But still he was unable to get through to Antonio. He had gone through so many years of hope in the effort to find him and bring him home, and now Antonio hated the house, he hated the business, he was rude to Ralph’s wife and to the servants. But Ralph had time. He had had nothing but time for the long years and it had taught him to stand straight, not to bend into the cold.
Every day the winter thinned. The stubble rose again in the field, the light grew longer in the afternoons. Ice still coated the black river, but it was as though the prison doors were opening and people waited for the first warm day and then, finally, the day when the girls appeared in their summer dresses. There was a future.
Antonio learned to drive the horse and carriage, and immediately, over the muddy roads, he went to town every night, where he took up with a young widow, Mrs. Alverson, whose husband had committed suicide two years before. Her sexual desperation matched his own, and their rendezvous were the talk of the town. It hurt Ralph to hear his name mentioned again as a subject of gossip, to hear of that kind of scandal. He made an attempt to rein in Antonio’s behavior.
“Her husband was twenty-five. She has a baby who was born after her husband was already dead. Her heart is an open wound.”
“She likes my company.”
“She lives on charity. Of course she likes your company. People are talking.”
“Your reputation is worthless to me, if that’s what you’re worried about. You have no reputation, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll do exactly what I want to.”
“Maybe you should go to Europe. There are many Mrs. Alversons over there, women who have a better understanding of the arrangement. Maybe you’d be happier. I was happy. There are women…”
“And leave you and Mrs. Truitt and the fun we’re having? Why?”
“Antonio. Because Mrs. Alverson… what’s her name?
“Violet.”
“Because Mrs. Alverson is worth more than this. Anybody is. Because you have no heart for business. The only other thing I have to give you is money. I’ve given you enough to go around the world, if that’s what you want. You’ll play it out. You’ll come around. The fire burns out.”
When he was Antonio’s age, Ralph had been forced to give up his dissolute life, to come home and take over the business. He had learned by doing, badly at first, then better and better. It had become his life, and Italy was a distant memory. Antonio had reached an age when the notion of going to a foreign country where he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the language and had nowhere to live was overwhelming to him. He had his life in hand, and the thrill of the new wasn’t available to him. He had brought his whole life to Wisconsin, and now he had no way back. He also had no way to get what he wanted, and his rage mounted. His old friends would envy him, but his old friends were not welcome here. Here it was all governors and senators and tired old businessmen with cigars and potbellies who came to lick the boots of Ralph Truitt, hoping to get in at the beginning of the next big thing, the next capital investment that would make them even richer.
Antonio retired to his widow in town and his rooms in the vast house, and he didn’t care that he was breaking his father’s soul, little by little. It couldn’t last long, this tenuous balance of hatred and greed. It couldn’t last.
Violet Alverson came to dinner. She was painfully shy and gentle, and seemed in awe of the grandeur of the food and the house. Catherine showed her everything, and she seemed most enchanted by the conservatory with its songbirds and its tropical plants. She didn’t know which spoon or fork to use, but Ralph talked to her in a gentle, kindly voice about her hopes for the future, a better life, a life of her own, a fine boy who would have an education and be somebody, somebody in business, perhaps.
Catherine asked her to spend the night since it was four miles back to town and the roads were dark and muddy, but Violet declined, and left in her borrowed buggy, whip in hand. She and Antonio had said not one word to each other. She drove home believing that he was going to ask her to marry him.
After the dinner, Antonio got bored with Violet Alverson. She had a child, and she had no conversation. She was not pretty enough to stir his vanity. He wrote to her that he wouldn’t see her anymore. He wouldn’t even go in person.
She hanged herself the next day from the same beam her husband had used, in the attic of her shabby house with its sad double bed. Her baby was asleep on a quilt on the floor. She had nursed him just before she tied the rope. Her dress was still unbuttoned, her bare breast hanging out. The cries of the baby alerted the neighbors. The local newspaper said she had died due to her continuing grief over the loss of her young husband. Ralph and Catherine went to the spare funeral of this woman they hardly knew. Antonio stayed home and played the piano.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The wind blew warmer from the south. The nights were still long and frigid, but the earth was visible now. Ralph spent the last light of the days in the barn with his car, making it shine, bringing it to sputtering life again. The winter had gone on too long. He had Antonio’s automobile brought out from town, and he taught Antonio to drive on the long driveway up to the house. It was the first mechanical thing Antonio had ever been able to do well. His automobile was a marvel, leather upholstery and brass and crystal lamps, with bud vases in the back, and he and Ralph drove up and down along the sweeping road to the house. The car brought them a measure of peace. They tried to get comfortable with each other. They tried to talk.
“It was a terrible thing, the thing I did to you.”
“You were angry, I suppose.”
“I was angry. I was angry and your mother was gone. I had loved her with all my heart. Believe me. I had. When she was gone, everything went black.”
“And I was left behind.”
“Your sister dead. Your mother gone. You were left, and I turned that grief and rage on you, a little boy, and I will never stop regretting it.”
“You managed to forget pretty well, it seems to me.”
“I looked for you for ten years. I looked everywhere.”
“It must have cost a lot of money.”
“I didn’t care. After you left, ran away, I knew what an awful thing I’d done. No amount of money can make that right. Being tortured for something you didn’t do.”
The slow dance of the father and the son, the old song of regret and retribution twined through their every conversation. During the conversations late at night Antonio was usually drunk, Catherine upstairs in bed.
“You married.”
“I wanted you to come home. I thought it would help. And I was lonely. Lonely and unloved and sad every day. You don’t know what happens to a life without love. To a heart. It withers. It loses reason. I just wanted what people have. I wanted a companion, some company in my heart. Someone other than myself.”
“And have you been happy? Happy with the young Mrs. Truitt? What do you really know about her?”
“Her life hasn’t been easy. I’m glad to make it better. And she brought you home. She’s my wife. Yes. I’m happy.”
“She’s much younger.”
“She’d be a friend to you, if you’d let her.”
“I have friends, but they don’t live here. You beat me until I was blinded by the blood in my eyes. You kept me locked in a room. You left me alone with no explanation of where my mother was or why your cruelty was so immense and unending.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don’t think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”