It was just a story about despair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The funeral was only the three of them, Truitt and Catherine and Mrs. Larsen. Truitt had dug the hole himself, spending a long day breaking up the thawing earth. There were no tears. There was a minister from one of the churches, and Antonio was buried with the fewest possible words next to his sister and Ralph’s mother and father, near the old house.
His coffin seemed so large to Catherine. It was impossible to believe that his beautiful body was shut inside it, locked away from the light and the air forever. “Every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,” the poet had said. “Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.” She felt the giddy sense of being alive in the presence of the dead.
Two days had passed. She stood now in the ruins of the garden she hoped to build. The high walls cut off her view of the rest of the world; there was still snow in the corners of the garden, and the fallen statues were glazed with ice. It seemed ten degrees colder here than in the rest of the world, although the back of the house was splendid in the western sun. She could barely remember how all this had begun.
She had wanted something, and she had set out to get it, clear of her purpose and sure in her actions. But it had gotten confused, confused in the mass of the ordinary, confused in the way people live, in the way the heart attracts and repels the things it wants and fears. Her own heart had gone out in directions she never imagined, her hopes had become pinned to the things she would never have allowed.
She wore the blue wool dress she had been finishing when Antonio died. His hands had felt the cloth around her body. She stood, severe and simple, in the middle of an old garden in the hidden back of a remarkable house. Antonio was dead. A whole life was dead to her.
She had no idea how it would turn out. Truitt had not spoken to her since the death, and she had not interfered with his profound grief. They ate together at the long table, but there was no discussion, no reading of poetry after supper, no sumptuous feast of flesh in the dark. She had picked for herself a small and insignificant bedroom, and retired there to weep in private for all she had lost.
She was afraid. She was afraid for the rest of her life. When Truitt disposed of her, as she supposed he would, she would have nowhere to go. She didn’t want to end like Emilia, alone in a filthy house. She didn’t want to end like Alice, dying in the snow in an alley, remembering how nice it had once been, glad to have the burden of an exhausting life lifted from her, abandoned even by the angels and laughing at the death squeezing her with cold fingers by the throat. She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before.
The memory of what she had done with her days and nights seemed unthinkable. They came to her, those days and nights, like the pages of a calendar being flipped by a child, a blur of days and months and years. Had she gone to the theater? Had she written coquettish letters in a fine hand, the lavender-scented ink staining the sleeve of a ruffled gown from Worth in Paris? Had she turned away in bed from men so that she wouldn’t see the money left on a bedside table? It wasn’t possible. Yet she couldn’t deny it-every bad memory, every loss of faith, had brought her the long way from where she had been to where she was.
It was obviously done with Truitt, Antonio had seen to that, his last act of cruelty. There was no way to judge what the depth of his sorrow would drive him to do and she stood, knowing she had done wrong but unable to imagine the consequences. He couldn’t stay silent. The truth was too blatant to ignore, and he had been through it before. Perhaps it was simple weariness that had kept him from striking her when he turned from the frozen pond, the still meadow and the rearing Arabian and Antonio gone.
She had something she wanted to say to him, not about the life which was growing inside her, stronger and stronger every day, but about the virtues of his heart, about the years he had waited in patient humiliation for happiness to find him, about how he had set out to build a small kind of happiness and been horribly deceived. There was no apology she could make. She had known more than he did, and she had used that knowledge to ruin his life, again, the one thing he had guarded himself so carefully against.
She didn’t know where he was in the house. She hadn’t seen him since lunch. He retired to his study, or to the blue bedroom, and she had no way of knowing what he did or what he thought about. His silence was suffocating to her, his distance unbearable. She would die for him if her death would do him any good. But it wouldn’t do anything except add to the anguish of events that he had never anticipated.
She had never before had anything to hold on to, nothing to root her to a place or a time, not until Truitt. And she had brought harm to him, in the belief that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die. She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad.
Somewhere, for those other people she so often thought about, there was the comfort of continuance and of habit. She realized it wasn’t easy. The winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air. Even in the country the madness of the time would not leave people untouched. Throughout her life, people came and went, some amusing, most not, but their leaving was no more surprising to her than their coming. Truitt had arrived, and leaving him now would be the end of comfort for Catherine Land.
She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She wasn’t cold, not yet, and the house looked warm as the lights began to come on, Mrs. Larsen moving slowly, room to room. Mrs. Larsen had known Antonio since he was a baby. She had watched him go into the ground next to his sister and turned away as though it were the most natural thing in the world. For her, life went on, dinners got made, lights got turned on, and that was the way you got from one day to the next. Habit saved her from grief, from horror at her own husband’s sudden insanity, from the ache of watching a young man die whose sweetness had left the earth long before his body.
It was four o’clock, and everything around her stood perfectly still. The wind died, and the animals in the field, even the gray Arabian, stood to watch as the light slanted suddenly into the prism of evening. The large facade of the house, with its imposing windows and its classical statues spaced along the edge of the roof, lit up golden and hazy and ancient. It was the hour at which she had arrived. Her discarded dress. Her lost jewels, now so trivial. Truitt standing on the platform in a black coat with a fur collar in the howling snow. The startled deer and the runaway horses. Just as everything waited-for the end of winter, for the beginning of spring.
She moved her foot and looked down. The grass under her shoe turned green as she watched, and it grew away from her, grew greening until the whole of the patch where she stood was green and clipped and glowing in the golden light. The green wonder of the world filled her garden and spread out from her feet wherever she walked.
It moved away from her, and she stepped back. Everywhere she placed her foot turned green and lush. The parterre grew rich with the odors of rosemary and sage, clipped into globes between a lover’s knot of box and yew, and lavender, the long spikes with their purple heads as still as the rest.