He no longer scratched his sores. He no longer felt as though his clothes were on fire. He drank the soup and ate the herbs. The women salved his wounds, and they could feel the change in him. They moved him upstairs to his bed in the blue bedroom, and sat together, taking meals with him. Mrs. Larsen finally, after all these years, consented to eat with Truitt.
He wanted oysters, and they sent to Chicago for a barrel of them. Mrs. Larsen kept them in the cold cellar, and fed them brine and cornmeal. Every night, Truitt had a dozen fat oysters and a glass of brandy, Truitt who hadn’t had a drink in years, amazed that he wanted these things, amazed that they had gotten them for him. The women didn’t eat oysters. The women didn’t drink brandy.
Catherine couldn’t tell him about the baby. She couldn’t bear to tell him about it when he was so ill. She hoped the baby was his. She felt sure, and she hoped she was right, because she couldn’t bear the thought that, because of her, Ralph Truitt would have to raise two children not his own. Hadn’t he, when she first came home, made love to her while she was showing blood? She believed so. She believed, in the way she had of making what she wanted into the truth, that there had been no other man but Truitt, that the days in Saint Louis had not been.
He had made love to her while she was bleeding. She remembered. It couldn’t be Antonio, he never came inside her, his fear of encumbrance was too great. It must be Truitt. He had made her new; her life had begun in a new way when she left Saint Louis, and nothing from that life could grow in her now.
She had never been a kind person. In the past, she had thought of others as no more than a way to get what she wanted.
Truitt was different, had made her new, and she could never go back. She washed his blisters and rubbed his feet and put salve on his forehead, and ground bark into a paste to spread on his hands. His hair came out in clumps when she brushed it, and she sorrowed for that; her guilt was overwhelming.
She could grieve for herself now, finally, for her wandering, wasted life. She lay on a wicker chaise in the sun of the conservatory, with her new roses beginning to show leaves in the warm, damp afternoons, and she wept for herself, she wept for her father and her mother, for her sister, and for every moment lost and forgotten and broken into bits on the long way from where she had been to the place where she sat. It was so fragile, a life, and she thought she had been tough enough to believe differently. Now everything was tender to her, tender as a new wound, her own memories, the dark wharves of Baltimore and the ordered grandeur of Rittenhouse Square and the sex and the stealing and the lying and the angel descending from heaven, the angel who had not carried Alice to the grand capitals of the world so that she might be dazzled by the splendors. As though it were all, the good and the bad, one long endless scar, up and down her arms, across her breasts, and she was applying medications to her own skin as she was nursing Truitt.
Hers was a sickness of the soul, but it was not incurable; she had to believe that there was still innocence inside her, somewhere, and hope, and a person who might have a life altogether different from the one she had had. The scars, her scars, would never go away, she knew that. She would never be whole, as Truitt would never again be young. But new skin would grow over the scars; they would whiten and fade and be barely noticeable to a child.
Truitt had seen her in a new way. And his vision had made her over, had caused her to turn into the kind of woman he wanted. He deserved no less. Catherine, for her part, had led a life in which kindness was neither expected nor given. Battered as she was, she didn’t know the difference between happiness and dread. She didn’t know the difference between excitement and fear. She felt a knot in her stomach every hour of the day and didn’t know what to call it. Her hands shook. She vomited in the mornings, in secret, but she felt that, finally, the end of the tightrope was in view, that the slamming doors and the hostile, mercantile sex and the demented nights in the opium dens were behind her.
She had been adept at the beginning and the ends of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.
Then one day he could speak, his voice no longer a harsh and burning rasp. Then one day he could walk, could dress himself, could carry on a conversation, could imagine going back to work to repair his fortunes, to meet the anxious eyes of the town that depended on his being well. He was changed, of course. He walked like an old man, as though each step were a learned and torturous act. His hair had turned stark gray. When he drank from his glass of brandy, his hand moved to his mouth in a series of distinct, static movements, like flashing photographs.
They sat at the dinner table. He had asked for beef and potatoes and pudding, the food from his schoolboy days. He was reading her the daily disasters from the paper as they ate.
His fork clattered on the plate when a knock came at the big front door. It was far away, and Catherine offered to go, but Ralph was already on his feet, unsteady.
“No. I want to go.”
He walked the long way, lighting every light as he went. He opened one of the big double doors, and a man stood on the terrace in the darkness, looking out over the steps and the snow. He turned, and Ralph could make out his shape, but could barely see his face.
The man held out his hand. “I am Tony Moretti,” he said. And then, after a pause, “I am your son.”
And even though they both knew what the man said was a fiction, Ralph stepped into the dark and opened his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sons came home to their fathers, even to men who weren’t their fathers, men who had beaten them senseless. Sons came home, malevolent with revenge, home to fathers who could not forgive themselves for the cruelties they had committed. Such things happened.
He had brought everything he owned, the fancy suits, the extravagant Paris neckties, the pristine shirts and the silver-headed walking stick and amber colognes from London. He was penniless. He was like a swan, long-necked and useless except for beauty, and everything he did, every gesture he made and every word he spoke seemed out of place, too exotic, too mannered. He played the piano after dinner, and even that seemed excessive, as though he were playing for a fancy crowd in a rococo concert hall. Truitt preferred Catherine’s simplicity of feeling, her lack of expertise.
Catherine and Truitt lay in the big bed in their blue bedroom. Antonio slept far away from them, in a bachelor apartment he had devised out of his mother’s old rooms. A dressing room. A magnificent sitting room for which he had taken bits of furniture from all over the house, for which Truitt had ordered an ebony piano. And a bedroom, which was large and grand and hung with tapestries.
They could feel his eyes on them in the dark. A new quiet had entered into the way they treated each other, a simplicity of manner. It was, Catherine supposed, love. It was what normal people had when passion had run its course. They spoke quietly after making love. They spoke of small matters, his business, Mrs. Larsen and her silent sorrow, the husband she would never see again, his care paid for by Truitt, the garden for which the plants were arriving daily. They never spoke of Truitt’s illness, as though it had never happened.
“He reminds me so much of Emilia. Her eyes and mouth, that dark hair. An Italian.”
Catherine sat up in bed and stared at the pale light of the new moon coming through the window.
“How did she die?”
She could feel his stillness beside her. He remained weak, and continued to have moments when he did not know where he was or who she was or where they lived. His body was covered with scars, a silent reminder of her iniquities and her consolations and his forgiveness.