lied and pretended and worse, but he woke up every morning with the feeling of having passed the night in dreams of pleasure. He had sought one thing and found another. She was the instrument of his death. She was the invitation to his life. He knew where he stood.
He grew stronger, and he got richer and more powerful. His business, so long a duty to pass the time, to assuage his guilt over his father’s lonely death, had become infused with his passion, and his arms reached out, his hands full of money, to buy and to ruin and to save and to build and to own whatever would make his power grow. It was what he had become. It was what America had offered him. It was what Antonio might grow to be.
“It bores me.”
“It bored me, too. It was getting good at it that made it interesting. It’s life, Antonio. It’s work. It’s what people do.”
“It’s not my life. It’s not what I do.”
“The country, the whole country, Antonio, is building and growing. There’s so much of it to own and control. There are people, on farms, in cities, who don’t know where to go. All they need is a light, and they’ll follow.”
“You. They can follow you to hell for all I care.”
And still Ralph persisted, his patience infinite, his love vast and unexplored. Antonio was, for him, the one thing he had managed to save out of the disaster of his early life-or at least he was doing what he could to save it- and he would do anything, endure any insult, to make him stay.
He had been willing to die, but now life had come back to him, life and power and passion, and he would never stand unloved and alone in a crowd of people on a train platform again. He would never again be an object of pity to the men who worked for him and their wives and children. He would never again be little more than a rumor.
The house was growing around them. Mrs. Larsen’s staff of two had grown to six, including a laundress, a maid for Antonio, and someone extra to help in the kitchen. Catherine had sent to Chicago and hired a gardener who brought the tropics to the conservatory, who made the orange and the jasmine bloom in the hot afternoon sun. It was wet there, and songbirds flew from branch to branch, singing. It made Ralph’s bones feel warm, to sit there in the afternoon. It made the pain go away.
The heavy old damask curtains were pulled down, and lighter ones were put up, to let in more sun. The silk bed hangings in their bedroom were replaced with fabrics adorned with Chinese patterns, designs from another century. Their exotic splendor transported Ralph and Catherine into their own Xanadu, a place that was wholly and entirely the kingdom of their own desires.
Seamstresses came from Chicago, bringing pattern books and bolts of rich material, to make dresses for Catherine, nothing excessive. They made Ralph splendid striped shirts with white cuffs and collars and gold collar buttons.
They were rich, and while they felt no need to be ostentatious, they felt comfortable with living the way rich people live. Ralph didn’t change his habits, and he stopped drinking again once he had had enough brandy; he ate only as much as he needed and not as much as he wanted. The food was exquisite. The company increased as light was let into the house.
But still he was unable to get through to Antonio. He had gone through so many years of hope in the effort to find him and bring him home, and now Antonio hated the house, he hated the business, he was rude to Ralph’s wife and to the servants. But Ralph had time. He had had nothing but time for the long years and it had taught him to stand straight, not to bend into the cold.
Every day the winter thinned. The stubble rose again in the field, the light grew longer in the afternoons. Ice still coated the black river, but it was as though the prison doors were opening and people waited for the first warm day and then, finally, the day when the girls appeared in their summer dresses. There was a future.
Antonio learned to drive the horse and carriage, and immediately, over the muddy roads, he went to town every night, where he took up with a young widow, Mrs. Alverson, whose husband had committed suicide two years before. Her sexual desperation matched his own, and their rendezvous were the talk of the town. It hurt Ralph to hear his name mentioned again as a subject of gossip, to hear of that kind of scandal. He made an attempt to rein in Antonio’s behavior.
“Her husband was twenty-five. She has a baby who was born after her husband was already dead. Her heart is an open wound.”
“She likes my company.”
“She lives on charity. Of course she likes your company. People are talking.”
“Your reputation is worthless to me, if that’s what you’re worried about. You have no reputation, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll do exactly what I want to.”
“Maybe you should go to Europe. There are many Mrs. Alversons over there, women who have a better understanding of the arrangement. Maybe you’d be happier. I was happy. There are women…”
“And leave you and Mrs. Truitt and the fun we’re having? Why?”
“Antonio. Because Mrs. Alverson… what’s her name?
“Violet.”
“Because Mrs. Alverson is worth more than this. Anybody is. Because you have no heart for business. The only other thing I have to give you is money. I’ve given you enough to go around the world, if that’s what you want. You’ll play it out. You’ll come around. The fire burns out.”
When he was Antonio’s age, Ralph had been forced to give up his dissolute life, to come home and take over the business. He had learned by doing, badly at first, then better and better. It had become his life, and Italy was a distant memory. Antonio had reached an age when the notion of going to a foreign country where he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the language and had nowhere to live was overwhelming to him. He had his life in hand, and the thrill of the new wasn’t available to him. He had brought his whole life to Wisconsin, and now he had no way back. He also had no way to get what he wanted, and his rage mounted. His old friends would envy him, but his old friends were not welcome here. Here it was all governors and senators and tired old businessmen with cigars and potbellies who came to lick the boots of Ralph Truitt, hoping to get in at the beginning of the next big thing, the next capital investment that would make them even richer.
Antonio retired to his widow in town and his rooms in the vast house, and he didn’t care that he was breaking his father’s soul, little by little. It couldn’t last long, this tenuous balance of hatred and greed. It couldn’t last.
Violet Alverson came to dinner. She was painfully shy and gentle, and seemed in awe of the grandeur of the food and the house. Catherine showed her everything, and she seemed most enchanted by the conservatory with its songbirds and its tropical plants. She didn’t know which spoon or fork to use, but Ralph talked to her in a gentle, kindly voice about her hopes for the future, a better life, a life of her own, a fine boy who would have an education and be somebody, somebody in business, perhaps.
Catherine asked her to spend the night since it was four miles back to town and the roads were dark and muddy, but Violet declined, and left in her borrowed buggy, whip in hand. She and Antonio had said not one word to each other. She drove home believing that he was going to ask her to marry him.
After the dinner, Antonio got bored with Violet Alverson. She had a child, and she had no conversation. She was not pretty enough to stir his vanity. He wrote to her that he wouldn’t see her anymore. He wouldn’t even go in person.
She hanged herself the next day from the same beam her husband had used, in the attic of her shabby house with its sad double bed. Her baby was asleep on a quilt on the floor. She had nursed him just before she tied the rope. Her dress was still unbuttoned, her bare breast hanging out. The cries of the baby alerted the neighbors. The local newspaper said she had died due to her continuing grief over the loss of her young husband. Ralph and Catherine went to the spare funeral of this woman they hardly knew. Antonio stayed home and played the piano.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The wind blew warmer from the south. The nights were still long and frigid, but the earth was visible now. Ralph spent the last light of the days in the barn with his car, making it shine, bringing it to sputtering life again.
