“And so we will.”
“How will we speak to him? It’s important not to frighten him. He must listen calmly to his father’s request. There’s more in it for him than he might think. Than he might think at first.”
“We go on Sunday.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
She paced her rooms. She didn’t go to the library. She forgot her gardens and her ladylike ways. She thought of Tony Moretti, and imagined his body in bed, she imagined being in bed with Tony Moretti, and the desire she felt for him was like a drug in her veins. He was younger than she was; he would be the last adventure of her youth. She burned with the image of Tony Moretti sitting in the restaurant with his oysters, his liquid eyes, and his long fingers playing the sorrowful, trivial tune, his eyes as he looked into hers and inquired after his foolish stickpin. She tried to find a place to sit, a book to read, and she was uncomfortable wherever she perched. In the hotel dining room, her book useless and unopened, she felt everyone was looking at her, as if they could see, not her calm manner and her proper clothes, but only her desire. She was always lying naked and wanton next to Tony Moretti, her husband’s son.
On seeing him, she had felt the sexual pulse of the city begin to beat. She had not noticed. She wondered, at any hour of the day and night, how many people were making love at exactly that minute. Behind every window the sexual act was being completed second after second. The poor with their ecstatic, animal grunts, the rich with their unimaginable refinements and perversions.
She couldn’t sleep. She felt Truitt was watching her, that Truitt had known all along this would happen.
Sunday finally came. It was bright, bright and hard and cold, with snow in the air. They had said two o’clock. He would be awake, he would be sober, he might be alone. She was ready. She wore her gray silk dress, her wedding dress and her diamond engagement ring, and the long fur coat she had bought. As though they could protect her. She felt she was pretending to be a proper matron going to make a call on a distant relative.
Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk walked her silently through bright, slick, shiny streets that led away from the hotel, from everything new and modern, and then through streets that weren’t nice, that were silent on a Sunday. They walked away from the fine stores and the streets so brightly lit at night, until they came to a neighborhood of low brownstones, houses not in good repair. They were without yards or even window boxes, just dingy marble stoops. Catherine could picture the rooms behind the grimy windows, rooms she herself had lived in, low, cramped, greasy from years without care. The furniture, too, would be old and comfortless, the floors unswept, the smell of onions frying, of cheap cigars, the windows always closed, a room in the back where the mother and father slept, another for the children, no matter how many, and one thing, or two, brought from the country and cherished. Sad, hard lives, without affection, without any moment but the present and that not to be enjoyed but endured. The only rhythm of their lives was the incessant turning of the machines in the factories where they worked, and their dreams in the night were of the little towns they had come from, the sun rising and setting, the turning of the seasons, the crops planted and grown and tended and harvested.
When they woke, they would not remember the dreams, but as they stood, day after day, at their relentless jobs, their hearts would ache for something they could not name.
The faces would be as worn as the furniture, unloved and hard. Now and then, in the evenings, a look of wistful longing would come over the wives, and they would have a kind gesture for one of the girls, a kind word. The fathers would be drunk or grave or both, and sometimes violent, the children slow-witted and slothful and unschooled and uncared for, except in those few brief useless moments when the mothers could forget their hard lives. These were not the streets of the bounding ambitious muscular America, but of the tired and the lost and the dirty.
Catherine felt a million miles away, in her warm fur coat and her gray silk dress that trailed in the snow no matter how she lifted it with her gloved hands. In the country, the snow was clean as a fresh bedsheet. Here it was filthy. The cold got into her boots and crept up her legs, despite her wool stockings. She felt removed from these houses and these habits and this life. She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn’t change back.
Her pulse raced. The blood beat in her ears. She was finally going to reveal herself to Tony Moretti.
They turned away from these streets and into others even more depressing. Here there was no pavement, no cobblestones, just mud tracks that ran between wooden houses, mostly unpainted, some with broken windows, all with tattered, filthy curtains hanging limply in the hard light. Linden Street, with not a tree in sight. Malloy and Fisk looked at her occasionally, as if to apologize, but she stared straight ahead, avoiding their gaze. She was lost in her own history now. Her history was unfolding with every step.
They stopped in front of one of the three-story houses, painted a dull red, as though someone had made a brief effort, long ago, to make it look more respectable, more refined. Malloy checked his notebook. “Number 18. This is it.”
She felt a chill and pulled her collar tightly around her neck. Mr. Fisk and Mr. Malloy hesitated, having come all this way with so much information at hand, and at last having no idea what to do.
“Well. I’m cold. Let’s go in.” It was Catherine who broke the silence. “We’re here. It’s time we knew. Let’s get on with it.” She stepped up the stairs and tried the door, Malloy and Fisk following behind. It was unlocked and opened into a dark stairwell.
“Third floor, Mrs. Truitt. It’s dark. I’m sorry.”
“It’s hardly your fault.” She stepped aside and followed the two men up the stairs. And then they were knocking on the door, and then, after beats that snapped her nerves one by one, the door opened, and there in front of them was Antonio Moretti.
He looked ravaged. He looked pure. He shone like a saint. He stood in a red paisley silk dressing gown, the front barely closed. He obviously wore nothing underneath, and he obviously didn’t care.
“Mr. Moretti. There’s a lady here.”
“So there is. I see. I always ask a lady to come in.”
Malloy took out his notebook, as though that would help them to find their way. “Mr. Moretti… Mr. Truitt, we’ve come to take you home. Your father…”
A shudder crossed his brow, fleeting, gone in a second. “What was that name? It’s not anybody I know. My name is Moretti. Tony Moretti.”
“Mr. Ralph Truitt. In Wisconsin, where you were born.”
“Won’t you come in? I have some brandy. It’s cold outside.”
They didn’t want to, but the force of his eyes and the whiteness of his skin somehow drew them forward and into his sitting room. It was furnished elegantly, completely at odds with the house itself, with delicate French and Italian furniture, obviously good. The ceiling was draped with orange silk, like a tent, and Moroccan lanterns hung down, the light from the candles flickering. Probably still burning from last night. Beyond, they could see the ruin of a tented, brocaded bedroom, like a palace abandoned before a revolution.
The room was littered with clothes, and he carelessly picked up a few items, as though to make a place for them to sit. Nobody sat. He turned to Catherine and smiled.
“What was that name?”
Again, the breathlessness made her voice faint. “Truitt. Mr. Ralph Truitt.”
“And you would be…?”
“Mrs. Truitt. The new Mrs. Truitt.”
“I hope you’ll be very happy.”
“Thank you.”
“It isn’t a name I know.”
Malloy cleared his throat. “He is your father.”
Moretti laughed, showing his alabaster throat, his cheeks dark with yesterday’s beard.
“My father is named Pietro Moretti. My mother is Angelina. He played the accordion in Naples, where I was born. When I was three, he and my mother moved to America, to Philadelphia, to the Italian section of Philadelphia,
