is everything compared to the world I have seen and, if you will have me, I will come.
With the letter she had sent a photograph of herself, and he could feel the tattered edge of it with his thumb as he raised his hat to one more person, saw, from the corner of his eye, one more person gauge the unusual sobriety and richness of his black suit and strong boots and fur-collared overcoat. His thumb caressed her face. His eyes could see her features, neither pretty nor homely. Her large, clear eyes stared into the photographer’s flash without guile. She wore a simple dress with a plain cloth collar, an ordinary woman who needed a husband enough to marry a stranger twenty years her senior.
He had sent her no photograph in return, nor had she asked for one. He had sent instead a ticket, sent it to the Christian boardinghouse in which she stayed in filthy, howling Chicago, and now he stood, a rich man in a tiny town in a cold climate, at the start of a Wisconsin winter in the year 1907. Ralph Truitt waited for the train that would bring Catherine Land to him.
Ralph Truitt had waited a long time. He could wait a little longer.
CHAPTER TWO
Catherine Land sat in front of the mirror, unbecoming all that she had become. The years had hardened her beyond mercy.
I’m the kind of woman who wants to know the end of the story, she thought, staring at her face in the jostling mirror. I want to know how it’s all going to end before it even starts.
Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.
It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.
The land flew away by her window, rushing horizontal flat with snow. The train jostled just enough so that, even though she held her head perfectly still, her earrings swayed and sparkled in the light.
He had sent a private car with a sitting room and a bedroom and electric lights. She had not seen another passenger, although she knew other people had to be on the train. She imagined them, sitting calmly in their seats, pale winter skin on gray horsehair, while in her car it was all red velvet and swagging and furbelows. Like a whorehouse, she thought. Like a whorehouse on wheels.
They had left after dark and crept through the night, stopping often to clear drifts from the tracks. The porter had brought her a heavy, glistening meal, slabs of roast beef and shrimp on ice, lovely iced cakes which she ate at a folding table. No wine was offered and she didn’t ask for it. The hotel silver felt smooth and heavy in her hand, and she devoured everything that was brought to her.
In the morning, steaming eggs and ham and rolls and hot black coffee that burned her tongue, all brought by a silent Negro porter, served as though he were performing some subtle magic trick. She ate it all. There was nothing else to do, and the movement of the train was both hypnotic and ravishing, amplifying her appetites, as each rushing second brought her closer to the fruition of her long and complicated scheme.
When she wasn’t eating, or sleeping beneath the starched, immaculate sheets, she stared at her face in the mirror above the dressing table. It was her one sure possession, the one thing she could count on never to betray her, and she found it reassuring, after thirty-four years, that it remained, every morning, essentially unchanged, the same sure beauty, the same pale and flawless skin, unlined, fresh. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet reached her face.
Still she was restless. Her mind raced, reviewing her options, her plans, her jumbled memories of a turbulent past, and what it was about her life that had led her here, to this sumptuous room on wheels, somewhere in the middle.
So much had to happen in the middle, and no matter how often she had rehearsed it in her mind, she didn’t trust the middle. You could get caught. You could lose your balance, your way, and get found out. In the middle, things always happened you hadn’t planned on, and it was these things, the possibility of these things, that haunted and troubled her, that showed now in the soft mauve hollows beneath her dark almond eyes.
Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love or money. She could not, would not accept that as a fact, because to accept it now would mean that the end had already come and gone.
She was determined, cold as steel. She would not live without at least some portion of the two things she knew were necessary as a minimum to sustain life. She had spent her years believing that they would come, in time. She believed that an angel would come down from heaven and bless her with riches as she had been blessed with beauty. She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object, a shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.
She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been born.
Her mother’s golden hair was lit by the reflection from an elaborate lavender silk dress, her skirts voluminous and extravagantly decorated. She drove a large and simple carriage, and Catherine sat in the front seat, between her mother and a man, a military man who was not her father. In her memory, as it came to her, she could not see his face. Behind them, straight as pins, sat three other young men, cadets, smartly dressed in tight wool uniforms with epaulets and braids and stripes.
It had rained on the way, a quick, fierce downpour, and the hood of the carriage had been drawn over, and the rain fell even though the sun never stopped shining on them, such a thick rain she had barely been able to see as far as the horses’ steaming flanks. Then, miraculous and beautiful, the rain had stopped and the hood had been drawn back by one of the young men so the sweet cool air had flowed around them. The hood sprinkled her mother’s hair with tiny droplets, and her mother had laughed in a charming way. It was such a clear memory, the sound of it. That and the weather and the storm itself had been nice. Lovely, long ago.
The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.
Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.
It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.
But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning, the beginning of all that had come after.
It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus. It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.
