A Reliable Wife Read online

  And he didn’t care. He just didn’t care anymore.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS EVERYWHERE. Arsenic. Inheritance powder, the old people called it. It was in his food, his water, on his clothing. It was on his hairbrush when he brushed his hair in the morning. He smelled it. He tasted it on the back of his tongue and in his throat. Not all the time, not every day, but always there. At first, the effect was tonic. He felt marvelous and strong. His skin looked ruddy and clear. His heart beat solidly in his chest. His hair was glossy and his eyes blue and clear and piercing. People remarked on his appearance, people who never made a personal remark to Ralph Truitt told him he looked ten years younger. They thought his new marriage agreed with him.

  Whatever his desperate sorrow, he kept on as before. He was cordial and well mannered and evenhanded with the workers, and he was dying and he knew he was dying and kindness seemed to be all that was left.

  Catherine was extremely tender. She listened intently when he spoke, and he spoke to her often, about his business, about his plans to expand. He never spoke about Antonio, never told her how his heart was heavy and dead. He never said that he wanted to die but was afraid of death, of the long painful process of dying. He wanted to tell her it was all right, he wanted to tell her she would have everything when it was done, he had made a will while she was in Saint Louis, not believing that Antonio would ever come to claim it, but he couldn’t. He was shocked by what she was doing, of course. Yet he couldn’t speak to her about it. He was complicit. He was her only accomplice.

  Her voice was like music to him.

  “I’ve never had a minute’s peace until now,” he said. “For twenty years. Not a minute’s happiness. You have given that to me, and I’m grateful. So grateful, you couldn’t know.” They sat at the long table, their dinner done.

  “I’d do anything to make you happy. Give you things. Say whatever you wanted to hear. You know that.” He took her hand.

  She knew the words he was saying were true. “What else would I want? You’re exactly the thing I waited for. I don’t want anything else. I thought I would be disappointed. I thought I would want to escape. I made plans. I had some foolish jewels. I lost them that first night when the carriage ran away. They were what I would have used to run away. I didn’t know then that . . . How could this come to be? From an advertisement.” She laughed, and it was like water falling from a great height. He laughed, thinking of his foolishness.

  “I could have chosen someone else.”

  “I could have sent you my own picture and not India’s, and you would not have chosen me. Were there so many?”

  “Dozens. All virtuous. Some widows. Some young. Practically children. Younger than you. Some gold diggers.”

  “Then why me?”

  “ ‘I am a simple, honest woman.’ You wrote that. A simple, honest face. I knew right away. There wasn’t anybody else, after that.”

  “It wasn’t my face.”

  “As it turned out, no.”

  “Do you have any regrets?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What did you do with the letters? The other letters?”

  “I burned them, in a big pile in the yard.”

  They moved into the grand palace through the woods. Truitt had modern bathrooms installed throughout the house, as a wedding present to his new wife. He had the house wired for electricity, and sent for lamps from Chicago. He had the chandelier wired. He put in a new kitchen for Mrs. Larsen, although she said she didn’t need one. Everything else stayed as it had always been.

  They packed the pieces of fancy furniture from the farmhouse into wagons and hauled them the long way to the big golden house, restoring the chairs and the tables to the spots they had occupied twenty years before. Truitt gave the farmhouse to Larsen, signed the deed over to him.

  The big house was reborn, and they sat close together at one end of the long table in the frescoed dining room, a fire blazing against the chill as the wind howled outside, and they spoke of love and practical matters in low voices. She changed her dress for dinner. She played the piano for him. She read Whitman to him in the yellow salon, by the great fireplace, big enough to drive a wagon into.

  They gave dinner parties, small, solemn affairs attended by men who needed Truitt’s influence. Doctors came, and lawyers and judges with their mute wives. The governor came. He wanted Truitt’s money, and Truitt gave him some as he left. The dinner parties were not amusing. The food was superb.

  They picked out their bedroom with care. It was not the grandest, not the ornate one he had shared with Emilia. It was a large, simple, blue room with a view of the walled garden. They installed his father’s big bed, and he would lie with his head on the soft pillows at night, while her scarlet bird sang sweetly and she sat in the window seat before they made love. She described the splendors that would come with the summer, the roses and the clematis and the calla lilies and the cheerful dark-eyed daisies. She cataloged the Latin names she had learned. She described the rich fragrance that would come in the night air through the open windows. She would paint every leaf, every flower for him in color, and he would lie, eyes closed, and wonder if he would live long enough to see it. It was lovely, in her description. It was the garden that Emilia had never had the patience or knowledge to create.

  She had asked Larsen to dig through the snow, to uncover the ruin of the plants that had not been cared for in twenty years, and she would stare into the cold moonlight at the tangled naked vines and the overturned statues, the empty lemon house and orangery. She would speak to him of the life she would bring to the earth, with her own hands. She would tell him of her long days in the library, of all she had learned.

  The house sheltered them against the late snows. The moonlight came through the window. She was alive beside him, and he could not believe that his desires could be so strong as his body turned to poison, while his sorrow for Antonio grew more and more terrible.

  The house was too much, too large for Mrs. Larsen, and they hired two girls from the village, and an extra man, so that everything was always clean and there was wood enough to keep a fire going in every fireplace in the evenings, so they could choose any room they wanted to sit in after dinner.

  In late February, Ralph’s bookkeeper went suddenly insane and murdered his wife of twenty-eight years for no reason. Mr. and Mrs. Truitt attended the funeral, standing solemnly in black clothes while the grown children wept for their lost mother.

  “Why do they do these things? These terrible things?” Catherine asked as they rode home in the carriage.

  “They hate their lives. They start to hate each other. They lose their minds, wanting things they can’t have.”

  Ralph attended the brief trial, watching as the husband wept for his lost wife and tore at his clothes. The children stared on in horror and hatred.

  Ralph, however, understood. He knew that people suddenly woke up one day and reason was gone, all sense of right and wrong, all trust in their own intentions. It happened. The winter was too long. The air was too bleak. The cause was unknowable, the effect unpredictable. The bookkeeper was sent to an insane asylum, where every day he would mourn his beloved wife, and ask if she was coming to see him.

  Ralph wanted to believe that Catherine was drugging him to inspire youth and vigor, the way a horse trader would dope a horse to put shine in its coat, fire in its eye, to fool an unsuspecting buyer. He believed that she had brought the poison from Saint Louis, from Chinatown perhaps, bought with some flimsy excuse, that in her long days without him, she had conceived of this plan to give him tiny doses of a poison that would make him young again. If only for a little while. A little while would be enough. In Florence he had sometimes used such poisons so that his lovemaking could go on without stopping for hours, and he had used it to cure a case of the clap he had gotten one summer. He felt oblivious, then. He felt divine. There were reasons. There had to be reasons. It was possible.

  Her ardor matched his own.
He no longer cared that her skill in sexual variations far exceeded her descriptions of her former life, her narrow, missionary life. She seemed wanton to him, without limits, like the women he had loved in his youth. He loved her, he wanted her, and she was always there. She had gone away to Saint Louis shy and distant, dressed in plain straight dresses, and she had come home a different person, softer, lighter around the mouth, in simple clothes that spoke of quiet good taste and old money, someone he had never expected to find again in his life. She was his dream.

  He struggled every night to get through dinner without touching her, to wait until time to go to bed. He struggled to make conversation to avoid her gaze, to listen to her sweet voice as she read to him, the soft strain as she played the piano or they played cards while Mrs. Larsen cleared and cleaned the dinner things.

  Catherine lay in his arms every night, and every night the sweat that ran off his back would collect between her breasts, leave them both soaked. She would bring a clean linen cloth, and gently dry his back, his chest, his legs and feet. Every night she slept beside him, every night he drank his crystal water until there was nothing left, and every morning she was there when he woke already hard from his troubled dreams.

  Poison. It was the poison of pleasure, the poison he had known would kill him. His mother knew. He still had the scar on his hand to remind him. This was the poison his mother had seen in the flecks of his eyes even before his eyes had looked at a woman’s naked body. This was wickedness, and it was fatal.

  He dreamed about women. His sensual life, so long ago, came back to him in his dreams, finely detailed, lusciously intoxicating. Voices called to him. He lay naked in open fields, the wind ruffling the hair of a young girl who lay next to him, her dress open to the light, her breasts in his hands. He lay in courtyards, in gardens while water from the fountains played over marble statues and the air was rich with the scent of gardenias and jasmine and rosemary, and the soft voices of women whispered in his ear, while their fingertips pulled at his clothes. While their fingernails, clean and sharp, tore at the flesh of his back. Dreaming, his eyes roamed behind his lids over the luxuries of sex.

  He dreamed about men who were not himself and women he had never known. He dreamed about his mother and father, lost in the mute, loveless passion that had created him. He dreamed about the men and women of the town, so religious, so strict and secret and fertile. He dreamed of young lovers and the first kiss, the first ribbon untied with trembling adolescent fingers while standing by a waterfall, a crystal stream, a place he knew.

  He dreamed about large house parties. They were gay and filled with good things to eat and well-dressed men and women from twenty and forty years before. In these dreams, he was a child among grownups. There was laughter and pleasure and the unspoken signs of desires fulfilled. They were not people he knew. They were not houses he recognized. The houses were enormous, and filled with many rooms that opened on to one another so there was a constant flow among the guests from room to room, from gaiety to gaiety and partner to partner. They had beautiful skin and musical voices, and he loved them, loved being among them. In these dreams, where he sometimes saw his mother and father happy, he did not have sex, but the air was so redolent with desire that he became sex itself, and walked with strength in his legs, with a pride unknown to him.

  He never dreamed of Catherine. He never dreamed of Emilia. They were never present. He dreamed of Antonio, and the sight of Antonio with woman after woman. These dreams embarrassed him and filled him with shame but also with longing.

  He smelled flowers, in his dreams. He smelled almonds. He smelled his own flesh dying.

  The dreams vanished before dawn, and he awoke anxious and disturbed, to find Catherine already there, reaching out for him.

  “You were restless in your sleep. I could feel you moving.”

  “I had dreams.”

  “Was I there?”

  “No.”

  It didn’t matter that her hair was tangled, her breath stale, her nightdress around her knees. It didn’t matter who she was, who she had pretended to be. It didn’t matter the atrocity she was committing. What she was doing to him. He reached out of his dream and took her into his arms, wanting more than any woman could possibly give, and getting more than he ever thought could come to him.

  He knew that this moment, this feeling of well-being, these gorgeous dreams of gross desire and easy fulfillment, he knew this was a momentary thing. The drug’s erotic effect would end soon, and the horror would begin, if that was what she wanted. And the fact of it didn’t appall him as he thought it should. He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t save himself. He loved her. He loved her and she wanted him dead, and his son was lost forever to him and that was fine, too. That was what his life had led him to. This was what he had lived twenty years of solitude for, to see what would happen, to see how it would all turn out.

  “Before you came, life was terrible.”

  “You have so much.”

  “I have whatever’s left from the things I’ve broken; my wife, my child . . . children.”

  “Those things weren’t your fault. Your wife was terrible to you.”

  “She did what she was made to do. She made me miserable because I was blind, because I wanted to be made miserable. It wasn’t her fault. I was ignorant.”

  “You were generous.”

  “I almost killed my son. My own boy.”

  “He . . .”

  “He was all the son I had. He was son enough. And he was innocent. Like Franny. Innocent and sweet and stupid.”

  “The boy in Saint Louis . . . Mr. Moretti.”

  “What?”

  “He might change his mind. He may be your son. I think he is.”

  Ralph’s hand took hers. They stared at each other across the snowy linen.

  “Then he’s a liar. He’ll never change his mind. Everything has failed. It was all for nothing.”

  He had made his efforts. He had hired detectives, strangers, to find his son. He had placed a shameless advertisement in the newspapers in Chicago and Saint Louis and Philadelphia and San Francisco and he had received and answered the many letters and he had made his choice. His son had turned out to be a phantom. His illegitimate son, he was aware. His wife had turned out to be the person he had waited for ever since the day he had driven Emilia away. Poison. The life he had was the life he had made, no more, no less, and he wouldn’t struggle anymore, wouldn’t try to change the course of events.

  “What will you do today?”

  “I feel so lazy, like a cat. I’ll read. I’ll sew. I’ll ask Mrs. Larsen if she wants any help and she’ll say no. I’ll wait for you.”

  “And does that make you happy?”

  “It’s all I need. It’s all I ever wanted.”

  When she was in the bath, he looked for the poison. He looked in her sewing basket. He searched the pockets of her dresses. He looked through the few contents of her dressing table. He never found anything. It was like a giddy game to him, an Easter egg hunt, and he didn’t really care whether he found it or not. He felt it was his duty to look. He would never have confronted her, no matter what he found. He was agitated when he woke, and he wanted to find something, anything, that would prove what he knew to be true. Nothing would matter. She would do as she liked. She wanted everything, he supposed, the house, the money, everything, and he would have given it to her, all of it, if she had asked. He would have lived alone with nothing, if she had wanted. And he would die, if that’s what she required.

  Mrs. Larsen told him Catherine was restless during the day. Mrs. Larsen assumed she was bored, confined in the big house with nothing to do. Nothing was holding her in. She could go to town now, buy odds and ends, visit ladies she might have met. But she rarely went out, except to the snowy garden. She sometimes walked the road, in the thinning snow, peering into the ruts here and there as though she were trying to find something, but she always came home empty-handed.

  Larsen found them in the en
d. Coming home with rabbits over his shoulder, he looked down and saw a glitter through the mud and picked up her little jewels and rubbed them with his finger until they sparkled in the sun. He brought them home, went straight into Catherine where she sat playing the piano, the dead rabbits still hanging over his shoulder, his muddy boots on the rug from France. He held out his open hand; she took her things.

  “This is it, ain’t it? What you been looking for?”

  “They are, Mr. Larsen. They mean nothing now. But I thank you. I’ll put them away. I wore them once, in another place.”

  Truitt knew it. He heard it before darkness fell, from Mrs. Larsen, but he never asked, and he never saw the trinkets she had brought with her. Women’s things, jewelry, rubies or glass, they were all the same.

  A widow in town took strychnine, the poison scalding her blood, the bile spewing from her mouth as she lay on the kitchen floor, a cake cooling on the kitchen table. A young man threw his only daughter down a well and smoked a cigarette as she drowned. Such things happened.

  Ralph didn’t go to the funerals or the trials. He couldn’t stand the idea of being in a crowd of people. He couldn’t stand the idea of being looked at. He felt the winter would never end, just as each day he couldn’t wait for the hours in his office to be over. He felt he would go crazy until he sat again at the long table, listening to the soothing voice of his young wife.

  Every death was the death of Antonio. Every crime was the disappearance of his boy. He wept during the day. He wept on the long ride home from his office. He wept every morning as he woke up. And Catherine was the only thing that could ease his sorrow.