A Reliable Wife Page 14

  “Yes. Before she’s dead.”

  She knew that Antonio needed her in a way that was beyond speech, and this she took for adoration. It wasn’t. It was need and habit, an addiction, but it wasn’t love, no matter how often he might say it.

  Sometimes, sitting in the early afternoon, still in her nightdress in the quiet of her room at the hotel, the scarlet bird on her finger pecking at small pieces of a roll she held up, sometimes she knew this with a clarity that was like a knife in her heart. But he was different.

  For Antonio, Catherine was the one woman who never stopped being thrilling, because her need for him was so enormous, because it made her vulnerable and willing and unprotected in ways that other women weren’t. Antonio was years younger than Catherine. He was, for her, the last grasp at a youth that was betraying her.

  He could do anything he wanted, love her, smack her, kiss her feet, and she would do anything he asked. She was older. She was losing her youth, and that in itself was part of her interest for him, like drinking the last of the wine. And she would kill his father and give him everything. She would do anything. She would do this. His father’s death had become the bit in his teeth, the impossible, unbeatable hand at poker. He was willing to wait, but not for long.

  He would fall asleep with his fingers inside her, lick the musk away when he woke up. He would have sex with her when she was bleeding, would have sex with her when she was drunk, would have sex with her when she was asleep. His appetite and her desire to be pleased were both endless. He found it exciting when she came to him in her plain proper dresses, like sex with a stranger, somebody foreign to him.

  She was in a dream. She found it hard to remember where she was.

  She wrote to Truitt every day. She constructed a life, and she wrote him every imagined detail. She did not want him to forget her power over him, the power to end his loneliness, to bring his son home, to make his garden grow again.

  “Tell me about him,” Antonio said once, after sex. His head was on her breasts, his dark hair teasing her, teasing her into a kind of stupor. She could close her eyes and try to imagine his face. She could see nothing, although she could recall with perfect clarity the faces of people she hardly knew.

  “I want to know everything. Tell me again.”

  “He’s tall. He’s thick.”

  “Fat?”

  “Not at all. Powerful.” She was careful now. She wanted to please; it was her profession. She wanted to tell him only what he wanted to hear. “He’s got a lot of money, I think. I know. He’s got a lot of businesses. Mostly iron, for the railroads, for machinery, for everything. Everybody works for him. A lot of money. I don’t know how much. He’s got a railroad car. He thinks it’s remarkable to own an automobile. And there’s the house, but you know it. There’s his silence. He reads poetry. I read to him at night. He’s very sad. He’s sad in himself, in his heart.”

  “Imagine when we live in the house. Imagine the parties.” He could see the parties; she didn’t have to describe them. They were like his life now, but with more people and more money and more champagne and more everything that might, in the smallest way, give him pleasure. There would be women to wait on him, to pick up and clean his ruined clothes. There was his father’s grave, next to his sister’s. He would spit on it.

  Where would the people come from? They would bring them in the railroad car, from Chicago, from Saint Louis, an endless succession of people who would do anything for him because he could do anything for them, if he chose, at his whim. He would have sex with somebody else while Catherine watched. He would shave his face in a gilded mirror from France. Sleep in the golden bed his mother had brought from Italy. They would take drugs from Chicago and walk down the middle of the streets of the town laughing at nothing, and nobody could do one thing about it. And the money would never stop coming in. There would be no end to the luxuries.

  “Your toys are still there. Your sister’s dresses hang in the closets. Your mother’s, too. They are beautiful.”

  “You’ll wear them.”

  “I’ve tried. They’re too small. They would fit Alice. They’re hopelessly out of fashion, like in a museum. A box of jewelry is in her dressing table. Pearls and emeralds and rubies. Bows made of diamonds to wear in your hair. A diamond watch. Things she forgot to take, or couldn’t take, when she left.”

  “He beat my lovely mother. He beat her until she bled. She hardly knew what she was doing. She left with the dress that was on her back, nothing else.”

  “It’s all still there.”

  “And I don’t want Alice. Not anywhere near me.”

  She tired of telling the story. Tired of comforting him. He was still a boy, a little boy who was frozen in childhood, and who could never get it back. She knew this. She knew the father’s death and the diamond bows and the callous, lascivious disregard would never restore to him what he had lost, because what he had lost was time and what he had left was rage.

  He knew it, too. He tried to remember. He tried to remember his sister, or his mother, and nothing came to mind. His anger was the hot still point on which his life was impaled.

  “He misses you with all his heart. He’s sorry for what he did. The pain of it never goes away.”

  “You think my pain goes away? You think I like this, this ignorant life?”

  She had to be careful at every step, a tightrope walker in the circus.

  He couldn’t sleep at night. His heart pounded and the blood raced at his temples. He felt a pressure in his body and he tossed and turned until the light was too bright outside to stay in bed. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he settled for unconsciousness, the morphine, the opium, the wine, but he woke up and he didn’t feel rested.

  He felt that his soul, his rage, showed on his face. He imagined the skin of his face splitting open and the pus of his rage sliding down his fine high cheekbones.

  He ate only enough to stay alive, and then only foods of the most rarified kind. Oysters and champagne. Quail and caviar. Melons that were brought up the river from South America out of season. Ham from Parma. Foods that passed for a caress from a woman long dead, a woman he imagined had loved him as a child.

  He had sex because he was beautiful. It was beauty’s burden to be made available. He had sex because there was a moment during the act of love in which he forgot who he was, forgot everything, forgot his father and his mother and his tiny idiot sister, forgot the beatings and the curses that Ralph had hurled against his flesh, and Ralph cold sober, sober and cold, over and over, willing him to hell and he a child of eight, when it began. In sex, he ceased thinking and became only being, all movement and pleasure and expertise. He lived in a sexual frenzy because sometimes, afterward, he could sleep for an hour or two.

  “Don’t tell me about it. Don’t talk about him.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Catherine was an exception, the woman he came back to again and again. The woman who was all he understood of love. She had been savaged by her life and her face was still beautiful, her body untouched by disease. She knew what she was getting into; she saw into his soul and wasn’t burned by the fire.

  Alice was another exception. He had gotten drunk one night when Catherine was away marrying his father, and he had spotted Alice as he staggered home in the dawn. She was standing, standing as though frozen, on the corner of a dark street, and he had approached and said two words to her. They had had sex in less time than it would take to play the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. They had not said a single word, as though he were too bored and Alice merely mute.

  “I know where she is.”

  “Who?”

  “Alice. She’s in Wild Cat Chute.”

  Catherine turned away and covered her face with her hands. Tony Moretti smiled.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALICE.

  When Catherine Land was eight years old, after her mother had died of influenza and Alice was just old enough to walk, her father lost all reaso
n. He couldn’t bear the sunlight, couldn’t bear the feel of clothing on his skin, couldn’t bear the taste of the saliva in his mouth when it wasn’t being burned by cheap liquor. He lost his business, he lost his friends.

  One day, they had no money. One day, they had no house. Their furniture, her mother’s furniture, lay in a pile of snow in the street.

  And then he died, too. It took six years. Catherine never went to school, because they never stayed anywhere long enough to go to a school and because there was no one to watch after the baby.

  Her father died of drunkenness, of course. He drank himself to death, but Catherine secretly knew he died of a broken heart. It happens. She knew it and she watched it, and it wasn’t pretty or romantic and sad. It was pathetic and ungainly and hard as horses pulling a wagon through the mud.

  And then they had nobody. Then they had nowhere. Catherine was just fourteen, Alice seven.

  They went to the poorhouse. Catherine marched them across the docks until they came to the grim warehouse that hid the poorest away from the eyes of the less poor. Alice went to a little school, a charity inside the charity, and she taught Catherine to read. Catherine did whatever chores she was given, washing clothes, cleaning floors on her hands and knees. She took on small bits of charity sewing, and she became expert at it, the first thing she could do with pride.

  While Alice was at school, Catherine sat in a small park near the harbor and watched the water sparkle in the thin sunlight, and she sat there, just staring, until one day a man came and sat beside her and touched her hand and asked her to his cheap hotel room, and she found what she was to do with her life, what was to become of her and how she was to save Alice.

  She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know why he asked or why she did what he asked her to do. It meant nothing to her.

  She realized that her body was her bank; it was all the money she had. It was all she would ever need.

  She worked, she learned to read, and at night, before they locked the doors, she wandered the docks and made small bits of money the only way she had available to her, sex in doorways, in huge shipping crates, on a pile of coats in the back room of a bar.

  Sometimes Catherine stayed out all night, moving from man to man as the hours moved relentlessly on, returning in the morning when they unlocked the big double doors. Her body ached, as though she had been scrubbing floors all night.

  While Alice learned her letters and numbers, Catherine tasted power in the hunger of men. Power over them, over their desires, power to save her sister. She knew now she could keep Alice safe, could get her away from the rats and the lice and the small-mouthed halfwit children who were abandoned, too. At least she and Alice had been loved, once, in a place that seemed like some country in a dream.

  She lay in strange beds and imagined the house in which she and Alice would live when they had money. And there they would be perfectly happy and complete in themselves. The house would be clean all the time, and sunlight would stream through the windows even in winter.

  She was sixteen. When there was enough money, she moved them to Philadelphia. They moved into a room in a shanty on the Schuylkill. Catherine would come home late and sleep in the same bed with Alice. She was always there in the morning to wake her with a kiss. They hadn’t come a single step from their days in Baltimore, but Alice went to a proper school, a charity Catholic school with strict rules and dirty windows. Alice hated it, but every night, before she went out, Catherine helped her with her homework, and so Catherine began to learn little bits about little things.

  Alice dressed in real clothes, which Catherine made for her. She had a warm coat in winter, and Catherine would go to the market and wander through the bolts of cloth, touching every one. She sewed, and she discovered the big library. She remembered her mother telling her that the library housed all she would ever need to know, about history and art and science.

  It terrified her at first. On her initial visits she could only stare, not knowing what to ask for or where to turn. Finally she asked for a book, a book on sewing, and she read it, sitting at the long tables, taking notes with a pencil she had stolen from one of the stalls in the market.

  Learning became her. She loved the smell of the books from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. She learned the card catalog. She never learned more than she needed to know.

  She read romantic novels, and she imagined that the men and women at the reading tables around her were the subject of those books. Happy and passionate lives, so simple it seemed for others.

  She read Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, stories in which the lives of the tattered poor turned out to be blissful in the end.

  She read about the capitals of the world, the cathedrals and minarets, the broad avenues, and the volatile and ever-expanding world of science.

  When she was eighteen, she was the kept mistress of a married man. She was grown; Alice was still a child. She lived near Ritten-house Square, in real rooms on a real street. These were the rooms she had dreamed of in the hotels. She learned the art of pleasing a man without having sex with him, sitting on his lap, making small talk, cutting his cigar. She was intelligent, she realized. From the library, she had many topics she could discuss with ease and charm. Men enjoyed these things. She was like the geishas she read about in the library, like the courtesans, the mistresses of the great. She dressed beautifully, silk dresses she made herself from pattern books, dresses from Paris he bought for her, wrapped in grosgrain ribbon from fancy stores in Broad Street. She entertained his friends when he had card parties, telling amusing stories, pouring them wine, laughing at their crude jokes.

  She was astonished at how simple it was. He came on Sunday afternoons, and he always brought some little gift, a token of his gratitude that such a lovely young girl would allow him to touch her, to put his hand on her breasts. Then he went home to his wife and his own children, to other rooms she was never to see.

  Alice had no patience or aptitude for learning. She was a bitter child, bitter and recalcitrant and selfish, and there was no reason for it. Everything had been done for her. Catherine had a lot of time on her hands, and she would sit for hours, trying with Alice to figure out her lessons. Alice was all feeling, a being without reason or intellect. Finally she refused to go to school at all. She loved pretty dresses and walking out in public in the finery Catherine’s protector bought for them, and she loved him, solid, red-faced Uncle Skip, as she called him. After a year, Catherine found them in bed together. Alice was twelve.

  It was not a shock. It didn’t surprise her that Uncle Skip, having bought two women, would want to enjoy two women, but her rage was uncontrollable. She stole and sold everything she could from their fancy rooms, and Catherine and Alice got on a train a second time and went to New York.

  It was a new city, vast and filled with possibility, a blank canvas. But it was the same story. Catherine would sew and whore and spend her days in the library. Alice looked like a little princess and yearned for freedom. She loved to make men look at her and then turn away with a scornful laugh.

  Alice told Catherine she hated her. She said she had been in prison all her life. Catherine wasn’t surprised. Alice said that, as soon as she had someplace to go, she would leave Catherine and never look back. Catherine was twenty-two and she felt like she had been on the planet for a hundred years.

  Then Alice was gone. Catherine found her in Gramercy Park, walking a little white dog, a fifteen-year-old girl on the arm of a forty-year-old man, and Catherine gave up. There wasn’t any more she could do.

  Now she had become the thing Catherine had wanted to save her from; she had become Catherine, only worse, because for Alice there was no reason. It was not a thing she had to do; it was what she wanted. The empty attention of stupid, lonely men. It was beyond thought.

  Catherine left New Yo
rk and went to Chicago, where she lived for years with no further word from Alice.

  Then she began reading in the newspapers about the Great Exposition to be built in Saint Louis, and she decided to go there because she knew there would be a lot of men, laborers from Italy and Germany who had left their families behind and come to Saint Louis to make money. She had not one ounce of kindness left in her heart.

  And then one day she saw Alice.

  She approached her gently.

  “Alice. Sister.”

  Alice turned. The shock of recognition turned instantly to bitterness.

  “What are you . . . ?”

  “Same as you. The Expo. The men. The money.” Alice laughed.

  “What happened to New York? To Gramercy Park?”

  “The dog died. William hit me. I came here. A long time ago, I don’t remember when. The Golden West.”

  “I . . .”

  Then Alice had slapped her face. Had left a welt on her cheek and run down the street laughing.

  Catherine never saw her again, had not tried to find her. Now it burned in her like a fire. She had money. She had a place to take Alice. She wanted to save her sister. It was not a kindness. It was a desperate hard unbreakable need to create some order out of the chaos of the past. Alice might find peace in white Wisconsin. The blindingly pure snow might wash away her bitterness and her cruelty and the hardness of her soul.

  Wild Cat Chute was a bad place. It was the place you went to when you had run out of other places that would let you in. It was crawling with rats and garbage and diseases and the diseased. It was just a place on the way to the river, a runway once used to bring cargo up into the city, but now it was filled with shacks and people who didn’t even have shacks, people who were no longer able or fit to sleep indoors, in the prison of a room. People who heard voices. People who died.

  Still, as Catherine turned the dark corner into the mud track, all she could see were the children. They were herself. They were her childhood and her past and the hunger and the fear and the loss, and no coat could have kept out the chill of that. They had no names. They had no light in their faces. They had no one waiting for them and nowhere to go.