Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

“He wants your forgiveness.”

“He wants to sleep soundly at night. Or does he? Sleep, I mean. You sleep in his bed. You would know.”

“He’s restless. He’s restless for your happiness.”

The threat was always there. It was always there and it was very real. They had made a plan, and the plan had involved both of them. Now he said that she disgusted him. With Ralph out of the way, he would throw her out and there would be no place for her to go. Nowhere other than back to the life, back to a woman she had ceased to be.

Catherine didn’t know what to do. She realized that, while there was in the world a series of people who knew things about her, no one person knew everything. She had told so many lies, had invented too many selves, one for each tableau. She had nobody to turn to, and the situation as it was couldn’t go on for long. Not even Truitt’s patience was infinite.

Antonio’s rage grew as Ralph got stronger. The color had returned to his ashen cheeks; he didn’t feel dizzy as he walked up the steep stairs to the house. His sleep was untroubled by the old anxieties. The ghosts were gone.

She read to them at night by the fire, Whitman, the American poet.

“God. This is boring. Do you have any idea how boring this is?”

At night, as she and Ralph made love in the blue bedroom, she thought of Antonio pacing in his rooms far away, drinking brandy, smoking cigars, and she could feel his anger, and knew that it was leading to something awful, something she couldn’t picture or describe. She tried to warn Truitt, but he wouldn’t hear it.

“He’s going to ruin everything. He’s a danger to you.”

“I was the same at his age. I was restless and bored and hateful. Certainly he is his mother’s child. Maybe he’ll never come around. Maybe he is my son. I never wanted to stop, either. The disdain. The hatefulness. I have to try.”

Ralph took Antonio to the factory, patiently explaining how the ore was smelted, showing him the shapes and variations that could be made from the molten red-hot iron. Antonio insulted the workers, laughed at their efforts.

His only real interest was Catherine, whom he always called Mrs. Truitt. When Ralph was away, when he finally got out of bed and she was sitting at lunch, or discussing the night’s menu with Mrs. Larsen, he would creep in like a cat, and suddenly be beside her, in her way, in her mind when she had almost forgotten his presence.

“Mrs. Truitt…”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“You’re my father’s wife. What should I call you?”

“Catherine.”

“I would never. Mrs. Truitt, think what fun we could have. All that money. There’s enough wine for years. All those bedrooms, we could fill them up with people we know, with our friends…”

“Antonio. There is no we. Not anymore. You have to understand.”

“And all you have to do is make him die.”

“I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, in fact. I no longer have the medicine.”

“There’s more. I’ll go to Chicago. The house is crawling with rats, that’s what I’ll tell them.”

She looked out the dining room windows, down the long field toward the river. The ice was already fragile. The children no longer came to skate after school. The winter wouldn’t last much longer.

“I won’t do it. I’ve told you a hundred times. He’s my husband. You already have everything you could want.”

“I’m bored.”

“Then go to Chicago. Play with your friends.”

“I don’t have any friends in Chicago.”

“They’re the same as the people you know in Saint Louis. There’s not a hair’s difference between them. They sleep all day and drink all night and gamble and go to whores and smoke opium. The things you like. You could buy clothes. You have money. Truitt has an excellent tailor. You could live like the Prince of Wales.”

“It wouldn’t be any fun.”

“Go to Europe. He did.”

“And get lost for five years?”

“He would send you all the money you wanted.”

“I don’t speak the language. I don’t like churches. I’ve told you what I want.”

“And I’ve told you you won’t have it. Not today. Not ever. You’ll have to make do.”

“Making do is not my way, and you know it.”

“I am begging you. For one hour, for one afternoon, please leave me alone.”

He would leave her then, but she could feel his presence in the house. She stood for hours in the secret garden, staring up at the windows of her bedroom, hoping for spring, wishing Antonio would go away, wishing she had never started on this disastrous course, wishing she had never seen the light in Truitt’s eyes, wishing she had never heard the poet’s words: “Those who love shall be made invincible.” She didn’t feel invincible. She felt like a new wound, open to the air, vulnerable to any passerby. How had this happened? Standing in the ruins of the garden, she could barely remember how it started, but she felt giddy with fear, that she would never escape it. The knot in her stomach said that Antonio was right: Truitt would find out one way or another. She had laid waste to her life, and that life was now a secret buried deep inside her, safe except for Antonio.

She had been to the doctor in town. She had timed it out very carefully in her mind. The child was Truitt’s. It lay in her belly like the garden lay in her mind, under the earth, waiting for care. When Truitt was stronger, she would tell him. When Antonio tired of his scheme and realized that everything that was Truitt’s was also his, he would go away and spend money until he died in Saint Louis or London or Paris, an aging fop too bored to live anymore. He would move from city to city as he had always done, using people, soiling them like sheets and walking away, to find fresh faces and new diversions. Truitt had loved a person who didn’t exist. Surely he would love and find consolation and hope in the person who was going to be.

Even though he couldn’t ride, Antonio bought an Arabian horse, the finest in the whole state, some said. He hired a teacher, a young farm boy, and took lessons down in the vast old barn, where Truitt had leveled the floor and made an indoor riding ring. In two weeks that fascination was spent, and the horse stood idly in the barnyard, picking through the thin, icy snow far from the desert sands.

Antonio bought a car that was newer and fancier and far more expensive than his father’s. It arrived on the train and astonished the town, but he couldn’t drive, and the roads were too rutted anyway, so it sat in a stable in town.

Antonio went to Chicago for five days and came home with a glazed and exhausted look, a trunkful of new clothes and a packet of arsenic and a ball of opium. He came home with a Miss Carruthers, Elsie Carruthers, a girl Catherine recognized from the theater and her nights with India, and installed her in a suite of rooms next to his own. They would spend the nights there, drinking vintage wine and tearing at each other’s clothes. But Miss Carruthers was ignorant and was bored with the long dinners and the poetry, and she and Antonio stopped coming down for them. Ralph said it was what young men did; it was what he had done, although he had traveled three thousand miles to do it. He had never brought his depravities under his mother and father’s roof, but he never said a word to Antonio. It was a relief to Catherine to have him out of the way, a relief to find she enjoyed her time alone with Truitt again.

Antonio grew bored with Miss Carruthers, and Ralph paid her a sum of money to get on the train and go back to Chicago. After that, Antonio had nothing to do. Nothing at all.

“Mrs. Truitt, we have the powder. You know the plan. I told you I’d tell him and I will.”