The Storm at the Door (12 page)

It’s Frederick
, Katharine begins, and then stumbles through an awkward, rosier version of the story. She does not mention the police, or the nudity. She focuses her staggering narrative upon the bourbon and Frederick’s restlessness. But when Katharine
says the name Mayflower, she lapses into a momentary silence, knowing all that
Mayflower
says about chaos and delusion, madness and genius, screams and straitjackets.

Well
, Tat says,
he couldn’t be in a better place
.

They think he just needs a rest, and some time to sort things out
.

And what do you think?

I think
—Katharine begins, and pauses. She then tries to respond as another version of herself, more like Tat, a person who can receive misfortune and transform it to theater, for the entertainment of others.
I think that husband of mine could use a strong slap in the face
.

Katharine decides her tone is almost perfect, Ethel calling Lucy to complain.
I think someone needs to tell that man to pull himself together!

Tat does not laugh as Katharine expected.

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.

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.

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?

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.