. Dexter, Katherine’s mother, beamed and prattled and plied him with an endless array of sweetmeats, sandwiches, fruits, nuts and beverages, while he sat awkwardly in the parlor and thought of Katherine dressing in the empyreal realms above him. And did Mr. McCormick appreciate how clever her daughter was? Mrs. Dexter wanted to know. She’d tried to discourage her with this scientific business from the beginning, heaven knew, because science just wasn’t a lady’s provenance, or hadn’t been, until Katherine came along to tackle it with her keen intellect and persevering nature, but now she had to admit that her daughter couldn’t have made her prouder, and would he like another chocolate?
And Katherine. She was receptive, very sweet and encouraging, a paragon, especially during his first few visits, and that made him soar with a kind of elation he’d never known, but by the end of the week she’d begun to beg off on account of her studies and he found himself spending more and more time with Mrs. Dexter, a teacup balanced on one knee and a plate of sandwiches on the other. She had to study, of course she did — she was a brainy intellectual young woman and she’d been working eight years for this — but still it threw him into a panic. What if she were using her studies as an excuse, a way to get rid of him early so she could slip out at nine or ten and flit around with Butler Ames, whom he’d already encountered twice on her very doorstep? He was beside himself. He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. And he didn’t dare look in the mirror.
But on Friday she consented to go to dinner and the theater with him, and he took her and her mother to dine at his hotel and then to a very amusing production of The Importance of Being Earnest. At least Stanley found it amusing, and Katherine seemed to enjoy herself too, laughing in all the right places, but he worried that it might be too frivolous for her, not enough concerned with the pressing issues of the day, and when they got back to her place he started in on Debs again, by way of compensation. “Do you know what Debs says?” he began as Mrs. Dexter made a discreet exit and the maid set down a plate of poppy seed cakes and vanished.