Catherine sat in a chair, swept clean of clothing, among which she noticed a pair of women’s dark stockings.
“Mr. Moretti,” she said softly.
“You were the lady, yes? The lady in black in the restaurant. The lady in mourning.”
“Yes.” Her hand was trembling as she spoke. “I’m not in mourning, as I said. You play beautifully.”
She pictured him in bed. She pictured him naked, aroused, lying back against silk pillows and waiting. Waiting for her. He smelled of last night’s stale cologne and the warmth of his bed. She could picture it all. She knew where he had been, what he had done. She smelled the woman who had recently left.
She spoke clearly, directly to him, and he listened to her words with careful attentiveness. “You have suffered. He knows that. He knows you must be angry. He’s suffered, too. His heart’s raw with the nights he’s spent in hurt. He knows he has hurt you. He knows he treated you badly. Now he wants to make it right. He wants to bring you home, to the house you were born in, the big house, and make it alive again. I won’t say he loves you. Yet. He wants to love you. To be kind to you. To be forgiven for… for everything. Please. I don’t know…”
“And what would you, Mrs. New Truitt, what would you do to make this ridiculous fantasy come true?”
“I have promised him. I’m telling you. He’s rich. I would do anything.”
“Give me your ring.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I lost my stickpin, remember? I like diamonds. Give it to me. I might want to give it to a girlfriend. I might want to wear it myself, one of my extravagances. I could make it into a new stickpin. It would attract attention when I play, don’t you think? The light? I may want to throw it in the Mississippi. I may swallow it. Give it to me.”
“Mrs. Truitt,” said Mr. Fisk in genuine alarm.
She hesitated a long moment, then she took off her yellow diamond and put it into his waiting hand.
“There. He told me to do anything. I said I would. It’s yours gladly. Just come home.”
“If it was home, if it had any connection to me, I would do it in a second, for you, and never need to take a ring from your lovely hand.” He slipped it on his little finger. “Small, but pretty.” It glinted in the light from the candles overhead, just guttering out.
“Now I want you to get out. Leave me in peace. Do you think my life is so nice? It’s not. Do you think I’m surrounded by love? I’m not. But there’s enough that I don’t need to go through this charade.” He handed the ring back to Catherine. “Or your little country diamond. Get the hell out, all of you.”
Malloy wasn’t finished. “Mr. Truitt, we don’t make mistakes.”
Moretti turned in a rage. “Don’t call me that name one more time, I’m warning you. My name is Moretti. This is my day off. My hour of being nice to strangers is over. Take your insane story back to this country bumpkin, whoever he is, and tell him how wrong you were. No, better yet, get on a train and go to Philadelphia. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you where Moretti’s is, and ask them about their son. They don’t like what I do. They think piano playing is for girls. They want me home, too. I would far rather go to a home where at least I know the people. But I have a home here. And you’re in it. Now get out.”
He opened the bottle and poured himself another big glass of brandy. Catherine could feel the warmth of it shooting through her veins like fire.
“We’ll come back.” Fisk spoke softly. There was almost no threat in his voice. Just enough.
“I don’t think so. I can’t imagine why.” Antonio sat down in a blue velvet chair, his scarlet dressing gown falling open across his chest. Catherine could see down his long torso to his navel.
There was nothing else to do. They left, and they could hear him laughing as they stumbled down the stairs in the half-light. Humiliated, the two Pinkertons. Catherine, putting her ring back on her finger, smiled. She was somehow elated.
On the way home, through the Sunday market, through the cheap dresses and thin coats and tin rings and frozen cabbage and copper cooking pots, she passed a man who sold birds. Yellow and blue and red canaries. Little songbirds. They looked half-dead with the cold, but she bought one, and an elaborate cage, and carried both home, holding the bird in her gloved hand, blowing her warm breath on its shivering body through the frozen Sunday streets of Saint Louis.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She would wait for five days. Her heart was on fire, but she would wait. After that, though, she couldn’t wait any longer. Not one hour more.
While she waited, she wrote to Truitt. Before she told him about Antonio, she told him of her plans for the garden. She told him about her reading, her long afternoons of research in the library. She told him about the high windows and the long quiet tables and the slanting light. She told him about the possibilities for the garden, about how she might make it bloom again. She was even tender, but no more so than she needed to be. After all, she barely knew him.
She asked if she might buy some seeds and order some plants for the spring, to welcome Antonio home. She knew what his reply would be, that she could have whatever she liked, and she smiled, knowing it was true.
She stood for hours in the Missouri Botanical Garden, looking at the impossible orchids, flowers white and elegant like Tony Moretti, blossoms exorbitantly delicate and beautiful. They might grow in the glass conservatory. She waited at the counters while the plant men cataloged for her what would and would not grow in the climate she described. How long was the spring? How hot was the summer? She didn’t know. She imagined what might or might not be true, and she bought carefully but with hope. She paid with cash and went to the bank for more. She arranged the arrival date. She bought a small silver pen and notebook with red and white Florentine endpapers, and she carefully noted the name and qualities of every plant she ordered.
She thought of her garden. She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.
She had no knowledge of good. She had no heart and so no sense of the good thing, the right thing, and she had no field on which to wage the battle that was, in fact raging in her.
At least a garden had order. A garden gave order to an untamed wilderness. She hoped for all these things. With her bird sitting on her finger, she hoped for order in her secret walled square, for some sense of what the right thing might be. Waiting was not good for her, she knew. Thinking was not good. It made her remember the past, and the past was the place she did not want to be.
Tony Moretti was like her. He was like a secret garden. He believed the lies he told. He never faltered for a moment, never wavered. And he had won.
She wrote again to Truitt and suggested that she visit Moretti alone, without the sharp intensity of Malloy and Fisk. She wrote that a gentler approach might make Moretti see the light. She was convinced, she said, that the Pinkertons were right; the man who called himself Moretti was his son. His son in masquerade. There was a feeling, she said, a tic in his eye, a curl to his lip that suggested to her that he was lying. He harbored bitterness, to be sure, and regret as well, she was careful to add, but he hid the truth behind his condescending charm and insolence, and he didn’t hide it very well.