Hardscrabble Road(12)

“I didn’t spend three years at the Harvard Law School to pour orange juice for you in the morning,” she would say, when the anger went beyond the point where striking attitudes was enough for her. “And you didn’t get Parkinson’s disease at Phillips Exeter. You can pour your own damned coffee.”

In the years since—and there were many years—Neil had wondered why she hadn’t walked out on him long before, but of course that was the times. You didn’t walk out on a perfectly good husband in 1963. You especially didn’t file for divorce because he wanted you to pour his orange juice in the morning, and you thought you were too busy and important to do it. Eventually, he’d gotten her a maid, and that was when the real trouble started. That was when he realized that she wasn’t really angry about the orange juice. She didn’t care about making beds. She didn’t care about making toast. What she cared about was the fact that she was one of only two women in her graduating class at Harvard Law, she’d had to be twice as intelligent and twice as determined as any of the men there to make it at all, and now she was married in Philadelphia and had nothing in particular to do.

Well, Neil thought, she had something in particular to do now. He hadn’t mentioned it at the office when the subject had first come up, but he was going to have to, soon. The men in the firm who remembered his marriage were largely long gone. Partners did that. They got worn-out by age and time. The ones who did remember probably didn’t realize that this Kate was that Kate. She wasn’t using Savage as a last name, and she’d never used her maiden name when she’d come to firm parties or paid her respects to the managing partner’s wife at Christmas. She also wasn’t from Philadelphia, so not so many people knew her family as might have if the firm had been located in Boston or New York. She hadn’t even called herself Kate. When Neil thought of the two of them married, she was always Katherine to him, as she had been Katherine at Vassar when he’d first met her, and she’d first explained how and why she intended to go to law school, and what she intended to do with the degree once she got it.

Of course, she wasn’t doing, now, what she had intended to do with the degree when she’d first started at Harvard, and he’d first decided to indulge her by not insisting that they get married right away, as soon as he graduated from law school himself. The truth of it was, he’d been afraid to press her. He’d been afraid she’d turn him down. He’d been able to sense the ferocity in her even then. Then, of course, the “women’s movement” had come along, and that had been the impetus she needed—no, Katherine never needed impetus. She had that all on her own. The “women’s movement” had been the narrative she needed, as they would have said when Neil was in college, and the narrative had taken her out of his life forever, and to New York. She would have gone anyway. It would only have taken her longer. She needed someplace to be that would let her be a lawyer, and Philadelphia at that time and in that era was not it.

Of all the vulgarities in a vulgar age, Neil thought that the “women’s movement” was the very worst. It made ugly what had the right to be beautiful, and harsh what had the right to be gentle. It wasn’t that he begrudged women the right to be lawyers if they wanted to be. It was that he begrudged the loss of grace in the world that had come about when women began to shriek. Maybe he just begrudged the loss of Katherine, who had not only walked out on his life and let him arrange the divorce in any way he wanted to, without so much as a backward glance at the property settlements, but had never bothered to send him a Christmas card in all the years since. He sent Christmas cards to her, when he knew where she was, which was less often than he liked. He kept the photograph album of their wedding that she had left behind.

Right now, he kept only the orange juice. The rest of the food—toast, coffee, ginger preserve, butter—he put away or threw away. None of it appealed to him. It was one thing to say he didn’t like to get into the office before nine. It was another thing to waltz into the office after nine. Even Grayson Barden didn’t do that. The fact was, he’d been sitting here at this table for an hour and a half, thinking not about work, not about getting ready to get going, not about Drew Harrigan and his problems, but about Kate, and the fact of Kate was making it impossible for him to move. He should have married again. He should have abandoned his principles and found some nice Philadelphia debutante who wanted nothing more than to spend her days arranging charity functions and playing tennis at a country club, and married her, and done what all partners do, put up with it. If it had felt too sordid, he wouldn’t have had to have a mistress on the side. He just couldn’t seem to make himself care, one way or the other, about the sort of woman who would be interested in marrying him. The divorcées and widows his own age were the least attractive of all. They were not only not-Kate, they had hardened in their tastes and attitudes. They already knew all they wanted to know.