A Reliable Wife Read online

  The train would come, late or not, and everything that happened before its arrival would be before, and everything that came after would be after. It was too late to stop it now. His past would be only a set of certain events that had led him to this desperate act of hope.

  He was a fifty-four-year-old man whose face was shocking to him, and in a few moments even that slate would be wiped clean. He allowed himself that hope.

  We all want the simplest things, he thought. Despite what we may have, or the children who die, we want the simplicity of love. It was not too much to ask that he be like the others, that he, too, might have something to want.

  For twenty years, not one person had said good night to him as he turned off the light and lay down to sleep. Not one person had said good morning as he opened his eyes. For twenty years, he had not been kissed by anyone whose name he knew, and yet, even now, as the snow began to fall lightly, he remembered what it felt like, the soft giving of the lips, the sweet hunger of it.

  The townspeople watched him. Not that it mattered anymore. We were there, they would tell their children and their neighbors. We were there. We saw her get off the train for the first time, and she got off the train only three times. We were there. We saw him the minute he set eyes on her.

  The letter was in his hand. He knew it by heart.

  Dear Mr. Truitt,

  I am a simple honest woman. I have seen much of the world in my travels with my father. In my missionary work I have seen the world as it is and I have no illusions. I have seen the poor and I have seen the rich and do not believe there is so much as a razor’s edge between, for the rich are as hungry as the poor. They are hungry for God.

  I have seen mortal sickness beyond imagining. I have seen what the world has done to the world, and I cannot bear to be in the world any longer. I know now that I can’t do anything about it, and God can’t do anything about it either.

  I am not a schoolgirl. I have spent my life being a daughter and had long since given up hope of being a wife. I know that it isn’t love you are offering, nor would I seek that, but a home, and I will take what you give because it is all that I want. I say that not meaning to imply that it is a small thing. I mean, in fact, that it is all there is of goodness and kindness to want. It is everything compared to the world I have seen and, if you will have me, I will come.

  With the letter she had sent a photograph of herself, and he could feel the tattered edge of it with his thumb as he raised his hat to one more person, saw, from the corner of his eye, one more person gauge the unusual sobriety and richness of his black suit and strong boots and fur-collared overcoat. His thumb caressed her face. His eyes could see her features, neither pretty nor homely. Her large, clear eyes stared into the photographer’s flash without guile. She wore a simple dress with a plain cloth collar, an ordinary woman who needed a husband enough to marry a stranger twenty years her senior.

  He had sent her no photograph in return, nor had she asked for one. He had sent instead a ticket, sent it to the Christian boardinghouse in which she stayed in filthy, howling Chicago, and now he stood, a rich man in a tiny town in a cold climate, at the start of a Wisconsin winter in the year 1907. Ralph Truitt waited for the train that would bring Catherine Land to him.

  Ralph Truitt had waited a long time. He could wait a little longer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CATHERINE LAND SAT IN FRONT of the mirror, unbecoming all that she had become. The years had hardened her beyond mercy.

  I’m the kind of woman who wants to know the end of the story, she thought, staring at her face in the jostling mirror. I want to know how it’s all going to end before it even starts.

  Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.

  It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.

  The land flew away by her window, rushing horizontal flat with snow. The train jostled just enough so that, even though she held her head perfectly still, her earrings swayed and sparkled in the light.

  He had sent a private car with a sitting room and a bedroom and electric lights. She had not seen another passenger, although she knew other people had to be on the train. She imagined them, sitting calmly in their seats, pale winter skin on gray horsehair, while in her car it was all red velvet and swagging and furbelows. Like a whorehouse, she thought. Like a whorehouse on wheels.

  They had left after dark and crept through the night, stopping often to clear drifts from the tracks. The porter had brought her a heavy, glistening meal, slabs of roast beef and shrimp on ice, lovely iced cakes which she ate at a folding table. No wine was offered and she didn’t ask for it. The hotel silver felt smooth and heavy in her hand, and she devoured everything that was brought to her.

  In the morning, steaming eggs and ham and rolls and hot black coffee that burned her tongue, all brought by a silent Negro porter, served as though he were performing some subtle magic trick. She ate it all. There was nothing else to do, and the movement of the train was both hypnotic and ravishing, amplifying her appetites, as each rushing second brought her closer to the fruition of her long and complicated scheme.

  When she wasn’t eating, or sleeping beneath the starched, immaculate sheets, she stared at her face in the mirror above the dressing table. It was her one sure possession, the one thing she could count on never to betray her, and she found it reassuring, after thirty-four years, that it remained, every morning, essentially unchanged, the same sure beauty, the same pale and flawless skin, unlined, fresh. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet reached her face.

  Still she was restless. Her mind raced, reviewing her options, her plans, her jumbled memories of a turbulent past, and what it was about her life that had led her here, to this sumptuous room on wheels, somewhere in the middle.

  So much had to happen in the middle, and no matter how often she had rehearsed it in her mind, she didn’t trust the middle. You could get caught. You could lose your balance, your way, and get found out. In the middle, things always happened you hadn’t planned on, and it was these things, the possibility of these things, that haunted and troubled her, that showed now in the soft mauve hollows beneath her dark almond eyes.

  Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love or money. She could not, would not accept that as a fact, because to accept it now would mean that the end had already come and gone.

  She was determined, cold as steel. She would not live without at least some portion of the two things she knew were necessary as a minimum to sustain life. She had spent her years believing that they would come, in time. She believed that an angel would come down from heaven and bless her with riches as she had been blessed with beauty. She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object, a shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.

  She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been born.

  Her mother’s golden hair was lit by the reflection from an elaborate lavender silk dress, her skirts voluminous and extravagantly decorated. She drove a large and simple carriage, and Catherine sat in the front seat, between her mother and a man, a military man who was not her father. In her memo
ry, as it came to her, she could not see his face. Behind them, straight as pins, sat three other young men, cadets, smartly dressed in tight wool uniforms with epaulets and braids and stripes.

  It had rained on the way, a quick, fierce downpour, and the hood of the carriage had been drawn over, and the rain fell even though the sun never stopped shining on them, such a thick rain she had barely been able to see as far as the horses’ steaming flanks. Then, miraculous and beautiful, the rain had stopped and the hood had been drawn back by one of the young men so the sweet cool air had flowed around them. The hood sprinkled her mother’s hair with tiny droplets, and her mother had laughed in a charming way. It was such a clear memory, the sound of it. That and the weather and the storm itself had been nice. Lovely, long ago.

  The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.

  Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.

  It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.

  But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning, the beginning of all that had come after.

  It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus. It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.

  From that beginning she had gone on and on, until her legs were tired and her mother was dead and her heart was broken. She had, no matter how impossible it seemed from moment to moment, gone on without love or money, always wondering when it would begin, the splendid end to match the splendid beginning.

  She no longer dwelled on the past. She had no fond memories there, except for the single rainbow, the pot of gold. She had bitten and bludgeoned her way through life, angry, fighting in a rage for the next good thing to happen. It hadn’t happened yet. So that, on the day she suddenly realized that her life was, in fact, her life, she wondered what it could possibly have been that led her forward, day after day, what events could possibly have happened to fill the hours between sleep and sleep. But at moments like this, when everything was so quiet she could notice the trembling of her earrings, she knew with dread that the answer was not nothing much, but simply nothing.

  She would not, could not live without love or money.

  She would remember those faceless young soldiers forever. They would be forever young. She would cherish the glory of the sun coming through the clouds, and the rainbow. Her mother’s loveliness would never abandon her. But what good did it do? What use was all that to her now, sitting in front of a mirror on a train going to the middle of nowhere, on the tightrope between the beginning and the end?

  There was a soft knock on the door. The porter who had brought her meals and turned down her bed leaned his dark handsome face into the compartment. “Station in half an hour, Miss.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly, never taking her eyes from the mesmerizing mirror. The door closed and she was alone again.

  She had seen Ralph Truitt’s personal advertisement six months before, as she sat at a table with Sunday coffee and the newspaper:

  COUNTRY BUSINESSMAN SEEKS

  RELIABLE WIFE.

  COMPELLED BY PRACTICAL,

  NOT ROMANTIC REASONS.

  REPLY BY LETTER.

  RALPH TRUITT. TRUITT, WISCONSIN.

  DISCREET.

  “Reliable wife.” That was new, and she smiled. She had read in her life perhaps thousands of advertisements just like it. It was a hobby of hers, like knitting. She was engrossed by these notices, lonely men who called out from the vast wildernesses of the country. Sometimes the notices were placed by women, who asked for strength or patience or kindness or merely civility.

  She laughed at their stories, at their pitiful foolhardiness. They asked and probably found somebody as lonely and desperate as themselves. How could they expect more? The halt and the lame calling the blind and hopeless. Catherine found it hilarious.

  She assumed, still, that these men and these women found each other through their sad little calls for comfort. They found, if not love or money, at least another life to cling to. Advertisements like this one appeared every week. These people didn’t like the solitude of their lives. Perhaps they, at least some of them, eventually found lives they liked better.

  The night before, just before she slept, she suddenly saw herself as if from above, lying in her bed, the chill of loneliness and death all around her like a nimbus of disconsolation. She hovered in the air, watching herself. She had felt, and still felt that she would die unless someone could find the sweetness to touch her with affection. Unless someone would appear to shelter her from the storm of her awful life. It was Ralph Truitt’s terse announcement, containing the promise of a beginning, not splendid, perhaps, but new, that she had finally answered. “I am a simple, honest woman,” she had written, and he had answered by return mail. They had written all through the hot summer, tentative descriptions of their lives. His handwriting was blunt and compelling, hers practiced and elegant, she hoped, and seductive. She had at last sent the photograph, and he had written at greater length, as though it were already decided, the whole match. She had feigned hesitation, until he insisted and sent her a ticket for the train to come and bring her to be his wife.

  The young soldier who had sat beside her in the carriage would be old himself now. She could still see the way his thumb jutted from the palm of his hand, feel the way his thigh touched her thigh as he leaned toward her. Perhaps he had a wife and children of his own now. Perhaps he loved them and treated them with kindness, with grace and affection. The world had not shown her that such things were common, but her unhappiness had been made bearable only by the certain knowledge that somewhere there lived people whose lives were not like her own.

  Perhaps this Ralph Truitt was one of those other people. Perhaps this life he offered would be some other kind of life. The sun set every day. It could not be that it would set in splendor only once in her lifetime.

  Half an hour. She stood up from the dressing table and stepped out of her red silk shoes, lining them up side by side. She began quickly to undo the embroidered jacket of her fancy traveling suit, discarding it behind her on the floor. Then she took off her silk blouse and the heavy red velvet skirt. She undid the laces of her embroidered corset, and shrugged it off. She felt suddenly light, as though she would rise from the floor, a pool of crimson velvet at her feet.

  She watched herself in the mirror as she did these things. She
saw, for a moment, the reflection of her headless body. It was not unpleasant. She enjoyed her body, the way women sometimes do, and looked at it with a dispassionate eye, as though it were in a shop window, understanding exactly the raw material from which she had produced, a thousand times, certain effects. Every day she took the raw material of her body and pushed and pulled it, decorated it so that it became a heightened version of itself, a version designed to attract attention.

  No more.

  She leaned over and scooped up her clothes, along with her silk shoes, and tied it all into a neat bundle. Moving quickly to the window of the compartment, she pulled it open and threw her expensive clothes into the darkness and the racket of the train’s wheels. The snow was beginning now. Spring was a long way off. Her beautiful clothes would be a blackened ruin by then.

  She pulled a small tattered gray suitcase from the rack above her head. She opened the clasps and pulled out a plain black wool dress, one of three just like it. She sat again at her dressing table, and ripped open a short length of hem. Taking off her jewelry, a garnet bracelet and earrings, funfair trinkets, she wrapped them in a delicate handkerchief still smelling of a man’s tart cologne. Adding to it a delicate diamond ring, she stuffed the small package into the hem of the skirt.

  With deft fingers she threaded a needle and quickly sewed her jewelry into the hem of the skirt. Insignificant as it was, it reminded her of the way she had once lived, her old life now hidden in the hem of a plain dress. It was her insurance, her little baubles, her ticket out of the darkness, if darkness fell. It was her independence. It was her past.

  There. She stepped into the dress, buttoning the thirteen buttons. These were her clothes, the only clothes she had. She had made them herself, in the way her mother had taught her. Without corset or stays, she felt surprisingly light. She quickly finished dressing.