A Reliable Wife (18 page)

It had returned, of course, this agony over this boy who was not even his own flesh and blood, and he wondered, with so much
within reach, with this woman in his arms and under his roof, why he needed to get Andy back. Yet it was a dream he had held
in his heart for so long that nothing could replace it, nothing made up for his loss and his desire for restitution. This
boy, this child whom he had betrayed, whom he might have loved and watched grow into a man, a man who might have rebelled
and gone away even so, but who might have come back as Truitt himself had done, to run the businesses, learning the ways of
production and accounting and the endless management of the people who worked for him, their stories, their hardships, their
small victories. Antonio. Andy. Tony Moretti. A stranger, now grown into the handsome, careless man he tried to imagine. This
man whom he did not know, whom he had beaten. His wife’s son. His own prodigal, to whom he would have opened the doors wide.

Catherine slept beside him. Her slow breathing filled the air with sweetness. The dark surrounded them, and she slept on the
side of the bed that had been empty for twenty years. Mrs. Larsen would see the evidence of their lovemaking, the stained
sheets, and know that he was not alone anymore. She would smile. The thought made him shy. They knew so much from such small
details.

It was no use. He sat up and put his feet on the floor. His naked body shivered with the cold. However strong his body, however
smooth his flesh, he was no longer young. He couldn’t get it back; too much was behind him and too little ahead. He felt at
that moment the end of his life had begun. He felt it in his heart. He felt it in his bones. He heard it in his labored breathing.
His blood rushed with pleasure, and his mind dwelt on death. He would be in the ground, beside his parents. He would be in
hell, living forever with his mother, with the pin through the soft part of his hand.

He felt, with Antonio now irretrievably gone, that something in him had ceased to live, had given up the hope that had kept
him going through all the loneliness and all the years. He didn’t understand it. He had so much, and he didn’t understand
why he had invested this one thing with so much importance. The advertisement and the wife who was not what she pretended
to be, the detectives and the money and the hope and the waiting, it was for one single reason, for the dream of Antonio,
and now he knew finally that he would never come home again.

The moonlight shone through the window. The faint blue light caught the glass of water by the bed, and he suddenly felt so
thirsty he thought he would die. He reached out and held the glass in his hands for a long moment. He smelled it and paused,
but only for a second. Then he drank the water, drank all the water, and with the first sip, from the faint smell and the
bitter aftertaste, he knew the water was tainted. He looked into the bottom of the beautiful Italian glass. He looked at his
lovely wife, sleeping peacefully as a child in the moonlight. He remembered Florence, his days of indolence. He knew he was
being poisoned.

And he didn’t care. He just didn’t care anymore.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Whatever his desperate sorrow, he kept on as before. He was cordial and well mannered and evenhanded with the workers, and
he was dying and he knew he was dying and kindness seemed to be all that was left.

Catherine was extremely tender. She listened intently when he spoke, and he spoke to her often, about his business, about
his plans to expand. He never spoke about Antonio, never told her how his heart was heavy and dead. He never said that he
wanted to die but was afraid of death, of the long painful process of dying. He wanted to tell her it was all right, he wanted
to tell her she would have everything when it was done, he had made a will while she was in Saint Louis, not believing that
Antonio would ever come to claim it, but he couldn’t. He was shocked by what she was doing, of course. Yet he couldn’t speak
to her about it. He was complicit. He was her only accomplice.

Her voice was like music to him.

“I’ve never had a minute’s peace until now,” he said. “For twenty years. Not a minute’s happiness. You have given that to
me, and I’m grateful. So grateful, you couldn’t know.” They sat at the long table, their dinner done.

“I’d do anything to make you happy. Give you things. Say whatever you wanted to hear. You know that.” He took her hand.

She knew the words he was saying were true. “What else would I want? You’re exactly the thing I waited for. I don’t want anything
else. I thought I would be disappointed. I thought I would want to escape. I made plans. I had some foolish jewels. I lost
them that first night when the carriage ran away. They were what I would have used to run away. I didn’t know then that .
. . How could this come to be? From an advertisement.” She laughed, and it was like water falling from a great height. He
laughed, thinking of his foolishness.

“I could have chosen someone else.”

“I could have sent you my own picture and not India’s, and you would not have chosen me. Were there so many?”

“Dozens. All virtuous. Some widows. Some young. Practically children. Younger than you. Some gold diggers.”

“Then why me?”

“ ‘I am a simple, honest woman.’ You wrote that. A simple, honest face. I knew right away. There wasn’t anybody else, after
that.”

“It wasn’t my face.”

“As it turned out, no.”

“Do you have any regrets?”

“Not anymore.”

“What did you do with the letters? The other letters?”

“I burned them, in a big pile in the yard.”

They moved into the grand palace through the woods. Truitt had modern bathrooms installed throughout the house, as a wedding
present to his new wife. He had the house wired for electricity, and sent for lamps from Chicago. He had the chandelier wired.
He put in a new kitchen for Mrs. Larsen, although she said she didn’t need one. Everything else stayed as it had always been.

They packed the pieces of fancy furniture from the farmhouse into wagons and hauled them the long way to the big golden house,
restoring the chairs and the tables to the spots they had occupied twenty years before. Truitt gave the farmhouse to Larsen,
signed the deed over to him.

The big house was reborn, and they sat close together at one end of the long table in the frescoed dining room, a fire blazing
against the chill as the wind howled outside, and they spoke of love and practical matters in low voices. She changed her
dress for dinner. She played the piano for him. She read Whitman to him in the yellow salon, by the great fireplace, big enough
to drive a wagon into.

They gave dinner parties, small, solemn affairs attended by men who needed Truitt’s influence. Doctors came, and lawyers and
judges with their mute wives. The governor came. He wanted Truitt’s money, and Truitt gave him some as he left. The dinner
parties were not amusing. The food was superb.

They picked out their bedroom with care. It was not the grandest, not the ornate one he had shared with Emilia. It was a large,
simple, blue room with a view of the walled garden. They installed his father’s big bed, and he would lie with his head on
the soft pillows at night, while her scarlet bird sang sweetly and she sat in the window seat before they made love. She described
the splendors that would come with the summer, the roses and the clematis and the calla lilies and the cheerful dark-eyed
daisies. She cataloged the Latin names she had learned. She described the rich fragrance that would come in the night air
through the open windows. She would paint every leaf, every flower for him in color, and he would lie, eyes closed, and wonder
if he would live long enough to see it. It was lovely, in her description. It was the garden that Emilia had never had the
patience or knowledge to create.

She had asked Larsen to dig through the snow, to uncover the ruin of the plants that had not been cared for in twenty years,
and she would stare into the cold moonlight at the tangled naked vines and the overturned statues, the empty lemon house and
orangery. She would speak to him of the life she would bring to the earth, with her own hands. She would tell him of her long
days in the library, of all she had learned.

The house sheltered them against the late snows. The moonlight came through the window. She was alive beside him, and he could
not believe that his desires could be so strong as his body turned to poison, while his sorrow for Antonio grew more and more
terrible.

The house was too much, too large for Mrs. Larsen, and they hired two girls from the village, and an extra man, so that everything
was always clean and there was wood enough to keep a fire going in every fireplace in the evenings, so they could choose any
room they wanted to sit in after dinner.

In late February, Ralph’s bookkeeper went suddenly insane and murdered his wife of twenty-eight years for no reason. Mr. and
Mrs. Truitt attended the funeral, standing solemnly in black clothes while the grown children wept for their lost mother.

“Why do they do these things? These terrible things?” Catherine asked as they rode home in the carriage.

“They hate their lives. They start to hate each other. They lose their minds, wanting things they can’t have.”

Ralph attended the brief trial, watching as the husband wept for his lost wife and tore at his clothes. The children stared
on in horror and hatred.

Ralph, however, understood. He knew that people suddenly woke up one day and reason was gone, all sense of right and wrong,
all trust in their own intentions. It happened. The winter was too long. The air was too bleak. The cause was unknowable,
the effect unpredictable. The bookkeeper was sent to an insane asylum, where every day he would mourn his beloved wife, and
ask if she was coming to see him.

Ralph wanted to believe that Catherine was drugging him to inspire youth and vigor, the way a horse trader would dope a horse
to put shine in its coat, fire in its eye, to fool an unsuspecting buyer. He believed that she had brought the poison from
Saint Louis, from Chinatown perhaps, bought with some flimsy excuse, that in her long days without him, she had conceived
of this plan to give him tiny doses of a poison that would make him young again. If only for a little while. A little while
would be enough. In Florence he had sometimes used such poisons so that his lovemaking could go on without stopping for hours,
and he had used it to cure a case of the clap he had gotten one summer. He felt oblivious, then. He felt divine. There were
reasons. There had to be reasons. It was possible.

Her ardor matched his own. He no longer cared that her skill in sexual variations far exceeded her descriptions of her former
life, her narrow, missionary life. She seemed wanton to him, without limits, like the women he had loved in his youth. He
loved her, he wanted her, and she was always there. She had gone away to Saint Louis shy and distant, dressed in plain straight
dresses, and she had come home a different person, softer, lighter around the mouth, in simple clothes that spoke of quiet
good taste and old money, someone he had never expected to find again in his life. She was his dream.

He struggled every night to get through dinner without touching her, to wait until time to go to bed. He struggled to make
conversation to avoid her gaze, to listen to her sweet voice as she read to him, the soft strain as she played the piano or
they played cards while Mrs. Larsen cleared and cleaned the dinner things.

Catherine lay in his arms every night, and every night the sweat that ran off his back would collect between her breasts,
leave them both soaked. She would bring a clean linen cloth, and gently dry his back, his chest, his legs and feet. Every
night she slept beside him, every night he drank his crystal water until there was nothing left, and every morning she was
there when he woke already hard from his troubled dreams.

Poison. It was the poison of pleasure, the poison he had known would kill him. His mother knew. He still had the scar on his
hand to remind him. This was the poison his mother had seen in the flecks of his eyes even before his eyes had looked at a
woman’s naked body. This was wickedness, and it was fatal.

He dreamed about women. His sensual life, so long ago, came back to him in his dreams, finely detailed, lusciously intoxicating.
Voices called to him. He lay naked in open fields, the wind ruffling the hair of a young girl who lay next to him, her dress
open to the light, her breasts in his hands. He lay in courtyards, in gardens while water from the fountains played over marble
statues and the air was rich with the scent of gardenias and jasmine and rosemary, and the soft voices of women whispered
in his ear, while their fingertips pulled at his clothes. While their fingernails, clean and sharp, tore at the flesh of his
back. Dreaming, his eyes roamed behind his lids over the luxuries of sex.

He dreamed about men who were not himself and women he had never known. He dreamed about his mother and father, lost in the
mute, loveless passion that had created him. He dreamed about the men and women of the town, so religious, so strict and secret
and fertile. He dreamed of young lovers and the first kiss, the first ribbon untied with trembling adolescent fingers while
standing by a waterfall, a crystal stream, a place he knew.

He dreamed about large house parties. They were gay and filled with good things to eat and well-dressed men and women from
twenty and forty years before. In these dreams, he was a child among grownups. There was laughter and pleasure and the unspoken
signs of desires fulfilled. They were not people he knew. They were not houses he recognized. The houses were enormous, and
filled with many rooms that opened on to one another so there was a constant flow among the guests from room to room, from
gaiety to gaiety and partner to partner. They had beautiful skin and musical voices, and he loved them, loved being among
them. In these dreams, where he sometimes saw his mother and father happy, he did not have sex, but the air was so redolent
with desire that he became sex itself, and walked with strength in his legs, with a pride unknown to him.

He never dreamed of Catherine. He never dreamed of Emilia. They were never present. He dreamed of Antonio, and the sight of
Antonio with woman after woman. These dreams embarrassed him and filled him with shame but also with longing.

He smelled flowers, in his dreams. He smelled almonds. He smelled his own flesh dying.

The dreams vanished before dawn, and he awoke anxious and disturbed, to find Catherine already there, reaching out for him.

“You were restless in your sleep. I could feel you moving.”

“I had dreams.”

“Was I there?”

“No.”

It didn’t matter that her hair was tangled, her breath stale, her nightdress around her knees. It didn’t matter who she was,
who she had pretended to be. It didn’t matter the atrocity she was committing. What she was doing to him. He reached out of
his dream and took her into his arms, wanting more than any woman could possibly give, and getting more than he ever thought
could come to him.

He knew that this moment, this feeling of well-being, these gorgeous dreams of gross desire and easy fulfillment, he knew
this was a momentary thing. The drug’s erotic effect would end soon, and the horror would begin, if that was what she wanted.
And the fact of it didn’t appall him as he thought it should. He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t save himself. He loved her.
He loved her and she wanted him dead, and his son was lost forever to him and that was fine, too. That was what his life had
led him to. This was what he had lived twenty years of solitude for, to see what would happen, to see how it would all turn
out.