A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When it was finally clear to her that Alice was gone forever, had been within reach and had slipped away to despair and death, she lay on her bed in the hotel and wept for two days. She was undone with grief. She wore the plain, austere dresses she had brought from Wisconsin. The maids brought her broth and worried for her, asking if she were sick, changing her sheets, drawing a hot bath for her in the afternoons, plumping her ruined pillows. They fed the bird.

Alice had been her child, her darling. She had lived a part of her life in the hope that things would be different for her, that she would find a nice man and a little house, something normal, nothing grand, and she would be industrious and motherly. She was prepared not to see her; she was prepared for their lives to become unmanageably distinct; but she had never imagined this.

She went to church. She didn’t know how to pray, and she asked one of the fathers to help her. She knelt down, her face pale, and she asked for forgiveness, she asked for some reason to go on, and none came. God, as he had always been, was silent. No angels descended, no honey-haired Christ child, no voices comforted her, no miracle brought her back to life. She was dead, as dead as Alice would be.

The priest blessed her, forgave her sins, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. She was ashamed to tell him she didn’t understand what he was doing, that the act was meaningless to her.

Sometimes she didn’t sleep for days. Sometimes she slept around the clock. She never knew, when she went to bed, whether it would be dark or light out when she woke up.

If it was dark, she would find Antonio. If it was light, she would sit in her room while the maids came and went, reading poetry her husband had given her, the long love poem to everything on the planet, and dreaming of the garden she would make when the spring came.

She wrote Truitt a letter and told him she was coming home, and was deliberately vague about whether she was bringing Antonio along. She told him she hoped his son would be with her, that he seemed to be coming closer to her point of view. She apologized for being away so long. She hoped his health was good, and asked after Mrs. Larsen. She said that she had eaten nothing in Saint Louis half so good as Mrs. Larsen’s cooking, which was, at least in a way, true. She felt as though her life, her old life, were going up in flames in front of her eyes. Then she wrote to Truitt and asked him to send the railroad car.

When the railroad car was waiting in the station, she made the walk one last time through the dusk to Tony Moretti’s. The air had lost the sharp heart of its chill. Winter’s back was broken.

She knocked on Tony’s door, and she found she was trembling, shaking with an old familiar rage. Where was the miracle? Why was she always on the tightrope caught between the beginning and the end?

He was sleek as a tiger, ready for his night. He loathed her. He pitied her. He needed her. He was struck by her calm, the simplicity of her beauty, which he had not noticed before. But she looked full of something, something new.

“I’ve come to tell you something. To ask something.”

“You better come in. At least that.”

It was so simple, and she didn’t know how to tell him. He was the closest she had ever come to having a sweetheart, and she felt an old fondness for him. She saw the open closet, her useless finery still hanging, the hats and bags, the extravagant dresses, and they seemed like things she had worn a long, long time ago. In another life lost to her now. The dresses were just sad reminders, like the dirty plates from a dinner she had relished.

“Release me from my promise. I can’t do it. I won’t.”

“Won’t do what?” He lay back on a long chair, so lean, so muscular and beautiful, his shoes polished and elegant.

“I won’t kill Truitt.”

He smiled. “Yes, you will. Listen to me, Catherine. You mean a lot to me, but not as much as you think. There was a time you were the moon and the stars. Remember? Coming home at dawn, sleeping until the afternoon and making love as the sun went down? My body, your body, bathed in the glow of twilight and Chinese lanterns. You found me in that bar, a tough little boy, and you made me feel graceful and sweet and wild with love. We could have that again. We could have it forever. And we will. Out of this filthy city, away from these cold and foulmouthed people. We will have a life of music and luxury and endless delight. You made a promise. For us. I hold you to it.”

“I can’t. He’s a good man, Tony.”

“So you love him now?”

“No. I don’t know if I love anybody, but if I do, I love you. It seems I’ve loved you forever.”

“Then why?”

“He went into this with an honest heart, and he doesn’t deserve it. Come home. He’ll be good to you. He’s good to me.”

“I don’t care. That house and his money are worthless to me while he’s alive. I’m not going to wait until he dies. I’m not going to wait while you sleep in his bed. He killed my mother. You don’t shake hands and forgive. You don’t forget.”

“We’ve lived the lives we’ve made. I’ve lost. You’ve lost. This memory you have. It was sweet for such a short time. We’ve behaved badly. To each other. In the world. It’s over. We’re over. It’s got to stop.”

“And it will. It’ll stop the moment Truitt is dead. The minute you send me word Truitt is dead, this whole life is a history at an end. I’ll be sweet as a lamb. We’ll have everything.”

“I have everything. I have more than I deserve.”

He jumped up from the chaise. He grabbed her by the wrists and looked at her with iron fury. “I don’t give a damn what you have. You come here all contrite, awash with remorse, changed you say like some country moron who’s seen the face of Christ in a potato, and you think you can go to Wisconsin and be the little wife in a town that’s named after my father’s father, and none of this will have happened. You think you’ve bought your freedom. As long as I’m alive, you’ll never be free, and you’ll do what you promised. You’ll do what I tell you. You know why?”

She knew. She knew exactly, but she couldn’t stand to hear it. She twisted her wrists from his beautiful hands; she walked across the room and stupidly felt her dresses, the fabric of her old life, as though it were an exhibit in the Japanese Pavilion. She couldn’t look at him.

“Because if you don’t, if you don’t kill him, I’ll write him a letter. That’s all it will take. One letter. You think he wants to hear this? You think he wants to hear about his wife in bed with his son? The filthy details? You think he wants to hear his wife is a common whore who’s been doing the same thing over and over and over from the time she was fifteen? Where does his kindness, his goodness go then?”

“I can’t stand this. I’ll die.”

“You haven’t died yet. You won’t die now. You don’t die from being ashamed.”

“I’ll stay here with you. I’ll never go back there.”

“And live in this filth? This filthy life? I wouldn’t have you. Not now. Not ever. No, Catherine. You’ll go back up there, you’ll pretend to be everything you’re not, a virgin, if that’s what he wants, a duchess, a believer, and you’ll drop poison in his food, just like you said, and he’ll be dead. I can wait. I’ve waited all my life. I despise you, but you’ll lose everything and you’ll end up in the gutter.”

She knelt on the floor, pulling a dress from the closet behind her. “I beg you.”

“Get on your fancy train and go home to your fancy husband and get rid of him. Dead. That’s the only way he means anything to me.”

“I beg you.”

“Some promises can’t be broken. It’s gone too far. We’re too close now, too deep in the water. Get up off the floor and get out of here. I don’t want to hear from you until he’s dead.”

“I-”

“Not one word, Catherine. You haven’t earned the right to beg. There’s no freedom for you. No place to go. You ruin everything you touch. I’m leaving. I don’t want to find you here when I get back. I don’t want to find you anywhere in Saint Louis.”

She rose from the floor. He was right, of course. There was no way out.

He turned before leaving. His voice was almost kind again. “It’s true. I have loved you. I could love you again. We both knew what we were getting into. We got into it out of love. You knew from the start.”

When he was gone, she wandered his rooms. Her mind could only plague her with the old thoughts. There was death by poison in her deep bathtub. There was arsenic, laudanum, muriatic acid. There was the silken cord from a sturdy beam. There was the long fall, like a black bird, from the window of her quiet room at the Planter’s Hotel. She would set the bird free. There was death beneath the wheels of a train car, death by syringe and razor and bullet.

Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.

Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive