A Reliable Wife Read online

  “Oh, Larsen,” she heard Mrs. Larsen say, “Leave it go. Give the poor girl a chance.”

  A chance at what, exactly? If only they knew, she thought. She couldn’t find a chair to sit in, couldn’t figure out where she was meant to stand. She looked out across the frozen landscape and could see her jewels beneath the snow. She wept for no reason.

  Mrs. Larsen said to her one day, out of the blue, as they lifted Truitt’s heavy body onto clean white sheets, “I couldn’t bear it, Miss. I couldn’t bear it if he was hurt again.”

  “Who hurt him?”

  “Everybody. It was a long time ago. But that kind of thing never goes away. It pretty much ruined his life.”

  “You care very much for him.”

  “I respect him. You’ve got to respect that kind of grief. I’d have picked up a gun. But I’m telling you, if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you.”

  “I won’t hurt him.”

  “No, you surely won’t.”

  Catherine was lying, but at least she wouldn’t hurt him yet. He had to get well before she could hurt him. He could not die, and leave her stranded, without love or money. She couldn’t bear it, the long train ride back, empty-handed.

  She spooned the food into his mouth. She gently wiped the sweat from his forehead, stripped his nightshirt from him when he grew too hot. She begged Larsen to get the doctor, snowbound two towns away. Larsen figured, having seen Catherine stitch him up, that she was practically as good as any doctor he could find, and, anyway, the snow was deeper every day. It was useless to try.

  She gave him hot tea. She wrapped his legs tight in heavy wool blankets, and sat up all night. She and Mrs. Larsen lifted his naked body from the bath.

  She got up in the night, and stood over Truitt as he shivered with the fever. She lay beside him, and held him close to her until the warmth of her body passed through to his and the chill had passed. Her nipples rose up and radiated heat into Truitt’s shivering back.

  It was, she imagined, the erotic allure of human tenderness. The comfort of kindness. She had forgotten.

  Her hands moved across his body as so many hands had moved across hers, and he felt no more of it than she had. When the chill had passed and he slept peacefully again, she sat in a chair until dawn, feeling a cold she thought would never pass, shivering, staring silently in the dark.

  On the fourth night, the fever broke and the snow stopped falling. He would live. She had saved his life.

  Catherine stood by her window for hours in the dark, the blue bottle in front of her on the windowsill. The snow covered everything and shone in the moonlight like the kind of fairy kingdom little girls dream of.

  The snow was eternal, infinite. Across the yard, across the roof of the barn, down to the smooth round pond at the foot of the farthest field. There was not a footprint, not a mark in the entire landscape, only the silvered and impenetrable sweep of snow. Perfection.

  You see, thought Catherine, sooner or later, everything gets a fresh start. It’s not just possible. It happens.

  She stood through the night, perfectly warm, perfectly comfortable in her plain dress, and waited to speak to Ralph Truitt in the morning.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN THE SUN ROSE, the snow blazed copper as a new roof, then paled to rose, and suddenly whitened into a dazzling brightness. The barn and buildings floated in a haze of blinding light, and Catherine had to shield her eyes with her hand.

  She dressed carefully, and walked downstairs in the silent house. She sat at the spinet, and began to play a Chopin Prelude, not one of the most difficult ones, very softly, so as not to wake anyone. She could tell he was behind her in the doorway before he spoke, but his voice startled her all the same.

  “That was my wife’s favorite music. She played it over and over.” He looked weak, bent over as though he might be walking with a cane.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

  “No, no. I’d like to hear it. Please.”

  She played without missing a note, played with, she hoped, a sweetness and simplicity that might seem lack of bravado rather than lack of skill, and then she rose and sat opposite Ralph in front of the fireplace. He was shockingly pale and seemed melancholy, perhaps because his grief for his wife had been refreshed by the music.

  “My father believed that music was the voice of God.” Catherine spoke quietly, as she might have calmed a frightened dog. “He was a missionary for God. We traveled the world, Africa, India, China, wherever he was called to spread the word. He died in China, leaving me and my sister alone.

  “He used it to speak to people in lands where they don’t speak English. He believed music was universal, and he believed God spoke to people through music. He believed I played well.”

  She went on to describe the peoples of Africa and China, heathens who had been touched by her awkward playing, and moved by her father’s sermons and had turned, in the end, to Christianity. Their souls, she said, had been saved from hell.

  She made it all up, of course, made it up out of books she had read in the library, the customs of the African tribes, the strict and brilliant dressing of the women of the Chinese court, their tiny feet and birdlike voices, but she got it right, every detail, and he sat listening attentively.

  When she had finished, run through everything she knew, afraid of having used up her meager store of information too quickly, he sat still for a moment, and then said, “Who are you?”

  “I am Catherine Land. I’m the woman who wrote the letters, not the woman in the photograph, but I wrote the letters. I am that woman.”

  He fiddled with his trousers. He seemed undecided as to what he was going to say.

  “I have a story to tell you. We’re going to be married. Whoever you are, whoever you turn out to be. You should know.”

  “You said . . . I thought you weren’t sure. You are suspicious. Still.”

  “You saved my life. That’s enough. I know what you did for me.” He stared into her eyes. “Everything you did. I was sick, I was almost dead, but I wasn’t unaware.”

  She sat still, her hands in her lap. She looked into his pale eyes.

  “You’re not who you said you were,” he said.

  “My father said my face was . . . my face was the devil’s handiwork. Meant to do evil. I sent another person’s picture, my plain cousin India. You didn’t want, or so you said . . . my father . . .” She was helpless.

  “Enough. It’s enough. I said we’d be married. You’re here. We will be married.”

  They stared at each other, stared at the fire.

  “Now listen,” he said softly. “Listen to my life.”

  He sat for a long time, staring at the fire.

  “Listen to my life.”

  He talked for hours. He told her everything. His harsh and bitter childhood. He told her about his mother and the pin and the raw scraping of his soul during every Sunday sermon, his mother’s eyes on him every minute. He had believed his mother the way we all believe the people we love when they tell us who we are, believe them because what the beloved says is truth to us, and he told Catherine all of this. He told her of his dark and tortured desires, desires his mother had seen before he felt them, seen them in him as a baby, so that she would not pick him up or hold him, even then.

  He told her about the death of his brother, his brother’s body in a box in the icehouse, waiting for the ground to thaw before they could bury him, and told her about the women and Europe and the sensuous rambles in the palaces and the whorehouses.

  He made no apologies. He never tilted his head in sentimentality, or paused for her approval or her sympathy, and she never turned her eyes from his, never wandered around the room or shuffled her feet or asked for a glass of water. She just listened. It was a life he told her, entire, flawed, scarred with indulgence and self-laceration, but brave, it seemed to her, courageous at the same time.

  He had caused pain, it was true. Who hadn’t? But he had suffered as well. It evened out.

&n
bsp; He told her about Emilia, the shocking thunderclap of his love for her. He told Catherine how pale her skin was, how the flowers had trembled in her hair, how her pearls lit up her skin with a rosy glow, how she blushed when he spoke in his fragile Italian. He told Catherine that he had loved Emilia and, because of the awful profundity of his love, he had not answered his father’s letters or telegrams, and he had missed his father’s death and returned home only in time to kneel at his father’s graveside in the cold with his pregnant wife.

  He told everything. He had never spoken of any of this to anyone, but he told Catherine, because she was going to become his wife. He felt he owed her at least an album of the past. He tried very hard not to pity himself. He never placed blame, or accepted it, nor did he ever shirk responsibility. He described to her the smell of jasmine in the air, the rustle of silk in a Florentine palazzo, the dust drifting from the ancient, ruined curtains, but told her without poetry, simply described these postcards from his past, and she took in the information as though she were reading quietly in a public library.

  “I wasn’t a good son. I was careless, and profligate in ways I can’t imagine now. And I wasn’t a good husband or father, although I tried to be.”

  Something about his candor made her want to run away. She didn’t want to know this story. She didn’t want to hear the end. It made him too real. She didn’t want to think of him as a person. She didn’t want to hear his heartbeat.

  “My wife hated this house. Well, you can see . . . It wasn’t what she was used to. And she hated my mother and my mother hated her, and she was pregnant. I built her another house.”

  Catherine’s attention had wandered. Now it shifted back.

  “It isn’t far from here. It took a long time. There was an architect brought from Italy, couldn’t speak a word of English as far as I could tell, and he was followed by a boatload of dago workmen, and then the child was born, Franny.”

  His hands worked nervously. His voice caught, just for a second, but he went on.

  “Francesca, my wife called her. She was as beautiful as . . . nothing. As water. As anything on this earth. Babies are, of course. She was beautiful, and tiny. My wife carried her, every day, in a carriage, over there to where this thing was being built, this palace, and they all chatted in Italian until it was dark, and then Emilia would come home and she was at least partially happy, at least for awhile.

  “I wrote checks. So much money, I couldn’t tell you. Money going for marble stairs and fancy china—you’ve seen some of it—and silverware and beds from Italy that belonged to the pope or the king of somewhere, and curtains and pictures. She was happy. Emilia was happy, like a little dog with a big bone.

  “And then we moved into the house. I didn’t know where to sit. I had to ask one of the maids where I was supposed to sleep. I rarely slept beside Emilia after we moved. She had her own rooms. Two years, it took.

  “Franny got scarlet fever. Babies do. A lot of babies did, that winter. She was two. The fever lasted five days, and when it was gone, Franny was gone, too. Or at least her mind was gone. Her body recovered, but her mind had died. I knew that what I had always feared was true. Desire is poison. Lust was a disease that had slaughtered my child. She was sweet and simple and beautiful and blank as clear water. She loved the colored glass in the windows. She loved the way the maids would fuss over her, dressing her in these unbelievable getups. This sewing woman came from France and lived in the house, and all she did from the time the sun came up until it went down was make these costumes for Emilia and my little girl.

  “The house was always full of foreigners. It made Emilia happy, and they came from everywhere. She never spent one minute with her daughter. Brought her downstairs once in a while, dressed like a princess in a fairy story, showed her off like a monkey.”

  Catherine saw herself wandering the corridors of the house he described, smiling at her guests, who bowed to her as she passed, dukes and duchesses and rich people and actresses, people who owned railroads and Arabian horses just for riding, just for show, touching every object on every table with the certain knowledge that she owned it all.

  And somewhere in the dark the dense child, and somewhere in the light the clatter of fancy music on a piano.

  “She brought a piano teacher from Italy, another Italian, I didn’t even ask his name. I never knew until it was too late that it was finally one too many. We had another child, a boy, Antonio she called him, Andy. He was dark, as she was, of course, they all are, and he was like some rare bird she’d gone to the Amazon to get. A boy shouldn’t be beautiful. So much black hair. So handsome, even when he was four. We lived like that, in that house, for eight years.

  “Of course she was with him. Had been with him. The piano teacher. I should have known. I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know that. Imagine. The whispering and chatting and the walks in the garden, always speaking Italian, the man sitting at the table with us, every night, eating dinner like a guest, when I wrote him a check every week.

  “I never saw it. Never saw it coming. She was a countess. I saw that she was happy, and it was costing fortunes. Yet my little girl, my sweet little thing, was growing every day, her hands reaching for the light like a blind person, feeling her way.

  “And after Antonio . . . Andy was born, she slept apart from me, my wife. In her own rooms every night. She never came to me. I never touched her. She would stay up all night, playing cards with whores and fools, and laughing at me. Sometimes I would pass her on my way down to breakfast, just coming upstairs, a champagne glass still in her hand. Smoking cigarettes.

  “Six years I put up with it. I never touched her. Then I saw them. My wife. The music teacher. I walked into her apartment. Her rooms. I just wanted to ask a question. Imagine. They didn’t even look particularly surprised, and they didn’t look like it was all that much fun, but they’d been doing it for years by then. Since before my boy was born, you see? It was an old routine. I remember how at home he looked, like I was the interloper and he was where he should be, between my wife’s naked legs. And everybody knew. Everybody knew but me.

  “I beat her, and I nearly killed him, and I threw them out. I drove them from my house. My little girl spread her arms wide and watched her mother go. I fired the servants, the maids and the gardeners and the drivers in their braided coats. I kept Mrs. Larsen, who was only a young girl then. She’s not as old as she looks, I guess, but this was a long time ago, now. I kept the house exactly the way it was because I didn’t want Franny to lose one more thing, but nobody came anymore, nobody was asked and nobody came.

  “I hated Antonio. My own son and I couldn’t go near him. He favored his mother, and as much as I tried, I saw her face and her skin and her eyes, and I only saw in him a lying, scheming memento of her. It wasn’t fair, I know. I know it wasn’t. I beat him and I yelled at him until he looked at me with a single hatred that never changed, and no, I don’t blame him for that.

  “After a long time, my little girl died. She caught influenza, and I held her in my arms and she died, and the day she died I walked out of the door of that house, and locked it behind me. I left everything in that house, all that gorgeous trash I had brought from all over the world, just to see a smile on my wife’s face, and I never went back. The clothes are still hanging in the closets. I brought some of the plates, you’ve seen them. Some silver. Little things. Expensive things, but little. Except that sofa. Imagine. I had gotten used to it. A piece of yellow silk furniture. The feel of a fork.

  “I had nowhere to go. I came here. My mother took one look and went to live with her sister in Kansas, and I never saw her again. And I lived in this house, and I beat my own boy until he was bloody, and the minute he was old enough he ran away. One minute he was here, so handsome, fourteen by then, playing those Italian things on that old piano just to make me mad. I can see where he was sitting. I told him his mother was dead, burned to death in a fire in Chicago. It was a lie, but I told him, and I told him I was
glad, that the news of her death gave me the first free breath I’d had in seven years, and the next night he was gone.”

  He looked up at Catherine, as though he had just realized she was there. As though it took him a second to realize who she was.

  “I’m sorry. There isn’t any delicate way to tell it. I’ve never told this to one single soul. Everybody knows it, but they don’t know it from me. And I’m only going to tell it once.”

  She looked steadily in Ralph’s eyes, her hands completely still in her lap. She sat as she had told herself she would do, no matter what he said, told herself that she would not shift so much as an ankle until he finished his story. And then she would decide. Her pulse was racing. She could feel it throbbing in her wrist.

  The story, she knew, was almost over.

  “I have looked for him for twelve years. I have put flowers on my little girl’s grave, and I have looked for my boy. And now I’ve found him.”

  Despite whatever she had told herself, she jumped.

  “Where? Alive?”

  “Alive. In Saint Louis. Playing piano in some whorehouse. They think it’s him. The detectives. They’ve thought others were him, except they weren’t. This time I think it is. And I want him back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s my son. He’s all I’ve got.”

  “I mean, why do you think it’s him?”

  “I heard you play that music, his mother’s music. I always knew that something would happen one day to make me tell the story and the telling would make it all right. The telling would call him back. I’m not a superstitious man. But I believe that.”

  Tears glistened in his cold eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, didn’t seem to notice they were there. His hands picked at his black trousers, trembling, rose into the air to catch at a piece of dust and twist it into nothingness. He looked so ill. She didn’t move a muscle.