On New Year’s Day, in her gray silk wedding dress and her dark glasses, she boarded the train once again. The blue bottle was still in her suitcase. It waited like a serpent. The snowdrifts were as high as a strong man’s shoulders. Ralph Truitt stared at her through the window, searching for her hidden eyes. He did not wave as the train pulled away.
Part Two
SAINT LOUIS. WINTER. 1908.
CHAPTER TEN
The city entered her like music, like a wild symphony. The train pulled into Union Station, that giant garish chateau, and she stepped from Truitt’s railroad car into the largest train station in the world as though her skin were on fire.
The station smelled of beef and newsprint, of beer and iron. She had been away from this for too long. She had been in the wild white country, and her heart burned with the adventures, the friends, the food and drink, the multiplicity of event the city promised. People came here to be bad. People came here to do the things they couldn’t do at home. Smoke cigarettes. Have sex. Make their way in the world.
Mrs. Larsen was to have come with her, but Larsen had burned his hand badly the day before, so Catherine came alone.
She arrived in Saint Louis with a letter of credit at a bank and a room already reserved for her at the new Planter’s Hotel. It was a fine room on the sixth floor, with an austere bedroom and a small sitting room filled with mohair-covered furniture in dark colors, with elaborately swagged velvet curtains and a small fireplace. A fine room. Not the grandest room-Truitt would never have done that-just adequate, and she imagined the splendor of the suites on the upper floors, all flocked wallpaper and chandeliers and big plants in Chinese pots; cattle barons and oil barons and beer kings, men with money alone in hotel rooms, men who looked at city women in a certain way, wanted certain illicit things and were willing to pay for them, and she would have moved herself and her few belongings to something more grand, with a marble bathroom and real paintings, but she wanted to play it out, play it right, so she sat in her room and waited for the visit of Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk, the Pinkerton agents Truitt had hired to find his dissolute, prodigal, intractable son.
She felt that she was being watched herself, so that reports might be sent to Truitt about who this Catherine Land was when she was away from the white wilderness. She was careful to reveal nothing, although she didn’t know whether eyes were on her or not.
The bank manager smiled and immediately gave her whatever she asked for. He asked after Mr. Truitt’s health. He offered her tea. She never asked for too much money, never an amount that would have been questionable. She went shopping so that she might look more like the ladies she saw taking tea and gossiping in quiet, birdlike voices in the hotel lobby. With Truitt’s money, she walked into Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, Saint Louis’s largest and finest store, aisle after modern aisle of finery and foolishness, and she walked in with a sense of power she had never felt before. Anything could be hers. She had only to lay the hand with the yellow diamond on any of the dozens of counters, an obsequious salesperson would instantaneously appear, and anything inside the display case could belong to her. Anything that caught her fancy, even for a moment. But instead of indulging herself, she held her old hungers in check and asked only for things she needed to play a part she’d never played before.
She bought dresses for the city, simple dresses, small hats, fine and expensive, but demure. She bought a black karakul coat with a mink collar, extravagant for the country, but ubiquitously proper and anonymous in Saint Louis. She wore black kid gloves on the street. She wore white cotton gloves to take tea in the lobby, like the other ladies. She observed the women in the hotel dining room and tried to dress and behave and smile the way they did. They were all calm and glitter.
She wore her quiet dresses and her smart fur coat as she walked in the evening through the early dark and the light snow along Broadway with its halo of gas lamps, its arch that showed a portrait of every president. There were trolleys and horses, wagons filled with barrels of beer and enough automobiles to turn Truitt’s foolish pride to embarrassment. In Saint Louis, Truitt would be one of hundreds of men just like him. Rich men.
She passed the fruit markets, filled with bright vegetables even in winter, and the vendors, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the cold, their hands in fingerless gloves, hawking their wares in German and Italian accents, assisted by wretched children in hand-me-down cotton dresses in the middle of winter. She walked without pity through the sea of destitution that washed over her.
In the country, there was insanity. There were fires and burnings and murders and rapes, unthinkable cruelties, usually committed by people against people they knew. It was at least personal. Here there was the heartless, sane, anonymous whir of the desolate modern machinery, the wheels and cogs, cold iron from Truitt’s foundry. Here there was appalling poverty and gracelessness. She gave coins to the children. She couldn’t look at the mothers.
She walked through the buildings and monumental statues that were left from the Great Exposition, the museum, the Japanese exhibit hall, filled with hundreds of small and delicate objects of impossible artistry and with kimonos that looked like elaborately embroidered dressing gowns, heavy and opulent.
She went to the Odeon, to the symphony, sitting alone in a box and attracting no attention. She didn’t know the composers; she just liked the sweet majesty of the noise. She liked watching the crowd from above. She wore no jewelry, carried no fan. She did nothing to attract attention.
She walked through the streets at evening, hearing the music from the beer halls as the doors swung open and shut, the gay waltzes and polkas played on rattly old pianos, the laughing men and women coming and going from their pleasures. She never went in. She never thought of buying other dresses, more ostentatious, more vulgar, and joining in the laughing crowds, of being one of the laughing women. She missed her small jewels, which she might have worn, at the neck, at the wrists and ears. She might have worn perfume, scented the air as she walked. She imagined the taste of beer at the back of her throat, but found that, in fact, she didn’t miss it. She thought of cigarettes, but the thought seemed far away, without magnetism. She imagined sitting with lidded eyes and hearing some tacky Negro musician play the piano and sing low down and dirty. She passed through the cold streets as inconspicuously as any other well-to-do married woman, and she was happy in her anonymity.
She ate alone in the hotel dining room, bearing the humiliation of solitude with good grace, reading Jane Austen as she waited to be served. The food was delicious, although not as good as Mrs. Larsen’s, but rich and heavy so that she felt drowsy and light-headed. She ate oysters and beef and vegetables and large pale fish brought fresh from Chicago or even New York. She had dishes with French names she couldn’t pronounce or understand, so that the waiter had to stand over her and patiently explain how each one was made.
In the mornings she spent long hours making herself ready for the day, deciding which of her new dresses to wear, fixing her hair in a way that was neither severe nor ostentatious. She was like an actress preparing to go on stage, and not one detail of her performance escaped her. She was used to watching everything, she needed to know what was going on around her, and she copied the manners of her fellow travelers exactly. She fastidiously pulled every hair from her hairbrush. She spoke in soft, kindly tones to the maids who came to clean and dust her room so that every day it seemed brand new.