Robert Goolrick - A Reliable Wife

He would wake in the night and the room would be filled with dead people, all the dead people he had ever known. His mother and father, Emilia, sweet Franny. Larsen with his bloody wrist would be there. Standing beatific in the midst of them would be Antonio, his eyes white as marble, his face a blank. Truitt would call out their names, as if they could speak to him their terrible secrets.

He would hear the poet’s voice:

It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.

Catherine would wake. She would move around the room, her arms aloft like white wings, her nightdress billowing around her feet, until the dead were gone, leaving only the blue moonlight. Then she would quiet him, and he would sleep for a while.

Every night he would drink his water, while she turned her eyes away and wept. He felt an enormous sadness, a particular sensation of loss, but he never wept anymore, and he never spoke of it.

Some days he wouldn’t speak. He would wander restlessly from room to room, through the many rooms of the grand palazzo, picking up small objects, turning them this way and that in the light, trying to remember where they came from and what they were for. He would ask her the names of things. He would ask her where they had come from. She didn’t know. From Europe, she would say. From Italy. From Limoges.

She stopped. She started again. She wanted to walk into the woods and throw the arsenic away where no living thing would find it. But she didn’t throw it away. She kept it, in its blue bottle with a Chinese label.

She knew there was a point at which she could stop and the poison would fade. He would be left weak and haggard and scarred from the deep blisters in his skin. He would live, but he would die early. Still, he would not die now. He would not die at her hands, while her hands bathed his skin. He would not die in agony. There was a point at which he could live, and there was a point beyond which nothing could be done for him. She knew she was approaching that point, and her anguish grew every time he forgot a name or sat up suddenly in his chair and moved to another, every time she bathed him with warm water to alleviate his chills and his fear.

Mrs. Larsen had grown to hate her, knowing somehow that Catherine was the cause of whatever was killing Truitt, that she was killing him as Emilia had tried to kill him. But Truitt knew it was his youth, the dissipations of his youth that had brought him to this.

Luxe, calme et volupte, the poet had written, and Truitt had taken it to mean a life of endless indulgence, a life in which beauty and sensation were all that mattered, a life in which there were no consequences. When Emilia had betrayed him, when Franny had died, he had vowed that his days of indulgence were over. He had given up drinking. He had led a sober life. He had learned nothing. He loved Catherine with the sensuality of his youth, he longed for Antonio as he might have longed for a lover, and it was killing him. He had forgotten the poison, had forgotten that this was being done to him. He thought he had done it to himself, long ago, an illness he had contracted in his youth, the rancid sexual contagion of his childhood, knowing it was fatal and was now, after years of denial, finally showing its vengeful teeth.

He looked on his life, on the part of him that was living and that had once been whole, with awkward tenderness. He tilted his head toward it as one might toward a baby, afraid to hold it, to pick up such unblemished beauty. He had once moved and talked like other men, been comfortable in his clothes, held women in his arms. He had been a father. His child had been an idiot. He had been a husband. His wife had been a charmer and a beauty and had ruined his life. He couldn’t remember her face. He hadn’t seen Antonio since he was fourteen, twelve years ago. Where had they gone? What would his face look like now? His mind turned all day long like a plant toward the light, toward questions that had no answers.

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.

She sent a telegram to Antonio. “Come at once,” was all it said.

She nursed Ralph with all the care she could give him. She wrapped his hands and body with gauze dipped in liniment, the sores had become so terrible. He itched and burned, and the salve seemed to soften the torment. She covered his face with salve and gauze, his face, where the skin was falling off in sheets. She closed his ears and covered his eyes with cotton, she put her dark glasses on him. The sound and the light had become piercing to him, the smallest footfall an agony. She wrapped her shoes in wool so that her feet barely made a sound as she walked through the marble halls. She drew the curtains against the light and the sound, and she tied him with velvet and cotton cords to a chair when his restlessness and dementia would not let him stay still. She drew the curtains, and the white world went away for a time.