A Reliable Wife Page 9

  He sent for chocolates. He sent for marzipan in the shape of animals and flowers, candies for which she had no taste and which Mrs. Larsen slipped to her sweet-toothed husband in secret, until they were gone. He sent for bonnets she had no place to wear. He sent for music boxes, and sparkling ear bobs, which she would not put on. He sent for novels, and she read of the adventures of rakes half his age, of the despair of English girls wandering the moors looking for their dead lovers. He sent for a tiny bird, which sang her to sleep, which she allowed to fly at will around her room, the room he had slept in as a boy.

  He would not allow her to leave the property. She had never seen the town. So, instead, he gave her trifles.

  He had a taste, long suppressed, for the luxurious and the exquisite, and he knew how to pick a wine or a brooch or a bolt of silk. These things were like a memory in his flesh. The superb. The intoxicating. Every day he arrived home with something in his hand for her, little, expensive gifts that she accepted shyly, with a slight surprise. She had, he knew, no place to wear them, no place to put them.

  These things, these ribbons and all this rigmarole, were his way of touching her. These things, out of season, unattainable, reserved for the few, for the rich and decadent, passed from his hand into hers every day. “Oh,” she said, drawing in her breath. “Oh, Mr. Truitt, how beautiful.”

  He could feel the simplicity of his life fading away, like a drunk long sober about to take his first taste of brandy.

  Love drove people crazy. He saw it every day. He read it every week in the paper. Every week the papers were filled with the barn burnings, the arsenic taken, the babies drowned in wells to keep their names a secret, to keep their fathers away from them, to keep them from knowing the craziness of love. To send them home to the holiness of God. He read these stories aloud to Catherine at night, after supper, and she would invent stories about the sad women and the deranged men. She would say their names over and over, until even their names became a kind of derangement.

  “Why do they do it, Mr. Truitt? Why are they so sad and affected by . . . ?”

  “Long winters. Religion.”

  “Will it happen to us, then?”

  “No.”

  She wanted to go to town, of course. Anybody would, to walk the streets, to spot the ordinary woman who next week might drown her children, the wearied worker who would slaughter forty head of his own cattle in a single night. He would not let her go to town, even though people already knew she was in his house. Finally, they thought.

  If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do? It would, thought Ralph, produce me. It has. His hand would reach into his pocket as she spun her stories. He would touch, lightly, the length of his own sex.

  But still he did not touch her. He separated his desire for her, for any and every woman, from her actual physical self. He kept his distance. He knew neither how to love nor how to desire, in any real way. He had lost the habit of romance.

  But he lay in bed every night, the sheets clean and smelling of crisp winter nights, and he thought of her, in her room down the hall. He pictured, like pornographic etchings, the hidden parts of her body. He did not touch himself. He couldn’t bear it. A grown man. A man who was almost old, the stupidity of it, and her just down the hall.

  His sins lay not in acrobatic visions of penetrations and humiliations. His perversion was silence. Silence and distance.

  He lay, straight and sober in his bed and thought of Lady Lucy Berridge in Florence thirty years before, her aristocratic vagaries and titillations. Sooner or later, in the dark, Lucy’s face, or Serafina’s or even Emilia’s, always turned into Catherine’s. Catherine laughing at him.

  He wondered, in the dark, in the latest hours, whether she thought of him in return, just down the hall, so clean, so rich, so polite. But she did not. He never crossed her mind.

  She lay, Catherine, in a clean, simple nightdress, her eyes to the blinding moon and the drifting snow, and she dreamed of cigarettes. She dreamed about smoking cigarettes and about the body of a worthless man who lay next to some other woman in some other bed, in tangled sheets in a rotten town, miles and miles and miles away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  HE GAVE HER A DIAMOND RING. It was large and yellow, surrounded by smaller diamonds like a glittering daisy. He kissed her hand.

  He gave her a gold cross on a fine gold chain. He brushed away the wisps of her hair and fastened it around her neck.

  She thought of her pathetic baubles, buried in the snow, her ticket to freedom. They seemed inconsequential now.

  Men only give you what they give you, Catherine thought, staring out at the endless and uncontrollable snow, when they know they can’t give you what you want.

  What she wanted, of course, was a quick marriage to Ralph Truitt, followed by his painless demise. What she wanted was both love and money, and she was not to have either except through Ralph, except, in fact, after Ralph. What she wanted was some control in her life, to get her meaningless little jewels back, something that was her own, the sparkle of her old life, to sleep once again with her faithless lover, far away. She had had a lifetime of filthiness and vileness and lust. What she longed for, in her heart, to her surprise, was a springtime as lush and erotic as the winter was chaste and bloodless.

  The light bothered her eyes and gave her headaches that would rage fiercely for days. She had fair eyes, like her father.

  “I would like some dark glasses for the sun.”

  “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

  “The light hurts my eyes.”

  “Don’t look out the windows.”

  “It’s all there is to do.”

  He got smoked glasses for her, and she wore them in the house during the day. Like a blind person, she stared out into the white blank canvas that was her only pastime. She could see rabbits, frozen in the snow. She could watch the crows that descended to pick at the flesh. She could watch Larsen as he watched her staring out the window. With the glasses, the whiteness had detail. With the glasses, no one could see the glitter in her eyes.

  Her package arrived from Chicago. Twelve yards of dove gray raw silk. A paper pattern. Ralph gave her the exquisite diamond ring, and the cross, which he swore had not come from his first wife. Ralph gave her a trip to see the house. The real house.

  She had had presents before, of course. Funhouse bijoux, carny sparkles boys had given her even when they knew they would not walk with her beyond the limits of the fairground. But this, this was different. It was not, in the first place, a present in the actual sense, since he would not give it to her. He was merely letting her see it. He was merely letting her know that it would, in fact, be her future home, once she had done as he asked, married him and brought his lost boy home.

  Yet it was a gift, she supposed, watching the house rise out of the landscape’s interminable sameness, watching it take shape before her. It was his best hope he was giving her. It was his folly and his disastrous failure. It was the house he had built hoping his heart would find a home there, and it had not worked, and he had been shamed there, and humiliated. Still, he was showing it to her, knowing that he was showing her also his heart, and that was, after all, the one gift that no one had ever given her.

  They crossed a field and through a wood, and entered into a long sloping rise, and the house began to appear before them.

  It was splendid. It stood square and golden and massive and beautiful, and Catherine’s heart took flight when she saw it. She had never seen anything like it, so alone in the vast wilderness, so regal in the midst of such ordinary land.

  It took everything in her to remain calm, to rest her hands quietly on the heavy wool throw, to wait until the horse had stopped before descending from the sleigh. But it was her heart’s delight, the first wonderment she had felt for so many years.

  They walked up one side of the broad double staircase that led to the massive double door. Truitt pointed out a painting over the door which showed, she supposed, the v
illa as it must look in summer, with its orchards and its gardens and it pools and its broad long lawns leading down to the pond and the river beyond.

  The doors were unlocked and swung open easily, and they walked into a broad, high central hall. Catherine couldn’t stop herself. She gasped. It was so lovely, lovely despite its grandeur and its size. The ceilings were frescoed with adorable babies with wings and flowers in their hair. The room was lit by two colored glass chandeliers that hung from yellow velvet cords, each prism a different jewel, each ray of light a different soft color. From Venice, he said. They had been lowered and lit for her, ablaze with flame for their arrival. They were crystal flowers, hanging in the air, flowers that gave light.

  The walls were covered in rose silk. Portraits, too many to count, looked down. The floor was marbled and patterned, covered in rich old rugs. The sofas along the sides of the hall were large and gilded. Countesses had walked here. Dukes had read poetry on the sofas. The high windows dazzled the room with light.

  On either side, more massive rooms. He showed her everything, with the same slow disinterest. There was a ballroom, a music room, a library, a dining room where thirty people could have dinner. There was a glass conservatory where exotic plants once grew, orchids and palms. There were sitting rooms in many colors, filled with rich old furniture. One room was all pale yellow, like butter. One was turquoise, one green. One was trellised, painted with vines and flowers. The windows gave out onto the same interminable whiteness, but inside, everything was warm and golden.

  “It’s always heated. Mrs. Larsen comes over to clean. I haven’t been here for years.” Truitt seemed to feel nothing. He was the tour guide, pointing out a picture here or a table there, things that even still had special meaning for him.

  Upstairs, nine massive bedrooms, each a different color, each warm and rich beyond anything Catherine had ever seen. The beds swagged and ribboned, the sheets laid perfectly, as though important guests would arrive at any moment.

  “This was her room.” It was a sumptuous, royal blue. A sitting room and a dressing room were attached to it. Her comb and brush were still on the dressing table. A cut crystal bottle was still filled with amber perfume. “And this was Franny’s room.” He stood at the door but wouldn’t go in. They hung back and looked at the tiny bed, fancy enough for a princess, and the child’s furniture and the gay curtains. A rocking horse stood beneath one of the high windows.

  “She would ride for hours, back and forth. Back and forth, laughing. God, she was a delight.” The slightest catch in his voice was the only emotion. “She died in that bed. I sat by her, night and day.”

  It was as though the child would walk into the room the next minute, pick up one of the dolls laid neatly in a row on the bed, each with its fixed expression of innocent bliss. Catherine wanted to pick one up, but she didn’t go in. She couldn’t. Mixed with the odor of childhood still hanging in the air was the sharp smell of death, and grief, a smell too familiar to her. The last of childhood. The end of purity.

  They saw it all. Antonio’s room. The guest rooms, the servants’ hall, the kitchen with copper pots by the dozen gleaming on stone walls.

  At the back of the house, outside, was a walled enclosure, visible from the window of Emilia’s room, and from the broad hallway.

  “Her secret garden. Giardino segreto. Italian foolishness. She would grow flowers there, roses and things. She said every Italian house had one, and she brought gardeners from Italy to tend it. She had trees that twined around each other, white flowers that, in the night, smelled like a woman’s perfume. The small house, just there, that’s where she grew lemons and oranges.

  “Except it never worked. The summer is too short and she could never plant the right things. The gardeners were fools, used to a different climate, I guess. The lemons died. The flowers never came up, frozen in the ground. She sent for hothouse flowers, put them in the ground where they died. The Italians couldn’t do a thing. Useless and stupid. It was an idea. It didn’t work.”

  When they had seen it all, Catherine outwardly as sober and unmoved as Truitt himself, they went home. Home to the small ordinary house decked out with the fantastic leavings of the more fantastic empire.

  Catherine dreamed of the house. She saw herself walking its broad halls, sweeping in gowns of silk and lace and embroidery down its wide marble stairs. She imagined herself mistress of the house.

  Catherine began to go there every other day. When Mrs. Larsen went to clean, when Truitt was away at business, she would go and sit in every room, play the long untuned piano in the ballroom, look through the drawers and the closets. She spent whole afternoons staring at the enclosed white of the secret garden, imagining it fragrant with lemons and lilies, alive in the sunlight of August. It was a place for lovers’ secret whisperings. It was in the world, but away from it, like the heart.

  It was as he had said. Everything was still there. In Francesca’s room, she opened the closet to stare at the tiny dresses. She touched one and felt its silken whisper in her hands.

  “Her mother had a dress made for the child to match every dress she had for herself. Even made little copies for the dolls. They look old-fashioned now, but you can tell. Still. It was senseless.” Mrs. Larsen was enraged by the idiocy of it. “Look at them. Are these for a child? A child who couldn’t dress herself, couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t do anything but look with that little smile on her face? Look at this.”

  She pulled from the rack a white linen shift, simple and graceful. There were words embroidered on the front of the dress, foreign words.

  “She couldn’t even say her own prayers. So her mother had this made, with prayers in Italian embroidered down the front. ‘So she’ll sleep with God.’ That’s exactly what she said. Franny was like a puppet to her mother, a mindless puppet. But she had a heart. She loved her rocking horse, she loved to be held, she loved to hear a man’s voice singing. She didn’t have the brain God gave a baby. But she was a person. A whole person. It broke his heart when she died. It broke his heart when she was alive. Like it was his fault.”

  “It wasn’t his fault. Surely not.”

  “It was that woman. Was me, I’d rip every one of these dresses out of here. Make a fire. It’s sad, but the child is dead. They’re all dead.”

  “Not the son. He says. Truitt says.”

  “If you ask me, he’s dead, too, Antonio. Dead or useless as his mother. All this chasing around, it’s not going to get Truitt anything.”

  Catherine didn’t tell Truitt she went to the house. She didn’t tell Truitt she wore his wife’s pearls, stuck diamond bows in her hair. She didn’t tell him that she tried on the old-fashioned dresses, even though they were too small, sweeping the carpeted floor with the sweet whoosh of ruffled silk. She didn’t tell him she spent long afternoons in the library, reading the romances and the plays and the poets. Mrs. Larsen kept her secret, she supposed, because life went on as before. Because she hoped for Truitt’s happiness.

  They ate dinner. He read to her from the newspaper the accounts of madness and true crimes, committed by people he knew. She read to him from his beloved Walt Whitman, seemingly the only thing he read. She read to him Whitman’s vast throbbing hopeful despairing panorama of America, the unparticular passion for every living thing.

  “Be not disheartened,” she read. “Affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet / Those who love each other shall become invincible.”

  She didn’t love Truitt, and every night the blue bottle came out from her suitcase; rage infused her as she held it in her hand. The blue bottle fueled her; it was her simple, her only plan. The house would be hers. The pearls, the books and pictures, the fancy rugs from India and the East, and Truitt would be hers, too. But there would be no affection, no ambling toward a sweet old age. One drop. Two drops. That was the future.

  She roamed the rooms in secret, she wandered the secret garden, up to her knees in snow, the drifts in the corners over her head, while Mrs. Larsen
scoured the copper pots and shook the dust from the heavy brocaded curtains. And all the while she did not forget. Her rage never decreased. The blue bottle was her defense, her key to the infinite splendor, the drowsy magnificence of the house itself.

  She sewed her gray silk dress, according to an innocuous pattern picked from a ladies’ book. She felt foolish when she looked in the mirror, as though she didn’t remember what she was dressing for. The days crawled by. The snow never stopped falling.

  They were married by a judge, in the living room of the farmhouse. A noonday fire burned in the fireplace. The weather cleared for the day, and two carriages stood in the yard. Two couples watched silently as they said the words. They signed their names as witnesses in the judge’s book. They joined them for lunch and went away. They might as well have been strangers.

  Ralph Truitt never looked at her. She was only the first step. She herself was unimportant, inconsequential to him now. That she was beautiful was both an attraction and an irritation, a detail of her usefulness. He would have his son back.

  The afternoon was endless. They were both awkward. It seemed they were strangers. They didn’t speak. Catherine tried to play the piano but found she was so exhausted she could barely move her fingers. The yellow diamond sparkled on her finger, the first spoils of her larceny. Ralph read by the fire, awkward in his wedding clothes. The house was cold. The sun shone off the snow. Truitt stared into the endless landscape as the light faded. They picked at supper, served by a silent Mrs. Larsen. Then they went upstairs and went to bed together.

  “You’ll have to help me. I’m not . . .”

  He didn’t, couldn’t, hear her. She lay very still in his father’s bed, and he entered her and almost believed she was a virgin.

  She was his, she was vast, she was an empire of smells and surfaces and small sighs.