The Storm: A Novel

Chapter One

They say that Kenzie Maxwell married Willow because she was the only woman he still knew at the time who could afford him. She was a patrician to her fingertips and, like Kenzie’s two earlier wives, a woman of means. He said that, poor as he was, he would have been crazy to marry for money but crazier still to have let it stand in his way any more than pretty eyes or a fetching sense of humor. The wives on their part never complained that he hadn’t given them their money’s worth one way or another. It was just that after a few years, in each case, he managed to convey to them in his disarming way that he had found another who seemed to find him worth a little more.

They say that Willow married Kenzie—they were both in their early sixties at the time—because she was bored and because even at his worst, she told him, he struck her as at least less boring than most people she knew. She had more wrinkles than any other woman on Plantation Island—most of the others had had tucks taken in their faces so many times that they could hardly get their mouths closed—and she was also the most beautiful. Even at the approach of seventy, she had the figure of a girl and a girl’s supple movement when she walked, usually with either a parasol or a golf club for a walking stick. She took no pains with her clothes but always looked more chic than anybody else in a pair of floppy slacks, maybe, and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved silk jacket, and any one of a number of broad-brimmed straw hats that she had picked up at some thrift shop or souvenir stand with a gauzy scarf tied under her chin to hold it in place, and sunglasses. She did nothing with her hair but let it straggle about her shoulders, oystery white and uncombed. Her smile was both mocking and self-mocking.

Kenzie had a large, intelligent face and a bushy mustache at a time when in his particular world even a small one was considered an eccentricity. When Willow talked about boredom, he said boredom was a sin and that being bored to death, as she often said she was, was a form of suicide. She said she was all for suicide, but as for sin, she didn’t believe in it any more than she believed in much of anything else. Unlike you, Kenzie, she said. You are a believer—like your friend the Bishop.

I believe in everything, he said. It’s why I am never bored.

Bishop Hazleton, who was known as Frog because he somewhat resembled one, had for several seasons since his retirement been in charge of the chapel that Violet Sickert had caused to be built overlooking one of the fairways, and Kenzie attended the early service there every Sunday. Whereas every other man in the place looked as though he was straight out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue, Kenzie wore a baggy, dark sweatshirt with a hood in back like a monk’s cowl and always chose a pew near a window so he would have as much light to read the service by as possible. With a faint smile on his lips, he would sit attentive through the Bishop’s rambling homilies, which seldom failed to include a pleasantry or two about the Sunday golfers going by outside in their electric golf carts. As soon as the service was over, Kenzie always left through the side door so he wouldn’t have to shake hands with everybody on the front steps afterwards.

They say he has taken up karate lessons, Willow said.

Kenzie shrugged his shoulders.

It’s better than destroying the life of a girl young enough to be your daughter, he said. I say it so you won’t have to.

I would never dream of saying it, Kenzie, she said. We are mismatched in almost every way, but we have always treated each other with consideration.

"Noblesse oblige, Kenzie said. He pushed the sunglasses back on her forehead so he could see her better. Tendresse oblige."

Can you imagine the Bishop breaking bricks in two with his bare hand? Willow said, and he said, The trouble is I have always been able to imagine almost anything. It has been my downfall.

It had also been his strongest suit and, before scandal drove him into exile, the way he had made his mark on the world. It was what had led him to become a writer or, as he preferred to put it sometimes, a delusionist, which struck him as less pretentious. He thought of himself as a man who wrote because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his delusions.

He had first appeared in print when, to his surprise, The New Yorker accepted one of his stories while he was still in his twenties and then maybe five or six others over the next few years. They were ironic, graceful little glimpses of people falling in and out of love in Manhattan, where he had often fallen in and out of love himself, and their style was spare, translucent, wistful. Eventually a collection of them was published under the title Both, Both, My Girl, from Prospero’s answer to Miranda when she asks him if it was by blessèd means or foul that they were washed up on their enchanted island. Both, both is what all those stories are about, he told his wife at the time. It is also the story of my life.

The book never sold particularly well but was by and large favorably received by reviewers so that in time his name and even his face started to ring a bell in places where such matters were known and talked about. He gave a reading or two at the Gotham Book Mart and was invited to apply for a month of literary seclusion at Yaddo at about the time that young aspirants like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell were holed up there. He declined on the grounds that he always felt uneasy in the presence of real writers. He was also elected to membership in the Apollonian Club, where he often sought refuge from one or the other of his marriages, and every week or so enlivened lunch there at the Long Table.

Occasionally he was asked to give readings from his own work in the library, and sometimes he interspersed them with poems he was particularly fond of. He recited them from memory so naturally and feelingly, as if he was forging them out of himself as he went along, that there were times when he brought tears not only to his own eyes but even to those of such unlikely members of the audience as the senior partner of some great law firm, say, or an ancient biographer of Alexander Hamilton who everybody thought couldn’t hear thunder. When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, / And all my bonds I needs must loose apart, / Must doff my will as raiment laid away—it was one of his favorites and he spoke it so quietly, so hesitantly, that he seemed half afraid of where it was leading him—With the first dream that comes with the first sleep / I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

In addition to these recitations, from time to time he might describe at length some adventure he had had, and did it in such a way that it was unclear whether it had really happened or not, or even whether he himself believed that it had. He told of how as a boy he had wanted to become a magician because once he had seen one make his entire audience disappear so that only Kenzie and the magician himself had been left in the otherwise empty theater. He told of how only that day at the club he had come upon the ghost of Judge Learned Hand fumbling with his zipper at the downstairs urinal, and of how one day on his way home at dusk, he was all but certain that he had seen the angel who leads General Sherman’s horse by the bridle in front of the Plaza Hotel suddenly spread its golden wings and go soaring over the trees of the park. It was remarkable that only a few of his listeners found these stories preposterous. It was perhaps because he clearly found them rather preposterous himself.

His second book not only attracted a good deal more attention than the first but also either brought about a major change in his life or perhaps in some way was the product of changes that had already started to take place without his being aware of them. It was a book of saints, of all things, and was possibly triggered, at least in an outward way, by the fact that his wife at the time was a practicing Roman Catholic. The title he gave it was A Fine Frenzy, and the madder and more frenzied the saints were, the more he lost his heart to them.

There was Margaret of Antioch, for instance, who was swallowed up whole by the Devil in the form of a dragon, and a third-century schoolmaster named Cassian, whose pagan students got together and stabbed him to death with their pens, and Rose of Lima, who was so ashamed of her own beauty that she burned off her face with quicklime. He was delighted especially by Joseph of Cuperino, a half-wit who terrified the faithful by flying up and down the length of their churches like a bat in his brown Franciscan robes, and by an Irish child named Sillan, who copied the Gospels out nightly with all five fingers of his left hand burning like candles so he could see what he was doing. There was a devout Roman matron named Felicitas whose seven sons were slain before her eyes and who then was made to wait four months in anguish because she longed so to join them; finally, when she still refused to renounce her faith, she was thrown into a tub of seething oil.

The people who liked the book and talked it up to their friends until eventually it made the Times’ New and Recommended list for a week or two were for the most part people who avoided religion like the plague and found in such absurd accounts yet further justification for doing so. Perhaps there was something of this in Kenzie himself when he started out writing them, but by the time he had finished, his view had changed.

The more he came to know of these crazies and misfits with their pointless acts of self-sacrifice and grisly martyrdoms, the more he was struck by the passion that they all seemed driven by. Unlike the characters in his fiction, who were continually, like Kenzie himself, drifting from one passion to the next, theirs was as constant as it was off-the-wall. Nothing seemed too much to them for the God they adored. The storm-lashed rocks they clung to like limpets, the iron vests that bit into their flesh, the nettles they flogged themselves with, and every other grotesque penance and superhuman fast with which they ecstatically renounced everything that makes life lovely as if the renunciation itself were incomparably lovelier still—it all of it struck him as the kind of lunatic thing that he had done in his more passionate moments, such as standing for hours in the rain looking up at a particular window or buying presents he couldn’t possibly afford. As he saw it, it wasn’t that God so much as dreamed of asking such outrageous things of them, which would make him even more outrageous than they were, but that they did them for him because they couldn’t find anything else that cost so dear and would thus seem so precious either in his sight or theirs. Watching them became for him like looking out the window at a swarm of zanies running around the street below in a frenzy of excitement over something that they were all pointing at in the sky but that, because of the overhang of the roof, he himself was unable to see. So what he eventually did, in effect, was to come down into the street to find out for himself what all the excitement was about. Or, as Willow put it years later, he went off the deep end.

She had been married to somebody else at the time but knew Kenzie slightly from having run into him now and then at a cocktail party somewhere or in the crowded lobby of the opera during intermission. She remembered how his face had always struck her as too big for his body, and how his shaggy hair curled about his ears and over the back of his collar. She remembered his sad eyes and the easy, joshing way he had of speaking to people, like herself, whom he barely knew as though they were among his oldest friends. She remembered how, except for being a little more articulate than most, a little more unpredictable, he seemed to her so much like any number of other men she knew that she was quite taken aback when word reached her about the new direction his life had taken.

The way he began was by starting to go to church for the first time since his boarding-school days when it had been forced upon him and he had sat in his assigned pew with his head piously bowed so he could read the Tribune funnies spread out at his feet like a prayer rug. He tried a different church every Sunday for a while—fancy ones and down-at-the-heels ones, Catholic ones and Protestant ones, no-nonsense ones and screwball ones—until he finally settled for one in the theater district known as Smoky Mary’s, where there were billowing clouds of incense that smelled like Christmas, and vestments that looked like a production of The Mikado, and a good deal of chanting that rose in waves to the stone vaulting overhead where he could imagine Joseph of Cuperino soaring approvingly back and forth like Count Dracula.

Little by little he began to feel that he was catching at least an occasional glimpse of what all the shouting was about. It was something utterly out of reach up there in the sky where they were all rushing about in the street pointing at it, and yet it was apparently near enough to have set them on fire. It was something even more outlandish than they were who had fallen in love with it, and yet it was at the same time so full of stillness and loveliness and ultimate sanity that to live blind to its existence, the way he always had, struck him as more outlandish still. He began to believe that it might even be worth burning your face off for if you became convinced that it was somehow your face that kept you from it.

In time he decided that it was not enough simply to sit there a little tipsy on the haze of Smoky Mary’s with tears prickling his eyes when the Host was elevated to the tinkling of a bell that reminded him of Papageno tinkling his in The Magic Flute, not enough occasionally to hear as plainly as though they were being whispered into his ear the words I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart as he stood in the shuffling line to receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest as gorgeously gotten up as Sarastro in the temple of Isis and Osiris. Increasingly he felt the need to go deeper off the deep end still and do something as out character and against nature, or at least against his nature, as Francis kissing the leper or Simeon Stylites on his sixty-foot column in the Syrian desert.

What he eventually found his way to was a rescue mission for the young in the South Bronx called the Alodians after a Spanish martyr named Alodia, the patron saint of abused children and runaways, whom he had not put in his book because at the time he had never heard of her and probably wouldn’t have found her colorful enough for inclusion if he had. Her story was simply that, along with her sister Nunilos, she was brutally mistreated by a Muslim stepfather and ended up being beheaded rather than give up her virginity along with her religious convictions. It was Kenzie’s older brother, Dalton, chairman of the Alodians’ board, who originally put him on to them, just as it was Dalton too who became eventually the chief instrument in having him drummed out. But when Kenzie first became involved with them, it seemed to be