A Reliable Wife (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

She dressed carefully, and walked downstairs in the silent house. She sat at the spinet, and began to play a Chopin Prelude,
not one of the most difficult ones, very softly, so as not to wake anyone. She could tell he was behind her in the doorway
before he spoke, but his voice startled her all the same.

“That was my wife’s favorite music. She played it over and over.” He looked weak, bent over as though he might be walking
with a cane.

“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

“No, no. I’d like to hear it. Please.”

She played without missing a note, played with, she hoped, a sweetness and simplicity that might seem lack of bravado rather
than lack of skill, and then she rose and sat opposite Ralph in front of the fireplace. He was shockingly pale and seemed
melancholy, perhaps because his grief for his wife had been refreshed by the music.

“My father believed that music was the voice of God.” Catherine spoke quietly, as she might have calmed a frightened dog.
“He was a missionary for God. We traveled the world, Africa, India, China, wherever he was called to spread the word. He died
in China, leaving me and my sister alone.

“He used it to speak to people in lands where they don’t speak English. He believed music was universal, and he believed God
spoke to people through music. He believed I played well.”

She went on to describe the peoples of Africa and China, heathens who had been touched by her awkward playing, and moved by
her father’s sermons and had turned, in the end, to Christianity. Their souls, she said, had been saved from hell.

She made it all up, of course, made it up out of books she had read in the library, the customs of the African tribes, the
strict and brilliant dressing of the women of the Chinese court, their tiny feet and birdlike voices, but she got it right,
every detail, and he sat listening attentively.

When she had finished, run through everything she knew, afraid of having used up her meager store of information too quickly,
he sat still for a moment, and then said, “Who are you?”

“I am Catherine Land. I’m the woman who wrote the letters, not the woman in the photograph, but I wrote the letters. I am
that woman.”

He fiddled with his trousers. He seemed undecided as to what he was going to say.

“I have a story to tell you. We’re going to be married. Whoever you are, whoever you turn out to be. You should know.”

“You said . . . I thought you weren’t sure. You are suspicious. Still.”

“You saved my life. That’s enough. I know what you did for me.” He stared into her eyes. “Everything you did. I was sick,
I was almost dead, but I wasn’t unaware.”

She sat still, her hands in her lap. She looked into his pale eyes.

“You’re not who you said you were,” he said.

“My father said my face was . . . my face was the devil’s handiwork. Meant to do evil. I sent another person’s picture, my
plain cousin India. You didn’t want, or so you said . . . my father . . .” She was helpless.

“Enough. It’s enough. I said we’d be married. You’re here. We will be married.”

They stared at each other, stared at the fire.

“Now listen,” he said softly. “Listen to my life.”

He sat for a long time, staring at the fire.

“Listen to my life.”

He talked for hours. He told her everything. His harsh and bitter childhood. He told her about his mother and the pin and
the raw scraping of his soul during every Sunday sermon, his mother’s eyes on him every minute. He had believed his mother
the way we all believe the people we love when they tell us who we are, believe them because what the beloved says is truth
to us, and he told Catherine all of this. He told her of his dark and tortured desires, desires his mother had seen before
he felt them, seen them in him as a baby, so that she would not pick him up or hold him, even then.

He told her about the death of his brother, his brother’s body in a box in the icehouse, waiting for the ground to thaw before
they could bury him, and told her about the women and Europe and the sensuous rambles in the palaces and the whorehouses.

He made no apologies. He never tilted his head in sentimentality, or paused for her approval or her sympathy, and she never
turned her eyes from his, never wandered around the room or shuffled her feet or asked for a glass of water. She just listened.
It was a life he told her, entire, flawed, scarred with indulgence and self-laceration, but brave, it seemed to her, courageous
at the same time.

He had caused pain, it was true. Who hadn’t? But he had suffered as well. It evened out.

He told her about Emilia, the shocking thunderclap of his love for her. He told Catherine how pale her skin was, how the flowers
had trembled in her hair, how her pearls lit up her skin with a rosy glow, how she blushed when he spoke in his fragile Italian.
He told Catherine that he had loved Emilia and, because of the awful profundity of his love, he had not answered his father’s
letters or telegrams, and he had missed his father’s death and returned home only in time to kneel at his father’s graveside
in the cold with his pregnant wife.

He told everything. He had never spoken of any of this to anyone, but he told Catherine, because she was going to become his
wife. He felt he owed her at least an album of the past. He tried very hard not to pity himself. He never placed blame, or
accepted it, nor did he ever shirk responsibility. He described to her the smell of jasmine in the air, the rustle of silk
in a Florentine palazzo, the dust drifting from the ancient, ruined curtains, but told her without poetry, simply described
these postcards from his past, and she took in the information as though she were reading quietly in a public library.

“I wasn’t a good son. I was careless, and profligate in ways I can’t imagine now. And I wasn’t a good husband or father, although
I tried to be.”

Something about his candor made her want to run away. She didn’t want to know this story. She didn’t want to hear the end.
It made him too real. She didn’t want to think of him as a person. She didn’t want to hear his heartbeat.

“My wife hated this house. Well, you can see . . . It wasn’t what she was used to. And she hated my mother and my mother hated
her, and she was pregnant. I built her another house.”

Catherine’s attention had wandered. Now it shifted back.

“It isn’t far from here. It took a long time. There was an architect brought from Italy, couldn’t speak a word of English
as far as I could tell, and he was followed by a boatload of dago workmen, and then the child was born, Franny.”

His hands worked nervously. His voice caught, just for a second, but he went on.

“Francesca, my wife called her. She was as beautiful as . . . nothing. As water. As anything on this earth. Babies are, of
course. She was beautiful, and tiny. My wife carried her, every day, in a carriage, over there to where this thing was being
built, this palace, and they all chatted in Italian until it was dark, and then Emilia would come home and she was at least
partially happy, at least for awhile.

“I wrote checks. So much money, I couldn’t tell you. Money going for marble stairs and fancy china—you’ve seen some of it—and
silverware and beds from Italy that belonged to the pope or the king of somewhere, and curtains and pictures. She was happy.
Emilia was happy, like a little dog with a big bone.

“And then we moved into the house. I didn’t know where to sit. I had to ask one of the maids where I was supposed to sleep.
I rarely slept beside Emilia after we moved. She had her own rooms. Two years, it took.

“Franny got scarlet fever. Babies do. A lot of babies did, that winter. She was two. The fever lasted five days, and when
it was gone, Franny was gone, too. Or at least her mind was gone. Her body recovered, but her mind had died. I knew that what
I had always feared was true. Desire is poison. Lust was a disease that had slaughtered my child. She was sweet and simple
and beautiful and blank as clear water. She loved the colored glass in the windows. She loved the way the maids would fuss
over her, dressing her in these unbelievable getups. This sewing woman came from France and lived in the house, and all she
did from the time the sun came up until it went down was make these costumes for Emilia and my little girl.

“The house was always full of foreigners. It made Emilia happy, and they came from everywhere. She never spent one minute
with her daughter. Brought her downstairs once in a while, dressed like a princess in a fairy story, showed her off like a
monkey.”

Catherine saw herself wandering the corridors of the house he described, smiling at her guests, who bowed to her as she passed,
dukes and duchesses and rich people and actresses, people who owned railroads and Arabian horses just for riding, just for
show, touching every object on every table with the certain knowledge that she owned it all.

And somewhere in the dark the dense child, and somewhere in the light the clatter of fancy music on a piano.

“She brought a piano teacher from Italy, another Italian, I didn’t even ask his name. I never knew until it was too late that
it was finally one too many. We had another child, a boy, Antonio she called him, Andy. He was dark, as she was, of course,
they all are, and he was like some rare bird she’d gone to the Amazon to get. A boy shouldn’t be beautiful. So much black
hair. So handsome, even when he was four. We lived like that, in that house, for eight years.

“Of course she was with him. Had been with him. The piano teacher. I should have known. I thought I knew everything, but I
didn’t know that. Imagine. The whispering and chatting and the walks in the garden, always speaking Italian, the man sitting
at the table with us, every night, eating dinner like a guest, when I wrote him a check every week.

“I never saw it. Never saw it coming. She was a countess. I saw that she was happy, and it was costing fortunes. Yet my little
girl, my sweet little thing, was growing every day, her hands reaching for the light like a blind person, feeling her way.

“And after Antonio . . . Andy was born, she slept apart from me, my wife. In her own rooms every night. She never came to
me. I never touched her. She would stay up all night, playing cards with whores and fools, and laughing at me. Sometimes I
would pass her on my way down to breakfast, just coming upstairs, a champagne glass still in her hand. Smoking cigarettes.

“Six years I put up with it. I never touched her. Then I saw them. My wife. The music teacher. I walked into her apartment.
Her rooms. I just wanted to ask a question. Imagine. They didn’t even look particularly surprised, and they didn’t look like
it was all that much fun, but they’d been doing it for years by then. Since before my boy was born, you see? It was an old
routine. I remember how at home he looked, like I was the interloper and he was where he should be, between my wife’s naked
legs. And everybody knew. Everybody knew but me.

“I beat her, and I nearly killed him, and I threw them out. I drove them from my house. My little girl spread her arms wide
and watched her mother go. I fired the servants, the maids and the gardeners and the drivers in their braided coats. I kept
Mrs. Larsen, who was only a young girl then. She’s not as old as she looks, I guess, but this was a long time ago, now. I
kept the house exactly the way it was because I didn’t want Franny to lose one more thing, but nobody came anymore, nobody
was asked and nobody came.

“I hated Antonio. My own son and I couldn’t go near him. He favored his mother, and as much as I tried, I saw her face and
her skin and her eyes, and I only saw in him a lying, scheming memento of her. It wasn’t fair, I know. I know it wasn’t. I
beat him and I yelled at him until he looked at me with a single hatred that never changed, and no, I don’t blame him for
that.

“After a long time, my little girl died. She caught influenza, and I held her in my arms and she died, and the day she died
I walked out of the door of that house, and locked it behind me. I left everything in that house, all that gorgeous trash
I had brought from all over the world, just to see a smile on my wife’s face, and I never went back. The clothes are still
hanging in the closets. I brought some of the plates, you’ve seen them. Some silver. Little things. Expensive things, but
little. Except that sofa. Imagine. I had gotten used to it. A piece of yellow silk furniture. The feel of a fork.

“I had nowhere to go. I came here. My mother took one look and went to live with her sister in Kansas, and I never saw her
again. And I lived in this house, and I beat my own boy until he was bloody, and the minute he was old enough he ran away.
One minute he was here, so handsome, fourteen by then, playing those Italian things on that old piano just to make me mad.
I can see where he was sitting. I told him his mother was dead, burned to death in a fire in Chicago. It was a lie, but I
told him, and I told him I was glad, that the news of her death gave me the first free breath I’d had in seven years, and
the next night he was gone.”