Somewhere, for those other people she so often thought about, there was the comfort of continuance and of habit. She realized it wasn’t easy. The winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air. Even in the country the madness of the time would not leave people untouched. Throughout her life, people came and went, some amusing, most not, but their leaving was no more surprising to her than their coming. Truitt had arrived, and leaving him now would be the end of comfort for Catherine Land.
She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She wasn’t cold, not yet, and the house looked warm as the lights began to come on, Mrs. Larsen moving slowly, room to room. Mrs. Larsen had known Antonio since he was a baby. She had watched him go into the ground next to his sister and turned away as though it were the most natural thing in the world. For her, life went on, dinners got made, lights got turned on, and that was the way you got from one day to the next. Habit saved her from grief, from horror at her own husband’s sudden insanity, from the ache of watching a young man die whose sweetness had left the earth long before his body.
It was four o’clock, and everything around her stood perfectly still. The wind died, and the animals in the field, even the gray Arabian, stood to watch as the light slanted suddenly into the prism of evening. The large facade of the house, with its imposing windows and its classical statues spaced along the edge of the roof, lit up golden and hazy and ancient. It was the hour at which she had arrived. Her discarded dress. Her lost jewels, now so trivial. Truitt standing on the platform in a black coat with a fur collar in the howling snow. The startled deer and the runaway horses. Just as everything waited—for the end of winter, for the beginning of spring.
She moved her foot and looked down. The grass under her shoe turned green as she watched, and it grew away from her, grew greening until the whole of the patch where she stood was green and clipped and glowing in the golden light. The green wonder of the world filled her garden and spread out from her feet wherever she walked.
It moved away from her, and she stepped back. Everywhere she placed her foot turned green and lush. The parterre grew rich with the odors of rosemary and sage, clipped into globes between a lover’s knot of box and yew, and lavender, the long spikes with their purple heads as still as the rest.
The beds along the old brick walls still lay brown and tangled, but as she walked toward them spreading green from the hem of her dress, the old canes of the roses began to uncurl themselves, the dark waxy foliage began to make its first appearance. The tiny snowdrops and crocus sprouted along the edge of the beds, white and yellow and purple, the hellebores and then the narcissi, the poetic Acteon and the rich yellows and pale yellows of King Alfred. The flowers appeared and the names came back to her from the long afternoons in the library, those hours of rest from her exertions with Antonio.
He was a dessert that was too rich, but she had run to him from the time he was hardly more than a boy, the mixture of beauty and arrogance, the tenderness and charm which cost him so much now stilled forever, buried beneath the black earth, already frozen over again. She wept for how cold he would be. It was not his fault. So little that happened was anybody’s fault.
The lilacs bloomed, blue and white, and the air grew soft with their perfume, the gentle swaying of their heavy-headed flowers, and the irises with their sculptured heads, blue and yellow and indigo and brown.
The tulips shot up, the Asian flower, the flower of mania, with many colors and shapes, some with speckled leaves and sharp pointed crimson petals with indigo eyes, some yellow, some white, some pale pink and green, some variations which came only once and never reappeared.
The foxgloves began to appear, shooting up spikes which opened into many bell-shaped flowers that hung their heads along the stems. The peony bushes came into bloom, and then came their rich Chinese blossoms, many petaled, the size of tea plates, heavy with moisture, pinks and whites.
She swept out her hand, over the painted hostas and dianthus and sweet alyssum, the sumptuous Chinese lilies with their splendid colors, suddenly filling the air with a perfume that was like a kind of fainting.
The rose canes unwound and thrived, the glossy foliage giving way to bud and bloom, the old roses, the old names. Mme. Hardy, the sumptuous pure white moss rose, and silvery pink La Noblesse. Old Velvet, the color of blood, of Antonio’s blood; Clifton Moss, the resplendent pristine white of his shirt, purity and violence mixed together. The brilliant Fantin Latour rose up and flowered, the old French roses, the double Pellison, the bright crimson Henri Martin, Leda, with crimson markings on the edge of white petals.
There was no sound. There was no shift in the light. Everything was still.
The trellises straightened, and the climbing roses stood tall, twining up and around, mixing the thorny canes with clematis, purple and white.
The statues righted themselves, the classical figures with their sinuous curves, patinaed with age and moss, and the grotesques which hung at the four corners of the garden, which guarded the way in and out.
She had never seen anything so beautiful. The secret garden made her weep with the beauty of all that was living. It would last long after she died. Now and then, one of the roses would release a shower of petals that fell prettily through the golden light, until the ground beneath the climbers splayed against the wall was carpeted with the fragrant petals, the rich sweet and peppery smell filling the air, perfuming even the fabric of her dress.
The garden was perfect. The garden was her glory. It had come from nothing except the earth; it grew wherever she walked, wherever she turned her gaze. It would fill the house with vase after vase of flowers, so that their days would be perfumed. Truitt would ask her the names and she would reel them off and tell him about their histories, of the tulips brought from Asia Minor, to illuminate the sultan’s nights, the jeweled earrings and the candled turtles. She would put together bouquets and take them to the town, to girls getting married, bringing them still dewy on the wedding morning, the stephanotis, the white roses and the lilies.
The light shifted from golden to pale yellow and then to gray blue, but the flowers seemed to glow more as the light faded, as though each petal were illuminated from within, until her little square was filled with light and fragrance and gaiety that all of Saint Louis couldn’t match. Each rose, each bloom was a perfect masterpiece of kindness.
It was almost dark, and the darkest flowers vanished into the twilight, even as the pale white and palest pink roses seemed to give out a richer fragrance. The first star appeared above the brick wall.
The star brightened and was joined by other, paler stars as the dark deepened into night. She heard her name and turned toward the golden brightness of the house.
“Catherine.”
She turned and Truitt was standing on the steps. He was still wearing the black suit he had worn to the funeral, a band of black crepe around his arm. She turned away, her long dress sweeping the ground, and the garden was vanished, had gone away, its beds a mess of old and dying flowers, its branches bare, the roses all thorns and the limes and yews a tangle of ruined wood. The garden waited, as it had waited for twenty years.
She was just a simple, honest woman standing in the ruin of a late winter garden, waiting for the spring.
“Catherine.” She turned back toward him, afraid of him for the first time, afraid of his anger and his pain and his disapproval, and afraid also of her own shame. A wasted life. A ruined idea. Antonio dead.
Such things happened.
“I knew.” His voice was clear in the darkness, his body a silhouette, his face lost in shadow. “I always knew.”
“Knew what?”
“I knew what Antonio told me. Your history. What you’ve been. The lies you’ve told me. Who you are. I always knew. Malloy and Fisk sent me a letter. I burned it. It’s private, and it means nothing. But I already knew before you came back from Saint Louis.”
The garden waited. How could he forgive so much? How could he be so patient
? So much depended on her now, on her answer, and she tried to wait as long as she could, still smelling the sweet perfume of the last old Bourbon rose.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
He stood for a long time, until she shivered with the sudden cold.
“We’re going to have a child.”
In the darkness, she could see just enough to know the stillness in his tired face. He reached out his arm toward her. The lights from the house behind him began to come on, one by one. “Well then,” he said. “Well then. You’d better come in the house.”
She took one last look at the garden. The air had turned suddenly cold, but it was a springtime kind of cold, an evening cold, without threat. It was almost dark. Things wait, she thought. Not everything dies. Living takes time. And she walked toward the golden house and took his outstretched hand in her own.
Such things happen.
BEHOLDEN
The pictures you’re about to see are of people who were once actually alive. That’s the way it begins. And it never lets up.
I was set on fire in 1973. The blaze in my heart and brain was caused by the first reading of Michael Lesy’s brilliant book Wisconsin Death Trip. Its collage of words and photographs paint a haunting, cinematic portrait of a small town in Wisconsin at the diseased end of the nineteenth century. We had imagined the cities to be teeming with moral turpitude and industrial madness, and rural America to be sleeping in a prosperous innocence, filled with honest and industrious people. Not so. Lesy unlocks the Pandora’s box of country life to show us its dark and ravaged soul.
The portrait he paints has never left me. It had a profound influence on the structure and genesis of A Reliable Wife. I set it in Lesy country, frozen Wisconsin in the dead of winter, and played out a complex entangling of three lives against his starkly compelling canvas.
I owe a great deal to Michael Lesy, to his explication of the awful life endured by the mass of people caught between machinery and madness. Read Lesy’s book. It will never leave you. It left me changed forever. Such things happen.
SPECIAL THANKS
To Elaine Markson, first responder and a great gardener; Doug Stewart, tenacious and smart agent; Chuck Adams, fine and careful editor; Michael Taeckens and Brunson Hoole at Algonquin; Bob Jones, who saved me more than once—as good as they come; and to those who read this book in its long incubation, and always said the one thing that gave me continuance: Dale Sessa, Nancy Axthelm, Dana Hoey, James Whiteside, Marybeth Hurt and Paul Schrader, faroff and lovely Jodie Tillen—a great heart and a great eye—Daphne Merkin, Jeb and Lexi Byers, Bob Balaban and Lynn Grossman, Everett Kane, Sally Mann, and her fine daughter, sweet Virginia Mann, Alexandra Como Saghir, Lisa Tracy, Suzanne Rice and Elizabeth Greenlee. So many wonderful friends! And to Nell Lancaster and Jim Waddell, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude beyond words.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BEHOLDEN
SPECIAL THANKS
A Reliable Wife Page 24