by T. C. Boyle
“Stanley!” she called, but he was beyond hearing, already swallowed up in the milling crowd, already lost.
She didn’t see him again till late that night—past ten—and all through her reunion with her mother and dinner and the unwrapping of the little gifts Josephine had brought her back from Paris she was sick with worry. She was sure Stanley had gone off and got himself in some sort of trouble (she thought of the old man at the lake and what might have happened if he hadn’t been able to swim)—trouble no amount of money could get him out of. He was seething. Out of control. Ready to lash out at anyone who got in his way, however unknowingly or innocently. And while her mother nattered on about Prangins and Madame Fleury and how the wedding was still the talk of the village, all Katherine could think of was the police. Should she call them? But what would she say—that her husband was lost? That Stanley Robert McCormick, with all his savoir faire and talent and wealth, couldn’t be trusted on the public streets? That he was mad and disoriented and suffering from sexual hypochondriacal neurasthenia?
She broke down in the middle of one of her mother’s stories about Emily Esterbrook, of the Worcester Esterbrooks, who’d had the stateroom across from hers on the passage back and could whistle the second violin part to Beethoven’s Harp Quartet—all the way through—without missing a note. “Emily’s daughter is engaged to the nicest man,” her mother was saying, when suddenly Katherine began to sob and she couldn’t seem to stop, not even when Stanley finally came banging up the stairs.
“Stanley,” Josephine cried, rising from her chair to greet him, “how nice to see you again,” but then she faltered. Stanley stood there in the middle of her mother’s parlor with the strangest look on his face, as if he didn’t recognize the place at all—or the people in it. There was a smudge of oil or grease on his forehead and the flesh round his right eye was puffy and discolored, as if just that smallest part of him had begun to decay. His jacket had suffered too, the left sleeve hanging by a thread and the right gone altogether. What looked to be blood was crusted round the elbow of the exposed shirtsleeve.
“But Stanley, what’s happened?” Josephine exclaimed, crossing the room to take him by the hand, and she was thinking of her own son, her own dead son, all sympathy and maternal solace, and Katherine’s heart went out to her. As for Stanley—her own reaction to him, that is—she was paralyzed, utterly paralyzed. She couldn’t say What? or How? or even open her mouth. “Here,” Josephine was crooning, “let me see. Here, under the light.”
At first, in the first moment her mother touched him, Stanley seemed to acquiesce, bowing his head and relaxing his shoulders, but then all at once he jerked his hand away as if he’d been bitten. “You stupid old woman!” he shouted, every cord of his throat flexed and straining. “You stupid interfering old woman, don’t you touch me, don’t you dare touch me!”
“Stanley!” Katherine gasped, and suddenly she’d found her voice, angry now as she watched her mother’s face collapse—the kindest woman in the world and she meant nothing but kindness—sore and angry and ready to put an end to this... this insanity. “Stanley, you apologize this instant!”
But he turned on her now, out of control, out of anybody’s control, even his own, his face a whipping rag of rage. “Shut up, you bitch!”
In the morning, early, before anyone was stirring, they went out to Brookline in a private carriage, Stanley sunk so deep in the cushions he was all but invisible from the street, his long legs tented before him, his head and shoulders slouched at the uncomfortable level of Katherine’s buttocks. Both his cheekbones had swollen overnight—he’d been beaten, beaten savagely, she could see that now—and it gave him a look of squint-eyed inscrutability, as if he’d been transformed into a Tatar tribesman while he slept. He said nothing. Not a word. No explanations, no apologies. As soon as they got home, she put him to bed and he slept all through that day and the night and morning that followed.
Then came the procession of psychiatrists, neurologists and pathologists, an unending parade of them marching through the parlor of the Brookline house, tapping, probing and auscultating her shrinking husband, holding up pictures and geometric forms for his comment, questioning him closely about current events and throwing their arms over his shoulder and suggesting a nice walk around the garden. Katherine was frightened. Stanley seemed to be getting progressively worse, slipping away from her, and no one seemed capable of touching him—each physician who came to the door undermined the opinion of his predecessor, as if it were all some elaborate medical chess match. She needed a plan of action, a line of inquiry and therapy to pursue, but all she got was confusion. Outside, the trees stood in tatters, winter advancing, the light fading, the wind gathering, and nothing settled. She wasn’t sleeping well. Meals were a torment. She couldn’t exercise, couldn’t read, couldn’t think. In her desperation, she wired Nettie, hoping for some insight, some shred of wisdom, sympathy, anything. The reply was curt: YOU‘VE MADE YOUR BED STOP NOW LIE IN IT.
The last of the doctors, a leonine general practitioner with white hairs growing out of his nose and ears, was the only one able to reach Stanley—at least at first. Dr. Putnam had been recommended by a friend of Josephine, and though he didn’t know Charcot from Mesmer or Freud from Bloch, in his forty-seven years in the medical profession he’d encountered just about everything, including dementia in all its forms and the secret hysteria that made women hang themselves in closets. He came up the steps jauntily enough, considering he was in his seventies, and before he had his hat and gloves off he’d challenged Stanley to a game of checkers. The two of them played wordlessly through the afternoon and into the evening, and the next morning at eight the doctor appeared with two iron posts and a set of horseshoes under his arm. All morning the posts clanked as he and Stanley studied and released their shoes, and the only other sound was the low murmur of their voices totting up the score.
The next day, the old doctor didn’t appear till nearly three in the afternoon—he’d had to make the rounds of his other patients, he explained, and Mrs. Trusock had kept him with her shingles—but Stanley had been out all morning in a cold wind, flinging his horseshoes at the unyielding stake, over and over again. They played till dark, and then the doctor, warming himself by the fire with a cup of tea before heading home to his wife and supper, called Katherine into the room. She found the two of them drawn up to the hearth in a pair of straight-backed chairs, their knees practically touching. “Stanley,” the doctor said when Katherine had settled herself in the armchair across from them, “you’re as crafty a checkers player as I’ve seen and a deadeye shot at horseshoes. My advice to you, sir, is to find yourself a hobby and pursue it—does wonders for the nerves. Tell me, what do you like, in the way of hobbies, that is?”
Stanley made no reply.
“Nothing?” The old man canted his head, as if listening for a response from the next room. “Well,” he said, smacking his lips over the tea and giving Katherine a quick penetrating look, “I’d prescribe German and fencing lessons. Something you can sink your teeth into. And useful too. Nothing more useful than German in today’s world, and the fencing, well, it will give you some discipline and rigor, and that’s just what you need to take your mind off your troubles. Business troubles, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so.” He set down his teacup with elaborate care and rose from the chair. “I’ll stop in to see how you’re doing in a week or so—and I’ll bring my sabre along too.... Well,” he said, smacking his lips again and looking round the room as if he’d just healed all the lepers of Calcutta in one stroke, “what can I say but auf Wiedersehen!”
For the next several days Stanley was very quiet. Twice Katherine found him out in the yard, brooding over the extemporized horseshoe pit, but when she asked him about it—if he’d like her to play him a match—he wouldn’t give her the courtesy of a reply. One night, soon after, it snowed; Stanley hung the horseshoes on a nail in the basement and never mentioned them again. Christmas came and went—Stanley’s fa
vorite season—and he hardly seemed to notice. He didn’t send out cards, he was so unenthusiastic about the decorations that Katherine and the maid wound up trimming the tree, and their exchange of presents was perfunctory to say the least. They spent a quiet New Year’s mewed up in the house, barely talking to one another, while everyone else was dancing and visiting. Stanley brooded. Katherine was miserable.
At the end of the first week of January they went into Boston, Katherine to see about her research work at the Institute and Stanley to locate and purchase the foils he would need for fencing. They had a late breakfast with her mother and Stanley didn’t have two words to say the whole time, but at least he was tractable and outwardly calm, and then they took a walk down Commonwealth Avenue, just as they had when they were lovers two years before.
Stanley was very solemn and he held himself with a kind of fanatic rigidity, his chest thrust out so far the buttons of his overcoat seemed ready to give way. She tried to make small talk, more as a way of reassuring herself than anything else, but after a while she gave it up and made do with the morning, the briskness of the air and the gentle pressure of her husband’s arm in her own. German and fencing, she was thinking. As ridiculous as the idea had first sounded to her, she’d now begun to warm to it—maybe it would help focus Stanley in the way the checkers and horseshoes had. Maybe the old ghost of a country G.P. knew more than the experts, maybe he was right, maybe he was. Just then, just as she began to feel that things might turn out right after all, Stanley began to drag his foot—his right foot—as if he’d been shot in the leg. She tried to ignore it at first—it was a passing quirk, she was sure of it—but after they’d gone a block, people staring, his foot scraping rhythmically at the concrete, the pressure ever greater on her arm till it felt as if she were supporting his entire weight, she had to say something.
“Stanley, dear, are you all right?” she asked, slowing her pace to accommodate him. “Are you feeling tired? Or cold? Would you like to go back now?”
He pulled up short then and looked at her in surprise, as if he didn’t know how she’d become attached to his arm. His face was working and she had the strangest fancy that he was drifting away from her like a helium-filled balloon and that if she let go, even for an instant, he’d recede into the clouds. “I can‘t,” he said. “You see, I’ve got—got to find a German teacher. That’s where I’m going.”
“But your leg—?”
“My leg?”
“Yes. You were limping. I thought you’d got a stone in your shoe,or—”
He gently disengaged himself from her arm and tipped his hat. “Auf Wiedersehen,” he said, and he went off down the street in a peculiar slouching hobble, dragging his right foot all the way.
It was a repetition of the scene at the pier and she was afraid for him—anything could happen—but she knew enough to understand that she couldn’t stop him now, short of putting a collar and leash on him, and she still fanned that dim little coal of a hope: the German teacher. Of course. Why not? She went on to MIT and at two she took a cab to the restaurant where they’d arranged to meet for lunch, but no Stanley. No Stanley at two or two-fifteen or two-thirty either. She waited until three and then she left a note with the maître d’ and went back to the Institute.
It was dark by the time she returned to her mother‘s, only to discover that Josephine was out, and she settled into a chair with Wallace and read about natural selection amongst the mammalian species of Borneo and watched the clock. Sometime later—at seven or thereabout—the bell rang downstairs and she heard the maid tripping through the hallway to answer it. This was succeeded by a confusion of voices—Stanley’s, she recognized Stanley‘s—and a thunder of footsteps coming up the stairs. She rose from her chair and her heart was flapping like a sheet in the wind: what now?
A moment later Stanley appeared at the parlor door, a slight embarrassed-looking man in a gray overcoat and gold-rimmed spectacles at his side. Stanley had his hand on the man’s upper arm and he wore a look of transport on his face, of rapture, as if he’d found the very key to existence. “My—my German teacher,” he announced.
The man in his grip seemed to shrink away from him. “I’m very sorry,” he said through the impediment of a heavy accent while lifting his eyes to Katherine‘s, “sorry to intrude on you this way.” He looked to Stanley, but Stanley was oblivious. “My name is Schneerman, and I teach at the Deutsche Schule, and, uh, this gentleman, your husband, I take it, well—he was very persuasive. I give him my card. I tell him that I am expected home to dinner with my wife—and here his voice cracked—”and, and my children, but he is very insistent.“
“Deutsche Schule,” Stanley repeated. “Das Bettchen. Der Tisch. Ich bin gut. Wie geht es Ihnen?”
Katherine moved across the room and tried to separate her husband from the German teacher, who’d gone white and begun to breathe rapidly and shallowly, as if he were having some sort of attack. She laid a hand on Stanley’s arm and said, as casually as she could, “You must be exhausted, both of you. Here, sit down, won’t you, Mr. Schneerman?”
Stanley was in a sweat; he neither moved nor relaxed his grip. The German teacher looked as if he were about to faint.
“How about a nice cup of tea, Stanley?” she said. “We can sit here with Mr. Schneerman and have a chat about your lessons—perhaps he’ll even give us some tips as to our pronunciation of some of the more difficult configurations, the umlauts and such. Would you like that, Stanley? Hm?” She turned to the German teacher. “Mr. Schneerman?”
“Yah,” the little man said. “Yah, sure. We have a lesson now.”
Still nothing. Stanley seemed to be in some sort of trance, his eyes fixed on the lamp across the room, his hand so tightly clamped to the German teacher’s arm she could see the tendons standing out like wires beneath his skin. She was afraid suddenly. Very afraid. What if he hurt the man? What if he had one of his tantrums? It was then that she hit on the expedient of asking Stanley’s help with the furniture—as a gentleman coming to the aid of a lady, and that was the true and invincible core of him, she knew it, civility, decency and goodness. “Stanley,” she said, “would you help me move this end table so we can settle Mr. Schneerman here by the fireplace?” And she bent to remove the lamp, doily and bric-a-brac from the table, then lifted it with some effort and held it out before him in two trembling hands.
Stanley’s eyes came back into focus. He gave her that searching, bewildered look and then automatically dropped the German teacher’s arm and took the table from her. Immediately, the little man backed away from him, ducked his head and shot out the door, Katherine on his heels. “Just a minute, Stanley,” she called over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back.”
She caught up with Mr. Schneerman at the front door. “Please,” she begged, and she thought she was going to cry, “please let me explain. It’s my husband, he—”
The little man spun round to finish the sentence for her: “—he should be locked up. The man is a menace. I have in my mind to sue, that is what!” If he’d been meek and cowed in the parlor, he was self-possessed now, storming at her, all the fear and embarrassment of the situation released in a rush of anger. “You, you people!” he cried, and he might have gone further but for the fact that Stanley appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs, the end table still cradled in his arms. “Where did you say you wanted this, Katherine?” Stanley called, and the man shrank into himself all over again, flung open the door and disappeared into the night.
Clearly the situation had become impossible. There was no fooling herself anymore—Stanley had become a danger to himself and to others and he needed to be watched around the clock, watched and protected. She wasn’t equal to it, she knew that, and the charade of domestic life had to end, at least for the present. Stanley needed help—professional help, institutional help—and he needed it now.
She was able to calm him that night by having him rearrange all the furniture in the parlor, even the heaviest pieces, which h
e was capable of handling without the slightest evidence of strain. He worked at it with the obsessive attention to detail he brought to any task, shifting a chair an inch here or an inch there, over and over, till he got it right, but after an hour or so he began to flag, moving automatically now, until finally, at her suggestion, he took a seat by the fire. The maid brought up a light supper and Katherine put him to bed. When she looked in on him an hour later, he was in a deep sleep, the covers pulled up to his chin, his face as relaxed and still and beautiful as if it had been carved of marble.
When her mother came home, they sat up over biscuits and hot chocolate and discussed the situation. “Oh, I liked him well enough before he changed,” Josephine said, pursing her lips as she dipped a biscuit into her chocolate. “That’s the way it is with marriage sometimes—once they’ve got you they lose all respect for you. The things he said to me in this house, well, I just hope I don’t have to hear anything like that again as long as I live. To think I’d be called a stupid old woman in my own parlor—and by my own son-in-law!”
“He’s sick, mother,” Katherine said. “Very sick. He needs help.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. Look at his family. His sister. His mother. They’re all of them three steps from the madhouse, and if he keeps on like this, I must say I’m going to very much regret your having married him.”
The room was very still. But for the hiss of the coals in the fireplace and the low persistent ticking of the clock there wasn’t a sound. Katherine cradled the cup in her hands. She was thinking of her wedding night, of the scene on the boat, of Maine, of Doctors Putnam and Trudeau and the sick pale terrified face of that poor little German teacher. She looked up at her mother, at the paintings on the walls, the furniture, the draperies. There she was, her mother’s daughter, safe in the familiar room, surrounded by the shapes and colors of the life she’d led up till now, but it seemed different somehow, barren and cold as some Arctic landscape. ,
