A Reliable Wife (15 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

One day, they had no money. One day, they had no house. Their furniture, her mother’s furniture, lay in a pile of snow in
the street.

And then he died, too. It took six years. Catherine never went to school, because they never stayed anywhere long enough to
go to a school and because there was no one to watch after the baby.

Her father died of drunkenness, of course. He drank himself to death, but Catherine secretly knew he died of a broken heart.
It happens. She knew it and she watched it, and it wasn’t pretty or romantic and sad. It was pathetic and ungainly and hard
as horses pulling a wagon through the mud.

And then they had nobody. Then they had nowhere. Catherine was just fourteen, Alice seven.

They went to the poorhouse. Catherine marched them across the docks until they came to the grim warehouse that hid the poorest
away from the eyes of the less poor. Alice went to a little school, a charity inside the charity, and she taught Catherine
to read. Catherine did whatever chores she was given, washing clothes, cleaning floors on her hands and knees. She took on
small bits of charity sewing, and she became expert at it, the first thing she could do with pride.

While Alice was at school, Catherine sat in a small park near the harbor and watched the water sparkle in the thin sunlight,
and she sat there, just staring, until one day a man came and sat beside her and touched her hand and asked her to his cheap
hotel room, and she found what she was to do with her life, what was to become of her and how she was to save Alice.

She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know why he asked or why she did what he asked her to do. It meant nothing
to her.

She realized that her body was her bank; it was all the money she had. It was all she would ever need.

She worked, she learned to read, and at night, before they locked the doors, she wandered the docks and made small bits of
money the only way she had available to her, sex in doorways, in huge shipping crates, on a pile of coats in the back room
of a bar.

Sometimes Catherine stayed out all night, moving from man to man as the hours moved relentlessly on, returning in the morning
when they unlocked the big double doors. Her body ached, as though she had been scrubbing floors all night.

While Alice learned her letters and numbers, Catherine tasted power in the hunger of men. Power over them, over their desires,
power to save her sister. She knew now she could keep Alice safe, could get her away from the rats and the lice and the small-mouthed
halfwit children who were abandoned, too. At least she and Alice had been loved, once, in a place that seemed like some country
in a dream.

She lay in strange beds and imagined the house in which she and Alice would live when they had money. And there they would
be perfectly happy and complete in themselves. The house would be clean all the time, and sunlight would stream through the
windows even in winter.

She was sixteen. When there was enough money, she moved them to Philadelphia. They moved into a room in a shanty on the Schuylkill.
Catherine would come home late and sleep in the same bed with Alice. She was always there in the morning to wake her with
a kiss. They hadn’t come a single step from their days in Baltimore, but Alice went to a proper school, a charity Catholic
school with strict rules and dirty windows. Alice hated it, but every night, before she went out, Catherine helped her with
her homework, and so Catherine began to learn little bits about little things.

Alice dressed in real clothes, which Catherine made for her. She had a warm coat in winter, and Catherine would go to the
market and wander through the bolts of cloth, touching every one. She sewed, and she discovered the big library. She remembered
her mother telling her that the library housed all she would ever need to know, about history and art and science.

It terrified her at first. On her initial visits she could only stare, not knowing what to ask for or where to turn. Finally
she asked for a book, a book on sewing, and she read it, sitting at the long tables, taking notes with a pencil she had stolen
from one of the stalls in the market.

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the books from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was
an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another
book. She learned the card catalog. She never learned more than she needed to know.

She read romantic novels, and she imagined that the men and women at the reading tables around her were the subject of those
books. Happy and passionate lives, so simple it seemed for others.

She read Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, stories in which the lives of the tattered poor turned out to be blissful in the
end.

She read about the capitals of the world, the cathedrals and minarets, the broad avenues, and the volatile and ever-expanding
world of science.

When she was eighteen, she was the kept mistress of a married man. She was grown; Alice was still a child. She lived near
Ritten-house Square, in real rooms on a real street. These were the rooms she had dreamed of in the hotels. She learned the
art of pleasing a man without having sex with him, sitting on his lap, making small talk, cutting his cigar. She was intelligent,
she realized. From the library, she had many topics she could discuss with ease and charm. Men enjoyed these things. She was
like the geishas she read about in the library, like the courtesans, the mistresses of the great. She dressed beautifully,
silk dresses she made herself from pattern books, dresses from Paris he bought for her, wrapped in grosgrain ribbon from fancy
stores in Broad Street. She entertained his friends when he had card parties, telling amusing stories, pouring them wine,
laughing at their crude jokes.

She was astonished at how simple it was. He came on Sunday afternoons, and he always brought some little gift, a token of
his gratitude that such a lovely young girl would allow him to touch her, to put his hand on her breasts. Then he went home
to his wife and his own children, to other rooms she was never to see.

Alice had no patience or aptitude for learning. She was a bitter child, bitter and recalcitrant and selfish, and there was
no reason for it. Everything had been done for her. Catherine had a lot of time on her hands, and she would sit for hours,
trying with Alice to figure out her lessons. Alice was all feeling, a being without reason or intellect. Finally she refused
to go to school at all. She loved pretty dresses and walking out in public in the finery Catherine’s protector bought for
them, and she loved him, solid, red-faced Uncle Skip, as she called him. After a year, Catherine found them in bed together.
Alice was twelve.

It was not a shock. It didn’t surprise her that Uncle Skip, having bought two women, would want to enjoy two women, but her
rage was uncontrollable. She stole and sold everything she could from their fancy rooms, and Catherine and Alice got on a
train a second time and went to New York.

It was a new city, vast and filled with possibility, a blank canvas. But it was the same story. Catherine would sew and whore
and spend her days in the library. Alice looked like a little princess and yearned for freedom. She loved to make men look
at her and then turn away with a scornful laugh.

Alice told Catherine she hated her. She said she had been in prison all her life. Catherine wasn’t surprised. Alice said that,
as soon as she had someplace to go, she would leave Catherine and never look back. Catherine was twenty-two and she felt like
she had been on the planet for a hundred years.

Then Alice was gone. Catherine found her in Gramercy Park, walking a little white dog, a fifteen-year-old girl on the arm
of a forty-year-old man, and Catherine gave up. There wasn’t any more she could do.

Now she had become the thing Catherine had wanted to save her from; she had become Catherine, only worse, because for Alice
there was no reason. It was not a thing she had to do; it was what she wanted. The empty attention of stupid, lonely men.
It was beyond thought.

Catherine left New York and went to Chicago, where she lived for years with no further word from Alice.

Then she began reading in the newspapers about the Great Exposition to be built in Saint Louis, and she decided to go there
because she knew there would be a lot of men, laborers from Italy and Germany who had left their families behind and come
to Saint Louis to make money. She had not one ounce of kindness left in her heart.

And then one day she saw Alice.

She approached her gently.

“Alice. Sister.”

Alice turned. The shock of recognition turned instantly to bitterness.

“What are you . . . ?”

“Same as you. The Expo. The men. The money.” Alice laughed.

“What happened to New York? To Gramercy Park?”

“The dog died. William hit me. I came here. A long time ago, I don’t remember when. The Golden West.”

“I . . .”

Then Alice had slapped her face. Had left a welt on her cheek and run down the street laughing.

Catherine never saw her again, had not tried to find her. Now it burned in her like a fire. She had money. She had a place
to take Alice. She wanted to save her sister. It was not a kindness. It was a desperate hard unbreakable need to create some
order out of the chaos of the past. Alice might find peace in white Wisconsin. The blindingly pure snow might wash away her
bitterness and her cruelty and the hardness of her soul.

Wild Cat Chute was a bad place. It was the place you went to when you had run out of other places that would let you in. It
was crawling with rats and garbage and diseases and the diseased. It was just a place on the way to the river, a runway once
used to bring cargo up into the city, but now it was filled with shacks and people who didn’t even have shacks, people who
were no longer able or fit to sleep indoors, in the prison of a room. People who heard voices. People who died.

Still, as Catherine turned the dark corner into the mud track, all she could see were the children. They were herself. They
were her childhood and her past and the hunger and the fear and the loss, and no coat could have kept out the chill of that.
They had no names. They had no light in their faces. They had no one waiting for them and nowhere to go.

Alice was nowhere.

Some said they remembered a girl like her, a girl who had gone away with a boatman. Some said they remembered a girl who had
gone to the hospital, dragged kicking and screaming, maybe to a loony bin, maybe to a hospital where you came back better.
Catherine searched the hospitals and found nothing. You sink to a certain level, you don’t have a name any more. You don’t
have a history or any particular features or friends, and Alice had reached the Chute, the end of the line, the end of hope,
the end of whatever it is that makes a person particular in the world.

“Where is she, Tony?” She begged him. He was supposed to know. He had said he did.

“Things change. People move. People are always moving around down there, sleeping in each other’s beds, beating each other’s
children. She’s there. Just keep looking. Hurt yourself if you want.”

“I’ll go again tonight. Every night. Now.”

He was naked in front of her, the last sun glowing on his shoulder blades as he washed himself, his exquisite clothes laid
out on a chair. He threw down his towel and turned with sudden exhausted fury, “Why do you care? People lose things, Catherine.
It happens. People lose what they love all the time.”

“I care about her.”

“You don’t care about anything. You care about getting back something you’ve lost. Like an umbrella on a trolley. Like a locket
in the street. That’s all. But I’ll tell you this. She’s not the thing you lost anymore. She’s a hag, she’s
nothing.
She’s got no face, no name, no place to live. And this pathetic attempt to find your sister isn’t going to change anything.
You’re still going to kill my father, you’re still going to live in his palace with me and all that money.”

His beautiful clothes. His beautiful hair, his hands holding a silver hairbrush, his handsome face in a cracked silver mirror.
The way he cared for her and didn’t all at once.

“Your cruelty is astonishing. Alice—”

“Was sweet and cute and fresh and not very bright, but she could sit in your lap, just sit in your lap, and make you come.
She didn’t have a shred of a soul even then. And she’s dying because she’s not cunning and careful and smart like her big
sister and she wants it that way. You disgust her. Your name enrages her. You think she’s not down there? You’ve left your
name with every drunk in the place and she’s still not there. Because it’s the place you go if you don’t want to be found.
Ever. There’s only one way in, and there’s only one way out, so leave her in peace. Just leave. Go back to Wisconsin. Forget
Alice. Do what you promised. It’s what you were born for.”