A Reliable Wife Read online

  She knelt on the floor, pulling a dress from the closet behind her. “I beg you.”

  “Get on your fancy train and go home to your fancy husband and get rid of him. Dead. That’s the only way he means anything to me.”

  “I beg you.”

  “Some promises can’t be broken. It’s gone too far. We’re too close now, too deep in the water. Get up off the floor and get out of here. I don’t want to hear from you until he’s dead.”

  “I—”

  “Not one word, Catherine. You haven’t earned the right to beg. There’s no freedom for you. No place to go. You ruin everything you touch. I’m leaving. I don’t want to find you here when I get back. I don’t want to find you anywhere in Saint Louis.”

  She rose from the floor. He was right, of course. There was no way out.

  He turned before leaving. His voice was almost kind again. “It’s true. I have loved you. I could love you again. We both knew what we were getting into. We got into it out of love. You knew from the start.”

  When he was gone, she wandered his rooms. Her mind could only plague her with the old thoughts. There was death by poison in her deep bathtub. There was arsenic, laudanum, muriatic acid. There was the silken cord from a sturdy beam. There was the long fall, like a black bird, from the window of her quiet room at the Planter’s Hotel. She would set the bird free. There was death beneath the wheels of a train car, death by syringe and razor and bullet.

  Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.

  Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive.

  Part Three

  WISCONSIN . WINTER INTO SPRING . 1908 .

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HE LIKED TO HAVE a glass of clear, cold water by his bed when he went to sleep at night. The glass was tall and straight and etched with vines, and Mrs. Larsen washed it every morning and filled it every night from the cold tap and put it by his bed. It was a beautiful glass, brought from Italy, and the light shone through the water and the glass with its frosted sides in a way that pleased him. When he was alone, when he was alone for those twenty years, night after night after solitary night, lying in immaculate sheets, he would sometimes swing his legs over the edge of the bed, put his feet solidly on the floor, and take a sip of the clear cold water. He sat up straight because he was afraid he might choke, alone in the big old house at night with no one to hear him.

  The sheets of his bed were changed twice a week, and he sometimes looked with sadness at the other side of the bed, seeing the pillow where no head ever lay. He felt embarrassed to think of Mrs. Larsen taking the sheets off his bed twice a week, to see them so little used. It was one of the ways his loneliness was made visible to the world, and he was ashamed.

  The glass of water comforted him, and he clung to the habit with tenacity. The water meant nothing in itself. He was rarely thirsty. The ritual meant everything, a moment to close the day, the moisture on his dry lips like a soft kiss.

  He could smell his clean white shirts in the armoire, soap and bluing and starch. He could see the day’s clothes, neatly folded in a chair, waiting for Mrs. Larsen to sponge and press them fresh in the morning. Everything he owned was clean all the time. He could smell Mrs. Larsen’s industry in the still night air, the laundry, the furniture polish, the floor wax, and he was grateful for her, that she looked after him so well. It was a comfort. Even though he paid her, and took care of her and Mr. Larsen well, it was a kindness. He paid many people, and not one felt it necessary to be more than cordial.

  He had never called her by her first name, a name he must have known once, but had long ago forgotten. Mrs. Larsen had been only a girl when he first knew her, Jane, Jeanette, something, unmarried, not pretty, and she had grown into middle age learning his habits and making his life comfortable. He presumed she never liked Emilia. She showed no sorrow when she was gone.

  He thought of the endless meals she had cooked and served to him. He thought of the shirts and the trousers and the shoes polished and the tears mended and the mud scraped off his boots, and he loved her for her kindness. So little was done to tend his creature comforts, and these comforts, in the absence of passion, had meant everything to him. She had witnessed the terrible sadness, the betrayal, and managed to treat him as though her heart went out to him and, at the same time, as though the past had never happened. She knew his awful solitude and didn’t pay notice. She cooked enough food every night for four or six, since the sight of the food pleased him, and then she and Larsen ate later, after he had finished and gone to his study. He had asked, but they had never sat down to the table with him. It wouldn’t be right. They wouldn’t have been comfortable.

  He had meant to be so many things. He had meant to be a poet. He had meant to be a lover and collector of art, to encourage young artists and have them gather around him. He had meant to live his life in an orgy of sensation, according to the sensual rules of attraction and seduction. He had meant to be a father, to have children to inherit his love of the arts and the flesh. Instead, he had lost his heart’s deepest passions; one day he woke up and realized they were gone, amputated as surely as an arm, cut off by the death of his little girl and the infidelities of his wife, the intractable rage he felt toward his bastard child. His affections and obsessions had been replaced by clean shirts and half-slept-in sheets and polished boots and clear soups. The world of the body and its pleasures had closed over, as a scab closes over a wound.

  Catherine Land had stepped off the train from Saint Louis, softer, warmer in her face, unexpectedly beautiful, and the wound had opened and filled him with its pain. Antonio was not by her side, and neither one of them said a word about him.

  Standing in the station, he had felt that something in him would break forever if he didn’t touch her. He reached up and shyly fingered the collar of her coat. That was all. That was enough. He was lost in hope and desire, as lost as he had been in his first days with Emilia. Catherine was everything. She was not a woman; she was a world. She might wound him, she might lie to him, and still he would do anything to hear one word of kindness from her lips, to feel his flesh touch her flesh without humiliation. He was willing to take the chance. And all this because she had stepped from the train with a small scarlet bird in a cage, and she was coming home to him, bringing a fluttering life. He was at last waiting for someone whose name was known to him. People saw her come home to him, people in his town. She smiled at him, and he knew then that he would die for her.

  His skin was soft as a clean chamois. He was strong, he was lean. But he was not young. His heart had for so long been open only to bitterness and regret, but now his sexual passion, buried for so long, was once again wild in his heart.

  She looked solemn, almost stricken. The bird sang sweetly. She kissed his cheek gravely and there she was. She was home.

  The snow still lay around them as they rode home, and neither one spoke. His heart pounded in his chest. He wanted her. He wanted to know about his son, but he couldn’t speak or make a move. He wanted to say something, to remark about the difference between her first arrival, so wild, and this, so calm and peaceful. He wanted to be affectionate and familiar, but he couldn’t form a sentence. He fingered the faint scar on his forehead and stared straight ahead.

  At home, they sat across from each other in front of the fire. Her dress was new. Her hair and her face had softened. He knew her news before she spoke it, because Antonio was not with her, and because he could see in her face that she wished it were otherwise.

  “He’s not your son. He swears he’s not your son.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that what he says is all we’ve got to go on. Any more . . . there is no more
. He says his name is Moretti. He says his parents run a restaurant in Philadelphia. He says he’s never seen you or heard of you or been closer to Wisconsin than Chicago. Malloy and Fisk say he’s not a nice man, without scruples or morals or decency. I . . . there wasn’t any farther to go with it. I tried.”

  “What does he look like?”

  She was careful. “He looks Italian. Exotic. He looks refined, like an aristocrat of some kind.”

  “How does he live?”

  “He plays the piano in . . . in a music hall, a cheap place. I never saw it. He likes it. I went to see him, to where he lives, to offer him anything to come home. He simply said it was not his home, he didn’t know what I was talking about. His rooms are done up like a circus tent. He dresses like a dandy. A fop.”

  “What did his voice sound like?”

  “Malloy and Fisk say he’s a useless, pretty object, good for nothing. They’ve followed him for months. They say he’s not worth the finding.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s your wife’s son and Moretti’s. I don’t know. He’s whatever you want him to be. I think he’s lying. I think he can’t forgive you and won’t come home. Not now. Not ever. I think he’s a lost cause. I wish . . .”

  “Wish what, Catherine?”

  “I wish I could have done more. I tried. I went to him. I saw a flicker on his brow the first time he heard your name, something that gave him away. Or so I thought. And I knew he was lying, and I went to him and offered him money. I talked to him for hours. I told him about your regret, that you were sorry. That you had never forgiven yourself. He doesn’t care. I gave him the ring from my finger. Your ring. He asked for it and I gave it gladly, instantly, but he laughed and handed it back. He won’t be persuaded. Even if . . .”

  “Even if what?”

  “Even if he is your son.”

  “And you say he is.”

  “I do. He doesn’t.”

  “Andy.”

  “He calls himself Tony.”

  “He asked for your ring?”

  “I gave it to him. He was teasing.”

  She could see the agony on his face. He wanted the thing that frightened him the most, and the pain was terrible, worse than the wound on his forehead when she stitched him up. She hoped he believed her. She counted on it.

  “We’ll move to the big house. We’ll move next week. Give this place to Larsen and his wife.”

  “We don’t have to. There’s no reason. Now there’s no reason.”

  “It’s been ready for him for years. Malloy writes that he’s greedy, that he never has any money. He’ll come when everything else has failed. We’ll move in and we’ll wait.”

  She thought of her garden and the delight it would bring her. She thought of the high halls and the crystal chandeliers and the portraits of people unknown to her. She thought of herself, skirts trailing, walking the long halls of the upper galleries, and she knew it was what she wanted, that he was doing it for her after his own hope was gone.

  “I’ve been happy here. We could go on.”

  “I want a child. I won’t die without having a child. If you’re willing. If God is willing and you’d be so kind, I’d be grateful.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s a house for children. A palace of adventures and secret staircases, and . . . I was a child when I built it, a spoiled, willful, stupid child. We go on, as you say.”

  They ate dinner in silence, Mrs. Larsen bringing and removing the plates. They ate little. Even after her long train trip, Catherine respected Truitt’s sorrow, and her appetite seemed nothing to her. How could her heart not go out to him, knowing what she knew, steeled as she was?

  He had no mechanism to discuss his sorrow. He had not had a single unmitigated joy in twenty years, and now a real sorrow had hit him, without explanation or protection, and he was just as mute. His lost son. The dream of his life, to save something out of all that terror, his own terrible behavior, and now even that gone.

  And she, over coffee growing cold, she couldn’t resist speaking of it, as much as she felt for him.

  “We saw him. In a restaurant. We heard him play.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “Charming. Sad. I’m no judge.”

  “You play beautifully.”

  “I’m no judge.”

  I’ve lost everything, he wanted to say. I have denied myself and tortured myself and done every single thing that has been expected of me, and it was for nothing. My shirts are clean. My behavior is above reproach. And it means nothing. He was caught in the softest places of his heart, his gaze at her face, the beginnings of a fondness for her, because she came home and he was glad to see her, a bird in its cage, singing, and his anguished memory of the cruelties he had shown this boy who now denied his existence. It was too much. And he was struck mute.

  The coffee was cold. The dinner was over, and it was late. When they went up the stairs, he asked her gently if she would like to sleep in her own room.

  “Whatever for?”

  “You must be tired from the trip.”

  “You’re my husband.”

  His glass of water was by the bed, a good night gift from Mrs. Larsen while they had lingered over their sad cold coffee. He went into the bathroom, to give her time to dress for bed, and knelt on the floor with his forehead on the cold commode until his fever had cooled. When he came back to the bedroom, he neatly undressed and folded his clothes for Mrs. Larsen to take care of, then turned back the sheets, shocked and aroused and touched to see that she was for the first time naked in bed, ready for him, waiting naked, knowing his need.

  He made love to her with a ferocity that surprised him, that caused rivulets of sweat to run down his back and chest, his mouth on hers, his hand on the soft curve of her thigh, the thrill of his weight supported on his arms, his hands everywhere. Making love to her was like bathing in warm water. She washed over him. She was pliant and helpful, not forward, but helpful, and he was pleased that he could please her even as he pleased himself. To feel the action and passion and flesh of his body, his own sweat, his own manipulations of a woman’s desires, beyond speech, so that he became, in the end, pure movement, pure desire, obliterating his body and his business and his terrible agony and even her face and body until his own body and his need and his own mute sorrow were the only things in the whole wide world. He heard her soft moan of pleasure, and for a moment, for one moment, he felt at peace, his breath coming in long slow sighs, his hands stilled, his angers forgotten and his passions dissipated. He held her in his arms, his weight fully on her now. He smoothed the wild hair back from her forehead.

  “Thank you,” he said, and she turned her head and said nothing, and he knew that it was the wrong thing to say. It was the kind of thing he had said, long ago, to wanton women in hotel rooms. It was not even what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her that his heart was finally broken, broken beyond repair or solace, leaving only his sorrow and his rage to hold him upright. But Ralph Truitt couldn’t speak of the workings of his heart, it wasn’t his habit. So he thanked her and instantly regretted it, regretted also the tears he could not shed over his son. He wanted to weep. But having shed not a single tear after all these years, he had no tears now. Not for himself. Not for Antonio. Not for his wife who would, in the end, bear the awful burden of the man he would become. And she would sleep beside him, and she would know and she would be helpless and he would come to hate her, hate her helplessness.

  It had returned, of course, this agony over this boy who was not even his own flesh and blood, and he wondered, with so much within reach, with this woman in his arms and under his roof, why he needed to get Andy back. Yet it was a dream he had held in his heart for so long that nothing could replace it, nothing made up for his loss and his desire for restitution. This boy, this child whom he had betrayed, whom he might have loved and watched grow into a man, a man who might have rebelled and gone away even so, but who might have come back a
s Truitt himself had done, to run the businesses, learning the ways of production and accounting and the endless management of the people who worked for him, their stories, their hardships, their small victories. Antonio. Andy. Tony Moretti. A stranger, now grown into the handsome, careless man he tried to imagine. This man whom he did not know, whom he had beaten. His wife’s son. His own prodigal, to whom he would have opened the doors wide.

  Catherine slept beside him. Her slow breathing filled the air with sweetness. The dark surrounded them, and she slept on the side of the bed that had been empty for twenty years. Mrs. Larsen would see the evidence of their lovemaking, the stained sheets, and know that he was not alone anymore. She would smile. The thought made him shy. They knew so much from such small details.

  It was no use. He sat up and put his feet on the floor. His naked body shivered with the cold. However strong his body, however smooth his flesh, he was no longer young. He couldn’t get it back; too much was behind him and too little ahead. He felt at that moment the end of his life had begun. He felt it in his heart. He felt it in his bones. He heard it in his labored breathing. His blood rushed with pleasure, and his mind dwelt on death. He would be in the ground, beside his parents. He would be in hell, living forever with his mother, with the pin through the soft part of his hand.

  He felt, with Antonio now irretrievably gone, that something in him had ceased to live, had given up the hope that had kept him going through all the loneliness and all the years. He didn’t understand it. He had so much, and he didn’t understand why he had invested this one thing with so much importance. The advertisement and the wife who was not what she pretended to be, the detectives and the money and the hope and the waiting, it was for one single reason, for the dream of Antonio, and now he knew finally that he would never come home again.

  The moonlight shone through the window. The faint blue light caught the glass of water by the bed, and he suddenly felt so thirsty he thought he would die. He reached out and held the glass in his hands for a long moment. He smelled it and paused, but only for a second. Then he drank the water, drank all the water, and with the first sip, from the faint smell and the bitter aftertaste, he knew the water was tainted. He looked into the bottom of the beautiful Italian glass. He looked at his lovely wife, sleeping peacefully as a child in the moonlight. He remembered Florence, his days of indolence. He knew he was being poisoned.