Katherine sat across from him, in an armchair. Outside, it was raining, the streets shining with it, the sound of the horses’ hoofs magnified in the steadily leaking night air. You could hear them — clop, clop, clop — and that was all, but for the hiss of the rain and the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. “No,” she sighed, tucking her feet up under her skirts and settling into the chair. “I don’t really know.”
“ ‘The few who own the machines do not use them,’ ” Stanley quoted, leaning forward with a sage look. “ ‘The many who use them do not own them. ’ You see? Simple, direct, brilliant. And of course the result is the sort of inequity you and I see and abhor every day but that the rest of the world seems to turn its back on. He wants national laws to protect workers against accidents on the job, unemployment and old age insurance programs, public works for the unemployed — and until workers take over the means of production, a decrease in the work hours as production increases—”
She didn’t seem to be listening. She was stirring a cup of tea with a demitasse spoon, her eyes unfocused and vague.
“He says,” Stanley went on, “he says—”
“Stanley?”
“I — um — yes?”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but while I admire your commitment to the progressive causes, I really do, don’t you ever stop to wonder why you seem, well, so obsessed with them?”
“Me? Obsessed?”
She laughed then, and he didn’t know whether to laugh with her or to bristle because she might have meant it as a barb, the tiniest dart that would tear his flesh open, a wound that would grow wider and wider till there was room enough for all the Butler Ameses of the world to march right on through him. His face was blank. He reached for a poppy seed cake and got it halfway to his mouth before he thought better of it and set it back carefully on the plate.
“Could it be a defensive reaction, do you think? I mean, because you and I have so much in contrast to the poor?”
“Well — I — yes. Yes, of course. My father, you see, he’s the one. He wouldn’t allow a union in his shop, the Haymarket Riots, all that, and it’s not right, it’s not. My father—” he said, and he found he couldn’t quite organize his thoughts beyond that, because his head was suddenly filled with the image of that cranky imperious old man with his jabbing rapier of a beard, filling the halls of the house with his roars and his bile and his unloving fierce stifling presence. “My father—” he repeated.
Katherine’s voice was very soft, so soft he had to. strain to hear it over the noise of the rain, the plodding horses, the ticking of the clock that rose suddenly in volume till it was like a whole symphony of clocks all beating time in unison, tearing away at the hours, the minutes, the seconds he had left before she got up and dismissed him. “I know it must be hard,” she said, “but you have to put it behind you. And as admirable as progressive reform may be, there are other things in life — music, painting, all the arts — and when a man and woman are alone together, when they’re as intimate as you and I are now, don’t you think there are more appropriate things to talk about?”
“Well, yes,” he said, but he didn’t have a clue.
Another sigh. “Oh, Stanley, I don’t know about you. You’re very sweet, but really, you do have a lot to learn about the art of wooing.” And then she stood and the maid was there and the evening was over.
He was back the next day, undeterred, ready to hire Cyrano to rehearse his speeches for him, anything, but he couldn’t seem to get socialism out of his head. In the afternoon, he took Katherine and Mrs. Dexter to the art museum, and he was able to talk knowledgeably about Titian, Tintoretto and the Dutch masters and fill them in on his experiences as a pupil of Monsieur Julien in Paris, but inevitably he found the conversation veering back toward social welfare and reform, because what was art after all but a plaything of the rich? Katherine couldn’t dine with him that evening — she was busy preparing for the following day’s classes — and he brooded over a long tasteless repast, which he interrupted three times to wire his mother on the subject of Katherine and her perfection, her intellect, her beauty, and his mother wired back almost immediately: WORRIED SICK STOP HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WEEK STOP VERY INCONSIDERATE STOP KATHERINE WHO? STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER.
Then — and he couldn’t help himself; he felt he’d explode like an overbaked potato if he had to look at those pallid hotel-room walls another second — he took a stroll past Katherine’s house. A stroll, that was all. A constitutional. For his health. He had no thought of snooping, no thought of encountering Butler Ames or his ilk on the doorstep or catching Katherine slipping into a coach in her dinner clothes, nothing of the kind. It was raining again. He’d forgotten his umbrella and his silk hat was like a lead weight bearing down on the crown of his head and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through by the time he’d made his eighth circuit of Katherine’s block. And when he became conscious of that, the wetness beginning to seep through now, he just happened, by the purest coincidence, to be passing by the front entrance of Mrs. Dexter’s neat and prim narrow-shouldered stone house at 393 Commonwealth Avenue.
Katherine had made it very clear that she couldn’t see him, and he respected that, he did, but he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from mounting the steps and pressing the buzzer anyway. All sorts of things went through his head in the interval between pressing the buzzer and the maid’s appearance — visions of Butler Ames, with his blowfish eyes and prissy little hands, making love to Katherine over a box of chocolates, Katherine husbanded with nineteen faceless suitors, Katherine out dancing at that very moment and not lucubrating over a stack of scientific texts shot through with diagrams of the internal anatomy of lizards, turtles and snakes — but there was the maid with her mawkish smile, and the entrance hall, and Mrs. Dexter rushing to greet him as if she hadn’t seen him in six months rather than six hours.
His reward for braving the elements was a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Dexter that stretched past eleven o‘clock (and wasn’t it just five after eight when he arrived?), a gallon and a half of scalding tea and the ever-present platter of poppy seed cakes and sandwiches, which were soggy now and looking a bit frayed around the edges. Mrs. Dexter said things like, “You know, I’m afraid Katherine’s had so many gentlemen calling on her lately that she’s going to have to hold a lottery if she ever wants to get married”; and, “That Butler Ames is a darling, a perfect darling, don’t you think so? ”; and, “Did I ever tell you the time Katherine saw her first Angora goat — she was three at the time, or was it four?” Ever polite, Stanley sat there stiff as a post and made the occasional supportive noise in the back of his throat, but otherwise he didn’t have much to say — about progressivism, Butler Ames or anything else.
Finally, at half-past eleven, Katherine crept into the room in a pair of carpet slippers and her mother jumped up as if she’d been bitten and promptly disappeared. “Stanley,” Katherine said, extending her hand, which he rose to take in his, and then she clucked at him as if he were a naughty child or a puppy that’s just peed on the carpet. “Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t see you tonight?” she scolded, wagging a finger at him, and he would have felt miserable, abject, run through with a rusty sword of rejection and humiliation, but for the fact that she was smiling.