A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER SIX

It snowed for three days. Catherine was so bored she was sometimes afraid she would lose her mind, or at least lose her way. In the midst of this crisis, she must not lose sight of her plan. Every night she turned the blue bottle in her hands and watched the blizzard through the liquid. Like a scene in a snow-globe; she saw it unfold. Every night she prayed he wouldn’t die.

When she wasn’t nursing Ralph, she roamed the rooms, looking at everything, touching every object, every piece of furniture. She turned over every plate, picked up every piece of silver to see the hallmarks stamped there. Limoges, France. Tiffany amp; Co., New York. Wedgewood. She calculated the worth of each piece, the value of the whole.

The few conversations she had with Mrs. Larsen either concerned Ralph’s treatment, or seemed to her like snatches grasped from a dim understanding of a foreign language.

“His shoes is never there, by the door. His shoes is by the chest of drawers. He gets them from New York City.”

“I’ll move them.”

“No. Leave them be. I’ll move them. I know how he likes things.”

Deep in the night, as they sat by his side, “Sleeping like a baby now. His head is big as a watermelon. He ain’t going to die.”

Catherine never knew whether some response was required. She had slight knowledge of how to talk to other people.

She slept sitting in a chair in his room. She wore her plain black dress and heard the wind howling outside. She nursed him with tenderness and efficiency. Three times a day, she sat alone at the gleaming table and ate the exquisite food Mrs. Larsen brought her. A clear soup the color of rubies. A meringue with chestnuts. Duck in a mustard sauce. Things she had never seen, foods that frightened her with their beauty. She asked Mrs. Larsen if she and her husband didn’t want to eat with her, or have her eat in the kitchen with them. That, apparently, was not part of the plan, and so she went on in solitude at the head of the enormous table.

She ate with an appetite that excited and appalled her. Rich foods so at odds with the bleak country, so suitable for the comfort of the cold. Her hunger was fueled by boredom and anxiety, and it never went away, no matter how much she ate.

At night, she stood for hours at her window, watching the snow fall, longing for what she had left behind. During the day, the whiteness was so bright, she had to shield her eyes from the glare. She could not keep the curtains open for more than a few minutes.

She thought of people, ordinary people, moving through the streets of the cities, and she marveled at the commonplace of their lives.

She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she waked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and listless people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her.

They owned plates. They all had socks. The world was filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily few she had known, really known, in her life.

And as much as she might sneer at the emptiness of their lives, the stupidity and the boredom, she had ended up in this house, soundless in the relentless snow, and she gladly would trade places with any one of them.

In the life behind her, she would smoke cigarettes and drink liquor and take drugs and grab what she could get out of the sea of people around her. Men wrote her letters. They had seen her at the theater, high up in a box, and they would write and she would answer. So delicate. She would find forgetfulness for an hour or a summer or a night with any one of them whose letter amused her, a man with blue eyes or green eyes or brown eyes, their faces so close, pleading for what she could not imagine, and eventually the tremor would pass and the luxurious beauty of it would fade and she would see only the stupidity and the foul odors and the hatefulness of her own heart, a hatefulness which told her every minute that the pleasure these people obviously found in these simple moments would be forever denied to her. And then she would move on.

She itched for a cigarette. She would wade through drifts over her head for the escape of opium or morphine. But she was far away from all that. She would not even take a glass of sherry. She would follow her plan and her plan would work, if, of course, Truitt did not die.

“How is he, Miss?”

“He’s restless. And hot.”

“Tough old bird. Don’t you worry, he’ll make it.”

When I have his money, she thought, I will go far away, I will go to a country where I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak the language and I will never talk to anybody ever again. But no, that wasn’t the plan. She must remember the plan. When she had his money, she would marry her useless and beautiful lover and they would live a life of such extraordinary delight. Oh, yes, that was the plan.

In every one of the cities where she haphazardly had landed, when anxiety and dissatisfaction engulfed her as they eventually did, she found the municipal library and spent hours there, reading descriptions and guides to other places she might eventually go. She knew the street plans of Buenos Aires and Saint Louis and London. She knew in intimate detail any number of places she had never been. Like a studious schoolgirl, she sat in the waning light of a vast municipal library, and she learned things.

She imagined them in Venice, herself and her useless child of a lover, sleeping until afternoon, their rooms at the Danieli a riot of half-eaten sweets and empty champagne bottles and exquisite lingerie. She had studied Italian, the light slanting down from the library’s high windows.

She saw them rising languidly, the morphine a dull film across his black eyes, swathed in silks and cigarette smoke, drinking Chianti in a gondola as it moved across the black water toward the lights of the Lido, and the gondolier would sing of love and every door would open to them, revealing infinite ancient rooms of luxury and beauty and charm where aristocrats, princesses, and counts and kings would kiss them on both their cheeks and they would never grow old and they would never die. She would never be alone. She would have her lover’s beauty and her own, and she would have Ralph’s money, and surely the two together would be enough. That at least was the plan.

She would marry Ralph Truitt, and then, one day, almost imperceptibly he would begin to grow old and die. And then, one day, not long after, he would be dead and she would have it all.

“Mrs. Larsen?”

“Yes, Miss?”

“Where does this food come from?”

Mrs. Larsen laughed, spooning sauce over a breast of duck. “Come from? I make it.”

“But…”

“You thought we ate beef jerky? Corned beef and cabbage? Ham from October to May? Like hicks? Well, some do. We don’t. There’s an icehouse where we keep most things. Some things he sends for, from Chicago. Some of it came on the same train you came on.”

“You cook like an angel.”

“I learned it a long time ago. I was just a girl. In the other house. It was another time. And, I have to say, it’s nice to do it again. Do it properly.”

“Another house?”

“Yes. It was a long time ago.”

“Where was it?”

“Is. It’s still there.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s nearby. No more than a mile. We never go there.”

“What’s it like?” Perhaps this other house was where the beautiful things with the names on the bottom had come from.

“It doesn’t matter. We never go there. Snow doesn’t stop, we’ll be at the end of the fancy food soon enough.” Mrs. Larsen left her alone at the long table with the gleaming silver.

Catherine knew about cooking, French cooking. She had read about it in the library. She had never actually done it, but she knew recipes for sauces by heart. She tried not to appear overly curious. It made Mrs. Larsen nervous.

It was amazing the things you could learn in a library, just by looking them up. Poisons, for instance. Page after page after page of poisons. As simple as a cookbook. If you could read, you could poison somebody in such a way that nobody would ever know.

Ralph Truitt’s house had no books. There was an old upright piano covered with an embroidered Spanish shawl, and between her nursing chores, before every meal, she practiced her little pieces. Mostly, though, she didn’t know where she belonged here, and there was no one to tell her. Not Mrs. Larsen, who was jolly and honest and assumed the same of her, assuming, along with the rest of it, that comfortable people somehow made themselves comfortable. She was enormous and kind, Mrs. Larsen, unlike her tiny thin husband, who watched Catherine’s every move with suspicion and treated her with only barely disguised contempt.

“Oh, Larsen,” she heard Mrs. Larsen say, “Leave it go. Give the poor girl a chance.”

A chance at what, exactly? If only they knew, she thought. She couldn’t find a chair to sit in, couldn’t figure out where she was meant to stand. She looked out across the frozen landscape and could see her jewels beneath the snow. She wept for no reason.

Mrs. Larsen said to her one day, out of the blue, as they lifted Truitt’s heavy body onto clean white sheets, “I couldn’t bear it, Miss. I couldn’t bear it if he was hurt again.”

“Who hurt him?”

“Everybody. It was a long time ago. But that kind of thing never goes away. It pretty much ruined his life.”

“You care very much for him.”

“I respect him. You’ve got to respect that kind of grief. I’d have picked up a gun. But I’m telling you, if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you.”

“I won’t hurt him.”

“No, you surely won’t.”

Catherine was lying, but at least she wouldn’t hurt him yet. He had to get well before she could hurt him. He could not die, and leave her stranded, without love or money. She couldn’t bear it, the long train ride back, empty-handed.

She spooned the food into his mouth. She gently wiped the sweat from his forehead, stripped his nightshirt from him when he grew too hot. She begged Larsen to get the doctor, snowbound two towns away. Larsen figured, having seen Catherine stitch him up, that she was practically as good as any doctor he could find, and, anyway, the snow was deeper every day. It was useless to try.

She gave him hot tea. She wrapped his legs tight in heavy wool blankets, and sat up all night. She and Mrs. Larsen lifted his naked body from the bath.

She got up in the night, and stood over Truitt as he shivered with the fever. She lay beside him, and held him close to her until the warmth of her body passed through to his and the chill had passed. Her nipples rose up and radiated heat into Truitt’s shivering back.

It was, she imagined, the erotic allure of human tenderness. The comfort of kindness. She had forgotten.

Her hands moved across his body as so many hands had moved across hers, and he felt no more of it than she had. When the chill had passed and he slept peacefully again, she sat in a chair until dawn, feeling a cold she thought would never pass, shivering, staring silently in the dark.

On the fourth night, the fever broke and the snow stopped falling. He would live. She had saved his life.

Catherine stood by her window for hours in the dark, the blue bottle in front of her on the windowsill. The snow covered everything and shone in the moonlight like the kind of fairy kingdom little girls dream of.

The snow was eternal, infinite. Across the yard, across the roof of the barn, down to the smooth round pond at the foot of the farthest field. There was not a footprint, not a mark in the entire landscape, only the silvered and impenetrable sweep of snow. Perfection.

You see, thought Catherine, sooner or later, everything gets a fresh start. It’s not just possible. It happens.

She stood through the night, perfectly warm, perfectly comfortable in her plain dress, and waited to speak to Ralph Truitt in the morning.