Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

“I went one more time. I took Antonio to see her, but it was too awful. He saw her, saw her in ruins, and then I made him wait in the carriage. There was a room… there was a room in her house where she had thrown everything dirty, her clothes, her underclothes, and her fancy petticoats, along with plates she had eaten off of once and hadn’t bothered to clean. Embroidered tablecloths she had used once, hats she had bought and never worn. It was up to your waist. Jewelry she didn’t want anymore. Packets of letters from Antonio who wrote to her, pleaded with her to come and save him. Some of the letters weren’t even opened. The curtains were drawn against the light; you had to wade through this disaster, wondering what to save, what could be saved, some token to bring to her boy as a sign that at least his mother loved him. God knows I couldn’t. She had left her life, stuffed it away in this rank, dark room on the third floor of her fancy townhouse, which I paid for.

“She was lying in her bed, barely conscious. Probably drugged. Probably crazy. She was still beautiful. She had a refinement, a beauty, even in her madness, that caught my breath. She needed sun. She needed fresh air and a long cure, out west, in Europe. She might have lived, lived for a while, at least.

“She spoke to me. She told me I was a fool, a fool and a liar and a cuckold. She told me I was weak and stupid and that she had duped me and used me from the moment she set eyes on me and she was glad. I knew it, of course. I had known it by then for a long time.

“I left her there. I left her alone to die. She was my heart’s first love, and she despised me and I left her. No cure. No more doctors. No more money. She was thrown out of her house, her possessions auctioned in the street. She died three months later in a charity hospital, her wrists tied to the bed, gone blind, her hair fallen out, a pathetic freak who had no one to hold her hand, no priest to say the final prayer over her head, no redemption, no forgiveness from a God who had finally abandoned her too, left her to die without the words, without the invitation to heaven.

“I could have saved her. I didn’t. And I don’t regret it. There comes a moment when you can’t take it anymore. I saw that room with her discarded dresses and the unopened letters and the unpaid dressmaker’s bills, and my heart stopped caring whether she lived or died.”

There was a long, dark silence.

“You couldn’t have done differently. No one would have expected…”

“ I expected. I. She was my wife. Once, she was. Then she was dead. I don’t even know where she’s buried. I don’t care.”

“You have to forgive yourself.”

He turned violently to her. “You don’t know anything. I don’t have to do a damned thing. I’ll do and think what I do and think for as long as it takes. You asked. I told you. Never mention her name again.”

He lay back against the sheets. He pulled her close to him. He drew up the covers and immediately she could feel the warmth of his body against hers. “What I felt for her wasn’t love. I thought it was. It wasn’t. It was an addiction, a kind of insanity. I so wanted… something, I don’t remember what. Revenge. My mother. The long years of her rage. I wanted revenge, and she was the instrument. I wanted my mother to have to live with her every day and to feel small and useless and ugly and old. Only it didn’t matter for a minute. To her. It didn’t change anything. I spent my youth loving a woman who wasn’t worth the effort.”

He was drowsy. “I hope, I hope in my heart, that the fire is out. It burned too hot. It kills everything. Now. Say your prayers and go to sleep. Antonio is home. You’re here. We’ll make it work. That’s all that matters. Go to sleep now.”

He turned away and she lay in the dark, mute and thoughtless. Antonio had lied to her, had lied to get her to believe something about Truitt that wasn’t true, had described in detail a horrible, convulsive, murderous event that never happened. She herself had lied, but now it seemed the lie had burned through her, leaving only white blank space behind, white as the landscape outside the window. At that moment, something in her ended and something began. And she lay awake until the thin light came through the windows while she gave birth to the new thing.

Then Truitt stirred. It was barely morning. He opened his eyes, and she kissed him before he was fully awake. Truitt would do. He wasn’t what she had dreamed of. He wasn’t what she had expected. But he was enough.

Antonio was everywhere. His insolence, his boredom filled the house. Truitt never noticed the hypocrisy, the small insults. He gave him a bank account, a bank account with enough money to keep Antonio for years. He tried to interest Antonio in the business, sitting with him for as long as Antonio could stand it in his grand study, explaining where everything was, telling him how to buy and sell, how to grow rich. He was not a fool. He could see how condescending Antonio was, and it reminded him of his own youth, his own lack of interest in anything except the pursuit of pleasure.

There was no amusement in the town for Antonio. There were no restaurants, except at the one small, sad hotel, and there were no women. He soon exhausted the drugs he had brought, and faced his days with a lucidity that was rare and unpleasant for him. He smoked cigarettes at the table. He spoke endlessly of Saint Louis and its enchantments.

Truitt opened the old wine cellar for him, and every night Antonio got drunk on the beautiful wines that had been laid by twenty years before, vintages of an astonishing rarity and subtlety. Ports and Bordeaux and Burgundies shipped from Europe when the house was filled with his mother’s friends. It didn’t matter to Antonio. He just wanted to get drunk and say insulting things to his father.

“The house is cold. My rooms are cold. My feet are freezing all the time.”

“The house is old, and big. Maybe your clothes…”

“And wear what? The trick, Father, is not to change your clothes to suit your environment, but to change your environment to suit your clothes. You’re rich. Do something.”

“It’ll be spring soon.”

“And then we’ll be warm and there will still be nothing to do.”

It went on and on, Truitt patient, Antonio disdainful of every effort he made to be kind. The money meant nothing. Sleeping every night in his mother’s gilded bed meant nothing. Seeing his old playroom, his old toys still there, meant nothing. Antonio had no sentimental heart. He was not to be moved. He had come to bring death.

“People who spend their days in business are wasting their lives. We only live for art.”

“I felt the same way. I do feel it. I didn’t choose this. There was no one else.”

“And someday it’ll all be mine? I’ll sell it and live a beautiful life.”

“It has been what this family has done for a hundred years. There isn’t a person in town who doesn’t depend on it, in some way.”

“They’re little nobodies.”

They might have talked about the things that mattered. They might have sat up at night by a fire, and Ralph might have been able to say what was in his heart, that he was sorry, that for all he cared Antonio could do whatever he liked, sell the business, burn down the house and sow the earth with salt. He only wanted one thing, his son’s forgiveness. And that Antonio was never going to give.

He cornered Catherine while Ralph was away in town.

“He’s supposed to be dead. He’s not even dying. Come at once, you said.”

“He needed you here. He needed to believe you would come. It was the only way I could get you to come. If you believed…

“So you lied to me.”

“Yes.”

“I need one thing. I need him dead. Just remember, I can always tell him. Every night, when he wants to have those little chats, every night I am about to tell him, and I don’t. I’m kind of enjoying it, actually. He sits there like a monkey, and you can say anything to him and he literally turns the other cheek.”