A Reliable Wife (2 page)

Most nights Ralph could stand it. But some nights he couldn’t. On those nights he lay suffocating beneath the weight of the
lust he imagined around him, the desires rewarded, the unspoken physical kindnesses that can occur in the dark even between
people who loathe the sight of each other by daylight.

In every house, he thought with fascination, there is a different life. There is sex in every bed. He walked the streets of
his town every day, seeing on every face the simple charities they had afforded one another in the dark, and he told himself
that he alone among them did not need that in order to go on.

He went to their weddings and their funerals. He adjudicated their quarrels, bore their tirades. He hired them and fired them,
and he never lost the picture of them groping their way through the mute darkness, hunting and finding comfort, so that when
the sun came up, they could go on with their lives.

That morning, in the mirror, he had seen his face, and it was a face he didn’t want to be seen. His hunger, his rapacious
solitude—they were not dead. And these people around him were not blind. They must have been, all these years, as horrified
as he had been that morning.

In his pocket was the letter, and in the letter was a picture of a plain woman whom he did not know, ordered like a pair of
boots from Chicago, and in that picture was Ralph’s whole future, and nothing else mattered. Even his shame, as he stood in
the gawking crowd, waiting for an overdue train, was secondary to that, because he had set his heart on a course before he
had the first idea of what the course would bring him, and because he could not, under their darting eyes, avert his gaze
or turn his intention from what he had decided with his whole heart, long before he had known what it meant.

The train would come, late or not, and everything that happened before its arrival would be before, and everything that came
after would be after. It was too late to stop it now. His past would be only a set of certain events that had led him to this
desperate act of hope.

He was a fifty-four-year-old man whose face was shocking to him, and in a few moments even that slate would be wiped clean.
He allowed himself that hope.

We all want the simplest things, he thought. Despite what we may have, or the children who die, we want the simplicity of
love. It was not too much to ask that he be like the others, that he, too, might have something to want.

For twenty years, not one person had said good night to him as he turned off the light and lay down to sleep. Not one person
had said good morning as he opened his eyes. For twenty years, he had not been kissed by anyone whose name he knew, and yet,
even now, as the snow began to fall lightly, he remembered what it felt like, the soft giving of the lips, the sweet hunger
of it.

The townspeople watched him. Not that it mattered anymore. We were there, they would tell their children and their neighbors.
We were there. We saw her get off the train for the first time, and she got off the train only three times. We were there.
We saw him the minute he set eyes on her.

The letter was in his hand. He knew it by heart.

Dear Mr. Truitt,

I am a simple honest woman. I have seen much of the world in my travels with my father. In my missionary work I have seen
the world as it is and I have no illusions. I have seen the poor and I have seen the rich and do not believe there is so much
as a razor’s edge between, for the rich are as hungry as the poor. They are hungry for God.

I have seen mortal sickness beyond imagining. I have seen what the world has done to the world, and I cannot bear to be in
the world any longer. I know now that I can’t do anything about it, and God can’t do anything about it either.

I am not a schoolgirl. I have spent my life being a daughter and had long since given up hope of being a wife. I know that
it isn’t love you are offering, nor would I seek that, but a home, and I will take what you give because it is all that I
want. I say that not meaning to imply that it is a small thing. I mean, in fact, that it is all there is of goodness and kindness
to want. It is everything compared to the world I have seen and, if you will have me, I will come.

With the letter she had sent a photograph of herself, and he could feel the tattered edge of it with his thumb as he raised
his hat to one more person, saw, from the corner of his eye, one more person gauge the unusual sobriety and richness of his
black suit and strong boots and fur-collared overcoat. His thumb caressed her face. His eyes could see her features, neither
pretty nor homely. Her large, clear eyes stared into the photographer’s flash without guile. She wore a simple dress with
a plain cloth collar, an ordinary woman who needed a husband enough to marry a stranger twenty years her senior.

He had sent her no photograph in return, nor had she asked for one. He had sent instead a ticket, sent it to the Christian
boardinghouse in which she stayed in filthy, howling Chicago, and now he stood, a rich man in a tiny town in a cold climate,
at the start of a Wisconsin winter in the year 1907. Ralph Truitt waited for the train that would bring Catherine Land to
him.

Ralph Truitt had waited a long time. He could wait a little longer.

CHAPTER TWO

I’m the kind of woman who wants to know the end of the story, she thought, staring at her face in the jostling mirror. I want
to know how it’s all going to end before it even starts.

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe
at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the
last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.

It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet,
the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than
that.

The land flew away by her window, rushing horizontal flat with snow. The train jostled just enough so that, even though she
held her head perfectly still, her earrings swayed and sparkled in the light.

He had sent a private car with a sitting room and a bedroom and electric lights. She had not seen another passenger, although
she knew other people had to be on the train. She imagined them, sitting calmly in their seats, pale winter skin on gray horsehair,
while in her car it was all red velvet and swagging and furbelows. Like a whorehouse, she thought. Like a whorehouse on wheels.

They had left after dark and crept through the night, stopping often to clear drifts from the tracks. The porter had brought
her a heavy, glistening meal, slabs of roast beef and shrimp on ice, lovely iced cakes which she ate at a folding table. No
wine was offered and she didn’t ask for it. The hotel silver felt smooth and heavy in her hand, and she devoured everything
that was brought to her.

In the morning, steaming eggs and ham and rolls and hot black coffee that burned her tongue, all brought by a silent Negro
porter, served as though he were performing some subtle magic trick. She ate it all. There was nothing else to do, and the
movement of the train was both hypnotic and ravishing, amplifying her appetites, as each rushing second brought her closer
to the fruition of her long and complicated scheme.

When she wasn’t eating, or sleeping beneath the starched, immaculate sheets, she stared at her face in the mirror above the
dressing table. It was her one sure possession, the one thing she could count on never to betray her, and she found it reassuring,
after thirty-four years, that it remained, every morning, essentially unchanged, the same sure beauty, the same pale and flawless
skin, unlined, fresh. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet reached her face.

Still she was restless. Her mind raced, reviewing her options, her plans, her jumbled memories of a turbulent past, and what
it was about her life that had led her here, to this sumptuous room on wheels, somewhere in the middle.

So much had to happen in the middle, and no matter how often she had rehearsed it in her mind, she didn’t trust the middle.
You could get caught. You could lose your balance, your way, and get found out. In the middle, things always happened you
hadn’t planned on, and it was these things, the possibility of these things, that haunted and troubled her, that showed now
in the soft mauve hollows beneath her dark almond eyes.

Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love
or money. She could not, would not accept that as a fact, because to accept it now would mean that the end had already come
and gone.

She was determined, cold as steel. She would not live without at least some portion of the two things she knew were necessary
as a minimum to sustain life. She had spent her years believing that they would come, in time. She believed that an angel
would come down from heaven and bless her with riches as she had been blessed with beauty. She believed in the miraculous.
Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her
life.
The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging
object, a shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.

She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed
in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been
born.

Her mother’s golden hair was lit by the reflection from an elaborate lavender silk dress, her skirts voluminous and extravagantly
decorated. She drove a large and simple carriage, and Catherine sat in the front seat, between her mother and a man, a military
man who was not her father. In her memory, as it came to her, she could not see his face. Behind them, straight as pins, sat
three other young men, cadets, smartly dressed in tight wool uniforms with epaulets and braids and stripes.

It had rained on the way, a quick, fierce downpour, and the hood of the carriage had been drawn over, and the rain fell even
though the sun never stopped shining on them, such a thick rain she had barely been able to see as far as the horses’ steaming
flanks. Then, miraculous and beautiful, the rain had stopped and the hood had been drawn back by one of the young men so the
sweet cool air had flowed around them. The hood sprinkled her mother’s hair with tiny droplets, and her mother had laughed
in a charming way. It was such a clear memory, the sound of it. That and the weather and the storm itself had been nice. Lovely,
long ago.

The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all
these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the
rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice
vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold
that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.

Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating
light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother
who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly
saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.

It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no
memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something
ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling
flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and
herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.

But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed
her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets
and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning,
the beginning of all that had come after.

It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus.
It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.

From that beginning she had gone on and on, until her legs were tired and her mother was dead and her heart was broken. She
had, no matter how impossible it seemed from moment to moment, gone on without love or money, always wondering when it would
begin, the splendid end to match the splendid beginning.

She no longer dwelled on the past. She had no fond memories there, except for the single rainbow, the pot of gold. She had
bitten and bludgeoned her way through life, angry, fighting in a rage for the next good thing to happen. It hadn’t happened
yet. So that, on the day she suddenly realized that her life was, in fact, her life, she wondered what it could possibly have
been that led her forward, day after day, what events could possibly have happened to fill the hours between sleep and sleep.
But at moments like this, when everything was so quiet she could notice the trembling of her earrings, she knew with dread
that the answer was not nothing much, but simply nothing.

She would not, could not live without love or money.

She would remember those faceless young soldiers forever. They would be forever young. She would cherish the glory of the
sun coming through the clouds, and the rainbow. Her mother’s loveliness would never abandon her. But what good did it do?
What use was all that to her now, sitting in front of a mirror on a train going to the middle of nowhere, on the tightrope
between the beginning and the end?

There was a soft knock on the door. The porter who had brought her meals and turned down her bed leaned his dark handsome
face into the compartment. “Station in half an hour, Miss.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, never taking her eyes from the mesmerizing mirror. The door closed and she was alone again.

She had seen Ralph Truitt’s personal advertisement six months before, as she sat at a table with Sunday coffee and the newspaper:

COUNTRY BUSINESSMAN SEEKS

RELIABLE WIFE.

COMPELLED BY PRACTICAL,

NOT ROMANTIC REASONS.

REPLY BY LETTER.

RALPH TRUITT. TRUITT, WISCONSIN.

DISCREET.

“Reliable wife.” That was new, and she smiled. She had read in her life perhaps thousands of advertisements just like it.
It was a hobby of hers, like knitting. She was engrossed by these notices, lonely men who called out from the vast wildernesses
of the country. Sometimes the notices were placed by women, who asked for strength or patience or kindness or merely civility.

She laughed at their stories, at their pitiful foolhardiness. They asked and probably found somebody as lonely and desperate
as themselves. How could they expect more? The halt and the lame calling the blind and hopeless. Catherine found it hilarious.

She assumed, still, that these men and these women found each other through their sad little calls for comfort. They found,
if not love or money, at least another life to cling to. Advertisements like this one appeared every week. These people didn’t
like the solitude of their lives. Perhaps they, at least some of them, eventually found lives they liked better.

The night before, just before she slept, she suddenly saw herself as if from above, lying in her bed, the chill of loneliness
and death all around her like a nimbus of disconsolation. She hovered in the air, watching herself. She had felt, and still
felt that she would die unless someone could find the sweetness to touch her with affection. Unless someone would appear to
shelter her from the storm of her awful life. It was Ralph Truitt’s terse announcement, containing the promise of a beginning,
not splendid, perhaps, but new, that she had finally answered. “I am a simple, honest woman,” she had written, and he had
answered by return mail. They had written all through the hot summer, tentative descriptions of their lives. His handwriting
was blunt and compelling, hers practiced and elegant, she hoped, and seductive. She had at last sent the photograph, and he
had written at greater length, as though it were already decided, the whole match. She had feigned hesitation, until he insisted
and sent her a ticket for the train to come and bring her to be his wife.

The young soldier who had sat beside her in the carriage would be old himself now. She could still see the way his thumb jutted
from the palm of his hand, feel the way his thigh touched her thigh as he leaned toward her. Perhaps he had a wife and children
of his own now. Perhaps he loved them and treated them with kindness, with grace and affection. The world had not shown her
that such things were common, but her unhappiness had been made bearable only by the certain knowledge that somewhere there
lived people whose lives were not like her own.

Perhaps this Ralph Truitt was one of those other people. Perhaps this life he offered would be some other kind of life. The
sun set every day. It could not be that it would set in splendor only once in her lifetime.

Half an hour. She stood up from the dressing table and stepped out of her red silk shoes, lining them up side by side. She
began quickly to undo the embroidered jacket of her fancy traveling suit, discarding it behind her on the floor. Then she
took off her silk blouse and the heavy red velvet skirt. She undid the laces of her embroidered corset, and shrugged it off.
She felt suddenly light, as though she would rise from the floor, a pool of crimson velvet at her feet.