She didn’t get pregnant. She was aggrieved. She was in tears for a month.
Seventy years later Catherine found it all comically absurd. She had been willful indeed. She had truly been a sexual person only periodically. It had been grotesquely hard in her life to find a good man. Besides, she had never wanted to be married.
She returned from England on the boat and then a train to Billings, Montana, and another home. She arrived early the next morning and Catherine impulsively went straight to the farm and unloaded all of her luggage. Her grandpa was still alive, if barely, and she wanted to take care of him and help him with work. When she arrived he was having an early afternoon snooze on the couch with the Detroit Tigers ball game on the radio. He opened one eye and said to her, “You’re home,” and went back to sleep. He looked very old but then she had been gone for five years. In the kitchen the cook Bertha was cleaning green beans. She looked at Catherine and smiled broadly.
“You’re here! Now I can quit, your grandfather is an ass.”
Catherine merely nodded. She put on her coat and swiftly walked out.
She made the obligatory drive to town to say hello to her father. She was dreading it. Mother had said in a letter that he had been in a bad way since the divorce. She noticed that the bank was closed early in the afternoon and the shades were drawn but then remembered it was Saturday.
The front door was open at their house and her father sat at the dining room table with a glass and half a quart of gin and his journal in front of him. When he saw her he broke into tears. She didn’t remember ever seeing him weep before except tears of rage over her mother or Bobby. It all must have been terribly hard on him, she thought. He had spent his life studying and playing with money and now his wife had run off with a man of ponderous inherited wealth. He had found no way to counter these thoughts except with the emotion of jealousy, gin, and occasional weeping.
“Bobby stopped by while driving someone’s car to Chicago. He looked good but wouldn’t talk to me. I said you were in England and his mother had left and filed for divorce. He only said, ‘Good’ and walked out with some of his wretched books.”
When she left soon after, the divorcée was coming up the walk with a paper sack, likely another quart of gin. She nodded and Catherine nodded back. At least he had someone but sometimes someone can be less than nothing. A few years later when she discovered her father’s poems she thought the better ones were written after her mother left. They were less flowery.
The farm was her home, simply enough. All through high school Catherine helped her grandfather feed and water the cattle and exercise the horses, and the chickens were her special domain. When he saw her off to college Grandpa said to her, “Don’t stay too long. This farm is yours now.”
After she got home from Barnard, her grandpa was nearly ninety and facing the prospect of selling his cows which was a blow to his morale. He couldn’t bear the idea of selling the horses for fear they wouldn’t be taken care of. Occasionally, for reasons of sentiment, Catherine would help him harness the team of horses and ride the stone boat while they dragged him through the far pasture. The horses would automatically stop when they saw a big stone. This very old man would get off the boat and wrestle the stone on, to be unloaded later into a pile behind the barn. A friend of his was the local stonemason and would come out to pick up a load now and then and he and Grandpa would share a pint of whiskey.
Later, in the fifties, the farm behind them to the west came up for sale at $25,000 for 120 acres, a price that Catherine was largely considered a fool for paying at the time, but she never regretted it. She installed a hired man, Clyde, and his young wife in the farmhouse on the new acreage. The wife Clara wept uncontrollably. She had been raised in a trailer and they now lived in a small trailer down the road and despaired of ever living in their own house. Catherine was overwhelmed and had her young lawyer in town cut out the house and five acres and deed it to Clara personally so she would stop worrying that her husband could get fired and she’d be homeless again. Catherine had borrowed the money from her mother to buy the additional farm and she had said to consider it a gift, but Catherine intended to pay it back. Beef prices were fairly high and the pasturage was good on the new place so she would get a lot more feeders in the spring. Clara worked for her two days a week and would bring her little girl Laurel who truly enjoyed the chickens. She would sit on a milk stool in a daze watching them with one of the bird dogs, Belle, who belonged to Catherine’s father, sitting beside her. Catherine borrowed the dog because it didn’t look like it was being fed enough, but told her father that she was thinking of taking up bird hunting. Grandpa had an old shotgun which her father described as a menace and lent her one of his, a pretty little English gun she knew was worth a lot so she vowed to be careful. He wanted to give her lessons but she demurred for the time being, not wanting to hunt with someone full of gin. Meanwhile Clara would always make something for dinner. She was a good cook and after a successful deer season for her husband she made an old-fashioned venison mincemeat pie which was delicious.
Chapter 3
Catherine disliked her neighbor who owned a big ranch to the east. It was the early 1960s and her grandfather had died three years before. Running the farm without him was lonely sometimes but she enjoyed it. The neighbor was a lawyer from Dallas and when he drove into her yard he laughed at the chickens she was raising. That embedded him in the mud forever as far as she was concerned. What a motormouth big shot, she thought. When they were raising money for the library he donated a thousand dollars, more by far than anyone else, so Catherine donated two thousand that she couldn’t afford just to bust his balls. He had built a pointlessly large house with pillars in front, an imitation of a television program. His wife disliked Montana, and his son and daughter preferred to stay in Texas. His loutish friends and business associates came up to fish for trout and to hunt birds and elk. One of them had paid five thousand to a relatively poor kid for a giant bull elk to take back to Texas pretending he had shot it himself. She had once run into the whole group, the Dallas lawyer and his friends, in the grocery store buying a case of liquor and whining about the lack of fine brands. She was wearing a pair of cotton bib overalls which were admittedly tight across her striking butt. Out in front in the parking lot when she leaned over to put her groceries in the car one of the lawyer’s friends whistled and she turned and yelled, “Go to hell, you old creep.” The man blushed and his friends laughed.
In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean. She felt an odd sexual tingle which she attributed to the intensity of the sunlight in the tropics. She thought how chickens needed light to urge them to lay eggs though any kind of light would do. She had made contact with a Barnard friend who was living in Key West with a writer. Jerry had told her that writers came to Key West to misbehave in peace and without criticism. On the way to the hotel Jerry asked the guide to drive them past Hemingway’s house which meant little to her. She liked the stories about Michigan and A Farewell to Arms but his reputation as a bully and alcoholic reminded her uncomfortably of her father when she learned of it. Young men she had known in college who loved Hemingway had taken absurd steps to act manly. All of which was beyond her own comprehension. Farmers were manly without thinking about it. In fact she had never heard one mention the idea. College itself was so mechanistic that maybe the young men were only seeking a release.