The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.
Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.
It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.
But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning, the beginning of all that had come after.
It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus. It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.
From that beginning she had gone on and on, until her legs were tired and her mother was dead and her heart was broken. She had, no matter how impossible it seemed from moment to moment, gone on without love or money, always wondering when it would begin, the splendid end to match the splendid beginning.
She no longer dwelled on the past. She had no fond memories there, except for the single rainbow, the pot of gold. She had bitten and bludgeoned her way through life, angry, fighting in a rage for the next good thing to happen. It hadn’t happened yet. So that, on the day she suddenly realized that her life was, in fact, her life, she wondered what it could possibly have been that led her forward, day after day, what events could possibly have happened to fill the hours between sleep and sleep. But at moments like this, when everything was so quiet she could notice the trembling of her earrings, she knew with dread that the answer was not nothing much, but simply nothing.
She would not, could not live without love or money.
She would remember those faceless young soldiers forever. They would be forever young. She would cherish the glory of the sun coming through the clouds, and the rainbow. Her mother’s loveliness would never abandon her. But what good did it do? What use was all that to her now, sitting in front of a mirror on a train going to the middle of nowhere, on the tightrope between the beginning and the end?
There was a soft knock on the door. The porter who had brought her meals and turned down her bed leaned his dark handsome face into the compartment. “Station in half an hour, Miss.”
“Thank you,” she said softly, never taking her eyes from the mesmerizing mirror. The door closed and she was alone again.
She had seen Ralph Truitt’s personal advertisement six months before, as she sat at a table with Sunday coffee and the newspaper:
COUNTRY BUSINESSMAN SEEKS RELIABLE WIFE. COMPELLED BY PRACTICAL, NOT ROMANTIC REASONS. REPLY BY LETTER. RALPH TRUITT. TRUITT, WISCONSIN. DISCREET.
“Reliable wife.” That was new, and she smiled. She had read in her life perhaps thousands of advertisements just like it. It was a hobby of hers, like knitting. She was engrossed by these notices, lonely men who called out from the vast wildernesses of the country. Sometimes the notices were placed by women, who asked for strength or patience or kindness or merely civility.
She laughed at their stories, at their pitiful foolhardiness. They asked and probably found somebody as lonely and desperate as themselves. How could they expect more? The halt and the lame calling the blind and hopeless. Catherine found it hilarious.
She assumed, still, that these men and these women found each other through their sad little calls for comfort. They found, if not love or money, at least another life to cling to. Advertisements like this one appeared every week. These people didn’t like the solitude of their lives. Perhaps they, at least some of them, eventually found lives they liked better.
The night before, just before she slept, she suddenly saw herself as if from above, lying in her bed, the chill of loneliness and death all around her like a nimbus of disconsolation. She hovered in the air, watching herself. She had felt, and still felt that she would die unless someone could find the sweetness to touch her with affection. Unless someone would appear to shelter her from the storm of her awful life.
It was Ralph Truitt’s terse announcement, containing the promise of a beginning, not splendid, perhaps, but new, that she had finally answered. “I am a simple, honest woman,” she had written, and he had answered by return mail. They had written all through the hot summer, tentative descriptions of their lives. His handwriting was blunt and compelling, hers practiced and elegant, she hoped, and seductive. She had at last sent the photograph, and he had written at greater length, as though it were already decided, the whole match. She had feigned hesitation, until he insisted and sent her a ticket for the train to come and bring her to be his wife.
The young soldier who had sat beside her in the carriage would be old himself now. She could still see the way his thumb jutted from the palm of his hand, feel the way his thigh touched her thigh as he leaned toward her. Perhaps he had a wife and children of his own now. Perhaps he loved them and treated them with kindness, with grace and affection. The world had not shown her that such things were common, but her unhappiness had been made bearable only by the certain knowledge that somewhere there lived people whose lives were not like her own.
Perhaps this Ralph Truitt was one of those other people. Perhaps this life he offered would be some other kind of life. The sun set every day. It could not be that it would set in splendor only once in her lifetime.
Half an hour. She stood up from the dressing table and stepped out of her red silk shoes, lining them up side by side. She began quickly to undo the embroidered jacket of her fancy traveling suit, discarding it behind her on the floor. Then she took off her silk blouse and the heavy red velvet skirt. She undid the laces of her embroidered corset, and shrugged it off. She felt suddenly light, as though she would rise from the floor, a pool of crimson velvet at her feet.
She watched herself in the mirror as she did these things. She saw, for a moment, the reflection of her headless body. It was not unpleasant. She enjoyed her body, the way women sometimes do, and looked at it with a dispassionate eye, as though it were in a shop window, understanding exactly the raw material from which she had produced, a thousand times, certain effects. Every day she took the raw material of her body and pushed and pulled it, decorated it so that it became a heightened version of itself, a version designed to attract attention.