The winter had gone on too long. He had Antonio’s automobile brought out from town, and he taught Antonio to drive on the long driveway up to the house. It was the first mechanical thing Antonio had ever been able to do well. His automobile was a marvel, leather upholstery and brass and crystal lamps, with bud vases in the back, and he and Ralph drove up and down along the sweeping road to the house. The car brought them a measure of peace. They tried to get comfortable with each other. They tried to talk.
“It was a terrible thing, the thing I did to you.”
“You were angry, I suppose.”
“I was angry. I was angry and your mother was gone. I had loved her with all my heart. Believe me. I had. When she was gone, everything went black.”
“And I was left behind.”
“Your sister dead. Your mother gone. You were left, and I turned that grief and rage on you, a little boy, and I will never stop regretting it.”
“You managed to forget pretty well, it seems to me.”
“I looked for you for ten years. I looked everywhere.”
“It must have cost a lot of money.”
“I didn’t care. After you left, ran away, I knew what an awful thing I’d done. No amount of money can make that right. Being tortured for something you didn’t do.”
The slow dance of the father and the son, the old song of regret and retribution twined through their every conversation. During the conversations late at night Antonio was usually drunk, Catherine upstairs in bed.
“You married.”
“I wanted you to come home. I thought it would help. And I was lonely. Lonely and unloved and sad every day. You don’t know what happens to a life without love. To a heart. It withers. It loses reason. I just wanted what people have. I wanted a companion, some company in my heart. Someone other than myself.”
“And have you been happy? Happy with the young Mrs. Truitt? What do you really know about her?”
“Her life hasn’t been easy. I’m glad to make it better. And she brought you home. She’s my wife. Yes. I’m happy.”
“She’s much younger.”
“She’d be a friend to you, if you’d let her.”
“I have friends, but they don’t live here. You beat me until I was blinded by the blood in my eyes. You kept me locked in a room. You left me alone with no explanation of where my mother was or why your cruelty was so immense and unending.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don’t think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”
“You’d be very rich.”
“And you would be unmourned, except perhaps for the lovely Mrs. Truitt. Certainly not by me. And not by all those people who live in fear of you.”
Despite the vitriol, it was a beginning, some kind of communication between father and son. Ralph went to work every day with a hope that Antonio would come around, would grow to forgive and to love. He was an honest man and he had such a yearning to believe.
For Antonio, of course, he was a fish on the line. Antonio gave and then withheld, leaving the hook in his father’s mouth. It gave him pleasure.
Antonio wanted so much. He wanted for most of his childhood never to have happened. He wanted his mother to have been faithful and beautiful and virtuous. He wanted her to have cared for him. He wanted her to have taken him with her when she ran away, giving him more than the idiot sister and the terrifying father who was not his father. He wanted the days of his boyhood to have been different. He wanted, more than anything, for his mother not to have died in squalor, to have lived and stayed with him and kept things from becoming so sadly, wrenchingly wrong. He didn’t care anymore about the beatings. They had made him stronger than his father, his real father, ever could have been. He cared about the loss.
He sat drunk by the fire every night after Ralph had gone to bed, to the consolation of sex with Antonio’s old mistress. And he cried. He wept for his own boyhood and its simple pleasures. He sat in his old playroom and touched everything, the rocking horse, the stuffed animals and the wooden boats and the tin soldiers and he wept for his own losses in battle.
It wasn’t the beatings or the loneliness he was weeping for, sitting with a bottle of brandy on the floor of his unchanged playroom. It was time. It was the time he couldn’t get back. Yes, Ralph would do anything, and yes, the future could hold a better life. But he would never get back the days and the hours that might have been something other than angry and miserable and painful. No money could ever change that, and nothing Truitt could say would make it right.
There was an almost sexual pleasure in the boundless sorrow, a comfort he could give himself by letting go, a release not found even in sex for the first time with a woman he coveted. He didn’t know why he behaved the way he behaved. He didn’t care. Nobody else had lived his life. Nobody else could tell him how to be.
Perhaps, he thought, Ralph was right. Maybe he could change. It wasn’t as though his life had given him much joy or peace.
Perhaps weeping in the playroom was his first fearful and tentative step toward some kind of love. He didn’t know what love was, but he knew that he had begun to feel differently toward Ralph, to feel something that was not blind hatred. He was a child, and he wanted his father and his mother.
He would wake up in the morning on the floor of his old rooms, his head throbbing, his body covered with the quilt that had covered him as a child, and he would shiver with grief and sometimes with remorse at his own behavior. He wished he could have been another person.
Ever since Truitt had stopped torturing him, ever since he had been strong enough to run away, he had done nothing but torture himself. If Truitt had tried to kill him, then Antonio, for all his sorrow, had done his best to finish the job. The blurred days and nights, the women, the debauchery, none of it had been enough. With the return of Truitt’s love, he would have to be his own destruction.
The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him. That he was rich, that he could go to Rome and marry a princess, that he might drink cold champagne at dawn on the deck of a steamer bound for the South Seas, in the company of someone who simply loved him, that he might do anything that would give him joy, that would create a wonderful life, these were phantoms that eluded him.
Love was gone forever, just outside the window, just beyond reach, like fruit on an upper branch. In its place was the sexual attraction of tragedy. He would hang his head and swig his brandy and mourn for his life, for the hours of his childhood, for the kindness of this man who wanted to father him, for the lost beauty of his mother. He explored the extravagant rooms of his father’s house, knowing that there was no home for him anywhere. There was no getting there. There was no one there when he arrived.
He wanted nothing more than to lie in a small, dark, warm room in an anonymous house where there was neither day nor night and have ravenous sex with woman after woman until he died. He wanted a drunkenness of the flesh. He wanted the thing he loved most in the world, the soft touch of another human being, to become a torture. He wanted to die in a sexual embrace, the last of thousands.
There was Catherine. She was like the drug, the poison he craved. In the absence of other diversions, she was a woman whose secrets he knew. She was always in the house, sewing, reading the books she had sent from Chicago. She had abandoned him. She had betrayed him, denied him the golden promise.
She slept every night in his father’s bed. His father had sex with her, and told her he loved her, a thing Antonio had never said, and would never have meant. It wasn’t enough to want all women; he wanted Catherine be all women to him.
She deliberately avoided him. She shut herself up in her room, sewing, when Truitt was away. She sat at the table like a stranger and talked to him as though she had no memory of the velvet cords that he had used to tie her to his bed, of the fire that had burned her skin. His sorrow was infinite. His desire was specific, and immense.
Truitt went to town. Antonio would find her, follow her, would open his heart to her, tell her how coming back to this house had made him different, how it had opened a wound he had thought healed forever. The sight of Truitt, the man who had been so capable of destruction, sitting calm and safe from accusation, even sitting in his own remorse, made him afraid, he said. It frightened him to think it could be different, that things could, from this moment, change.
