A Reliable Wife (21 page)

He no longer scratched his sores. He no longer felt as though his clothes were on fire. He drank the soup and ate the herbs.
The women salved his wounds, and they could feel the change in him. They moved him upstairs to his bed in the blue bedroom,
and sat together, taking meals with him. Mrs. Larsen finally, after all these years, consented to eat with Truitt.

He wanted oysters, and they sent to Chicago for a barrel of them. Mrs. Larsen kept them in the cold cellar, and fed them brine
and cornmeal. Every night, Truitt had a dozen fat oysters and a glass of brandy, Truitt who hadn’t had a drink in years, amazed
that he wanted these things, amazed that they had gotten them for him. The women didn’t eat oysters. The women didn’t drink
brandy.

Catherine couldn’t tell him about the baby. She couldn’t bear to tell him about it when he was so ill. She hoped the baby
was his. She felt sure, and she hoped she was right, because she couldn’t bear the thought that, because of her, Ralph Truitt
would have to raise two children not his own. Hadn’t he, when she first came home, made love to her while she was showing
blood? She believed so. She believed, in the way she had of making what she wanted into the truth, that there had been no
other man but Truitt, that the days in Saint Louis had not been.

He had made love to her while she was bleeding. She remembered. It couldn’t be Antonio, he never came inside her, his fear
of encumbrance was too great. It must be Truitt. He had made her new; her life had begun in a new way when she left Saint
Louis, and nothing from that life could grow in her now.

She had never been a kind person. In the past, she had thought of others as no more than a way to get what she wanted.

Truitt was different, had made her new, and she could never go back. She washed his blisters and rubbed his feet and put salve
on his forehead, and ground bark into a paste to spread on his hands. His hair came out in clumps when she brushed it, and
she sorrowed for that; her guilt was overwhelming.

She could grieve for herself now, finally, for her wandering, wasted life. She lay on a wicker chaise in the sun of the conservatory,
with her new roses beginning to show leaves in the warm, damp afternoons, and she wept for herself, she wept for her father
and her mother, for her sister, and for every moment lost and forgotten and broken into bits on the long way from where she
had been to the place where she sat. It was so fragile, a life, and she thought she had been tough enough to believe differently.
Now everything was tender to her, tender as a new wound, her own memories, the dark wharves of Baltimore and the ordered grandeur
of Rittenhouse Square and the sex and the stealing and the lying and the angel descending from heaven, the angel who had not
carried Alice to the grand capitals of the world so that she might be dazzled by the splendors. As though it were all, the
good and the bad, one long endless scar, up and down her arms, across her breasts, and she was applying medications to her
own skin as she was nursing Truitt.

Hers was a sickness of the soul, but it was not incurable; she had to believe that there was still innocence inside her, somewhere,
and hope, and a person who might have a life altogether different from the one she had had. The scars, her scars, would never
go away, she knew that. She would never be whole, as Truitt would never again be young. But new skin would grow over the scars;
they would whiten and fade and be barely noticeable to a child.

Truitt had seen her in a new way. And his vision had made her over, had caused her to turn into the kind of woman he wanted.
He deserved no less. Catherine, for her part, had led a life in which kindness was neither expected nor given. Battered as
she was, she didn’t know the difference between happiness and dread. She didn’t know the difference between excitement and
fear. She felt a knot in her stomach every hour of the day and didn’t know what to call it. Her hands shook. She vomited in
the mornings, in secret, but she felt that, finally, the end of the tightrope was in view, that the slamming doors and the
hostile, mercantile sex and the demented nights in the opium dens were behind her.

She had been adept at the beginning and the ends of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay
in the middle. She could find some peace there.

Then one day he could speak, his voice no longer a harsh and burning rasp. Then one day he could walk, could dress himself,
could carry on a conversation, could imagine going back to work to repair his fortunes, to meet the anxious eyes of the town
that depended on his being well. He was changed, of course. He walked like an old man, as though each step were a learned
and torturous act. His hair had turned stark gray. When he drank from his glass of brandy, his hand moved to his mouth in
a series of distinct, static movements, like flashing photographs.

They sat at the dinner table. He had asked for beef and potatoes and pudding, the food from his schoolboy days. He was reading
her the daily disasters from the paper as they ate. His fork clattered on the plate when a knock came at the big front door.
It was far away, and Catherine offered to go, but Ralph was already on his feet, unsteady.

“No. I want to go.”

He walked the long way, lighting every light as he went. He opened one of the big double doors, and a man stood on the terrace
in the darkness, looking out over the steps and the snow. He turned, and Ralph could make out his shape, but could barely
see his face.

The man held out his hand. “I am Tony Moretti,” he said. And then, after a pause, “I am your son.”

And even though they both knew what the man said was a fiction, Ralph stepped into the dark and opened his arms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

He had brought everything he owned, the fancy suits, the extravagant Paris neckties, the pristine shirts and the silver-headed
walking stick and amber colognes from London. He was penniless. He was like a swan, long-necked and useless except for beauty,
and everything he did, every gesture he made and every word he spoke seemed out of place, too exotic, too mannered. He played
the piano after dinner, and even that seemed excessive, as though he were playing for a fancy crowd in a rococo concert hall.
Truitt preferred Catherine’s simplicity of feeling, her lack of expertise.

Catherine and Truitt lay in the big bed in their blue bedroom. Antonio slept far away from them, in a bachelor apartment he
had devised out of his mother’s old rooms. A dressing room. A magnificent sitting room for which he had taken bits of furniture
from all over the house, for which Truitt had ordered an ebony piano. And a bedroom, which was large and grand and hung with
tapestries.

They could feel his eyes on them in the dark. A new quiet had entered into the way they treated each other, a simplicity of
manner. It was, Catherine supposed, love. It was what normal people had when passion had run its course. They spoke quietly
after making love. They spoke of small matters, his business, Mrs. Larsen and her silent sorrow, the husband she would never
see again, his care paid for by Truitt, the garden for which the plants were arriving daily. They never spoke of Truitt’s
illness, as though it had never happened.

“He reminds me so much of Emilia. Her eyes and mouth, that dark hair. An Italian.”

Catherine sat up in bed and stared at the pale light of the new moon coming through the window.

“How did she die?”

She could feel his stillness beside her. He remained weak, and continued to have moments when he did not know where he was
or who she was or where they lived. His body was covered with scars, a silent reminder of her iniquities and her consolations
and his forgiveness.

“I killed her.”

The moon seemed so far away. The winter had been so long, she could not remember a time when it had not been winter. She could
not remember her life before she stepped down from the train and into the gaze of Ralph Truitt. Would not remember or want
to, except for the presence of Antonio, moving like a cat through the house, watching her day and night.

“I can’t believe it. I don’t.”

Truitt sat up in bed and took her hand. “I will talk about this one time. When I’ve told it all, her name will never be said
in this house again. I killed her. I let her die.

“She had moved to Chicago with Moretti. She was my wife. There was no divorce, no legal recourse. She was a Catholic and they
don’t do that. I had her child, her boy, under my roof and she was my wife and I felt pain every time I thought about her,
but I always knew where she was, I heard the stories. Everybody in town heard the stories and I was ashamed, but I went on
and nobody, of course nobody spoke about it, at least not to me.

“I sent her money. She wasn’t destitute. I sent her money and she lived in a style that was despicable to me, but I sent it
anyway because she was my wife, because I was haunted by Franny and had her boy and because . . . because I couldn’t let her
live in squalor.

“Moretti left her. Left her for some rich widow with a big house and a blind eye to his infidelities and his affectations
and his lack of talent or charm. Emilia . . .” She could hear the pain in his voice as he spoke her name. “Emilia took a series
of lovers, each young, each useless, going around Chicago saying he had had a countess, a real countess, and describing in
beer halls the things she was willing to do. She was still beautiful.

“She never wrote to Antonio. She never came to see the grave of her daughter. She could have chosen differently. She could
have chosen something other than this parade of young ne’er-do-wells, something with kindness, something with honor, a house
where she might have brought her boy and raised him up. She had money. She was intelligent. She was cultivated. She slept
with women, I heard. She got drunk in public. She was robbed twice. By men she knew, men who had been guests in her house.

“I went to see her. Several times. Not to ask her back home, I wouldn’t have her here. I asked her to stop. Just to stop it.
She laughed in my face. She threw wine at me. She told me I disgusted her.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “Do you need to know the rest?”

The moonlight was so faint and cold, her skin rippled with the cold. “I need to know.”

“She got sick. Consumption, they called it then. Tuberculosis, I suppose. I sent doctors. I didn’t want to see her. She was
still so young. She had tuberculosis, they said, she had syphilis, she had gone mad with it, and no man or woman would come
near her. Her name was up, as people say, in the streets of Chicago, and no one would come to comfort her, all those dinner
parties she had given, all those men she had given a moment’s pleasure to, and money, endless amounts of money to show off
the affectations of the Countess Emilia. She could still barely speak English. The doctors couldn’t do anything. She lived
alone and there was no one to feed her or clean up after her, and she had never learned to do the first thing for herself.

“I went one more time. I took Antonio to see her, but it was too awful. He saw her, saw her in ruins, and then I made him
wait in the carriage. There was a room . . . there was a room in her house where she had thrown everything dirty, her clothes,
her underclothes, and her fancy petticoats, along with plates she had eaten off of once and hadn’t bothered to clean. Embroidered
tablecloths she had used once, hats she had bought and never worn. It was up to your waist. Jewelry she didn’t want anymore.
Packets of letters from Antonio who wrote to her, pleaded with her to come and save him. Some of the letters weren’t even
opened. The curtains were drawn against the light; you had to wade through this disaster, wondering what to save, what could
be saved, some token to bring to her boy as a sign that at least his mother loved him. God knows I couldn’t. She had left
her life, stuffed it away in this rank, dark room on the third floor of her fancy townhouse, which I paid for.

“She was lying in her bed, barely conscious. Probably drugged. Probably crazy. She was still beautiful. She had a refinement,
a beauty, even in her madness, that caught my breath. She needed sun. She needed fresh air and a long cure, out west, in Europe.
She might have lived, lived for a while, at least.

“She spoke to me. She told me I was a fool, a fool and a liar and a cuckold. She told me I was weak and stupid and that she
had duped me and used me from the moment she set eyes on me and she was glad. I knew it, of course. I had known it by then
for a long time.

“I left her there. I left her alone to die. She was my heart’s first love, and she despised me and I left her. No cure. No
more doctors. No more money. She was thrown out of her house, her possessions auctioned in the street. She died three months
later in a charity hospital, her wrists tied to the bed, gone blind, her hair fallen out, a pathetic freak who had no one
to hold her hand, no priest to say the final prayer over her head, no redemption, no forgiveness from a God who had finally
abandoned her too, left her to die without the words, without the invitation to heaven.

“I could have saved her. I didn’t. And I don’t regret it. There comes a moment when you can’t take it anymore. I saw that
room with her discarded dresses and the unopened letters and the unpaid dressmaker’s bills, and my heart stopped caring whether
she lived or died.”

There was a long, dark silence.

“You couldn’t have done differently. No one would have expected . . .”

“
I
expected. I. She was my wife. Once, she was. Then she was dead. I don’t even know where she’s buried. I don’t care.”

“You have to forgive yourself.”

He turned violently to her. “You don’t know anything. I don’t have to do a damned thing. I’ll do and think what I do and think
for as long as it takes. You asked. I told you. Never mention her name again.”

He lay back against the sheets. He pulled her close to him. He drew up the covers and immediately she could feel the warmth
of his body against hers. “What I felt for her wasn’t love. I thought it was. It wasn’t. It was an addiction, a kind of insanity.
I so wanted . . . something, I don’t remember what. Revenge. My mother. The long years of her rage. I wanted revenge, and
she was the instrument. I wanted my mother to have to live with her every day and to feel small and useless and ugly and old.
Only it didn’t matter for a minute. To her. It didn’t change anything. I spent my youth loving a woman who wasn’t worth the
effort.”

He was drowsy. “I hope, I hope in my heart, that the fire is out. It burned too hot. It kills everything. Now. Say your prayers
and go to sleep. Antonio is home. You’re here. We’ll make it work. That’s all that matters. Go to sleep now.”

He turned away and she lay in the dark, mute and thoughtless. Antonio had lied to her, had lied to get her to believe something
about Truitt that wasn’t true, had described in detail a horrible, convulsive, murderous event that never happened. She herself
had lied, but now it seemed the lie had burned through her, leaving only white blank space behind, white as the landscape
outside the window. At that moment, something in her ended and something began. And she lay awake until the thin light came
through the windows while she gave birth to the new thing.

Then Truitt stirred. It was barely morning. He opened his eyes, and she kissed him before he was fully awake. Truitt would
do. He wasn’t what she had dreamed of. He wasn’t what she had expected. But he was enough.

Antonio was everywhere. His insolence, his boredom filled the house. Truitt never noticed the hypocrisy, the small insults.
He gave him a bank account, a bank account with enough money to keep Antonio for years. He tried to interest Antonio in the
business, sitting with him for as long as Antonio could stand it in his grand study, explaining where everything was, telling
him how to buy and sell, how to grow rich. He was not a fool. He could see how condescending Antonio was, and it reminded
him of his own youth, his own lack of interest in anything except the pursuit of pleasure.

There was no amusement in the town for Antonio. There were no restaurants, except at the one small, sad hotel, and there were
no women. He soon exhausted the drugs he had brought, and faced his days with a lucidity that was rare and unpleasant for
him. He smoked cigarettes at the table. He spoke endlessly of Saint Louis and its enchantments.

Truitt opened the old wine cellar for him, and every night Antonio got drunk on the beautiful wines that had been laid by
twenty years before, vintages of an astonishing rarity and subtlety. Ports and Bordeaux and Burgundies shipped from Europe
when the house was filled with his mother’s friends. It didn’t matter to Antonio. He just wanted to get drunk and say insulting
things to his father.

“The house is cold. My rooms are cold. My feet are freezing all the time.”

“The house is old, and big. Maybe your clothes . . .”

“And wear what? The trick, Father, is not to change your clothes to suit your environment, but to change your environment
to suit your clothes. You’re rich. Do something.”

“It’ll be spring soon.”

“And then we’ll be warm and there will still be nothing to do.”

It went on and on, Truitt patient, Antonio disdainful of every effort he made to be kind. The money meant nothing. Sleeping
every night in his mother’s gilded bed meant nothing. Seeing his old playroom, his old toys still there, meant nothing. Antonio
had no sentimental heart. He was not to be moved. He had come to bring death.

“People who spend their days in business are wasting their lives. We only live for art.”

“I felt the same way. I do feel it. I didn’t choose this. There was no one else.”

“And someday it’ll all be mine? I’ll sell it and live a beautiful life.”

“It has been what this family has done for a hundred years. There isn’t a person in town who doesn’t depend on it, in some
way.”

“They’re little nobodies.”

They might have talked about the things that mattered. They might have sat up at night by a fire, and Ralph might have been
able to say what was in his heart, that he was sorry, that for all he cared Antonio could do whatever he liked, sell the business,
burn down the house and sow the earth with salt. He only wanted one thing, his son’s forgiveness. And that Antonio was never
going to give.

He cornered Catherine while Ralph was away in town.

“He’s supposed to be dead. He’s not even dying. Come at once, you said.”