A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER FIVE

In his fever, the women came to him. They lifted his trembling body from the twisted sheets and lowered him into a tepid bath, still in his nightshirt. His eyes rolled wildly; his breaths came in gulping bursts. Then the chills came, and their strong hands held him.

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.

His love of women, and his fear of them, of his death and theirs, grew into a hatred that never abated. It took away the sweet and left only the sharp. His childhood was desire and nightmare mixed inextricably.

He went to Chicago, to university. Away from his mother’s tireless harangue, he was free to spend his days and nights in the pursuit of pleasure. He learned easily. He was popular. He despised himself when he was alone, so he rarely was. He developed a taste for champagne and the sight of naked women in hotel rooms. He saw each of these women only once; afraid of the infections his desire was seeding in them. They would have laughed at him with their cynical, musical voices. If they had known. He gave dinner parties in restaurants. He bought velvet sofas. He bought ancient paintings of naked saints, pierced by arrows. He had a tailor.

He was one of those men whose good looks are illuminated by their unawareness of them, a kind of ruddy shyness. He engaged in sex as though avoiding his reflection in a mirror, all hands and mouth, no eyes, and women found this endearing. His hungers were insatiable, his mouth sucking forward into his desire like a man’s in the desert dying of thirst.

His mother never wrote and he never went home. He played cards. He read the writings of philosophers. He read French poetry aloud to uncomprehending whores. He studied charts that predicted how money grows into wealth, and he studied the tout sheets at racetracks that predicted how bloodlines could turn into a nose across a wire.

His father sent money, what seemed an infinite amount of money. Ralph stopped writing his dutiful notes to his father, stopped going to university altogether for months at a time, until he would wake, one morning, with the taste of champagne in his mouth and long for the quiet of the scholastic life, the dusty library, the drone of professors’ voices. And despite this silence, every month, the same enormous amount of money would arrive in his checking account. His bankers would cluck and look at him with envy and hatred, but he was never denied a single penny.

His father was recreating him, finally taking revenge on his sour and unforgiving wife. Ralph had become reckless and wicked, and his father, if he heard of it, did not seem to care.

Ralph’s brother was dull and pious. Andrew stayed home. He went to work in his father’s businesses, and kept his nose to the grindstone, and never complained and never showed the slightest genius for any of it. Competency yes, but no more. He sat beside his mother in church, and his eyes were as brilliant as hers. He married at eighteen, and was dead of influenza the next winter. His wife’s mother went crazy with disbelief, that her daughter had come so close to the pot of gold and seen it all go into the ground, no heir, no allowance, nothing but the bitter company of Ralph’s mother, which finally, of course, drove the girl away too. Better to live with her own deranged family than her dead husband’s mother, whose rectitude was unpleasant and stifling.

Ralph’s father was left alone in the house with his wife. For that reason he was there less and less and went on long trips to visit his mines, his vast herds, to discuss the various partnerships involved in the creation of a railroad, and he would come home from a month or two away, richer than ever, flush with brilliance and success, to find the house dark and shabby, his wife in the same despicable dress, and still he did not say the one thing he wanted to say to his beloved older son. Come home.

Ralph had not been home in five years. He loved sex and he hated it. He loved bad women because he didn’t care if he destroyed them. There was a core of hatred in his hunger for them that never ever went away, a distaste that bit like sharp teeth, stabbed like needles, and still he couldn’t stop. He rented a hotel room, rich, the bed festooned with garlands and gold, the waiters silent as they brought champagne for Mr. Truitt and Miss Mackenzie, or Miss Irons, or Miss Kenny, for singers and dance hall girls and whores and artists’ models.

He thought of his brother dead beneath the ground and envied him the quiet. Death at least would end this terrifying desire.

He went to Europe. A wanderjahr, his father called it, a common thing for young men of his day. He lived in Europe the arrogant life of the newly sophisticated, his principal sophistications consisting of speaking French and knowing how to check into a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. He was taking the Grand Tour, through the haze of London and the brilliant clarity of Paris, through the picture galleries and the racetracks and the drawing rooms of the destitute aristocracy. They pandered to him, they offered their terrified daughters like ormolu clocks, and they laughed at him the minute his back was turned. Ralph didn’t mind. He could order in any restaurant, and he could always pay the bill.

In Florence he ran into a friend from Chicago, Edward, who was trying his hand at being a painter. Edward spent his days at the Uffizi and the Pitti, making hungover sketches, and lived in a state of such licentious dissolution that even Ralph was shocked. Ralph took a grand villa, and brought Edward to live with him. The two of them drank champagne from iced bottles and laughed as the candles dripped white wax on the marble floors during the nightly card parties and music parties and parties where no one wore any clothes.

Every morning, young maids would kneel and scrape away the wax while Edward and Ralph slept in their sumptuous beds with their overblown whores. Life had the serenity of knowing, ceaseless decadence.

Occasionally, in the ornately frescoed churches he visited almost by accident, Ralph would get a glimpse of a God who was, if not less terrible, at least more opulent than the God of his childhood.

Ralph had a cook, two gardeners, six peacocks, and a handsome carriage with a liveried driver. In the back of the carriage rode a second liveried servant whose function was unclear to him.

Edward knew pharmacies where furtive men would sell whatever drugs they wanted, powders to keep them asleep for forty-eight hours while the sun rose and set and rose again on the duomo, powders to make an erection last four hours. Ralph and Edward bought poisons in dark blue bottles which, when taken in tiny doses, could produce euphoria such as Ralph had never known, an ecstasy which felt like sex in every pore of his skin.

Still the money came without reproach. The terror of what happened to his body when he felt desire never went away. His heart never hardened to the pain, the hatred never ceased its relentless beat. Then he saw Emilia.

She rode by him in a shining carriage, an exquisite girl of sixteen wearing a white muslin dress with wisteria intricately woven in her black hair. Ralph never went to the pharmacist again. He never played cards, and he moved Edward and the whores and the cardsharps and the drunks into large, dark rooms on the other side of the river. He was in love.

It shocked him to wake every morning with a clear head, to find his rooms as neat as he had left them the night before, to taste the brilliant Tuscan food laid before him by the calm, dark-eyed servants. He exercised. He took boxing lessons. He took Italian lessons for hours every day from a university student, just so he could speak to her. He rode and hunted and resolved to be the kind of man who could win the heart of this girl whose name he didn’t know.

His clothes were splendid, his manners good enough, his parentage unknowable at this distance. American, that was enough, he supposed. His hair was brilliantined, he smelled of cologne from the pharmacy at Santa Maria Novella and of money from America.

He was introduced to Emilia’s father, then to her mother and the slow pleasantries of her drawing room where every object spoke of old, old luxury and culture. At last he was allowed to speak to Emilia herself. Ralph was more naive in his mid-twenties than these people had been in the cradle.

They were ordinary people, pretentious and penniless and ambitious for their beautiful daughter, and Ralph took them for more than they were. He miscalculated how most Italian families can drag some title out of the attic. He didn’t see that they had no money, that their servants went unpaid, and that angry dressmakers went out the back door as he came in the front. He didn’t see that their daughter was their only marketable asset.

He saw an exquisite beauty whose voice was music and whose manners were poetry. His Italian was, after all the lessons, the language of a child. Emilia spoke pleasant French and comical English, she blushed like the dawn as he tried to see her eyes. For months, she was sweet and charming and just beyond his reach, like the peach at the top of the tree.

He whispered her name to himself as he walked along the Arno. Absence from her was physically painful, as though his nerves were on fire. Her company was the only context in which he found his character acceptable. He lit candles for her love. He prayed for a miracle. Then finally, Ralph understood, was made to understand. Emilia was for sale.

She was sweet to him, and infinitely charming in a musical way, and Ralph, knowing so little of love, saw what he felt in his heart reflected on her face, and believed that she loved him. Her father would be saddened to part with her, but would, in the end do so because she loved Ralph and because he would, after all, be compensated for his loss.

Buying things was easy for Ralph. He had already spent three years in the silver vaults and picture markets of Europe, and he knew that the aristocracy were always reluctant to part with their treasures, and he also knew that, in the end, it wasn’t the parting that was in question but only the price.

He wrote again to his father. He asked for a great deal of money. His father replied that he would send what Ralph wanted, but that he wished for Ralph to come home now, to come back and run the business. A bargain was struck. Ralph could have the bride if he would take on the responsibility he had been allowed to shirk for so long. For Ralph, the solution was a happy one. He had known for years that, no matter how long the line he had been given to play on, sooner or later he would feel the sting of the hook in his mouth and be reeled home.

All his life, he had hoped that, in the end, he would be allowed to love someone enough to speak of his fears and so be rid of them, and it was to Emilia that he told his terrible secrets, the fire in his veins, the cruel rage in his heart, and she healed him with a laugh and a kiss. You will see, she said, this is silly. No one will die.

She barely understood what he was saying. Her English was composed of manners and poetry and light, and she had no vocabulary to comprehend such darkness. All she knew was that she had been raised to be sold, and being sold to Ralph was certainly not the worst of her options.

While waiting for her elaborate trousseau to be sent from Paris and then fitted and refitted, while the endless negotiations about the dowry were being completed with such cruel acumen by Emilia’s father that not a single tradesperson went unpaid, the telegrams came. Your father is ill, the first one said, come at once, but he could not leave. Your father is dying, said the second, and still he waited for Emilia to be ready.

Your father is dead, said the third telegram. So he married Emilia in haste and boarded a train and then a boat and then a train and traveled until he arrived at the farm in Wisconsin with his wife, the prodigal son come home.

Emilia was pregnant before they got home. Ralph welcomed and dreaded the birth. He remembered kneeling by his father’s grave, Emilia beside him, her voluminous pearl gray skirt from Paris shimmering in the sun. Her face, so angelic in Florence, seemed merely peculiar here, too exotic for the flat landscape.

It was all so long ago. They were all dead now, his father, Emilia, the little girl she gave birth to in that first Wisconsin spring, his brother. All dead, even, finally, his relentless mother, who never forgave him.

He had thought it would fade, but it never did. For twenty years not one soul had touched him with affection or desire, and he had thought his need would fade, and he was amazed, at the turning of every year, how the lust that had gripped his youth gripped him still in all its ardor, all its rage. It had hardened around his heart, more every year, and it never let him go.

Yet he leaned away from the soft voices of the few women who spoke to him, knowing he could have any one of them, yet choosing none. Instead, he chose solitude, or he was chosen by it, and it was horrible and unbreakable. For still, at any moment, every night and day, his flesh itched with desire, his mind turned constantly on the sexual lives of the men and women around him, and this turning caused him to loathe and cherish other people in equal measure. His love died with Emilia, and with the child, but his desire flourished in the barren soil of his heart and its soft whispering never ceased in his ear.

In his fever, now, the women came to him. In his fever, they touched him. Their touch both burned and cooled.