A Reliable Wife (20 page)

He moved into the old house with Mrs. Larsen. He moved into the bedroom he had as a boy, the narrow iron bed, the overhanging
eave, and the one gabled window to the stars. He was afraid of the ghosts in the big house. He thought he could escape them.

He woke up every morning anxious for his wife, and came the long way back to Catherine, offered up his days to her, so that
she might patiently explain the things he forgot, so that she could ladle soup into his mouth and bathe him in the warm baths
which took away the chill for five minutes. He came back so that she could inject him with morphine and drop poison into his
food and onto his hairbrush and onto the clothes he could no longer bear to put on his body. He remembered how it worked,
in certain lucid moments. He had, for the most part, forgotten what it was that was being done to him. He never found her
at fault.

After he had gone back to Mrs. Larsen’s, after dinner and the reading by the fire which warmed the nights, after he had been
bundled in shawls and lap robes and Mrs. Larsen had driven him slowly away with a look of hatred that pierced her to the heart,
Catherine would walk through the dark, the long way through the dark fields, and climb the stairs of the old farmhouse and
sit outside his door until morning. If he woke, she would hold his hand, rub his forehead with a soft warm cloth, she would
recite for him the names of the dead and the living who peopled his nights. And every morning, before the sun came up, she
would wrap her cloak around her and walk the long way home to sleep for an hour before he came into the house, not knowing
where to be, not knowing what chair to sit in, or who she was some mornings.

At last he was ready. He wanted to die. But still she could not do it. And, finally, she knew she could not do it.

He was sitting in a chair in the music room. She had put cotton in his ears, because any noise drove him into a frenzy, and
she came to him, she knelt on the floor. She finally couldn’t bear his suffering and her own wickedness, or his patient acceptance
of what was happening to him. She knelt on the floor and lay her head in his lap and she spoke softly, looking up into his
tired face.

“It’s over,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“I can’t do it. Can’t do it to you. You’re all I’ve known, all I will ever know, and I can’t do it. I love you so much it
makes me ashamed when you look at me, to have you see me. But, there, take my hand. It stops now. You’ll live. I will make
you well.”

He looked at her, his face a realm of kindness.

“If you die, I would grieve for you all my life. I’ll grieve for you if they hang me, if they put the rope around my neck.”

“I wanted to die. It seemed I did. Do.”

“You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“Antonio . . .”

“Will come. I promise. He will come. Until he does, I’m here. Live for me.”

He reached out and touched her hair. He caught a single strand between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth.

He loved her. He would live.

Perhaps there was to be some light, in the end. Maybe, after all, there was a way out of the darkness. She hoped it was true.
She was so tired.

CHAPTER TWENTY

She burned the sheets, his clothes and shoes and bath towels. She burned and buried anything he might have touched, anything
that might contain the slightest trace of the white powder. She threw away his razor, his father’s, and his silver hairbrush
from Italy. She burned the rug, the heavy silk bed hangings. She burned her own nightgowns, knowing as she did that the smoke
from the fire was full of the same poison, that everything he had touched she had touched as well, that he had drunk his icy
water and kissed her on the mouth.

The blue bottle she took into the woods and poured the poison over rocks, away from water, away from where sheep might graze
in summer, or birds might come to nest. No more harm would come to any living thing.

She fed him nothing but warm milk, to make him vomit and to still the tremors of his chill. She gave him limewater to soak
up the poisons. She covered him with furs and blankets and held the bowl for him while he vomited into it. She never flinched.

She called on Mrs. Larsen. “I don’t believe the doctor. He is, has been very ill. We can make him better. We did it once before.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But the doctor doesn’t know either. He’s wrong. This is no cancer. My father died of cancer and
this is different. He knows what’s going on around him. My father knew nothing. He lost his mind, at the end. It’s not his
brain. I don’t know. My sister was ill once. We gave her milk and egg whites, to make her vomit. Give it to him. He’s freezing
cold. Keep him warm. What else can we do?”

“The old people . . . there are herbs in the field for the sores. For drawing out the boils.”

“Then we’ll ask the old people. We’ll get what we can. It’s still winter. There’s not much. You’ll watch him. I’ll go to Chicago
and find a doctor, a real doctor. I’ll ask him what to do.”

She went to Chicago, to visit poor, sad-faced India. India who looked like her picture. India whom rich Ralph Truitt had chosen
out of the whole world, who might herself have been wearing silk and walking the marble halls. She would never know where
her picture had gone. She would never know she might have been loved and respected, the mistress of those high frescoed halls.
And Truitt would have found happiness with her, a thin happiness. He would not be dying now, if India had been the one.

Catherine had always loved India, had loved her plain shyness and her lack of prospects. She wanted to tell her that Ralph
Truitt had loved her; she wanted to say he had chosen her picture and loved it, because then, when she entered a room or walked
down the street, she might be able to do it differently, knowing that she was loved.

It was easy to lie to her. It had been easy to say that she had always wanted her picture, a remembrance, a sentimental keepsake,
and to persuade shy India to sit in front of the photographer’s plate.

Now it was easy to tell her only as much as she needed and lie about why she needed it. India had spent a lifetime watching
other people’s lives, looking in shop windows, watching life through the plate glass of her own indifferent looks, and she
had noticed everything and stored it away, her only treasure. It was her only furniture of use; her protection against the
loneliness that never left her and the ugly men and the sad, sad life.

India embraced her. India held her hand. India listened, nodding, and then she got her hat and coat and said the only things
she had said, through Catherine’s long and lying story. “Let’s go downtown.”

Chicago outdid Saint Louis in brawl and confusion. They went through big streets and tiny streets, and came to Chinatown,
to a small shop with dingy windows. Inside, a Chinaman bowed with elaborate courtesy and listened to the version of the story
Catherine told. At the word
arsenic
, the air in the room stopped moving for a moment. Catherine thought she would cry, would howl with guilt and terror, but
she went on as though nothing were happening. The air began to move again. India breathed, and the wheels started turning,
the clock began to tick.

The Chinaman bowed again, smiled broadly, and began to move hastily around his dark shop, pulling phials of powder from one
shelf, milky liquids from another, collecting the ancient and secret reversals of terrible and vengeful substances. Now and
then he stopped and smiled as though he were telling a joke.

“Brandy,” he said. “Keeps his belly warm.”

“Opium,” he said, “to calm the stomach. Make him happy. Make bad dreams go away.” He cut out opium in tiny, waxy balls.

“One every day, until his dreams are clear and clean. Fresh dreams.”

When he was done, there were eight bottles, and they cost a lot of money and Catherine paid, carrying the bottles and jars
in a plain brown sack from the store. She buried it deep in a big black bag she was carrying, and offered India dinner.

They ate at a grand hotel, Catherine never saying that she would sleep the night in a room upstairs. India was ravenous, her
eyes wide, the huge menu in front of her like a shield. She ate oysters, lobster thermidor, a cold soup, and a guinea hen.
She drank a great deal of wine. Catherine ate little and drank no wine. She had no taste for it.

“You look different,” said India, waiting for the smooth waiter to reappear. “You look like a lady. Like . . .” she nodded
her head. “Like one of them.”

“He likes a simple way. They’re simple people there, not like us. I try to be what he wants me to be.”

“And he gives you money?”

“Yes.”

“A lot of money.”

Catherine was embarrassed. “Yes.”

“Give me some. You have a sweetheart, a husband for God’s sake, he gives you money. I want money.”

“Not here. But, yes, of course, whatever you need.”

“I need a lot of things. I need some twenty-eight-year-old man with white teeth to fall in love with me. I need a winter coat
and a little dog to sit in my lap. Bet you got a little dog.”

Catherine smiled.”No. But I have a winter coat. You can have it if you want. I’ll get another. Or we’ll get you one you like.”

The waiter came with dessert, a huge mound of whipped cream and cake and fruit. “You think that’s the answer. You think it’ll
make me pretty or get me a sweet man? It’ll just give me the idea, on cold nights, that I could have one of those men, that
my face was pretty like yours, that it wasn’t all so goddamned endless and stupid and boring. Money. That’ll be enough, for
now.”

Catherine had spent so much of her life on the other side of the glass, the India side, the Alice side. She found it extraordinary
to be the one who had the things people wanted. And she, now, wanted only one thing, and the way to that thing lay in her
black bag.

Catherine walked plain India the long way home, tried to give her the black seal coat she was wearing, but India refused it,
saying it would make her look like a fool. She gave her as much money as she could, knowing India wouldn’t spend it on drugs
or foolishness or fripperies.

She spent the night in her narrow bed in her plain room in the grand hotel. She thought of Truitt, of Mrs. Larsen sitting
up by him all night, nursing him through one more grief. Mrs. Larsen who never once had a bad dream, she said, even after
she watched her husband chop off his own hand for no reason at all.

Catherine dreamed of Antonio. He was like a spider, everywhere at once. His skin was in her skin, his organs were connected
to hers. Her heartbeat was his heartbeat, the flutter of her eyelids moved above his drugged terrible haunting black eyes.
He was her passion and her violation, and it brought her sharply awake.

She smoked one opium ball from the Chinaman and fell asleep into bliss, into cool water and her mother’s arms and the water
trembling on her mother’s hair, the lilac blooms in May. She fell into a dream of her garden, of how it would smell on summer
evenings, the jasmine trees white with bloom, the koi darting in the pond when she bent over to sprinkle bread crumbs on the
water, Truitt sitting in a white chair in a white suit, playing with a child.

Catherine woke up, and she knew she was pregnant. She felt luxuriously tired, although she knew she had slept.

At her mirror she pulled her hair back tightly, put on her simple traveling dress, and sat on the train for hours. As she
ate her lunch, she wondered if she could see the remains of her red traveling suit. She stared out the window, but nothing
was there, nothing left that she could see. When she had finished her lunch, she vomited it into the bathroom sink, washed
the sink out with a cloth, then threw the cloth from the train. It fluttered away like a stiff heavy white bird. She felt
light-headed. She felt grateful. She was beyond gratitude, beyond any understanding of it, and lost in a bliss the opium could
not have produced, in a sense of being in the right place, a feeling she had never known. There was, at last, a chair for
her to sit on, and Truitt would live.

At home, Mrs. Larsen ran to the door.

“He’s quiet, now,” she said. “He had a terrible night. Screamed with the pain. Screamed from what he was seeing when he was
asleep. I forgot where I was. He slept all morning. I had to tie him down.” Mrs. Larsen looked terrible and old, shaky and
bleary eyed.

“Go home now, Mrs. Larsen. Go home and sleep. I’ve brought medicine.”

She walked through the long sunroom, the glass conservatory. The first roses had arrived from Saint Louis, tagged with cardboard
tags, roses and orange trees and jasmine and fuchsia and orchids, waiting to be put into the enormous terra-cotta pots that
lined the hallway. It was hot here, hot and damp, although the snow still lay in its blinding blanket outside, less pure now,
more pocked and dirty, but endless.

He sat quietly in a high-backed chair, a lap robe over his legs, her sunglasses on his face. His eyes were shut.

She knelt beside his chair. His hand strayed idly through her hair. “Hello, Emilia,” he said softly. “Welcome home.”

“It’s Catherine, Truitt,” she said. “Catherine Land. Your wife. You were dreaming.”

“Of course. Catherine. I was . . .”

“You were dreaming.” She reached into her black bag, gave him one of the opium balls. “Swallow this,” she said. “Swallow this
and dream some more.”

For days the two women ministered to him, sleeping in shifts or not at all. For the second time, they bathed him together,
holding him in the steaming water until the chills had passed, rubbing his stomach endlessly so that the terrible cold would
go away. He was drunk on brandy, sedated into joy with opium, and he was getting better.

They sat together in the nights and watched him roll in his sleep.

“Larsen cut off his hand because . . . because I asked him to stop.” It was the first time she had said his name.

“Stop what?”

“Just stop. Ten years ago. To leave me be. He couldn’t stand it.”

“You miss him.”

“He was all I ever knew. I miss him, yes.”

“You never go to see him.”

“I wouldn’t. It’s my fault.”

They sat through the long night in silence. Mrs. Larsen had said about her husband what she needed to say. In her own quiet
way she had driven her husband, also, into the far reaches of madness and death. She had known because she had seen it before,
she had done it herself.

Catherine took the dark glasses from Truitt’s eyes. They were still fierce blue, but ringed with deep, haggard shadows. They
were unfocused and wandered unhitched inside his head. His forehead was a mass of pustules that had begun to heal. There would
be scars. He looked ten years older, as though some boundary had been crossed and he would never again be young or completely
well. She had broken his youth and left him floundering on the shore of old age, his power gone, his ambitions stilled.

His hands, when she unbandaged them, lay quiet in his lap. He was neither cruel nor kind; he was simply waiting for whatever
the next thing was. He grew less cold, his dreams became softer and subtler, more filled with shapes that embraced him. He
described his dreams to her in the morning when he woke up, and she listened patiently, although the dreams did not make sense
and he had the same dreams over and over. They were memories of events he hadn’t described to her yet. They were ideas he
had had but never acted on. They were dreams.