The Catherine Wheel, by Jean Stafford

This 1951 novel recalls sharply Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I read about a year ago. The Catherine Wheel spans a summer not a day, but moves back along the remembrances and regrets of its characters as fully and poignantly as Woolf’s. 

Cousin Katherine, unmarried, and fortyish though with hair turned white by a bout of typhus, summers in a grand house outside a small town near the Maine coast. Though the book is set in the late 1930s – early 1940s, Katherine’s life is anachronistic, as if by resisting modernity she can keep time itself from intruding. Instead of a car she has a carriage and team of horses and coachman, as well as a gardener, a cook, a couple of maids, and a tenant on her land. She is the grande dame of the region, respected and appreciated and gossiped-over by the townsfolk. 

Every summer Katherine hosts her twin nieces and nephew, who under her indulgent intellectual eye are free to do as they will. Andrew, now twelve, has been best friends with the tenant’s son Victor, a rough character a couple years older than himself, with whom he would otherwise never cross paths. In summers past they have been inseparable, performing mischief, fishing and clam-digging, swimming and boating, and spying on the townsfolk of the nearby village. This year, however, Victor’s older brother Charles, a sailor, is home with some nonspecific ailment; Victor appoints himself nursemaid and confidante. Andrew is inflamed with jealousy – he has lost his companion, and the hours weigh on him. He longs for Charles’s death, or recuperation and return to seafaring – either would give Victor back to him. 

But this is not to be – Charles’s health waxes and wanes, Victor is under his sway, and Andrew wishes ever more fervently that Charles will meet some terrible fate. Katherine has her own secret, but while she and Andrew suffer and sense each other’s misery, they cannot confide. Yet, their dual distresses unbalance the household, so that instead of Katherine’s firm grip on her emotions and Andrew’s youthful nature steadying them, they only grow worse in tandem. 

Woolf’s visitations into the pasts of her characters are no less perceptive and pointed than those Stafford brings to bear, and we have to ask ourselves: which turning was the one that changed our trajectory from a steady and hopeful one, to disaster? Which thwarted relationship warped our future, crippling our capacity to live our ideal lives? It is too late for remedy – one can only plan for a fitting end.