A Reliable Wife (5 page)

Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow jerky movements of
the motes that floated across her pupils. They had amazed her, as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved,
floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on,
free and alone.

She knew no other way to be. Her schemes, she saw now, were listless fantasies, poorly imagined, languidly acted, and so doomed
to failure, again and again.

She rose to her feet and wandered through the rooms of Truitt’s house. There were not many of them, and they were all alike,
equally immaculate, furnished with the same odd blend of the rustic and the magnificent. The dining room was tiny, but the
table was elaborately set for dinner for two. She picked an ornate fork from the table; it was almost as long as her forearm
and astonishing in its weight. The brilliant polish caught the light as she turned it over to read the maker: Tiffany & Co.,
New York City. She felt she had never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

“Larsen’s with him.” Catherine dropped the fork as Mrs. Larsen came into the room. “I’ve made supper. It’s maybe not spoilt
too bad, and you might as well eat.” She adjusted the fork Catherine had dropped, so that it was in perfect alignment with
the other, equally massive utensils.

“I was just . . .”

“Looking. I saw. Sit. It’ll just be a minute. You must be starved.”

Catherine sat at the table. She felt she was about to cry, for no reason except that it was a long way back and she was alone.
She tried to fix her hair, then let it go.

The soup was clear and hot, the lamb cooked in a sauce that was both delicious and exotic, all of it accomplished and fine
in a way that would have been admired in any restaurant in any city she had ever been to, and Mrs. Larsen served it with a
simplicity and finesse that surprised and pleased her. She had thought she wasn’t hungry, but she ate everything, including
a dessert made of light meringues floating in glistening, silky custard.

The beautiful plates came and went, the utensils were used until none were left, and finally, Mrs. Larsen stood in the kitchen
doorway and they both listened to the clumping of Larsen’s boots as Truitt and Larsen walked back and forth, back and forth
in an upstairs bedroom, first across a rug and then on the floor and then back to the rug.

“That was a fine dinner.”

“Well, I’d hoped for more of a celebration, but . . .”

The footsteps continued.

“But there’ll be other nights, I guess. Miss?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you’ll be happy here. I truly do. It wasn’t much of a welcome, but I do, we do, welcome you.”

Catherine blushed, embarrassed. “You’re a wonderful cook.”

“Some people have one gift, some another.” She made rough sewing gestures with her hands. “Me, I was always a mess with a
needle. But put me in a kitchen, I know where I am. Even after a long while, and it’s been a while, I know what to do.”

Catherine stood, and they stared awkwardly at each other. Catherine was suddenly exhausted. She looked at the ceiling, the
clodding boots.

“Will they be all right?”

“Larsen’ll look after him. They’ve known each other since they were boys. Truitt’s safe enough.”

Mrs. Larsen began to clear away the dishes.

“I’ll help you. I’m used to keeping myself.”

“You should rest. Go to bed if you want.”

“Where do I . . .”

“Sleep? I’ll show you.” Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, then licking her fingers to put out the sputtering candles, extinguishing
the sparkle on the silver, she led Catherine out of the dining room, picked up her case and started up the stairs. “It’s a
nice room. You can see the river, and you can see over to the little house where Larsen and I live.”

She opened the door to a graceful bedroom, the simple bed laid with good linens, the tester of the delicate four-poster hung
with lace.

She put the suitcase on the bed, went to the dressing table and poured water from a pitcher into a porcelain bowl. She went
to the bathroom and brought back a beautiful cut crystal glass of cold water, which she set neatly by the bed.

“The facilities is down the hall. Indoors. First in the county. I’ve tried to make it nice. I know you come from the city.”

“Nothing so grand.”

“You’d be surprised the number of people don’t know the first thing about how to use all those forks. You can tell the places
a person’s been by the way he eats. You’ve been some fancy places.”

Mrs. Larsen left her. Catherine unpacked her things, hanging her pathetic, ugly dresses in the small closet, laying away her
underclothes in a bureau. This would be home, she thought. These are my things and I am putting them away in my new home.
The last thing in her suitcase was a small blue medicine bottle, and she sat for a long time in a chair by the window looking
at it, before she put it back in a silk pocket inside the suitcase and slid the whole thing under the bed.

She opened the heavy curtains and immediately felt the pressing cold of the air outside. Tired as she was, it was a pleasant
sensation, bracing, reminding her of her own flesh. The few lights from the house lit up the constant swirl of the snow outside.
She sat in a small blue velvet chair and watched the storm, and drifted in and out of a light sleep accompanied by the clumping
of Larsen’s boots in the room next door. Her own life was like that of a stranger to her.

Finally, the footsteps stopped. She waited until the house was completely quiet, and then she stood, and stepped out of her
ruined skirt, undid the thirteen buttons of her awful dress. She could smell the hard iron smell of Truitt’s blood on her
clothes, on her skin, and she used a linen cloth and the warm water in the nightstand washbasin to bathe as best she could.

She stepped into a plain nightgown she had sewn only two days before, and stood, as she so often did, looking at her face
in the oval mirror.

This was not an illusion, here in this house in this storm. This was not a game. This was real. Her heart felt, all at once,
that it was breaking, and tears stung her eyes.

It could have been different, she thought. She might have been the woman who dandled a child on her knee, or took food to
a neighbor whose house had been visited by illness or fire or death. She might have smocked dresses for her daughters, read
to them on nights like this. Worlds of fantasy and wonder on a night when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
She couldn’t exactly imagine the circumstances under which any of this might have come to pass, but, like an actress who sees
a role she might have played go to someone with less talent, Catherine felt somehow the loss of a role more graceful, more
suited to the landscape of her heart.

Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims.
Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might come to it. She had no way of knowing, of course,
whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier’s severed arm
that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined
was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming
or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? And why was she left out of the whole
sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?

She wanted, for once in her life, to be at the center of the stage. The stakes therefore were higher in the game with Ralph
Truitt than she had realized. Because what she was, standing before the mirror in a lonely farmhouse, was, in fact, all she
was.

She was a lonely woman who answered a personal advertisement in a city paper, a woman who had traveled miles and miles on
somebody else’s money. She was neither sweet nor sentimental, neither simple nor honest. She was both desperate and hopeful.
She was like all those women whose foolish dreams made her and her friends howl with hopeless derision, except that now she
was looking into the face of such a woman and it didn’t seem funny at all.

She turned out the overhead light, so that the room danced in the light from a single candle on the nightstand. She drew the
heavy curtains against the storm, and slipped into the comfort of the ladylike bed.

As she leaned forward to blow out the candle, there was a sharp knock. She stepped quickly across the cold floor in the pitch-black
darkness, and opened the door to find the pale, haggard face of Mrs. Larsen.

“He’s very hot,” she said.

CHAPTER FIVE

After a long time, they raised him again, the cooling water running in thick rivers from the nightshirt that pressed on his
flesh like a second skin. Then they stripped him, roughly toweled his naked body and dressed him again, and helped him to
freshly laid sheets in his father’s bed. They had seen his body, which no woman had seen for almost twenty years.

He was never alone, never without a woman’s hand on his arm or his forehead or his shivering chest. They held his hand. They
made poultices of snow and laid them on his head, waiting for the fever to break.

They held his head and chin as they tried to spoon dark broth into his slack mouth, and he could hear their quiet voices,
but as though from far away. He was ill. He was not young, his flesh no longer sweet. The women touched him. They saw his
body. They came and went, quietly, far away, except they never left together. There was always a woman by his side, a woman’s
hand on his flesh.

He had not thought. Not true. He had never
not
thought of it, not one minute in all those years, but the weight and intensity of his thinking had stripped from the idea
all possibility of its ever being a reality, this touch, and this faraway sibilance of the women’s voices. They were real,
one known to him, one unknown, and they were there at every minute. In the dark. In the dim daylight. Every minute.

Mrs. Larsen prayed over him. The other one did not.

Their fingers touched him. Their fingers lifted the hair back from his eyes, held his waist when he coughed into the handkerchief
they held gently against his mouth. They heard his groans.

They held packs of ice against his head, against the back of his neck. They wrapped his long legs tightly in heavy wool blankets,
wrapped his whole body until he could not move a muscle.

So long in this house, and in the fever, so many lives around him. His mother and his father. His brother. His wife—although
she had hated the house so much that even her ghost would not walk the floors. His children, gone into a void deeper than
the blizzard.

It had been a dark house when he was a child, when he and his dead brother had played in the attic. He was twelve years old
before he realized that his father was rich, sixteen before he realized the immeasurable breadth and depth of the wealth,
how far it stretched, how many lives were held in the grip of his father’s money.

Yet still they lived on at the farm they began in, never changing one thing for a more luxurious thing, never painting the
place, never planting a rose. They lived like poor people. It was immigrant country, and they lived like immigrants.

Inside the house, there was no mention or show of wealth. There was only God, the stern and terrible God his mother spoke
of day and night, the God who burned, the God who blamed, the God who filled his mother’s brilliantly focused mind even while
she slept beside the husband she considered no better than a demon, his mind on sex, on touching her, on getting inside her
and wallowing there like a boat in shallow water, his mind on money and how to make more and more of it.

They went to meetings, one in the morning, one in the evening. Different churches on different Sundays. The services lasted
for hours. His father dozed. His mother lit up like a fire. She said her husband’s soul was a lost cause.

They prayed at breakfast and every other meal. They prayed at odd times, when the children had been reckless or rude or prideful,
prayed as though hell were right next door instead of far beneath the earth.

His father did not believe. His father winked. He was damned, although he didn’t seem to know it, or at least it didn’t seem
to matter. His mother worked on him in public, and worked harder in secret, sure from the first breath he ever took that he
was lost.

His mother was sewing at the kitchen table. “What is hell like?” Ralph asked her, and she paused and said to him, “Hold out
your hand,” and he did. He could feel the heat from the kitchen stove; he could see the deep gouges in the kitchen table from
which his mother scrubbed away, every day, every trace of human hunger. His hand was steady and his trust was infinite. He
was six years old.

“What is hell like?” His mother’s hand flew through the stifling air of the kitchen as her son stared into her piercing eyes.
She stabbed her needle deep into the soft part of his hand, at the base of his thumb, and the pain tore through his arm and
into his brain, but he did not move, just watched his mother’s fierce and steady eyes.

She twisted the needle. He could feel it scrape against bone. It sent a pain like nettles in his bloodstream, through every
vein of his body, straight to his heart.

Her voice was patient and loving and sad, without anger. “That’s what hell is like, son. But it’s like that all the time.
Forever
.”

And she took the needle out of his hand without ever taking her eyes from his and wiped it on the apron she always wore except
to church. She calmly resumed her sewing. He did not cry, and they never spoke of it again. He never told his father or his
brother or anybody. And he never for one moment ever forgot or forgave what she had done.

“The pain of hell never heals. It never stops burning for one second. It never goes away.”

He never forgot it because he knew she was right. Whatever happened or did not happen to his faith after that night, whatever
happened as his hand got infected and swelled until yellow pus oozed from the wound and then got better, whatever happened
as the scar rusted over from deep purple to a faint and tiny dot that only he could see, he knew she was right. And he never,
for one moment, from that night on, he never breathed a breath without hating her.

Later, years later, when he was leaving the house to go to college, she said to him, “You were born a wicked child, so wicked
I wouldn’t pick you up for a year. And you’ll grow into a wicked adult. Born wicked. Die wicked.” Then she turned and slammed
the door, leaving him alone on the wide porch with his new leather valise, and he wondered how she knew, for he knew she was
right.

He saw women on the street, and they were not like his mother. Their graceful necks rose from their high-collared dresses
like fountains of cream; their skirts smelled of iron and naphtha and talc. When he walked downtown with his father, they
would sometimes take his hand or touch his chin, and an electric current would pass through him, so exactly like, yet so different
from, the pain of his mother’s needle. There was a luxuriousness in this other pain, and though he was only seven or eight,
he suddenly felt languid and hot and helpless before any woman, and he didn’t know where the feeling came from and he didn’t
know what to do with it, but he knew it was all he ever wanted.

The young girls he knew and was occasionally allowed to speak to were different from these women. Once he touched his finger
to the finger of a neighbor’s daughter, older than he was, and he felt a sudden tingling rush to his groin, and he withdrew
his hand quickly. These young girls, the ones his age, their skin was milk, not cream, and their scent was floral, without
the metallic aftertaste that made the sweetness sharp, that made the sweetness burn him to the heart. At night, in bed, he
kissed the skin of his own forearm, imagining he was kissing one of the women his father knew.

In his dreams, as now in his fever, the women came to him, held him in their arms. He was never apart from them. When he sat
in church or ran across the schoolyard with the other boys, he knew at every minute where they stood and whether or not they
were watching him.

He never spoke of it. He never talked to his brother, or his father. He knew they knew. He knew that when his mother read
the long passages from the Bible which they suffered through every night and morning, he knew that his father and his brother
knew as well as he what the stories were really about.

They were about how the world began with one man’s hunger for one woman, how the serpent’s venom ran through every man’s veins
so that he could not forget himself in work or sleep, but only in a woman’s arms.

Lust. It was about lust, and lust was his sin, and hell would be his natural home forever. His manners were perfect; his demeanor
was calm and dignified; his longings were painful beyond endurance.

At fifteen, he would bite his pillow in the dark and silent house, and scream his muffled lust until his throat hurt. His
hands were tired from groping, and eight or ten times a day he would find his hands inside his pants, his pants around his
ankles, his thin hips thrusting into his fist. Afterward, more times than not, he would feel the sharp stab of his mother’s
needle. A pain so severe that sweat would break out on his forehead, his hands grow clammy and the small of his back damp.
It was a pain that ran upward from his groin through every vein in his body, like the first sting of the nettles. And the
more it happened, the more he hated God.

After that first time, he never touched a girl. He felt that the violence of his desire, the rotted malevolence of his lust
would kill any woman he touched. He believed it literally, and his belief did not waver. He felt he was dying of some disease
that had no symptoms and that he could not name, but he knew it would kill others as well as himself as sure as typhoid, as
sure as a knife to the heart.

He was born wicked. He would die wicked. Sometimes a woman would touch him by accident, would sit with him on a step, for
instance, with a thigh brushing his thigh, and he knew that this woman would die, and he would move his leg, would move away
until he found himself alone in a quiet room, his pants around his ankles, the pleasure followed by the serpent’s certain
fang.

His father was a man. His father had touched his mother and had not died or killed. Still, he knew what he knew.

Everywhere he turned he saw evidence and heard gross rumors that what would surely happen to him was already happening to
others. Women ripped out their insides with knitting needles. Men spat in their wives’ faces and dropped dead of heart attacks.
People photographed their dead babies in tiny coffins; the black silk dresses were stiff as dead flesh. Lust was a sin and
sin was death and he was not alone, but he was in pain, constant pain, and there was no one to tell.

He was mistaken, of course, although he knew it only years later. Almost anyone could have told him he was wrong, if he had
found a way to describe to anyone the terror he felt. If he had found someone to tell. But there were no words for it at the
time, the sure and deadly mark of that serpent’s bite.

He grew tall and handsome. His father was rich, and this he learned not from his mother or father, but from the taunting of
other boys in the schoolyard, in the fact that all the boys he knew had fathers who worked for his father. As strict as mothers
in the town were, any mother would have sold her daughter to Ralph Truitt for a dollar.

His mother prayed over him. His father read to him from the
Morte
D’Arthur
, the old stories of the round table and the Grail, and wanted him to be educated in the city. His sweet brother had neither
the head nor the blood for business, and his father demanded that the empire he was building every day must last after his
death. Ralph understood he was marked for the inheritance.

Ralph didn’t long for his father’s life. He longed for the life of Lancelot du Lac, who woke from a sleep to find four queens
under four silk parasols gazing down upon him. Lancelot’s mother, the Lady of the Lake, sending him into the world to be a
knight, letting him go though she loved him and feared for his soul, explained the difference between the virtues of the heart
and the virtues of the body. The virtues of the body are reserved for those who are fair of face and strong of body, but the
virtues of the heart, being goodness and kindness and compassion, are available to anybody.

Such is the sweetness of boys that Ralph believed these words with all his heart, even as he believed the virtues of goodness
would always be denied to him, and that he would never be tall or handsome or wanted. He felt displaced in his body, homeless
in his heart.

And so, Lancelot left his mother and ventured into the world, where he was strong and brave and utterly helpless in the face
of women. His purity and his strength and beauty and courage were doomed to end in failure and corruption. He would never
see the Holy Grail. Lancelot’s helpless lust destroyed the world, not his strength, and Ralph understood all this as his father
read to him. Ralph felt the hot tears in his eyes.

Lust and luxury. In the end, the virtues of the body came easily to Ralph. Believe what he might, he was tall, and good-looking
and strong and rich. The virtues of the heart were unknown to him, and through his mother’s incessant prayer, he knew, whatever
they were, he would never have them. She sat in a bare church on a plain wooden bench and saw heaven. He sat next to her and
thought of nothing but naked women and rich surroundings, silk parasols and fine carriages and endless pleasure.