A Reliable Wife Read online

  He took his hand away from her mouth and kissed her, violated her mouth with his tongue and bit at her lips and still she didn’t make a sound, still she stood twisting beneath his arms, but soundlessly, only the rustle of her skirt on the floor, only the sound of the flapping wings of the birds and the rustling of the palm fronds where the birds alighted. He kissed her eyes, the skin of her forehead. He licked her face and bit at the lobes of her ears. It felt as though he were on fire.

  He needed her to want him. He needed her never to have gone away, never to have abandoned him in this insane scheme they had concocted, never to have slept with his father. She was his lover. His. She was the desire of his childhood, the woman on the trolley car, the young girl in the restaurant, the whore at the end of the dark street.

  He ripped at her dress, and it tore open in his hands, two quick pulls and it was open. He tore at her thin camisole until he could see her breasts, the dark nipples full and erect. He fell to his knees and pulled her forward, her breasts in his mouth, his teeth biting her nipples. He knew he was raping her. He knew this was not her will, not what she wanted, and he found that erotic as well.

  He tore at fabric, and he saw the dark triangle of hair. She was still standing, her hands on top of his head. His hair was wild, it was slick with sweat from the exertion of doing this thing he didn’t want to do, this thing he had to do to bring himself one step closer to his own death.

  She was crying now, and he could hear her breath coming in and out as she cried, and he rose and licked the tears from her face as he undid his pants and pushed himself into her, against her will and he knew it and didn’t care. She wasn’t Catherine anymore. She was someone he didn’t know, and he didn’t care if he hurt her or defiled her or made her ashamed. She was the last one; this was the last time. He would never see her again.

  She stabbed him twice. She stabbed him with her sewing scissors out of a basket on the arm of the chair. She stabbed him in the back and then she stabbed him in the shoulder when he lurched back in shock. Her dress hung open in the front, her skin exposed; her camisole was a rag around her naked torso, just beginning now to round, to show a fullness. Her body arched forward as she howled in pain and rage and despair.

  “Why?” was all she screamed. “Why?” Again and again.

  Now he began to cry, blood pouring from his shoulder and his back, he howled in pain for all that was lost, everything that was broken now for good, everything he could never get back. He had wanted something, but now he couldn’t remember what, “He killed my mother! I saw it!”

  “He didn’t, Antonio. That never happened.” Drawing her ruined dress around her, trying to hold it closed with one hand and sweep her hair away from her face with the other, her eyes dry now, her mouth hard and unyielding and her voice hard, too, hard and filled with the truth.

  “He let her die. She was sick, Antonio. You dreamed it. You imagined it so much, out of hatred, out of . . . I don’t know, out of something, that you thought it was real, but it wasn’t. She was sick. She was alone and dying, and he took you to see her and she didn’t even know your name, and he turned his back on her and walked away and in that, yes, he killed her, but not the way you think.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. And he has spent a lifetime regretting it, wishing he could have felt otherwise, but he didn’t, and he let her die and you have to let her die, you have to let her die in peace and not look to find her, not wonder where she is. She’s gone, that’s all. She was always gone. Long before she was dead.”

  He was bleeding badly. He was in pain. He didn’t care. He fell to his knees and buried his head in her ruined skirt and wept, wept for himself. And then they heard the sound in the door. They heard Truitt’s footsteps in the hall, but it was too late. Her dress was ruined, Antonio’s blood fell to the marble floor and Truitt would know everything that had happened, and know, too, that he had finally been betrayed beyond his ability to endure it.

  Then he was standing in the door. Then he knew.

  Antonio turned to him, his hands covered with his own blood, his face a mask of pain. “Yes! I raped her. I’ve been with her, inside her a thousand times. Do you know what she is? Do you know who she is?”

  The color drained from Truitt’s face. He stood stock still. He saw everything, in frozen detail, the tattered dress, the blood on his boy, the birds, the palms. He smelled the jasmine and the orange blossoms and he saw the dress and the blood and he understood, and he knew he was going to kill his son.

  He stepped forward and picked Antonio up by the shoulders and held him in his arms, the son’s blood staining his father’s shirtfront, wetting him through to the skin.

  And then Truitt’s hands moved. He fists came down on his son’s head, buckling his knees, and Antonio stood while his father beat his face and his body with his fists and he didn’t resist, he didn’t try to protect himself. It was like a dream of long ago, a memory of his boyhood. He merely thought, said to himself, this is it, this is the moment and then you can rest. If we just get through this, you can finally come home, be at home and rest.

  Finally he ran. He turned from his father’s grasp, he turned from Catherine, seeing her scream but not hearing it, seeing the last look on her face as she screamed because she loved him and hated him at the same time, seeing her call his name but not hearing it, the voice he had loved, he ran from the conservatory, scattering the tiny birds, he ran and Ralph followed him, his fists still beating his son’s bleeding back.

  Antonio ran into the big hallway, the hallway with the Venetian mirrors, the long corridor tilting wildly, where he could not get a footing because his shoes were wet now with his own blood, and he ran to the fireplace and picked up the iron poker, and when Ralph ran up to him, he hit Ralph in the face with the poker, drawing blood, sending his father reeling, his head cracking on the stone floor. Catherine followed into the hall, she caught at him, tried to stop him as he ran past her and out the door into the garden.

  Catherine ran to Ralph. She lifted his head from the floor. She saw his eyes open wide in rage and knew that this was not hers to stop, that it would play itself out to an end she didn’t want and couldn’t have imagined. Ralph got to his feet, Catherine begging him to stop, now, to stop before it was too late, but he didn’t hear her or wouldn’t hear her, and he followed Antonio into the garden and beyond, catching and beating him. Antonio never made a sound. He stood and ran and was caught by his father and was beaten the way he had been beaten so often as a boy, except that this time he was guilty and filled with sin and horror, and they both knew it.

  Down the long meadow they fought, Antonio fighting back with whatever he could find—sticks, rocks—hurting Ralph, drawing blood from his head. But Ralph wouldn’t be stopped, as he used his fists to beat back the memory of the wife who had used him, the child who had run away, the days spent in the idleness of love while his own father lay dying, the mother who had buried the needle in his palm. In his fury, all the rage of all the years came pouring out.

  Catherine was standing on the broad stone terrace, afraid to go any farther, afraid to interfere, knowing that however it played out, the end was already decided. Mrs. Larsen was standing beside her now, flour in her hair. Catherine could see every detail of what was happening, every detail of the field, the Arabian standing in the short grass, its head down, then up in alarm as the two men passed, screaming and fighting.

  They came to the pond, and Antonio skidded out onto the ice and stood like a bull in the ring, wounded, bleeding, tears still running down his face. There was no more fight in him. He had come to the end of his strength, the end of his hatred, the end of his regret, and he stood in the center of the pond, on the black ice, waiting to be killed. He thought of the days in heaven, he thought of his reunion with his mother, he thought of the incredible pain of dying, the physical pain the body could stand before it gave out, until the irrevocable blow was mercifully given and darkness fell.

  Ralph paused at the edge of th
e pond. He was bleeding, too, from a cut on his head, and his hands were broken, the pain shooting up his arms. He found too that his anger had spent itself, that while the unforgivable things were still unforgivable, and the terror still terrifying, he had no more stomach for the rest. He thought of the accounts in the newspaper, the suicides, the murders, and the corpses, and he found that the living were more beautiful than the dead, that in the end, something must be saved, even if that meant it also had to be endured. Antonio would go away. Antonio would never be seen again and would die alone with his guilt and shame and memories, but there would be no corpse to carry to the graveyard, not today. There would be no white, still flesh in his house, not anymore. He would mourn his loss, but he would, in secret, still love his son and send him money, and when he died, the son would be sent for, and would stand by his father’s grave and remember this day as though it had happened to somebody else a long time ago.

  Then they heard the crack. A white jagged line shot through the black ice and Antonio went down, into the icy water, under the ice. He came up under the ice, no air to breathe, his head hitting, his blood mingling with the black water.

  Antonio struggled, but he couldn’t see his way out, and he floated into unconsciousness, into the peaceful cold of the black water, his body showing dimly beneath the surface of the ice.

  Ralph Truitt howled in pain, and he tried to get out to his boy, but the ice gave way around him and he floundered in the frigid water. He ran to the barn where he found a pole and a rope, and he raced back to the water, trying to save him, trying to save the years and the days, not knowing or admitting that Antonio was already dead, already gone, the plumes of blood now visible under the ice, surrounding his dead body, floating, arms at his sides as though he were flying, head down as though he were looking from a great height on the small earth beneath him.

  The pole and the rope were useless, and as his son lay all night under the ice, Ralph was inconsolable. He slept alone. He wouldn’t speak. He ate nothing.

  Catherine couldn’t sleep. She walked the halls of the huge house, looking at the pictures, running her hands over the furniture, finally going into Antonio’s rooms and packing up his things in trunks. She stripped the sheets from his bed and smelled in them the rich scent of her old lover, and she wept until there weren’t any more tears. Then, finally, she went and lay down on the narrow bed in the perfect playroom and slept.

  They had to get men to come in the morning from town and pull Antonio from the water, his pristine shirt still bravely white over his chest. He was long and narrow and light as a boy. His black hair lay back in the cart as they pulled him away, and it froze to his scalp in the morning light and the warming wind.

  Ralph would have forgiven him. He would have taken his son in his arms and said, hush, hush now, it’s over now. There is no more to happen, no more that can happen. The story, the old story has come to an end. He would have put his mouth to his son’s and breathed over and over until the warm breath filled his son’s lungs, and his son’s eyes opened and looked at him and trusted him.

  But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had.

  It was just a story of how the bitter cold gets into your bones and never leaves you, of how the memories get into your heart and never leave you alone, of the pain and the bitterness of what happens to you when you’re small and have no defenses but still know evil when it happens, of secrets about evil you have no one to tell, of the life you live in secret, knowing your own pain and the pain of others but helpless to do anything other than the things you do, and the end it all comes to.

  It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart. It was a story of poison, poison that causes you to weep in your sleep, that comes to you first as a taste of ecstasy. It was a story of people who don’t choose life over death until it’s too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child’s toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair.

  It was just a story about despair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE FUNERAL WAS ONLY the three of them, Truitt and Catherine and Mrs. Larsen. Truitt had dug the hole himself, spending a long day breaking up the thawing earth. There were no tears. There was a minister from one of the churches, and Antonio was buried with the fewest possible words next to his sister and Ralph’s mother and father, near the old house.

  His coffin seemed so large to Catherine. It was impossible to believe that his beautiful body was shut inside it, locked away from the light and the air forever. “Every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,” the poet had said. “Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.” She felt the giddy sense of being alive in the presence of the dead.

  Two days had passed. She stood now in the ruins of the garden she hoped to build. The high walls cut off her view of the rest of the world; there was still snow in the corners of the garden, and the fallen statues were glazed with ice. It seemed ten degrees colder here than in the rest of the world, although the back of the house was splendid in the western sun. She could barely remember how all this had begun.

  She had wanted something, and she had set out to get it, clear of her purpose and sure in her actions. But it had gotten confused, confused in the mass of the ordinary, confused in the way people live, in the way the heart attracts and repels the things it wants and fears. Her own heart had gone out in directions she never imagined, her hopes had become pinned to the things she would never have allowed.

  She wore the blue wool dress she had been finishing when Antonio died. His hands had felt the cloth around her body. She stood, severe and simple, in the middle of an old garden in the hidden back of a remarkable house. Antonio was dead. A whole life was dead to her.

  She had no idea how it would turn out. Truitt had not spoken to her since the death, and she had not interfered with his profound grief. They ate together at the long table, but there was no discussion, no reading of poetry after supper, no sumptuous feast of flesh in the dark. She had picked for herself a small and insignificant bedroom, and retired there to weep in private for all she had lost.

  She was afraid. She was afraid for the rest of her life. When Truitt disposed of her, as she supposed he would, she would have nowhere to go. She didn’t want to end like Emilia, alone in a filthy house. She didn’t want to end like Alice, dying in the snow in an alley, remembering how nice it had once been, glad to have the burden of an exhausting life lifted from her, abandoned even by the angels and laughing at the death squeezing her with cold fingers by the throat. She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before.

  The memory of what she had done with her days and nights seemed unthinkable. They came to her, those days and nights, like the pages of a calendar being flipped by a child, a blur of days and months and years. Had she gone to the theater? Had she written coquettish letters in a fine hand, the lavender-scented ink staining the sleeve of a ruffled gown from Worth in Paris? Had she turned away in bed from men so that she wouldn’t see the money left on a bedside table? It wasn’t possible. Yet she couldn’t deny it—every bad memory, every loss of faith, had brought her the long way from
where she had been to where she was.

  It was obviously done with Truitt, Antonio had seen to that, his last act of cruelty. There was no way to judge what the depth of his sorrow would drive him to do and she stood, knowing she had done wrong but unable to imagine the consequences. He couldn’t stay silent. The truth was too blatant to ignore, and he had been through it before. Perhaps it was simple weariness that had kept him from striking her when he turned from the frozen pond, the still meadow and the rearing Arabian and Antonio gone.

  She had something she wanted to say to him, not about the life which was growing inside her, stronger and stronger every day, but about the virtues of his heart, about the years he had waited in patient humiliation for happiness to find him, about how he had set out to build a small kind of happiness and been horribly deceived. There was no apology she could make. She had known more than he did, and she had used that knowledge to ruin his life, again, the one thing he had guarded himself so carefully against.

  She didn’t know where he was in the house. She hadn’t seen him since lunch. He retired to his study, or to the blue bedroom, and she had no way of knowing what he did or what he thought about. His silence was suffocating to her, his distance unbearable. She would die for him if her death would do him any good. But it wouldn’t do anything except add to the anguish of events that he had never anticipated.

  She had never before had anything to hold on to, nothing to root her to a place or a time, not until Truitt. And she had brought harm to him, in the belief that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die. She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad.