A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Alice.

When Catherine Land was eight years old, after her mother had died of influenza and Alice was just old enough to walk, her father lost all reason. He couldn’t bear the sunlight, couldn’t bear the feel of clothing on his skin, couldn’t bear the taste of the saliva in his mouth when it wasn’t being burned by cheap liquor. He lost his business, he lost his friends.

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 gros-grain 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.”

But she couldn’t forget Alice, and, in the end, she found her. She stood in her new fur coat against a wall and howled like the wind. A solemn little girl took her by the hand and led her to the end of the street.

She was finishing off a drunken sailor under a streetlight at midnight in the snow while people passed by and threw pennies and nickels on the cobblestones. When she was finished, she spit on the street, on the sailor’s shoes, and he staggered away without even closing his pants. Alice looked up and saw Catherine, then calmly leaned over and began to pick up the change in the dark.

“I don’t want you here.”

“I’ve come to take you… to take you someplace nice.”

“I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to know.”

“I have money. I have money for you.” She reached into her purse.

“I don’t want it. What would I do with it?”

“I’ve come here for you. Let’s go to your… to where you live so we can talk.” She looked at the row of shanties, lean-tos with candles guttering out in the late dark. “Which one?”

“Whichever one’s empty. I don’t want you here.” She was counting her money. “Some rich man, I guess.”

“Yes. He’s rich.”

“In here.” Alice ducked into an empty shanty, no more than boards stacked against a wall. Catherine ducked and followed her in. Alice reached in her pocket, pulled out a two-penny candle stolen from a church and lit it with a trembling hand. “There. Home.”

In the flickering light, Alice’s face looked girlish again, softer, golden. The skin across her cheekbones had the tightness of somebody who was going to die. It didn’t matter from what.

Catherine thought of the sweet dresses she had made, the smocking and the lace and the long pleated hems. She thought of the homework, Alice’s beautiful and careful penmanship, the safe rooms of Philadelphia. She remembered the tiny dog in Gramercy Park. All lost. So much losing in this world. So much loss.

“I’ll get you doctors. I’ll take you home and…”

“Oh. A home. I bet you got a lot of money in that purse.”

“I’ll give you some. I’ll give you anything to come with me.”

Alice leaned back against the wall of the shack and rolled a cigarette. Her hands trembled with the cold. She lit the cigarette and looked at Catherine. “You know, I feel so lazy. I work so hard all the time and I don’t feel tired, I can’t sleep at night, but I feel lazy. Like you could do anything to me and I’d be too lazy to care. But I can’t go with you. I don’t know where it is, but I know it’s too far.”

“I’d take you on a train.”

Her face turned hard again. It was just a flicker, her hope, and then it went out. Her cigarette sparked in the darkness. “Catherine. Try to understand something. I never liked you. I told you once. I’m telling you now. Not ever.”

“I…”

“You could take me away, you could take me to Paris, to some spa far away and make me well, and I’d still be bad.”

“There was never a moment when I didn’t love you.”

“Like some little doll baby.”

“You were all I had in the world. All I loved. I wanted things to be different for you. Sweeter.”

The candle flickered out. They sat in darkness except for the glowing tip of Alice’s cigarette. Catherine wanted to reach out to her, but she didn’t. “Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

Alice hesitated, then grabbed Catherine’s hand, caressed Catherine’s silken skin with her own rough, dirty fingers.

“Sister, sit. I’m sorry. I’m bad and I’m sick and I say things. But just sit by me. I’m never alone, but I always feel so lonely. So far away from everybody. Nobody holds me. Nobody touches me or calls my name. Sit with me until I sleep. That’s all I need, all you need to do. Please.”

“Can’t I take you somewhere? Out of here? To a hotel? A hot bath? Clean sheets?”

“You know, it’s funny. Even if I were well and clean and dressed in a hat and a fine silk dress, I would never leave here. This is all my life is about. I finally found a place I belong.”

Catherine stood, took off her fine fur coat, and laid it over her sister’s body.

“That’s nice,” said Alice. “You always looked out for me.”

“I tried.”

“Why were you so good to me? I didn’t deserve it.”

“You were all I had. I tried to save you from some of the misery.”

“You can’t save anybody. You know that by now.”

Alice closed her eyes, smoothed the fur of her sister’s coat. “I remember the boats. On the river in Philadelphia. The beautiful men rowing, like spiders skating with the tide, the sun on their strong brown shoulders. So quick they were, here and then gone. You think I’ve forgotten, and I’ve tried, but I remember. The beautiful dresses you made, they must have been beautiful, everything you did was beautiful. And the little shoes, the buttonhook. Where are they now? What happened to those things? You were good to me. So good and kind.”

“I haven’t been good or kind. What a pair we are.”

“When I close my eyes, when my head is clear enough, I think you did your best, and I hated you and I was hateful. You were the last nice thing, and I may never see you again and so I say thank you. I’ve never said thank you to anybody, for anything, but I’m saying it to you now.”

“You’re welcome.”

“As though it were ever enough. You should go now. It’s late. It can get pretty rough. Go back to your nice hotel and your rich man. You tried to save me and you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

They sat until the cigarette was gone and Alice was asleep, her money clutched in her hand. Rats crawled around them once the light was out, and the cold came in and the snow came down harder, and Catherine looked at the slim outline of her sister’s face, and she thought her heart would break.

Then she saw it. She saw something descend, an angel was all she could call it, grace made visible, like a mist, like a fog. With golden wings and white hair and white skin the angel floated down, like out of a child’s picture book, like a book of stories from the library, this creature of light and air wafting down from the sky as quiet, as vaporous as breath. She knew this angel, this answered prayer had come to her, and to Alice, and the boards would part and the angel would take her sister in his arms and fly with her around the world, to London and to Rome and to the mountains of South America, the whole brilliant gracious blue spinning mother, and lay Alice softly into a clean white bed with clean white sheets, wholly safe and completely healthy. The angel drew closer. She could hear the soft whoosh of wings, and no other sound but that, the whooshing. She could see the angel’s pure white transparent feet, could feel his warm breath on her frozen cheek.

Then Catherine watched the angel rise into the dark night sky, his arms empty. Alice lay unredeemed, as inert as an abandoned doll. Catherine knew it was too late; there was an abandonment of hope. Her sister couldn’t be saved.

And she knew she couldn’t kill Ralph Truitt. She knew she couldn’t bring harm to one living soul. Not anymore.

The angel was gone, the whooshing only the icy wind off the dirty frozen river, trailing up and into Wild Cat Chute, where Alice Land lay dying.

The snow was falling harder. The cold got through Catherine’s skin and into her bones. She shivered. She opened her sister’s hand and curled into it all the money she had, dollar after dollar, crumpled bills, whore’s money, dirty money, and she closed her sister’s hand around it. She kissed her on the forehead, wet with the sweat of disease, of dissipation and despair. She wiped a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She watched the snow fall through the open roof and onto her fine new black fur coat over her sister’s sleeping body, knowing the money and the coat would both be gone before her sister woke up.

These were the lives they had made, she and Alice. Such things happened.