Melinda nudges Katherine's shoulder, pointing to a corner where a blanket gathers some of the girls from school, one of them sobbing so hard that she is collapsed in a stretch.
“Come on, Kate,” Melinda says anxiously.
Katherine can hear the stories weaving through the trees already, Walter Cronkite breaking into
As the World Turns
, Jackie with blood on her suit, the principal's voice bursting in on the classroom through the PA speaker and the teacher turning as white as chalkâall the details of yesterday, which brings a fresh wave of tears to her eyes. But she doesn't want to sit down and cry with the smokers of St. Ursula. She shakes her head at Melinda. “I'll be there in a minute,” she says. She turns to Trip Holbly, who is peeling a callous on his thumb.
“I'm sick of those girls,” she says. She has never had to act brave before and is impressed by the credibility of her own performance. “Do you want to take a walk? You can see all the way into Kentucky over the ridge.”
Out of his long, gray jacket, Trip Holbly has large biceps and skinny legs. His forearms are covered in cobwebs of fine blond hair. And Katherine, leading him to her favorite view of the river, is already wondering what it must be like to kiss a man with missing teeth.
JOSEPH'S MOTHER FALLS
for Trip Holbly on the spot. She later blames the decision (that's what she called it, a decision) on the vulnerability and confusion of that week in 1963. But to look at pictures of him thenâtall and unpretentious, with fresh muscles hatching on his body, with an honest crooked smile that comes from not expecting too muchâit's obvious the attraction is physical. To be fair, though, she's right. Katherine Guiteau's generation never fully digested the sorrow of that weekend. It collects in their stomachs and bowels like sediment, flaring up whenever conversations turn to the events surrounding November 22. For Katherine that weekend also carries radically different associations, which haunt and later chisel away at her sense of balance. A bridge connects Kennedy's death to the moment she fell in love, and it is with some degree of shame that she looks at photographs of the First Lady gritting her teeth through her lace veil or the eternal flame bobbing in Arlington and thinks of Trip, slipping his arm around her waist and pointing out boats in the brown slate water that rushes under interstate bridges. She keeps the copy of
Life
with the stills from the Zapruder film, examining the whirl of pinks and silvers locked in nuclear greens, politicians the shape of movie stars, as if the insanity in those images turns into flowers under her eyes. She studies them alone in her bedroom with the door locked. There is an exotic glamour to those pictures, to the center of the world the size of an open convertible. Because her own life has contracted to a single frame as well, the shape of a construction worker raised in the countryside who lives in a factory neighborhood ten-minute's drive from her own. She knows to be ashamed of her thoughts, even as she searches newspapers for photographs of the funeral march, of Oswald's murder outside the police station, or of Jackie waving graciously at Love Field. She hides those thoughts the way she keeps the copy of
Life
hidden under her mattressâthe hot pornography of falling in love, the kind that blows her world to pieces, while everyone else stands around not entirely aware that what is happening will have unimaginable consequences.
Trip picks her up from school in a red mud-splattered truck four days later, the passenger seat cleared of tools and his smile fixed. He opens his mouth wide so she can judge the dental patch-up job for herself. They drive to his apartment in silence.
The three railroaded rooms on the second floor above a hardware store are badly carpeted in thin maroon scraps that fit together unevenly, occasionally
revealing brown linoleum where the carpet cuts away at the foot of the oven or the refrigerator. The heat ticks from an organ of old metal pipes, and the windows are lit in white frost. A gritty bar of soap curls like dry leather in the kitchen sink. Katherine notices that it is caked in black resin. He must spend his evenings washing tar from his fingers. There are no pictures hanging in frames, although the walls are punctured like a star map from a previous tenant's attempts at a home. A pencil sketch of a fighter jet hangs on the refrigerator door by a magnet. She wonders if it is an interest in warplanes or in drawing that brought him to trace it.
He pours two glasses of water from the tap; one a chipped coffee mug that he keeps for himself and the other a crystal green glass with no visible set mate in the cupboard. He offers it to her with a surprising lack of embarrassment. In fact, it is Katherine who is suddenly embarrassed, aware that it is the trapping of her privileged background that instantly regards the crudeness of the cup, and too quickly she tries to correct her response. Trip smiles, now guessing the inadequacy of his apartment for a girl like the one in front of him. He follows her into his living room and apologizes for the mess.
She pretends to appreciate the cracked plaster walls with their dust-covered molding, as if inspecting the room for domestic possibility. The place feels lonely, shadowed in slants of late autumn sun, dank with mildew and rotted wood. Crumbled brown leaves drift in the corners.
“Is it your first apartment?”
“I've only been here three months. It still feels new. Are you sure you're okay here?”
“Yes, I'm sure.”
“I can drive you back.”
He reaches his hand out to comfort her. She unzips her coat with its soft lamb's wool lining and hooks the collar on his open fingers. The heater is failing for all of its effort, but sweat pours from Katherine's neck and she has the sudden urge to dip her head out a window to let the cold wind rinse her face.
This is the first time she's been alone in the apartment of a man; an apartment, not a house with barely concealed parents in her Hyde Park neighborhood; and a man, not a boy from one of the local academies nervously pinching trophies and sports gear as if to confirm that one day, with enough patience, he will grow up to be one. She turns to examine Trip, standing still in the
cold, bare light like an organism she can't quite identify in biology books, and it takes all of her courage not to ask him to drive her home. Her stomach cramps and a rush of focus keeps her legs from buckling. Every event in her life before this one has felt controlled, by god or nuns or her own mother or even the government, which until now has always appeared to her as efficient and reliable as god himself. But Trip Holbly is a force outside of those safe lairs.
He leads her to a clear plot of carpet in front of a black television set and unbuttons his flannel coat, flailing as he pulls the coat's arms inside out. She sits on a bed pillow neatly disguised inside of a wool throw and tries to check her appearance in the television's blank screen.
“Do you want me to turn on the TV?” he asks.
“No,” she says, turning away from its reflection. She has watched so much television over the last few days, and each time she turns a channel there is new information, new news, new plots overtaking the last ones that have not yet been resolved, new funerals, new deaths; she is terrified to find out what she has missed by spending a day in class. She wants to be terrified by something else, and she is, her heart racing, her fingers fluttering toward her teeth. She sips the tap water slowly, while Trip yanks his sweater over his head, leaving him in a white T-shirt with a gold chain swaying a small crucifix side to side. She thinks of these seconds as if they exist on television, the seconds before everything goes crazy, the possibility that something else might happen, a million things, although only one will. Katherine reaches to put the glass on a wood side table and it slides straight off before she can catch it, knocking against the heater pipes and smashing into pieces on the carpet.
It feels as if everything in the universe is just barely holding together, as if those tiny glass pieces only assembled for a little while to form a cup and decided to break apart again on their own. That's when Katherine starts to cry, not so much for the nation or for Kennedy or even that skinny runt Oswald, but for whatever is holding together in herself.
Trip touches her chin, lifting it with the side of his finger and then takes aim and kisses her.
His hands wrestle open the buttons of her Oxford shirt and start twisting the metal spoke of her bra. She grabs the bottom of his T-shirt, slipping it over his head and feeling the rubbery skin of his back. His fingers touch her left breast, and, with the other hand, he finishes the job of removing his shirt, tossing it to the side, and smiles down at her. She leans back onto the floor and
gets a look at his body, the blond hair of his chest descending like a stream over his abdomen. She touches his shoulders, grooved with small scars, as his knees push her legs apart. He is shivering, his arms pocked in goose bumps, his chest puffing in and out. She is terrified if she lets another few seconds of stillness move between them, she'll lose her nerve and stop. So she lifts her hips, pinches the elastic of her underwear beneath her skirt and pulls the white silk material down until it expands between her thighs. Trip swivels back on his knees, pushes the underwear the rest of the way to her ankles, and then, without bothering to unbuckle, snakes out of his pants. Soon his body rests on top of her. He holds his weight with a right arm anchored just above her head, and she can hear his teeth click back and forth as he fills her mouth with his tongue. His penis slips under the pleats of her skirt as she blends her fingers into the curls of his hair, the way hairdressers measure the length before cutting. Only one thing can happen next, and she doesn't cry when it does. Why has it always been described to her as a loss?
Joseph's mother imagined losing her virginity to an artist in Paris or a university professor on a college excursion through Rome. She loses her virginity on the carpeted floor of a weekly rental in the neighborhood where her own cleaning lady goes home every night to cook dinner for her kids. That is as exotic as Cincinnati has to offer a seventeen-year-old, and, anyway, she is deeply, grossly, morosely in love.
Katherine returns to Trip's apartment three evenings each week, strips down to her underwear, and soaks up the filthy stench of poverty, all the nicks and grit staining the walls and dirtying the carpet squares. She washes her hands with the scab of soap in the kitchen sink and then descends upon Trip, whom she likes best when he doesn't shower because he reeks of sweat and lumber, the wilderness of men who build garage additions and third bathrooms, skylights and gazebos, in her part of town. When she isn't with him or about to see him, her body feels as if it wears one of those iron blankets nurses throw over you for dental X-rays. And the only way to shed it is Trip Holbly, who once dreamed of being a pilot although his vision was too poor, who smiles patiently as she quotes feminist theory or prosaic love sonnets, who incuriously never shares her one-way-ticket runaway fantasies to European capitals, and who takes her to dinner when she receives a full scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, which means that she isn't going anywhere. Katherine Guiteau is staying put.
IN THE FALL
of 1964, a rash of tornadoes sweep through the Ohio Valley and rip open the barns in the surrounding countryside like soup cans. Downed power lines inside the city limits kill two and set a mansion on fire. On the last day of the inclement weather, when the noon sky makes a horrific sunrise of purple and black, Katherine Guiteau and Trip Holbly marry in St. Mary's Church to the mood music of warning tornado sirens and steeple bells. Katherine, in a white satin dress buoyed with crinoline and lace, is escorted up the aisle by her maternal grandfather, Dominic Garfield. The couple hosts their wedding reception in the vaulted marble undercroft whose corridors are named after Katherine's grandfather after all of her grandmother's donations. Aurelia, a white ghost in a wheelchair, who gave her granddaughter a pair of freshwater-pearl earrings to wear, is steered through the Tyson Guiteau memorial tunnel. Katherine likes to think of her grandmother's nodding head as a sign of approval, although when she makes her way over to kiss Aurelia on the cheek, her hands and shoulders are also bobbing up and down. “You must always keep those pearls with you,” Aurelia tells her, squaring her gulleted eyes on the bride's earlobes. “Some things have to remain in this family, understand?”
Katherine teaches freshman history at a small Catholic college on the east side of town, while her husband tars driveways into gleaming black pastures for grazing luxury cars. Their own two-floor Queen Anne has the deceptive look of affluence as well, due to Trip's skimming of unused construction supplies from job sites. He is responsible for the greenhouse addition that bubbles from the back and that inadvertently kills birds, sometimes three or four a day, which fly into the polished glass and collect dead on the porch, a mortuary of cardinals and sparrows and brilliant, suicidal blue jays swept into mulch bags on Sunday morning. He also draws a large dirt oval in the backyard, outlining the swimming pool he begins to dig by himself in 1971. Katherine is obsessed with committing the progress of the pool to film, with two years worth of shots of her husband disappearing into a hole in the ground, hands on a shovel, his torso glowing and an orange Cincinnati Bengals T-shirt tied around his forehead to soak the sweat.
Their son crawls into their photos in 1973. Joseph Thomas Guiteau Holbly arrives like an ambassador of peace, bringing all of them together, a fat Buddha baptized at St. Mary with a diaper rash and green socks with crocodile teeth stitched along the toes. He's the solid wrinkled future,
the aftermath of astonishing love. Even Aurelia, who takes forty minutes to descend from her attic bedroom to the front porch, hails the child as a blessing.