Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

“You don’t need me, if that’s what you want.”

“The lost son killing the father? Wouldn’t work. I’m a coward. You’re not. No, Mrs. Truitt, I will always need you. The sound of your hem on the stairs makes me want you, all over again.”

“The past is dead.”

“No, it’s not. It never is.”

“I couldn’t do it.”

He touched her neck, the beating pulse. “Tell me you love me.”

She slapped his face.

He smiled. “You see?”

Antonio was used to being adored and desired and had no place in his heart for the complexities of love. He was never driven by the need for affection; desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event. And, given the chance to have and do anything he wanted, he was filled with a crippling lassitude, a despair and anger that made him feel like a tiger in a cage. He looked for the new sensation, the new conquest, and found nothing.

Ralph realized Antonio would never wear a wedding ring. The simple happiness of domesticity meant nothing to him, that his life would be spent moving from woman to woman, from raw pleasure to pleasure, forever, until his looks ran out and his desires failed him, and he would be left with nothing. Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart. It existed outside of time, on a continuum that couldn’t be seen or described. Ralph thought of Catherine during the day with a mixture of love and fear, but he found himself content that she would be there when evening came.

Antonio would never see it. His mother had died for sexual pleasure, she had debased and ruined her life, and Antonio was the product of her attenuated perversity. Never to give up the primacy of sex was to die alone, in a kind of poverty. It was never to know the comfort of sex without need.

Ralph had found his passion again, so long suppressed. He had found it in a woman who had deceived and lied and pretended and worse, but he woke up every morning with the feeling of having passed the night in dreams of pleasure. He had sought one thing and found another. She was the instrument of his death. She was the invitation to his life. He knew where he stood.

He grew stronger, and he got richer and more powerful. His business, so long a duty to pass the time, to assuage his guilt over his father’s lonely death, had become infused with his passion, and his arms reached out, his hands full of money, to buy and to ruin and to save and to build and to own whatever would make his power grow. It was what he had become. It was what America had offered him. It was what Antonio might grow to be.

“It bores me.”

“It bored me, too. It was getting good at it that made it interesting. It’s life, Antonio. It’s work. It’s what people do.”

“It’s not my life. It’s not what I do.”

“The country, the whole country, Antonio, is building and growing. There’s so much of it to own and control. There are people, on farms, in cities, who don’t know where to go. All they need is a light, and they’ll follow.”

“You. They can follow you to hell for all I care.”

And still Ralph persisted, his patience infinite, his love vast and unexplored. Antonio was, for him, the one thing he had managed to save out of the disaster of his early life-or at least he was doing what he could to save it-and he would do anything, endure any insult, to make him stay.

He had been willing to die, but now life had come back to him, life and power and passion, and he would never stand unloved and alone in a crowd of people on a train platform again. He would never again be an object of pity to the men who worked for him and their wives and children. He would never again be little more than a rumor.

The house was growing around them. Mrs. Larsen’s staff of two had grown to six, including a laundress, a maid for Antonio, and someone extra to help in the kitchen. Catherine had sent to Chicago and hired a gardener who brought the tropics to the conservatory, who made the orange and the jasmine bloom in the hot afternoon sun. It was wet there, and songbirds flew from branch to branch, singing. It made Ralph’s bones feel warm, to sit there in the afternoon. It made the pain go away.

The heavy old damask curtains were pulled down, and lighter ones were put up, to let in more sun. The silk bed hangings in their bedroom were replaced with fabrics adorned with Chinese patterns, designs from another century. Their exotic splendor transported Ralph and Catherine into their own Xanadu, a place that was wholly and entirely the kingdom of their own desires.

Seamstresses came from Chicago, bringing pattern books and bolts of rich material, to make dresses for Catherine, nothing excessive. They made Ralph splendid striped shirts with white cuffs and collars and gold collar buttons.

They were rich, and while they felt no need to be ostentatious, they felt comfortable with living the way rich people live. Ralph didn’t change his habits, and he stopped drinking again once he had had enough brandy; he ate only as much as he needed and not as much as he wanted. The food was exquisite. The company increased as light was let into the house.

But still he was unable to get through to Antonio. He had gone through so many years of hope in the effort to find him and bring him home, and now Antonio hated the house, he hated the business, he was rude to Ralph’s wife and to the servants. But Ralph had time. He had had nothing but time for the long years and it had taught him to stand straight, not to bend into the cold.

Every day the winter thinned. The stubble rose again in the field, the light grew longer in the afternoons. Ice still coated the black river, but it was as though the prison doors were opening and people waited for the first warm day and then, finally, the day when the girls appeared in their summer dresses. There was a future.

Antonio learned to drive the horse and carriage, and immediately, over the muddy roads, he went to town every night, where he took up with a young widow, Mrs. Alverson, whose husband had committed suicide two years before. Her sexual desperation matched his own, and their rendezvous were the talk of the town. It hurt Ralph to hear his name mentioned again as a subject of gossip, to hear of that kind of scandal. He made an attempt to rein in Antonio’s behavior.

“Her husband was twenty-five. She has a baby who was born after her husband was already dead. Her heart is an open wound.”

“She likes my company.”

“She lives on charity. Of course she likes your company. People are talking.”

“Your reputation is worthless to me, if that’s what you’re worried about. You have no reputation, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll do exactly what I want to.”

“Maybe you should go to Europe. There are many Mrs. Alversons over there, women who have a better understanding of the arrangement. Maybe you’d be happier. I was happy. There are women…”

“And leave you and Mrs. Truitt and the fun we’re having? Why?”

“Antonio. Because Mrs. Alverson… what’s her name?

“Violet.”

“Because Mrs. Alverson is worth more than this. Anybody is. Because you have no heart for business. The only other thing I have to give you is money. I’ve given you enough to go around the world, if that’s what you want. You’ll play it out. You’ll come around. The fire burns out.”

When he was Antonio’s age, Ralph had been forced to give up his dissolute life, to come home and take over the business. He had learned by doing, badly at first, then better and better. It had become his life, and Italy was a distant memory. Antonio had reached an age when the notion of going to a foreign country where he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the language and had nowhere to live was overwhelming to him. He had his life in hand, and the thrill of the new wasn’t available to him. He had brought his whole life to Wisconsin, and now he had no way back. He also had no way to get what he wanted, and his rage mounted. His old friends would envy him, but his old friends were not welcome here. Here it was all governors and senators and tired old businessmen with cigars and potbellies who came to lick the boots of Ralph Truitt, hoping to get in at the beginning of the next big thing, the next capital investment that would make them even richer.