She knew. She knew exactly, but she couldn’t stand to hear it. She twisted her wrists from his beautiful hands; she walked across the room and stupidly felt her dresses, the fabric of her old life, as though it were an exhibit in the Japanese Pavilion. She couldn’t look at him.
“Because if you don’t, if you don’t kill him, I’ll write him a letter. That’s all it will take. One letter. You think he wants to hear this? You think he wants to hear about his wife in bed with his son? The filthy details? You think he wants to hear his wife is a common whore who’s been doing the same thing over and over and over from the time she was fifteen? Where does his kindness, his goodness go then?”
“I can’t stand this. I’ll die.”
“You haven’t died yet. You won’t die now. You don’t die from being ashamed.”
“I’ll stay here with you. I’ll never go back there.”
“And live in this filth? This filthy life? I wouldn’t have you. Not now. Not ever. No, Catherine. You’ll go back up there, you’ll pretend to be everything you’re not, a virgin, if that’s what he wants, a duchess, a believer, and you’ll drop poison in his food, just like you said, and he’ll be dead. I can wait. I’ve waited all my life. I despise you, but you’ll lose everything and you’ll end up in the gutter.”
She knelt on the floor, pulling a dress from the closet behind her. “I beg you.”
“Get on your fancy train and go home to your fancy husband and get rid of him. Dead. That’s the only way he means anything to me.”
“I beg you.”
“Some promises can’t be broken. It’s gone too far. We’re too close now, too deep in the water. Get up off the floor and get out of here. I don’t want to hear from you until he’s dead.”
“I-”
“Not one word, Catherine. You haven’t earned the right to beg. There’s no freedom for you. No place to go. You ruin everything you touch. I’m leaving. I don’t want to find you here when I get back. I don’t want to find you anywhere in Saint Louis.”
She rose from the floor. He was right, of course. There was no way out.
He turned before leaving. His voice was almost kind again. “It’s true. I have loved you. I could love you again. We both knew what we were getting into. We got into it out of love. You knew from the start.”
When he was gone, she wandered his rooms. Her mind could only plague her with the old thoughts. There was death by poison in her deep bathtub. There was arsenic, laudanum, muriatic acid. There was the silken cord from a sturdy beam. There was the long fall, like a black bird, from the window of her quiet room at the Planter’s Hotel. She would set the bird free. There was death beneath the wheels of a train car, death by syringe and razor and bullet.
Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.
Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive
Part Three
WISCONSIN. WINTER INTO SPRING. 1908.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He liked to have a glass of clear, cold water by his bed when he went to sleep at night. The glass was tall and straight and etched with vines, and Mrs. Larsen washed it every morning and filled it every night from the cold tap and put it by his bed. It was a beautiful glass, brought from Italy, and the light shone through the water and the glass with its frosted sides in a way that pleased him. When he was alone, when he was alone for those twenty years, night after night after solitary night, lying in immaculate sheets, he would sometimes swing his legs over the edge of the bed, put his feet solidly on the floor, and take a sip of the clear cold water. He sat up straight because he was afraid he might choke, alone in the big old house at night with no one to hear him.
The sheets of his bed were changed twice a week, and he sometimes looked with sadness at the other side of the bed, seeing the pillow where no head ever lay. He felt embarrassed to think of Mrs. Larsen taking the sheets off his bed twice a week, to see them so little used. It was one of the ways his loneliness was made visible to the world, and he was ashamed.
The glass of water comforted him, and he clung to the habit with tenacity. The water meant nothing in itself. He was rarely thirsty. The ritual meant everything, a moment to close the day, the moisture on his dry lips like a soft kiss.
He could smell his clean white shirts in the armoire, soap and bluing and starch. He could see the day’s clothes, neatly folded in a chair, waiting for Mrs. Larsen to sponge and press them fresh in the morning. Everything he owned was clean all the time. He could smell Mrs. Larsen’s industry in the still night air, the laundry, the furniture polish, the floor wax, and he was grateful for her, that she looked after him so well. It was a comfort. Even though he paid her, and took care of her and Mr. Larsen well, it was a kindness. He paid many people, and not one felt it necessary to be more than cordial.
He had never called her by her first name, a name he must have known once, but had long ago forgotten. Mrs. Larsen had been only a girl when he first knew her, Jane, Jeanette, something, unmarried, not pretty, and she had grown into middle age learning his habits and making his life comfortable. He presumed she never liked Emilia. She showed no sorrow when she was gone.
He thought of the endless meals she had cooked and served to him. He thought of the shirts and the trousers and the shoes polished and the tears mended and the mud scraped off his boots, and he loved her for her kindness. So little was done to tend his creature comforts, and these comforts, in the absence of passion, had meant everything to him. She had witnessed the terrible sadness, the betrayal, and managed to treat him as though her heart went out to him and, at the same time, as though the past had never happened. She knew his awful solitude and didn’t pay notice. She cooked enough food every night for four or six, since the sight of the food pleased him, and then she and Larsen ate later, after he had finished and gone to his study. He had asked, but they had never sat down to the table with him. It wouldn’t be right. They wouldn’t have been comfortable.
He had meant to be so many things. He had meant to be a poet. He had meant to be a lover and collector of art, to encourage young artists and have them gather around him. He had meant to live his life in an orgy of sensation, according to the sensual rules of attraction and seduction. He had meant to be a father, to have children to inherit his love of the arts and the flesh. Instead, he had lost his heart’s deepest passions; one day he woke up and realized they were gone, amputated as surely as an arm, cut off by the death of his little girl and the infidelities of his wife, the intractable rage he felt toward his bastard child. His affections and obsessions had been replaced by clean shirts and half-slept-in sheets and polished boots and clear soups. The world of the body and its pleasures had closed over, as a scab closes over a wound.
Catherine Land had stepped off the train from Saint Louis, softer, warmer in her face, unexpectedly beautiful, and the wound had opened and filled him with its pain. Antonio was not by her side, and neither one of them said a word about him.
Standing in the station, he had felt that something in him would break forever if he didn’t touch her. He reached up and shyly fingered the collar of her coat. That was all. That was enough. He was lost in hope and desire, as lost as he had been in his first days with Emilia. Catherine was everything. She was not a woman; she was a world. She might wound him, she might lie to him, and still he would do anything to hear one word of kindness from her lips, to feel his flesh touch her flesh without humiliation. He was willing to take the chance. And all this because she had stepped from the train with a small scarlet bird in a cage, and she was coming home to him, bringing a fluttering life. He was at last waiting for someone whose name was known to him. People saw her come home to him, people in his town. She smiled at him, and he knew then that he would die for her.