his corrupt, protective heart. As Victor pointed out (all higher interpretation came from him), this was plain old middle-class ideology, the erotic components of which were easy to make out. Ignorance in women, a strong stimulus for men who considered themselves rough. On an infinitely higher level, Baudelaire had advised staying away from learned ladies. Bluestockings and bourgeois ladies caused sexual paralysis. Artists could trust only women of the people.
Anyway, Katrina had been raised to consider herself a nitwit. That she knew she was not one was an important secret postulate of her feminine science. And she didn’t really object to Dorothea’s way of discussing her intricate and fascinating problem with Victor. Dorothea said, “I want to get you to look at it from every angle.” What this really meant was that Dotey would try to shaft her from every side. “Let’s start with the fact that as Mrs. Alfred Goliger nobody in Chicago would take notice of you. When Mr. Goliger invited people to look at his wonderful collections of ivory, jade, semiprecious stones, and while he did all the talking, he only wanted you to serve the drinks and eats. And to the people with whom he tried to make time, the Lyric Opera types, the contemporary arts crowd, the academics, and those other shits, you were just a humdrum housewife. Then all of a sudden, through Wulpy, you’re meeting all the Mother-wells and Rauschenbergs and Ashberys and Frankenthalers, and you leave the local culture creeps groveling in the dust. However, when your old wizard dies, what then? Widows are forgotten pretty fast, except those with promotional talent. So what happens to girlfriends?”
Arriving at Northwestern University to give his seminars on American painting, Victor had been lionized by the Goligers. Alfred Goliger, who, flying to Bombay and to Rio, had branched out from gems to antiques and objets d’art and bought estate jewelry and also china, sterling, pottery, statuary in all continents, longed to be a part of the art world. He wasn’t one of your hobbled husbands; he did pretty much as he liked in Brazil and India. He misjudged Katrina if he thought that in her he had a homebody who spent her time choosing wallpapers and attending PTA meetings. Victor, the perfect lion, relaxing among Evanston admirers while he drank martinis and ate hors d’oeuvres, took in the eager husband, aggressively on the make, and then considered the pretty wife—in every sense of the word a dark lady. He perceived that she was darkest where darkness counted most. Circumstances had made Katrina look commonplace. She did what forceful characters do with such imposed circumstances; she used them as camouflage. Thus she approached Wulpy like a nearsighted person, one who has to draw close to study you. She drew so near that you could feel her breath. And then her lowering, almost stubborn look rested on you for just that extra beat that carried a sexual message. It was the incompetency with which she presented herself, the nearsighted puzzled frown, that made the final difference. Her first handshake informed him of a disposition, an inclination. He saw that all her preparations had been set. With a kind of engraved silence about the mouth under the wide bar of his mustache, Wulpy registered all this information. All he had to do was give the countersign. He intended to do just that.
At first it was little more than the fooling of a visiting fireman, an elderly, somewhat spoiled celebrity. But Wulpy was too big a man for crotchets. He was a disciplined intellectual. He stood for something. At the age of seventy, he had arranged his ideas in well-nigh final order: none of the weakness, none of the drift that made supposedly educated people contemptible. How can you call yourself a modern thinker if you lack the realism to identify a weak marriage quickly, if you don’t know what hypocrisy is, if you haven’t come to terms with lying—if, in certain connections, people can still say about you, “He’s a sweetheart!”? Nobody would dream of calling Victor “a sweetheart.” Wickedness? No, well-seasoned judgment. But whatever his first intentions might have been, the affair became permanent. And how do you assess a woman who knows how to bind such a wizard to her? She’s got to be more than a dumpy suburbanite sex-pot with clumsy ankles. And this is something more than the cruel absurdity, the decline and erotic enslavement, of a distinguished man grown (how suddenly!) old.
The divorce was ugly. Goliger was angry, vengeful. When he moved, he stripped the house, taking away his Oriental treasures, the jade collection, the crystal, the hangings, the painted gilded elephants, the bone china, even some of the valuable jewelry he had given her and which she hadn’t had the foresight to put in the bank. He was determined to evict her from the house, too, a fine old house. He could do that if he obtained custody of the kids. The kids took little notice of the disappearance of the Indian and Venetian objects, although Trina’s lawyer argued in court that they were disoriented. Dorothea said about her nieces, “I’ll be interested to find out what gives with those two mysterious characters. As for Alfred, this is all-out war.” She thought that Katrina was too absentminded to be a warrior. “Are you taking notice, or not?”
“Of course I’m taking notice. He was always flying to an auction. Never at home. What did
Katrina was still at the dinner table when Victor’s call came. Her guest was Lieutenant Krieggstein, a member of the police force. He arrived late, because of the fierce weather, and told a story about skidding into a snowdrift and waiting for a tow truck. He had almost lost his voice and said it would take him an hour to thaw. A friend of the family, he needed no permission to bring up wood from the cellar and build a fire. The house had been built in the best age of Chicago architecture (made like a Stradivarius, said Krieggstein), and the curved tiles of the fireplace (“the old craftsmanship!”) were kingfisher blue.
“I’ve seen rough weather before, but this beats everything,” he said, and he asked for Red Devil sauce to sprinkle on his curry and drank vodka from a beer mug. His face still burned with the frost, and his eyes went on watering at the table. He said, “Oh, what a luxury that fire is on my back.”
“I hope it doesn’t set off your ammunition.”
The Lieutenant carried at least three guns. Were all plainclothes (“soft-clothes”) men armed to the teeth, or did he have more weapons because he was a little guy? He set himself up as gracious but formidable. Just challenge him and you’d see fatal action. Victor said about him that he was just this side of sanity but was always crossing the line. “A lone cowhand on both sides of the Rio Grande simultaneously.” On the whole, he took an indulgent view of Krieggstein.
It was nearly midnight in Buffalo. Katrina hadn’t expected Victor to call just yet. Thoroughly familiar with his ways, Katrina knew that her old giant must have had a disappointing evening, had probably thrown himself disgusted on the bed in the Hilton, more than half his clothing on the floor and a pint of Black Label nearby to “keep the auxiliary engines going.” The trip was harder than he was willing to admit. Beila, his wife, had advised him not to take it, but her opinions didn’t count. A subordinate plant manager didn’t tell the chairman of the board what to do. He was off to see Katrina. Lecturing, of course, was his pretext. “I promised those guys,” he said. Not entirely a pretext, however. Greatly in demand, he got high fees. Tonight he had spoken at the state university, and tomorrow he was speaking to a group of executives in Chicago. Buffalo was a combined operation. The Wulpys’ youngest daughter, Vanessa, who was an undergraduate there, was having problems. For Victor, family problems could never be what they were for other people—he wouldn’t
Well, when the phone rang, Katrina said, “There’s Victor. A little early. This may take a while.” With Krieggstein you needn’t stand on ceremony. Dinner had ended, and if she was too long on the phone he could let himself out. A large heavy beauty, shapely (only just within the limits), Katrina left the dining room as rapidly as her style of movement allowed. She released the catch of the swinging kitchen door. Of course Krieggstein meant to stay and to eavesdrop. Her affair was no secret and he considered himself her confidant. He had every qualification for this: he was a cop, and cops saw it all; he was a Pacific-war hero; and he was her scout’s-honor friend. Listening, he turned his thick parboiled face to the fire, made his plump legs comfortable, crossed his short arms over his cardigan.
“How has it been, Victor?” said Katrina. How tired winter travel had made him was what she had to determine from the pitch of his voice and his choice of words. This must have been an exceptionally hard trip. It was strenuous labor for a man of his size, and with a surgically fused knee, to pole his way upon a walking stick against the human tides of airports. Wearing his Greek sea captain’s cap, he was all the more conspicuous. He made his way everywhere with a look of willing acceptance and wit. He was on good terms with his handicaps (a lifelong, daily familiarity with pain) and did not complain about going it alone. Other famous old men had helpers. She had heard that Henry Moore kept no fewer than six assistants. Victor had nobody. His life had assumed a crazy intensity that could not be shared. Secrecy was necessary, obviously. At the heart of so much that was obvious was an unyielding mystery: Why
Katrina thought him mysterious-looking, too. Beneath the bill of the Greek or Lenin-style cap there was a sort of millipede tangle about the eyes. His eyes were long, extending curiously into the temples. His cheeks were as red in sickness as in health; he was almost never pale. He carried himself with admirable, nonposturing, tilted grace,
