She had been to the doctor in town. She had timed it out very carefully in her mind. The child was Truitt’s. It lay in her belly like the garden lay in her mind, under the earth, waiting for care. When Truitt was stronger, she would tell him. When Antonio tired of his scheme and realized that everything that was Truitt’s was also his, he would go away and spend money until he died in Saint Louis or London or Paris, an aging fop too bored to live anymore. He would move from city to city as he had always done, using people, soiling them like sheets and walking away, to find fresh faces and new diversions. Truitt had loved a person who didn’t exist. Surely he would love and find consolation and hope in the person who was going to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Even though he couldn’t ride, Antonio bought an Arabian horse, the finest in the whole state, some said. He hired a teacher, a young farm boy, and took lessons down in the vast old barn, where Truitt had leveled the floor and made an indoor riding ring. In two weeks that fascination was spent, and the horse stood idly in the barnyard, picking through the thin, icy snow far from the desert sands.
Antonio bought a car that was newer and fancier and far more expensive than his father’s. It arrived on the train and astonished the town, but he couldn’t drive, and the roads were too rutted anyway, so it sat in a stable in town.
Antonio went to Chicago for five days and came home with a glazed and exhausted look, a trunkful of new clothes and a packet of arsenic and a ball of opium. He came home with a Miss Carruthers, Elsie Carruthers, a girl Catherine recognized from the theater and her nights with India, and installed her in a suite of rooms next to his own. They would spend the nights there, drinking vintage wine and tearing at each other’s clothes. But Miss Carruthers was ignorant and was bored with the long dinners and the poetry, and she and Antonio stopped coming down for them. Ralph said it was what young men did; it was what he had done, although he had traveled three thousand miles to do it. He had never brought his depravities under his mother and father’s roof, but he never said a word to Antonio. It was a relief to Catherine to have him out of the way, a relief to find she enjoyed her time alone with Truitt again.
Antonio grew bored with Miss Carruthers, and Ralph paid her a sum of money to get on the train and go back to Chicago. After that, Antonio had nothing to do. Nothing at all.
“Mrs. Truitt, we have the powder. You know the plan. I told you I’d tell him and I will.”
“You don’t need me, if that’s what you want.”
“The lost son killing the father? Wouldn’t work. I’m a coward. You’re not. No, Mrs. Truitt, I will always need you. The sound of your hem on the stairs makes me want you, all over again.”
“The past is dead.”
“No, it’s not. It never is.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
He touched her neck, the beating pulse. “Tell me you love me.”
She slapped his face.
He smiled. “You see?”
Antonio was used to being adored and desired and had no place in his heart for the complexities of love. He was never driven by the need for affection; desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event. And, given the chance to have and do anything he wanted, he was filled with a crippling lassitude, a despair and anger that made him feel like a tiger in a cage. He looked for the new sensation, the new conquest, and found nothing.
Ralph realized Antonio would never wear a wedding ring. The simple happiness of domesticity meant nothing to him, that his life would be spent moving from woman to woman, from raw pleasure to pleasure, forever, until his looks ran out and his desires failed him, and he would be left with nothing. Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart. It existed outside of time, on a continuum that couldn’t be seen or described. Ralph thought of Catherine during the day with a mixture of love and fear, but he found himself content that she would be there when evening came.
Antonio would never see it. His mother had died for sexual pleasure, she had debased and ruined her life, and Antonio was the product of her attenuated perversity. Never to give up the primacy of sex was to die alone, in a kind of poverty. It was never to know the comfort of sex without need.
Ralph had found his passion again, so long suppressed. He had found it in a woman who had deceived and lied and pretended and worse, but he woke up every morning with the feeling of having passed the night in dreams of pleasure. He had sought one thing and found another. She was the instrument of his death. She was the invitation to his life. He knew where he stood.
He grew stronger, and he got richer and more powerful. His business, so long a duty to pass the time, to assuage his guilt over his father’s lonely death, had become infused with his passion, and his arms reached out, his hands full of money, to buy and to ruin and to save and to build and to own whatever would make his power grow. It was what he had become. It was what America had offered him. It was what Antonio might grow to be.
“It bores me.”
“It bored me, too. It was getting good at it that made it interesting. It’s life, Antonio. It’s work. It’s what people do.”
“It’s not my life. It’s not what I do.”
“The country, the whole country, Antonio, is building and growing. There’s so much of it to own and control. There are people, on farms, in cities, who don’t know where to go. All they need is a light, and they’ll follow.”
“You. They can follow you to hell for all I care.”
And still Ralph persisted, his patience infinite, his love vast and unexplored. Antonio was, for him, the one thing he had managed to save out of the disaster of his early life-or at least he was doing what he could to save it-and he would do anything, endure any insult, to make him stay.
He had been willing to die, but now life had come back to him, life and power and passion, and he would never stand unloved and alone in a crowd of people on a train platform again. He would never again be an object of pity to the men who worked for him and their wives and children. He would never again be little more than a rumor.
The house was growing around them. Mrs. Larsen’s staff of two had grown to six, including a laundress, a maid for Antonio, and someone extra to help in the kitchen. Catherine had sent to Chicago and hired a gardener who brought the tropics to the conservatory, who made the orange and the jasmine bloom in the hot afternoon sun. It was wet there, and songbirds flew from branch to branch, singing. It made Ralph’s bones feel warm, to sit there in the afternoon. It made the pain go away.
The heavy old damask curtains were pulled down, and lighter ones were put up, to let in more sun. The silk bed hangings in their bedroom were replaced with fabrics adorned with Chinese patterns, designs from another century. Their exotic splendor transported Ralph and Catherine into their own Xanadu, a place that was wholly and entirely the kingdom of their own desires.
Seamstresses came from Chicago, bringing pattern books and bolts of rich material, to make dresses for Catherine, nothing excessive. They made Ralph splendid striped shirts with white cuffs and collars and gold collar buttons.
They were rich, and while they felt no need to be ostentatious, they felt comfortable with living the way rich people live. Ralph didn’t change his habits, and he stopped drinking again once he had had enough brandy; he ate only as much as he needed and not as much as he wanted. The food was exquisite. The company increased as light was let into the house.