The Storm at the Door (19 page)

But, behind his few words, was he offering what Katharine believed he was offering? Lars was now one of Exeter’s three town lawyers, with modest wealth and modest aspirations. Set against Frederick’s grand ambitions and vertiginous risings and fallings, Lars’s stable little life seemed to Katharine something out of a storybook, how a child might imagine adulthood, before adulthood comes with its revelation of the inevitability of dissatisfaction. Would it be possible, she wondered abstractly—but not seriously, not really—for her simply to make a decision, and then move her family into that fable life?

After their initial conversation, she made excuses for herself whenever he called, citing errands to be run, food on the stove, imminent plans with her girlfriends. But then, one afternoon when her daughters were at school, she simply let herself talk once more, beginning a surreptitious communication that has come at nearly regular intervals—once or twice a week—for the last four weeks.

Katharine knows that she mustn’t allow herself more fantasies.
And she must be her own now, not Frederick’s and certainly not Lars’s. But why, then, has she continued this clandestine conversation? Maybe, Katharine thinks, she continues with these secret conversations not because of the appeal of Lars but because of the appeal of the secret itself. Katharine has for so long held back the truth of Frederick, from friends and family, or at least she has tried so hard to hold it back, to gather that darkness to her, force it inside of her, and then emit only rosy light. But now Katharine has a secret of her own. It is a small thing, perhaps ultimately insignificant, but it holds a power that is hers.

Katharine has made a life of accommodating, but now it is time for others to accommodate her. Katharine knows that, in Exeter, Lars daily waits for her next call. How is it possible that this somehow makes her feel guilty, some unspoken obligation she feels to this man who likely is trying to seduce her away from her husband? Katharine tells herself:
he can wait
.

Katharine is in her closet now, slipping the contents of a fresh package of mothballs into the pockets of her jackets. When she has finished, she pauses in the wooden space of her bedroom, considering what chore she will do next. Standing there, Katharine eyes the sterling silver trifold frame, an anniversary gift from Frederick, that rests upon her dresser. She has passed by these pictures hundreds of times, as just another object. But now,
closing the cottage for the winter, a prefigurative wintry longing for Echo Cottage and its objects compels her to lift the frame and examine the photographs that her husband chose to display in commemoration of the first fifteen years of their marriage.

The left panel holds the picture of Frederick from his naval academy, dressed in uniform, his gaze romantic and lucid, an image that seemed, in a terrible way when he first gave it to her, to belong to an already dead sailor. The panel to the right displays the photo of the girls they had taken last year, all in three-quarters profile, lined up by age and so also by height, a staircase to adulthood: giggling Jillian, blushing Louise, timid Susie, imperious Rebecca. And between the photos of her husband and her children is the picture of Katharine that Frederick loves most. Katharine, dressed in her pilose black fur coat in Boston, during that brief gap between her childhood and Frederick. Katharine can easily forget that there was that time. That woman, for those years in Boston; once that was she. The image can seem vain and self-aggrandizing now, this photograph of Katharine dressed in fur, made up and lit for a future belonging to Ingrid Bergman, when she has only become another anxious housewife, puttering about in her chores.

But that was Katharine. She was, very briefly, neither cheery daughter nor placating mother. She was a desirable young woman named Katharine Mead, who lived in a city, and traveled to other cities, advising department stores on fashion. She was courted, constantly. At dances and at pubs and even at restaurants, men presented themselves to her. It had seemed to her then that she was just coming into an immense power. Marriage, career, and family, when it came: it would all be hers, to make of it whatever she liked. But Katharine sees clearly now that she misunderstood. She mistook the power of her marriageability for a much
greater power. That time, it has turned out, was in fact her time of greatest power. An ellipsis in her transformation from placated to placater. The photograph may seem vain now, but Katharine reminds herself this is not a picture of her, but a picture of another Katharine, one who never quite came to be. Katharine decides to take the photograph with her back to Graveton.

Katharine turns the trifold onto its face, then unfastens the copper clasps that hold the backing in place. She removes the wooden slat and is momentarily stunned. It is like when she once happened upon Bea Davis, a girlfriend from her childhood in Concord, now a young woman walking the streets of Boston among the crowds. Or it is like the moment she lifted just another ringing phone to hear the voice of Lars Jensen. A reminder that time, which can seem only to disperse and erase, also holds its continuities. For there, on the back of the picture, is her husband’s handwriting. A note dated June 4, 1944, which she has never seen before.

This, then, had been the picture of Katharine that Frederick had taken with him to sea. Two days before D-Day, as Frederick waited on his ship for the orders to battle to come, he had written:

But he had never shown this to her. Why? Maybe he never really intended it to be read; maybe it was just something he scrawled in a panic that night, a letter to be returned to her in the event of his death.

Frederick had been a young man in love then, as she had been a young woman in love. Across great distances, they had loved and mourned notions of each other. Frederick had fantasized to a fantasy of Katharine about another world, in which their separation was not necessary. They could not then have known that to love each other in the way they imagined required that distance. On his night-shift watch, in the ocean of a world about to explode, what else did he have but this romantic, false vision? What choice but to believe in it?

Katharine lowers the image of herself to her thigh and looks at the picture that stands next to the triptych on the dresser, a framed photograph of their wedding day. Still dressed in his uniform, arm in arm with his bride beneath a canopy of swords his fellow soldiers have drawn, Frederick is nearly skeletal from the strange anorexic condition that he was never quite able to explain to her. But from the caverns of his eye sockets, Frederick’s gaze glistens, as he looks out at—what? The photographer, of course, but also—it being their wedding day—the future, which seemed so certain that day, their history safely sealed away beyond what they would build with their unstinting will and deliberate
consideration. In the pilgrim tradition of New England, together they would settle in the new land of their new lives; together they would create a life, in the way he imagined that artists create their art, coming from them and thus clarifying them.

Frederick had returned early from his battleship and attempted to realize an only slightly compromised version of his fantasy, an entire world spun around Katharine, but still there was war.

Katharine lifts the photo of herself, and looks at it again. On the front is the image of a glamoured young woman, unclaimed and certain that her greatest powers were still in her future. On the other side is what Frederick had once written to his idea of Katharine, who would realize his utopian vision. Katharine replaces the picture in its spot between her husband and her children. She makes a promise to herself. She will wait until one week from today, and, if she still can’t bear it, she will call Lars and agree to see him. And then Katharine goes downstairs to empty the cabinets of their perishables.

In his room at the Mayflower Home, my grandfather writes:

In the early evening outside, the trees absorb the autumn in effusive tones. High above the slate roofs and the aesthetic arbosphere of Madhouse Hill, Canada geese disgustedly honk in southward Vs, as if pointing out the direction in which the sane should flee the coming winter. In the city that spreads from Belmont to the sea, chimney sweeps stroll from house to house, their eyes peering luminously through their charcoal dustings, their pockets stuffed with the annual glut. In the northern suburbs, store-window artists obsess over the depictions of bountiful
cornucopias and chubby turkeys they paint onto the facades of grocery stores. Cycling among all, carrying bits of one scene to the next, is the constant presence of the autumnal wind. The wind emptying treetops, whipping the surface of Boston Harbor into an angry script, rattling the grated windows of Ingersoll House.

And there is my grandfather, in whom this gale seems unimpeded by the walls that separate him from the outdoors. A thought whips through him, then another and another, each enlivening, thrilling, but few finding time to settle. His mind, like his daughters in their front yard two hundred miles to the north, trying to grasp at the rush of red maple leaves racing by.

Perhaps Frederick is right; perhaps the grim events of the last few days, like leaden storm clouds, have generated this electricity. But this heightening is also undoubtedly an effect of the Miltown that Frederick has, this evening, managed to evade. In any
one of the previous ninety-six days of the Canon administration, the thought of escaping any dosage would have been certifiable delusion. But the wind that has blown forth since the night Marvin made of his gown a fiery costume seems to have rushed through the halls of Mayflower in subtler forms, tousling the staff and its protocols. The last few days have reminded all who have been here long enough to remember of the vaguely anarchic gap between the Wallace and Canon administrations.

Despite the denials of the staff, by noon of the day after Marvin’s self-immolation, the news had spread beyond Ingersoll House, prompting the defiant, ceaseless questions of the women of South Webster, the teenagers of North Webster and South House. The men of Ingersoll speculated it was even possible that the local news would describe the outcome of Marvin’s incendiary sprint, but no television is to be tuned to a news report in the wake of any catastrophe, local or worldwide, to avoid needlessly upsetting the patients. However, whether or not word of Mayflower’s famous patient setting himself aflame has yet spread beyond campus, at the top of Madhouse Hill, it is the only news.