Her mother, the claws of disappointment raking her face, agreed that yes, it might be for the better if she were to go to Europe for a while to think things over. But it wasn’t the end of the world — everyone had second thoughts, “even your own mother, and look what a saint your father turned out to be.” It was normal — entirely normal — and nothing to cry over. So she should dry up her tears and pack her things and think of it as the vacation she so rightfully deserved after all those grinding hours she’d put in at the Institute. That’s right. Go ahead now. And hush.
The next morning, while Stanley was on his way to Chicago to consult his specialist about the arcana of his body and mind, Katherine directed Bridget and the two younger maids to begin packing her things for an indefinite stay at Prangins. She’d made up her mind — it was the only thing to do — and yet why did she feel so sick and miserable? She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat breakfast or lunch. She ached and creaked like a ship at sea, converting dry handkerchiefs to wet ones, her eyes and nose running in spate, and she spent the afternoon in bed with a headache. The maids tiptoed by the door and the clothing whispered in the hallway, the hatboxes, the steamer trunks, all these particles of her life in sudden motion. She lay there through the long afternoon, watching the curtains trace the sun, and she’d never felt so desolated in her life, not since her father and brother left this earth.
But there was no sense in crying — Stanley was too much for her, too big a reclamation project, she could see that now, and everything he was, the vision she had of him, lay shattered on the parlor floor. She had to get away, she knew that, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Because even while she grieved and fought to steel herself against him and the kind of life she’d hoped for, she kept thinking of him in the grip of his mother, of Nettie, the vampire who would drain him till he was a withered doddering white-haired husk of himself sitting at the foot of her deathbed and the dust gathering like snow. Katherine couldn’t let her do that to Stanley — no man deserved such a fate — and what’s more, she couldn’t just walk off and leave the playing field to Nettie. She was a Dexter, and the Dexters never quit on anything.
Suddenly she was up and scattering the maids, bending over the trunks and suitcases and unpacking in a raw fury of motion, each dress and skirt and shirtwaist returned to its hanger a lightening of the load, but that was no good either, and before long she found herself slowing and slowing until the process began to reverse itself and she was packing all over again. And why? Because she was going to Switzerland, to Geneva, to Prangins, and she was going to stay there until all this was sorted out and she could look at herself in the mirror and say that nothing in the world could compare to being Mrs. Stanley Robert McCormick. And if she couldn’t? If she honestly couldn’t? Well, there was always Butler Ames — or the Butler Ames who would come after him.
The shadows were lengthening on the wall and the house had fallen into a bottomless well of silence when Bridget stuck her head in the door. Did madame need assistance? Katherine looked up. There were dresses everywhere, an avalanche of them, hats, coats, scarves, shoes. “Yes,” she said, “yes,” and by nightfall order reigned, everything packed, filed and arranged and her passage booked on a steamer leaving for Cherbourg three days hence.
How Stanley got wind of it, she would never know. But as the gangplank was drawn up and the anchor weighed and her mother and the servants standing solemnly amongst the crowd and waving handkerchiefs in a slow sad sweep, he suddenly appeared, a foot taller than anyone on the quay, a giant among men, hurtling through the crowd on the full tilt of his manic energy. She was hanging over the rail with a thousand other passengers, a handkerchief pressed tragically to her face and one white-gloved hand waving, waving, already bound over to the smell of the sea, coal smoke, dead fish and third-class cookery. And there he was, Stanley, Stanley Robert McCormick, standing tall in the June sun, shouting up to her amidst the pandemonium of voices and engines and the two irrevocable blasts of the ship’s horn.
“Katherine!” he was shouting, and she could see his face and its diminished features as if from a cliff or the edge of a cloud, and somehow, even from that height, she could hear his voice piercing through the din as clearly as if he were standing beside her. “It’s all right,” he cried, waving something above his head, a sheet of paper, some sort of certificate, the boat drawing massively back now till it seemed as if it was the dock that was moving and she was stuck fast. “I can have”—and here the ship’s horn intervened, the rumbling metallic basso obliterating all thought and comprehension and Stanley’s voice trailing off into the faintest persistent whine of desperation and hope—“I can have children!”
6. OF DEATH AND BEGONIAS
O‘Kane was eating a steak at Menhoff’s on a wind-scoured November night when news of the Armistice came over the telegraph — belatedty, because the wires had been down since morning. The wind had kept people in, but there were a few couples having dinner under the aegis of Cody’s chaste white candles and the usual crowd out in the barroom swallowing pickled eggs and gnawing pretzels while their beers sizzled yellow and their shots of whiskey and bourbon stood erect beside them like good soldiers. Nothing short of the apocalypse would have kept that crowd from exercising their elbows, and O’Kane meant to join them after a while, but for the moment he was enjoying his steak and his French-cut potatoes and his first piquant glass of beer while the wind buffeted the windows and made the place feel snug as a ship’s cabin.
He was reading a bit in the paper about the completion of Las Tejas, a new Montecito palace modeled after the Casino of the sixteenth-century Villa Farnese in Viterbo, Italy, when Cody Menhoff himself came bursting out of the kitchen in a white apron singing, “The War’s over! The War’s over!” Actually, the dishwasher was the first to hear of it, beating a procession of shopowners, drummers and tomato-faced drunks by a matter of minutes. He’d been out back dumping a load of trash when he heard a hoot and looked up to see a pack of boys hurtling down the alley in a scramble of legs and white-capped knees, a flag flapping behind them like wash on a line. “What’s the news?” he shouted, though he’d already guessed, and one of the boys stopped banging two trashcan lids together long enough to tell him that the Huns had made it official. He’d relayed the news to Cody, and Cody, a big Dutchman with a face like a butterchurn, roared through the place and set up drinks on the house for all comers.
Before long there was a string of cars going up and down the street honking their horns, and the front room began to fill up, wind or no wind — and this wasn’t just a capricious breeze, this was a sundowner, the dried-out breath of the season that came tearing down out of the mountains in a regular cyclone, bane to all hats and shake roofs and the brittle rasping fronds of the palm trees. But there was no wind inside Menhoff‘s, except what the crowd was generating itself. People were cheering and making toasts and speeches and then somebody sat down at the piano and struck up the National Anthem and everybody sang along in a bibulous roar, and when they’d gone through it three times they sang “God Bless America,” “Yankee Doodle” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It was heady and glorious, and though O’Kane had planned on limiting himself to two shots only (things had been slipping away from him lately and he was trying to curb himself) there was no stopping him after that. He got into the spirit of things, slapping backs, crowing out jokes and limericks, dancing an improvised jig with Mart, who’d turned up just past nine with Roscoe and a glowing high-crowned face of victory. By ten O‘Kane was off in a corner, singing the old sad songs in a fractured moan of a voice, and when Roscoe came for him the next morning he had to vomit twice before he could get his suit on and go out to see how Mr. McCormick was receiving the news.