“Nonsense.”
Katherine held her peace. Stevens stood there in the cold, the horses stamping and shuddering, the wind sending a fusillade of leaves and papers down the street in a sudden blast. Stanley was seated between the two women, and he didn’t dare look at Katherine, not on this battleground, not now. “I was only thinking of you, Mother, what with your heart condition and knowing how hard it is on your legs and the circulation to your, well, your feet, to, to sit cooped up like this, and I just, well, I just thought you’d be more comfortable at home.”
He watched his mother’s face tighten a notch and then suddenly let go, like an overwound spring. “All right,” she sighed, and now she was the invalid, the dying matriarch (who would, paradoxically, live another eighteen years in perfect health), too sick and enervated to fight. “It’s very thoughtful of you, Stanley. Drive on, Stevens,” she ordered in a diminished voice. And she was patient, biting her tongue until they’d arrived and Stanley was helping her up the walk and into the vestibule of the house while Katherine sat wrapped in her furs in the coach and watched her own breath crystallize in the stinging air. Then, just as the door shut behind them and Stanley was helping her off with her coat, his mother murmured, “Yes, Stanley, you’re right — and you’re such a dear to think of your poor old mother. Obviously, Stevens can see Miss Dexter home on his own and there’s no need at all for us to bother, with the weather so bitter — and that wind. It could even snow, that’s what they’re saying.”
“But, but”—Stanley was holding his mother’s coat out away from him as if it were the pelt of some animal he’d just bludgeoned and skinned—“I wanted to, that is I intended to take Katherine, I mean, Miss Dexter — to see her, I mean, home, that is—”
His mother turned a trembling face to him and took hold of his arm. “I won’t hear of it.”
“But no, no, you don’t understand. Katherine’s waiting for me.”
“Nonsense. You’re staying right here. You’ll catch your death out in that wind, and besides, it’s not proper you being all alone with her like that without a chaperone. Oh, maybe these modern girls think nothing of it, but believe you me, I, for one, won’t stand for it.”
Before he could think, Stanley had jerked his arm away. The blood was in his face, and he could hear the tick of the steam radiators and the faint sound of carolers off down the street somewhere. “I’m going,” he said, “and don’t try to stop me.”
His mother’s eyes boiled. Her face was like the third act of a tragedy. She swung an imaginary sword and cleaved the head from his body. “What,” she said, “you defy me?”
Stanley clenched his jaw. “Yes.”
And then they were struggling, actually wrestling at the doorway in plain sight of Katherine, his mother clutching at his arm as if she were drowning amid the crashing waves she herself had summoned up, and Stanley tore his arm away again, and he didn’t want to hurt her, not physically or emotionally, but when he broke loose she collapsed to the floor with a sob that sucked all the air out of him. It was the moment of truth. The moment he’d been awaiting for thirty years. He drew himself up, squared his shoulders and cinched the muffler tight against his throat. “I’m going now,” he said.
Katherine was waiting for him. Her eyes never left him as he emerged from the house, strode up the walk and climbed back into the carriage. He felt heroic, felt he could do anything — climb the Himalayas, beat back invading hordes, mush dogs across the frozen tundra. “Katherine,” he said, and she rustled beside him, her face turned to his, the carriage moving now and the rest of the afternoon and the city and everything in it left to them and them alone, “Katherine, I just wanted to, to—”
“Yes?” Her voice was lush and murmurous, floating up to meet his out of the depths of the gently swaying compartment. A fading watery light flickered at the windows. Stanley dreamed he was in a submarine, rising up and up, insulated from everything.
“Well, to tell you—”
“Yes?”
“About Debs, Debs and what he said in the paper the other — the other, well, day. It was the most significant thing I‘ve—” but he couldn’t go on. Not really. Not anymore.
In February, in Boston, they became secretly engaged. Stanley had come down by train and set himself up with rooms at the Copley Plaza just after Groundhog Day. After a week of hemming and hawing and discoursing on Jack London’s childhood, labor unions, black lung disease and the will he’d executed leaving all his moneys and possessions to be divided equally among the 14,000 McCormick workers, he put another hypothetical proposal to her and she amazed and exalted him by accepting. But only on the condition that they keep the engagement confidential till the end of the term, because the papers were sure to take it up — BOSTON SOCIALITE TO WED M‘CORMICK HEIR — and it would just be too much of a distraction in light of her thesis and exams. They had a celebratory dinner with Josephine, who swore to keep their secret and delivered a breathless monologue on the cruciality—Was that a word? of preserving the Dexter line, not to mention the Moores and McCormicks—And who were his mother’s people? — and how she hoped Katherine wouldn’t stop at four or five children, what with the threat of disease in the world today, and did Stanley know how they’d lost Katherine’s brother, the sweetest boy there ever was?
He did. And he hung his head and pulled mournfully at his cuffs and offered Josephine his handkerchief, but he was soaring, absolutely, no dogs in the mirror now. Katherine loved him. Incredibly. Improbably. Beyond all doubt or reason. He mooned at her across the table through the soup and fish courses and kept on mooning and beaming and winking till the dessert was in crumbs and the coffee cups drained, and after she’d pecked a goodnight kiss to the hollow of his right cheek, he phoned up an old friend from Princeton and went out to drink champagne into the small hours of the morning.
The next afternoon he was back at Katherine’s door, pale and shaking, his head stuffed full of gauze and his eyes aching in their sockets. No one was home and the maid wouldn’t let him in, so he sat on the stoop in a daze and watched a skin of ice thicken over a puddle in the street until Katherine came home and found him there. “I can’t let you do this,” he said, rising from the cold stone in a delirium of shame and self-abnegation.
She was in her furs and a scarf, the brim of her hat faintly rustling in a wind that came up the street from the Bay. “Do what?” she said. “What are you talking about? Her smile faded. ”And what are you doing out here in this weather — do you want to catch your death?“
Slouching, miserable, crapulous, chilled to the bone, his veins plugged with suet and his fingertips dead to all sensation, he could only croak out the words: “Marry me.”
She puzzled a minute, her bag and books clutched tight in her arms, her eyes working, her hat brim fluttering, and then she decided he was joking. “Marry you?” she echoed, talking through a grin. “Are you asking me again? Or is that the imperative form of the verb?”
“No, I… I didn’t mean that. I mean, I can’t let you do this to yourself, throw your life away, on, on someone like me.”
She tried to make light of it, tried to slip her arm through his and lead him up the stairs, but he broke away, his face working. “Stanley?” she said. And then: “It’s all right now. Calm down. Come on, let’s discuss it inside where it’s warm.”
“No.” He stood there shivering, fitfully clenching and unclenching his hands. There was ice in his mustache where his breath had condensed and frozen. “I don’t deserve you. I’m no good. I’ve never — I won’t ever… Didn’t you read my letters?”