He went to Chicago, to university. Away from his mother’s tireless harangue, he was free to spend his days and nights in the pursuit of pleasure. He learned easily. He was popular. He despised himself when he was alone, so he rarely was. He developed a taste for champagne and the sight of naked women in hotel rooms. He saw each of these women only once; afraid of the infections his desire was seeding in them. They would have laughed at him with their cynical, musical voices. If they had known. He gave dinner parties in restaurants. He bought velvet sofas. He bought ancient paintings of naked saints, pierced by arrows. He had a tailor.
He was one of those men whose good looks are illuminated by their unawareness of them, a kind of ruddy shyness. He engaged in sex as though avoiding his reflection in a mirror, all hands and mouth, no eyes, and women found this endearing. His hungers were insatiable, his mouth sucking forward into his desire like a man’s in the desert dying of thirst.
His mother never wrote and he never went home. He played cards. He read the writings of philosophers. He read French poetry aloud to uncomprehending whores. He studied charts that predicted how money grows into wealth, and he studied the tout sheets at racetracks that predicted how bloodlines could turn into a nose across a wire.
His father sent money, what seemed an infinite amount of money. Ralph stopped writing his dutiful notes to his father, stopped going to university altogether for months at a time, until he would wake, one morning, with the taste of champagne in his mouth and long for the quiet of the scholastic life, the dusty library, the drone of professors’ voices. And despite this silence, every month, the same enormous amount of money would arrive in his checking account. His bankers would cluck and look at him with envy and hatred, but he was never denied a single penny.
His father was recreating him, finally taking revenge on his sour and unforgiving wife. Ralph had become reckless and wicked, and his father, if he heard of it, did not seem to care.
Ralph’s brother was dull and pious. Andrew stayed home. He went to work in his father’s businesses, and kept his nose to the grindstone, and never complained and never showed the slightest genius for any of it. Competency yes, but no more. He sat beside his mother in church, and his eyes were as brilliant as hers. He married at eighteen, and was dead of influenza the next winter. His wife’s mother went crazy with disbelief, that her daughter had come so close to the pot of gold and seen it all go into the ground, no heir, no allowance, nothing but the bitter company of Ralph’s mother, which finally, of course, drove the girl away too. Better to live with her own deranged family than her dead husband’s mother, whose rectitude was unpleasant and stifling.
Ralph’s father was left alone in the house with his wife. For that reason he was there less and less and went on long trips to visit his mines, his vast herds, to discuss the various partnerships involved in the creation of a railroad, and he would come home from a month or two away, richer than ever, flush with brilliance and success, to find the house dark and shabby, his wife in the same despicable dress, and still he did not say the one thing he wanted to say to his beloved older son. Come home.
Ralph had not been home in five years. He loved sex and he hated it. He loved bad women because he didn’t care if he destroyed them. There was a core of hatred in his hunger for them that never ever went away, a distaste that bit like sharp teeth, stabbed like needles, and still he couldn’t stop. He rented a hotel room, rich, the bed festooned with garlands and gold, the waiters silent as they brought champagne for Mr. Truitt and Miss Mackenzie, or Miss Irons, or Miss Kenny, for singers and dance hall girls and whores and artists’ models.
He thought of his brother dead beneath the ground and envied him the quiet. Death at least would end this terrifying desire.
He went to Europe. A wanderjahr, his father called it, a common thing for young men of his day. He lived in Europe the arrogant life of the newly sophisticated, his principal sophistications consisting of speaking French and knowing how to check into a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. He was taking the Grand Tour, through the haze of London and the brilliant clarity of Paris, through the picture galleries and the racetracks and the drawing rooms of the destitute aristocracy. They pandered to him, they offered their terrified daughters like ormolu clocks, and they laughed at him the minute his back was turned. Ralph didn’t mind. He could order in any restaurant, and he could always pay the bill.
In Florence he ran into a friend from Chicago, Edward, who was trying his hand at being a painter. Edward spent his days at the Uffizi and the Pitti, making hungover sketches, and lived in a state of such licentious dissolution that even Ralph was shocked. Ralph took a grand villa, and brought Edward to live with him. The two of them drank champagne from iced bottles and laughed as the candles dripped white wax on the marble floors during the nightly card parties and music parties and parties where no one wore any clothes.
Every morning, young maids would kneel and scrape away the wax while Edward and Ralph slept in their sumptuous beds with their overblown whores. Life had the serenity of knowing, ceaseless decadence.
Occasionally, in the ornately frescoed churches he visited almost by accident, Ralph would get a glimpse of a God who was, if not less terrible, at least more opulent than the God of his childhood.
Ralph had a cook, two gardeners, six peacocks, and a handsome carriage with a liveried driver. In the back of the carriage rode a second liveried servant whose function was unclear to him.
Edward knew pharmacies where furtive men would sell whatever drugs they wanted, powders to keep them asleep for forty-eight hours while the sun rose and set and rose again on the duomo, powders to make an erection last four hours. Ralph and Edward bought poisons in dark blue bottles which, when taken in tiny doses, could produce euphoria such as Ralph had never known, an ecstasy which felt like sex in every pore of his skin.
Still the money came without reproach. The terror of what happened to his body when he felt desire never went away. His heart never hardened to the pain, the hatred never ceased its relentless beat. Then he saw Emilia.
She rode by him in a shining carriage, an exquisite girl of sixteen wearing a white muslin dress with wisteria intricately woven in her black hair. Ralph never went to the pharmacist again. He never played cards, and he moved Edward and the whores and the cardsharps and the drunks into large, dark rooms on the other side of the river. He was in love.
It shocked him to wake every morning with a clear head, to find his rooms as neat as he had left them the night before, to taste the brilliant Tuscan food laid before him by the calm, dark-eyed servants. He exercised. He took boxing lessons. He took Italian lessons for hours every day from a university student, just so he could speak to her. He rode and hunted and resolved to be the kind of man who could win the heart of this girl whose name he didn’t know.
His clothes were splendid, his manners good enough, his parentage unknowable at this distance. American, that was enough, he supposed. His hair was brilliantined, he smelled of cologne from the pharmacy at Santa Maria Novella and of money from America.
He was introduced to Emilia’s father, then to her mother and the slow pleasantries of her drawing room where every object spoke of old, old luxury and culture. At last he was allowed to speak to Emilia herself. Ralph was more naive in his mid-twenties than these people had been in the cradle.
They were ordinary people, pretentious and penniless and ambitious for their beautiful daughter, and Ralph took them for more than they were. He miscalculated how most Italian families can drag some title out of the attic. He didn’t see that they had no money, that their servants went unpaid, and that angry dressmakers went out the back door as he came in the front. He didn’t see that their daughter was their only marketable asset.
He saw an exquisite beauty whose voice was music and whose manners were poetry. His Italian was, after all the lessons, the language of a child. Emilia spoke pleasant French and comical English, she blushed like the dawn as he tried to see her eyes. For months, she was sweet and charming and just beyond his reach, like the peach at the top of the tree.
He whispered her name to himself as he walked along the Arno. Absence from her was physically painful, as though his nerves were on fire. Her company was the only context in which he found his character acceptable. He lit candles for her love. He prayed for a miracle. Then finally, Ralph understood, was made to understand. Emilia was for sale.
She was sweet to him, and infinitely charming in a musical way, and Ralph, knowing so little of love, saw what he felt in his heart reflected on her face, and believed that she loved him. Her father would be saddened to part with her, but would, in the end do so because she loved Ralph and because he would, after all, be compensated for his loss.
Buying things was easy for Ralph. He had already spent three years in the silver vaults and picture markets of Europe, and he knew that the aristocracy were always reluctant to part with their treasures, and he also knew that,
