A Reliable Wife (25 page)

Antonio ran into the big hallway, the hallway with the Venetian mirrors, the long corridor tilting wildly, where he could
not get a footing because his shoes were wet now with his own blood, and he ran to the fireplace and picked up the iron poker,
and when Ralph ran up to him, he hit Ralph in the face with the poker, drawing blood, sending his father reeling, his head
cracking on the stone floor. Catherine followed into the hall, she caught at him, tried to stop him as he ran past her and
out the door into the garden.

Catherine ran to Ralph. She lifted his head from the floor. She saw his eyes open wide in rage and knew that this was not
hers to stop, that it would play itself out to an end she didn’t want and couldn’t have imagined. Ralph got to his feet, Catherine
begging him to stop, now, to stop before it was too late, but he didn’t hear her or wouldn’t hear her, and he followed Antonio
into the garden and beyond, catching and beating him. Antonio never made a sound. He stood and ran and was caught by his father
and was beaten the way he had been beaten so often as a boy, except that this time he was guilty and filled with sin and horror,
and they both knew it.

Down the long meadow they fought, Antonio fighting back with whatever he could find—sticks, rocks—hurting Ralph, drawing blood
from his head. But Ralph wouldn’t be stopped, as he used his fists to beat back the memory of the wife who had used him, the
child who had run away, the days spent in the idleness of love while his own father lay dying, the mother who had buried the
needle in his palm. In his fury, all the rage of all the years came pouring out.

Catherine was standing on the broad stone terrace, afraid to go any farther, afraid to interfere, knowing that however it
played out, the end was already decided. Mrs. Larsen was standing beside her now, flour in her hair. Catherine could see every
detail of what was happening, every detail of the field, the Arabian standing in the short grass, its head down, then up in
alarm as the two men passed, screaming and fighting.

They came to the pond, and Antonio skidded out onto the ice and stood like a bull in the ring, wounded, bleeding, tears still
running down his face. There was no more fight in him. He had come to the end of his strength, the end of his hatred, the
end of his regret, and he stood in the center of the pond, on the black ice, waiting to be killed. He thought of the days
in heaven, he thought of his reunion with his mother, he thought of the incredible pain of dying, the physical pain the body
could stand before it gave out, until the irrevocable blow was mercifully given and darkness fell.

Ralph paused at the edge of the pond. He was bleeding, too, from a cut on his head, and his hands were broken, the pain shooting
up his arms. He found too that his anger had spent itself, that while the unforgivable things were still unforgivable, and
the terror still terrifying, he had no more stomach for the rest. He thought of the accounts in the newspaper, the suicides,
the murders, and the corpses, and he found that the living were more beautiful than the dead, that in the end, something must
be saved, even if that meant it also had to be endured. Antonio would go away. Antonio would never be seen again and would
die alone with his guilt and shame and memories, but there would be no corpse to carry to the graveyard, not today. There
would be no white, still flesh in his house, not anymore. He would mourn his loss, but he would, in secret, still love his
son and send him money, and when he died, the son would be sent for, and would stand by his father’s grave and remember this
day as though it had happened to somebody else a long time ago.

Then they heard the crack. A white jagged line shot through the black ice and Antonio went down, into the icy water, under
the ice. He came up under the ice, no air to breathe, his head hitting, his blood mingling with the black water.

Antonio struggled, but he couldn’t see his way out, and he floated into unconsciousness, into the peaceful cold of the black
water, his body showing dimly beneath the surface of the ice.

Ralph Truitt howled in pain, and he tried to get out to his boy, but the ice gave way around him and he floundered in the
frigid water. He ran to the barn where he found a pole and a rope, and he raced back to the water, trying to save him, trying
to save the years and the days, not knowing or admitting that Antonio was already dead, already gone, the plumes of blood
now visible under the ice, surrounding his dead body, floating, arms at his sides as though he were flying, head down as though
he were looking from a great height on the small earth beneath him.

The pole and the rope were useless, and as his son lay all night under the ice, Ralph was inconsolable. He slept alone. He
wouldn’t speak. He ate nothing.

Catherine couldn’t sleep. She walked the halls of the huge house, looking at the pictures, running her hands over the furniture,
finally going into Antonio’s rooms and packing up his things in trunks. She stripped the sheets from his bed and smelled in
them the rich scent of her old lover, and she wept until there weren’t any more tears. Then, finally, she went and lay down
on the narrow bed in the perfect playroom and slept.

They had to get men to come in the morning from town and pull Antonio from the water, his pristine shirt still bravely white
over his chest. He was long and narrow and light as a boy. His black hair lay back in the cart as they pulled him away, and
it froze to his scalp in the morning light and the warming wind.

Ralph would have forgiven him. He would have taken his son in his arms and said, hush, hush now, it’s over now. There is no
more to happen, no more that can happen. The story, the old story has come to an end. He would have put his mouth to his son’s
and breathed over and over until the warm breath filled his son’s lungs, and his son’s eyes opened and looked at him and trusted
him.

But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio
and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as
people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they
had never had.

It was just a story of how the bitter cold gets into your bones and never leaves you, of how the memories get into your heart
and never leave you alone, of the pain and the bitterness of what happens to you when you’re small and have no defenses but
still know evil when it happens, of secrets about evil you have no one to tell, of the life you live in secret, knowing your
own pain and the pain of others but helpless to do anything other than the things you do, and the end it all comes to.

It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not
undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart. It was a story of poison, poison that causes you
to weep in your sleep, that comes to you first as a taste of ecstasy. It was a story of people who don’t choose life over
death until it’s too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child’s toy in a
dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt
themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged
by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst,
most misshapen life from despair.

It was just a story about despair.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

His coffin seemed so large to Catherine. It was impossible to believe that his beautiful body was shut inside it, locked away
from the light and the air forever. “Every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,” the poet had said. “Whoever is not
in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.” She felt the giddy sense of being alive in the presence of the
dead.

Two days had passed. She stood now in the ruins of the garden she hoped to build. The high walls cut off her view of the rest
of the world; there was still snow in the corners of the garden, and the fallen statues were glazed with ice. It seemed ten
degrees colder here than in the rest of the world, although the back of the house was splendid in the western sun. She could
barely remember how all this had begun.

She had wanted something, and she had set out to get it, clear of her purpose and sure in her actions. But it had gotten confused,
confused in the mass of the ordinary, confused in the way people live, in the way the heart attracts and repels the things
it wants and fears. Her own heart had gone out in directions she never imagined, her hopes had become pinned to the things
she would never have allowed.

She wore the blue wool dress she had been finishing when Antonio died. His hands had felt the cloth around her body. She stood,
severe and simple, in the middle of an old garden in the hidden back of a remarkable house. Antonio was dead. A whole life
was dead to her.

She had no idea how it would turn out. Truitt had not spoken to her since the death, and she had not interfered with his profound
grief. They ate together at the long table, but there was no discussion, no reading of poetry after supper, no sumptuous feast
of flesh in the dark. She had picked for herself a small and insignificant bedroom, and retired there to weep in private for
all she had lost.

She was afraid. She was afraid for the rest of her life. When Truitt disposed of her, as she supposed he would, she would
have nowhere to go. She didn’t want to end like Emilia, alone in a filthy house. She didn’t want to end like Alice, dying
in the snow in an alley, remembering how nice it had once been, glad to have the burden of an exhausting life lifted from
her, abandoned even by the angels and laughing at the death squeezing her with cold fingers by the throat. She had no one
in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before.

The memory of what she had done with her days and nights seemed unthinkable. They came to her, those days and nights, like
the pages of a calendar being flipped by a child, a blur of days and months and years. Had she gone to the theater? Had she
written coquettish letters in a fine hand, the lavender-scented ink staining the sleeve of a ruffled gown from Worth in Paris?
Had she turned away in bed from men so that she wouldn’t see the money left on a bedside table? It wasn’t possible. Yet she
couldn’t deny it—every bad memory, every loss of faith, had brought her the long way from where she had been to where she
was.

It was obviously done with Truitt, Antonio had seen to that, his last act of cruelty. There was no way to judge what the depth
of his sorrow would drive him to do and she stood, knowing she had done wrong but unable to imagine the consequences. He couldn’t
stay silent. The truth was too blatant to ignore, and he had been through it before. Perhaps it was simple weariness that
had kept him from striking her when he turned from the frozen pond, the still meadow and the rearing Arabian and Antonio gone.

She had something she wanted to say to him, not about the life which was growing inside her, stronger and stronger every day,
but about the virtues of his heart, about the years he had waited in patient humiliation for happiness to find him, about
how he had set out to build a small kind of happiness and been horribly deceived. There was no apology she could make. She
had known more than he did, and she had used that knowledge to ruin his life, again, the one thing he had guarded himself
so carefully against.

She didn’t know where he was in the house. She hadn’t seen him since lunch. He retired to his study, or to the blue bedroom,
and she had no way of knowing what he did or what he thought about. His silence was suffocating to her, his distance unbearable.
She would die for him if her death would do him any good. But it wouldn’t do anything except add to the anguish of events
that he had never anticipated.

She had never before had anything to hold on to, nothing to root her to a place or a time, not until Truitt. And she had brought
harm to him, in the belief that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed
to kill him without realizing that he would die. She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind
a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the
thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made
her immeasurably sad.

Somewhere, for those other people she so often thought about, there was the comfort of continuance and of habit. She realized
it wasn’t easy. The winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air. Even in the country the madness of
the time would not leave people untouched. Throughout her life, people came and went, some amusing, most not, but their leaving
was no more surprising to her than their coming. Truitt had arrived, and leaving him now would be the end of comfort for Catherine
Land.

She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She wasn’t cold, not yet, and the house looked warm as the lights began to come
on, Mrs. Larsen moving slowly, room to room. Mrs. Larsen had known Antonio since he was a baby. She had watched him go into
the ground next to his sister and turned away as though it were the most natural thing in the world. For her, life went on,
dinners got made, lights got turned on, and that was the way you got from one day to the next. Habit saved her from grief,
from horror at her own husband’s sudden insanity, from the ache of watching a young man die whose sweetness had left the earth
long before his body.

It was four o’clock, and everything around her stood perfectly still. The wind died, and the animals in the field, even the
gray Arabian, stood to watch as the light slanted suddenly into the prism of evening. The large facade of the house, with
its imposing windows and its classical statues spaced along the edge of the roof, lit up golden and hazy and ancient. It was
the hour at which she had arrived. Her discarded dress. Her lost jewels, now so trivial. Truitt standing on the platform in
a black coat with a fur collar in the howling snow. The startled deer and the runaway horses. Just as everything waited—for
the end of winter, for the beginning of spring.

She moved her foot and looked down. The grass under her shoe turned green as she watched, and it grew away from her, grew
greening until the whole of the patch where she stood was green and clipped and glowing in the golden light. The green wonder
of the world filled her garden and spread out from her feet wherever she walked.

It moved away from her, and she stepped back. Everywhere she placed her foot turned green and lush. The parterre grew rich
with the odors of rosemary and sage, clipped into globes between a lover’s knot of box and yew, and lavender, the long spikes
with their purple heads as still as the rest.

The beds along the old brick walls still lay brown and tangled, but as she walked toward them spreading green from the hem
of her dress, the old canes of the roses began to uncurl themselves, the dark waxy foliage began to make its first appearance.
The tiny snowdrops and crocus sprouted along the edge of the beds, white and yellow and purple, the hellebores and then the
narcissi, the poetic Acteon and the rich yellows and pale yellows of King Alfred. The flowers appeared and the names came
back to her from the long afternoons in the library, those hours of rest from her exertions with Antonio.

He was a dessert that was too rich, but she had run to him from the time he was hardly more than a boy, the mixture of beauty
and arrogance, the tenderness and charm which cost him so much now stilled forever, buried beneath the black earth, already
frozen over again. She wept for how cold he would be. It was not his fault. So little that happened was anybody’s fault.

The lilacs bloomed, blue and white, and the air grew soft with their perfume, the gentle swaying of their heavy-headed flowers,
and the irises with their sculptured heads, blue and yellow and indigo and brown.

The tulips shot up, the Asian flower, the flower of mania, with many colors and shapes, some with speckled leaves and sharp
pointed crimson petals with indigo eyes, some yellow, some white, some pale pink and green, some variations which came only
once and never reappeared.

The foxgloves began to appear, shooting up spikes which opened into many bell-shaped flowers that hung their heads along the
stems. The peony bushes came into bloom, and then came their rich Chinese blossoms, many petaled, the size of tea plates,
heavy with moisture, pinks and whites.

She swept out her hand, over the painted hostas and dianthus and sweet alyssum, the sumptuous Chinese lilies with their splendid
colors, suddenly filling the air with a perfume that was like a kind of fainting.

The rose canes unwound and thrived, the glossy foliage giving way to bud and bloom, the old roses, the old names. Mme. Hardy,
the sumptuous pure white moss rose, and silvery pink La Noblesse. Old Velvet, the color of blood, of Antonio’s blood; Clifton
Moss, the resplendent pristine white of his shirt, purity and violence mixed together. The brilliant Fantin Latour rose up
and flowered, the old French roses, the double Pellison, the bright crimson Henri Martin, Leda, with crimson markings on the
edge of white petals.

There was no sound. There was no shift in the light. Everything was still.

The trellises straightened, and the climbing roses stood tall, twining up and around, mixing the thorny canes with clematis,
purple and white.

The statues righted themselves, the classical figures with their sinuous curves, patinaed with age and moss, and the grotesques
which hung at the four corners of the garden, which guarded the way in and out.

She had never seen anything so beautiful. The secret garden made her weep with the beauty of all that was living. It would
last long after she died. Now and then, one of the roses would release a shower of petals that fell prettily through the golden
light, until the ground beneath the climbers splayed against the wall was carpeted with the fragrant petals, the rich sweet
and peppery smell filling the air, perfuming even the fabric of her dress.

The garden was perfect. The garden was her glory. It had come from nothing except the earth; it grew wherever she walked,
wherever she turned her gaze. It would fill the house with vase after vase of flowers, so that their days would be perfumed.
Truitt would ask her the names and she would reel them off and tell him about their histories, of the tulips brought from
Asia Minor, to illuminate the sultan’s nights, the jeweled earrings and the candled turtles. She would put together bouquets
and take them to the town, to girls getting married, bringing them still dewy on the wedding morning, the stephanotis, the
white roses and the lilies.

The light shifted from golden to pale yellow and then to gray blue, but the flowers seemed to glow more as the light faded,
as though each petal were illuminated from within, until her little square was filled with light and fragrance and gaiety
that all of Saint Louis couldn’t match. Each rose, each bloom was a perfect masterpiece of kindness.

It was almost dark, and the darkest flowers vanished into the twilight, even as the pale white and palest pink roses seemed
to give out a richer fragrance. The first star appeared above the brick wall.

The star brightened and was joined by other, paler stars as the dark deepened into night. She heard her name and turned toward
the golden brightness of the house.

“Catherine.”

She turned and Truitt was standing on the steps. He was still wearing the black suit he had worn to the funeral, a band of
black crepe around his arm. She turned away, her long dress sweeping the ground, and the garden was vanished, had gone away,
its beds a mess of old and dying flowers, its branches bare, the roses all thorns and the limes and yews a tangle of ruined
wood. The garden waited, as it had waited for twenty years.