“I killed her.”
The moon seemed so far away. The winter had been so long, she could not remember a time when it had not been winter. She could not remember her life before she stepped down from the train and into the gaze of Ralph Truitt. Would not remember or want to, except for the presence of Antonio, moving like a cat through the house, watching her day and night.
“I can’t believe it. I don’t.”
Truitt sat up in bed and took her hand. “I will talk about this one time. When I’ve told it all, her name will never be said in this house again. I killed her. I let her die.
“She had moved to Chicago with Moretti. She was my wife. There was no divorce, no legal recourse. She was a Catholic and they don’t do that. I had her child, her boy, under my roof and she was my wife and I felt pain every time I thought about her, but I always knew where she was, I heard the stories. Everybody in town heard the stories and I was ashamed, but I went on and nobody, of course nobody spoke about it, at least not to me.
“I sent her money. She wasn’t destitute. I sent her money and she lived in a style that was despicable to me, but I sent it anyway because she was my wife, because I was haunted by Franny and had her boy and because… because I couldn’t let her live in squalor.
“Moretti left her. Left her for some rich widow with a big house and a blind eye to his infidelities and his affectations and his lack of talent or charm. Emilia…” She could hear the pain in his voice as he spoke her name. “Emilia took a series of lovers, each young, each useless, going around Chicago saying he had had a countess, a real countess, and describing in beer halls the things she was willing to do. She was still beautiful.
“She never wrote to Antonio. She never came to see the grave of her daughter. She could have chosen differently. She could have chosen something other than this parade of young ne’er-do-wells, something with kindness, something with honor, a house where she might have brought her boy and raised him up. She had money. She was intelligent. She was cultivated. She slept with women, I heard. She got drunk in public. She was robbed twice. By men she knew, men who had been guests in her house.
“I went to see her. Several times. Not to ask her back home, I wouldn’t have her here. I asked her to stop. Just to stop it. She laughed in my face. She threw wine at me. She told me I disgusted her.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “Do you need to know the rest?”
The moonlight was so faint and cold, her skin rippled with the cold. “I need to know.”
“She got sick. Consumption, they called it then. Tuberculosis, I suppose. I sent doctors. I didn’t want to see her. She was still so young. She had tuberculosis, they said, she had syphilis, she had gone mad with it, and no man or woman would come near her. Her name was up, as people say, in the streets of Chicago, and no one would come to comfort her, all those dinner parties she had given, all those men she had given a moment’s pleasure to, and money, endless amounts of money to show off the affectations of the Countess Emilia. She could still barely speak English. The doctors couldn’t do anything. She lived alone and there was no one to feed her or clean up after her, and she had never learned to do the first thing for herself.
“I went one more time. I took Antonio to see her, but it was too awful. He saw her, saw her in ruins, and then I made him wait in the carriage. There was a room… there was a room in her house where she had thrown everything dirty, her clothes, her underclothes, and her fancy petticoats, along with plates she had eaten off of once and hadn’t bothered to clean. Embroidered tablecloths she had used once, hats she had bought and never worn. It was up to your waist. Jewelry she didn’t want anymore. Packets of letters from Antonio who wrote to her, pleaded with her to come and save him. Some of the letters weren’t even opened. The curtains were drawn against the light; you had to wade through this disaster, wondering what to save, what could be saved, some token to bring to her boy as a sign that at least his mother loved him. God knows I couldn’t. She had left her life, stuffed it away in this rank, dark room on the third floor of her fancy townhouse, which I paid for.
“She was lying in her bed, barely conscious. Probably drugged. Probably crazy. She was still beautiful. She had a refinement, a beauty, even in her madness, that caught my breath. She needed sun. She needed fresh air and a long cure, out west, in Europe. She might have lived, lived for a while, at least.
“She spoke to me. She told me I was a fool, a fool and a liar and a cuckold. She told me I was weak and stupid and that she had duped me and used me from the moment she set eyes on me and she was glad. I knew it, of course. I had known it by then for a long time.
“I left her there. I left her alone to die. She was my heart’s first love, and she despised me and I left her. No cure. No more doctors. No more money. She was thrown out of her house, her possessions auctioned in the street. She died three months later in a charity hospital, her wrists tied to the bed, gone blind, her hair fallen out, a pathetic freak who had no one to hold her hand, no priest to say the final prayer over her head, no redemption, no forgiveness from a God who had finally abandoned her too, left her to die without the words, without the invitation to heaven.
“I could have saved her. I didn’t. And I don’t regret it. There comes a moment when you can’t take it anymore. I saw that room with her discarded dresses and the unopened letters and the unpaid dressmaker’s bills, and my heart stopped caring whether she lived or died.”
There was a long, dark silence.
“You couldn’t have done differently. No one would have expected…”
“ I expected. I. She was my wife. Once, she was. Then she was dead. I don’t even know where she’s buried. I don’t care.”
“You have to forgive yourself.”
He turned violently to her. “You don’t know anything. I don’t have to do a damned thing. I’ll do and think what I do and think for as long as it takes. You asked. I told you. Never mention her name again.”
He lay back against the sheets. He pulled her close to him. He drew up the covers and immediately she could feel the warmth of his body against hers. “What I felt for her wasn’t love. I thought it was. It wasn’t. It was an addiction, a kind of insanity. I so wanted… something, I don’t remember what. Revenge. My mother. The long years of her rage. I wanted revenge, and she was the instrument. I wanted my mother to have to live with her every day and to feel small and useless and ugly and old. Only it didn’t matter for a minute. To her. It didn’t change anything. I spent my youth loving a woman who wasn’t worth the effort.”
He was drowsy. “I hope, I hope in my heart, that the fire is out. It burned too hot. It kills everything. Now. Say your prayers and go to sleep. Antonio is home. You’re here. We’ll make it work. That’s all that matters. Go to sleep now.”
He turned away and she lay in the dark, mute and thoughtless. Antonio had lied to her, had lied to get her to believe something about Truitt that wasn’t true, had described in detail a horrible, convulsive, murderous event that never happened. She herself had lied, but now it seemed the lie had burned through her, leaving only white blank space behind, white as the landscape outside the window. At that moment, something in her ended and something began. And she lay awake until the thin light came through the windows while she gave birth to the new thing.
Then Truitt stirred. It was barely morning. He opened his eyes, and she kissed him before he was fully awake. Truitt would do. He wasn’t what she had dreamed of. He wasn’t what she had expected. But he was enough.
Antonio was everywhere. His insolence, his boredom filled the house. Truitt never noticed the hypocrisy, the small insults. He gave him a bank account, a bank account with enough money to keep Antonio for years. He tried to interest Antonio in the business, sitting with him for as long as Antonio could stand it in his grand study, explaining where everything was, telling him how to buy and sell, how to grow rich. He was not a fool. He could see how condescending Antonio was, and it reminded him of his own youth, his own lack of interest in anything except the pursuit of pleasure.