A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

  She was his wife. He touched her with his hands; he kissed her with his tongue, and she moved under him as gentle as water, as warm as a bath. The first touch of her naked skin made him gasp with all that he remembered and had denied himself for so many years.

  At every moment, he asked her permission to advance, and she shyly whispered yes in his ear. He had actually forgotten the depth and intricacy of his own passion, and it flooded him with warmth and kindness.

  Catherine fought her own desires. She forgot her many expert enticements. This was not about her, and that was, for once, a relief. She remembered that she was playing a part, and she played it well. She had become used to being the woman that men wanted, and she knew that Ralph wanted to begin again, to begin with a woman who was naive and shy and giving only in small, discreet ways, and she did it well, so well that she believed her own lie. He was not the first man who wanted his own desire to be central, who thought little of her except as a necessary part of his own blind groping. She became the thing he wanted, and was surprised that she, in some way, wanted it, too.

  His warmth flooded her. His mastery of the ways and manipulations of love excited her. She had expected, even after his story of youthful excess, to be bored, as bored as she always was, but the textures of his body were rich and varied and exciting in ways she felt without thought. She knew that, for now, her simplicity excited him, made him believe that he was young again, all the sweetness, the charm of blind affection at his command.

  He was safety. He was security. He was more passionate and kind than she had imagined he would be, and she felt, somehow, that she was losing her footing, losing her way in the dark room under his hot hands. She must not forget. She fought against forgetfulness. She fought the desire to take his hand and kiss the palm, to skim his flesh with her tongue.

  They made love every night. She no longer took the blue bottle from her suitcase, to hold it in her hand, to watch the thin liquid glitter through the cobalt. She didn’t forget; she delayed.

  The days seemed endless, the dinners a torture of manners and appetite suppressed. Mrs. Larsen would not look them in the eye. After dinner they went upstairs, and she went to him naked from her room and lay beside him in his father’s bed. Every night they created movement and desire out of nothing but the necessities of flesh. He found her mouth and kissed her sometimes until she couldn’t remember her own name; sometimes he just kissed her, and then moved his head and slept on her shoulder.

  He didn’t speak to her anymore of his sorrows. He rarely spoke at all, as though the sexuality between them was all the conversation they needed. She tried to tell him the story she had carefully invented of her childhood. She tried to describe the horror of her molestation, the details of missionary life on other continents, all details learned from books in the library. He was sympathetic, but hushed her with his hand softly on her mouth.

  He wanted a child. He longed for grandchildren, to dandle on his knee.

  Little by little, with imperceptible manipulations, she became more expert, more adept at knowing what would please him. Sometimes in the night, while Ralph slept and she stared at the ceiling, she wondered whether she didn’t already have the thing she had set out to get. The love and wealth of a man who would not harm her. A man she found herself unable to find comical.

  He clearly loved her. Or, if he didn’t love her, he was obsessed by her. He would allow her to have whatever she wanted. She felt herself wavering, as though a new landscape were opening before her, as though she was too exhausted from the nights of passion to focus her thoughts. The blue bottle lay in her suitcase, and sometimes she willed herself to forget it was there.

  She went to town. It was very ordinary, a mud track through a short stretch of dry goods stores and hardware stores and butchers and barbers. The meat looked sad and dry in the dirty windows. The people nodded at her with curiosity and thinly veiled disdain. She wore her hair more gracefully around her face. She met the Swensons and the Carllsons and the Magnussons. She looked for the insanity she read about in the papers. She found none. She looked for beauty and found little to interest her, except the untouched faces of the children. She looked for sophisticated pleasures, but there seemed to be few pleasures of any kind. Still, she wasn’t bored. She wasn’t restless. Every day, she waited for the time to pass. She waited for Ralph to come home.

  She was dazed by the way he looked without his clothes. She was entranced by the way his hand never left her cheek as he made love to her, caressing her the way he might gentle a wild horse.

  They forgot conversation. She played the piano for him, the pieces he liked, the pieces he never tired of hearing. She read Whitman to him, the electric, wounded, fruitful country spread before them, the elasticity of desire. It was all a prelude to what happened in the dark, by candlelight, in Ralph’s father’s bed.

  On New Year’s Day, in her gray silk wedding dress and her dark glasses, she boarded the train once again. The blue bottle was still in her suitcase. It waited like a serpent. The snowdrifts were as high as a strong man’s shoulders. Ralph Truitt stared at her through the window, searching for her hidden eyes. He did not wave as the train pulled away.

  Part Two

  SAINT LOUIS . WINTER . 1908 .

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CITY ENTERED HER like music, like a wild symphony. The train pulled into Union Station, that giant garish château, and she stepped from Truitt’s railroad car into the largest train station in the world as though her skin were on fire.

  The station smelled of beef and newsprint, of beer and iron. She had been away from this for too long. She had been in the wild white country, and her heart burned with the adventures, the friends, the food and drink, the multiplicity of event the city promised. People came here to be bad. People came here to do the things they couldn’t do at home. Smoke cigarettes. Have sex. Make their way in the world.

  Mrs. Larsen was to have come with her, but Larsen had burned his hand badly the day before, so Catherine came alone.

  She arrived in Saint Louis with a letter of credit at a bank and a room already reserved for her at the new Planter’s Hotel. It was a fine room on the sixth floor, with an austere bedroom and a small sitting room filled with mohair-covered furniture in dark colors, with elaborately swagged velvet curtains and a small fireplace. A fine room. Not the grandest room—Truitt would never have done that—just adequate, and she imagined the splendor of the suites on the upper floors, all flocked wallpaper and chandeliers and big plants in Chinese pots; cattle barons and oil barons and beer kings, men with money alone in hotel rooms, men who looked at city women in a certain way, wanted certain illicit things and were willing to pay for them, and she would have moved herself and her few belongings to something more grand, with a marble bathroom and real paintings, but she wanted to play it out, play it right, so she sat in her room and waited for the visit of Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk, the Pinkerton agents Truitt had hired to find his dissolute, prodigal, intractable son.

  She felt that she was being watched herself, so that reports might be sent to Truitt about who this Catherine Land was when she was away from the white wilderness. She was careful to reveal nothing, although she didn’t know whether eyes were on her or not.

  The bank manager smiled and immediately gave her whatever she asked for. He asked after Mr. Truitt’s health. He offered her tea. She never asked for too much money, never an amount that would have been questionable. She went shopping so that she might look more like the ladies she saw taking tea and gossiping in quiet, birdlike voices in the hotel lobby. With Truitt’s money, she walked into Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, Saint Louis’s largest and finest store, aisle after modern aisle of finery and foolishness, and she walked in with a sense of power she had never felt before. Anything could be hers. She had only to lay the hand with the yellow diamond on any of the dozens of counters, an obsequious salesperson would instantaneously appear, and anything inside the display case could belong to her. Anything that caught
her fancy, even for a moment. But instead of indulging herself, she held her old hungers in check and asked only for things she needed to play a part she’d never played before.

  She bought dresses for the city, simple dresses, small hats, fine and expensive, but demure. She bought a black karakul coat with a mink collar, extravagant for the country, but ubiquitously proper and anonymous in Saint Louis. She wore black kid gloves on the street. She wore white cotton gloves to take tea in the lobby, like the other ladies. She observed the women in the hotel dining room and tried to dress and behave and smile the way they did. They were all calm and glitter.

  She wore her quiet dresses and her smart fur coat as she walked in the evening through the early dark and the light snow along Broadway with its halo of gas lamps, its arch that showed a portrait of every president. There were trolleys and horses, wagons filled with barrels of beer and enough automobiles to turn Truitt’s foolish pride to embarrassment. In Saint Louis, Truitt would be one of hundreds of men just like him. Rich men.

  She passed the fruit markets, filled with bright vegetables even in winter, and the vendors, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the cold, their hands in fingerless gloves, hawking their wares in German and Italian accents, assisted by wretched children in hand-me- down cotton dresses in the middle of winter. She walked without pity through the sea of destitution that washed over her.

  In the country, there was insanity. There were fires and burnings and murders and rapes, unthinkable cruelties, usually committed by people against people they knew. It was at least personal. Here there was the heartless, sane, anonymous whir of the desolate modern machinery, the wheels and cogs, cold iron from Truitt’s foundry. Here there was appalling poverty and gracelessness. She gave coins to the children. She couldn’t look at the mothers.

  She walked through the buildings and monumental statues that were left from the Great Exposition, the museum, the Japanese exhibit hall, filled with hundreds of small and delicate objects of impossible artistry and with kimonos that looked like elaborately embroidered dressing gowns, heavy and opulent. She went to the Odeon, to the symphony, sitting alone in a box and attracting no attention. She didn’t know the composers; she just liked the sweet majesty of the noise. She liked watching the crowd from above. She wore no jewelry, carried no fan. She did nothing to attract attention. She walked through the streets at evening, hearing the music from the beer halls as the doors swung open and shut, the gay waltzes and polkas played on rattly old pianos, the laughing men and women coming and going from their pleasures. She never went in. She never thought of buying other dresses, more ostentatious, more vulgar, and joining in the laughing crowds, of being one of the laughing women. She missed her small jewels, which she might have worn, at the neck, at the wrists and ears. She might have worn perfume, scented the air as she walked. She imagined the taste of beer at the back of her throat, but found that, in fact, she didn’t miss it. She thought of cigarettes, but the thought seemed far away, without magnetism. She imagined sitting with lidded eyes and hearing some tacky Negro musician play the piano and sing low down and dirty. She passed through the cold streets as inconspicuously as any other well-to-do married woman, and she was happy in her anonymity.

  She ate alone in the hotel dining room, bearing the humiliation of solitude with good grace, reading Jane Austen as she waited to be served. The food was delicious, although not as good as Mrs. Larsen’s, but rich and heavy so that she felt drowsy and light-headed. She ate oysters and beef and vegetables and large pale fish brought fresh from Chicago or even New York. She had dishes with French names she couldn’t pronounce or understand, so that the waiter had to stand over her and patiently explain how each one was made.

  In the mornings she spent long hours making herself ready for the day, deciding which of her new dresses to wear, fixing her hair in a way that was neither severe nor ostentatious. She was like an actress preparing to go on stage, and not one detail of her performance escaped her. She was used to watching everything, she needed to know what was going on around her, and she copied the manners of her fellow travelers exactly. She fastidiously pulled every hair from her hairbrush. She spoke in soft, kindly tones to the maids who came to clean and dust her room so that every day it seemed brand new.

  And she thought of Truitt, of his simplicity and trust. And, oddly, she thought of his body, and the nights they had spent together. His body was not young, but richly scented and textured, and somehow familiar to her. His was a body of size without menace. He had never caused her pain. She wasn’t sure the nights had been a pleasure to her, she wasn’t sure she knew what pleasure was anymore, but she knew they had been something to Truitt, some kind of release from his private agony, the opening of a window kept shut for too long. A homecoming. And, as always when she had given pleasure, she was happy to have given it. She knew the cost of solace in this world. She knew its rarity.

  Truitt was only the gate she had to pass through on the way to where she was going, but she was pleased that he had turned out not to be fat or loathsome, or cruel and tyrannical, or simply ignorant, traits shared by almost every other man she had ever known.

  She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel for him, or even what she was supposed to do now. She was his wife, his legal wife. He was rich beyond her imagination. She knew the end of the story. She knew that Truitt didn’t appear in it. But she was growing foggy on how to get there, to get to the end and her rich and spectacular reward. She forgot sometimes that she was working. She was working a scheme the rules of which seemed no longer clear to her.

  She felt almost as though finally she were simply living life as other people lived it, moving from event to event in a kind of haze, a sort of questionless acceptance of the way things were. She was surprised to find how easily it came to her. She was surprised to find it such a relief.

  She spent her afternoons in the public library, its high windows slanting the pale thin winter light down on the long tables where men and women, ladies and gentlemen, the latter mostly young and handsome with glossy hair and ruddy cheeks, sat and passed an afternoon reading novels or the newspaper, or seriously researching things with maps and biographies and dictionaries. She liked these people. She sat among them as one of them, a stranger to them as they were to one another, and she was happy.

  She read about plants. She read Edith Wharton about the endless verdure and pleasure of the Italian gardens and the villas to which they belonged. “There is, none the less, much to be learned from the old Italian gardens, and the first lesson is that, if they are to be a real inspiration, they must be copied, not in the letter but the spirit.” She read about the singing fountains of Gamberaia, of Petraia with its immense loggia, and the long lawns and high com forts of I Mansi and I Tati, and the streets of Florence and Lucca. She read about garden statuary, the grotesque and the mythical.

  She imagined the secret garden, the lemon house, and in her imagination she saw them growing again, fragrant in the evening and in the day a barrage of color and foliage. She read about the hellebores, which burst with blossom through the late winter snows, the foxgloves and delphinium and the old Bourbon roses. She read about heliotrope and amaranthus and lilies. She read about the hostas that thrived in shade, and the Japanese painted fern, its delicate leaves fringed with indigo brush strokes. She said the names over and over, cataloging them: calendula, coleus, and coreopsis. She was enchanted.

  She read books and catalogs about preparing the soil, how to triple dig a garden until the dirt was as fine and granular as sand, about how to enrich the soil with manure and mulch. It was not as poetic as the descriptions of the flowers, but in a way it was more exciting to her. She loved the details of things, the technique.

  She was just another married woman reading about gardening. Her black kid gloves and purse lay on the long oak table beside her, the high light and the brass reading lamps making the pages bright with reflection.

  She had the librarians bring her gigantic books of bota
nical illustrations, hand-colored etchings showing the plants she read about, and she memorized what she saw, stamen and pistil and petal and leaf. She had the beginning of an idea. It was an idea that seemed so comforting to her, so small and simple and comforting, to restore the walled secret garden, to watch it grow and make it her own. A place where she would be safe, where the world would be locked out. Giardino segreto, she repeated over and over. She liked secrets.

  Her mind was on fire, and she returned to the hotel at night to lie in her narrow bed in the fresh white sheets, and she could see it; she could see clearly how it would turn out, once she learned, not just to picture it in her mind, but to make it come true with her hands. It was the first thing she had loved for as long as she could remember.

  The first thing she had loved in her whole life, since the day in the carriage with her mother and the young soldiers and the rainbow. Finally she had seen the pot of gold they promised her, long ago, and now she would have it, whatever happened. She had almost forgotten about Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk.

  And then they appeared. One afternoon when she happened to be in her room a meek porter brought a card. And then Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk were sitting in her small sitting room, holding their brown hats in their hands. They were of almost identical size and could have been brothers. Mr. Fisk was ruddy in the face, and Mr. Malloy was pale as winter, but both had the same steady blue eyes, and both wore brown suits of anonymous cut and color.

  She offered them coffee. She offered them tea. They declined. She almost offered them a glass of beer, which they might have liked—everybody in Saint Louis seemed to drink beer all the time—but she felt it would have been out of character for her, and they might have relayed the information to Truitt.

  They opened their identical little notebooks and began to reel off the details. He called himself Tony Moretti. A ridiculously thin pseudonym. His real name, of course, his true father’s name, was Moretti. His given name, his legal name, was Antonio Truitt. Truitt, however, was almost certainly not his father. He had told people his father was a famous Italian pianist. Black hair. Olive skin. Over six feet tall. His shoe size. His preference in shirts. His taste in music. His disastrous fondness for women—this embarrassed them almost into silence. The drinking. The opium. His spendthrift ways with the little money he had. They had missed nothing.