Still, he kept going. He was in shock, so hurt and mortified he felt like a burnt-out cinder, immolated in shame, and he had no other thought than to make it home as quickly as he could. He hurtled through the night, spooking foxes, skunks and opossums and striking terror in the breast of every slumbering horse and stertorous cow within earshot, and through it all he was picturing the yellow pine camp on Saranac Lake with its six-foot-high fireplace and overstuffed couches and a hundred rustic nooks and niches where he could burrow deep and lick his festering wounds.
Katherine had rejected him. That was the fact of his life. It was his sorrow and his burden and it wet him through and hurled wind in his teeth and basted him in mud. Inevitably, though, as the night wore on and the car rocked and lurched its way through the storm, the thunder of the elements and the even, unbroken whine of the engine began to soothe him. Sure. He was making good time, conquering the night, alone and adventuring, and he got as far as Westborough before he took a wrong turn, blew out both front tires simultaneously and sank to the axles in an evil-smelling plastic mud that sucked the boots from his feet the minute he abandoned the car.
There were no lights anywhere. But he labored on, barefooted, and the night was hallucination enough for him. He followed one road to another and on to the next till it was dawn and still raining and a farm-house loomed up out of the gloom like an island at sea. The farmer obliged him by taking him back into town — which he’d somehow managed to circumvent by a good five miles during his nocturnal ramblings — and then wishing him the very best of everything as he stood shivering and shoeless on the platform at the Westborough train station. He caught the first train to Albany and hired a man and a coach to take him up to Saranac as he huddled sleepless on the cold leather seat, Katherine’s face slipping in and out of his consciousness and a whole host of unattributed voices chanting in his ears till he had to put his hands up and force them shut.
Naturally, he caught cold.
And his mother, brisk and censorious, orbited his bed day and night as if all the doctors and serving girls on earth had been carried off by the plague. She forced beef broth on him every fifteen minutes, deluged him with syrups and tonics, scalded him with mentholated vapors and hot water bottles. “It all comes of womanizing,” she scolded, wiping his nose with a camphor-scented handkerchief.
“Womanizing? I wasn‘t—”
“Well, what do you call it then? Certainly not courting in any sense of the word as I know it, not with a young woman your own mother has never laid eyes on in her life.”
“But I just met her—”
“And another thing — I’ve been asking around this past week and I’m told that your Miss Katherine Dexter is a cold fish if there ever was one, the sort of spoiled young woman who wouldn’t even give a proper tip to her own mother’s maid. She’s entirely scientific, is what I hear, practically an atheist, like this odious Englishman with his descent of man and his monkeys and all the rest of it, and she had no more idea of worshiping the Lord than a naked aborigine.”
Stanley breathed vapors and swallowed broth, watching the leaves shrivel and fall outside his window and listening to the lake slap mournfully at the shingle, and every day he wrote Katherine a letter, sometimes as long as twenty or thirty pages, and every day he had one of the servants take it down to the post office. He didn’t have an opportunity to gaze in the mirror much — his mother insisted he stay in bed — but as he lay there brooding he began to see how ridiculous he must look in Katherine’s eyes. He felt he had to explain himself to her, and the beginning of any credible explanation had to take into account his shortcomings — if he wanted to be honest with her. And he did want to be honest. He had to be. Because this was no mere flirtation or passing fancy — this was the whole world and everything in it.
One of his shorter letters, which ran to fifteen pages, painstakingly indited in an unrestrained flood tide of tottering consonants and tail-lashing vowels, began like this, without date or salutation:
I know you know I am as useless as a stone in your path, and no one is more conscious of that than I, a man who has never accomplished a thing in all his twenty-nine years, a blot on society, a parasite who never earns a cent by the sweat of his brow but feeds off the poor and oppressed in the name of “Capitalism.” I have no talent for anything, I’ve never cultivated my mind, I’m consumed by degrading thoughts all the day long and half the nights, too, and live in a putrid scum of sin. I cannot blame you for refusing me. In fact, I applaud you and urge you to prefer Butler Ames or any other man over me, because I esteem you above all women and want only the best for you. Life to me is as dull as the grave and I live only to beg and pray for your happiness. You are all and everything to me and I hope you will believe me when I tell you I am not fit to lick the dirt from your shoes, if any dirt would ever adhere to them, which I doubt…
He realized he’d gone a bit overboard, but then once he fixated on something he just couldn’t seem to let it go, and his letters became more and more slavish and self-denigrating until even Fu Manchu would have seemed wholesome compared to the Stanley Stanley exposed.
Katherine’s replies were brief and never alluded to his letters, not in the slightest. She wrote of the weather, her mother’s latest contretemps with a milliner or maître d‘, the gustatory habits of the checkered garter snake. She didn’t specifically prohibit him from visiting (though she reminded him of how deeply absorbed she was in her studies), and so he saw his opportunity and took the train for Boston as soon as his mother let him out of bed. The first time — in early October — he stayed on for a week, and then, at the end of November, for two weeks more. He was rewarded for his perseverance by Mrs. Dexter—“Please, Stanley, call me Josephine”—who sat with him in the parlor every night through both of his visits, regaling him with reminiscences of her youth as he worked his way dutifully through the soggy fish-paste sandwiches and poppy seed cakes and pot after pot of undrinkable tea. But it was worth it, because Katherine seemed genuinely pleased to see him, shining like a seal and flush with her accumulation of knowledge, and when she could squeeze a social hour or two into her schedule, she permitted him to take her out to the theater or a concert.
At Christmas, she came to Chicago to stay with a girlfriend while her mother was in Europe, and Stanley was elated. He and Nettie had retreated to Rush Street when the weather turned bitter in the Adirondacks, and though he hadn’t felt up to going back to work yet he’d begun sketching again and had done half a dozen portraits of Katherine in a brown wash over chalk and brown ink — all from a single photograph she’d given him. Of course, he was no good as an artist and had no right to attempt a portrait of her — it would take a Pintoricchio or a Cellini to do justice to her — but still he thought he’d managed to capture something she might find interesting and he’d been wrestling with the idea of another visit to Boston to present her with one of the sketches. Or maybe two of them. Or all six. He could barely restrain himself, bombarding her with flowers and telegrams, sick with the thought that Butler Ames or some other oily competitor was getting the jump on him and yet not wanting to seem overeager, when he got her letter informing him that she was coming to Chicago on the nineteenth to visit Nona Martin, of the upholstering Martins, and he melted away in a sizzle of anticipation like a pat of butter in a hot pan.