When the train arrived, Stanley was waiting at the station with his chauffeur and his new car, a Packard equipped with a tonneau cover for the passenger seat. He was standing there like a sentinel when she stepped down from the train, his arms laden with flowers, three boxes of candy and the most recent of the portraits, wrapped in brown paper. The train was fifteen minutes late and he’d been practicing his smile so long his gums had dried out and somehow managed to stick to the inner lining of his mouth, so he had a bit of trouble with the speech he’d rehearsed. “Katherine,” he cried, taking her hand in an awkward fumble of flowers and candy while the chauffeur negotiated the transfer of her luggage from the porter, “I can’t begin to tell you how much this means to me, your coming here to Chicago — your visit, I mean — because this is the high point of my miserable, foul, utterly worthless existence, and I. I—”
She was wearing a fur coat and the smell of the body-heated air caught in its grip was intoxicating. She lifted the veil of her hat to reveal a smile and two glad and glowing eyes. “Stanley!” she exclaimed. “What a surprise! It’s so thoughtful of you to come meet me, but you didn’t have to go out of your way, really you didn’t.” And then she let out a kind of squeal and fell into the arms of a girl in a fox coat with hair the color of old rope and Stanley felt as if he’d been rejected all over again. But no, this was Nona Martin and she was pleased to meet him — Katherine had told her so much about him — and pleased too to accept a ride in his motorcar.
Stanley was lit up like a bonfire, electrified—Katherine has told me so much about you — ashe squeezed in beside the girls, struggling all the while with the framed sketch in its heavy brown wrapping. Katherine was right there, right there beside him, and he could smell her perfume and the sweet mint of her breath. “For you,” he said, handing her the portrait in a confusion of wrists and elbows and the constricting bulk of coats and mufflers and gloves, “I–I hope you won’t be, well, I hope you — I mean, I, uh, I took the liberty of drawing, uh, you—”
She smiled her secret thin-lipped smile, tore away the paper and held the portrait high up to the light as the car banged away over the streets like a roller coaster and all three of them had to hold onto their hats. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and she turned the smile on him now and showed him her teeth, the teeth he loved, and the other girl came into the picture suddenly, her wide grinning seraphic face looming over Katherine’s shoulder, and she was cooing praise too. And Stanley? Well, it was winter in Chicago, the sun weak as milk, the wind howling, ice everywhere, but it was high summer inside of him and all the boats beating across the lake in full sail.
Even then, though, even as he sailed through the streets on the fresh breeze that was Katherine, the heavy seas were building. His mother wasn’t going to let him go without a fight, and when Katherine and Miss Martin came to dinner two nights later, the storm broke in all its fury. Nettie had insisted on a formal eight-course dinner and a guest list of eighteen, including Favill and Bentley and their wives, Cyrus Jr. and his wife, Missy Hammond, Anita (who’d been a widow going on eight years now) and an assortment of dried-up female religious fanatics in their sixties and seventies who hadn’t found anything pleasant to say to anyone since the Battle of Bull Run. She sat at the head of the table, while Cyrus took up the honorary position at the far end, and she seated Katherine across from Stanley and as close to herself as she could bear — that is, with a buffer of one crabbed Presbyterian mummy on her immediate right and another on her left.
The soup had barely touched the table when she cleared her throat to get Katherine’s attention and said, in a voice that was meant to carry all the way down to Cyrus’s end of the table, “And so, Miss Dexter, perhaps, as a scientist, you’d like to give us your opinion of Mr. Charles Darwin and his perversion of everything God tells us in the Bible?”
Katherine looked into Stanley’s eyes a moment and he could see the steel there, case-hardened and inflexible, before she turned to his mother, looking past Mrs. Tuggle, the mummy on her right. “My training has been in the sciences, yes, Mrs. McCormick, and I do tend to take a scientific view of phenomena beyond our ken, but I must remind you that Darwin’s theories are only that: theories.”
There was a silence. Every conversation had died. Anita was staring, Cyrus Jr. fussing with his shirt studs. Favill smirked. The mummies faintly nodded their wizened heads.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Nettie had knitted her hands in front of her, as if she were praying for strength. “Do you believe in all this sacrilegious bunk or don’t you?”
Katherine sighed. Lifted the water glass to her lips, took a sip and then set it down again, in perfect control. “Since you ask, Mrs. McCormick, I have to say that I do believe in Darwin’s theories as to the origin of our species through evolution. I find his arguments utterly convincing.”
Stanley was about to say something, anything, a comment on the weather or the soup or the way the electric lights were holding up, just to throw his mother off the scent, but she was too quick for him.
“And this Negro music the young seem so eager to dance to, this ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and all the rest of it, I suppose you find this sort of thing proper, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have much time for dancing, Mrs. McCormick,” Katherine said, and she glanced up and down the length of the table before coming back to her again. “I’m very busy with my studies.”
“Yes,” Nettie said, all but spitting it out, “so I’m told. Snakes, isn’t it?”
The following afternoon, in a bleak cold rinsed-out light that made the whole city look as if it had been sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan, Stanley and his mother escorted Katherine to Harold’s place in the landau — Nettie wouldn’t dream of setting foot in a motorcar — and had a tense lunch with Harold and Edith. The verbal sparring resumed over fricasseed chicken, boiled onions, beef tongue and ice cream, and continued through the farewells and out into the carriage. Stanley was at a loss. He should have been ebullient, irrepressible, kicking up his heels and shouting hosannas, because here were the two people he cared most about in the world, together at last, but instead he felt as if he’d gone into battle, a bewildered infantryman caught between opposing generals. “And your family, Katherine? I hear your father has passed on,” Nettie said, “and your mother never entertains,” and Katherine came back with, “Tell me about your other daughter, the older one — Mary Virginia?”
They’d just turned into Rush Street when Nettie suddenly rapped at the window and ordered the carriage to a stop. Perplexed, the driver climbed down and came to the window. “Ma‘am?” he said, showing his teeth in a nervous little grin.
“Where are you taking us?”
“Home, ma‘am. Six-seventy-five Rush Street.”
“Rush Street? Have you lost you senses? We have a guest with us, and she needs to be transported all the way back out to Astor Street, to the Martin residence.”
“But Mother,” Stanley was saying, “I told Stevens to drop you first, since we’re so close — I mean, there’s no need for you to—”
“Drop me? Whatever are you talking about? We’ve invited Miss Dexter, and we shall see her home. Really, Stanley, I’m surprised at you — where are your manners?”
“No, I, well — I was going to, well, see Miss Dexter home myself, after I, after we—”