A Reliable Wife Read online

  Such things happen, he would think as he drove home, the road ahead blurred with tears. The winters were long and life was hard and children died and religion was terror, so he would weep for these sad people, and weep as well for his own Antonio, his own child down the well. He would weep because there had been no trial, no retribution, no one to protect or save the boy from his father’s terrible anger. He had escaped unscathed, and Antonio had run away and been lost in the brutal world, while he rode home in his clean clothes to be poisoned by his beautiful wife.

  And so he wept.

  She got up to change the sheets in the middle of the night. Her arms flew out, and the linens flew across the bed like great birds. Her hands smoothed the sheets, her arms stuffed the pillows into the cases and she piled them, pillow after pillow, on the great bed.

  She put on her nightdress and lay beneath the covers. Mrs. Larsen would find the ruined sheets in the linen closet. Catherine patted his side of the bed, and he lay his head on the pillow and stared into her beautiful, calm face. She looked so far away. She was so beloved.

  His heart pounded in his chest. His hand reached under her nightdress and lay along her thigh.

  “I know what you’re doing. I know what’s happening to me.”

  “I . . .”

  “Don’t say anything. Don’t speak. We’ll never mention it again. I just wanted you to know that I know, that it’s all right. I don’t mind. I forgive you. Just . . .”

  Her hands were frozen still. Her eyes were wide in the moonlight. They spoke in whispers.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re talking about.”

  “When it gets worse, if that’s what you want, make it go quickly. I’ve waited so long to see what would happen, and now I know, and it’s fine, it’s fine with me, but I want it to go quickly. I don’t want to suffer.”

  “You’re tired. Sleep now. I don’t know what you’re saying. I would never want you to suffer.”

  He could feel the blood pulsing through the vein of her leg. He could see her eyes dart away from him, dart toward the moonlight. She put out her hand and closed his eyes. She kept her cold hand over his lids, her breath shushed him in his ear, as one might calm a child to sleep, a child who had waked from a nightmare.

  “I’ll never talk about it again. You are free.”

  “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what you’re saying. I love you.”

  She had never said it before. No one had said it to him for more than twenty years, yet he believed her. She loved him, and she was the thing that was bringing his death, an end to his torment. She was the angel of his death. And he loved her with all his heart.

  She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to watch him die. She truly loathed the idea of him suffering or sickening or any of the things that were about to happen. But she knew that, any day, a letter might come, a letter that would end it all. Love and money—she had promised herself these two things, but she realized more and more that maybe one person got only one thing, and she would not, could not be ruined. She would live in the gutter, Antonio had said. She would grow sad and disheveled, and eventually she would die. But whatever happened, she could only save herself.

  A man ate an entire dictionary and died. Larsen cut off his own burned hand with an axe, believing the burn which would not heal was the kiss of the devil, the ineradicable mark of sin, while Mrs. Larsen watched and screamed. As a boy of fifteen, he had fought in the Civil War and come home without a scratch. Now he lay, a drooling idiot with one hand, in an expensive Catholic hospital in Chicago, paid for by Truitt, while Mrs. Larsen never mentioned him again. Such things happened.

  Catherine Land, a young wife of Truitt, Wisconsin, set out to poison—slowly, with arsenic—the husband who loved her, whom she herself loved, to her surprise, the man who had saved her from a life of destitution and despair.

  Such things happened.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I’M COLD. I’M COLD all the time.” Ralph Truitt said, as he sat and shivered in the evenings.

  Catherine hesitated in her purpose. With the medicine dropper in her hand, her courage wavered. She put away the poison. She stopped for a week. He was a good man, honest, decent, good in his bones, and he didn’t deserve this. She knew that, and she felt in some way, for the first time, that these things mattered. The idea of goodness had never crossed her mind, and now it seemed very real. There was a reason people did things; there was a reason some lives turned out well, others badly. It had never occurred to her. As though goodness itself were some perfect heaven, and she might have constantly judged her distance from it, had she ever stopped to think. Now it haunted her.

  She could change her mind, she supposed, would have to, but the thought of Antonio hung on her like a noose. It was not an idle threat. He would write, and it would all be over. Antonio was love to her, or all of it she had known until Ralph. What Antonio wanted, what she had promised him, would have to be done, somehow. And so she started again.

  Love, even bad love, was a glittering lure that could draw her attention, if only for a time. The idea of Antonio dangled in front of her mesmerized eyes. It was just a drop, after all, a drop in his water, in his soup, a drop on his hairbrush. It was clear and icy and almost without odor. She knew how awful it would be. She knew how he would die. She couldn’t stop now.

  True to his word, he never spoke of it again. He never asked her to stop, never complained of the changes beginning to affect his body, his life. He became anxious. The dreams that had enchanted his sleep turned terrifying, and still he never complained.

  He would wake at two or three in the morning, covered in the sweat of terror, and he would turn to her and she would dry him and place him beneath the covers where he would lie until dawn, shivering with the cold. She felt his forehead with her hand. He was burning up. She felt a tenderness she had never felt for any man, a tenderness that went beyond love.

  He looked haggard. His clothes began to burn his skin. Any sound, any noise, began to scrape at his ear until he couldn’t stand it.

  After dinner one night he spoke in a soft voice, reciting a poem:

  I wander all night in my vision,

  Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,

  Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,

  Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill- assorted, contradictory,

  Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

  She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t know where the words came from. There was no reproach in his voice. She assumed it was the beginning of a dementia that would at least make him oblivious to much of what would happen to him.

  Depression, morbidity, followed by death. These were the words she had read in the library. She knew everything that was to happen, the sores, the spots in his vision that would turn the world yellow and green, the bilious pustules, the haggard eyes, the dark hollows. She knew and she had thought she was ready.

  “It’s wrong,” said Mrs. Larsen. “I’ve seen sickness, plenty of it, in Truitt, in . . . in the world, and this ain’t no sickness I’ve ever seen.”

  Mrs. Larsen began to watch her. Catherine sat and talked to her.

  “I don’t know what it is. We’ll call the doctor. He’ll tell us what to do.”

  A doctor would find nothing, would suspect nothing. A man Truitt’s age might develop eczema and rashes. His hair might fall out. He might develop a visionary mind, an acute hearing, a ringing in the ears, an irrationality. Anybody might. Such things happened. Truitt, while he wasn’t old, wasn’t young either. But Truitt wouldn’t have the doctor. The poison was his fuel. He was not unhappy. And he loved his wife. She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his shirt to her with gladness.

  Mrs. Larsen watched Catherine every minute of the day. Truitt was her life, and she felt her life slipping cruelly away, as so much e
lse had gone. Gone into madness, into incurable awfulness. And she knew, as she had known before, that it wasn’t natural.

  Ralph could not bear to be touched. His skin was so raw he couldn’t stand the feel of the softest nightshirt next to him. He slept naked, under smooth sheets that Mrs. Larsen now changed every day.

  He could not bear to have Catherine’s skin on his skin, and yet his desire for her was undiminished. He shivered with the constant cold. His skin felt raw, the sheets felt like icy nettles in the night. The anxiety he felt before going to sleep could be lessened only by sex. Gently he led her, taught her to give him pleasure without touching.

  When he had come, he could sleep for a while, but he woke from terrible dreams. He would sit on the edge of the bed, shivering and burning up with itching. She would undo her hair and let it fall on his shoulders and slide down his back, to ease the itching. She would do it for an hour, back and forth as light as breath, her silken hair, while he closed his eyes and dreamed. He was like her child. She was gentle past belief.

  He didn’t understand her sorrow. This awful thing was not happening to her. She was causing his death, and he wanted death, so he forgave her. He felt his life slipping away without regret, along with his houses, his businesses, the people he had known and the memories he had harbored for fifty years. Everything had been a burden to him. Losing it now made him feel light. He let it go without regret. Only the bitter image of Antonio, the face he might have known, refused to leave him. But he felt no sorrow, not anymore, while she seemed to grieve deeply. It was deep and private and she had no way to tell him, and he would never have asked, but he wondered and she nursed and dried him and led him like a blind man to the dark bed where she pulled the soft sheets up to his chin and sat in the moonlight as he slept. She was his assassin and his nurse.

  “There is iron and oil,” he would say. “There are cotton fields and cotton mills. There is the railroad. There are wheat fields as far away as Kansas,” explaining the empire that would be hers. He was losing money, losing money every day, Truitt who had spent a lifetime acquiring it, and he didn’t care. There was a lot of money.

  “I love you,” he would say, his hands caressing her breasts in the dark. “These are the things you need to know. To watch over. You will have so much to take care of. I thank you,” he said, and now it had a different meaning.

  He would sit in the shadows of the great hall and think of killing people. He dreamed of killing Catherine. He was worried he would kill Mrs. Larsen, or innocent people in the town, even though he hardly ever went to town anymore.

  “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “I’m afraid of killing Antonio when he comes.”

  “He’s not coming,” she said softly. “He’s never coming.”

  Mrs. Larsen was out of her mind with worry and suspicion. She wouldn’t let Catherine in the kitchen. She made different foods for him, the things he liked from his boyhood. He wouldn’t eat them. She insisted he call the doctor. She had never shed one tear for Larsen, never mentioned his name, but she couldn’t look at Truitt’s blistered hands without crying.

  There was no need, and Truitt didn’t want it. Mrs. Larsen begged him. Catherine went to town and begged the doctor to come. She lied. The doctor came. Cancer, he said. Cancer of the blood and the bones and the brain. Cancer everywhere. Cancer caused from breathing the fumes of smelting fires. High in arsenic, he said. Could be that. He had seen so much putrefaction of the flesh, such sepsis of the blood, in the workers of Truitt’s foundries, men who died at thirty-five and left widows and children and he was unmoved. Prepare yourself, he said. Prepare and wait. He gave Truitt morphine for the pain.

  “It’s cancer,” Catherine told Mrs. Larsen. “We have to make him comfortable. We have to wait. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “I don’t believe him,” Mrs. Larsen said. “Something is happening. Something not natural.” Her kindness toward Catherine turned to suspicion and a maddened wretchedness. She could do nothing. Truitt couldn’t eat her food. He couldn’t sit at the table.

  Truitt began to go to the churches, each in turn. He had a profound fear of other people, of being touched and looked at, but he went. Catherine went with him, sitting in plain dresses among the Calvinists, the Lutherans, the Swedenborgians, the Holy Rollers, and snake handlers. The ministers left off preaching about the fires of hell, looking at Truitt’s blistered face, and spoke softly about the redemptive power of love. The fires of hell had burned out, leaving only mercy. It was difficult, but Truitt sat straight, avoiding the staring eyes, and spoke gently to his neighbors and workers after the services. No one touched him. No one remarked that he looked less than well. The ride home, the jostling carriage in the rutted roads was an agony. Truitt was afraid, he was afraid that the horses would shy. They had done it before.

  He would wake in the night and the room would be filled with dead people, all the dead people he had ever known. His mother and father, Emilia, sweet Franny. Larsen with his bloody wrist would be there. Standing beatific in the midst of them would be Antonio, his eyes white as marble, his face a blank. Truitt would call out their names, as if they could speak to him their terrible secrets.

  He would hear the poet’s voice:

  It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,

  Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.

  Catherine would wake. She would move around the room, her arms aloft like white wings, her nightdress billowing around her feet, until the dead were gone, leaving only the blue moonlight. Then she would quiet him, and he would sleep for a while.

  Every night he would drink his water, while she turned her eyes away and wept. He felt an enormous sadness, a particular sensation of loss, but he never wept anymore, and he never spoke of it.

  Some days he wouldn’t speak. He would wander restlessly from room to room, through the many rooms of the grand palazzo, picking up small objects, turning them this way and that in the light, trying to remember where they came from and what they were for. He would ask her the names of things. He would ask her where they had come from. She didn’t know. From Europe, she would say. From Italy. From Limoges.

  She stopped. She started again. She wanted to walk into the woods and throw the arsenic away where no living thing would find it. But she didn’t throw it away. She kept it, in its blue bottle with a Chinese label.

  She knew there was a point at which she could stop and the poison would fade. He would be left weak and haggard and scarred from the deep blisters in his skin. He would live, but he would die early. Still, he would not die now. He would not die at her hands, while her hands bathed his skin. He would not die in agony. There was a point at which he could live, and there was a point beyond which nothing could be done for him. She knew she was approaching that point, and her anguish grew every time he forgot a name or sat up suddenly in his chair and moved to another, every time she bathed him with warm water to alleviate his chills and his fear.

  Mrs. Larsen had grown to hate her, knowing somehow that Catherine was the cause of whatever was killing Truitt, that she was killing him as Emilia had tried to kill him. But Truitt knew it was his youth, the dissipations of his youth that had brought him to this.

  Luxe, calme et volupté, the poet had written, and Truitt had taken it to mean a life of endless indulgence, a life in which beauty and sensation were all that mattered, a life in which there were no consequences. When Emilia had betrayed him, when Franny had died, he had vowed that his days of indulgence were over. He had given up drinking. He had led a sober life. He had learned nothing. He loved Catherine with the sensuality of his youth, he longed for Antonio as he might have longed for a lover, and it was killing him. He had forgotten the poison, had forgotten that this was being done to him. He thought he had done it to himself, long ago, an illness he had contracted in his youth, the rancid sexual contagion of his childhood, knowing it was fatal and was now, af
ter years of denial, finally showing its vengeful teeth.

  He looked on his life, on the part of him that was living and that had once been whole, with awkward tenderness. He tilted his head toward it as one might toward a baby, afraid to hold it, to pick up such unblemished beauty. He had once moved and talked like other men, been comfortable in his clothes, held women in his arms. He had been a father. His child had been an idiot. He had been a husband. His wife had been a charmer and a beauty and had ruined his life. He couldn’t remember her face. He hadn’t seen Antonio since he was fourteen, twelve years ago. Where had they gone? What would his face look like now? His mind turned all day long like a plant toward the light, toward questions that had no answers.

  He moved into the old house with Mrs. Larsen. He moved into the bedroom he had as a boy, the narrow iron bed, the overhanging eave, and the one gabled window to the stars. He was afraid of the ghosts in the big house. He thought he could escape them.

  He woke up every morning anxious for his wife, and came the long way back to Catherine, offered up his days to her, so that she might patiently explain the things he forgot, so that she could ladle soup into his mouth and bathe him in the warm baths which took away the chill for five minutes. He came back so that she could inject him with morphine and drop poison into his food and onto his hairbrush and onto the clothes he could no longer bear to put on his body. He remembered how it worked, in certain lucid moments. He had, for the most part, forgotten what it was that was being done to him. He never found her at fault.

  After he had gone back to Mrs. Larsen’s, after dinner and the reading by the fire which warmed the nights, after he had been bundled in shawls and lap robes and Mrs. Larsen had driven him slowly away with a look of hatred that pierced her to the heart, Catherine would walk through the dark, the long way through the dark fields, and climb the stairs of the old farmhouse and sit outside his door until morning. If he woke, she would hold his hand, rub his forehead with a soft warm cloth, she would recite for him the names of the dead and the living who peopled his nights. And every morning, before the sun came up, she would wrap her cloak around her and walk the long way home to sleep for an hour before he came into the house, not knowing where to be, not knowing what chair to sit in, or who she was some mornings.