Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

He was a fifty-four-year-old man whose face was shocking to him, and in a few moments even that slate would be wiped clean. He allowed himself that hope.

We all want the simplest things, he thought. Despite what we may have, or the children who die, we want the simplicity of love. It was not too much to ask that he be like the others, that he, too, might have something to want.

For twenty years, not one person had said good night to him as he turned off the light and lay down to sleep. Not one person had said good morning as he opened his eyes. For twenty years, he had not been kissed by anyone whose name he knew, and yet, even now, as the snow began to fall lightly, he remembered what it felt like, the soft giving of the lips, the sweet hunger of it.

The townspeople watched him. Not that it mattered anymore. We were there, they would tell their children and their neighbors. We were there. We saw her get off the train for the first time, and she got off the train only three times. We were there. We saw him the minute he set eyes on her.

The letter was in his hand. He knew it by heart. Dear Mr. Truitt, I am a simple honest woman. I have seen much of the world in my travels with my father. In my missionary work I have seen the world as it is and I have no illusions. I have seen the poor and I have seen the rich and do not believe there is so much as a razor’s edge between, for the rich are as hungry as the poor. They are hungry for God. I have seen mortal sickness beyond imagining. I have seen what the world has done to the world, and I cannot bear to be in the world any longer. I know now that I can’t do anything about it, and God can’t do anything about it either. I am not a schoolgirl. I have spent my life being a daughter and had long since given up hope of being a wife. I know that it isn’t love you are offering, nor would I seek that, but a home, and I will take what you give because it is all that I want. I say that not meaning to imply that it is a small thing. I mean, in fact, that it is all there is of goodness and kindness to want. It is everything compared to the world I have seen and, if you will have me, I will come.

With the letter she had sent a photograph of herself, and he could feel the tattered edge of it with his thumb as he raised his hat to one more person, saw, from the corner of his eye, one more person gauge the unusual sobriety and richness of his black suit and strong boots and fur-collared overcoat. His thumb caressed her face. His eyes could see her features, neither pretty nor homely. Her large, clear eyes stared into the photographer’s flash without guile. She wore a simple dress with a plain cloth collar, an ordinary woman who needed a husband enough to marry a stranger twenty years her senior.

He had sent her no photograph in return, nor had she asked for one. He had sent instead a ticket, sent it to the Christian boardinghouse in which she stayed in filthy, howling Chicago, and now he stood, a rich man in a tiny town in a cold climate, at the start of a Wisconsin winter in the year 1907. Ralph Truitt waited for the train that would bring Catherine Land to him.

Ralph Truitt had waited a long time. He could wait a little longer.

Catherine Land sat in front of the mirror, unbecoming all that she had become. The years had hardened her beyond mercy.

I’m the kind of woman who wants to know the end of the story, she thought, staring at her face in the jostling mirror. I want to know how it’s all going to end before it even starts.

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.

It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.

The land flew away by her window, rushing horizontal flat with snow. The train jostled just enough so that, even though she held her head perfectly still, her earrings swayed and sparkled in the light.

He had sent a private car with a sitting room and a bedroom and electric lights. She had not seen another passenger, although she knew other people had to be on the train. She imagined them, sitting calmly in their seats, pale winter skin on gray horsehair, while in her car it was all red velvet and swagging and furbelows. Like a whorehouse, she thought. Like a whorehouse on wheels.

They had left after dark and crept through the night, stopping often to clear drifts from the tracks. The porter had brought her a heavy, glistening meal, slabs of roast beef and shrimp on ice, lovely iced cakes which she ate at a folding table. No wine was offered and she didn’t ask for it. The hotel silver felt smooth and heavy in her hand, and she devoured everything that was brought to her.

In the morning, steaming eggs and ham and rolls and hot black coffee that burned her tongue, all brought by a silent Negro porter, served as though he were performing some subtle magic trick. She ate it all. There was nothing else to do, and the movement of the train was both hypnotic and ravishing, amplifying her appetites, as each rushing second brought her closer to the fruition of her long and complicated scheme.

When she wasn’t eating, or sleeping beneath the starched, immaculate sheets, she stared at her face in the mirror above the dressing table. It was her one sure possession, the one thing she could count on never to betray her, and she found it reassuring, after thirty-four years, that it remained, every morning, essentially unchanged, the same sure beauty, the same pale and flawless skin, unlined, fresh. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet reached her face.

Still she was restless. Her mind raced, reviewing her options, her plans, her jumbled memories of a turbulent past, and what it was about her life that had led her here, to this sumptuous room on wheels, somewhere in the middle.

So much had to happen in the middle, and no matter how often she had rehearsed it in her mind, she didn’t trust the middle. You could get caught. You could lose your balance, your way, and get found out. In the middle, things always happened you hadn’t planned on, and it was these things, the possibility of these things, that haunted and troubled her, that showed now in the soft mauve hollows beneath her dark almond eyes.

Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love or money. She could not, would not accept that as a fact, because to accept it now would mean that the end had already come and gone.

She was determined, cold as steel. She would not live without at least some portion of the two things she knew were necessary as a minimum to sustain life. She had spent her years believing that they would come, in time. She believed that an angel would come down from heaven and bless her with riches as she had been blessed with beauty. She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object, a shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.

She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been born.