Beautiful Kate (29 page)

Thus, in the days following the discordant little scene at the pond and my hopeless conversation later on the front porch with Cliff, the three of us had been innocently pointed toward an August Saturday evening and the Saint Helen’s Hospital Ball, unaware that for us it would be more like a battle than a dance, a battle not all of us would survive. For me, they were days of blessed routine: long hard hours in the sun followed by solitary sessions scratching deathless thoughts and intriguing lists onto the pages of my yellow pads. During those days I had as little to do with Kate and Cliff as I could, yet I saw them often enough—at dinner, mostly—to notice that they were not themselves at all. In Kate’s case, this meant that she had dropped one of her more recent poses—that of the radiant junior prom queen—in favor of a brooding melancholia that she seemed almost to revel in. She stopped setting her hair and wearing lipstick. And on one occasion, when she left the house wearing old jeans and a workshirt, I might have cheered had it not been for the fact that she was going out on a date with Arthur.

It was the deepening change in Cliff, though, that worried me more. Always so steady and cheerful, he now almost never smiled or laughed. And for the first time in his life, he had difficulty getting up in the morning and making it to work. The reason for this, I knew, was that he was awake a good part of every night, or at least on those nights when I intentionally had lain awake and listened for the inevitable whisper of his feet on the front stairway as he went out onto the porch, where he would sit alone for hours thinking—what? Was he brooding over my reckless slip of the tongue:
Maybe she was covering up?
Had the look of dread in his eyes become conviction in his mind—because Kate herself had confirmed it? Was it that he, like his mindless younger brother, could no longer think of her as his sister?

No, it had to be something else, I told myself. Something simple and feasible, such as that he and Sally were having problems. Perhaps they’d had sex together and he was feeling guilty because of it. For some reason, I just could not accept it that the similarity in Cliff and Kate’s demeanor, that somber depression they both now shared, might have meant that they shared something else as well, some new and crushing burden. I could not accept it then and even now I don’t know that it was so. I only know that in the long dog days leading up to the dance, the Kendall household was steeped in silence and misery, as if we were already grieving for our dead.

On the night of the dance, I bathed late and stretched out on my bed downstairs, waiting to hear Cliff and Kate leave before I started to dress. Mother almost spoiled my plans by bursting in and breathlessly announcing that I had to come upstairs and see Kate before she left.

“She looks so beautiful in her gown, Greg! You’ve just got to see her.”

I pointed out that I wasn’t dressed and that I would be seeing her soon anyway, at the dance, which drew from Mother a weary toss of her head.

“I don’t know what’s got into you lately,” she lamented.

“I’ll see her
, Mom. Later.”

As she went back upstairs I could hear her gaining speed with every step, for Kate and Cliff were still in the process of leaving. They were going to the Fieldings’ first for some sort of pre-dance party—punch and cookies, most likely—so I knew that I still had plenty of time to get dressed and pick up my date without being unconscionably late. Because Sally and Arthur’s parents were also going to the dance, and taking their car, Cliff and Kate had had to use ours for their double-date with Sally and Arthur, which left me with nothing except our ratty old pickup, a calamity I unenthusiastically had explained to Barbara Polanski on the phone, only to learn that her generous uncle had already offered her the use of his car—a two-year-old Buick—for the affair. All I had to do was drive the pickup to her place and from that point on we would travel in style.

So I finished dressing, got Barbara’s corsage out of the refrigerator, and recklessly ran the gauntlet on the front porch. Jason and Junior managed to contain their enthusiasm better than Sarah, who gave me a bear-hug, and Mother, who exulted that all her children were so good-looking that she couldn’t tell which of them was best. Junior obligingly came to her aid by claiming that he was the fairest of all, which at least allowed me to leave them laughing.

As I drove the truck out onto the road and waved back, I had no idea that it would be the last time I would ever do so or that I would remember that moment all of my life, see the four of them there on the wide front porch of the big white house framed by the shaded lawn and the leaves of the elms, all of it eerily like an old
Saturday Evening Post
cover, a tableau from an America whose loss seems more and more to have been a fatal one, for all of us.

Spruced and ignorant, I drove to Barbara’s and the two of us went on to the dance in her uncle’s Buick. And as we treaded up the red carpet and entered the castle-like clubhouse, I don’t believe either one of us felt any more social anxiety than grazing cattle, probably because we enjoyed that best of all status symbols: youth. The ballroom itself was huge and nicely decorated, with an abundance of potted palms and bunting and Japanese lanterns and the like, especially outside on the sweeping patio and pool area, where most of the guests were dancing. Inside, at the dozens of tiny cocktail tables, each covered in white linen, the serious drinkers were already beginning their desperate pursuit of happiness. For myself, I was more interested in getting my date into my arms as rapidly as possible and we immediately took to the dance floor.

Barbara Polanski was a tall large-boned girl with a small waist and abundant breasts that she seemed quite willing to press against me. The music, which was being played by a Chicago dance band called Marty Moon and the Meteors, seemed adequate to my half-tin ear. And in fact almost everything struck me as just fine, with the possible exception of my plain blue suit, for I was surprised to see that most of my peers had gone to the expense of renting tuxedos. Barbara kept joking about those who wore them, saying that they looked like penguins and apprentice waiters, but I didn’t doubt that if I had been similarly attired, she would not have minded at all. As it was, we got along well enough and in time were enjoying ourselves. The few numbers we didn’t dance to, we sat out with some of my high school friends, drinking punch and Cokes spiked with rum that had to be smuggled in, because the waiters were so zealous in carding the young. Not wanting to cadge drinks all evening long, I located the official dance “pusher” —none other than our one-time victim, Joey Regan—and bought from him two pints of rum, brown bags and all.

We had been at the dance for almost an hour before Kate and Cliff and their dates arrived. And the moment I saw them, I no longer had to wonder who was the fairest of all, and not only of the Kendall siblings but of everyone at the Saint Helen’s Ball. I knew that Mother had made a special dress for Kate, but until now I hadn’t seen it, a floor-length black velvet thing, simple to the point of severity, yet just right for my twin with her lovely figure and carriage, her perfect arms and shoulders and her blond hair spilling free. To me, she looked heartbreakingly beautiful and I virtually had stopped dancing to gaze at her, a lapse that caused Barbara to smile ruefully.

“Who’s that?” she asked. “An old girl friend?”

“No. My sister.”

“You’re kidding. Boy, she’s a knockout.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

The incident embarrassed and angered me unreasonably, made me feel almost as if I had been caught at my favorite vice. And from that point on I began to feel things slowly coming apart, as though having a good time were like playing superior tennis or golf, a touch one suddenly could lose.

For a time, Barbara and I joined the four of them at their table, where unspiked punch was the drink of choice. But the mood there was so prickly and cheerless that we soon danced away and for the most part stayed by ourselves the rest of the evening. And I must confess my spirit had been buoyed temporarily at least by what I had sensed at the foursome’s table—and by what I saw later on the dance floor—for it was obvious that Kate could not abide her devoted Arthur. He watched over her like a Versailles footman, and for his trouble appeared to get nothing but contempt. At the table she barely spoke to him and on the dance floor she kept a good six inches between them and almost never even looked at him. When the band started a new number, “The Anniversary Waltz,” she steered him over to us and asked Barbara if she would mind changing partners for one dance.

“I want to talk to my brother,” Kate said, as if the matter were already settled.

Barbara gave me a wry look as Arthur dutifully waltzed off with her. Out on the floor, Kate did not bother to hold to the six-inch distance she had maintained with Arthur and I had all I could do to keep from closing my eyes and dancing off into some dreamscape where one could have everything he wanted, and the hell with the world.

“I hate it here,” Kate said.

“It shows.”

“Let it. All these drunks, they disgust me. Especially the women. They’re obscene. Fat old loudmouthed freaks.”

“That’s what’s bothering you?”

Suddenly she smiled warmly at me, and I realized that we were dancing past the table of the elder Fieldings.

“There!” Kate said. “Let them know I’m not sour all the time, just when I’m with their pride and joy.”

“Arthur? Why, I thought you two were meant for each other.”

Her fingers dug sharply into my shoulder. “Don’t be smart.”

“Sorry.”

As the strains of the waltz continued she dropped her I head against my shoulder and for a few seconds I felt the coolness of her nose and forehead nuzzled against my neck. Then I caught myself.

“Kate, for Christ’s sake.”

She looked up at me with surprise and puzzlement, as if she could not understand my reaction. And her eyes suddenly went moist.

“I don’t want to stay here anymore,” she said. “I want to leave. Will you take me?”

“Kate, I’ve got a date, remember? And so have you. If you want to go home, Arthur will take you.”

“I don’t want Arthur. And I didn’t say home.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Can’t I?” She just stood there looking up at me, not dancing now, her hand barely touching my shoulder, the determination in her eyes edged with desperation.

“The answer’s no,” I said.

And she immediately turned from me and swept off the floor, weaving her way rapidly through the dancers and on past the tables of those obscene old drunks she could not abide. I assumed she was heading for the ladies’ room and that is what I told Arthur when he asked where she was. He gave me a disapproving look.

“Well, what happened?” he snapped. “Did you say something?”

I smiled pleasantly. “I must have, eh?”

He wagged his head peevishly and took off through the tables, heading for the ladies’ room too, evidently to stand guard outside the door until Kate emerged. Meanwhile I took Barbara by the hand and led her back to a corner table on the patio, not far from the potted rubber plant where I had stashed one of my pints of rum. (The other was in the car.) I got a plateful of hors d’oeuvres and two large paper cups of punch, which I laced liberally with Barbara’s approval. A normal healthy Pole, she obviously was no stranger to demon rum.

“Can I be nosy?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“What did happen with your sister?”

“Nothing much. She’s just not too pleased with Arthur. She wanted me to take her home.”

“Why? She afraid of him?”

“Of
Arthur?
”

She smiled. “No, I guess not. But why then?”

“No reason. That’s just Kate. She gets a bee in her bonnet every now and then.”

Barbara said that if I thought we should take Kate home, it would be all right with her.

“It’s still early,” she added. “We could come back afterwards.”

“No, it’s okay,” I told her. “Kate will be fine.”

And so she seemed to be. When I saw her after that on the dance floor or sitting with Cliff and the Fieldings at their table, she did not seem particularly distressed. One reason for this might have been that she was dancing with partners other than Arthur now. Two of them were boys from our class; another looked like a forty-year-old La Salle Street banker; and I even saw her in the arms of a grinning Joey Regan, his evening’s business evidently completed. Finally I saw her dancing with Cliff to the strains of “Stardust.” I remember the number because Barbara, on hearing it begin, took my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor.

“We can’t miss this,” she said. “‘Stardust’ is
my
song.”

As we danced, I found myself steering her so that I could keep Kate and Cliff in view, remembering how Kate had behaved with me earlier. And what I saw did nothing to put my mind at ease. Cliff had never been keen on dancing, but now with Kate he was hopeless, so stiff he seemed almost incapable of movement. But what unsettled me was the way he and Kate kept looking at each other, staring into each other’s eyes not like lovers so much as strangers without a common language, lost souls trying to find meaning through the nebulous and uncertain windows of each other’s eyes. Occasionally Kate would say something and Cliff would close his eyes and move his head in what I could only read as a gesticulation of helplessness and futile denial.