She dressed herself carefully in her lady’s disguise, she walked without fear through the dark streets of the parts of Saint Louis nobody went to except out of necessity, and she slept like an innocent girl in her narrow bed at the Planter’s Hotel, the sound of her bird sending her to the angels.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She couldn’t stop. It was like a drug she had stayed away from for too long. She wrote to Truitt. She told him she was making progress, but progress was slow. She promised him that Andy, as she called him in her letters, would come home.
She went to Antonio’s every day. She was no longer afraid of Fisk and Malloy. She never saw them. She assumed they lurked in the shadows, but she was too far gone to care.
She and Antonio would make love, sometimes for ten fierce minutes, sometimes until dark turned to light and then to dark again, and then she would pull a dress from the closet and they would go out. They ate oysters and drank champagne.
Away from his singular obsession with Truitt, his charm was childish and indelible. He made her feel like a girl again, when everything was fresh and possible. He would tell her over and over the story of his travels, the comic peculiarities of the people he had met on the way, and it always seemed new and innocent, the endless adventures of a boy who never grew up. His laughter was like clear water, sparkling with sunlight, spilling over rocks in a spring forest.
He made her laugh. With Truitt, she never laughed. Truitt was many things, solid and good things, but she never laughed.
She knew also, because he sometimes told her in the night when his armor slipped away, when he lay naked and lean and finally vulnerable in her arms, that, in reality, it was mostly a long and lonely scramble for the next dollar or the next woman, a young, broken man alone in the world with no mother or father, never a home to come home to, but when he sat with her over oysters and champagne, it was as though his life had always been filled with sunlight and clean sheets.
He would speak to her of her beauty, how he never tired of it, and she would believe him.
She went to the rude beer hall where he played the piano, and she flirted with other men right in front of him, knowing he wouldn’t do anything. Sometimes there would be fights, overdressed laborers in a rage, and she wouldn’t even move from her table.
Afterward, they would go to the dens, where Chinese women would undress them, wrap them in silk, massage their naked bodies with warm scented oils and feed them black, rubbery balls of opium. They would go home at dawn, and she would change into her other clothes, the clothes she had worn to come to him, and go back to the Planter’s Hotel. She couldn’t get the key in the lock sometimes; a sleepy porter had to help her. She slept until noon and woke to the sound of a bird singing.
She drank strong black coffee and ate almost nothing, golden toast with sweet preserves. She hardly slept, just the hours between dawn and noon. Sometimes, in the library in the afternoons, she almost fainted from hunger, her kid gloves lying by the stack of books.
She studied the horticulture of roses. She could feel the thorns prick her skin, could almost smell the blood on the back of her hand. She was not what she appeared to be to Ralph Truitt, but she was not what she appeared to be to Tony Moretti either, and she never stopped to wonder which self was her true self and which one was false.
She saw so many of her old friends. Hattie Reno, Annie McCrae and Margaret and Louise and Hope, Joe L’Amour, Teddy Klondike. She looked everywhere in every room for her sister Alice, Alice who lived somewhere in this vast city, who moved in these circles when she felt well, Alice whom she used to take to the circus and the opera. But Alice was invisible, and nobody knew where she was.
She had bought Alice books that she never read. She had bought her jewelry that she lost or gave away. She had tried, in all the world, to save one thing, to make her sister thrive, to be her friend, and she had failed even in that.
Catherine wanted to find Alice and take her to Wisconsin, to wrap her in the white gauze of the far country until she was healed and whole. She wanted to dress her in Emilia’s finery and watch as she swept down the long staircase of the villa into the high frescoed hall. She would be like a child in a masterpiece, Catherine’s masterpiece. She still believed she could save her.
“Forget her,” said Hattie Reno. “Nobody’s seen her for months. And the last time anybody did see her, she looked awful. Nobody talked to her and she didn’t care. I was ashamed for her.”
“She’s my sister.”
“And she’s mean and she’s hard and she’s sick. She’s the kind of girl don’t want a roof over her head. Just runs wild. Men don’t even like her no more.”
“She’s never had a real roof over her head.”
“And you want to give her one. Before she’s dead. You and who else? Who would pay for this roof?” Catherine never talked about Ralph Truitt. Her absence went unexplained. In Chicago, they assumed. They imagined they knew the reason. Fresh blood. New men with new money.
“Yes. Before she’s dead.”
She knew that Antonio needed her in a way that was beyond speech, and this she took for adoration. It wasn’t. It was need and habit, an addiction, but it wasn’t love, no matter how often he might say it.
Sometimes, sitting in the early afternoon, still in her nightdress in the quiet of her room at the hotel, the scarlet bird on her finger pecking at small pieces of a roll she held up, sometimes she knew this with a clarity that was like a knife in her heart. But he was different.
For Antonio, Catherine was the one woman who never stopped being thrilling, because her need for him was so enormous, because it made her vulnerable and willing and unprotected in ways that other women weren’t. Antonio was years younger than Catherine. He was, for her, the last grasp at a youth that was betraying her.
He could do anything he wanted, love her, smack her, kiss her feet, and she would do anything he asked. She was older. She was losing her youth, and that in itself was part of her interest for him, like drinking the last of the wine. And she would kill his father and give him everything. She would do anything. She would do this. His father’s death had become the bit in his teeth, the impossible, unbeatable hand at poker. He was willing to wait, but not for long.
He would fall asleep with his fingers inside her, lick the musk away when he woke up. He would have sex with her when she was bleeding, would have sex with her when she was drunk, would have sex with her when she was asleep. His appetite and her desire to be pleased were both endless. He found it exciting when she came to him in her plain proper dresses, like sex with a stranger, somebody foreign to him.
She was in a dream. She found it hard to remember where she was.
She wrote to Truitt every day. She constructed a life, and she wrote him every imagined detail. She did not want him to forget her power over him, the power to end his loneliness, to bring his son home, to make his garden grow again.
“Tell me about him,” Antonio said once, after sex. His head was on her breasts, his dark hair teasing her, teasing her into a kind of stupor. She could close her eyes and try to imagine his face. She could see nothing, although she could recall with perfect clarity the faces of people she hardly knew.
“I want to know everything. Tell me again.”
“He’s tall. He’s thick.”
“Fat?”
“Not at all. Powerful.” She was careful now. She wanted to please; it was her profession. She wanted to tell him only what he wanted to hear. “He’s got a lot of money, I think. I know. He’s got a lot of businesses. Mostly iron, for the railroads, for machinery, for everything. Everybody works for him. A lot of money. I don’t know how much. He’s got a railroad car. He thinks it’s remarkable to own an automobile. And there’s the house, but you know it. There’s his silence. He reads poetry. I read to him at night. He’s very sad. He’s sad in himself, in his heart.”