A Reliable Wife Page 21

  “You’re my father’s wife. What should I call you?”

  “Catherine.”

  “I would never. Mrs. Truitt, think what fun we could have. All that money. There’s enough wine for years. All those bedrooms, we could fill them up with people we know, with our friends . . .”

  “Antonio. There is no we. Not anymore. You have to understand.”

  “And all you have to do is make him die.”

  “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, in fact. I no longer have the medicine.”

  “There’s more. I’ll go to Chicago. The house is crawling with rats, that’s what I’ll tell them.”

  She looked out the dining room windows, down the long field toward the river. The ice was already fragile. The children no longer came to skate after school. The winter wouldn’t last much longer.

  “I won’t do it. I’ve told you a hundred times. He’s my husband. You already have everything you could want.”

  “I’m bored.”

  “Then go to Chicago. Play with your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends in Chicago.”

  “They’re the same as the people you know in Saint Louis. There’s not a hair’s difference between them. They sleep all day and drink all night and gamble and go to whores and smoke opium. The things you like. You could buy clothes. You have money. Truitt has an excellent tailor. You could live like the Prince of Wales.”

  “It wouldn’t be any fun.”

  “Go to Europe. He did.”

  “And get lost for five years?”

  “He would send you all the money you wanted.”

  “I don’t speak the language. I don’t like churches. I’ve told you what I want.”

  “And I’ve told you you won’t have it. Not today. Not ever. You’ll have to make do.”

  “Making do is not my way, and you know it.”

  “I am begging you. For one hour, for one afternoon, please leave me alone.”

  He would leave her then, but she could feel his presence in the house. She stood for hours in the secret garden, staring up at the windows of her bedroom, hoping for spring, wishing Antonio would go away, wishing she had never started on this disastrous course, wishing she had never seen the light in Truitt’s eyes, wishing she had never heard the poet’s words: “Those who love shall be made invincible.” She didn’t feel invincible. She felt like a new wound, open to the air, vulnerable to any passerby. How had this happened? Standing in the ruins of the garden, she could barely remember how it started, but she felt giddy with fear, that she would never escape it. The knot in her stomach said that Antonio was right: Truitt would find out one way or another. She had laid waste to her life, and that life was now a secret buried deep inside her, safe except for Antonio.

  She had been to the doctor in town. She had timed it out very carefully in her mind. The child was Truitt’s. It lay in her belly like the garden lay in her mind, under the earth, waiting for care. When Truitt was stronger, she would tell him. When Antonio tired of his scheme and realized that everything that was Truitt’s was also his, he would go away and spend money until he died in Saint Louis or London or Paris, an aging fop too bored to live anymore. He would move from city to city as he had always done, using people, soiling them like sheets and walking away, to find fresh faces and new diversions. Truitt had loved a person who didn’t exist. Surely he would love and find consolation and hope in the person who was going to be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  EVEN THOUGH HE COULDN’T RIDE, Antonio bought an Arabian horse, the finest in the whole state, some said. He hired a teacher, a young farm boy, and took lessons down in the vast old barn, where Truitt had leveled the floor and made an indoor riding ring. In two weeks that fascination was spent, and the horse stood idly in the barnyard, picking through the thin, icy snow far from the desert sands.

  Antonio bought a car that was newer and fancier and far more expensive than his father’s. It arrived on the train and astonished the town, but he couldn’t drive, and the roads were too rutted anyway, so it sat in a stable in town.

  Antonio went to Chicago for five days and came home with a glazed and exhausted look, a trunkful of new clothes and a packet of arsenic and a ball of opium. He came home with a Miss Carru-thers, Elsie Carruthers, a girl Catherine recognized from the theater and her nights with India, and installed her in a suite of rooms next to his own. They would spend the nights there, drinking vintage wine and tearing at each other’s clothes. But Miss Carruthers was ignorant and was bored with the long dinners and the poetry, and she and Antonio stopped coming down for them. Ralph said it was what young men did; it was what he had done, although he had traveled three thousand miles to do it. He had never brought his depravities under his mother and father’s roof, but he never said a word to Antonio. It was a relief to Catherine to have him out of the way, a relief to find she enjoyed her time alone with Truitt again.

  Antonio grew bored with Miss Carruthers, and Ralph paid her a sum of money to get on the train and go back to Chicago. After that, Antonio had nothing to do. Nothing at all.

  “Mrs. Truitt, we have the powder. You know the plan. I told you I’d tell him and I will.”

  “You don’t need me, if that’s what you want.”

  “The lost son killing the father? Wouldn’t work. I’m a coward. You’re not. No, Mrs. Truitt, I will always need you. The sound of your hem on the stairs makes me want you, all over again.”

  “The past is dead.”

  “No, it’s not. It never is.”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  He touched her neck, the beating pulse. “Tell me you love me.”

  She slapped his face.

  He smiled. “You see?”

  Antonio was used to being adored and desired and had no place in his heart for the complexities of love. He was never driven by the need for affection; desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event. And, given the chance to have and do anything he wanted, he was filled with a crippling lassitude, a despair and anger that made him feel like a tiger in a cage. He looked for the new sensation, the new conquest, and found nothing.

  Ralph realized Antonio would never wear a wedding ring. The simple happiness of domesticity meant nothing to him, that his life would be spent moving from woman to woman, from raw pleasure to pleasure, forever, until his looks ran out and his desires failed him, and he would be left with nothing. Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart. It existed outside of time, on a continuum that couldn’t be seen or described. Ralph thought of Catherine during the day with a mixture of love and fear, but he found himself content that she would be there when evening came.

  Antonio would never see it. His mother had died for sexual pleasure, she had debased and ruined her life, and Antonio was the product of her attenuated perversity. Never to give up the primacy of sex was to die alone, in a kind of poverty. It was never to know the comfort of sex without need.

  Ralph had found his passion again, so long suppressed. He had found it in a woman who had deceived and lied and pretended and worse, but he woke up every morning with the feeling of having passed the night in dreams of pleasure. He had sought one thing and found another. She was the instrument of his death. She was the invitation to his life. He knew where he stood.

  He grew stronger, and he got richer and more powerful. His business, so long a duty to pass the time, to assuage his guilt over his father’s lonely death, had become infused with his passion, and his arms reached out, his hands full of money, to buy and to ruin and to save and to build and to own whatever would make his power grow. It was what he had become. It was what America had offered him. It was what Antonio might grow to be.

  “It bores me.”

  “It bored me, too. It was getting good at it that made it interesting. It’s life, Antonio.
It’s work. It’s what people do.”

  “It’s not my life. It’s not what I do.”

  “The country, the whole country, Antonio, is building and growing. There’s so much of it to own and control. There are people, on farms, in cities, who don’t know where to go. All they need is a light, and they’ll follow.”

  “You. They can follow you to hell for all I care.”

  And still Ralph persisted, his patience infinite, his love vast and unexplored. Antonio was, for him, the one thing he had managed to save out of the disaster of his early life—or at least he was doing what he could to save it—and he would do anything, endure any insult, to make him stay.

  He had been willing to die, but now life had come back to him, life and power and passion, and he would never stand unloved and alone in a crowd of people on a train platform again. He would never again be an object of pity to the men who worked for him and their wives and children. He would never again be little more than a rumor.

  The house was growing around them. Mrs. Larsen’s staff of two had grown to six, including a laundress, a maid for Antonio, and someone extra to help in the kitchen. Catherine had sent to Chicago and hired a gardener who brought the tropics to the conservatory, who made the orange and the jasmine bloom in the hot afternoon sun. It was wet there, and songbirds flew from branch to branch, singing. It made Ralph’s bones feel warm, to sit there in the afternoon. It made the pain go away.

  The heavy old damask curtains were pulled down, and lighter ones were put up, to let in more sun. The silk bed hangings in their bedroom were replaced with fabrics adorned with Chinese patterns, designs from another century. Their exotic splendor transported Ralph and Catherine into their own Xanadu, a place that was wholly and entirely the kingdom of their own desires.

  Seamstresses came from Chicago, bringing pattern books and bolts of rich material, to make dresses for Catherine, nothing excessive. They made Ralph splendid striped shirts with white cuffs and collars and gold collar buttons.

  They were rich, and while they felt no need to be ostentatious, they felt comfortable with living the way rich people live. Ralph didn’t change his habits, and he stopped drinking again once he had had enough brandy; he ate only as much as he needed and not as much as he wanted. The food was exquisite. The company increased as light was let into the house.

  But still he was unable to get through to Antonio. He had gone through so many years of hope in the effort to find him and bring him home, and now Antonio hated the house, he hated the business, he was rude to Ralph’s wife and to the servants. But Ralph had time. He had had nothing but time for the long years and it had taught him to stand straight, not to bend into the cold.

  Every day the winter thinned. The stubble rose again in the field, the light grew longer in the afternoons. Ice still coated the black river, but it was as though the prison doors were opening and people waited for the first warm day and then, finally, the day when the girls appeared in their summer dresses. There was a future.

  Antonio learned to drive the horse and carriage, and immediately, over the muddy roads, he went to town every night, where he took up with a young widow, Mrs. Alverson, whose husband had committed suicide two years before. Her sexual desperation matched his own, and their rendezvous were the talk of the town. It hurt Ralph to hear his name mentioned again as a subject of gossip, to hear of that kind of scandal. He made an attempt to rein in Antonio’s behavior.

  “Her husband was twenty-five. She has a baby who was born after her husband was already dead. Her heart is an open wound.”

  “She likes my company.”

  “She lives on charity. Of course she likes your company. People are talking.”

  “Your reputation is worthless to me, if that’s what you’re worried about. You have no reputation, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll do exactly what I want to.”

  “Maybe you should go to Europe. There are many Mrs. Alversons over there, women who have a better understanding of the arrangement. Maybe you’d be happier. I was happy. There are women . . .”

  “And leave you and Mrs. Truitt and the fun we’re having? Why?”

  “Antonio. Because Mrs. Alverson . . . what’s her name?

  “Violet.”

  “Because Mrs. Alverson is worth more than this. Anybody is. Because you have no heart for business. The only other thing I have to give you is money. I’ve given you enough to go around the world, if that’s what you want. You’ll play it out. You’ll come around. The fire burns out.”

  When he was Antonio’s age, Ralph had been forced to give up his dissolute life, to come home and take over the business. He had learned by doing, badly at first, then better and better. It had become his life, and Italy was a distant memory. Antonio had reached an age when the notion of going to a foreign country where he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the language and had nowhere to live was overwhelming to him. He had his life in hand, and the thrill of the new wasn’t available to him. He had brought his whole life to Wisconsin, and now he had no way back. He also had no way to get what he wanted, and his rage mounted. His old friends would envy him, but his old friends were not welcome here. Here it was all governors and senators and tired old businessmen with cigars and potbellies who came to lick the boots of Ralph Truitt, hoping to get in at the beginning of the next big thing, the next capital investment that would make them even richer.

  Antonio retired to his widow in town and his rooms in the vast house, and he didn’t care that he was breaking his father’s soul, little by little. It couldn’t last long, this tenuous balance of hatred and greed. It couldn’t last.

  Violet Alverson came to dinner. She was painfully shy and gentle, and seemed in awe of the grandeur of the food and the house. Catherine showed her everything, and she seemed most enchanted by the conservatory with its songbirds and its tropical plants. She didn’t know which spoon or fork to use, but Ralph talked to her in a gentle, kindly voice about her hopes for the future, a better life, a life of her own, a fine boy who would have an education and be somebody, somebody in business, perhaps.

  Catherine asked her to spend the night since it was four miles back to town and the roads were dark and muddy, but Violet declined, and left in her borrowed buggy, whip in hand. She and Antonio had said not one word to each other. She drove home believing that he was going to ask her to marry him.

  After the dinner, Antonio got bored with Violet Alverson. She had a child, and she had no conversation. She was not pretty enough to stir his vanity. He wrote to her that he wouldn’t see her anymore. He wouldn’t even go in person.

  She hanged herself the next day from the same beam her husband had used, in the attic of her shabby house with its sad double bed. Her baby was asleep on a quilt on the floor. She had nursed him just before she tied the rope. Her dress was still unbuttoned, her bare breast hanging out. The cries of the baby alerted the neighbors. The local newspaper said she had died due to her continuing grief over the loss of her young husband. Ralph and Catherine went to the spare funeral of this woman they hardly knew. Antonio stayed home and played the piano.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE WIND BLEW WARMER from the south. The nights were still long and frigid, but the earth was visible now. Ralph spent the last light of the days in the barn with his car, making it shine, bringing it to sputtering life again. The winter had gone on too long. He had Antonio’s automobile brought out from town, and he taught Antonio to drive on the long driveway up to the house. It was the first mechanical thing Antonio had ever been able to do well. His automobile was a marvel, leather upholstery and brass and crystal lamps, with bud vases in the back, and he and Ralph drove up and down along the sweeping road to the house. The car brought them a measure of peace. They tried to get comfortable with each other. They tried to talk.

  “It was a terrible thing, the thing I did to you.”

  “You were angry, I suppose.”

  “I was angry. I was angry and your mother was gone. I had loved he
r with all my heart. Believe me. I had. When she was gone, everything went black.”

  “And I was left behind.”

  “Your sister dead. Your mother gone. You were left, and I turned that grief and rage on you, a little boy, and I will never stop regretting it.”

  “You managed to forget pretty well, it seems to me.”

  “I looked for you for ten years. I looked everywhere.”

  “It must have cost a lot of money.”

  “I didn’t care. After you left, ran away, I knew what an awful thing I’d done. No amount of money can make that right. Being tortured for something you didn’t do.”

  The slow dance of the father and the son, the old song of regret and retribution twined through their every conversation. During the conversations late at night Antonio was usually drunk, Catherine upstairs in bed.

  “You married.”

  “I wanted you to come home. I thought it would help. And I was lonely. Lonely and unloved and sad every day. You don’t know what happens to a life without love. To a heart. It withers. It loses reason. I just wanted what people have. I wanted a companion, some company in my heart. Someone other than myself.”

  “And have you been happy? Happy with the young Mrs. Truitt? What do you really know about her?”

  “Her life hasn’t been easy. I’m glad to make it better. And she brought you home. She’s my wife. Yes. I’m happy.”

  “She’s much younger.”

  “She’d be a friend to you, if you’d let her.”

  “I have friends, but they don’t live here. You beat me until I was blinded by the blood in my eyes. You kept me locked in a room. You left me alone with no explanation of where my mother was or why your cruelty was so immense and unending.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don’t think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”

  “You’d be very rich.”

  “And you would be unmourned, except perhaps for the lovely Mrs. Truitt. Certainly not by me. And not by all those people who live in fear of you.”