He woke up every morning anxious for his wife, and came the long way back to Catherine, offered up his days to her, so that she might patiently explain the things he forgot, so that she could ladle soup into his mouth and bathe him in the warm baths which took away the chill for five minutes. He came back so that she could inject him with morphine and drop poison into his food and onto his hairbrush and onto the clothes he could no longer bear to put on his body. He remembered how it worked, in certain lucid moments. He had, for the most part, forgotten what it was that was being done to him. He never found her at fault.
After he had gone back to Mrs. Larsen’s, after dinner and the reading by the fire which warmed the nights, after he had been bundled in shawls and lap robes and Mrs. Larsen had driven him slowly away with a look of hatred that pierced her to the heart, Catherine would walk through the dark, the long way through the dark fields, and climb the stairs of the old farmhouse and sit outside his door until morning. If he woke, she would hold his hand, rub his forehead with a soft warm cloth, she would recite for him the names of the dead and the living who peopled his nights. And every morning, before the sun came up, she would wrap her cloak around her and walk the long way home to sleep for an hour before he came into the house, not knowing where to be, not knowing what chair to sit in, or who she was some mornings.
At last he was ready. He wanted to die. But still she could not do it. And, finally, she knew she could not do it.
He was sitting in a chair in the music room. She had put cotton in his ears, because any noise drove him into a frenzy, and she came to him, she knelt on the floor. She finally couldn’t bear his suffering and her own wickedness, or his patient acceptance of what was happening to him. She knelt on the floor and lay her head in his lap and she spoke softly, looking up into his tired face.
“It’s over,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
“Do what?”
“I can’t do it. Can’t do it to you. You’re all I’ve known, all I will ever know, and I can’t do it. I love you so much it makes me ashamed when you look at me, to have you see me. But, there, take my hand. It stops now. You’ll live. I will make you well.”
He looked at her, his face a realm of kindness.
“If you die, I would grieve for you all my life. I’ll grieve for you if they hang me, if they put the rope around my neck.”
“I wanted to die. It seemed I did. Do.”
“You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.”
“Antonio…”
“Will come. I promise. He will come. Until he does, I’m here. Live for me.”
He reached out and touched her hair. He caught a single strand between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth.
He loved her. He would live.
Perhaps there was to be some light, in the end. Maybe, after all, there was a way out of the darkness. She hoped it was true. She was so tired.
CHAPTER TWENTY
She sent a telegram to Antonio. “Come at once,” was all it said.
She nursed Ralph with all the care she could give him. She wrapped his hands and body with gauze dipped in liniment, the sores had become so terrible. He itched and burned, and the salve seemed to soften the torment. She covered his face with salve and gauze, his face, where the skin was falling off in sheets. She closed his ears and covered his eyes with cotton, she put her dark glasses on him. The sound and the light had become piercing to him, the smallest footfall an agony. She wrapped her shoes in wool so that her feet barely made a sound as she walked through the marble halls. She drew the curtains against the light and the sound, and she tied him with velvet and cotton cords to a chair when his restlessness and dementia would not let him stay still. She drew the curtains, and the white world went away for a time.
She burned the sheets, his clothes and shoes and bath towels. She burned and buried anything he might have touched, anything that might contain the slightest trace of the white powder. She threw away his razor, his father’s, and his silver hairbrush from Italy. She burned the rug, the heavy silk bed hangings. She burned her own nightgowns, knowing as she did that the smoke from the fire was full of the same poison, that everything he had touched she had touched as well, that he had drunk his icy water and kissed her on the mouth.
The blue bottle she took into the woods and poured the poison over rocks, away from water, away from where sheep might graze in summer, or birds might come to nest. No more harm would come to any living thing.
She fed him nothing but warm milk, to make him vomit and to still the tremors of his chill. She gave him limewater to soak up the poisons. She covered him with furs and blankets and held the bowl for him while he vomited into it. She never flinched.
She called on Mrs. Larsen. “I don’t believe the doctor. He is, has been very ill. We can make him better. We did it once before.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. But the doctor doesn’t know either. He’s wrong. This is no cancer. My father died of cancer and this is different. He knows what’s going on around him. My father knew nothing. He lost his mind, at the end. It’s not his brain. I don’t know. My sister was ill once. We gave her milk and egg whites, to make her vomit. Give it to him. He’s freezing cold. Keep him warm. What else can we do?”
“The old people… there are herbs in the field for the sores. For drawing out the boils.”
“Then we’ll ask the old people. We’ll get what we can. It’s still winter. There’s not much. You’ll watch him. I’ll go to Chicago and find a doctor, a real doctor. I’ll ask him what to do.”
She went to Chicago, to visit poor, sad-faced India. India who looked like her picture. India whom rich Ralph Truitt had chosen out of the whole world, who might herself have been wearing silk and walking the marble halls. She would never know where her picture had gone. She would never know she might have been loved and respected, the mistress of those high frescoed halls. And Truitt would have found happiness with her, a thin happiness. He would not be dying now, if India had been the one.
Catherine had always loved India, had loved her plain shyness and her lack of prospects. She wanted to tell her that Ralph Truitt had loved her; she wanted to say he had chosen her picture and loved it, because then, when she entered a room or walked down the street, she might be able to do it differently, knowing that she was loved.
It was easy to lie to her. It had been easy to say that she had always wanted her picture, a remembrance, a sentimental keepsake, and to persuade shy India to sit in front of the photographer’s plate.
Now it was easy to tell her only as much as she needed and lie about why she needed it. India had spent a lifetime watching other people’s lives, looking in shop windows, watching life through the plate glass of her own indifferent looks, and she had noticed everything and stored it away, her only treasure. It was her only furniture of use; her protection against the loneliness that never left her and the ugly men and the sad, sad life.
India embraced her. India held her hand. India listened, nodding, and then she got her hat and coat and said the only things she had said, through Catherine’s long and lying story. “Let’s go downtown.”
Chicago outdid Saint Louis in brawl and confusion. They went through big streets and tiny streets, and came to Chinatown, to a small shop with dingy windows. Inside, a Chinaman bowed with elaborate courtesy and listened to the version of the story Catherine told. At the word arsenic, the air in the room stopped moving for a moment. Catherine thought she would cry, would howl with guilt and terror, but she went on as though nothing were happening. The air began to move again. India breathed, and the wheels started turning, the clock began to tick.