A Reliable Wife (23 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“It was a terrible thing, the thing I did to you.”

“You were angry, I suppose.”

“I was angry. I was angry and your mother was gone. I had loved her with all my heart. Believe me. I had. When she was gone,
everything went black.”

“And I was left behind.”

“Your sister dead. Your mother gone. You were left, and I turned that grief and rage on you, a little boy, and I will never
stop regretting it.”

“You managed to forget pretty well, it seems to me.”

“I looked for you for ten years. I looked everywhere.”

“It must have cost a lot of money.”

“I didn’t care. After you left, ran away, I knew what an awful thing I’d done. No amount of money can make that right. Being
tortured for something you didn’t do.”

The slow dance of the father and the son, the old song of regret and retribution twined through their every conversation.
During the conversations late at night Antonio was usually drunk, Catherine upstairs in bed.

“You married.”

“I wanted you to come home. I thought it would help. And I was lonely. Lonely and unloved and sad every day. You don’t know
what happens to a life without love. To a heart. It withers. It loses reason. I just wanted what people have. I wanted a companion,
some company in my heart. Someone other than myself.”

“And have you been happy? Happy with the young Mrs. Truitt? What do you really know about her?”

“Her life hasn’t been easy. I’m glad to make it better. And she brought you home. She’s my wife. Yes. I’m happy.”

“She’s much younger.”

“She’d be a friend to you, if you’d let her.”

“I have friends, but they don’t live here. You beat me until I was blinded by the blood in my eyes. You kept me locked in
a room. You left me alone with no explanation of where my mother was or why your cruelty was so immense and unending.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don’t think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”

“You’d be very rich.”

“And you would be unmourned, except perhaps for the lovely Mrs. Truitt. Certainly not by me. And not by all those people who
live in fear of you.”

Despite the vitriol, it was a beginning, some kind of communication between father and son. Ralph went to work every day with
a hope that Antonio would come around, would grow to forgive and to love. He was an honest man and he had such a yearning
to believe.

For Antonio, of course, he was a fish on the line. Antonio gave and then withheld, leaving the hook in his father’s mouth.
It gave him pleasure.

Antonio wanted so much. He wanted for most of his childhood never to have happened. He wanted his mother to have been faithful
and beautiful and virtuous. He wanted her to have cared for him. He wanted her to have taken him with her when she ran away,
giving him more than the idiot sister and the terrifying father who was not his father. He wanted the days of his boyhood
to have been different. He wanted, more than anything, for his mother not to have died in squalor, to have lived and stayed
with him and kept things from becoming so sadly, wrenchingly wrong. He didn’t care anymore about the beatings. They had made
him stronger than his father, his real father, ever could have been. He cared about the loss.

He sat drunk by the fire every night after Ralph had gone to bed, to the consolation of sex with Antonio’s old mistress. And
he cried. He wept for his own boyhood and its simple pleasures. He sat in his old playroom and touched everything, the rocking
horse, the stuffed animals and the wooden boats and the tin soldiers and he wept for his own losses in battle.

It wasn’t the beatings or the loneliness he was weeping for, sitting with a bottle of brandy on the floor of his unchanged
playroom. It was time. It was the time he couldn’t get back. Yes, Ralph would do anything, and yes, the future could hold
a better life. But he would never get back the days and the hours that might have been something other than angry and miserable
and painful. No money could ever change that, and nothing Truitt could say would make it right.

There was an almost sexual pleasure in the boundless sorrow, a comfort he could give himself by letting go, a release not
found even in sex for the first time with a woman he coveted. He didn’t know why he behaved the way he behaved. He didn’t
care. Nobody else had lived his life. Nobody else could tell him how to be.

Perhaps, he thought, Ralph was right. Maybe he could change. It wasn’t as though his life had given him much joy or peace.

Perhaps weeping in the playroom was his first fearful and tentative step toward some kind of love. He didn’t know what love
was, but he knew that he had begun to feel differently toward Ralph, to feel something that was not blind hatred. He was a
child, and he wanted his father and his mother.

He would wake up in the morning on the floor of his old rooms, his head throbbing, his body covered with the quilt that had
covered him as a child, and he would shiver with grief and sometimes with remorse at his own behavior. He wished he could
have been another person.

Ever since Truitt had stopped torturing him, ever since he had been strong enough to run away, he had done nothing but torture
himself. If Truitt had tried to kill him, then Antonio, for all his sorrow, had done his best to finish the job. The blurred
days and nights, the women, the debauchery, none of it had been enough. With the return of Truitt’s love, he would have to
be his own destruction.

The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him. That he was rich, that he could go to Rome
and marry a princess, that he might drink cold champagne at dawn on the deck of a steamer bound for the South Seas, in the
company of someone who simply loved him, that he might do anything that would give him joy, that would create a wonderful
life, these were phantoms that eluded him.

Love was gone forever, just outside the window, just beyond reach, like fruit on an upper branch. In its place was the sexual
attraction of tragedy. He would hang his head and swig his brandy and mourn for his life, for the hours of his childhood,
for the kindness of this man who wanted to father him, for the lost beauty of his mother. He explored the extravagant rooms
of his father’s house, knowing that there was no home for him anywhere. There was no getting there. There was no one there
when he arrived.

He wanted nothing more than to lie in a small, dark, warm room in an anonymous house where there was neither day nor night
and have ravenous sex with woman after woman until he died. He wanted a drunkenness of the flesh. He wanted the thing he loved
most in the world, the soft touch of another human being, to become a torture. He wanted to die in a sexual embrace, the last
of thousands.

There was Catherine. She was like the drug, the poison he craved. In the absence of other diversions, she was a woman whose
secrets he knew. She was always in the house, sewing, reading the books she had sent from Chicago. She had abandoned him.
She had betrayed him, denied him the golden promise.

She slept every night in his father’s bed. His father had sex with her, and told her he loved her, a thing Antonio had never
said, and would never have meant. It wasn’t enough to want all women; he wanted Catherine be all women to him.

She deliberately avoided him. She shut herself up in her room, sewing, when Truitt was away. She sat at the table like a stranger
and talked to him as though she had no memory of the velvet cords that he had used to tie her to his bed, of the fire that
had burned her skin. His sorrow was infinite. His desire was specific, and immense.

Truitt went to town. Antonio would find her, follow her, would open his heart to her, tell her how coming back to this house
had made him different, how it had opened a wound he had thought healed forever. The sight of Truitt, the man who had been
so capable of destruction, sitting calm and safe from accusation, even sitting in his own remorse, made him afraid, he said.
It frightened him to think it could be different, that things could, from this moment, change.

She advised patience. She advised giving the old wounds time to heal. There was no more talk of Truitt’s death. He told her
he had arsenic in his room, the arsenic he had brought from Chicago, and that late at night, drunk on Bordeaux and alone while
his father slept with his mistress, his creation, he picked it up and sniffed it and held it in his hands and longed for death.
He told her that if there were a button in his leg he could push so that he would vanish and never have been, he would push
it. She expressed horror that he would contemplate such a thing. He had learned to drive a car, she said. He could go anywhere.
His life was waiting. She didn’t understand a word he said. She was no longer the woman who had spoken to him for hours of
nothing, of amorous nothings.

The silence enveloped him, strangling him. Every morning, his razor was an invitation. Every night, the arsenic was an aphrodisiac.
His loneliness was terrifying, but he wouldn’t come to town, wouldn’t come down to meet the proper young women his father
invited from Chicago, to sit at table with their banker fathers, all exquisite manners and musical, sexless laughter. They
had no darkness. It was useless, the light, to him.

He wrote suicide notes and stored them in a locked drawer. He wrote letters to his father in which he described Catherine’s
past in fine detail, letters that would destroy, in a single swift stroke, both their lives forever. These letters he burned.

He was lonely, lost inside himself; he was exhausted from simply sustaining a life he found horrible, from holding his head
up in a scornful public, from the pretense of his own narcissism. He said the words over and over to himself, realizing how
trivial they sounded. He spoke his heart to Ralph, late and drunk one night.

“I want . . . I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t.”

“We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you
grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony. I wanted . . . what? To be elegant, not some country
hick, to be loved, to live unharmed and have my way in everything. I never wanted this, never wanted to have anything to do
with business.

“I wanted to marry a contessa and live happily ever after. It doesn’t happen that way. Play the hand you have, Antonio, that’s
all anybody expects. And it’s a pretty good hand.”

“I’m in pain, all the time. I hurt.”

“And I’m sorry for that. If there were anything . . .”

“There isn’t.”

“I know.”

It was a road without end, a conversation with no point. If you spend your days speaking to someone who speaks a foreign language,
how are you ever to be understood? He could say the words, his father could listen, but the words had no weight for either
of them. It was a way of passing the time, the mournful son and the compassionate father.

Let it go, Antonio would tell himself late at night, as he lay on the nursery room floor. Live a regular life, crippled, sorrowful,
but sweetly ordinary. Speak to the girls from Chicago. Drive your car so that you can be the envy of the town. Learn the rules
of business and give up the dark room and the thousands of women. It was like seeing a distant shore and knowing he would
not reach it.

Catherine never left his mind. When he met her, he was a young boy, a young man, and she was an elegant courtesan pursuing
opportunities. She had seemed glamorous. She had manners, and she knew things about the world. He knew nothing, nothing at
all. She had bought him shirts. She had taught him how to dress, how to eat in restaurants and speak with his eyes lowered.
She had shown him the intricacies of his own body. She had woven a circle around him and kept him safe for a time. Then the
monsters returned to claim him, and he himself became a monster—cruel, unyielding, and conniving. He had turned on her because
she had seen him in his innocence and hope, because she believed in these things, and he had hurt her again and again, and
she had allowed it, and for this he felt a sorrow which burned like hot lead.

On a sober morning, when he happened to be awake, he went and sat by Truitt in the office. He listened and watched as Truitt
increased his fortune, as he listened to the complaints of his workers and dealt with them fairly and compassionately. It
was like watching a painting. There was no movement; there was no sound. Truitt thought his son was taking an interest. Truitt
thought he was coming around to a kind of acceptance, the kind of bargain he himself had made so many years before. The next
morning, Antonio couldn’t remember having been there, couldn’t recall a single word or picture one detail of the office.