a painting over the door which showed, she supposed, the villa as it must look in summer, with its orchards and its gardens and it pools and its broad long lawns leading down to the pond and the river beyond.
The doors were unlocked and swung open easily, and they walked into a broad, high central hall. Catherine couldn’t stop herself. She gasped. It was so lovely, lovely despite its grandeur and its size. The ceilings were frescoed with adorable babies with wings and flowers in their hair. The room was lit by two colored glass chandeliers that hung from yellow velvet cords, each prism a different jewel, each ray of light a different soft color. From Venice, he said. They had been lowered and lit for her, ablaze with flame for their arrival. They were crystal flowers, hanging in the air, flowers that gave light.
The walls were covered in rose silk. Portraits, too many to count, looked down. The floor was marbled and patterned, covered in rich old rugs. The sofas along the sides of the hall were large and gilded. Countesses had walked here. Dukes had read poetry on the sofas. The high windows dazzled the room with light.
On either side, more massive rooms. He showed her everything, with the same slow disinterest. There was a ballroom, a music room, a library, a dining room where thirty people could have dinner. There was a glass conservatory where exotic plants once grew, orchids and palms. There were sitting rooms in many colors, filled with rich old furniture. One room was all pale yellow, like butter. One was turquoise, one green. One was trellised, painted with vines and flowers. The windows gave out onto the same interminable whiteness, but inside, everything was warm and golden.
“It’s always heated. Mrs. Larsen comes over to clean. I haven’t been here for years.” Truitt seemed to feel nothing. He was the tour guide, pointing out a picture here or a table there, things that even still had special meaning for him.
Upstairs, nine massive bedrooms, each a different color, each warm and rich beyond anything Catherine had ever seen. The beds swagged and ribboned, the sheets laid perfectly, as though important guests would arrive at any moment.
“This was her room.” It was a sumptuous, royal blue. A sitting room and a dressing room were attached to it. Her comb and brush were still on the dressing table. A cut crystal bottle was still filled with amber perfume. “And this was Franny’s room.” He stood at the door but wouldn’t go in. They hung back and looked at the tiny bed, fancy enough for a princess, and the child’s furniture and the gay curtains. A rocking horse stood beneath one of the high windows.
“She would ride for hours, back and forth. Back and forth, laughing. God, she was a delight.” The slightest catch in his voice was the only emotion. “She died in that bed. I sat by her, night and day.”
It was as though the child would walk into the room the next minute, pick up one of the dolls laid neatly in a row on the bed, each with its fixed expression of innocent bliss. Catherine wanted to pick one up, but she didn’t go in. She couldn’t. Mixed with the odor of childhood still hanging in the air was the sharp smell of death, and grief, a smell too familiar to her. The last of childhood. The end of purity.
They saw it all. Antonio’s room. The guest rooms, the servants’ hall, the kitchen with copper pots by the dozen gleaming on stone walls.
At the back of the house, outside, was a walled enclosure, visible from the window of Emilia’s room, and from the broad hallway.
“Her secret garden. Giardino segreto. Italian foolishness. She would grow flowers there, roses and things. She said every Italian house had one, and she brought gardeners from Italy to tend it. She had trees that twined around each other, white flowers that, in the night, smelled like a woman’s perfume. The small house, just there, that’s where she grew lemons and oranges.
“Except it never worked. The summer is too short and she could never plant the right things. The gardeners were fools, used to a different climate, I guess. The lemons died. The flowers never came up, frozen in the ground. She sent for hothouse flowers, put them in the ground where they died. The Italians couldn’t do a thing. Useless and stupid. It was an idea. It didn’t work.”
When they had seen it all, Catherine outwardly as sober and unmoved as Truitt himself, they went home. Home to the small ordinary house decked out with the fantastic leavings of the more fantastic empire.
Catherine dreamed of the house. She saw herself walking its broad halls, sweeping in gowns of silk and lace and embroidery down its wide marble stairs. She imagined herself mistress of the house.
Catherine began to go there every other day. When Mrs. Larsen went to clean, when Truitt was away at business, she would go and sit in every room, play the long untuned piano in the ballroom, look through the drawers and the closets. She spent whole afternoons staring at the enclosed white of the secret garden, imagining it fragrant with lemons and lilies, alive in the sunlight of August. It was a place for lovers’ secret whisperings. It was in the world, but away from it, like the heart.
It was as he had said. Everything was still there. In Francesca’s room, she opened the closet to stare at the tiny dresses. She touched one and felt its silken whisper in her hands.
“Her mother had a dress made for the child to match every dress she had for herself. Even made little copies for the dolls. They look old-fashioned now, but you can tell. Still. It was senseless.” Mrs. Larsen was enraged by the idiocy of it. “Look at them. Are these for a child? A child who couldn’t dress herself, couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t do anything but look with that little smile on her face? Look at this.”
She pulled from the rack a white linen shift, simple and graceful. There were words embroidered on the front of the dress, foreign words.
“She couldn’t even say her own prayers. So her mother had this made, with prayers in Italian embroidered down the front. ‘So she’ll sleep with God.’ That’s exactly what she said. Franny was like a puppet to her mother, a mindless puppet. But she had a heart. She loved her rocking horse, she loved to be held, she loved to hear a man’s voice singing. She didn’t have the brain God gave a baby. But she was a person. A whole person. It broke his heart when she died. It broke his heart when she was alive. Like it was his fault.”
“It wasn’t his fault. Surely not.”
“It was that woman. Was me, I’d rip every one of these dresses out of here. Make a fire. It’s sad, but the child is dead. They’re all dead.”
“Not the son. He says. Truitt says.”
“If you ask me, he’s dead, too, Antonio. Dead or useless as his mother. All this chasing around, it’s not going to get Truitt anything.”
Catherine didn’t tell Truitt she went to the house. She didn’t tell Truitt she wore his wife’s pearls, stuck diamond bows in her hair. She didn’t tell him that she tried on the old-fashioned dresses, even though they were too small, sweeping the carpeted floor with the sweet whoosh of ruffled silk. She didn’t tell him she spent long afternoons in the library, reading the romances and the plays and the poets. Mrs. Larsen kept her secret, she supposed, because life went on as before. Because she hoped for Truitt’s happiness.
They ate dinner. He read to her from the newspaper the accounts of madness and true crimes, committed by people he knew. She read to him from his beloved Walt Whitman, seemingly the only thing he read. She read to him Whitman’s vast throbbing hopeful despairing panorama of America, the unparticular passion for every living thing.
“Be not disheartened,” she read. “Affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet / Those who love each other shall become invincible.”
She didn’t love Truitt, and every night the blue bottle came out from her suitcase; rage infused her as she held it in her hand. The blue bottle fueled her; it was her simple, her only plan. The house would be hers. The pearls, the books and pictures, the fancy rugs from India and the East, and Truitt would be hers, too. But there would be no affection, no ambling toward a sweet old age. One drop. Two drops. That was the future.
She roamed the rooms in secret, she wandered the secret garden, up to her knees in snow, the drifts in the corners over her head, while Mrs. Larsen scoured the copper pots and shook the dust from the heavy brocaded curtains. And all the while she did not forget. Her rage never decreased. The blue bottle was her defense, her key to the infinite splendor, the drowsy magnificence of the house itself.
She sewed her gray silk dress, according to an innocuous pattern picked from a ladies’ book. She felt foolish when she looked in the mirror, as though she didn’t remember what she was dressing for. The days crawled by. The snow never stopped falling.
They were married by a judge, in the living room of the farmhouse. A noonday fire burned in the fireplace. The weather cleared for the day, and two carriages stood in the yard. Two couples watched silently as they said the words. They signed their names as witnesses in the judge’s book. They joined them for lunch and went away. They
