“Thank you,” he said, and she turned her head and said nothing, and he knew that it was the wrong thing to say. It was the kind of thing he had said, long ago, to wanton women in hotel rooms. It was not even what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her that his heart was finally broken, broken beyond repair or solace, leaving only his sorrow and his rage to hold him upright. But Ralph Truitt couldn’t speak of the workings of his heart, it wasn’t his habit. So he thanked her and instantly regretted it, regretted also the tears he could not shed over his son. He wanted to weep. But having shed not a single tear after all these years, he had no tears now. Not for himself. Not for Antonio. Not for his wife who would, in the end, bear the awful burden of the man he would become. And she would sleep beside him, and she would know and she would be helpless and he would come to hate her, hate her helplessness.
It had returned, of course, this agony over this boy who was not even his own flesh and blood, and he wondered, with so much within reach, with this woman in his arms and under his roof, why he needed to get Andy back. Yet it was a dream he had held in his heart for so long that nothing could replace it, nothing made up for his loss and his desire for restitution. This boy, this child whom he had betrayed, whom he might have loved and watched grow into a man, a man who might have rebelled and gone away even so, but who might have come back as Truitt himself had done, to run the businesses, learning the ways of production and accounting and the endless management of the people who worked for him, their stories, their hardships, their small victories. Antonio. Andy. Tony Moretti. A stranger, now grown into the handsome, careless man he tried to imagine. This man whom he did not know, whom he had beaten. His wife’s son. His own prodigal, to whom he would have opened the doors wide.
Catherine slept beside him. Her slow breathing filled the air with sweetness. The dark surrounded them, and she slept on the side of the bed that had been empty for twenty years. Mrs. Larsen would see the evidence of their lovemaking, the stained sheets, and know that he was not alone anymore. She would smile. The thought made him shy. They knew so much from such small details.
It was no use. He sat up and put his feet on the floor. His naked body shivered with the cold. However strong his body, however smooth his flesh, he was no longer young. He couldn’t get it back; too much was behind him and too little ahead. He felt at that moment the end of his life had begun. He felt it in his heart. He felt it in his bones. He heard it in his labored breathing. His blood rushed with pleasure, and his mind dwelt on death. He would be in the ground, beside his parents. He would be in hell, living forever with his mother, with the pin through the soft part of his hand.
He felt, with Antonio now irretrievably gone, that something in him had ceased to live, had given up the hope that had kept him going through all the loneliness and all the years. He didn’t understand it. He had so much, and he didn’t understand why he had invested this one thing with so much importance. The advertisement and the wife who was not what she pretended to be, the detectives and the money and the hope and the waiting, it was for one single reason, for the dream of Antonio, and now he knew finally that he would never come home again.
The moonlight shone through the window. The faint blue light caught the glass of water by the bed, and he suddenly felt so thirsty he thought he would die. He reached out and held the glass in his hands for a long moment. He smelled it and paused, but only for a second. Then he drank the water, drank all the water, and with the first sip, from the faint smell and the bitter aftertaste, he knew the water was tainted. He looked into the bottom of the beautiful Italian glass. He looked at his lovely wife, sleeping peacefully as a child in the moonlight. He remembered Florence, his days of indolence. He knew he was being poisoned.
And he didn’t care. He just didn’t care anymore.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was everywhere. Arsenic. Inheritance powder, the old people called it. It was in his food, his water, on his clothing. It was on his hairbrush when he brushed his hair in the morning. He smelled it. He tasted it on the back of his tongue and in his throat. Not all the time, not every day, but always there. At first, the effect was tonic. He felt marvelous and strong. His skin looked ruddy and clear. His heart beat solidly in his chest. His hair was glossy and his eyes blue and clear and piercing. People remarked on his appearance, people who never made a personal remark to Ralph Truitt told him he looked ten years younger. They thought his new marriage agreed with him.
Whatever his desperate sorrow, he kept on as before. He was cordial and well mannered and evenhanded with the workers, and he was dying and he knew he was dying and kindness seemed to be all that was left.
Catherine was extremely tender. She listened intently when he spoke, and he spoke to her often, about his business, about his plans to expand. He never spoke about Antonio, never told her how his heart was heavy and dead. He never said that he wanted to die but was afraid of death, of the long painful process of dying. He wanted to tell her it was all right, he wanted to tell her she would have everything when it was done, he had made a will while she was in Saint Louis, not believing that Antonio would ever come to claim it, but he couldn’t. He was shocked by what she was doing, of course. Yet he couldn’t speak to her about it. He was complicit. He was her only accomplice.
Her voice was like music to him.
“I’ve never had a minute’s peace until now,” he said. “For twenty years. Not a minute’s happiness. You have given that to me, and I’m grateful. So grateful, you couldn’t know.” They sat at the long table, their dinner done.
“I’d do anything to make you happy. Give you things. Say whatever you wanted to hear. You know that.” He took her hand.
She knew the words he was saying were true. “What else would I want? You’re exactly the thing I waited for. I don’t want anything else. I thought I would be disappointed. I thought I would want to escape. I made plans. I had some foolish jewels. I lost them that first night when the carriage ran away. They were what I would have used to run away. I didn’t know then that… How could this come to be? From an advertisement.” She laughed, and it was like water falling from a great height. He laughed, thinking of his foolishness.
“I could have chosen someone else.”
“I could have sent you my own picture and not India’s, and you would not have chosen me. Were there so many?”
“Dozens. All virtuous. Some widows. Some young. Practically children. Younger than you. Some gold diggers.”
“Then why me?”
“‘I am a simple, honest woman.’ You wrote that. A simple, honest face. I knew right away. There wasn’t anybody else, after that.”
“It wasn’t my face.”
“As it turned out, no.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“Not anymore.”
“What did you do with the letters? The other letters?”
“I burned them, in a big pile in the yard.”
They moved into the grand palace through the woods. Truitt had modern bathrooms installed throughout the house, as a wedding present to his new wife. He had the house wired for electricity, and sent for lamps from Chicago. He had the chandelier wired. He put in a new kitchen for Mrs. Larsen, although she said she didn’t need one. Everything else stayed as it had always been.
They packed the pieces of fancy furniture from the farmhouse into wagons and hauled them the long way to the big golden house, restoring the chairs and the tables to the spots they had occupied twenty years before. Truitt gave the farmhouse to Larsen, signed the deed over to him.
The big house was reborn, and they sat close together at one end of the long table in the frescoed dining room, a fire blazing against the chill as the wind howled outside, and they spoke of love and practical matters in low voices. She changed her dress for dinner. She played the piano for him. She read Whitman to him in the yellow salon, by the great fireplace, big enough to drive a wagon into.
They gave dinner parties, small, solemn affairs attended by men who needed Truitt’s influence. Doctors came, and lawyers and judges with their mute wives. The governor came. He wanted Truitt’s money, and Truitt
