A Reliable Wife Read online

  At last he was ready. He wanted to die. But still she could not do it. And, finally, she knew she could not do it.

  He was sitting in a chair in the music room. She had put cotton in his ears, because any noise drove him into a frenzy, and she came to him, she knelt on the floor. She finally couldn’t bear his suffering and her own wickedness, or his patient acceptance of what was happening to him. She knelt on the floor and lay her head in his lap and she spoke softly, looking up into his tired face.

  “It’s over,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I can’t do it. Can’t do it to you. You’re all I’ve known, all I will ever know, and I can’t do it. I love you so much it makes me ashamed when you look at me, to have you see me. But, there, take my hand. It stops now. You’ll live. I will make you well.”

  He looked at her, his face a realm of kindness.

  “If you die, I would grieve for you all my life. I’ll grieve for you if they hang me, if they put the rope around my neck.”

  “I wanted to die. It seemed I did. Do.”

  “You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.”

  “Antonio . . .”

  “Will come. I promise. He will come. Until he does, I’m here. Live for me.”

  He reached out and touched her hair. He caught a single strand between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth.

  He loved her. He would live.

  Perhaps there was to be some light, in the end. Maybe, after all, there was a way out of the darkness. She hoped it was true. She was so tired.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SHE SENT A TELEGRAM to Antonio. “Come at once,” was all it said.

  She nursed Ralph with all the care she could give him. She wrapped his hands and body with gauze dipped in liniment, the sores had become so terrible. He itched and burned, and the salve seemed to soften the torment. She covered his face with salve and gauze, his face, where the skin was falling off in sheets. She closed his ears and covered his eyes with cotton, she put her dark glasses on him. The sound and the light had become piercing to him, the smallest footfall an agony. She wrapped her shoes in wool so that her feet barely made a sound as she walked through the marble halls. She drew the curtains against the light and the sound, and she tied him with velvet and cotton cords to a chair when his restlessness and dementia would not let him stay still. She drew the curtains, and the white world went away for a time.

  She burned the sheets, his clothes and shoes and bath towels. She burned and buried anything he might have touched, anything that might contain the slightest trace of the white powder. She threw away his razor, his father’s, and his silver hairbrush from Italy. She burned the rug, the heavy silk bed hangings. She burned her own nightgowns, knowing as she did that the smoke from the fire was full of the same poison, that everything he had touched she had touched as well, that he had drunk his icy water and kissed her on the mouth.

  The blue bottle she took into the woods and poured the poison over rocks, away from water, away from where sheep might graze in summer, or birds might come to nest. No more harm would come to any living thing.

  She fed him nothing but warm milk, to make him vomit and to still the tremors of his chill. She gave him limewater to soak up the poisons. She covered him with furs and blankets and held the bowl for him while he vomited into it. She never flinched.

  She called on Mrs. Larsen. “I don’t believe the doctor. He is, has been very ill. We can make him better. We did it once before.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. But the doctor doesn’t know either. He’s wrong. This is no cancer. My father died of cancer and this is different. He knows what’s going on around him. My father knew nothing. He lost his mind, at the end. It’s not his brain. I don’t know. My sister was ill once. We gave her milk and egg whites, to make her vomit. Give it to him. He’s freezing cold. Keep him warm. What else can we do?”

  “The old people . . . there are herbs in the field for the sores. For drawing out the boils.”

  “Then we’ll ask the old people. We’ll get what we can. It’s still winter. There’s not much. You’ll watch him. I’ll go to Chicago and find a doctor, a real doctor. I’ll ask him what to do.”

  She went to Chicago, to visit poor, sad-faced India. India who looked like her picture. India whom rich Ralph Truitt had chosen out of the whole world, who might herself have been wearing silk and walking the marble halls. She would never know where her picture had gone. She would never know she might have been loved and respected, the mistress of those high frescoed halls. And Truitt would have found happiness with her, a thin happiness. He would not be dying now, if India had been the one.

  Catherine had always loved India, had loved her plain shyness and her lack of prospects. She wanted to tell her that Ralph Truitt had loved her; she wanted to say he had chosen her picture and loved it, because then, when she entered a room or walked down the street, she might be able to do it differently, knowing that she was loved.

  It was easy to lie to her. It had been easy to say that she had always wanted her picture, a remembrance, a sentimental keepsake, and to persuade shy India to sit in front of the photographer’s plate.

  Now it was easy to tell her only as much as she needed and lie about why she needed it. India had spent a lifetime watching other people’s lives, looking in shop windows, watching life through the plate glass of her own indifferent looks, and she had noticed everything and stored it away, her only treasure. It was her only furniture of use; her protection against the loneliness that never left her and the ugly men and the sad, sad life.

  India embraced her. India held her hand. India listened, nodding, and then she got her hat and coat and said the only things she had said, through Catherine’s long and lying story. “Let’s go downtown.”

  Chicago outdid Saint Louis in brawl and confusion. They went through big streets and tiny streets, and came to Chinatown, to a small shop with dingy windows. Inside, a Chinaman bowed with elaborate courtesy and listened to the version of the story Catherine told. At the word arsenic, the air in the room stopped moving for a moment. Catherine thought she would cry, would howl with guilt and terror, but she went on as though nothing were happening. The air began to move again. India breathed, and the wheels started turning, the clock began to tick.

  The Chinaman bowed again, smiled broadly, and began to move hastily around his dark shop, pulling phials of powder from one shelf, milky liquids from another, collecting the ancient and secret reversals of terrible and vengeful substances. Now and then he stopped and smiled as though he were telling a joke.

  “Brandy,” he said. “Keeps his belly warm.”

  “Opium,” he said, “to calm the stomach. Make him happy. Make bad dreams go away.” He cut out opium in tiny, waxy balls.

  “One every day, until his dreams are clear and clean. Fresh dreams.”

  When he was done, there were eight bottles, and they cost a lot of money and Catherine paid, carrying the bottles and jars in a plain brown sack from the store. She buried it deep in a big black bag she was carrying, and offered India dinner.

  They ate at a grand hotel, Catherine never saying that she would sleep the night in a room upstairs. India was ravenous, her eyes wide, the huge menu in front of her like a shield. She ate oysters, lobster thermidor, a cold soup, and a guinea hen. She drank a great deal of wine. Catherine ate little and drank no wine. She had no taste for it.

  “You look different,” said India, waiting for the smooth waiter to reappear. “You look like a lady. Like . . .” she nodded her head. “Like one of them.”

  “He likes a simple way. They’re simple people there, not like us. I try to be what he wants me to be.”

  “And he gives you money?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of money.”

  Catherine was embarrassed. “Yes.”

  “Give me some. You have a sweetheart, a husband
for God’s sake, he gives you money. I want money.”

  “Not here. But, yes, of course, whatever you need.”

  “I need a lot of things. I need some twenty-eight-year-old man with white teeth to fall in love with me. I need a winter coat and a little dog to sit in my lap. Bet you got a little dog.”

  Catherine smiled.”No. But I have a winter coat. You can have it if you want. I’ll get another. Or we’ll get you one you like.”

  The waiter came with dessert, a huge mound of whipped cream and cake and fruit. “You think that’s the answer. You think it’ll make me pretty or get me a sweet man? It’ll just give me the idea, on cold nights, that I could have one of those men, that my face was pretty like yours, that it wasn’t all so goddamned endless and stupid and boring. Money. That’ll be enough, for now.”

  Catherine had spent so much of her life on the other side of the glass, the India side, the Alice side. She found it extraordinary to be the one who had the things people wanted. And she, now, wanted only one thing, and the way to that thing lay in her black bag.

  Catherine walked plain India the long way home, tried to give her the black seal coat she was wearing, but India refused it, saying it would make her look like a fool. She gave her as much money as she could, knowing India wouldn’t spend it on drugs or foolishness or fripperies.

  She spent the night in her narrow bed in her plain room in the grand hotel. She thought of Truitt, of Mrs. Larsen sitting up by him all night, nursing him through one more grief. Mrs. Larsen who never once had a bad dream, she said, even after she watched her husband chop off his own hand for no reason at all.

  Catherine dreamed of Antonio. He was like a spider, everywhere at once. His skin was in her skin, his organs were connected to hers. Her heartbeat was his heartbeat, the flutter of her eyelids moved above his drugged terrible haunting black eyes. He was her passion and her violation, and it brought her sharply awake.

  She smoked one opium ball from the Chinaman and fell asleep into bliss, into cool water and her mother’s arms and the water trembling on her mother’s hair, the lilac blooms in May. She fell into a dream of her garden, of how it would smell on summer evenings, the jasmine trees white with bloom, the koi darting in the pond when she bent over to sprinkle bread crumbs on the water, Truitt sitting in a white chair in a white suit, playing with a child.

  Catherine woke up, and she knew she was pregnant. She felt luxuriously tired, although she knew she had slept.

  At her mirror she pulled her hair back tightly, put on her simple traveling dress, and sat on the train for hours. As she ate her lunch, she wondered if she could see the remains of her red traveling suit. She stared out the window, but nothing was there, nothing left that she could see. When she had finished her lunch, she vomited it into the bathroom sink, washed the sink out with a cloth, then threw the cloth from the train. It fluttered away like a stiff heavy white bird. She felt light-headed. She felt grateful. She was beyond gratitude, beyond any understanding of it, and lost in a bliss the opium could not have produced, in a sense of being in the right place, a feeling she had never known. There was, at last, a chair for her to sit on, and Truitt would live.

  At home, Mrs. Larsen ran to the door.

  “He’s quiet, now,” she said. “He had a terrible night. Screamed with the pain. Screamed from what he was seeing when he was asleep. I forgot where I was. He slept all morning. I had to tie him down.” Mrs. Larsen looked terrible and old, shaky and bleary eyed.

  “Go home now, Mrs. Larsen. Go home and sleep. I’ve brought medicine.”

  She walked through the long sunroom, the glass conservatory. The first roses had arrived from Saint Louis, tagged with cardboard tags, roses and orange trees and jasmine and fuchsia and orchids, waiting to be put into the enormous terra-cotta pots that lined the hallway. It was hot here, hot and damp, although the snow still lay in its blinding blanket outside, less pure now, more pocked and dirty, but endless.

  He sat quietly in a high-backed chair, a lap robe over his legs, her sunglasses on his face. His eyes were shut.

  She knelt beside his chair. His hand strayed idly through her hair. “Hello, Emilia,” he said softly. “Welcome home.”

  “It’s Catherine, Truitt,” she said. “Catherine Land. Your wife. You were dreaming.”

  “Of course. Catherine. I was . . .”

  “You were dreaming.” She reached into her black bag, gave him one of the opium balls. “Swallow this,” she said. “Swallow this and dream some more.”

  For days the two women ministered to him, sleeping in shifts or not at all. For the second time, they bathed him together, holding him in the steaming water until the chills had passed, rubbing his stomach endlessly so that the terrible cold would go away. He was drunk on brandy, sedated into joy with opium, and he was getting better.

  They sat together in the nights and watched him roll in his sleep.

  “Larsen cut off his hand because . . . because I asked him to stop.” It was the first time she had said his name.

  “Stop what?”

  “Just stop. Ten years ago. To leave me be. He couldn’t stand it.”

  “You miss him.”

  “He was all I ever knew. I miss him, yes.”

  “You never go to see him.”

  “I wouldn’t. It’s my fault.”

  They sat through the long night in silence. Mrs. Larsen had said about her husband what she needed to say. In her own quiet way she had driven her husband, also, into the far reaches of madness and death. She had known because she had seen it before, she had done it herself.

  Catherine took the dark glasses from Truitt’s eyes. They were still fierce blue, but ringed with deep, haggard shadows. They were unfocused and wandered unhitched inside his head. His forehead was a mass of pustules that had begun to heal. There would be scars. He looked ten years older, as though some boundary had been crossed and he would never again be young or completely well. She had broken his youth and left him floundering on the shore of old age, his power gone, his ambitions stilled.

  His hands, when she unbandaged them, lay quiet in his lap. He was neither cruel nor kind; he was simply waiting for whatever the next thing was. He grew less cold, his dreams became softer and subtler, more filled with shapes that embraced him. He described his dreams to her in the morning when he woke up, and she listened patiently, although the dreams did not make sense and he had the same dreams over and over. They were memories of events he hadn’t described to her yet. They were ideas he had had but never acted on. They were dreams.

  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 S
aint 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.