want him to forget her power over him, the power to end his loneliness, to bring his son home, to make his garden grow again.
“Tell me about him,” Antonio said once, after sex. His head was on her breasts, his dark hair teasing her, teasing her into a kind of stupor. She could close her eyes and try to imagine his face. She could see nothing, although she could recall with perfect clarity the faces of people she hardly knew.
“I want to know everything. Tell me again.”
“He’s tall. He’s thick.”
“Fat?”
“Not at all. Powerful.” She was careful now. She wanted to please; it was her profession. She wanted to tell him only what he wanted to hear. “He’s got a lot of money, I think. I know. He’s got a lot of businesses. Mostly iron, for the railroads, for machinery, for everything. Everybody works for him. A lot of money. I don’t know how much. He’s got a railroad car. He thinks it’s remarkable to own an automobile. And there’s the house, but you know it. There’s his silence. He reads poetry. I read to him at night. He’s very sad. He’s sad in himself, in his heart.”
“Imagine when we live in the house. Imagine the parties.” He could see the parties; she didn’t have to describe them. They were like his life now, but with more people and more money and more champagne and more everything that might, in the smallest way, give him pleasure. There would be women to wait on him, to pick up and clean his ruined clothes. There was his father’s grave, next to his sister’s. He would spit on it.
Where would the people come from? They would bring them in the railroad car, from Chicago, from Saint Louis, an endless succession of people who would do anything for him because he could do anything for them, if he chose, at his whim. He would have sex with somebody else while Catherine watched. He would shave his face in a gilded mirror from France. Sleep in the golden bed his mother had brought from Italy. They would take drugs from Chicago and walk down the middle of the streets of the town laughing at nothing, and nobody could do one thing about it. And the money would never stop coming in. There would be no end to the luxuries.
“Your toys are still there. Your sister’s dresses hang in the closets. Your mother’s, too. They are beautiful.”
“You’ll wear them.”
“I’ve tried. They’re too small. They would fit Alice. They’re hopelessly out of fashion, like in a museum. A box of jewelry is in her dressing table. Pearls and emeralds and rubies. Bows made of diamonds to wear in your hair. A diamond watch. Things she forgot to take, or couldn’t take, when she left.”
“He beat my lovely mother. He beat her until she bled. She hardly knew what she was doing. She left with the dress that was on her back, nothing else.”
“It’s all still there.”
“And I don’t want Alice. Not anywhere near me.”
She tired of telling the story. Tired of comforting him. He was still a boy, a little boy who was frozen in childhood, and who could never get it back. She knew this. She knew the father’s death and the diamond bows and the callous, lascivious disregard would never restore to him what he had lost, because what he had lost was time and what he had left was rage.
He knew it, too. He tried to remember. He tried to remember his sister, or his mother, and nothing came to mind. His anger was the hot still point on which his life was impaled.
“He misses you with all his heart. He’s sorry for what he did. The pain of it never goes away.”
“You think my pain goes away? You think I like this, this ignorant life?”
She had to be careful at every step, a tightrope walker in the circus.
He couldn’t sleep at night. His heart pounded and the blood raced at his temples. He felt a pressure in his body and he tossed and turned until the light was too bright outside to stay in bed. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he settled for unconsciousness, the morphine, the opium, the wine, but he woke up and he didn’t feel rested.
He felt that his soul, his rage, showed on his face. He imagined the skin of his face splitting open and the pus of his rage sliding down his fine high cheekbones.
He ate only enough to stay alive, and then only foods of the most rarified kind. Oysters and champagne. Quail and caviar. Melons that were brought up the river from South America out of season. Ham from Parma. Foods that passed for a caress from a woman long dead, a woman he imagined had loved him as a child.
He had sex because he was beautiful. It was beauty’s burden to be made available. He had sex because there was a moment during the act of love in which he forgot who he was, forgot everything, forgot his father and his mother and his tiny idiot sister, forgot the beatings and the curses that Ralph had hurled against his flesh, and Ralph cold sober, sober and cold, over and over, willing him to hell and he a child of eight, when it began. In sex, he ceased thinking and became only being, all movement and pleasure and expertise. He lived in a sexual frenzy because sometimes, afterward, he could sleep for an hour or two.
“Don’t tell me about it. Don’t talk about him.”
“Whatever you want.”
Catherine was an exception, the woman he came back to again and again. The woman who was all he understood of love. She had been savaged by her life and her face was still beautiful, her body untouched by disease. She knew what she was getting into; she saw into his soul and wasn’t burned by the fire.
Alice was another exception. He had gotten drunk one night when Catherine was away marrying his father, and he had spotted Alice as he staggered home in the dawn. She was standing, standing as though frozen, on the corner of a dark street, and he had approached and said two words to her. They had had sex in less time than it would take to play the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. They had not said a single word, as though he were too bored and Alice merely mute.
“I know where she is.”
“Who?”
“Alice. She’s in Wild Cat Chute.”
Catherine turned away and covered her face with her hands. Tony Moretti smiled.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Alice.
When Catherine Land was eight years old, after her mother had died of influenza and Alice was just old enough to walk, her father lost all reason. He couldn’t bear the sunlight, couldn’t bear the feel of clothing on his skin, couldn’t bear the taste of the saliva in his mouth when it wasn’t being burned by cheap liquor. He lost his business, he lost his friends.
One day, they had no money. One day, they had no house. Their furniture, her mother’s furniture, lay in a pile of snow in the street.
And then he died, too. It took six years. Catherine never went to school, because they never stayed anywhere long enough to go to a school and because there was no one to watch after the baby.
Her father died of drunkenness, of course. He drank himself to death, but Catherine secretly knew he died of a broken heart. It happens. She knew it and she watched it, and it wasn’t pretty or romantic and sad. It was pathetic and ungainly and hard as horses pulling a wagon through the mud.
And then they had nobody. Then they had nowhere. Catherine was just fourteen, Alice seven.
They went to the poorhouse. Catherine marched them across the docks until they came to the grim warehouse that hid the poorest away from the eyes of the less poor. Alice went to a little school, a charity inside the charity, and she taught Catherine to read. Catherine did whatever chores she was given, washing clothes, cleaning floors on her hands and knees. She took on small bits of charity sewing, and she became expert at it, the first thing she could do with pride.
While Alice was at school, Catherine sat in a small park near the harbor and watched the water sparkle in the thin sunlight, and she sat there, just staring, until one day a man came and sat beside her and touched her hand and asked her to his cheap hotel room, and she found what she was to do with her life, what was to become of her and how she was to save Alice.
She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know why he asked or why she did what he asked her to do.
