There was no resemblance between the son and the father. But of course, she remembered, Truitt was almost certainly not the father. Truitt was quintessentially American, good-looking without being extreme or disturbing, stout and standard and strong. The son was European, the aquiline nose, the high cheekbones, the swarthy beard, the blue hollows of his cheeks, his sharp, glittering teeth, the lidded, almost oiled eyes. He was slender. His slim frame would have fit easily inside the warehouse of Truitt’s body.
His eyes were black as the ice on the Wisconsin River, and just as cold. He existed, or seemed to exist, only for himself, for that moment in time when he ate his oysters and drank his champagne, aware that he was being stared at by every woman, women who sipped the details of his face and his body as he sipped his champagne, with obvious pleasure. The men looked at him with condescension, as though he were a child’s doll. He was not a person. He was an object of beauty, and he existed for that single reason and he existed for himself alone.
He ate three dozen oysters. When he was finished, one of the portly waiters went over to him and whispered in his ear. Tony Moretti smiled and nodded. He got up slowly and languidly, like a cat in the sun, and moved to a piano in the rear of the room. He didn’t speak or turn around, but sat simply at the piano and stared at the keys. The room fell into a hush. Ladies put down their forks. Through the veil of Catherine’s hat, he was reduced to white skin and black hair, like a photograph, grainy shadow and glowing light. Finally he lifted his hands and began to play.
He played a popular song, but he played it slowly and sorrowfully, as though it had never been played before. The notes, so light and inconsequential, took on a weight and a resonance that was altogether new, and entirely his. There was something small but magnificent about his performance, a little jewel, an invention of love. He played as though each note could be touched, could be held in the hand like mercury, touching and not touching, but miraculous in a minor way.
When he was done, there was applause, but he did not acknowledge it, merely picked up his walking stick and stood, the sorrow of the music now in his face, a self-conscious look he had probably practiced a thousand times in front of a mirror.
He felt his necktie, looked down, and looked across the restaurant floor. He began to walk slowly to the door, his eyes down. The diners went back to their food, the ladies casting admiring glances over their shoulders. Apparently there was to be no bill for Tony Moretti. Either he ran an account, or the brief music was enough. As he got to Catherine’s table, he stopped and crouched to the floor, running the silver tip of his stick through the sawdust.
Catherine was panicked. Malloy and Fisk studiously looked the other way, subtly sliding their notebooks into their pockets. Tony Moretti looked up, stared at Catherine with his liquid eyes.
“May I help you?” There was no air, no air in her lungs to bring the words out, but she did, in a short, soft gasp.
“I’ve lost my stickpin. From my necktie. A diamond stickpin given to me by somebody I loved. I thought I saw it here. Have you seen it here?”
“No. I’ve seen nothing.”
“Well, then. Gone. Are you in mourning?”
She was astonished at his forwardness. She glanced in quick nervousness at Malloy and Fisk. They looked down at their hands.
“No. I’m not. I am recently married, in fact.”
“I hope happily. You looked like you had lost someone, the way I’ve lost my stickpin. I’m glad that you haven’t.”
“I’m sorry you’ve lost your stickpin.”
“It’s of no importance. Of absolutely no importance at all. A girl gave it to me. She means nothing to me anymore. I just hate to lose things.”
He stood up, bowed slightly from the waist, and left the restaurant.
He was a calla lily, pure and white, meant for solitude and death. She turned to Malloy and Fisk. “I would never believe he’s Truitt’s son.”
“Make no mistake. He is the man Truitt is looking for.”
“He’s always been Mr. Truitt’s son. In San Francisco. In New York. He’s a liar and a wastrel, but he’s Truitt’s son, or the man Truitt calls his son, and now we have him.”
Fisk looked at her sadly. “He’s a lost cause.”
Malloy echoed the sadness. “And he won’t go home. Mr. Truitt has spent a great deal of money for nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“There are too many pleasures he would miss. He’s entirely his mother’s creation. Overly refined. Immoral in every way. A pretty nothing. Truitt won’t like him. Wouldn’t want him around for five minutes. They don’t have anything to say to each other, no language between them.”
“Nobody would like him, in fact.”
“Still…” Her heart was pounding. She could feel the music in her veins, like liquor, warming her blood.
“Exactly. Still.”
“My husband has missed the music. He has missed his son. He has an idea, a dream. We’re here to make the dream come true.” She was careful not to appear overly excited. She was a woman who had been asked to execute a complicated transaction, no more.
“And so we will.”
“How will we speak to him? It’s important not to frighten him. He must listen calmly to his father’s request. There’s more in it for him than he might think. Than he might think at first.”
“We go on Sunday.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
She paced her rooms. She didn’t go to the library. She forgot her gardens and her ladylike ways. She thought of Tony Moretti, and imagined his body in bed, she imagined being in bed with Tony Moretti, and the desire she felt for him was like a drug in her veins. He was younger than she was; he would be the last adventure of her youth. She burned with the image of Tony Moretti sitting in the restaurant with his oysters, his liquid eyes, and his long fingers playing the sorrowful, trivial tune, his eyes as he looked into hers and inquired after his foolish stickpin. She tried to find a place to sit, a book to read, and she was uncomfortable wherever she perched. In the hotel dining room, her book useless and unopened, she felt everyone was looking at her, as if they could see, not her calm manner and her proper clothes, but only her desire. She was always lying naked and wanton next to Tony Moretti, her husband’s son.
On seeing him, she had felt the sexual pulse of the city begin to beat. She had not noticed. She wondered, at any hour of the day and night, how many people were making love at exactly that minute. Behind every window the sexual act was being completed second after second. The poor with their ecstatic, animal grunts, the rich with their unimaginable refinements and perversions.
She couldn’t sleep. She felt Truitt was watching her, that Truitt had known all along this would happen.
Sunday finally came. It was bright, bright and hard and cold, with snow in the air. They had said two o’clock. He would be awake, he would be sober, he might be alone. She was ready. She wore her gray silk dress, her wedding dress and her diamond engagement ring, and the long fur coat she had bought. As though they could protect her. She felt she was pretending to be a proper matron going to make a call on a distant relative.
Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk walked her silently through bright, slick, shiny streets that led away from the hotel, from everything new and modern, and then through streets that weren’t nice, that were silent on a Sunday. They walked away from the fine stores and the streets so brightly lit at night, until they came to a neighborhood of low brownstones, houses not in good repair. They were without yards or even window boxes, just dingy marble stoops. Catherine could picture the rooms behind the grimy windows, rooms she herself had lived in, low, cramped, greasy from years without care. The furniture, too, would be old and comfortless, the floors unswept, the smell of onions frying, of cheap cigars, the windows always closed, a room in the back where the mother and father slept, another for the children, no matter how many, and one thing, or two, brought from the country and cherished. Sad, hard lives, without affection, without any moment but the present and that not to be enjoyed but endured. The only rhythm of their lives was the incessant turning of the machines in the factories where they worked, and their dreams in the night were of the little towns they had come from, the sun rising and setting, the turning of the seasons, the crops planted and grown and tended and harvested.