“You perhaps set high standards for moral character. Modern people, I’m sure…”
“I’m afraid that is not the case, in this instance.” Mr. Malloy looked at her with a seriousness that lacked the slightest trace of humor. “He’s as worthless as a puppet. An exotic toy.”
She was careful to make only the smallest gestures, not to show surprise at the catalog of Truitt’s son’s lurid life.
“He is my husband’s son.”
“ If he is, you mean, Mrs. Truitt. Unlikely.” As though she herself were somehow not quite legitimate. She stared at him with what she hoped was disdain. Mr. Fisk looked back down at his notebook.
Mr. Malloy paused a long time before speaking again. “Sometimes, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us.” He chose his words with care. “Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.”
“Mr. Malloy. That is not our choice. It is my husband’s wish. He is my husband’s son. You’re sure?”
Mr. Fisk wiped Mr. Malloy’s slate clean. “He is. Tony Moretti is at least Ralph Truitt’s wife’s son. We have found him, Mrs. Truitt.”
“I want to see him.”
“And you will. We will go to his rooms.”
“I want to see him before he sees me. I want to observe him anonymously, across a room, in the street. I want to measure the son against the father.”
“The place he plays his music, this music hall, would not be suitable.”
She had not thought. Had not thought that far. “That much is clear.”
“There is a restaurant. It is frequented by the proper sort of people. You would not be ashamed. Not feel awkward. He goes there, in the evenings, before he goes to work, if that’s what he calls it, to eat oysters and drink champagne. It is seemingly all he ever consumes.”
“Then we will go there.”
Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk waited, as though there were more to say. There was not a speck of dust in the room. It was a fine room, not the best, but fine. It was the sort of room in which she might have served coffee or tea, dressed for dinner or the theater, might have kept a canary, if she had lived there, but she didn’t live there and no bird sang.
Mr. Fisk and Mr. Malloy waited.
“We will go there tomorrow night.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were hyacinths, so brief and heavy with peppery scent. Jonquils. Campanula. Dianthus. There was allium, the French onion with its pendulous purple bloom, impossibly heavy, and lilac with its wafting fragrance, and violets, which young girls received as nosegays from their beaux. And the ornamental herbs, rosemary and sage.
There were tulips, which had once driven men mad with their beauty. So delicate, so rare and brief. She read about the sultan, in Istanbul, who had grown over a hundred thousand tulips, brought as favors from the wild steppes of the East. Every spring, he would have an evening party to show them off. Tulips, she read, the ones that are fragrant, are fragrant only at night. Candles would be fixed to the backs of turtles, and the turtles would crawl among the flowers, as the courtiers strolled in their jeweled clothing, whispering amidst the beauty and the impossibly delicate scent, just a hint of fragrance from the East. Catherine could see their jewelry and diadems, their clothes of the thinnest silk, could hear the murmur of pleasure, their quiet singsong voices as they floated through the flickering beauty, drinking cool minted fruit juices.
It takes seven years for a seed to turn into a tulip bulb. She wondered if the turtles that carried the candles were hurt.
There were hydrangeas, which the Italians grew in giant terracotta pots, hydrangeas which change color with the chemistry of the soil. Acid soil would produce blooms of Prussian blue. Alkaline would turn the blooms to pink, a rose that matched the ridiculous extremes of the setting sun.
Anyone can learn. Anyone can read and learn. The hard thing is to do, to act-to speak French, to go to Africa, or to poison an enemy, to plant a garden. Catherine absorbed her hours in learning, waiting for Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk, expanding her knowledge and perfecting her scheme, though she hardly knew anymore what her scheme was exactly. A son. The son. The son, obviously, of a harlot and a piano teacher. And Truitt, she was sure, knew this, had known it from the beginning. This extraordinary wish of Truitt’s to bring him home and make him heir to all that Truitt possessed. So much. What if he should come? Yes, her blue bottle with its subtle secret medicine was hidden deep in her luggage, shining in her mind with its deep clear cobalt. But to commit such an act under the eyes of another, of a son, the risk would be too great. She couldn’t inherit everything with a son in the picture. She was beginning to think she couldn’t inherit anything with so little work. It should be harder. It should not fall into your lap easily. Catherine had never once in her life been confused. Now she sat and waited for her plan to grow clear once again, clear and hard and bright.
She wore a stiff black skirt and a short black jacket. She wore a hat with a veil. Although there was no reason to go anonymously, she wanted a screen between her and the man she had waited so patiently to see. She felt a deep and complex anxiety, caught as she was between her own desires and the needs of Truitt to restore some dream which would never again be made whole, no matter what. Before Fisk and Malloy arrived to call for her, she ordered a sherry, and drank it back fast, feeling the warmth and calm begin to pervade her body. She felt an almost erotic thrill, the old taste, the warmth, and she wanted another, wanted another and another, but she washed the glass and rinsed her mouth carefully until there was no trace left, and waited for the sunset.
They were unaccountably late. She walked her rooms; she tried on her hat and felt the fabric of her fine dresses. What was beneath her hands was sure to her, the things she could feel would not betray her. She sat and waited. Her gardening books, delivered to the hotel in brown paper packets from the booksellers, lay open on the table in front of the window. The illustrations calmed her, the dream of Italy.
They arrived with the dark, awkward and alert. She put on her hat and walked the streets of Saint Louis with her two watchdogs, until they came to a restaurant advertising beef and fresh oysters, lit from within by the warmth of gaslight, the sort of place with sawdust on the floor and portly waiters with long white aprons wrapped around their waists. They sat and ordered small steaks. Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk refused drink, and put their notebooks on the table.
He came in at seven, dressed in fine clothes, cleanly cut, spotless, carrying a walking stick and an air of insolence and familiarity. Everything about him looked clean. He had an aura of ownership that impressed her enormously. He sat without being shown to a table, and the waiters brought him oysters and champagne before he had settled in his seat.
He ate the oysters as though each were its own specific moment in time. His face and his long black hair were luxurious, there was no other word for it, and Catherine peered at him through the haze of her veil, noting every detail, the way his hair lapped over his collar as he tilted his head back to down an oyster, the way his head bowed forward into his champagne, the way his eyes closed as the liquor washed down his throat, his lashes impossibly long, like a woman’s. A lock of hair fell into his eyes, and he tossed back his head. His shirtfront was sparkling, his tie of an exquisite dark silk, and he looked both artistic and antique. He was handsome, handsome in ways Malloy and Fisk would never have noted in their little notebooks, handsome in a way that could cause a woman to gasp. He was beautiful without being at all feminine, and his long strong hands hovered like great agitated birds over his food.