CHAPTER TWENTY
She sent a telegram to Antonio. “Come at once,” was all it said.
She nursed Ralph with all the care she could give him. She wrapped his hands and body with gauze dipped in liniment, the sores had become so terrible. He itched and burned, and the salve seemed to soften the torment. She covered his face with salve and gauze, his face, where the skin was falling off in sheets. She closed his ears and covered his eyes with cotton, she put her dark glasses on him. The sound and the light had become piercing to him, the smallest footfall an agony. She wrapped her shoes in wool so that her feet barely made a sound as she walked through the marble halls. She drew the curtains against the light and the sound, and she tied him with velvet and cotton cords to a chair when his restlessness and dementia would not let him stay still. She drew the curtains, and the white world went away for a time.
She burned the sheets, his clothes and shoes and bath towels. She burned and buried anything he might have touched, anything that might contain the slightest trace of the white powder. She threw away his razor, his father’s, and his silver hairbrush from Italy. She burned the rug, the heavy silk bed hangings. She burned her own nightgowns, knowing as she did that the smoke from the fire was full of the same poison, that everything he had touched she had touched as well, that he had drunk his icy water and kissed her on the mouth.
The blue bottle she took into the woods and poured the poison over rocks, away from water, away from where sheep might graze in summer, or birds might come to nest. No more harm would come to any living thing.
She fed him nothing but warm milk, to make him vomit and to still the tremors of his chill. She gave him limewater to soak up the poisons. She covered him with furs and blankets and held the bowl for him while he vomited into it. She never flinched.
She called on Mrs. Larsen. “I don’t believe the doctor. He is, has been very ill. We can make him better. We did it once before.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. But the doctor doesn’t know either. He’s wrong. This is no cancer. My father died of cancer and this is different. He knows what’s going on around him. My father knew nothing. He lost his mind, at the end. It’s not his brain. I don’t know. My sister was ill once. We gave her milk and egg whites, to make her vomit. Give it to him. He’s freezing cold. Keep him warm. What else can we do?”
“The old people… there are herbs in the field for the sores. For drawing out the boils.”
“Then we’ll ask the old people. We’ll get what we can. It’s still winter. There’s not much. You’ll watch him. I’ll go to Chicago and find a doctor, a real doctor. I’ll ask him what to do.”
She went to Chicago, to visit poor, sad-faced India. India who looked like her picture. India whom rich Ralph Truitt had chosen out of the whole world, who might herself have been wearing silk and walking the marble halls. She would never know where her picture had gone. She would never know she might have been loved and respected, the mistress of those high frescoed halls. And Truitt would have found happiness with her, a thin happiness. He would not be dying now, if India had been the one.
Catherine had always loved India, had loved her plain shyness and her lack of prospects. She wanted to tell her that Ralph Truitt had loved her; she wanted to say he had chosen her picture and loved it, because then, when she entered a room or walked down the street, she might be able to do it differently, knowing that she was loved.
It was easy to lie to her. It had been easy to say that she had always wanted her picture, a remembrance, a sentimental keepsake, and to persuade shy India to sit in front of the photographer’s plate.
Now it was easy to tell her only as much as she needed and lie about why she needed it. India had spent a lifetime watching other people’s lives, looking in shop windows, watching life through the plate glass of her own indifferent looks, and she had noticed everything and stored it away, her only treasure. It was her only furniture of use; her protection against the loneliness that never left her and the ugly men and the sad, sad life.
India embraced her. India held her hand. India listened, nodding, and then she got her hat and coat and said the only things she had said, through Catherine’s long and lying story. “Let’s go downtown.”
Chicago outdid Saint Louis in brawl and confusion. They went through big streets and tiny streets, and came to Chinatown, to a small shop with dingy windows. Inside, a Chinaman bowed with elaborate courtesy and listened to the version of the story Catherine told. At the word arsenic, the air in the room stopped moving for a moment. Catherine thought she would cry, would howl with guilt and terror, but she went on as though nothing were happening. The air began to move again. India breathed, and the wheels started turning, the clock began to tick.
The Chinaman bowed again, smiled broadly, and began to move hastily around his dark shop, pulling phials of powder from one shelf, milky liquids from another, collecting the ancient and secret reversals of terrible and vengeful substances. Now and then he stopped and smiled as though he were telling a joke.
“Brandy,” he said. “Keeps his belly warm.”
“Opium,” he said, “to calm the stomach. Make him happy. Make bad dreams go away.” He cut out opium in tiny, waxy balls.
“One every day, until his dreams are clear and clean. Fresh dreams.”
When he was done, there were eight bottles, and they cost a lot of money and Catherine paid, carrying the bottles and jars in a plain brown sack from the store. She buried it deep in a big black bag she was carrying, and offered India dinner.
They ate at a grand hotel, Catherine never saying that she would sleep the night in a room upstairs. India was ravenous, her eyes wide, the huge menu in front of her like a shield. She ate oysters, lobster thermidor, a cold soup, and a guinea hen. She drank a great deal of wine. Catherine ate little and drank no wine. She had no taste for it.
“You look different,” said India, waiting for the smooth waiter to reappear. “You look like a lady. Like…” she nodded her head. “Like one of them.”
“He likes a simple way. They’re simple people there, not like us. I try to be what he wants me to be.”
“And he gives you money?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of money.”
Catherine was embarrassed. “Yes.”
“Give me some. You have a sweetheart, a husband for God’s sake, he gives you money. I want money.”
“Not here. But, yes, of course, whatever you need.”
“I need a lot of things. I need some twenty-eight-year-old man with white teeth to fall in love with me. I need a winter coat and a little dog to sit in my lap. Bet you got a little dog.”
Catherine smiled.”No. But I have a winter coat. You can have it if you want. I’ll get another. Or we’ll get you one you like.”
The waiter came with dessert, a huge mound of whipped cream and cake and fruit. “You think that’s the answer. You think it’ll make me pretty or get me a sweet man? It’ll just give me the idea, on cold nights, that I could have one of those men, that my face was pretty like yours, that it wasn’t all so goddamned endless and stupid and boring. Money. That’ll be enough, for now.”
Catherine had spent so much of her life on the other side of the glass, the India side, the Alice side. She found it extraordinary to be the one who had the things people wanted. And she, now, wanted only one thing, and the way to that thing lay in her black bag.
Catherine walked plain India the long way home, tried to give her the black seal coat she was wearing, but India refused it, saying it would make her look like a fool. She gave her as much money as she could, knowing India wouldn’t spend it on drugs or foolishness or fripperies.
She spent the night in her narrow bed in her plain room in the grand hotel. She thought of Truitt, of Mrs. Larsen sitting up by him all night, nursing him through one more grief. Mrs. Larsen who never once had a bad dream, she said, even after she watched her husband chop off his own hand for no reason at all.
Catherine dreamed of Antonio. He was like a spider, everywhere at once. His skin was in her skin, his organs were connected to hers. Her heartbeat was his heartbeat, the flutter of her eyelids moved above his drugged terrible haunting black eyes. He was her passion and her violation, and it brought her sharply awake.
She smoked one opium ball from the Chinaman and fell asleep into bliss, into cool water and her mother’s
