Here they were, four people, each one moving separately through the rooms of the same house. She had held his head in her lap and her clothes were wet with his blood, yet she was alone. Alone as she had always been.
Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They had amazed her, as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.
She knew no other way to be. Her schemes, she saw now, were listless fantasies, poorly imagined, languidly acted, and so doomed to failure, again and again.
She rose to her feet and wandered through the rooms of Truitt’s house. There were not many of them, and they were all alike, equally immaculate, furnished with the same odd blend of the rustic and the magnificent. The dining room was tiny, but the table was elaborately set for dinner for two. She picked an ornate fork from the table; it was almost as long as her forearm and astonishing in its weight. The brilliant polish caught the light as she turned it over to read the maker: Tiffany amp; Co., New York City. She felt she had never seen anything so beautiful in her life.
“Larsen’s with him.” Catherine dropped the fork as Mrs. Larsen came into the room. “I’ve made supper. It’s maybe not spoilt too bad, and you might as well eat.” She adjusted the fork Catherine had dropped, so that it was in perfect alignment with the other, equally massive utensils.
“I was just…”
“Looking. I saw. Sit. It’ll just be a minute. You must be starved.”
Catherine sat at the table. She felt she was about to cry, for no reason except that it was a long way back and she was alone. She tried to fix her hair, then let it go.
The soup was clear and hot, the lamb cooked in a sauce that was both delicious and exotic, all of it accomplished and fine in a way that would have been admired in any restaurant in any city she had ever been to, and Mrs. Larsen served it with a simplicity and finesse that surprised and pleased her. She had thought she wasn’t hungry, but she ate everything, including a dessert made of light meringues floating in glistening, silky custard.
The beautiful plates came and went, the utensils were used until none were left, and finally, Mrs. Larsen stood in the kitchen doorway and they both listened to the clumping of Larsen’s boots as Truitt and Larsen walked back and forth, back and forth in an upstairs bedroom, first across a rug and then on the floor and then back to the rug.
“That was a fine dinner.”
“Well, I’d hoped for more of a celebration, but…”
The footsteps continued.
“But there’ll be other nights, I guess. Miss?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you’ll be happy here. I truly do. It wasn’t much of a welcome, but I do, we do, welcome you.”
Catherine blushed, embarrassed. “You’re a wonderful cook.”
“Some people have one gift, some another.” She made rough sewing gestures with her hands. “Me, I was always a mess with a needle. But put me in a kitchen, I know where I am. Even after a long while, and it’s been a while, I know what to do.”
Catherine stood, and they stared awkwardly at each other. Catherine was suddenly exhausted. She looked at the ceiling, the clodding boots.
“Will they be all right?”
“Larsen’ll look after him. They’ve known each other since they were boys. Truitt’s safe enough.”
Mrs. Larsen began to clear away the dishes.
“I’ll help you. I’m used to keeping myself.”
“You should rest. Go to bed if you want.”
“Where do I…”
“Sleep? I’ll show you.” Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, then licking her fingers to put out the sputtering candles, extinguishing the sparkle on the silver, she led Catherine out of the dining room, picked up her case and started up the stairs. “It’s a nice room. You can see the river, and you can see over to the little house where Larsen and I live.”
She opened the door to a graceful bedroom, the simple bed laid with good linens, the tester of the delicate four-poster hung with lace.
She put the suitcase on the bed, went to the dressing table and poured water from a pitcher into a porcelain bowl. She went to the bathroom and brought back a beautiful cut crystal glass of cold water, which she set neatly by the bed.
“The facilities is down the hall. Indoors. First in the county. I’ve tried to make it nice. I know you come from the city.”
“Nothing so grand.”
“You’d be surprised the number of people don’t know the first thing about how to use all those forks. You can tell the places a person’s been by the way he eats. You’ve been some fancy places.”
Mrs. Larsen left her. Catherine unpacked her things, hanging her pathetic, ugly dresses in the small closet, laying away her underclothes in a bureau. This would be home, she thought. These are my things and I am putting them away in my new home. The last thing in her suitcase was a small blue medicine bottle, and she sat for a long time in a chair by the window looking at it, before she put it back in a silk pocket inside the suitcase and slid the whole thing under the bed.
She opened the heavy curtains and immediately felt the pressing cold of the air outside. Tired as she was, it was a pleasant sensation, bracing, reminding her of her own flesh. The few lights from the house lit up the constant swirl of the snow outside. She sat in a small blue velvet chair and watched the storm, and drifted in and out of a light sleep accompanied by the clumping of Larsen’s boots in the room next door. Her own life was like that of a stranger to her.
Finally, the footsteps stopped. She waited until the house was completely quiet, and then she stood, and stepped out of her ruined skirt, undid the thirteen buttons of her awful dress. She could smell the hard iron smell of Truitt’s blood on her clothes, on her skin, and she used a linen cloth and the warm water in the night-stand washbasin to bathe as best she could.
She stepped into a plain nightgown she had sewn only two days before, and stood, as she so often did, looking at her face in the oval mirror.
This was not an illusion, here in this house in this storm. This was not a game. This was real. Her heart felt, all at once, that it was breaking, and tears stung her eyes.
It could have been different, she thought. She might have been the woman who dandled a child on her knee, or took food to a neighbor whose house had been visited by illness or fire or death. She might have smocked dresses for her daughters, read to them on nights like this. Worlds of fantasy and wonder on a night when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. She couldn’t exactly imagine the circumstances under which any of this might have come to pass, but, like an actress who sees a role she might have played go to someone with less talent, Catherine felt somehow the loss of a role more graceful, more suited to the landscape of her heart.
Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might come to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier’s severed arm that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? And why was she left out of the whole sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?
She wanted, for once in her life, to be at the center of the stage. The stakes therefore were higher in the game with Ralph Truitt than she had realized. Because what she was, standing before the mirror in a lonely farmhouse, was, in fact, all she was.