Land was when she was away from the white wilderness. She was careful to reveal nothing, although she didn’t know whether eyes were on her or not.
The bank manager smiled and immediately gave her whatever she asked for. He asked after Mr. Truitt’s health. He offered her tea. She never asked for too much money, never an amount that would have been questionable. She went shopping so that she might look more like the ladies she saw taking tea and gossiping in quiet, birdlike voices in the hotel lobby. With Truitt’s money, she walked into Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, Saint Louis’s largest and finest store, aisle after modern aisle of finery and foolishness, and she walked in with a sense of power she had never felt before. Anything could be hers. She had only to lay the hand with the yellow diamond on any of the dozens of counters, an obsequious salesperson would instantaneously appear, and anything inside the display case could belong to her. Anything that caught her fancy, even for a moment. But instead of indulging herself, she held her old hungers in check and asked only for things she needed to play a part she’d never played before.
She bought dresses for the city, simple dresses, small hats, fine and expensive, but demure. She bought a black karakul coat with a mink collar, extravagant for the country, but ubiquitously proper and anonymous in Saint Louis. She wore black kid gloves on the street. She wore white cotton gloves to take tea in the lobby, like the other ladies. She observed the women in the hotel dining room and tried to dress and behave and smile the way they did. They were all calm and glitter.
She wore her quiet dresses and her smart fur coat as she walked in the evening through the early dark and the light snow along Broadway with its halo of gas lamps, its arch that showed a portrait of every president. There were trolleys and horses, wagons filled with barrels of beer and enough automobiles to turn Truitt’s foolish pride to embarrassment. In Saint Louis, Truitt would be one of hundreds of men just like him. Rich men.
She passed the fruit markets, filled with bright vegetables even in winter, and the vendors, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the cold, their hands in fingerless gloves, hawking their wares in German and Italian accents, assisted by wretched children in hand-me-down cotton dresses in the middle of winter. She walked without pity through the sea of destitution that washed over her.
In the country, there was insanity. There were fires and burnings and murders and rapes, unthinkable cruelties, usually committed by people against people they knew. It was at least personal. Here there was the heartless, sane, anonymous whir of the desolate modern machinery, the wheels and cogs, cold iron from Truitt’s foundry. Here there was appalling poverty and gracelessness. She gave coins to the children. She couldn’t look at the mothers.
She walked through the buildings and monumental statues that were left from the Great Exposition, the museum, the Japanese exhibit hall, filled with hundreds of small and delicate objects of impossible artistry and with kimonos that looked like elaborately embroidered dressing gowns, heavy and opulent.
She went to the Odeon, to the symphony, sitting alone in a box and attracting no attention. She didn’t know the composers; she just liked the sweet majesty of the noise. She liked watching the crowd from above. She wore no jewelry, carried no fan. She did nothing to attract attention.
She walked through the streets at evening, hearing the music from the beer halls as the doors swung open and shut, the gay waltzes and polkas played on rattly old pianos, the laughing men and women coming and going from their pleasures. She never went in. She never thought of buying other dresses, more ostentatious, more vulgar, and joining in the laughing crowds, of being one of the laughing women. She missed her small jewels, which she might have worn, at the neck, at the wrists and ears. She might have worn perfume, scented the air as she walked. She imagined the taste of beer at the back of her throat, but found that, in fact, she didn’t miss it. She thought of cigarettes, but the thought seemed far away, without magnetism. She imagined sitting with lidded eyes and hearing some tacky Negro musician play the piano and sing low down and dirty. She passed through the cold streets as inconspicuously as any other well-to-do married woman, and she was happy in her anonymity.
She ate alone in the hotel dining room, bearing the humiliation of solitude with good grace, reading Jane Austen as she waited to be served. The food was delicious, although not as good as Mrs. Larsen’s, but rich and heavy so that she felt drowsy and light-headed. She ate oysters and beef and vegetables and large pale fish brought fresh from Chicago or even New York. She had dishes with French names she couldn’t pronounce or understand, so that the waiter had to stand over her and patiently explain how each one was made.
In the mornings she spent long hours making herself ready for the day, deciding which of her new dresses to wear, fixing her hair in a way that was neither severe nor ostentatious. She was like an actress preparing to go on stage, and not one detail of her performance escaped her. She was used to watching everything, she needed to know what was going on around her, and she copied the manners of her fellow travelers exactly. She fastidiously pulled every hair from her hairbrush. She spoke in soft, kindly tones to the maids who came to clean and dust her room so that every day it seemed brand new.
And she thought of Truitt, of his simplicity and trust. And, oddly, she thought of his body, and the nights they had spent together. His body was not young, but richly scented and textured, and somehow familiar to her. His was a body of size without menace. He had never caused her pain. She wasn’t sure the nights had been a pleasure to her, she wasn’t sure she knew what pleasure was anymore, but she knew they had been something to Truitt, some kind of release from his private agony, the opening of a window kept shut for too long. A homecoming. And, as always when she had given pleasure, she was happy to have given it. She knew the cost of solace in this world. She knew its rarity.
Truitt was only the gate she had to pass through on the way to where she was going, but she was pleased that he had turned out not to be fat or loathsome, or cruel and tyrannical, or simply ignorant, traits shared by almost every other man she had ever known.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel for him, or even what she was supposed to do now. She was his wife, his legal wife. He was rich beyond her imagination. She knew the end of the story. She knew that Truitt didn’t appear in it. But she was growing foggy on how to get there, to get to the end and her rich and spectacular reward. She forgot sometimes that she was working. She was working a scheme the rules of which seemed no longer clear to her.
She felt almost as though finally she were simply living life as other people lived it, moving from event to event in a kind of haze, a sort of questionless acceptance of the way things were. She was surprised to find how easily it came to her. She was surprised to find it such a relief.
She spent her afternoons in the public library, its high windows slanting the pale thin winter light down on the long tables where men and women, ladies and gentlemen, the latter mostly young and handsome with glossy hair and ruddy cheeks, sat and passed an afternoon reading novels or the newspaper, or seriously researching things with maps and biographies and dictionaries. She liked these people. She sat among them as one of them, a stranger to them as they were to one another, and she was happy.
She read about plants. She read Edith Wharton about the endless verdure and pleasure of the Italian gardens and the villas to which they belonged. “There is, none the less, much to be learned from the old Italian gardens, and the first lesson is that, if they are to be a real inspiration, they must be copied, not in the letter but the spirit.” She read about the singing fountains of Gamberaia, of Petraia with its immense loggia, and the long lawns and high comforts of I Mansi and I Tati, and the streets of Florence and Lucca. She read about garden statuary, the grotesque and the mythical.
She imagined the secret garden, the lemon house, and in her imagination she saw them growing again, fragrant in the evening and in the day a barrage of color and foliage. She read about the hellebores, which burst with blossom through the late winter snows, the foxgloves and delphinium and the old Bourbon roses. She read about heliotrope and amaranthus and lilies. She read about the hostas that thrived in shade, and the Japanese painted fern, its delicate leaves fringed with indigo brush strokes. She said the names over and over, cataloging them: calendula, coleus, and coreopsis. She was enchanted.
She read books and catalogs about preparing the soil, how to triple dig a garden until the dirt was as fine and granular as sand, about how to enrich the soil with manure and mulch. It was not as poetic as the descriptions of the flowers, but in a way it was more exciting to her. She loved the details of things, the technique.
She was just another married woman reading about gardening. Her black kid gloves and purse lay on the long oak table beside her, the high light and the brass reading lamps making the pages bright with reflection.
She had the librarians bring her gigantic books of botanical illustrations, hand-colored etchings showing the plants she read about, and she memorized what she saw, stamen and pistil and petal and leaf. She had the beginning of an idea. It was an idea that seemed so comforting to her, so small and simple and comforting, to
