No more.
She leaned over and scooped up her clothes, along with her silk shoes, and tied it all into a neat bundle. Moving quickly to the window of the compartment, she pulled it open and threw her expensive clothes into the darkness and the racket of the train’s wheels. The snow was beginning now. Spring was a long way off. Her beautiful clothes would be a blackened ruin by then.
She pulled a small tattered gray suitcase from the rack above her head. She opened the clasps and pulled out a plain black wool dress, one of three just like it. She sat again at her dressing table, and ripped open a short length of hem. Taking off her jewelry, a garnet bracelet and earrings, funfair trinkets, she wrapped them in a delicate handkerchief still smelling of a man’s tart cologne. Adding to it a delicate diamond ring, she stuffed the small package into the hem of the skirt.
With deft fingers she threaded a needle and quickly sewed her jewelry into the hem of the skirt. Insignificant as it was, it reminded her of the way she had once lived, her old life now hidden in the hem of a plain dress. It was her insurance, her little baubles, her ticket out of the darkness, if darkness fell. It was her independence. It was her past.
There. She stepped into the dress, buttoning the thirteen buttons. These were her clothes, the only clothes she had. She had made them herself, in the way her mother had taught her. Without corset or stays, she felt surprisingly light. She quickly finished dressing.
She knew all the details of her new life. The details were not a problem. She had rehearsed them for hours and months. The phrases. The false memories. The little piece of music. She had so little life of her own, so little self, that it was easy to take on the mannerisms of another with ease and conviction. Her new self may have been no more inhabited, but it was no less real.
She undid her hair, the dark curls that ringed her face. She pulled it back until her eyes hurt, and wound it in a small neat bun at her neck.
She recounted her memories as they reeled into her past. A soldier beside her on a carriage seat. Her mother dying as her sister slipped from her body. The rainbow. She cataloged these memories and sewed them away as neatly as she had sewn her jewels in the hem of her skirt, needing to erase the intricacies of where she had been so that she might become the simplicity of where she was going.
She was a simple, honest woman, sitting in the unexpected splendor of a private railroad car. A child in white linen, sitting between her mother and a man she did not know.
Catherine Land sat until the last possible moment, poised between the beginning and the end. The train slowed and then stopped. The porter came in and took her suitcase from the rack. She tipped him, too much, and he smiled.
Still she stared at her face. She could not, would not live without money or love. Ralph Truitt had shyly promised in his last letter to share his life, and she would take what he had to give. She knew a good deal more about what was to happen than he did.
She got up, wrapped a heavy black missionary cape around her shoulders, and left the compartment, closing the door softly behind her. She wasn’t nervous. She made her way along the corridor. She stepped down the metal stairs, taking the porter’s hand in the billowing steam, and moved shyly and gracefully onto the platform to meet Ralph Truitt.
CHAPTER THREE
She stepped into snow, a swirling, blowing blizzard that blinded her, yet dazzled her at the same time. It both darkened and illuminated the air of the platform, surrounding her with an aura of moving light. Strangers darted back and forth, greeting, kissing, hurling trunks and suitcases onto shoulders, sheltering babies from the storm. The snow moved horizontally, spiking in giddying whirls around the hastening figures, flying swiftly upward into dark nothingness. There seemed to be no end to it.
She had thought she would not know him, not until he was the last man left, but of course she did. His was the unrequited face, his the disconnection from the eddying sea of people around him. She knew him at once. He looked so rich and so alone.
All of a sudden, she was afraid. It had never occurred to her that they would have to talk; they would say hello, of course, but she hadn’t gotten much farther than that. Now it seemed to stretch into infinity, the endless small talk she imagined as the daily life of married people, the details, the getting and grabbing, the parrying and accommodating, the doing of whatever it was that married people did.
Because she would marry him, of course. She had said she would and she would. But then what? How to fill the days, the endless round of meals, of chores, the endless hours in this brilliant blindness which seemed to suck out of her all possibility of speech.
The beginnings were so enchanting usually, and yet she could only stand in frozen dread at all the small complacencies that filled the middle. If she got sick, he would nurse her, she supposed. They would discuss the price of things. He would be tight with money, although he looked expensively dressed. She would ask him for money and he would give it and then she would pay for the things they needed, and then she would tell him what she had bought. They would discuss that at dinner, food she had made for him. They would discuss the weather, noting every change, or read together in the long howling evenings, by some fire or stove. She supposed they would do or say whatever it was people in their situation normally did and said but she realized now she didn’t know what that was.
In the train car, on the slow ride from Chicago, the edges of things were clear and everything stood out in sharp focus. Here in the snow, in the sharp weather, everything blurred, the edges disappeared leaving only vague unknowable shapes, and she was afraid.
Still, there was nothing for them, the two of them or anybody else, nothing for them to do except go on, huddle together, wait for spring. She would do what she had to do.
She stepped toward him, his hands in the pockets of a long black coat, its black fur collar sparkling with snow. She could barely make out his face as he turned toward her, unknowing. He seemed… what? Sad? Nice? He seemed alone.
She felt ridiculous, with her cheap black wool clothes and her cheap gray cardboard suitcase. Just begin, she thought. Just move forward to say hello; the rest, somehow, will take care of itself.
“Mr. Truitt. I’m Catherine Land.”
“You’re not her. I have a photograph.”
“It’s of someone else. It’s my cousin India.”
He could feel the eyes of the townspeople watching them, the eyes taking it all in, this deception. It was too much to bear.
“You need a proper coat. This is the country.”
“It’s what I have. I’m sorry. The picture. I’m sorry, but I can explain.”
This deceit in front of the whole town, this being made a fool of, again, in front of everybody. His heart raced and his legs felt bloodless.
“We can’t stand here all night. Whoever you are. Give me your case.”
She handed it to him as he took his hand from his pocket. Briefly, she felt its warmth.
“This is all. This is everything?”
“I can explain. I don’t have much. I thought…”
“We can’t stand here in a blizzard, with everybody… we can’t stay here.” He looked at her without warmth or welcome. “This begins in a lie. I want you to know I know that.”
He took the picture from his pocket, her picture, and showed it to her, as though bringing it out from his pocket would somehow make her become the shy, homely woman caught there. She looked at it.