Authors: Robert Goolrick
A Reliable Wife
A
RELIABLE
WIFE
ALSO BY
ROBERT GOOLRICK
The End of the World as We Know It
A
RELIABLE
WIFE
A NOVEL BY
ROBERT GOOLR ICK
ALGONQUIN BOOKS
OF CHAPEL HILL
2009
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2009 by Robert Goolrick.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published in Canada by HarperCollins
Canada
Ltd.
Design by Anne Winslow.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names,
characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goolrick, Robert, [date]
A reliable wife : a novel / by Robert Goolrick.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-596-4
1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction.
3. Wisconsin—History—19th cenury—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O5925R45 2009
813'.6—dc22 200804970
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For Jeanne Voltz
who was better to me than I was to myself
with eternal love and gratitude
and for my darling brother and sister
B and Lindlay.
Be not dishearten’d—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet;
Those who love each other shall become invincible.
—WALT WHITMAN,
“Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice”
A
RELIABLE
WIFE
CONTENTS
WISCONSIN . FALL . 1907 .
I
T WAS BITTER COLD, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. The world stood stock still, four o’clock dead on.
Nothing moved anywhere, not a body, not a bird; for a split second there was only silence, there was only stillness. Figures
stood frozen in the frozen land, men, women, and children.
If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time.
But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass
plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed,
that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.
It was not snowing yet, but it would be soon, a blizzard, by the smell of it. The land lay covered already in trampled snow.
The land here flew away from your eyes, gone into the black horizon without leaving one detail inside the eye. Stubble through
the snow, sharp as razors. Crows picking at nothing. Black river, frigid oil.
Nothing says hell has to be fire, thought Ralph Truitt, standing in his sober clothes on the platform of the tiny train station
in the frozen middle of frozen nowhere. Hell could be like this. It could be darker every minute. It could be cold enough
to sear the skin from your bones.
Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he
lived his life—every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him—everybody had a reason to be and a place to land.
Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit
down.
Ralph Truitt checked his silver watch. Yes, the train was late. The eyes around him were staring silently; they knew. He had
counted on the train being on time today. To the minute, he had told them. He had ordered punctuality the way another man
might order a steak cooked to his liking. Now he stood like a fool with everybody watching. And he was a fool. He had failed
at even this small thing. It would come to nothing, this last small spark of hope.
He was a man used to getting what he wanted. Since his first staggering losses twenty years before, his wife, his children,
his heart’s best hopes and his last lavish fantasies, he had come to see the implacability of his own expectations as the
only defense against the terrors he felt. It worked pretty well most of the time. He was relentless, and the people of the
town respected that, feared it even. Now the train was late.
Around him on the platform the people of his town walked and watched and waited, trying to look casual, as though their waiting
had some purpose other than watching Ralph Truitt wait for a train that was late. They exchanged little jokes. They laughed.
They spoke quietly, out of respect for what they knew to be Ralph Truitt’s failure. The train was late. They felt the snow
in the air. They knew the blizzard would soon begin. Just as there was a day every spring when the women of the town, as though
by some secret signal, appeared in their summer dresses before the first heat was felt, there was as well a day when winter
showed the knife before the first laceration. This was the day—October 17, 1907. Four o’clock and almost dark.
They all, each one, kept one eye on the weather and one eye on Ralph. Waiting, they watched Ralph wait, exchanging glances
every time Ralph checked his silver watch. The train was late. Serve him right, some thought, mostly the men. Some, mostly
the women, thought kinder thoughts. Maybe, they thought, after all these years.
Ralph knew they talked about him, knew their feelings for him, complicated as they were, were spoken aloud the moment he had
passed, tipping his hat with the civility he struggled so hard to show the world day after day. He could see it in their eyes.
He had seen it every day of his life. The chatter of deference, the inevitable snicker at what they all knew of his past.
Sometimes there was a whispered kindness because there was something about Ralph, even still, that could stir a sympathetic
heart.
The trick, Ralph knew, is not to give in. Not to hunch your shoulders in the cold or stamp your feet or blow warm breath into
cold palms. The trick is to relax into the cold, accept that it had come and would stay a long time. To lean into it, as you
might lean into a warm spring wind. The trick was to become part of it, so that you didn’t end a backbreaking day in the cold
with rigid, aching shoulders and red hands.
Some things you escape, he thought. Most things you don’t, certainly not the cold. You don’t escape the things, mostly bad,
that just happen to you. The loss of love. The disappointment. The terrible whip of tragedy.
So Ralph stood implacable, chest out, oblivious to the cold, hardened to the gossip, his eyes fixed on the train tracks wasting
away into the distance. He was hopeful, amazed that he was hoping, hoping that he looked all right, not too old, or too stupid,
or too unforgiving. Hoping that the turmoil of his soul, his hopeless solitude was, for just this hour before the snow fell
and shut them all in, invisible.
He had meant to be a good man, and he was not a bad man. He had taught himself not to want, after his first wanting and losing.
Now he wanted something, and his desire startled and enraged him.
Dressing in his house before he came to the train station, Ralph had caught sight of his face in one of the mirrors. The sight
had shocked him. Shocking to see what grief and condescension had done to his face. So many years of hatred and rage and regret.
In the house, before coming here, he had busied his hands with the collar button and the knot of his necktie; he did these
things every morning, the fixing and adjusting, the strict attentions of a fastidious man. But until he had looked in the
mirror and seen his own anxious hope, he had not imagined, at any step of this foolish enterprise, that the moment would actually
come and he would not, at the last, be able to stand it. But that’s what had occurred to him, looking at his collapsed face
in the spidery glass. He could not stand it, this wrenching coming to life again. For all these years, he had endured the
death, the hideous embarrassment. He had kept on, against every instinct in his heart. He had kept on getting up and going
to town and eating and running his father’s businesses and taking on the weight which he inevitably took on, no matter how
he tried to avoid it, of these people’s lives. He had always assumed his face sent a single signal: everything is all right.
Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong.
But, this morning, in the mirror, he saw that it was impossible, that he was the only one who had ever been fooled. And he
saw that he cared, that it all mattered.
These people, their children got sick. Their wives or husbands didn’t love them or they did, while Ralph himself was haunted
by the sexual act, the sexual lives, which lay hidden and vast beneath their clothes. Other people’s lust. They touched each
other. Their children died, sometimes all at once, whole families, in a single month, of diphtheria or typhoid or the flu.
Their husbands or their wives went crazy in a night, in the cold, and burned their houses down for no good reason, or shot
their own relatives, their own children dead. They tore their clothes off in public and urinated in the street and defecated
in church, writhing with snakes. They destroyed perfectly healthy animals, burned their barns. It was in the papers every
week. Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.
They soaked their dresses in naphtha and carelessly moved too close to a fire and exploded into flames. They drank poison.
They fed poison to each other. They had daughters by their own daughters. They went to bed well and woke up insane. Ran away.
Hanged themselves. Such things happened.
Through it all, Ralph thought that his face and body were unreadable, that he had turned a fair and sympathetic eye to the
people and their griefs and their bizarre troubles. He went to bed trying not to think of it, but he had gotten up this morning
and seen it all, the toll it had taken.
His skin was ashen. His hair was lifeless and thinner than he remembered. The corners of his mouth and his eyes turned downward,
engraved with a permanent air of condescension and grief. His head tilted back from the effort of paying attention to the
bodies that stood too close and spoke too loudly. These things, borne of the terrifying stillness of his heart, were visible.
Everybody saw it. He had not covered up a single thing. What a fool he had been.
There was a time when he had fallen in love on every street corner. Chased so tiny a thing as a charming ribbon on a hat.
A light step, the brush of a skirt’s hem, a gloved hand shooing a fly from a freckled nose had once been enough, had once
been all he needed to set his heart racing. Racing with joy. Racing with fair, brutal expectation. So grossly in love his
body hurt. But now he had lost the habit of romance, and in his look into the mirror, he had thought with a prick of jealousy
of his younger, lascivious self.
He remembered the first time he had seen the bare arm of a grown woman. He remembered the first time a woman had taken her
hair down just for him, the startling rich cascade of it, the smell of soap and lavender. He remembered every piece of furniture
in the room. He remembered his first kiss. He had loved it all. Once, it had been to him all there was. His body’s hungers
had been the entire meaning of his life.
You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless. He was fifty-four years old, and despair
had come to Ralph as an infection, without his even knowing it. He could not pinpoint the moment at which hope had left his
heart.
The townspeople nodded respectfully as they scuttled past. “Evening, Mr. Truitt.” And they couldn’t help it, “Train’s a tad
late, Mr. Truitt?” He wanted to hit them, tell them to leave, to leave him alone. Because of course they knew. There had been
telegrams, wire transfers, a ticket. They knew everything.
They knew the whole history of his years from the time he was a baby. Many of them, most of them, worked for him in one way
or another, in the iron foundry, logging or mining or buying and selling and tallying up the sales or the rents. He underpaid
them, though he grew richer by the hour. The ones who didn’t work for him were, by and large, not doing any kind of work at
all beyond the hardscrabble and desperate labor that kept the witless and lazy alive in hard climates.
Some, he knew, were lazy. Some were cruel to their wives and children, unfaithful to their dull and steady husbands. The winters
were too long, too hard, and nobody would be expected to last it out.
For some, normal lives turned to nightmare. They starved to death in the horrible winters. They removed themselves from society
and lived alone in ramshackle huts in the woods. They were found drooling and naked and were committed to the insane asylum
at Mendota where they were wrapped in icy sheets and lashed with electrical currents until they could be restored to sanity
and quietude. These things happened.
Still, every day, more people went on than didn’t; more people stayed than left. The ones who stayed, crazy and sane, all
of them sooner or later had business with Ralph Truitt. Ralph Truitt, he, too, went on through the cold and his own terrifying
loneliness.
“Snow coming hard,” they said.
“Dark already,” they said. Four o’clock and dark already.
“Evening, Ralph, Mr. Truitt. Going to be a big one, looks like. Said so in the almanac.”
All the little things they thought up, to pass the time, to make some small but brave attempt to establish a human connection
with him. Each conversation with him became something to be thought out, considered and turned this way and that long before
words were ever said, and to be remembered and reported after he was gone.
Saw Mr. Truitt today, they might say to their wives, because few dared think of his name any other way. He was cordial, asking
after you and the children. Remembered every one of their names.
They hated him and they needed him and they excused him. The wives would say as their husbands ranted about what a skinflint
bastard he was, what a tightwad, what an arrogant son of a bitch, “Well . . . you know . . . he’s had troubles.”
Of course they knew. They all knew.
He slept alone. He would lie in the dark and he would picture them, these people. He would dream their lives in the dark.
The husbands would turn and see their wives, and desire would burn through them like an explosion. Ralph imagined their lives,
their desires, kindled by no more than a muslin nightdress. Eleven children, some of them thirteen: nine dead four living,
six living seven gone.
In Ralph Truitt’s mind, in the dead of night, the knots of death and birth formed an insane lace, knitting the town together,
in a ravishment of sexual acts and the product of these acts. All skin to skin in the dark, just underneath the heavy torturous
garments in the day. Still, in his mind’s eye, the husbands would race into the warmed sheets and be young again, young and
in love if only for fifteen minutes in the dark, lying with wasted women who were themselves, for those few minutes, beautiful
young girls again with shiny braided hair and ready laughs. Sex was all he thought about in the dark.