in the end, it wasn’t the parting that was in question but only the price.
He wrote again to his father. He asked for a great deal of money. His father replied that he would send what Ralph wanted, but that he wished for Ralph to come home now, to come back and run the business. A bargain was struck. Ralph could have the bride if he would take on the responsibility he had been allowed to shirk for so long. For Ralph, the solution was a happy one. He had known for years that, no matter how long the line he had been given to play on, sooner or later he would feel the sting of the hook in his mouth and be reeled home.
All his life, he had hoped that, in the end, he would be allowed to love someone enough to speak of his fears and so be rid of them, and it was to Emilia that he told his terrible secrets, the fire in his veins, the cruel rage in his heart, and she healed him with a laugh and a kiss. You will see, she said, this is silly. No one will die.
She barely understood what he was saying. Her English was composed of manners and poetry and light, and she had no vocabulary to comprehend such darkness. All she knew was that she had been raised to be sold, and being sold to Ralph was certainly not the worst of her options.
While waiting for her elaborate trousseau to be sent from Paris and then fitted and refitted, while the endless negotiations about the dowry were being completed with such cruel acumen by Emilia’s father that not a single tradesperson went unpaid, the telegrams came. Your father is ill, the first one said, come at once, but he could not leave. Your father is dying, said the second, and still he waited for Emilia to be ready.
Your father is dead, said the third telegram. So he married Emilia in haste and boarded a train and then a boat and then a train and traveled until he arrived at the farm in Wisconsin with his wife, the prodigal son come home.
Emilia was pregnant before they got home. Ralph welcomed and dreaded the birth. He remembered kneeling by his father’s grave, Emilia beside him, her voluminous pearl gray skirt from Paris shimmering in the sun. Her face, so angelic in Florence, seemed merely peculiar here, too exotic for the flat landscape.
It was all so long ago. They were all dead now, his father, Emilia, the little girl she gave birth to in that first Wisconsin spring, his brother. All dead, even, finally, his relentless mother, who never forgave him.
He had thought it would fade, but it never did. For twenty years not one soul had touched him with affection or desire, and he had thought his need would fade, and he was amazed, at the turning of every year, how the lust that had gripped his youth gripped him still in all its ardor, all its rage. It had hardened around his heart, more every year, and it never let him go.
Yet he leaned away from the soft voices of the few women who spoke to him, knowing he could have any one of them, yet choosing none. Instead, he chose solitude, or he was chosen by it, and it was horrible and unbreakable. For still, at any moment, every night and day, his flesh itched with desire, his mind turned constantly on the sexual lives of the men and women around him, and this turning caused him to loathe and cherish other people in equal measure. His love died with Emilia, and with the child, but his desire flourished in the barren soil of his heart and its soft whispering never ceased in his ear.
In his fever, now, the women came to him. In his fever, they touched him. Their touch both burned and cooled.
CHAPTER SIX
It snowed for three days. Catherine was so bored she was sometimes afraid she would lose her mind, or at least lose her way. In the midst of this crisis, she must not lose sight of her plan. Every night she turned the blue bottle in her hands and watched the blizzard through the liquid. Like a scene in a snow-globe; she saw it unfold. Every night she prayed he wouldn’t die.
When she wasn’t nursing Ralph, she roamed the rooms, looking at everything, touching every object, every piece of furniture. She turned over every plate, picked up every piece of silver to see the hallmarks stamped there. Limoges, France. Tiffany amp; Co., New York. Wedgewood. She calculated the worth of each piece, the value of the whole.
The few conversations she had with Mrs. Larsen either concerned Ralph’s treatment, or seemed to her like snatches grasped from a dim understanding of a foreign language.
“His shoes is never there, by the door. His shoes is by the chest of drawers. He gets them from New York City.”
“I’ll move them.”
“No. Leave them be. I’ll move them. I know how he likes things.”
Deep in the night, as they sat by his side, “Sleeping like a baby now. His head is big as a watermelon. He ain’t going to die.”
Catherine never knew whether some response was required. She had slight knowledge of how to talk to other people.
She slept sitting in a chair in his room. She wore her plain black dress and heard the wind howling outside. She nursed him with tenderness and efficiency. Three times a day, she sat alone at the gleaming table and ate the exquisite food Mrs. Larsen brought her. A clear soup the color of rubies. A meringue with chestnuts. Duck in a mustard sauce. Things she had never seen, foods that frightened her with their beauty. She asked Mrs. Larsen if she and her husband didn’t want to eat with her, or have her eat in the kitchen with them. That, apparently, was not part of the plan, and so she went on in solitude at the head of the enormous table.
She ate with an appetite that excited and appalled her. Rich foods so at odds with the bleak country, so suitable for the comfort of the cold. Her hunger was fueled by boredom and anxiety, and it never went away, no matter how much she ate.
At night, she stood for hours at her window, watching the snow fall, longing for what she had left behind. During the day, the whiteness was so bright, she had to shield her eyes from the glare. She could not keep the curtains open for more than a few minutes.
She thought of people, ordinary people, moving through the streets of the cities, and she marveled at the commonplace of their lives.
She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she waked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and listless people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her.
They owned plates. They all had socks. The world was filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily few she had known, really known, in her life.
And as much as she might sneer at the emptiness of their lives, the stupidity and the boredom, she had ended up in this house, soundless in the relentless snow, and she gladly would trade places with any one of them.
In the life behind her, she would smoke cigarettes and drink liquor and take drugs and grab what she could get out of the sea of people around her. Men wrote her letters. They had seen her at the theater, high up in a box, and they would write and she would answer. So delicate. She would find forgetfulness for an hour or a summer or a night with any one of them whose letter amused her, a man with blue eyes or green eyes or brown eyes, their faces so close, pleading for what she could not imagine, and eventually the tremor would pass and the luxurious beauty of it would fade and she would see only the stupidity and the foul odors and the hatefulness of her own heart, a hatefulness which told her every minute that the pleasure these people obviously found in these simple moments would be forever denied to her. And then she would move on.
She itched for a cigarette. She would wade through drifts over her head for the escape of opium or morphine. But she was far away from all that. She would not even take a glass of sherry. She would follow her plan and her plan would work, if, of course, Truitt did not die.
“How is he, Miss?”
“He’s restless. And hot.”
“Tough old bird. Don’t you worry, he’ll make it.”
When I have his money, she thought, I will go far away, I will go to a country where I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak the language and I will never talk to anybody ever again. But no, that wasn’t the plan. She must remember the plan. When she had his money, she would marry her useless and beautiful lover and they would live a
