The Storm at the Door (26 page)

Sickened with nicotine and with worry, Katharine pushes her cigarette into Frederick’s ceramic tray. The cling of vapors on her clothes is nauseating. A metonymic smell, stale smoke, the smell of Frederick’s capitulation to his compulsions, the sour stench that remained with his regrets in the morning, the poison still pushing out of his pores.

Katharine closes her eyes for a moment, and the detritus imagery of her subconscious projects onto the backs of her eyelids. Faces, nearly. Colors, nearly. Susie’s voice, nearly. Shut eyes, sleep, now seem to promise the opposite of what they ought to.

Katharine thinks,
I am also going mad
. She thinks,
I am also imprisoned
.

Imprisoned. That is the word for it. A more subtle imprisoning than her husband’s, but no lesser.

An imprisoning, for what crime? Perhaps, as others say, Frederick is also blameless, simply cannot help himself. But at least there are nameable incidents, choices that Frederick could have
not made, impulses she still believes—is it unfair of her?—that he could have suppressed, if he had really tried. He could have not drowned his better reasoning in bourbon, night after night. He could have not changed into George Carlyle’s raincoat, could have not exposed himself to the passing traffic.

Katharine has done exactly what anyone would say she ought to have done, but it has yielded only this: an anxious middle-aged mother, mad with worry, snuffing out cigarettes in the empty living room of a house they can no longer afford.

The snowfall has reached full saturation; it is like the Milky Way now, so many particles that they all smear together into a single spectacular texture. Katharine thinks of the ropes that the farmers up the road tie between their houses and outhouses in the winter, to guide them from door to door in such weather. Each year, two or three farmers fail to secure these tethers and so freeze to death, lost just feet from their back doors. What is she supposed to do now?

Katharine goes to the kitchen and dials Lars. She does not consider what she will say, or what she will ask of him. The idea of the phone ringing in Lars’s house, of another person waiting there to receive her, is a tremendous relief, a telephonic life preserver cast out. One week ago, Katharine finally caved to Lars’s persistent pleas to see her, but with a caveat. She would agree to meet him, she said, but not for a month. This was her way of both agreeing and not agreeing, setting the date a month in advance, and then informing Lars she would not speak with him until then, to be certain it was what she wanted.
My capacity to please others is endless
, she had said with an eloquent self-awareness that so impressed her she later recorded it in her journal, a thesis statement for her being.
I need to be sure this is what I want. That I’m not just doing it to make you happy
. The date is still
three weeks away, and Lars has kept his part of the agreement, at least so far. When he answers the phone, Katharine panics and hangs up.

More than two and a half hours late now. Should she call Lars back and tell him to come help her? Should she call the parents of Susie’s friends? But which friends? Katharine has been so preoccupied this fall that she does not even know the names of some of the girls with whom she sees her daughter walking home from school. Should she call the police?

Katharine goes to the front hall closet, removes her mink coat (a gift from Frederick in better days), and pulls it over her robe. She slides her feet into her ankle-high, fur-trimmed boots. Considerable patches of her bare white legs remain exposed.

Outside, the familiar shapes of Graveton have metamorphosed into a cloud-dream. It reminds Katharine of when she had Rebecca’s first pair of baby shoes bronzed; first they poured a thick plaster over the booties, in which a bronze replica was cast. Graveton, abstracted with snow, seems readied to produce a replica of itself.

The snow pauses for a moment, for Katharine’s first steps out the door. But then, as if her entrance reminds the weather of its purpose, the snow begins to fall heavily enough that the few feet she can see in any direction become suddenly intimate, a mobile
enclosure of static. She walks toward Main Street by instinct, on what seems to be the sidewalk but could also be the street. Susie claimed to be going for a dinner at Archie’s, in the opposite direction, but Archie’s would have been closed for hours now. Katharine does not consider where she should go, but her instinct is to head toward the center of things.

In the milky orange oblivions between the strange snowy renderings of Graveton’s houses, Katharine loses her place. The snow, holding the streetlight, is more and more radiantly orange, and when she blinks it away, there are still, in her exhaustion or fear, that almost red and almost blue and almost yellow, mighty colors that vanish as they begin. Incandescent orange, the suggestion of other colors, and then, in a flash, the snow whites around her.

Headlights gain with a suddenness that feels final. But then they simply pass her and vanish. Katharine tries to decide if this was a near-fatal encounter, or only a car passing as she walked into town.

In space, John Glenn said on the news the other night, there is no up and no down. Our notions of place are tethered to the constant force of gravity. And it seems to Katharine that some constant force, the thing that has held her to earth, to her home, to her town, to her family, has come unbound, and she could be anywhere. Her daughter could be anywhere, could have been crushed by rising lights, as Katharine was perhaps just nearly crushed. Underneath the snow there are still streets and sidewalks and houses, still that constructed geography, but right now it seems that there is no such thing as forward.

Another car passes, less terrifyingly this time, and Katharine becomes aware of the figure she must strike, the snow matting
her hair to her scalp, her robe and mink billowing to press the cotton of her nightie flat to her body. A madwoman. She shivers and realizes she is tremendously cold.

In front of her, the orange deluge begins to whiten again. Twin lights rising slowly, two expanding cones. At first she thinks it impossible that a car could come from this direction, but concludes that she must be at an intersection. Alpine Street? Park? She tries to decide which way she should dart to dodge the coming car, or maybe she should remain where she is? She is frozen there, with a deer’s paralysis, until the twin lights loosen from their parallel beams. The headlights come unstuck from each other, the car gone cross-eyed. Katharine either mentally or actually gasps as the twin beams focus upon her and halt. And then, the lights turn upward to illuminate the faces of Susie and her friend Jacquelyn with such suddenness it is as if the snow were a magician’s confetti in which they have been conjured.

Mum?
Susie asks. Susie and Jacquelyn lower their flashlights and step toward her.

Susie
, Katharine says, as if to confirm this reality. It seems she might blink it away, might close her eyes and open them again to find her daughter replaced by some chromatic burst, the suggestion of some featureless face.

But they persist there. Susie and Jacquelyn are now in this space with Katharine, everything beyond particulate and flickering, as if they have entered a scene from a silent film, stained orange to resemble dawn.

What are you doing, Mum?

Katharine wants to tell her daughter how scared she was, and how that fear ignited something. The almost colors, the near sounds. To normalize the moment, she raises her voice. In
Katharine’s few moments of actual rage, the force of her own voice nearly crumples her, but now she performs only an imitation of parental scolding.

Susan! Where were you? I have been trying to find you. Where were you?

The answer is obvious: the girls’ mouths are rashy from kissing boys, and the cigarette reek, which vanished when Katharine left her living room, has returned. So, kissing and smoking. Likely in the balcony of the town hall’s theater; she knows kids sometimes sneak in there at night, for those purposes. She should yell at her daughter, and ground her. There is a simple script to follow, a lecture on the dangers of boys, impulsivity, ruined opportunities.

My mother, like my grandmother (and also like me), seems constructed of matter at the same harmonic resonance as a human yell; fury has the same effect upon her as a soprano’s high note upon a wineglass. But Susie must know the falseness of Katharine’s anger; she does not cower or seem on the verge of shattering; she is only startled, nonplussed.

Mum? I was just. We were just—finishing dinner? We were just coming home. I must have lost track of time?

The doomed futures opened to us at all times, the one path from which we must never stray; Katharine knows what she ought to tell her daughter.

C’mon, Jacquelyn
, Katharine says, her voice sinking back into its honeyed warmth.
Let’s get you home
.

It’s really coming down
, Jacquelyn remarks, testing Katharine’s restored softness.

Katharine turns to watch the snow for a long while, longer than she knows is quite appropriate. She closes her eyes, and still
her exhaustion montages inside her. When she turns back to Susie, her daughter looks at her with what seems acknowledgment. Not sympathy, or apology, but an eagerness to accept.

At this moment, in the spacelessness of the snow, it seems that they could go anywhere, that they could not go home, that they could be freed from the town and the history the snow has buried. Katharine nearly startles at the thought of that freedom.

Gosh. It’s hard to see where we are
, Susie says.

Maybe there is a simple and proper way forward that Katharine could discern, if only she focused. Maybe a right and clarifying direction is there, just beneath things, like the colors she can nearly see, the sounds she can nearly hear, the snowbound infrastructure. Maybe, but Katharine no longer knows which way it is. Katharine knows only that either she can fail her decisions and plans or else they will continue to imprison her. Katharine can no longer bear that prison; in this moment, my grandmother knows she will fail her husband.

In her bed the next morning, my mother wakes early, two hours before dawn, as she often has in the months that her father has been gone. Her father has his own form of insomnia, charged and restless straight through to morning, and Susie worries what this shared affliction of sleeplessness might imply. In ways, however, she thinks that her particular insomnia is crueler than her father’s, waking her to be present for the loneliest, unclaimed
hour that is not quite night and not quite day. Susie once read a poem in English class called “The Skunk Hour,” a name that she thinks of often, as she paces her room in this time fit only for crepuscular animals that waddle outside. Susie rises from bed and tiptoes the pine planks of her room, as silent as the Skunk Hour wants her to be.

Silent and pacing, Susie thinks of her mother standing there in the street, her nightie snow-dusted and flapping beneath her mink. Illuminated by the twin flashlights, her mother seemed deliberately arranged for operatically dramatic effect. Had she clutched a penknife in her fist, bloody from her adulterous husband, the image would have been complete. Her ethereal and tranquil mother, who has always been able to absorb others’ abuse with bullet-trap imperviousness, suddenly transformed into that haunted heroine. Susie clutches at her hair, shamed to consider that the tipping point was her own gleeful curfew violation.

Susie wonders how she could have allowed herself that selfishness. But maybe she is not entirely to blame. Her mother, after all, has encouraged her sisters in their self-indulgences; at times, it has seemed to the girls that this parental laxity is a rightful and fitting compensation for having a father in a loony bin. Susie knew her curfew, but also knew how her sisters had broken similar rules with little more than a halfhearted scolding. Generally, it seems what her mother wants most is for them to have fun.

And Susie was having fun there, at the empty theater of the town hall. As the hour of her curfew whizzed by, Susie split a cigarette with Dickie Clayton, a nerdy boy, who she had believed might be capable of a Clark Kent transformation with the simple removal of his horn-rimmed, tortoiseshell glasses. After
the cigarette burned to a nub, Susie, cavalier as Ava Gardner, stomped it between the rows of plush seats, then pulled away Dickie’s glasses. But the unencumbered face was not what Susie had hoped; without the glasses’ magnifying effect, Dickie’s eyes receded to two narrow, deep-set slits, and he looked at Susie with the expression an old man might make on all fours, feeling the ground for a dropped pill. But Susie kissed him anyway, only her third kiss ever, Dickie’s mouth opening so eagerly into hers. A thoughtless place, where she could think nothing about her family.

When their mouths separated, Dickie bowed his head and blinked up at her, with girlish timidity.

So
, Dickie said.

So—

I’ve been wanting to ask you
.

Yes?
Susie said, in a tone she felt certain would provoke what seemed his sentence’s inevitable conclusion:
do you want to go steady?

How’s your dad doing?

Had this been the point? The reason that even poindexter Dickie Clayton would kiss her? At school, all the kids seem finally to have learned where her father has gone, and a couple have even loaded that fact into their wicked arsenals. Last Tuesday, as Susie leapt mightily from a school yard bench, that jerk Tom Neuberger exclaimed,
Look! One flew over the cuckoo’s nest!

Susie never responds to the other kids’ questions; she imitates her mother’s demureness and, as with her mother, the intrigue surrounding her has grown, granting her a tragic sort of mystique. Is it possible Dickie invited her to Town Hall, kissed her for this reason? Did he think that his kiss earned him that intimacy, that he could be the one to know Susie Merrill’s secrets,
about which everyone was curious? Or was she being paranoid? Susie patted the side of Dickie’s face, as she might a puppy’s, and told Jacquelyn it was time to go.