arms and the water trembling on her mother’s hair, the lilac blooms in May. She fell into a dream of her garden, of how it would smell on summer evenings, the jasmine trees white with bloom, the koi darting in the pond when she bent over to sprinkle bread crumbs on the water, Truitt sitting in a white chair in a white suit, playing with a child.
Catherine woke up, and she knew she was pregnant. She felt luxuriously tired, although she knew she had slept.
At her mirror she pulled her hair back tightly, put on her simple traveling dress, and sat on the train for hours. As she ate her lunch, she wondered if she could see the remains of her red traveling suit. She stared out the window, but nothing was there, nothing left that she could see. When she had finished her lunch, she vomited it into the bathroom sink, washed the sink out with a cloth, then threw the cloth from the train. It fluttered away like a stiff heavy white bird. She felt light-headed. She felt grateful. She was beyond gratitude, beyond any understanding of it, and lost in a bliss the opium could not have produced, in a sense of being in the right place, a feeling she had never known. There was, at last, a chair for her to sit on, and Truitt would live.
At home, Mrs. Larsen ran to the door.
“He’s quiet, now,” she said. “He had a terrible night. Screamed with the pain. Screamed from what he was seeing when he was asleep. I forgot where I was. He slept all morning. I had to tie him down.” Mrs. Larsen looked terrible and old, shaky and bleary eyed.
“Go home now, Mrs. Larsen. Go home and sleep. I’ve brought medicine.”
She walked through the long sunroom, the glass conservatory. The first roses had arrived from Saint Louis, tagged with cardboard tags, roses and orange trees and jasmine and fuchsia and orchids, waiting to be put into the enormous terra-cotta pots that lined the hallway. It was hot here, hot and damp, although the snow still lay in its blinding blanket outside, less pure now, more pocked and dirty, but endless.
He sat quietly in a high-backed chair, a lap robe over his legs, her sunglasses on his face. His eyes were shut.
She knelt beside his chair. His hand strayed idly through her hair. “Hello, Emilia,” he said softly. “Welcome home.”
“It’s Catherine, Truitt,” she said. “Catherine Land. Your wife. You were dreaming.”
“Of course. Catherine. I was…”
“You were dreaming.” She reached into her black bag, gave him one of the opium balls. “Swallow this,” she said. “Swallow this and dream some more.”
For days the two women ministered to him, sleeping in shifts or not at all. For the second time, they bathed him together, holding him in the steaming water until the chills had passed, rubbing his stomach endlessly so that the terrible cold would go away. He was drunk on brandy, sedated into joy with opium, and he was getting better.
They sat together in the nights and watched him roll in his sleep.
“Larsen cut off his hand because… because I asked him to stop.” It was the first time she had said his name.
“Stop what?”
“Just stop. Ten years ago. To leave me be. He couldn’t stand it.”
“You miss him.”
“He was all I ever knew. I miss him, yes.”
“You never go to see him.”
“I wouldn’t. It’s my fault.”
They sat through the long night in silence. Mrs. Larsen had said about her husband what she needed to say. In her own quiet way she had driven her husband, also, into the far reaches of madness and death. She had known because she had seen it before, she had done it herself.
Catherine took the dark glasses from Truitt’s eyes. They were still fierce blue, but ringed with deep, haggard shadows. They were unfocused and wandered unhitched inside his head. His forehead was a mass of pustules that had begun to heal. There would be scars. He looked ten years older, as though some boundary had been crossed and he would never again be young or completely well. She had broken his youth and left him floundering on the shore of old age, his power gone, his ambitions stilled.
His hands, when she unbandaged them, lay quiet in his lap. He was neither cruel nor kind; he was simply waiting for whatever the next thing was. He grew less cold, his dreams became softer and subtler, more filled with shapes that embraced him. He described his dreams to her in the morning when he woke up, and she listened patiently, although the dreams did not make sense and he had the same dreams over and over. They were memories of events he hadn’t described to her yet. They were ideas he had had but never acted on. They were dreams.
He no longer scratched his sores. He no longer felt as though his clothes were on fire. He drank the soup and ate the herbs. The women salved his wounds, and they could feel the change in him. They moved him upstairs to his bed in the blue bedroom, and sat together, taking meals with him. Mrs. Larsen finally, after all these years, consented to eat with Truitt.
He wanted oysters, and they sent to Chicago for a barrel of them. Mrs. Larsen kept them in the cold cellar, and fed them brine and cornmeal. Every night, Truitt had a dozen fat oysters and a glass of brandy, Truitt who hadn’t had a drink in years, amazed that he wanted these things, amazed that they had gotten them for him. The women didn’t eat oysters. The women didn’t drink brandy.
Catherine couldn’t tell him about the baby. She couldn’t bear to tell him about it when he was so ill. She hoped the baby was his. She felt sure, and she hoped she was right, because she couldn’t bear the thought that, because of her, Ralph Truitt would have to raise two children not his own. Hadn’t he, when she first came home, made love to her while she was showing blood? She believed so. She believed, in the way she had of making what she wanted into the truth, that there had been no other man but Truitt, that the days in Saint Louis had not been.
He had made love to her while she was bleeding. She remembered. It couldn’t be Antonio, he never came inside her, his fear of encumbrance was too great. It must be Truitt. He had made her new; her life had begun in a new way when she left Saint Louis, and nothing from that life could grow in her now.
She had never been a kind person. In the past, she had thought of others as no more than a way to get what she wanted.
Truitt was different, had made her new, and she could never go back. She washed his blisters and rubbed his feet and put salve on his forehead, and ground bark into a paste to spread on his hands. His hair came out in clumps when she brushed it, and she sorrowed for that; her guilt was overwhelming.
She could grieve for herself now, finally, for her wandering, wasted life. She lay on a wicker chaise in the sun of the conservatory, with her new roses beginning to show leaves in the warm, damp afternoons, and she wept for herself, she wept for her father and her mother, for her sister, and for every moment lost and forgotten and broken into bits on the long way from where she had been to the place where she sat. It was so fragile, a life, and she thought she had been tough enough to believe differently. Now everything was tender to her, tender as a new wound, her own memories, the dark wharves of Baltimore and the ordered grandeur of Rittenhouse Square and the sex and the stealing and the lying and the angel descending from heaven, the angel who had not carried Alice to the grand capitals of the world so that she might be dazzled by the splendors. As though it were all, the good and the bad, one long endless scar, up and down her arms, across her breasts, and she was applying medications to her own skin as she was nursing Truitt.
Hers was a sickness of the soul, but it was not incurable; she had to believe that there was still innocence inside her, somewhere, and hope, and a person who might have a life altogether different from the one she had had. The scars, her scars, would never go away, she knew that. She would never be whole, as Truitt would never again be young. But new skin would grow over the scars; they would whiten and fade and be barely noticeable to a child.
Truitt had seen her in a new way. And his vision had made her over, had caused her to turn into the kind of woman he wanted. He deserved no less. Catherine, for her part, had led a life in which kindness was neither expected nor given. Battered as she was, she didn’t know the difference between happiness and dread. She didn’t know the difference between excitement and fear. She felt a knot in her stomach every hour of the day and didn’t know what to call it. Her hands shook. She vomited in the mornings, in secret, but she felt that, finally, the end of
