Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

There was no sound. There was no shift in the light. Everything was still.

The trellises straightened, and the climbing roses stood tall, twining up and around, mixing the thorny canes with clematis, purple and white.

The statues righted themselves, the classical figures with their sinuous curves, patinaed with age and moss, and the grotesques which hung at the four corners of the garden, which guarded the way in and out.

She had never seen anything so beautiful. The secret garden made her weep with the beauty of all that was living. It would last long after she died. Now and then, one of the roses would release a shower of petals that fell prettily through the golden light, until the ground beneath the climbers splayed against the wall was carpeted with the fragrant petals, the rich sweet and peppery smell filling the air, perfuming even the fabric of her dress.

The garden was perfect. The garden was her glory. It had come from nothing except the earth; it grew wherever she walked, wherever she turned her gaze. It would fill the house with vase after vase of flowers, so that their days would be perfumed. Truitt would ask her the names and she would reel them off and tell him about their histories, of the tulips brought from Asia Minor, to illuminate the sultan’s nights, the jeweled earrings and the candled turtles. She would put together bouquets and take them to the town, to girls getting married, bringing them still dewy on the wedding morning, the stephanotis, the white roses and the lilies.

The light shifted from golden to pale yellow and then to gray blue, but the flowers seemed to glow more as the light faded, as though each petal were illuminated from within, until her little square was filled with light and fragrance and gaiety that all of Saint Louis couldn’t match. Each rose, each bloom was a perfect masterpiece of kindness.

It was almost dark, and the darkest flowers vanished into the twilight, even as the pale white and palest pink roses seemed to give out a richer fragrance. The first star appeared above the brick wall.

The star brightened and was joined by other, paler stars as the dark deepened into night. She heard her name and turned toward the golden brightness of the house.

“Catherine.”

She turned and Truitt was standing on the steps. He was still wearing the black suit he had worn to the funeral, a band of black crepe around his arm. She turned away, her long dress sweeping the ground, and the garden was vanished, had gone away, its beds a mess of old and dying flowers, its branches bare, the roses all thorns and the limes and yews a tangle of ruined wood. The garden waited, as it had waited for twenty years.

She was just a simple, honest woman standing in the ruin of a late winter garden, waiting for the spring.

“Catherine.” She turned back toward him, afraid of him for the first time, afraid of his anger and his pain and his disapproval, and afraid also of her own shame. A wasted life. A ruined idea. Antonio dead.

Such things happened.

“I knew.” His voice was clear in the darkness, his body a silhouette, his face lost in shadow. “I always knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I knew what Antonio told me. Your history. What you’ve been. The lies you’ve told me. Who you are. I always knew. Malloy and Fisk sent me a letter. I burned it. It’s private, and it means nothing. But I already knew before you came back from Saint Louis.”

The garden waited. How could he forgive so much? How could he be so patient? So much depended on her now, on her answer, and she tried to wait as long as she could, still smelling the sweet perfume of the last old Bourbon rose.

“I’m going to have a baby.”

He stood for a long time, until she shivered with the sudden cold.

“We’re going to have a child.”

In the darkness, she could see just enough to know the stillness in his tired face. He reached out his arm toward her. The lights from the house behind him began to come on, one by one. “Well then,” he said. “Well then. You’d better come in the house.”

She took one last look at the garden. The air had turned suddenly cold, but it was a springtime kind of cold, an evening cold, without threat. It was almost dark. Things wait, she thought. Not everything dies. Living takes time. And she walked toward the golden house and took his outstretched hand in her own.

Such things happen.