They packed the pieces of fancy furniture from the farmhouse into wagons and hauled them the long way to the big golden house, restoring the chairs and the tables to the spots they had occupied twenty years before. Truitt gave the farmhouse to Larsen, signed the deed over to him.
The big house was reborn, and they sat close together at one end of the long table in the frescoed dining room, a fire blazing against the chill as the wind howled outside, and they spoke of love and practical matters in low voices. She changed her dress for dinner. She played the piano for him. She read Whitman to him in the yellow salon, by the great fireplace, big enough to drive a wagon into.
They gave dinner parties, small, solemn affairs attended by men who needed Truitt’s influence. Doctors came, and lawyers and judges with their mute wives. The governor came. He wanted Truitt’s money, and Truitt gave him some as he left. The dinner parties were not amusing. The food was superb.
They picked out their bedroom with care. It was not the grandest, not the ornate one he had shared with Emilia. It was a large, simple, blue room with a view of the walled garden. They installed his father’s big bed, and he would lie with his head on the soft pillows at night, while her scarlet bird sang sweetly and she sat in the window seat before they made love. She described the splendors that would come with the summer, the roses and the clematis and the calla lilies and the cheerful dark-eyed daisies. She cataloged the Latin names she had learned. She described the rich fragrance that would come in the night air through the open windows. She would paint every leaf, every flower for him in color, and he would lie, eyes closed, and wonder if he would live long enough to see it. It was lovely, in her description. It was the garden that Emilia had never had the patience or knowledge to create.
She had asked Larsen to dig through the snow, to uncover the ruin of the plants that had not been cared for in twenty years, and she would stare into the cold moonlight at the tangled naked vines and the overturned statues, the empty lemon house and orangery. She would speak to him of the life she would bring to the earth, with her own hands. She would tell him of her long days in the library, of all she had learned.
The house sheltered them against the late snows. The moonlight came through the window. She was alive beside him, and he could not believe that his desires could be so strong as his body turned to poison, while his sorrow for Antonio grew more and more terrible.
The house was too much, too large for Mrs. Larsen, and they hired two girls from the village, and an extra man, so that everything was always clean and there was wood enough to keep a fire going in every fireplace in the evenings, so they could choose any room they wanted to sit in after dinner.
In late February, Ralph’s bookkeeper went suddenly insane and murdered his wife of twenty-eight years for no reason. Mr. and Mrs. Truitt attended the funeral, standing solemnly in black clothes while the grown children wept for their lost mother.
“Why do they do these things? These terrible things?” Catherine asked as they rode home in the carriage.
“They hate their lives. They start to hate each other. They lose their minds, wanting things they can’t have.”
Ralph attended the brief trial, watching as the husband wept for his lost wife and tore at his clothes. The children stared on in horror and hatred.
Ralph, however, understood. He knew that people suddenly woke up one day and reason was gone, all sense of right and wrong, all trust in their own intentions. It happened. The winter was too long. The air was too bleak. The cause was unknowable, the effect unpredictable. The bookkeeper was sent to an insane asylum, where every day he would mourn his beloved wife, and ask if she was coming to see him.
Ralph wanted to believe that Catherine was drugging him to inspire youth and vigor, the way a horse trader would dope a horse to put shine in its coat, fire in its eye, to fool an unsuspecting buyer. He believed that she had brought the poison from Saint Louis, from Chinatown perhaps, bought with some flimsy excuse, that in her long days without him, she had conceived of this plan to give him tiny doses of a poison that would make him young again. If only for a little while. A little while would be enough. In Florence he had sometimes used such poisons so that his lovemaking could go on without stopping for hours, and he had used it to cure a case of the clap he had gotten one summer. He felt oblivious, then. He felt divine. There were reasons. There had to be reasons. It was possible.
Her ardor matched his own. He no longer cared that her skill in sexual variations far exceeded her descriptions of her former life, her narrow, missionary life. She seemed wanton to him, without limits, like the women he had loved in his youth. He loved her, he wanted her, and she was always there. She had gone away to Saint Louis shy and distant, dressed in plain straight dresses, and she had come home a different person, softer, lighter around the mouth, in simple clothes that spoke of quiet good taste and old money, someone he had never expected to find again in his life. She was his dream.
He struggled every night to get through dinner without touching her, to wait until time to go to bed. He struggled to make conversation to avoid her gaze, to listen to her sweet voice as she read to him, the soft strain as she played the piano or they played cards while Mrs. Larsen cleared and cleaned the dinner things.
Catherine lay in his arms every night, and every night the sweat that ran off his back would collect between her breasts, leave them both soaked. She would bring a clean linen cloth, and gently dry his back, his chest, his legs and feet. Every night she slept beside him, every night he drank his crystal water until there was nothing left, and every morning she was there when he woke already hard from his troubled dreams.
Poison. It was the poison of pleasure, the poison he had known would kill him. His mother knew. He still had the scar on his hand to remind him. This was the poison his mother had seen in the flecks of his eyes even before his eyes had looked at a woman’s naked body. This was wickedness, and it was fatal.
He dreamed about women. His sensual life, so long ago, came back to him in his dreams, finely detailed, lusciously intoxicating. Voices called to him. He lay naked in open fields, the wind ruffling the hair of a young girl who lay next to him, her dress open to the light, her breasts in his hands. He lay in courtyards, in gardens while water from the fountains played over marble statues and the air was rich with the scent of gardenias and jasmine and rosemary, and the soft voices of women whispered in his ear, while their fingertips pulled at his clothes. While their fingernails, clean and sharp, tore at the flesh of his back. Dreaming, his eyes roamed behind his lids over the luxuries of sex.
He dreamed about men who were not himself and women he had never known. He dreamed about his mother and father, lost in the mute, loveless passion that had created him. He dreamed about the men and women of the town, so religious, so strict and secret and fertile. He dreamed of young lovers and the first kiss, the first ribbon untied with trembling adolescent fingers while standing by a waterfall, a crystal stream, a place he knew.
He dreamed about large house parties. They were gay and filled with good things to eat and well-dressed men and women from twenty and forty years before. In these dreams, he was a child among grownups. There was laughter and pleasure and the unspoken signs of desires fulfilled. They were not people he knew. They were not houses he recognized. The houses were enormous, and filled with many rooms that opened on to one another so there was a constant flow among the guests from room to room, from gaiety to gaiety and partner to partner. They had beautiful skin and musical voices, and he loved them, loved being among them. In these dreams, where he sometimes saw his mother and father happy, he did not have sex, but the air was so redolent with desire that he became sex itself, and walked with strength in his legs, with a pride unknown to him.