A Reliable Wife (26 page)

She was just a simple, honest woman standing in the ruin of a late winter garden, waiting for the spring.

“Catherine.” She turned back toward him, afraid of him for the first time, afraid of his anger and his pain and his disapproval,
and afraid also of her own shame. A wasted life. A ruined idea. Antonio dead.

Such things happened.

“I knew.” His voice was clear in the darkness, his body a silhouette, his face lost in shadow. “I always knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I knew what Antonio told me. Your history. What you’ve been. The lies you’ve told me. Who you are. I always knew. Malloy
and Fisk sent me a letter. I burned it. It’s private, and it means nothing. But I already knew before you came back from Saint
Louis.”

The garden waited. How could he forgive so much? How could he be so patient? So much depended on her now, on her answer, and
she tried to wait as long as she could, still smelling the sweet perfume of the last old Bourbon rose.

“I’m going to have a baby.”

He stood for a long time, until she shivered with the sudden cold.

“We’re going to have a child.”

In the darkness, she could see just enough to know the stillness in his tired face. He reached out his arm toward her. The
lights from the house behind him began to come on, one by one. “Well then,” he said. “Well then. You’d better come in the
house.”

She took one last look at the garden. The air had turned suddenly cold, but it was a springtime kind of cold, an evening cold,
without threat. It was almost dark. Things wait, she thought. Not everything dies. Living takes time. And she walked toward
the golden house and took his outstretched hand in her own.

Such things happen.

BEHOLDEN

The pictures
you’re
about to see are of people who were once actually alive.
That’s the way it begins. And it never lets up.

I was set on fire in 1973. The blaze in my heart and brain was caused by the first reading of Michael Lesy’s brilliant book
Wisconsin
Death Trip
. Its collage of words and photographs paint a haunting, cinematic portrait of a small town in Wisconsin at the diseased end
of the nineteenth century. We had imagined the cities to be teeming with moral turpitude and industrial madness, and rural
America to be sleeping in a prosperous innocence, filled with honest and industrious people. Not so. Lesy unlocks the Pandora’s
box of country life to show us its dark and ravaged soul.

The portrait he paints has never left me. It had a profound influence on the structure and genesis of
A Reliable Wife
. I set it in Lesy country, frozen Wisconsin in the dead of winter, and played out a complex entangling of three lives against
his starkly compelling canvas.

I owe a great deal to Michael Lesy, to his explication of the awful life endured by the mass of people caught between machinery
and madness. Read Lesy’s book. It will never leave you. It left me changed forever. Such things happen.

SPECIAL THANKS

To Elaine Markson, first responder and a great gardener; Doug Stewart, tenacious and smart agent; Chuck Adams, fine and careful
editor; Michael Taeckens and Brunson Hoole at Algonquin; Bob Jones, who saved me more than once—as good as they come; and
to those who read this book in its long incubation, and always said the one thing that gave me continuance: Dale Sessa, Nancy
Axthelm, Dana Hoey, James Whiteside, Marybeth Hurt and Paul Schrader, faroff and lovely Jodie Tillen—a great heart and a great
eye—Daphne Merkin, Jeb and Lexi Byers, Bob Balaban and Lynn Grossman, Everett Kane, Sally Mann, and her fine daughter, sweet
Virginia Mann, Alexandra Como Saghir, Lisa Tracy, Suzanne Rice and Elizabeth Greenlee. So many wonderful friends! And to Nell
Lancaster and Jim Waddell, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude beyond words.