The Storm at the Door (7 page)

They say it takes months sometimes. Sometimes years
.

Years? How do you know that place has his best interests in mind? Those people are looking to make a buck, like anyone else
.

What other choice do we have?

Look, Katharine, I support you. I support you and the girls. I will never let anything happen to you and the girls. But that husband of yours. You don’t need to try to reason with his madness. You need to find a feasible solution
.

Katharine felt the need to protest, the moment requiring her to defend the wisdom of Mayflower, of this hospitalization. But suddenly she found herself tremendously exhausted, and couldn’t muster a viable counterargument.

What?
her father eventually said.

He just needs to come home
.

Well, if that’s how you feel—I mean, wasn’t it your decision to put him in that place?

It had been her decision, at least in part, hadn’t it? Maybe the idea had first come from the men—her cousins George, Edward, and Herman, the two state police officers—but the final decision had been, in no small part, her own.

And why deny it? There had been a relief to it, the acknowledgment, in front of friends and family, in front of the authorities, of the nameless affliction that, for years, had been the great secret of her marriage. Of course others were familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Frederick’s liquored behavior: his conversational
and sometimes just nearly physical pugnacity, his sloppy advances on other women, the sophomoric nihilist manifesto that the bourbon and he would often coauthor
(This is all there is, the pain of remembering and drinking to forget)
. But, in front of others, Frederick had always seemed able to sheath this darkness within the electric luminescence of his charismas, passions, and erudition, and others seemed to take these behaviors as necessary eccentricities of his brilliance, vaguely dangerous embers his powers sparked off.

Only Katharine, or at least she had felt, knew the depth of that darkness, that in the way joy and sorrow secretly generate each other, this grandiosity, this affability, this brilliance had a grim bride. And the two were so intimate, one a form of the other. Sometimes, one Frederick—drunk, effusive, pyrotechnically articulate—would go into the night, and another—sober, shattered—would return just hours later. There was one Frederick who would berate Katharine for the smallness of her aesthetic ambitions (her collection of Wedgwood tableware, her insistence upon matching outfits for her daughters), one Frederick who demeaned the very way she lived (
clean, shop, chat chat chat, sleep
, he had once summarized her existence), until she felt utterly reduced, less significant than the town drunk (at least he had a kind of celebrity). Hours later, there was another Frederick, maudlin and curled in her arms, pleading with her to teach him the secret of her simple goodness, her simple calm. Electric or fizzled: there were perhaps many Fredericks, but like iron filings to a magnet, they all congregated around one pole or the other.

Perhaps her true weakness, her true shame was that she had done so much to help him hide what he wanted so much to conceal. In the mornings, she would brew pots of coffee to rouse
him from hangovers. When his drunken diatribes would tilt to offensive—as when he began to theorize upon a vast Jewish conspiracy in front of the town banker, Samuel Levine—she would clutch his thigh and laugh so that no one could be certain whether he was serious. Once, before a crucial meeting with the board of the White Paper Company, she had to spoon a weeping Frederick in bed, whispering to him of his brilliance. She made of herself an anti-Delilah, reapplying virile powers to his balding head.

The secret had grown as vast and indescribable as his affliction. It was a fathomless depth over which they both had to work, laying tenuous ropes and gangplanks, to try to continue to navigate the world’s surface. Sometimes, her secret made her feel she and her husband were frighteningly alone; the solitude of their secret was perhaps its worst aspect. Other times, though, she would wonder if perhaps this was simply the truth of adult life, this unending project of keeping up appearances. Sometimes she would look at her married friends, watch the ways their eyes tracked their spouses with contempt or fear or gratitude, and Katharine would think,
My god! The secret lives everywhere! The true complexities! The unspoken burdens!
Sometimes, she could believe that, not only for Frederick and herself but for everyone, the visible world was a collective fantasy, to which we all consented in the attempt to obscure the ineffable stories of our true afflictions.

Of course Katharine wondered, at times, how she had ever let herself marry him. But then, at certain moments at social gatherings with her husband, Katharine startled with a spark of what Frederick had been able to kindle, when they first met. She has often chastised herself for her decisions, for her rash rush to marriage with this man she did not really know at all. Still, in certain
moments, Katharine knew there was no mystery to her decision. Once, after all, Frederick’s charms—which could enthrall the entirety of a crowded party—had been ray-beam-focused upon her. Their courtship, before he left for the war, had been two months of his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his canny metaphors, his poignant humor, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. She had never known a man like him.

There was no mystery to why she had fallen for him; the mystery was why she had continued with him despite all the fearsome evidence, what the better part of her knew almost from the beginning.

She had known, for the first time, only weeks after they met, on that trip Katharine made with Frederick to Chicago, halfway to San Diego and his time at sea with the Navy. On their last night together, the imminence of his departure and of war hung darkly over them. Trying to cheer or else distract themselves, they had gone to a bar near Lincoln Park. In those first months, their dates always smeared into late night drunkenness, but Katharine convinced herself all the liquor was only an element of the celebration of their having found each other.

As Frederick consumed his fourth and then fifth bourbons, Katharine nodded in agreement with his tirade on the absolute madness that a man living his own life should be sent to die for others. She tried to be agreeable for Frederick, as she had already learned she must. That night, however, for the first time, his screed narrowed to her: no longer just theories about universal ignorance but theories about Katharine’s own ignorance of what he suffered, what awaited him. On the street outside the bar, they encountered an olive-skinned man speaking in an accent, which drunken Frederick took to be German. Frederick could have beaten the life from the poor man had he not managed to
scramble away from Frederick’s fists. Katharine told herself then that it was just terror, reasonable in its way. That it was not Frederick, not really.

But then, just months into his service, Frederick’s letters began to arrive, without explanation, not from his ship but from a naval hospital in California. Katharine pressed Frederick for an explanation, but she so quickly accepted what now strikes her as his ludicrously vague reply:
It is nothing but exhaustion, dearest
, he wrote her.
And some weight loss. But I’m certain, under your care & love, I will improve in no time
.

In her letters, Katharine asked:

What is the diagnosis?

How much weight loss?

Has this happened to you before?

Frederick did not answer; he merely pleaded with her not to worry. When he sent Katharine a ring through the mail, she agreed to marry him.

But the Frederick who returned home, the Frederick she married, was also, she had told herself, not really Frederick. This other Frederick, hollowed with starvation, who would often weep in their bed at night, and sometimes in the mornings as well. This other Frederick, who failed to charm, failed to understand, failed even to cross a room without stumbling. This other Frederick, who navigated the world with a left hand’s crude and fumbling attempt to imitate the right hand’s dexterity. Well, Katharine thought, she herself had never known war. But she could comprehend, as women’s magazines constantly instructed soldiers’ wives to comprehend, that the traumas of war could be transformative. This was not really Frederick, this emaciated man convulsing with grief in the sheets. But through love and care, as Frederick had written her, she could restore the Real.

And for a time, at least, it seemed she had succeeded. Or at least there had been the evidence of success: there was Harvard Business School, then his career. And, occasionally, it had so perfectly resembled a perfect life. They had many moments of great happiness. Even after all his betrayals and failures that followed, there were many moments when it seemed they had succeeded, just barely, high-wiring their family on the ropes they stretched over her knowledge, his abyss.

But, that night, just over a month ago, the ropes finally snapped.

Frederick’s behavior at the beginning of that July evening was a mere extension, a slight deepening, of his alcoholic charisma, his nightly discovery of a radiant otherworld, refracted and luminous, through the browned light of his bourbon glass.

The regular crew had congregated, as they did nightly, in the new cabin Edith and George Carlyle had built up in the forest, to allow the adults time and space away from the children. As ever, Perry Como, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra crooned from the record player. These evenings were often wonderful times—laughing, chatting, sometimes even dancing—in the piney newness of that cabin, while their happy, healthy, numerous children slept safely in the next house. Despite her constant fretting, despite her inability to keep from contemplating possible bad outcomes, Katharine often found herself able to enjoy these evenings. She sometimes even had the thought that it had been precisely this, this prosperity and mirth, for which so many men had fought and died not twenty years before. Katharine had lost her best friend and cousin Bud to the Battle of the Bulge, her brother, Roger, was still addled with shell shock, but at least here, in this brown house with these people, the world seemed restored in exactly the way the war’s end had promised.

But, of course, people always complicate things; paradise on earth is never tenable, or even tolerable. Frederick began to complicate things. Frederick—in whom alcohol opened an insatiable appetite for conflict, a desire for the niceties of normal social transactions suddenly to break apart into high drama—would find ways to pick fights between married pairs. His litany of questions about the specifics of Edward’s mortgage on the island he had just purchased would chafe at his wife, Martha, who would eventually cry out her suppressed resentment of the entire acquisition. Frederick would suss out a small rift between Lieutenant General Pointer and his wife, Marjory, in their political beliefs about the Vietnam situation, and he would plunge his brutal fingers into the schism.

Oh
, General Pointer would then say to his wife,
now we’re finally saying how we feel. Swell! I’ve got a few things to say myself
.

Late that night, the night Frederick was taken to the hospital, had been like a hundred other nights, tensions snapping as Frederick settled into his fourth bourbon. Katharine sometimes wondered if others could mistake his boorishness, his lewdness for simple drunkenness or even topped-over charm. Perhaps to recognize when the other Frederick was in command required a wife’s intimacy.

Or maybe not. Katharine would later learn that earlier that week, down at the docks, the men—Herman, George, Edward, and Pointer—had held a long conversation about the ways Frederick preyed upon them, drove them to confrontation.

Do you think we should worry about his drinking?
George had put forth.

Well, I for one am damn worried. Damn worried
, Pointer had said. Herman had proposed a theory:
It’s not the drinking, per se. The
drinking is only a symptom. There is something dark in him. The man needs help. Don’t forget, he’s had breakdowns before. When he was just a boy, and also when he was in the Navy
.

The men had nodded.

The men all thought of this conversation when, that night, Frederick’s humor reduced, as it often would, to baser elements. By the fifth bourbon, gone were the displays of his erudition and wit. Now he was making jokes about fighting and fucking, jokes Frederick always seemed to have in a never-ending abundance: did he read these somewhere or, when the bourbon fuel was poured into his mental machinery, did his mind simply begin to manufacture them? As Frederick ascended, in rapidity of speech, rapidity of motion, the other guests slowed, muted. George, always the peacemaker, tried to acknowledge Frederick’s edgy humor, to laugh, but also to pat the other guests sympathetically on the knee. Several times, George slapped Frederick on the back, as if in a shared laugh, but then tried to usher him back to the couch.

Hey, John Winthrop
, Frederick said to George.
Tell the Puritans to lighten up
.

The faces before Frederick had no intention of lightening.
Dour, dour, dour
, Frederick said, brushing off George’s hand with a shudder of his scapula, and then turning away down the hall.

As soon as Frederick was out of the room, Katharine tried to clear the befouled air her husband had left.
I am so sorry
, she said.
He’s behaving terribly. We should go
.

Martha turned to Katharine, to accept her apology. But before Martha could speak, George interjected.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, Katharine, he isn’t your child. You must stop apologizing for him. The man needs help, not excuses
.

Maybe
, Katharine said, not knowing—how could she have then?—how this admission would haunt her.

It’s the damned bourbon
, Katharine said.
If he could only lay off the damned bourbon
.