The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Have you ever told him that? Tat says.

  And now Katharine wants again what she wanted just before she dialed. She wants to be seen; she wants to lay it all out for Tat; she wants to open her skull so Tat can observe the infinity loop of considerations and reconsiderations cycling within her. Katharine is suddenly nauseated and giddy with gratitude for Tat’s empathy.

  Oh, of course, Katharine says. Yes, well, not as often as I should have, I suppose.

  The memory, from near the beginning of her marriage, comes to Katharine again now, as it nearly always does when she thinks of her failure to confront her husband with his plain wrongs. There is an opening here, to let this memory outside of herself. For once to admit to it, and perhaps slightly disperse its needled pressure. But Katharine does not say anything.

  Well, at least you’ve spoken your mind. Good. Tat unfastens the suspended silence, then skillfully changes the topic to the latest happenings at church, another invitation to bridge, and finally excuses herself from the conversation with such tact that Katharine does not realize, until well after they have hung up, that it was Tat, not Katharine, who ended it.

  Katharine crosses back to the living room window, looks out over Barvel Bay, a postcard of itself. The memory, opened in the short conversation, casts its images: Frederick kissing that woman in the water, Katharine’s sickness in the woods, the latched suitcase.

  2

  They had been married just two and a half years then, and had known each other for only three. In a different time—in, say, 1962—they might have only just married after three years together. But the war was still on when they met; annihilation, at any moment, seemed entirely possible. Everything seemed precious; it seemed you must take what love you found immediately and wholly. When Frederick returned early from the war and they married, their courtship had been little more than a correspondence during Frederick’s military service, and that of only a few months. But they married, and after only two and a half years, there was that first failing.

  Frederick was still in business school then and, with money tight, they spent their summer under her parents’ dole at Echo Cottage. They had little other choice, but the arrangement worried Katharine from the start. She already knew well Frederick’s absolute intolerance for confinements. When they went out for dinner, he would routinely leave the table four or five times over to make a phone call, to use the restroom, or for no given reason at all. In the winters, he would violently tug at his sweaters until they were shapeless. He seemed never able to remain in their Cambridge apartment for more than two hours at a stretch. And living under the generosity of Katharine’s parents that summer, Frederick behaved just as she had feared.

  Often, Frederick would vanish from Echo Cottage for entire days. At first, the outcomes of these trips were innocuous, even delightfully eccentric; though Katharine’s father denies it now, Frederick then could charm even him. Frederick would return with a report on the conditions at the top of Mount Chocorua, or he would reveal a day spent repainting the water shed in the woods.

  Late one June evening, Katharine spotted a lone figure oaring some lopsided vessel toward Echo Cottage from Nineteen Mile Bay. The lake was a perfect purple mirror, disturbed only by the paddling silhouette. For twenty minutes they debated whether it was he, until the sight was unmistakable: Frederick, helming a rusted dinghy he had discovered, its waterlogged hull little more than a refashioned bathtub, its mast bent impotently to one side.

  For the following two or three weeks, Frederick was wholly engrossed by his dinghy. Katharine, checking in on her husband, could find him woodworking out back, hammering on the dock, or else engaged in whatever semblance of sailing that boat was capable of. For those weeks, he stopped complaining to Katharine about the knowing glances of her mother, the silent, judging Waspery of her father. Often, Frederick would sail up to the shore and ask Katharine and her parents to help him test his vessel’s lakeworthiness. Each time, despite Frederick’s most recent repairs, the four would make it no farther than one or two hundred yards before the water rose precipitously in the hull/tub, and they all began to cackle with laughter, half-submerged. One day, near the end of the month, the mast snapped in two and Frederick let the boat drown.

  Once again, Frederick began to vanish for the entirety of days. But Katharine was not suspicious, not then. Daily, she expected him to return from some Sawyeresque adventure, with some new boyish booty. Instead, he would return long after sunset, speaking in glib ways of trips to the diner, the library.

  Frederick’s psychiatrists like to speak of Freudian trauma, a scene that imprints itself onto the subconscious, some haunting iconography from toddlerhood. But the image that most haunts Katharine, the one that only delusions can censor from her memory, etched its indelible vision one afternoon of that summer in her early adulthood.

  That afternoon, Katharine and her mother took a walk together along the shoreline. It was a Saturday; the bay was dense with splashing weekenders. Katharine did not see Frederick when they passed, but her mother did. Is that Frederick? her mother asked.

  As she looked onto the scene, Katharine’s first apprehension was not betrayal. At first, it seemed the mistake was her own. There was Frederick, bare-chested in the water, embracing that woman, the renter from Abanaki Cottage. Frederick, kissing that woman’s cheeks as her boy floated beside them. The scene looked simply natural: a sound familial triangle, mother and father and child. It seemed as if this were simply Frederick’s reality, and Katharine and her family were some alternate, fictive dimension. It was the plainness, the unabashed openness that was so horrific. Frederick was neither hiding nor flaunting. Frederick, guiltless and free, was simply kissing that woman. Katharine’s mother guided her by the elbow, away, and later helped Katharine pack Frederick’s suitcase. Together, in shared fury, they rehearsed a speech, ornamented it with baroque reprimands, his plain failure from personal, ethical, even religious vantages. Both knew neither could ever invent such a speech in the moment of confrontation; that moment stupefied both.

  When Frederick returned home that night, he climbed the stairs, crept down the hall, opened the bedroom door, and found Katharine sitting on the bench of the vanity, suitcase latched and upright before her. Unsurprisingly, she forgot her script, entirely.

  Katharine could only say leave. She said it, then said it again, then kept repeating it until Frederick stopped her by saying her name once.

  Then Frederick looked at her, looked at the floor, then back at her, cycling through the logic of the moment. Potential counterarguments, pleas, excuses cycled so visibly through him, she could nearly see the considered words scrolling behind his eyes. But in the end he said nothing, and for a moment it seemed to Katharine that it could be that easy. You make a decision and become something else. Years before, she replied to his proposal by mail with a letter containing nothing but the word yes. One yes had transformed her from who she had been into his wife. Leave, she could say, and the unknowable future could open freshly to her.

  But Frederick did not leave. His expression slackened as he fell to the bed. He curled into himself, as if shame had some contracting effect upon his tendons. Katharine had known his lies, his manipulations, his restlessness, but she had never before known this, not exactly. She had never before looked at her husband and thought so entirely of the word pathetic.

  I must be deranged, Frederick said. I must be sick. I need you to make me better.

  It was Katharine, not Frederick, who left then. Katharine walked out the front door of Echo Cottage and made her way toward the docks. As she tried to steady herself, tried to remember some of the soliloquy she and her mother had scripted so that she could return to the bedroom and expel him, the pine needle floor of the walking path suddenly betrayed her, began to pitch and shift. Before Katharine could consider the vertigo, the sensation condensed to a rising in her belly, and then she was vomiting between the trees. This was how Katharine first knew her cycle was not merely late. She spent
a half hour sitting with her sickness in the forest, and by the time she stood, she had already begun to understand it as a directive.

  After all, except for her memory of what Frederick had done, everything was in place. With Rebecca swelling inside her, they returned to Cambridge and Frederick began to come home at the expected hours. Even Katharine’s mother, writer of her rage, seemed eager to forget. Eventually, Katharine allowed herself to make excuses. A year or two after his affair, and the furies it stoked, she convinced herself that this first failing was merely an obstacle that would, finally, prove the endurance and transcendence of their union. After all, they once again had wonderful moments together. Eventually, she again laughed so simply at Frederick’s punning, his impromptu living room tangos, his antic reenactments of Abbott and Costello routines. This was a time before Frederick’s charm and his humor seemed tinged with his darkness, long before Katharine began to consider her husband’s charisma and comedy as symptoms. Katharine read recently that often when soldiers run into battle, they laugh wildly. Perhaps Frederick’s continued power over her could be attributed to a similar effect.

  But what else was she to do? Maybe, by forgiving and pretending to forget, she has imprisoned herself; maybe, if not for her sickness in the woods that night, she might have delivered the speech she had wanted to deliver. Frederick might have left for good; she might have made a better life.

  3

  Katharine, looking out onto the lake, lets her thoughts drift to a glancing inspection of the upper branches for any early traces of autumn. After five or ten minutes spent considering nothing but this scenery, the tainted past and ruined future seem impossible against this day.

  There have been good moments. Yes, not only good moments but entire good years. And isn’t it possible for those memories to expand and buffer the others? A single kiss the night she met Frederick, a happy afternoon in his sinking dinghy, this moment, the scene before her fecund and perfect. Simple happiness exists, and you must gather it around yourself. With enough will you can choose to believe in a better life, until the better life becomes yours. Katharine thinks about calling Tat again and trying to explain that to her. That she is not weak, that she is not merely a woman who has let herself be swayed by more forceful wills. The stronger will is her own, a choice to believe in the best of things. Katharine wonders: would Tat see this as a gift for transcendence, or a gift for delusion?

  And what will others think?

  1

  They all laughed then, Albert Canon thinks, exactly in those words. It is early evening now, and Canon strides the Depression, emptied and silent.

  They all laughed then. For the last weeks, Canon finds himself thinking these words again and again, feeling their talismanic shape, hoping to engender the story they imply. In fact, no one had laughed.

  Yes, when he had set out on his research decades before, finding ways to observe and empirically measure the functioning of mental hospitals, some of his colleagues had expressed skepticism, had wondered whether the inherent chaos of a mental hospital milieu could ever be dissected with data, wondered if the governance of psychiatric institutions was more a craft, earned over a lifetime of refining finely tuned instincts. But, in truth, the same skeptics had also expressed gratitude for Canon’s findings. Still, in his office in the basement of Memorial Hall at Harvard, Canon, the academic, had always felt besieged by the practitioners, had felt they possessed the same misplaced brand of rugged smugness as labor unionists, claiming a superiority of knowledge of how things should be run at the highest level simply because they had been down there, for a lifetime, digging ditches with their hands.

  The truth, Canon knows, is that the complexities of daily work in a mental hospital can easily become a fog of war. Like the military’s high commanders, the psychiatrist in chief must maintain some clinical distance, the perspicuity of an empiricist. Just today, for example, Dr. Higgins flew into a panic at the staff’s inability to calm Marvin after his outburst in the group session, then, yet again, suggested an extreme course of electroconvulsive therapy.

  Electroconvulsive therapy! Marvin needs a lucid mind to address the profoundly advanced defense mechanisms of his major psychotic disorder. The last thing he needs is one hundred fifty volts scrambling his consciousness. But Canon tries to remind himself that no one is blameless; we are all only human. This awareness, in fact, is at the very heart of the research he has conducted and the conclusion he has drawn and now enacts. We all must recognize our own human failings before the patients do; we maintain uniformity and control by recognizing the ways we are different, the things over which we feel we have no power. Canon, for example, knows that he too is flawed. At this very moment, for example, Canon is walking the hallways of Upshire, dim in the twilight, to meet his mistress.

  Just a few more times, Canon thinks.

  Does Canon ever feel guilty? Not guilt, exactly. No, that is what has surprised him most about his first affair. What he feels, when slipping into bed with his wife, is instead a kind of repulsion. Not that he is repulsed by his mistress, or his wife, or by himself, exactly. Canon, who has dedicated the twenty years of his professional career to probing the psychodynamic motives behind behavior, tries not to think of this, this obscure repulsion. But he resolves now to end it soon, the affair and the sensation that is always waiting for him just beyond climax, as inevitable as his postcoital slackening. He is in control, he tells himself. This, Canon often thinks, is his one true gift: his ability always to distinguish truth from delusion and then to plant truth inside of delusion, thus causing delusion to implode.

  Not pausing as he often pauses—now certain in resolve—Canon pushes open the office door. Soon, he will end it. It will be bittersweet, he thinks, like a soldier leaving behind a foreign love affair to embark on another war campaign; nothing, not even a woman, will veer or dissuade him from the pull of his duty.

  At first, however, he thinks she has not come. As he sits alone in the empty room, something akin to the familiar repulsion rises within him, something birthed by repulsion but redder, a feeling nearly identical to when Jeff Wittgenstein, his doctoral classmate at Yale, was made associate professor just five years after graduation while Canon had remained a lowly lecturer. She hasn’t come. She has decided first.

  There is always a power balance to these things. Someone is always in control. And it is always he. But she hasn’t come. The affair is over. Canon wants desperately not to be there in his office, with his failure, his powerlessness. He wants to be in bed with his wife, or even watching television with his children, but he knows that every motion from this moment to that will be cumbersome with his self-recrimination. She hasn’t come. He was going to end it soon anyway. Just a few more times, and he could have set things right; the affair would have ended, delivering the wistful fulfillment he has imagined.

  In the dim light, Canon glimpses himself in the antique gilded mirror hung near the bookshelf. In the last five years or so, he has adopted a new strategy with mirrors, approaching them only at close proximity, then casting his gaze only upon details: the part of his hair, the grain of his beard, the spaces between his teeth, which seem to hold artifacts of food more than do others’. He has learned to observe himself in detail because if he considers himself in his entirety he can feel nearly like one of those rare Cotard’s sufferers, baffled by the stranger who faces him in mirrors.

  Within, Canon’s ambitions and energies seem only to grow. Go ahead and fault him, but he sees the world as young men see it: its deficiencies, its hypocrisies, its need for innovation, and he wants to be the one to make the required changes. On the outside, however, age has bloated and warped his features. Each pore of his cheeks is now stretched like a marker dot on an inflated balloon; his jowls are beginning to dangle like fleshy ornamentation from what was once the attractive angular aspect of his jaw. Looking at himself now, in the half-light of his office, Canon deflates with an approximation of his postejaculatory repulsion.

  Like
what you see?

  Canon startles. As he pivots, his belly swings with centrifugal motion. There she is, sitting on the analytic divan. Canon cannot help smiling, delighting in the slow adjustment of his eyes to the dark, she revealed slowly, as in a vaudevillian fan dance.

  I thought you didn’t come.

  I shouldn’t have.

  No, probably not.

  Canon is near her now, but not too near, one of the cheeks of his annually widening ass balanced on the divan’s corner. He touches her shoulder, shoves the meat of his fingers into the nearly imperceptible texture of her hair. His decision, he tries to remember, his determination. She is here and you will have her, but soon you will end it. The curvature of her back on his palm, his mouth craving with a hunger stronger than hunger.

  What good is his determination? For a moment afterward, as ever, he will mentally perform his ritualistic recitation of this wrongness and how it must stop soon, but his determination will be as false as ever. After all, these things are stronger than reason and determination. Stronger than logic. And there, again, is that repulsion.

  2

  The television’s volume is now permanently set to somewhere between deafening and stupefying. Even with the door shut to one’s room down the hall, one has no choice but to listen. To Frederick, the television’s volume is another cause for wild irritation. And yet, sometimes alone in his room, when confronted by two equally retardant forms of Ingersoll noise—the television and the screams—he is grateful to be able to focus on the TV’s babbling narratives. And sometimes, such as this evening, Frederick places himself with the catatonics on the couch, simply to receive it.

  A local news special on the new tower downtown recites statistics over footage taken from airplanes. Frederick gives the television the lazy half-attention it wants until he perceives a hovering presence behind him. He turns to find his roommate, seemingly drawn from his room by the television’s sound. Schultz, for one of the few times Frederick has observed, distracted from his work. Lowell, sitting in the corner with a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus, also recognizes the rarity of the moment.