A Reliable Wife Read online

  Truitt had seen her in a new way. And his vision had made her over, had caused her to turn into the kind of woman he wanted. He deserved no less. Catherine, for her part, had led a life in which kindness was neither expected nor given. Battered as she was, she didn’t know the difference between happiness and dread. She didn’t know the difference between excitement and fear. She felt a knot in her stomach every hour of the day and didn’t know what to call it. Her hands shook. She vomited in the mornings, in secret, but she felt that, finally, the end of the tightrope was in view, that the slamming doors and the hostile, mercantile sex and the demented nights in the opium dens were behind her.

  She had been adept at the beginning and the ends of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.

  Then one day he could speak, his voice no longer a harsh and burning rasp. Then one day he could walk, could dress himself, could carry on a conversation, could imagine going back to work to repair his fortunes, to meet the anxious eyes of the town that depended on his being well. He was changed, of course. He walked like an old man, as though each step were a learned and torturous act. His hair had turned stark gray. When he drank from his glass of brandy, his hand moved to his mouth in a series of distinct, static movements, like flashing photographs.

  They sat at the dinner table. He had asked for beef and potatoes and pudding, the food from his schoolboy days. He was reading her the daily disasters from the paper as they ate. His fork clattered on the plate when a knock came at the big front door. It was far away, and Catherine offered to go, but Ralph was already on his feet, unsteady.

  “No. I want to go.”

  He walked the long way, lighting every light as he went. He opened one of the big double doors, and a man stood on the terrace in the darkness, looking out over the steps and the snow. He turned, and Ralph could make out his shape, but could barely see his face.

  The man held out his hand. “I am Tony Moretti,” he said. And then, after a pause, “I am your son.”

  And even though they both knew what the man said was a fiction, Ralph stepped into the dark and opened his arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SONS CAME HOME to their fathers, even to men who weren’t their fathers, men who had beaten them senseless. Sons came home, malevolent with revenge, home to fathers who could not forgive themselves for the cruelties they had committed. Such things happened.

  He had brought everything he owned, the fancy suits, the extravagant Paris neckties, the pristine shirts and the silver-headed walking stick and amber colognes from London. He was penniless. He was like a swan, long-necked and useless except for beauty, and everything he did, every gesture he made and every word he spoke seemed out of place, too exotic, too mannered. He played the piano after dinner, and even that seemed excessive, as though he were playing for a fancy crowd in a rococo concert hall. Truitt preferred Catherine’s simplicity of feeling, her lack of expertise.

  Catherine and Truitt lay in the big bed in their blue bedroom. Antonio slept far away from them, in a bachelor apartment he had devised out of his mother’s old rooms. A dressing room. A magnificent sitting room for which he had taken bits of furniture from all over the house, for which Truitt had ordered an ebony piano. And a bedroom, which was large and grand and hung with tapestries.

  They could feel his eyes on them in the dark. A new quiet had entered into the way they treated each other, a simplicity of manner. It was, Catherine supposed, love. It was what normal people had when passion had run its course. They spoke quietly after making love. They spoke of small matters, his business, Mrs. Larsen and her silent sorrow, the husband she would never see again, his care paid for by Truitt, the garden for which the plants were arriving daily. They never spoke of Truitt’s illness, as though it had never happened.

  “He reminds me so much of Emilia. Her eyes and mouth, that dark hair. An Italian.”

  Catherine sat up in bed and stared at the pale light of the new moon coming through the window.

  “How did she die?”

  She could feel his stillness beside her. He remained weak, and continued to have moments when he did not know where he was or who she was or where they lived. His body was covered with scars, a silent reminder of her iniquities and her consolations and his forgiveness.

  “I killed her.”

  The moon seemed so far away. The winter had been so long, she could not remember a time when it had not been winter. She could not remember her life before she stepped down from the train and into the gaze of Ralph Truitt. Would not remember or want to, except for the presence of Antonio, moving like a cat through the house, watching her day and night.

  “I can’t believe it. I don’t.”

  Truitt sat up in bed and took her hand. “I will talk about this one time. When I’ve told it all, her name will never be said in this house again. I killed her. I let her die.

  “She had moved to Chicago with Moretti. She was my wife. There was no divorce, no legal recourse. She was a Catholic and they don’t do that. I had her child, her boy, under my roof and she was my wife and I felt pain every time I thought about her, but I always knew where she was, I heard the stories. Everybody in town heard the stories and I was ashamed, but I went on and nobody, of course nobody spoke about it, at least not to me.

  “I sent her money. She wasn’t destitute. I sent her money and she lived in a style that was despicable to me, but I sent it anyway because she was my wife, because I was haunted by Franny and had her boy and because . . . because I couldn’t let her live in squalor.

  “Moretti left her. Left her for some rich widow with a big house and a blind eye to his infidelities and his affectations and his lack of talent or charm. Emilia . . .” She could hear the pain in his voice as he spoke her name. “Emilia took a series of lovers, each young, each useless, going around Chicago saying he had had a countess, a real countess, and describing in beer halls the things she was willing to do. She was still beautiful.

  “She never wrote to Antonio. She never came to see the grave of her daughter. She could have chosen differently. She could have chosen something other than this parade of young ne’er-do-wells, something with kindness, something with honor, a house where she might have brought her boy and raised him up. She had money. She was intelligent. She was cultivated. She slept with women, I heard. She got drunk in public. She was robbed twice. By men she knew, men who had been guests in her house.

  “I went to see her. Several times. Not to ask her back home, I wouldn’t have her here. I asked her to stop. Just to stop it. She laughed in my face. She threw wine at me. She told me I disgusted her.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “Do you need to know the rest?”

  The moonlight was so faint and cold, her skin rippled with the cold. “I need to know.”

  “She got sick. Consumption, they called it then. Tuberculosis, I suppose. I sent doctors. I didn’t want to see her. She was still so young. She had tuberculosis, they said, she had syphilis, she had gone mad with it, and no man or woman would come near her. Her name was up, as people say, in the streets of Chicago, and no one would come to comfort her, all those dinner parties she had given, all those men she had given a moment’s pleasure to, and money, endless amounts of money to show off the affectations of the Countess Emilia. She could still barely speak English. The doctors couldn’t do anything. She lived alone and there was no one to feed her or clean up after her, and she had never learned to do the first thing for herself.

  “I went one more time. I took Antonio to see her, but it was too awful. He saw her, saw her in ruins, and then I made him wait in the carriage. There was a room . . . there was a room in her house where she had thrown everything dirty, her clothes, her underclothes, and her fancy petticoats, along with plates she had eaten off of once and hadn’t bothered to clean. Embroidered tablecloths she had used once, hats she had bought and never worn. It was up to your waist. Jewelry she didn’t want anymore
. Packets of letters from Antonio who wrote to her, pleaded with her to come and save him. Some of the letters weren’t even opened. The curtains were drawn against the light; you had to wade through this disaster, wondering what to save, what could be saved, some token to bring to her boy as a sign that at least his mother loved him. God knows I couldn’t. She had left her life, stuffed it away in this rank, dark room on the third floor of her fancy townhouse, which I paid for.

  “She was lying in her bed, barely conscious. Probably drugged. Probably crazy. She was still beautiful. She had a refinement, a beauty, even in her madness, that caught my breath. She needed sun. She needed fresh air and a long cure, out west, in Europe. She might have lived, lived for a while, at least.

  “She spoke to me. She told me I was a fool, a fool and a liar and a cuckold. She told me I was weak and stupid and that she had duped me and used me from the moment she set eyes on me and she was glad. I knew it, of course. I had known it by then for a long time.

  “I left her there. I left her alone to die. She was my heart’s first love, and she despised me and I left her. No cure. No more doctors. No more money. She was thrown out of her house, her possessions auctioned in the street. She died three months later in a charity hospital, her wrists tied to the bed, gone blind, her hair fallen out, a pathetic freak who had no one to hold her hand, no priest to say the final prayer over her head, no redemption, no forgiveness from a God who had finally abandoned her too, left her to die without the words, without the invitation to heaven.

  “I could have saved her. I didn’t. And I don’t regret it. There comes a moment when you can’t take it anymore. I saw that room with her discarded dresses and the unopened letters and the unpaid dressmaker’s bills, and my heart stopped caring whether she lived or died.”

  There was a long, dark silence.

  “You couldn’t have done differently. No one would have expected . . .”

  “I expected. I. She was my wife. Once, she was. Then she was dead. I don’t even know where she’s buried. I don’t care.”

  “You have to forgive yourself.”

  He turned violently to her. “You don’t know anything. I don’t have to do a damned thing. I’ll do and think what I do and think for as long as it takes. You asked. I told you. Never mention her name again.”

  He lay back against the sheets. He pulled her close to him. He drew up the covers and immediately she could feel the warmth of his body against hers. “What I felt for her wasn’t love. I thought it was. It wasn’t. It was an addiction, a kind of insanity. I so wanted . . . something, I don’t remember what. Revenge. My mother. The long years of her rage. I wanted revenge, and she was the instrument. I wanted my mother to have to live with her every day and to feel small and useless and ugly and old. Only it didn’t matter for a minute. To her. It didn’t change anything. I spent my youth loving a woman who wasn’t worth the effort.”

  He was drowsy. “I hope, I hope in my heart, that the fire is out. It burned too hot. It kills everything. Now. Say your prayers and go to sleep. Antonio is home. You’re here. We’ll make it work. That’s all that matters. Go to sleep now.”

  He turned away and she lay in the dark, mute and thoughtless. Antonio had lied to her, had lied to get her to believe something about Truitt that wasn’t true, had described in detail a horrible, convulsive, murderous event that never happened. She herself had lied, but now it seemed the lie had burned through her, leaving only white blank space behind, white as the landscape outside the window. At that moment, something in her ended and something began. And she lay awake until the thin light came through the windows while she gave birth to the new thing.

  Then Truitt stirred. It was barely morning. He opened his eyes, and she kissed him before he was fully awake. Truitt would do. He wasn’t what she had dreamed of. He wasn’t what she had expected. But he was enough.

  Antonio was everywhere. His insolence, his boredom filled the house. Truitt never noticed the hypocrisy, the small insults. He gave him a bank account, a bank account with enough money to keep Antonio for years. He tried to interest Antonio in the business, sitting with him for as long as Antonio could stand it in his grand study, explaining where everything was, telling him how to buy and sell, how to grow rich. He was not a fool. He could see how condescending Antonio was, and it reminded him of his own youth, his own lack of interest in anything except the pursuit of pleasure.

  There was no amusement in the town for Antonio. There were no restaurants, except at the one small, sad hotel, and there were no women. He soon exhausted the drugs he had brought, and faced his days with a lucidity that was rare and unpleasant for him. He smoked cigarettes at the table. He spoke endlessly of Saint Louis and its enchantments.

  Truitt opened the old wine cellar for him, and every night Antonio got drunk on the beautiful wines that had been laid by twenty years before, vintages of an astonishing rarity and subtlety. Ports and Bordeaux and Burgundies shipped from Europe when the house was filled with his mother’s friends. It didn’t matter to Antonio. He just wanted to get drunk and say insulting things to his father.

  “The house is cold. My rooms are cold. My feet are freezing all the time.”

  “The house is old, and big. Maybe your clothes . . .”

  “And wear what? The trick, Father, is not to change your clothes to suit your environment, but to change your environment to suit your clothes. You’re rich. Do something.”

  “It’ll be spring soon.”

  “And then we’ll be warm and there will still be nothing to do.”

  It went on and on, Truitt patient, Antonio disdainful of every effort he made to be kind. The money meant nothing. Sleeping every night in his mother’s gilded bed meant nothing. Seeing his old playroom, his old toys still there, meant nothing. Antonio had no sentimental heart. He was not to be moved. He had come to bring death.

  “People who spend their days in business are wasting their lives. We only live for art.”

  “I felt the same way. I do feel it. I didn’t choose this. There was no one else.”

  “And someday it’ll all be mine? I’ll sell it and live a beautiful life.”

  “It has been what this family has done for a hundred years. There isn’t a person in town who doesn’t depend on it, in some way.”

  “They’re little nobodies.”

  They might have talked about the things that mattered. They might have sat up at night by a fire, and Ralph might have been able to say what was in his heart, that he was sorry, that for all he cared Antonio could do whatever he liked, sell the business, burn down the house and sow the earth with salt. He only wanted one thing, his son’s forgiveness. And that Antonio was never going to give.

  He cornered Catherine while Ralph was away in town.

  “He’s supposed to be dead. He’s not even dying. Come at once, you said.”

  “He needed you here. He needed to believe you would come. It was the only way I could get you to come. If you believed . . .

  ”So you lied to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need one thing. I need him dead. Just remember, I can always tell him. Every night, when he wants to have those little chats, every night I am about to tell him, and I don’t. I’m kind of enjoying it, actually. He sits there like a monkey, and you can say anything to him and he literally turns the other cheek.”

  “He wants your forgiveness.”

  “He wants to sleep soundly at night. Or does he? Sleep, I mean. You sleep in his bed. You would know.”

  “He’s restless. He’s restless for your happiness.”

  The threat was always there. It was always there and it was very real. They had made a plan, and the plan had involved both of them. Now he said that she disgusted him. With Ralph out of the way, he would throw her out and there would be no place for her to go. Nowhere other than back to the life, back to a woman she had ceased to be.

  Catherine didn’t know what to do. She realized that, while there was in the world a series of peo
ple who knew things about her, no one person knew everything. She had told so many lies, had invented too many selves, one for each tableau. She had nobody to turn to, and the situation as it was couldn’t go on for long. Not even Truitt’s patience was infinite.

  Antonio’s rage grew as Ralph got stronger. The color had returned to his ashen cheeks; he didn’t feel dizzy as he walked up the steep stairs to the house. His sleep was untroubled by the old anxieties. The ghosts were gone.

  She read to them at night by the fire, Whitman, the American poet.

  “God. This is boring. Do you have any idea how boring this is?”

  At night, as she and Ralph made love in the blue bedroom, she thought of Antonio pacing in his rooms far away, drinking brandy, smoking cigars, and she could feel his anger, and knew that it was leading to something awful, something she couldn’t picture or describe. She tried to warn Truitt, but he wouldn’t hear it.

  “He’s going to ruin everything. He’s a danger to you.”

  “I was the same at his age. I was restless and bored and hateful. Certainly he is his mother’s child. Maybe he’ll never come around. Maybe he is my son. I never wanted to stop, either. The disdain. The hatefulness. I have to try.”

  Ralph took Antonio to the factory, patiently explaining how the ore was smelted, showing him the shapes and variations that could be made from the molten red-hot iron. Antonio insulted the workers, laughed at their efforts.

  His only real interest was Catherine, whom he always called Mrs. Truitt. When Ralph was away, when he finally got out of bed and she was sitting at lunch, or discussing the night’s menu with Mrs. Larsen, he would creep in like a cat, and suddenly be beside her, in her way, in her mind when she had almost forgotten his presence.

  “Mrs. Truitt . . .”

  “Please don’t call me that.”