A Fair Maiden

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Katya swallowed hard. Katya shivered, and laid her hand over Roy Mraz's heavy hand on her knee. Katya whispered, Yes.

  Following which, things happened swiftly.

  Not all of which Katya Spivak would recall afterward.

  Though she would recall calling Marcus Kidder from a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven store in Bayhead Harbor as Roy Mraz leaned over her, listening: "Mr. K-Kidder? It's me, Katya? I—I'd like to come back to see you, Mr. Kidder, like you said—" in a faint, halting voice, and at the other end of the line there was a startled silence followed by the surprised and elated voice of Marcus Kidder. "Why, Katya! My dear! I've been sitting here feeling lonely and sorry for myself and not daring to hope that you'd call. Can you come tonight?" Katya bit her lip, reluctant to answer, but Roy had heard, Roy gripped and squeezed her shoulder, and so Katya said, "Y-yes, as soon as I—I can. I need to do some things here and then I—" as the receiver fell from her slippery fingers and Roy Mraz caught it swinging at the end of its cord, wiped the receiver clean with a wadded tissue, and hung it up.

  It was eleven-fifteen of that humid August night in Bayhead Harbor when Roy Mraz and Katya Spivak returned in the Ramcharger to 17 Proxmire Street. Katya saw that outside lights had been switched on. And there stood a white-haired figure waiting on the front stoop for her, diminished by the size of the house behind him and by distorting nighttime shadows. While Roy waited behind the privet hedge, Katya hurried up the flagstone path and Mr. Kidder came forward to greet her eagerly in an embrace, brushing his lips against her cheek; for a long tremulous moment he held her tight. "Darling Katya! My love! I thought I'd lost my soul mate forever." How Roy Mraz would sneer at these extravagant words if he heard them! Katya felt a pang of pity for Marcus Kidder, stepping back from his embrace to see that he gazed upon her with watery adoring eyes. In preparation for her visit he'd shaved, and he smelled of fresh cologne; he'd changed into linen trousers and a shirt of some fine fabric. Covering his stubbled bald head was the snowy white wig, which seemed to Katya the most piteous thing about Marcus Kidder.

  Eagerly Mr. Kidder was speaking to Katya, who could not manage more than a few mumbled words to him.

  Inside the house, in the dimly lighted foyer, Mr. Kidder was just shutting the front door when Roy Mraz shoved it rudely open and pushed his way inside. As Mr. Kidder saw Roy Mraz with his belligerent young face and excited eyes and his dark hair shaved at the sides of his head, he must have known what was going to happen.

  Tersely Roy said, "Inside, Kidder. And keep your mouth shut."

  Katya turned aside guiltily. She could not meet Mr. Kidder's stricken gaze. She heard the astonished old man ask Roy who he was, why was he here, how dare he push his way inside this house, and she heard Roy say insolently that Katya was his cousin and Katya was only fifteen years old—"She says you drugged her and raped her, you sick bastard." And Mr. Kidder protested, "I—I never did such a thing—I l-love Katya, I would never—" and Roy said, shoving at Mr. Kidder, "She told me everything! She called me! Dirty old pervert, you are going to pay."

  Confused, badly frightened, Mr. Kidder appealed to Katya to explain to Roy Mraz that he hadn't hurt her—"You know, Katya, that I didn't, don't you? Katya, tell him"—and in that instant saw in Katya's face that she'd betrayed him. Of course, it had to be Katya who'd betrayed him; it was Katya who'd brought this furious young man into Mr. Kidder's house. Roy was saying that if Mr. Kidder didn't give them what they deserved they were going to the Bayhead police; and Mr. Kidder recovered enough of his poise to say that he wasn't going to be blackmailed; and Roy said mockingly, "Yeah? You won't? Then give my cousin what you owe her, you old shit." High on ice, Roy was flush-faced with heat and his forehead oozed sweat; he'd sweated through his Eagles jersey and stank of his body. Yet Katya saw that Roy had had the presence of mind to put on leather gloves, and this detail made her sick with apprehension. So he won't leave prints. Whatever he does to Mr. Kidder, he has prepared for.

  Bravely, Mr. Kidder told Roy Mraz that if he and Katya left now, he wouldn't report them to the police, and Roy laughed at him, shoving him in the chest with the flat of his hand, demanding money: "And whatever else you got, we deserve. Silverware, gold things, all kinds of expensive crap—you owe us, fucker." Mr. Kidder's face had drained of blood, he was shaky on his feet; he was pressing his hand against his chest as if he were in pain. With shocked and despairing eyes he looked at Katya, who stammered guiltily, "Roy? M-Maybe we should just leave? He's sorry for what he—" Roy struck Katya with the flat of his hand, not hard, but hard enough to silence her. "Shut your mouth, for Christ's sake. You crazy? We're not leaving until this fucker pays us."

  Roy forced Mr. Kidder to lead him into the rear of the house, to Mr. Kidder's studio, where he kept financial records in a large antique desk. Here on the walls were the portraits of Marcus Kidder's female subjects in gentle pastels, and for a moment Katya felt a shudder of dread that one of Marcus Kidder's portraits of her might be hanging among them for Roy Mraz to mock. Roy demanded that Mr. Kidder give him money, and Mr. Kidder was protesting that he hadn't any money in the house, never kept money in the house, only a few bills in his wallet; and Roy took his wallet from him, opened it, and yanked out a handful of bills and several small plastic cards, moving so jerkily, so clumsily, that some of the bills slipped from Roy's hand, and a small plastic card—not a credit card, Katya saw, but a card for the Bayhead Harbor public library. Roy then forced Mr. Kidder to take out his checkbook from one of the desk drawers and to make out a check for ten thousand dollars to Katya Spivak—"You owe Katya, and you know it." Roy pushed Mr. Kidder down into his desk chair, and Mr. Kidder fumbled for a pen, his hand shaking; as Roy crouched over him, Mr. Kidder began to make out a check, but his hand swerved, and the check was ruined; and Roy said, "You did that on purpose! Fuck you, old bastard, pervert, you've been lucky so far I haven't broken your face, filthy son of a bitch, putting your hands on my girl cousin, your dirty-old-man dick in my girl cousin, know what that is? Statutary rape—any kind of sex with a minor. She's only fifteen, did you know that, you son of a bitch? It's statutary rape—and you gave her drugs, some kind of sleeping pill, she said. You kept her here, that's kidnapping—adduction—you can get a life sentence for shit like that. Better make that twenty thousand, you filthy piece of shit." Roy was sweating profusely, and his eyes glittered crazily with the glassy sheen of the fossil flowers, crystalline flowers displayed in elegant vases and urns that Roy had only begun to notice; as if such beauty tormented him, he struck at random at the glass flowers with his fists—"What're these freaky things? Jeez-zus"—and with a sweep of his arm he cleared the fireplace mantel, glass flowers fell and shattered on the floor, and Mr. Kidder feebly protested: "You are a barbarian! You have no right! Get out of my house!" As Katya looked on in horror, Mr. Kidder dared to seize a carved sculpture on his desk and swing it at Roy Mraz, striking Roy in the chest. Roy laughed, incensed, and attacked the old man mercilessly with his fists: "You old fuck! What d'you think you're doing!" As Roy Mraz beat Marcus Kidder, Katya tried to intervene, tried to stop Roy's fists, but Roy threw her off—"What the fuck, Katya! Get away." Something struck Katya on the side of the head, near her left temple; she staggered and fell against one of the wicker chairs. For a moment she was blinded, as if concussed. Somehow Roy had hit her face, and her face was bleeding, and on the floor was Marcus Kidder, dazed, dripping blood, trying to rise to his knees as Roy cursed him, and laughed at him, and kicked him. Mr. Kidder was bleeding from a deep cut above his right eye and cuts at his nose and mouth; his breathing was labored and painful. Roy had no pity for him, now kicking him in the ribs and in the stomach, and, as the stricken elderly man tried to shield himself from the young man's blows, like a curling worm, in the back. Katya screamed for Roy to stop. She'd never seen so much blood from a head wound, dark rushing streams of blood; Mr. Kidder's eyes shone with terror, then glazed over. His bleeding mouth went slack and he lay still. Katya was begging Roy: "Let me call for
help, Roy, for an ambulance, what if he dies?" and Roy cursed her and shoved her from him. "This is fucked up, goddamn you. This wasn't supposed to happen, you stupid cunt, this is fucked up..." Roy was opening desk drawers, spilling papers, manila files, financial records onto the floor. Katya approached a wall phone with the idea of dialing 911 before Roy saw her, but he saw her, dragged her away, and slapped her, deciding then that they had better leave, that someone in the neighborhood might have heard them. He pulled Katya out of the studio, where Mr. Kidder lay moaning on the floor beside the desk amid a glitter of broken glass, and along the hall to the front of the house and to the front door, which all this while had been left ajar, so that anyone might have walked in. "Jesus! Is this fucked up." Roy laughed harshly, as if he'd never seen anything so funny.

  And in the SUV, driving away, Roy continued to laugh and to mutter to himself, and Katya pleaded with him, "Roy, please—let me call an ambulance from a pay phone, they won't know who made the call, please Roy, what if Mr. Kidder dies—" and Roy told her to shut up. And Katya dared to persist, for she could not bear it that she'd betrayed Marcus Kidder, she loved Marcus Kidder and she'd betrayed him and was leaving him now to die. She was crying, pulling at Roy's arm as Roy drove them along the residential street lined with glimmering and unearthly plane trees, and Roy said in a cold, furious voice, "You've got a thing for that old pervert, don't you! You and him. Jesus, is that disgusting. You liked him fucking you, eh? If he could? How'd he do it? Old bastard old enough to be your grandfather. Crazy like your father—know what he did? Jude Spivak? Instead of getting the hell out before they killed him, he thought he could make it up to these guys he owed money to—serious money—and he's dumped out in the Barrens, which everybody knows, or can figure, except you Spivaks." Katya stared at Roy Mraz, at Roy Mraz's face, blunt as a boot, sweaty and smirking. She was uncertain what she'd heard: her father was dead? Jude Spivak was dead? And his body dumped? In the Barrens, his body dumped? All this time that Katya had been waiting for him to return to her, he'd been dead, and everyone in Vineland had known...

  Katya took hold of the door handle and turned it; she had the door open before Roy could stop her. Roy braked the vehicle, cursed, and reached for her, but in his disgust with her changed his mind, and as the passenger door swung open, Roy shoved her out while the SUV was moving at about fifteen miles an hour. And Katya fell out, and onto the pavement, and lay there stunned, a high-pitched ringing in her ear, as Roy Mraz drove away, tires squealing.

  So quickly this happened. As Katya lay confused and unsure of her surroundings, the glassy-sharp clarity of the meth high, which was a purely visual clarity, rapidly faded. Katya felt now the heaviness of sorrow, loss. All along, he was dead! And I have betrayed Mr. Kidder, who is the only one who loves me.

  Wincing with pain, Katya picked herself up from the pavement. No idea where she was, where Roy had dumped her. She was in terror that Roy would return and drag her back into the SUV and out in the sand dunes, what Roy Mraz might do to her with his fists and feet in biker's boots ... A block ahead was a lighted street; Katya began limping in that direction. Both her knees were scraped, bleeding, scraped raw on the pavement. Her clothing, so carefully chosen to impress Roy Mraz, was torn and bloodstained. Her mouth and right eye felt swollen. Through a haze of pain, Katya recognized the street ahead: Meridian, which intersected with Ocean Avenue. She knew where she was now, more or less. The Engelhardts' house on New Liberty Street was less than a mile away. At this hour of a weekday night, Mrs. Engelhardt would probably be asleep.

  On Meridian, beside a darkened Sunoco station, was an outdoor phone booth, to which Katya hurriedly limped, shrinking into the shadows when traffic passed near. In the phone booth she lifted the receiver and heard the dial tone and dialed 911, and when a female dispatcher answered Katya said in a rapid lowered voice, "On Proxmire Street—17 Proxmire Street—a man has been hurt at the back of the house—a man is bleeding, and needs an ambulance—"

  The dispatcher asked who was calling. Katya said No one! and quickly hung up the receiver.

  27

  If he dies, I am to blame.

  And whatever happens to me, I will deserve.

  There followed then days in succession dreamlike and as charged with tension as those swollen and bruise-colored cumulus clouds massing above the Atlantic Ocean, blown inland by a chill northeast wind. Sleepless and guilt-racked, Katya waited to hear the news that Marcus Kidder had died, and waited for police officers to come for Katya Spivak.

  Waiting for a loud rapping on the door of the Engelhardt house overlooking the boat channel and Mr. Engelhardt's dazzling white Chris-Craft yacht. Waiting for the morning to be disturbed, rent in two. And Lorraine Engelhardt might answer the door expecting a woman friend, and if Katya was in another room with Tricia or with the baby she would hear men's voices and she would hear Mrs. Engelhardt say in a startled voice, Who? The girl who works for us? Why, what do you want with her—?

  Beyond this Katya didn't allow herself to think.

  Beyond this her thoughts dissolved in remorse, regret.

  For all of Bayhead Harbor was shocked by the news: the "home invasion" on Proxmire Street, the "attempted robbery," the "brutal, senseless beating" of the prominent Bayhead Harbor summer resident Marcus Kidder. In local newspapers, on local TV, repeatedly it was reported how Mr. Kidder, sixty-eight years old, living by himself in one of the "oldest oceanside" houses on "historic" Proxmire Street, seemed to have been "taken by surprise" in his home in the late evening; seemed to have struggled with his assailant or assailants before being "savagely" beaten and left bleeding and unconscious on the floor of his studio. By ambulance the injured man had been driven to the nearest intensive-care facility, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, fifty miles away; there, he had not yet regained consciousness and was listed "in critical condition." Katya dreaded hearing that Marcus Kidder had died. Yet Katya dreaded hearing that Marcus Kidder had regained consciousness. Numbly thinking, He will give them my name. That is what I deserve.

  In the Engelhardts' household, these dreamlike days, her head racked with pain and her eyes, behind dark-tinted glasses, brimming with moisture, Katya waited. For here was a throw of the dice, utterly out of her control.

  "Kat-cha? Why're you sad? Kat-cha, don't cry." Anxiously Tricia Engelhardt snuggled into Katya's arms as Katya became distracted in the midst of reading to the little girl from one of her picture books. Katya wiped at her eyes and gave Tricia a quick kiss. "Kat-cha isn't sad or crying, Kat-cha is just thinking how she will miss you, and little Kevin, after Labor Day."

  Tricia crinkled her nose and shook her head vigorously. No, no! It was bad to think of "after Labor Day," when Tricia would be starting preschool, back in Saddle River.

  Katya had to wonder what, after Labor Day, would be Katya Spivak's life.

  If Marcus Kidder died, Katya would be an accomplice to a murder. Felony homicide, it was.

  Yet she could not go to police, she could not confess her part in the crime. She dared not provide police with Roy Mraz's name; she was terrified of what he might do to her, or to her family in Vineland.

  A wildness came over her. Katya wanted to go to Mr. Kidder, to see him in his hospital bed. To beg forgiveness!

  She did love him, she thought. Yet she had betrayed him.

  Such remorse would be her secret. As over her bruised face Katya wore makeup for several days following Roy's attack. On the morning after the beating she'd wakened stiff and throbbing with pain, had had to drag herself from her bed in the nanny's quarters, where she'd fallen without removing her clothes, hurriedly showered and washed her hair and brushed her hair and arranged it to fall partly over her face to hide her swollen and discolored right eye. She wore dark-tinted glasses, and white cord slacks to hide her lacerated knees. Her hand shook as she applied flesh-colored makeup as thick as putty, which gave her an eerily composed, masklike look. Walking, she made an effort to resist wincing and limping.
When sharp-eyed Mrs. Engelhardt saw and asked Katya what had happened, Katya said with an embarrassed laugh that she'd walked into the bathroom door in her room, in the dark—"It must have been a dream—I thought I was at home. But it doesn't hurt at all, really." So convincingly Katya spoke, Mrs. Engelhardt seemed to believe her, or to wish to believe her. "If you'd like to see a doctor, Katya, I can drive you," Mrs. Engelhardt said. "And I'll pay for it, dear. That's a nasty cut on your mouth."

  Katya was deeply moved that Lorraine Engelhardt spoke so kindly to her. In these waning days of August, when Labor Day loomed near.

  "You are sure, Katya, aren't you, that no one has hurt you? A boy, or a..." Mrs. Engelhardt's voice faltered; Katya had never seen the woman so distressed. Blood rushed into Katya's face as she realized, She thinks I'm pregnant. She's anxious that the father might be her husband. That's my secret!

  Katya assured Mrs. Engelhardt that there was nothing to reveal.

  As in a fairy tale, endings can come abruptly. And unexpectedly.

  For on the morning following this exchange, Katya heard on the Engelhardts' kitchen TV, as she was feeding stewed apricots to the baby in his highchair, that Marcus Kidder had not only regained consciousness the previous day in the Philadelphia hospital, after five days in a coma, but he'd been able to describe his assailants to Bayhead Harbor police: the men who'd broken into his home to beat and rob him had been two Caucasian males in their mid-twenties, strangers he was certain he had never seen before but believed he could identify if he ever saw them again.