And she thought of Truitt, of his simplicity and trust. And, oddly, she thought of his body, and the nights they had spent together. His body was not young, but richly scented and textured, and somehow familiar to her. His was a body of size without menace. He had never caused her pain. She wasn’t sure the nights had been a pleasure to her, she wasn’t sure she knew what pleasure was anymore, but she knew they had been something to Truitt, some kind of release from his private agony, the opening of a window kept shut for too long. A homecoming. And, as always when she had given pleasure, she was happy to have given it. She knew the cost of solace in this world. She knew its rarity.
Truitt was only the gate she had to pass through on the way to where she was going, but she was pleased that he had turned out not to be fat or loathsome, or cruel and tyrannical, or simply ignorant, traits shared by almost every other man she had ever known.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel for him, or even what she was supposed to do now. She was his wife, his legal wife. He was rich beyond her imagination. She knew the end of the story. She knew that Truitt didn’t appear in it. But she was growing foggy on how to get there, to get to the end and her rich and spectacular reward. She forgot sometimes that she was working. She was working a scheme the rules of which seemed no longer clear to her.
She felt almost as though finally she were simply living life as other people lived it, moving from event to event in a kind of haze, a sort of questionless acceptance of the way things were. She was surprised to find how easily it came to her. She was surprised to find it such a relief.
She spent her afternoons in the public library, its high windows slanting the pale thin winter light down on the long tables where men and women, ladies and gentlemen, the latter mostly young and handsome with glossy hair and ruddy cheeks, sat and passed an afternoon reading novels or the newspaper, or seriously researching things with maps and biographies and dictionaries. She liked these people. She sat among them as one of them, a stranger to them as they were to one another, and she was happy.
She read about plants. She read Edith Wharton about the endless verdure and pleasure of the Italian gardens and the villas to which they belonged. “There is, none the less, much to be learned from the old Italian gardens, and the first lesson is that, if they are to be a real inspiration, they must be copied, not in the letter but the spirit.” She read about the singing fountains of Gamberaia, of Petraia with its immense loggia, and the long lawns and high comforts of I Mansi and I Tati, and the streets of Florence and Lucca. She read about garden statuary, the grotesque and the mythical.
She imagined the secret garden, the lemon house, and in her imagination she saw them growing again, fragrant in the evening and in the day a barrage of color and foliage. She read about the hellebores, which burst with blossom through the late winter snows, the foxgloves and delphinium and the old Bourbon roses. She read about heliotrope and amaranthus and lilies. She read about the hostas that thrived in shade, and the Japanese painted fern, its delicate leaves fringed with indigo brush strokes. She said the names over and over, cataloging them: calendula, coleus, and coreopsis. She was enchanted.
She read books and catalogs about preparing the soil, how to triple dig a garden until the dirt was as fine and granular as sand, about how to enrich the soil with manure and mulch. It was not as poetic as the descriptions of the flowers, but in a way it was more exciting to her. She loved the details of things, the technique.
She was just another married woman reading about gardening. Her black kid gloves and purse lay on the long oak table beside her, the high light and the brass reading lamps making the pages bright with reflection.
She had the librarians bring her gigantic books of botanical illustrations, hand-colored etchings showing the plants she read about, and she memorized what she saw, stamen and pistil and petal and leaf. She had the beginning of an idea. It was an idea that seemed so comforting to her, so small and simple and comforting, to restore the walled secret garden, to watch it grow and make it her own. A place where she would be safe, where the world would be locked out. Giardino segreto, she repeated over and over. She liked secrets.
Her mind was on fire, and she returned to the hotel at night to lie in her narrow bed in the fresh white sheets, and she could see it; she could see clearly how it would turn out, once she learned, not just to picture it in her mind, but to make it come true with her hands. It was the first thing she had loved for as long as she could remember.
The first thing she had loved in her whole life, since the day in the carriage with her mother and the young soldiers and the rainbow. Finally she had seen the pot of gold they promised her, long ago, and now she would have it, whatever happened. She had almost forgotten about Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk.
And then they appeared. One afternoon when she happened to be in her room a meek porter brought a card. And then Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk were sitting in her small sitting room, holding their brown hats in their hands. They were of almost identical size and could have been brothers. Mr. Fisk was ruddy in the face, and Mr. Malloy was pale as winter, but both had the same steady blue eyes, and both wore brown suits of anonymous cut and color.
She offered them coffee. She offered them tea. They declined. She almost offered them a glass of beer, which they might have liked-everybody in Saint Louis seemed to drink beer all the time-but she felt it would have been out of character for her, and they might have relayed the information to Truitt.
They opened their identical little notebooks and began to reel off the details. He called himself Tony Moretti. A ridiculously thin pseudonym. His real name, of course, his true father’s name, was Moretti. His given name, his legal name, was Antonio Truitt. Truitt, however, was almost certainly not his father. He had told people his father was a famous Italian pianist. Black hair. Olive skin. Over six feet tall. His shoe size. His preference in shirts. His taste in music. His disastrous fondness for women-this embarrassed them almost into silence. The drinking. The opium. His spendthrift ways with the little money he had. They had missed nothing.
He played the piano in a music hall frequented by ladies of the night, they said, ladies of the demimonde, and gamblers, probably one of the music halls she had passed. He played light classics and popular ditties, and sang sentimental songs of the moment, some in Italian, a language he seemed not to know. He didn’t sing well, they said. He wasn’t Caruso.
He had traveled around. He traveled the country, from San Francisco to New York, always the same, sometimes a different name, playing the piano, lazing the midnights away in whorehouses, opium dens. And each town had gone sour, each town finally had enough of Tony Moretti and he moved on.
That’s why they had a hard time finding him. That’s why several times they had found the wrong man. Each time they found that Mr. Moretti had just left the room, leaving only a shadow that resembled him.
“How long have you looked for him? Have you followed him from town to town?”
“Only two months, and only in Saint Louis. Speaking for Mr. Fisk and myself. Other operatives, detectives, in other cities.”
They, in this case, meant anonymous men like Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk. The man they had found may or may not have been the man other investigators had tracked in San Francisco, or New York, or Austin, passing the information along to the home office, which sent it on to Truitt.
“He’s not a good man, Mrs. Truitt.” Mr. Fisk held his notebook open in his hand, as though he had recorded even the points of the conversation so that he might speak clearly, like a telegraph, not a word wasted. “He’s not kind, or good, or particularly talented. He’s lazy. He’s dissolute. He’s illegitimate.”