He never dreamed of Catherine. He never dreamed of Emilia. They were never present. He dreamed of Antonio, and the sight of Antonio with woman after woman. These dreams embarrassed him and filled him with shame but also with longing.
He smelled flowers, in his dreams. He smelled almonds. He smelled his own flesh dying.
The dreams vanished before dawn, and he awoke anxious and disturbed, to find Catherine already there, reaching out for him.
“You were restless in your sleep. I could feel you moving.”
“I had dreams.”
“Was I there?”
“No.”
It didn’t matter that her hair was tangled, her breath stale, her nightdress around her knees. It didn’t matter who she was, who she had pretended to be. It didn’t matter the atrocity she was committing. What she was doing to him. He reached out of his dream and took her into his arms, wanting more than any woman could possibly give, and getting more than he ever thought could come to him.
He knew that this moment, this feeling of well-being, these gorgeous dreams of gross desire and easy fulfillment, he knew this was a momentary thing. The drug’s erotic effect would end soon, and the horror would begin, if that was what she wanted. And the fact of it didn’t appall him as he thought it should. He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t save himself. He loved her. He loved her and she wanted him dead, and his son was lost forever to him and that was fine, too. That was what his life had led him to. This was what he had lived twenty years of solitude for, to see what would happen, to see how it would all turn out.
“Before you came, life was terrible.”
“You have so much.”
“I have whatever’s left from the things I’ve broken; my wife, my child… children.”
“Those things weren’t your fault. Your wife was terrible to you.”
“She did what she was made to do. She made me miserable because I was blind, because I wanted to be made miserable. It wasn’t her fault. I was ignorant.”
“You were generous.”
“I almost killed my son. My own boy.”
“He…”
“He was all the son I had. He was son enough. And he was innocent. Like Franny. Innocent and sweet and stupid.”
“The boy in Saint Louis… Mr. Moretti.”
“What?”
“He might change his mind. He may be your son. I think he is.”
Ralph’s hand took hers. They stared at each other across the snowy linen.
“Then he’s a liar. He’ll never change his mind. Everything has failed. It was all for nothing.”
He had made his efforts. He had hired detectives, strangers, to find his son. He had placed a shameless advertisement in the newspapers in Chicago and Saint Louis and Philadelphia and San Francisco and he had received and answered the many letters and he had made his choice. His son had turned out to be a phantom. His illegitimate son, he was aware. His wife had turned out to be the person he had waited for ever since the day he had driven Emilia away. Poison. The life he had was the life he had made, no more, no less, and he wouldn’t struggle anymore, wouldn’t try to change the course of events.
“What will you do today?”
“I feel so lazy, like a cat. I’ll read. I’ll sew. I’ll ask Mrs. Larsen if she wants any help and she’ll say no. I’ll wait for you.”
“And does that make you happy?”
“It’s all I need. It’s all I ever wanted.”
When she was in the bath, he looked for the poison. He looked in her sewing basket. He searched the pockets of her dresses. He looked through the few contents of her dressing table. He never found anything. It was like a giddy game to him, an Easter egg hunt, and he didn’t really care whether he found it or not. He felt it was his duty to look. He would never have confronted her, no matter what he found. He was agitated when he woke, and he wanted to find something, anything, that would prove what he knew to be true. Nothing would matter. She would do as she liked. She wanted everything, he supposed, the house, the money, everything, and he would have given it to her, all of it, if she had asked. He would have lived alone with nothing, if she had wanted. And he would die, if that’s what she required.
Mrs. Larsen told him Catherine was restless during the day. Mrs. Larsen assumed she was bored, confined in the big house with nothing to do. Nothing was holding her in. She could go to town now, buy odds and ends, visit ladies she might have met. But she rarely went out, except to the snowy garden. She sometimes walked the road, in the thinning snow, peering into the ruts here and there as though she were trying to find something, but she always came home empty-handed.
Larsen found them in the end. Coming home with rabbits over his shoulder, he looked down and saw a glitter through the mud and picked up her little jewels and rubbed them with his finger until they sparkled in the sun. He brought them home, went straight into Catherine where she sat playing the piano, the dead rabbits still hanging over his shoulder, his muddy boots on the rug from France. He held out his open hand; she took her things.
“This is it, ain’t it? What you been looking for?”
“They are, Mr. Larsen. They mean nothing now. But I thank you. I’ll put them away. I wore them once, in another place.”
Truitt knew it. He heard it before darkness fell, from Mrs. Larsen, but he never asked, and he never saw the trinkets she had brought with her. Women’s things, jewelry, rubies or glass, they were all the same.
A widow in town took strychnine, the poison scalding her blood, the bile spewing from her mouth as she lay on the kitchen floor, a cake cooling on the kitchen table. A young man threw his only daughter down a well and smoked a cigarette as she drowned. Such things happened.
Ralph didn’t go to the funerals or the trials. He couldn’t stand the idea of being in a crowd of people. He couldn’t stand the idea of being looked at. He felt the winter would never end, just as each day he couldn’t wait for the hours in his office to be over. He felt he would go crazy until he sat again at the long table, listening to the soothing voice of his young wife.
Every death was the death of Antonio. Every crime was the disappearance of his boy. He wept during the day. He wept on the long ride home from his office. He wept every morning as he woke up. And Catherine was the only thing that could ease his sorrow.
Such things happen, he would think as he drove home, the road ahead blurred with tears. The winters were long and life was hard and children died and religion was terror, so he would weep for these sad people, and weep as well for his own Antonio, his own child down the well. He would weep because there had been no trial, no retribution, no one to protect or save the boy from his father’s terrible anger. He had escaped unscathed, and Antonio had run away and been lost in the brutal world, while he rode home in his clean clothes to be poisoned by his beautiful wife.
And so he wept.
She got up to change the sheets in the middle of the night. Her arms flew out, and the linens flew across the bed like great birds. Her hands smoothed the sheets, her arms stuffed the pillows into the cases and she piled them, pillow after pillow, on the great bed.
She put on her nightdress and lay beneath the covers. Mrs. Larsen would find the ruined sheets in the linen closet. Catherine patted his side of the bed, and he lay his head on the pillow and stared into her beautiful, calm face. She looked so far away. She was so beloved.
His heart pounded in his chest. His hand reached under her nightdress and lay along her thigh.
“I know what you’re doing. I know what’s happening to me.”
“I…”
“Don’t say anything. Don’t speak. We’ll never mention it again. I just wanted you to know that I know, that it’s all right. I don’t mind. I forgive you. Just…”