Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

Antonio retired to his widow in town and his rooms in the vast house, and he didn’t care that he was breaking his father’s soul, little by little. It couldn’t last long, this tenuous balance of hatred and greed. It couldn’t last.

Violet Alverson came to dinner. She was painfully shy and gentle, and seemed in awe of the grandeur of the food and the house. Catherine showed her everything, and she seemed most enchanted by the conservatory with its songbirds and its tropical plants. She didn’t know which spoon or fork to use, but Ralph talked to her in a gentle, kindly voice about her hopes for the future, a better life, a life of her own, a fine boy who would have an education and be somebody, somebody in business, perhaps.

Catherine asked her to spend the night since it was four miles back to town and the roads were dark and muddy, but Violet declined, and left in her borrowed buggy, whip in hand. She and Antonio had said not one word to each other. She drove home believing that he was going to ask her to marry him.

After the dinner, Antonio got bored with Violet Alverson. She had a child, and she had no conversation. She was not pretty enough to stir his vanity. He wrote to her that he wouldn’t see her anymore. He wouldn’t even go in person.

She hanged herself the next day from the same beam her husband had used, in the attic of her shabby house with its sad double bed. Her baby was asleep on a quilt on the floor. She had nursed him just before she tied the rope. Her dress was still unbuttoned, her bare breast hanging out. The cries of the baby alerted the neighbors. The local newspaper said she had died due to her continuing grief over the loss of her young husband. Ralph and Catherine went to the spare funeral of this woman they hardly knew. Antonio stayed home and played the piano.

The wind blew warmer from the south. The nights were still long and frigid, but the earth was visible now. Ralph spent the last light of the days in the barn with his car, making it shine, bringing it to sputtering life again. The winter had gone on too long. He had Antonio’s automobile brought out from town, and he taught Antonio to drive on the long driveway up to the house. It was the first mechanical thing Antonio had ever been able to do well. His automobile was a marvel, leather upholstery and brass and crystal lamps, with bud vases in the back, and he and Ralph drove up and down along the sweeping road to the house. The car brought them a measure of peace. They tried to get comfortable with each other. They tried to talk.

“It was a terrible thing, the thing I did to you.”

“You were angry, I suppose.”

“I was angry. I was angry and your mother was gone. I had loved her with all my heart. Believe me. I had. When she was gone, everything went black.”

“And I was left behind.”

“Your sister dead. Your mother gone. You were left, and I turned that grief and rage on you, a little boy, and I will never stop regretting it.”

“You managed to forget pretty well, it seems to me.”

“I looked for you for ten years. I looked everywhere.”

“It must have cost a lot of money.”

“I didn’t care. After you left, ran away, I knew what an awful thing I’d done. No amount of money can make that right. Being tortured for something you didn’t do.”

The slow dance of the father and the son, the old song of regret and retribution twined through their every conversation. During the conversations late at night Antonio was usually drunk, Catherine upstairs in bed.

“You married.”

“I wanted you to come home. I thought it would help. And I was lonely. Lonely and unloved and sad every day. You don’t know what happens to a life without love. To a heart. It withers. It loses reason. I just wanted what people have. I wanted a companion, some company in my heart. Someone other than myself.”

“And have you been happy? Happy with the young Mrs. Truitt? What do you really know about her?”

“Her life hasn’t been easy. I’m glad to make it better. And she brought you home. She’s my wife. Yes. I’m happy.”

“She’s much younger.”

“She’d be a friend to you, if you’d let her.”

“I have friends, but they don’t live here. You beat me until I was blinded by the blood in my eyes. You kept me locked in a room. You left me alone with no explanation of where my mother was or why your cruelty was so immense and unending.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don’t think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”

“You’d be very rich.”

“And you would be unmourned, except perhaps for the lovely Mrs. Truitt. Certainly not by me. And not by all those people who live in fear of you.”

Despite the vitriol, it was a beginning, some kind of communication between father and son. Ralph went to work every day with a hope that Antonio would come around, would grow to forgive and to love. He was an honest man and he had such a yearning to believe.

For Antonio, of course, he was a fish on the line. Antonio gave and then withheld, leaving the hook in his father’s mouth. It gave him pleasure.

Antonio wanted so much. He wanted for most of his childhood never to have happened. He wanted his mother to have been faithful and beautiful and virtuous. He wanted her to have cared for him. He wanted her to have taken him with her when she ran away, giving him more than the idiot sister and the terrifying father who was not his father. He wanted the days of his boyhood to have been different. He wanted, more than anything, for his mother not to have died in squalor, to have lived and stayed with him and kept things from becoming so sadly, wrenchingly wrong. He didn’t care anymore about the beatings. They had made him stronger than his father, his real father, ever could have been. He cared about the loss.

He sat drunk by the fire every night after Ralph had gone to bed, to the consolation of sex with Antonio’s old mistress. And he cried. He wept for his own boyhood and its simple pleasures. He sat in his old playroom and touched everything, the rocking horse, the stuffed animals and the wooden boats and the tin soldiers and he wept for his own losses in battle.

It wasn’t the beatings or the loneliness he was weeping for, sitting with a bottle of brandy on the floor of his unchanged playroom. It was time. It was the time he couldn’t get back. Yes, Ralph would do anything, and yes, the future could hold a better life. But he would never get back the days and the hours that might have been something other than angry and miserable and painful. No money could ever change that, and nothing Truitt could say would make it right.

There was an almost sexual pleasure in the boundless sorrow, a comfort he could give himself by letting go, a release not found even in sex for the first time with a woman he coveted. He didn’t know why he behaved the way he behaved. He didn’t care. Nobody else had lived his life. Nobody else could tell him how to be.

Perhaps, he thought, Ralph was right. Maybe he could change. It wasn’t as though his life had given him much joy or peace.

Perhaps weeping in the playroom was his first fearful and tentative step toward some kind of love. He didn’t know what love was, but he knew that he had begun to feel differently toward Ralph, to feel something that was not blind hatred. He was a child, and he wanted his father and his mother.

He would wake up in the morning on the floor of his old rooms, his head throbbing, his body covered with the quilt that had covered him as a child, and he would shiver with grief and sometimes with remorse at his own behavior. He wished he could have been another person.

Ever since Truitt had stopped torturing him, ever since he had been strong enough to run away, he had done nothing but torture himself. If Truitt had tried to kill him, then Antonio, for all his sorrow, had done his best to finish the job. The blurred days and nights, the women, the debauchery, none of it had been enough. With the return of Truitt’s love, he would have to be his own destruction.