to her as she passed, dukes and duchesses and rich people and actresses, people who owned railroads and Arabian horses just for riding, just for show, touching every object on every table with the certain knowledge that she owned it all.
And somewhere in the dark the dense child, and somewhere in the light the clatter of fancy music on a piano.
“She brought a piano teacher from Italy, another Italian, I didn’t even ask his name. I never knew until it was too late that it was finally one too many. We had another child, a boy, Antonio she called him, Andy. He was dark, as she was, of course, they all are, and he was like some rare bird she’d gone to the Amazon to get. A boy shouldn’t be beautiful. So much black hair. So handsome, even when he was four. We lived like that, in that house, for eight years.
“Of course she was with him. Had been with him. The piano teacher. I should have known. I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know that. Imagine. The whispering and chatting and the walks in the garden, always speaking Italian, the man sitting at the table with us, every night, eating dinner like a guest, when I wrote him a check every week.
“I never saw it. Never saw it coming. She was a countess. I saw that she was happy, and it was costing fortunes. Yet my little girl, my sweet little thing, was growing every day, her hands reaching for the light like a blind person, feeling her way.
“And after Antonio… Andy was born, she slept apart from me, my wife. In her own rooms every night. She never came to me. I never touched her. She would stay up all night, playing cards with whores and fools, and laughing at me. Sometimes I would pass her on my way down to breakfast, just coming upstairs, a champagne glass still in her hand. Smoking cigarettes.
“Six years I put up with it. I never touched her. Then I saw them. My wife. The music teacher. I walked into her apartment. Her rooms. I just wanted to ask a question. Imagine. They didn’t even look particularly surprised, and they didn’t look like it was all that much fun, but they’d been doing it for years by then. Since before my boy was born, you see? It was an old routine. I remember how at home he looked, like I was the interloper and he was where he should be, between my wife’s naked legs. And everybody knew. Everybody knew but me.
“I beat her, and I nearly killed him, and I threw them out. I drove them from my house. My little girl spread her arms wide and watched her mother go. I fired the servants, the maids and the gardeners and the drivers in their braided coats. I kept Mrs. Larsen, who was only a young girl then. She’s not as old as she looks, I guess, but this was a long time ago, now. I kept the house exactly the way it was because I didn’t want Franny to lose one more thing, but nobody came anymore, nobody was asked and nobody came.
“I hated Antonio. My own son and I couldn’t go near him. He favored his mother, and as much as I tried, I saw her face and her skin and her eyes, and I only saw in him a lying, scheming memento of her. It wasn’t fair, I know. I know it wasn’t. I beat him and I yelled at him until he looked at me with a single hatred that never changed, and no, I don’t blame him for that.
“After a long time, my little girl died. She caught influenza, and I held her in my arms and she died, and the day she died I walked out of the door of that house, and locked it behind me. I left everything in that house, all that gorgeous trash I had brought from all over the world, just to see a smile on my wife’s face, and I never went back. The clothes are still hanging in the closets. I brought some of the plates, you’ve seen them. Some silver. Little things. Expensive things, but little. Except that sofa. Imagine. I had gotten used to it. A piece of yellow silk furniture. The feel of a fork.
“I had nowhere to go. I came here. My mother took one look and went to live with her sister in Kansas, and I never saw her again. And I lived in this house, and I beat my own boy until he was bloody, and the minute he was old enough he ran away. One minute he was here, so handsome, fourteen by then, playing those Italian things on that old piano just to make me mad. I can see where he was sitting. I told him his mother was dead, burned to death in a fire in Chicago. It was a lie, but I told him, and I told him I was glad, that the news of her death gave me the first free breath I’d had in seven years, and the next night he was gone.”
He looked up at Catherine, as though he had just realized she was there. As though it took him a second to realize who she was.
“I’m sorry. There isn’t any delicate way to tell it. I’ve never told this to one single soul. Everybody knows it, but they don’t know it from me. And I’m only going to tell it once.”
She looked steadily in Ralph’s eyes, her hands completely still in her lap. She sat as she had told herself she would do, no matter what he said, told herself that she would not shift so much as an ankle until he finished his story. And then she would decide. Her pulse was racing. She could feel it throbbing in her wrist.
The story, she knew, was almost over.
“I have looked for him for twelve years. I have put flowers on my little girl’s grave, and I have looked for my boy. And now I’ve found him.”
Despite whatever she had told herself, she jumped.
“Where? Alive?”
“Alive. In Saint Louis. Playing piano in some whorehouse. They think it’s him. The detectives. They’ve thought others were him, except they weren’t. This time I think it is. And I want him back.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s my son. He’s all I’ve got.”
“I mean, why do you think it’s him?”
“I heard you play that music, his mother’s music. I always knew that something would happen one day to make me tell the story and the telling would make it all right. The telling would call him back. I’m not a superstitious man. But I believe that.”
Tears glistened in his cold eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, didn’t seem to notice they were there. His hands picked at his black trousers, trembling, rose into the air to catch at a piece of dust and twist it into nothingness. He looked so ill. She didn’t move a muscle.
“I have tried to lead a good life. I have tried to be kind, no matter what I felt, no matter how hard it was. You couldn’t know. And I’ve made money. He’ll need money. My son has… luxurious tastes. I know he does. He’s his mother’s son.”
She looked at him. It wasn’t love she felt for him; she didn’t know love. But it was something equally strange to her, an undiluted desire, produced, perhaps, by the sight of his anguish. Tears in a man. It was hard for him, the telling, and the awkwardness of it made her breasts and body flush with desire.
“You must be tired.”
“I’m not so tired I can’t finish telling what you need to know if you’re going to marry me. You saved my life. You played the music, the music my wife loved, the music my son played.”
“It’s a simple piece. Every schoolgirl knows it.”
“You played the music. I’m not naive. I’m not very nice, after all. If telling one lie makes you a liar, then I’m a liar, because I told Andy she had died in a fire, and she hadn’t, although she did die, some years later. You will marry me, or I hope you will, and we will open the house and move back into it, and everything will shine and he will come home to his own house and his own father and a mother who is far better in every way than the mother he never had the slightest idea about.”
She couldn’t help herself. “I have to say. It’s only fair. I don’t love you.”
“I don’t expect it.”
“It’s worse. I mean, Mr. Truitt, that I can’t love you.”
“I don’t require it.”
“How do you know? If it is him, what was his name?”
“Andy. Antonio.”
“How do you know he’ll come?”
He looked at her for a long time. The light through the windows was blinding. She could smell lunch cooking, almost ready. She could hear a clock tick. She could see Ralph in front of her, but as though lost in a dazzling snowfall.
“Because you’re going to go to Saint Louis on a train and get him.”
The light coming through the windows was brilliantly white. Almost blinding.
