“That was my wife’s favorite music. She played it over and over.” He looked weak, bent over as though he might be walking with a cane.
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
“No, no. I’d like to hear it. Please.”
She played without missing a note, played with, she hoped, a sweetness and simplicity that might seem lack of bravado rather than lack of skill, and then she rose and sat opposite Ralph in front of the fireplace. He was shockingly pale and seemed melancholy, perhaps because his grief for his wife had been refreshed by the music.
“My father believed that music was the voice of God.” Catherine spoke quietly, as she might have calmed a frightened dog. “He was a missionary for God. We traveled the world, Africa, India, China, wherever he was called to spread the word. He died in China, leaving me and my sister alone.
“He used it to speak to people in lands where they don’t speak English. He believed music was universal, and he believed God spoke to people through music. He believed I played well.”
She went on to describe the peoples of Africa and China, heathens who had been touched by her awkward playing, and moved by her father’s sermons and had turned, in the end, to Christianity. Their souls, she said, had been saved from hell.
She made it all up, of course, made it up out of books she had read in the library, the customs of the African tribes, the strict and brilliant dressing of the women of the Chinese court, their tiny feet and birdlike voices, but she got it right, every detail, and he sat listening attentively.
When she had finished, run through everything she knew, afraid of having used up her meager store of information too quickly, he sat still for a moment, and then said, “Who are you?”
“I am Catherine Land. I’m the woman who wrote the letters, not the woman in the photograph, but I wrote the letters. I am that woman.”
He fiddled with his trousers. He seemed undecided as to what he was going to say.
“I have a story to tell you. We’re going to be married. Whoever you are, whoever you turn out to be. You should know.”
“You said… I thought you weren’t sure. You are suspicious. Still.”
“You saved my life. That’s enough. I know what you did for me.” He stared into her eyes. “Everything you did. I was sick, I was almost dead, but I wasn’t unaware.”
She sat still, her hands in her lap. She looked into his pale eyes.
“You’re not who you said you were,” he said.
“My father said my face was… my face was the devil’s handiwork. Meant to do evil. I sent another person’s picture, my plain cousin India. You didn’t want, or so you said… my father…” She was helpless.
“Enough. It’s enough. I said we’d be married. You’re here. We will be married.”
They stared at each other, stared at the fire.
“Now listen,” he said softly. “Listen to my life.”
He sat for a long time, staring at the fire.
“Listen to my life.”
He talked for hours. He told her everything. His harsh and bitter childhood. He told her about his mother and the pin and the raw scraping of his soul during every Sunday sermon, his mother’s eyes on him every minute. He had believed his mother the way we all believe the people we love when they tell us who we are, believe them because what the beloved says is truth to us, and he told Catherine all of this. He told her of his dark and tortured desires, desires his mother had seen before he felt them, seen them in him as a baby, so that she would not pick him up or hold him, even then.
He told her about the death of his brother, his brother’s body in a box in the icehouse, waiting for the ground to thaw before they could bury him, and told her about the women and Europe and the sensuous rambles in the palaces and the whorehouses.
He made no apologies. He never tilted his head in sentimentality, or paused for her approval or her sympathy, and she never turned her eyes from his, never wandered around the room or shuffled her feet or asked for a glass of water. She just listened. It was a life he told her, entire, flawed, scarred with indulgence and self-laceration, but brave, it seemed to her, courageous at the same time.
He had caused pain, it was true. Who hadn’t? But he had suffered as well. It evened out.
He told her about Emilia, the shocking thunderclap of his love for her. He told Catherine how pale her skin was, how the flowers had trembled in her hair, how her pearls lit up her skin with a rosy glow, how she blushed when he spoke in his fragile Italian. He told Catherine that he had loved Emilia and, because of the awful profundity of his love, he had not answered his father’s letters or telegrams, and he had missed his father’s death and returned home only in time to kneel at his father’s graveside in the cold with his pregnant wife.
He told everything. He had never spoken of any of this to anyone, but he told Catherine, because she was going to become his wife. He felt he owed her at least an album of the past. He tried very hard not to pity himself. He never placed blame, or accepted it, nor did he ever shirk responsibility. He described to her the smell of jasmine in the air, the rustle of silk in a Florentine palazzo, the dust drifting from the ancient, ruined curtains, but told her without poetry, simply described these postcards from his past, and she took in the information as though she were reading quietly in a public library.
“I wasn’t a good son. I was careless, and profligate in ways I can’t imagine now. And I wasn’t a good husband or father, although I tried to be.”
Something about his candor made her want to run away. She didn’t want to know this story. She didn’t want to hear the end. It made him too real. She didn’t want to think of him as a person. She didn’t want to hear his heartbeat.
“My wife hated this house. Well, you can see… It wasn’t what she was used to. And she hated my mother and my mother hated her, and she was pregnant. I built her another house.”
Catherine’s attention had wandered. Now it shifted back.
“It isn’t far from here. It took a long time. There was an architect brought from Italy, couldn’t speak a word of English as far as I could tell, and he was followed by a boatload of dago workmen, and then the child was born, Franny.”
His hands worked nervously. His voice caught, just for a second, but he went on.
“Francesca, my wife called her. She was as beautiful as… nothing. As water. As anything on this earth. Babies are, of course. She was beautiful, and tiny. My wife carried her, every day, in a carriage, over there to where this thing was being built, this palace, and they all chatted in Italian until it was dark, and then Emilia would come home and she was at least partially happy, at least for awhile.
“I wrote checks. So much money, I couldn’t tell you. Money going for marble stairs and fancy china-you’ve seen some of it-and silverware and beds from Italy that belonged to the pope or the king of somewhere, and curtains and pictures. She was happy. Emilia was happy, like a little dog with a big bone.
“And then we moved into the house. I didn’t know where to sit. I had to ask one of the maids where I was supposed to sleep. I rarely slept beside Emilia after we moved. She had her own rooms. Two years, it took.
“Franny got scarlet fever. Babies do. A lot of babies did, that winter. She was two. The fever lasted five days, and when it was gone, Franny was gone, too. Or at least her mind was gone. Her body recovered, but her mind had died. I knew that what I had always feared was true. Desire is poison. Lust was a disease that had slaughtered my child. She was sweet and simple and beautiful and blank as clear water. She loved the colored glass in the windows. She loved the way the maids would fuss over her, dressing her in these unbelievable getups. This sewing woman came from France and lived in the house, and all she did from the time the sun came up until it went down was make these costumes for Emilia and my little girl.