“You’d be very rich.”
“And you would be unmourned, except perhaps for the lovely Mrs. Truitt. Certainly not by me. And not by all those people who live in fear of you.”
Despite the vitriol, it was a beginning, some kind of communication between father and son. Ralph went to work every day with a hope that Antonio would come around, would grow to forgive and to love. He was an honest man and he had such a yearning to believe.
For Antonio, of course, he was a fish on the line. Antonio gave and then withheld, leaving the hook in his father’s mouth. It gave him pleasure.
Antonio wanted so much. He wanted for most of his childhood never to have happened. He wanted his mother to have been faithful and beautiful and virtuous. He wanted her to have cared for him. He wanted her to have taken him with her when she ran away, giving him more than the idiot sister and the terrifying father who was not his father. He wanted the days of his boyhood to have been different. He wanted, more than anything, for his mother not to have died in squalor, to have lived and stayed with him and kept things from becoming so sadly, wrenchingly wrong. He didn’t care anymore about the beatings. They had made him stronger than his father, his real father, ever could have been. He cared about the loss.
He sat drunk by the fire every night after Ralph had gone to bed, to the consolation of sex with Antonio’s old mistress. And he cried. He wept for his own boyhood and its simple pleasures. He sat in his old playroom and touched everything, the rocking horse, the stuffed animals and the wooden boats and the tin soldiers and he wept for his own losses in battle.
It wasn’t the beatings or the loneliness he was weeping for, sitting with a bottle of brandy on the floor of his unchanged playroom. It was time. It was the time he couldn’t get back. Yes, Ralph would do anything, and yes, the future could hold a better life. But he would never get back the days and the hours that might have been something other than angry and miserable and painful. No money could ever change that, and nothing Truitt could say would make it right.
There was an almost sexual pleasure in the boundless sorrow, a comfort he could give himself by letting go, a release not found even in sex for the first time with a woman he coveted. He didn’t know why he behaved the way he behaved. He didn’t care. Nobody else had lived his life. Nobody else could tell him how to be.
Perhaps, he thought, Ralph was right. Maybe he could change. It wasn’t as though his life had given him much joy or peace.
Perhaps weeping in the playroom was his first fearful and tentative step toward some kind of love. He didn’t know what love was, but he knew that he had begun to feel differently toward Ralph, to feel something that was not blind hatred. He was a child, and he wanted his father and his mother.
He would wake up in the morning on the floor of his old rooms, his head throbbing, his body covered with the quilt that had covered him as a child, and he would shiver with grief and sometimes with remorse at his own behavior. He wished he could have been another person.
Ever since Truitt had stopped torturing him, ever since he had been strong enough to run away, he had done nothing but torture himself. If Truitt had tried to kill him, then Antonio, for all his sorrow, had done his best to finish the job. The blurred days and nights, the women, the debauchery, none of it had been enough. With the return of Truitt’s love, he would have to be his own destruction.
The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him. That he was rich, that he could go to Rome and marry a princess, that he might drink cold champagne at dawn on the deck of a steamer bound for the South Seas, in the company of someone who simply loved him, that he might do anything that would give him joy, that would create a wonderful life, these were phantoms that eluded him.
Love was gone forever, just outside the window, just beyond reach, like fruit on an upper branch. In its place was the sexual attraction of tragedy. He would hang his head and swig his brandy and mourn for his life, for the hours of his childhood, for the kindness of this man who wanted to father him, for the lost beauty of his mother. He explored the extravagant rooms of his father’s house, knowing that there was no home for him anywhere. There was no getting there. There was no one there when he arrived.
He wanted nothing more than to lie in a small, dark, warm room in an anonymous house where there was neither day nor night and have ravenous sex with woman after woman until he died. He wanted a drunkenness of the flesh. He wanted the thing he loved most in the world, the soft touch of another human being, to become a torture. He wanted to die in a sexual embrace, the last of thousands.
There was Catherine. She was like the drug, the poison he craved. In the absence of other diversions, she was a woman whose secrets he knew. She was always in the house, sewing, reading the books she had sent from Chicago. She had abandoned him. She had betrayed him, denied him the golden promise.
She slept every night in his father’s bed. His father had sex with her, and told her he loved her, a thing Antonio had never said, and would never have meant. It wasn’t enough to want all women; he wanted Catherine be all women to him.
She deliberately avoided him. She shut herself up in her room, sewing, when Truitt was away. She sat at the table like a stranger and talked to him as though she had no memory of the velvet cords that he had used to tie her to his bed, of the fire that had burned her skin. His sorrow was infinite. His desire was specific, and immense.
Truitt went to town. Antonio would find her, follow her, would open his heart to her, tell her how coming back to this house had made him different, how it had opened a wound he had thought healed forever. The sight of Truitt, the man who had been so capable of destruction, sitting calm and safe from accusation, even sitting in his own remorse, made him afraid, he said. It frightened him to think it could be different, that things could, from this moment, change.
She advised patience. She advised giving the old wounds time to heal. There was no more talk of Truitt’s death. He told her he had arsenic in his room, the arsenic he had brought from Chicago, and that late at night, drunk on Bordeaux and alone while his father slept with his mistress, his creation, he picked it up and sniffed it and held it in his hands and longed for death. He told her that if there were a button in his leg he could push so that he would vanish and never have been, he would push it. She expressed horror that he would contemplate such a thing. He had learned to drive a car, she said. He could go anywhere. His life was waiting. She didn’t understand a word he said. She was no longer the woman who had spoken to him for hours of nothing, of amorous nothings.
The silence enveloped him, strangling him. Every morning, his razor was an invitation. Every night, the arsenic was an aphrodisiac. His loneliness was terrifying, but he wouldn’t come to town, wouldn’t come down to meet the proper young women his father invited from Chicago, to sit at table with their banker fathers, all exquisite manners and musical, sexless laughter. They had no darkness. It was useless, the light, to him.
He wrote suicide notes and stored them in a locked drawer. He wrote letters to his father in which he described Catherine’s past in fine detail, letters that would destroy, in a single swift stroke, both their lives forever. These letters he burned.
He was lonely, lost inside himself; he was exhausted from simply sustaining a life he found horrible, from holding his head up in a scornful public, from the pretense of his own narcissism. He said the words over and over to himself, realizing how trivial they sounded. He spoke his heart to Ralph, late and drunk one night.
“I want… I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t.”
“We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony. I wanted