It was then, just when everything seemed to be going forward and all the major hurdles had been leapt, that things began to break down. Suddenly Stanley was having palpitations — he couldn’t seem to stop jittering, bouncing up off his feet, shaking out his fingers till they rattled like castanets, twisting his neck and gyrating his head in response to some frenetic inner rhythm — and all he could talk about was Mary Virginia. Mary Virginia and his genitals, that is.
He came bobbing and jittering into the house on Commonwealth Avenue early one morning two weeks or so after the engagement had been announced, his eyes fluttering, his face in flux, talking so fast no one could understand him. He frightened the maid, upset the cook and chased Josephine’s cat all the way up into the rafters of the attic in an excess of zeal. Katherine, who’d been dressing in her room, came out into the hall to see what the commotion was, and she watched Stanley dart past her up the stairs in pursuit of the cat, never even giving her a glance. When she caught up with him on the steps to the attic, he couldn’t seem to explain himself — he was afflicted with logorrhea, the words tripping over one another and piling up end to end, and he was going on and on about something she couldn’t quite catch, aside from the frequent repetition of his sister’s name. She’d never seen him like this — his eyes bugging out, his hair a mess, every cell and fiber of him rushing hell-bent down the tracks like a runaway freight train — and she was frightened. She managed to get him outside, out in the sunshine and fresh air, to try to walk it out of him, whatever it was.
They walked the length of Commonwealth Avenue, from the Public Garden to Hereford Square and back — or actually, it was more of a jog than a walk, Stanley setting an accelerated, stiff-kneed pace and Katherine clinging to his arm and struggling to keep up. The whole while Stanley kept shaking and trembling and running on about Mary Virginia and her illness and some sort of mysterious “whiteness,” as if she were lost in a blizzard somewhere instead of quietly ensconced with her nurse and doctor on a grand and faultless estate in Arkansas. It wasn’t till they’d passed the house for the second time, Stanley wet through with perspiration and the neighbors giving them looks that ranged from shock to alarm to amusement, that Katherine began to discern what he was driving at.
Leaping along, straining to look up into his face, her breathing labored and her mood beginning to fray, she managed to gasp out a little speech. “There’s no mental illness in my family, Stanley,” she wheezed on an insuck of breath. “On my mother’s or my father’s side, so the chances are very remote that our children will suffer, if that’s what’s worrying you, and it is, isn’t it?”
“She’s sick,” he said, never breaking stride. “Very sick.”
“Yes,” she gasped, “I know, and it’s right of you to bring it up now that we’re going to be married, but I really don‘t — can’t we stop here, just for a minute?”
It was as if she’d waved a flag in front of him or given a sudden jerk at a leash — he stopped as abruptly as he’d started, his feet jammed together, one arm clasped in hers, sweat standing out on his brow and his hat soaked under the brim in a dark expanding crescent. “It’s not just that,” he said, and he was talking not to her but to the ground beneath their feet. “It’s my genitals.”
“Your what?” They were stopped on the walk in front of a yard full of roses. Bees dug into the blossoms. The perfume of the flowers wafted out into the street. Everything had such an air of calm and normalcy — except Stanley. Stanley was making faces and staring down at his shoes. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except that two smart young women suddenly emerged from the yard under a trellis of white and yellow roses and gave them a long look before brusquely stepping around them.
“My genitals,” Stanley repeated.
Katherine studied him a moment, his nostrils like two holes drilled in his head, his eyes locked on the ground and every other part of him jerking into motion and relaxing again in a long continuous shudder. She waited till the women were out of earshot. “Yes,” she said. “All right. What about them?”
“I — well — I — what I mean is, maybe they’ve been… damaged.”
“Damaged? ”
“From, you know, from my habits—”
She was a patient woman. And she loved him. But this wasn’t the sort of romance she’d dreamed about, this wasn’t being swept off her feet and wooed with tender intimacies and anticipatory pleasures — this was psychodrama, this was crazy. It was hot and she was perspiring and she’d meant to go out with her mother and look at some lace for her trousseau, and now here she was making a spectacle of herself in the middle of the street and Stanley carrying on over nothing — yet again. She was fed up. The furrow she was unaware of crept into the gap between her eyebrows. “If you’re so worried,” she said, “then why don’t you go see a doctor,” and she turned and stalked off down the street without him.
He called her from his hotel later in the day to tell her he was taking her advice and catching the next train to Chicago to see a specialist and that he’d return at the end of the week and she shouldn’t worry. But by nightfall he was back on her doorstep, Bridget in hysterics, her mother’s face drawn up tight in a knot, and Stanley acting as oddly as he had that morning — or even more oddly. He’d boarded the train and gone as far as New London, he said, still talking as if a howling mob were at his heels and this was the last speech of his life, but then he’d got to thinking about their situation and had changed trains and come back because there were a few things that just couldn’t wait a week — or even another day.
She looked at him a long moment. “What things?” she asked, ushering him into the parlor and closing the door behind them.
He seemed confused, agitated, his movements jerky and clonic. He knocked over a vase of gladioli, water spreading a dark stain across the tabletop, and didn’t even seem to notice. “Things,” he said darkly. “Vital things. ”
She watched the water fan out, seeking the lowest point, and begin a slow, steady drip onto the carpet. She’d made a date with Betty Johnston to go visiting that evening and she was already impatient and exasperated. “You’ll have to be more specific, I’m afraid,” she said. “If I don’t know what these vague ‘things’ are, how can you expect me to discuss them with you?”
He kept shuddering and twitching, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a tightrope walker. “About us,” he said. “About our, about my—”
“Genitals?” she offered.
He averted his face. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Say what? Isn’t that what this is all about? Your genitals? Not to mention hypochondria. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t that the subject under discussion? Didn’t you just leave this morning to go to a specialist and clear up the suspense?” Suddenly she felt very tired. The whole thing seemed hopeless, as if she’d been wrapped up in a blanket and pitched headfirst into the dark river that was Stanley, and no coming up for air. “Listen, Stanley,” she said, and she could hear the rustle of skirts in the hallway, her mother and Bridget listening at the door and fidgeting with their sleeves and buttons, “you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You’re acting crazy, don’t you realize that?”
He stopped his quivering then, automatically and without hesitation, and for the first time he seemed to notice the overturned vase and the dripping water, and when he bent for it she assumed he was going to set it upright, to rectify the problem and make amends. But when he lifted it from the table — heavy leaded crystal with a sharp crenellated edge — and kept lifting it till it was cocked behind his ear like a football, she couldn’t help opening her mouth and letting out a tightly wound shriek of fear and outrage even as the mirror behind her dissolved in a flood of silvered glass.