Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

She was afraid. She was afraid for the rest of her life. When Truitt disposed of her, as she supposed he would, she would have nowhere to go. She didn’t want to end like Emilia, alone in a filthy house. She didn’t want to end like Alice, dying in the snow in an alley, remembering how nice it had once been, glad to have the burden of an exhausting life lifted from her, abandoned even by the angels and laughing at the death squeezing her with cold fingers by the throat. She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before.

The memory of what she had done with her days and nights seemed unthinkable. They came to her, those days and nights, like the pages of a calendar being flipped by a child, a blur of days and months and years. Had she gone to the theater? Had she written coquettish letters in a fine hand, the lavender-scented ink staining the sleeve of a ruffled gown from Worth in Paris? Had she turned away in bed from men so that she wouldn’t see the money left on a bedside table? It wasn’t possible. Yet she couldn’t deny it-every bad memory, every loss of faith, had brought her the long way from where she had been to where she was.

It was obviously done with Truitt, Antonio had seen to that, his last act of cruelty. There was no way to judge what the depth of his sorrow would drive him to do and she stood, knowing she had done wrong but unable to imagine the consequences. He couldn’t stay silent. The truth was too blatant to ignore, and he had been through it before. Perhaps it was simple weariness that had kept him from striking her when he turned from the frozen pond, the still meadow and the rearing Arabian and Antonio gone.

She had something she wanted to say to him, not about the life which was growing inside her, stronger and stronger every day, but about the virtues of his heart, about the years he had waited in patient humiliation for happiness to find him, about how he had set out to build a small kind of happiness and been horribly deceived. There was no apology she could make. She had known more than he did, and she had used that knowledge to ruin his life, again, the one thing he had guarded himself so carefully against.

She didn’t know where he was in the house. She hadn’t seen him since lunch. He retired to his study, or to the blue bedroom, and she had no way of knowing what he did or what he thought about. His silence was suffocating to her, his distance unbearable. She would die for him if her death would do him any good. But it wouldn’t do anything except add to the anguish of events that he had never anticipated.

She had never before had anything to hold on to, nothing to root her to a place or a time, not until Truitt. And she had brought harm to him, in the belief that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die. She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad.

Somewhere, for those other people she so often thought about, there was the comfort of continuance and of habit. She realized it wasn’t easy. The winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air. Even in the country the madness of the time would not leave people untouched. Throughout her life, people came and went, some amusing, most not, but their leaving was no more surprising to her than their coming. Truitt had arrived, and leaving him now would be the end of comfort for Catherine Land.

She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She wasn’t cold, not yet, and the house looked warm as the lights began to come on, Mrs. Larsen moving slowly, room to room. Mrs. Larsen had known Antonio since he was a baby. She had watched him go into the ground next to his sister and turned away as though it were the most natural thing in the world. For her, life went on, dinners got made, lights got turned on, and that was the way you got from one day to the next. Habit saved her from grief, from horror at her own husband’s sudden insanity, from the ache of watching a young man die whose sweetness had left the earth long before his body.

It was four o’clock, and everything around her stood perfectly still. The wind died, and the animals in the field, even the gray Arabian, stood to watch as the light slanted suddenly into the prism of evening. The large facade of the house, with its imposing windows and its classical statues spaced along the edge of the roof, lit up golden and hazy and ancient. It was the hour at which she had arrived. Her discarded dress. Her lost jewels, now so trivial. Truitt standing on the platform in a black coat with a fur collar in the howling snow. The startled deer and the runaway horses. Just as everything waited-for the end of winter, for the beginning of spring.

She moved her foot and looked down. The grass under her shoe turned green as she watched, and it grew away from her, grew greening until the whole of the patch where she stood was green and clipped and glowing in the golden light. The green wonder of the world filled her garden and spread out from her feet wherever she walked.

It moved away from her, and she stepped back. Everywhere she placed her foot turned green and lush. The parterre grew rich with the odors of rosemary and sage, clipped into globes between a lover’s knot of box and yew, and lavender, the long spikes with their purple heads as still as the rest.

The beds along the old brick walls still lay brown and tangled, but as she walked toward them spreading green from the hem of her dress, the old canes of the roses began to uncurl themselves, the dark waxy foliage began to make its first appearance. The tiny snowdrops and crocus sprouted along the edge of the beds, white and yellow and purple, the hellebores and then the narcissi, the poetic Acteon and the rich yellows and pale yellows of King Alfred. The flowers appeared and the names came back to her from the long afternoons in the library, those hours of rest from her exertions with Antonio.

He was a dessert that was too rich, but she had run to him from the time he was hardly more than a boy, the mixture of beauty and arrogance, the tenderness and charm which cost him so much now stilled forever, buried beneath the black earth, already frozen over again. She wept for how cold he would be. It was not his fault. So little that happened was anybody’s fault.

The lilacs bloomed, blue and white, and the air grew soft with their perfume, the gentle swaying of their heavy-headed flowers, and the irises with their sculptured heads, blue and yellow and indigo and brown.

The tulips shot up, the Asian flower, the flower of mania, with many colors and shapes, some with speckled leaves and sharp pointed crimson petals with indigo eyes, some yellow, some white, some pale pink and green, some variations which came only once and never reappeared.

The foxgloves began to appear, shooting up spikes which opened into many bell-shaped flowers that hung their heads along the stems. The peony bushes came into bloom, and then came their rich Chinese blossoms, many petaled, the size of tea plates, heavy with moisture, pinks and whites.

She swept out her hand, over the painted hostas and dianthus and sweet alyssum, the sumptuous Chinese lilies with their splendid colors, suddenly filling the air with a perfume that was like a kind of fainting.

The rose canes unwound and thrived, the glossy foliage giving way to bud and bloom, the old roses, the old names. Mme. Hardy, the sumptuous pure white moss rose, and silvery pink La Noblesse. Old Velvet, the color of blood, of Antonio’s blood; Clifton Moss, the resplendent pristine white of his shirt, purity and violence mixed together. The brilliant Fantin Latour rose up and flowered, the old French roses, the double Pellison, the bright crimson Henri Martin, Leda, with crimson markings on the edge of white petals.