She advised patience. She advised giving the old wounds time to heal. There was no more talk of Truitt’s death. He told her he had arsenic in his room, the arsenic he had brought from Chicago, and that late at night, drunk on Bordeaux and alone while his father slept with his mistress, his creation, he picked it up and sniffed it and held it in his hands and longed for death. He told her that if there were a button in his leg he could push so that he would vanish and never have been, he would push it. She expressed horror that he would contemplate such a thing. He had learned to drive a car, she said. He could go anywhere. His life was waiting. She didn’t understand a word he said. She was no longer the woman who had spoken to him for hours of nothing, of amorous nothings.
The silence enveloped him, strangling him. Every morning, his razor was an invitation. Every night, the arsenic was an aphrodisiac. His loneliness was terrifying, but he wouldn’t come to town, wouldn’t come down to meet the proper young women his father invited from Chicago, to sit at table with their banker fathers, all exquisite manners and musical, sexless laughter. They had no darkness. It was useless, the light, to him.
He wrote suicide notes and stored them in a locked drawer. He wrote letters to his father in which he described Catherine’s past in fine detail, letters that would destroy, in a single swift stroke, both their lives forever. These letters he burned.
He was lonely, lost inside himself; he was exhausted from simply sustaining a life he found horrible, from holding his head up in a scornful public, from the pretense of his own narcissism. He said the words over and over to himself, realizing how trivial they sounded. He spoke his heart to Ralph, late and drunk one night.
“I want… I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t.”
“We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony. I wanted
… what? To be elegant, not some country hick, to be loved, to live unharmed and have my way in everything. I never wanted this, never wanted to have anything to do with business.
“I wanted to marry a contessa and live happily ever after. It doesn’t happen that way. Play the hand you have, Antonio, that’s all anybody expects. And it’s a pretty good hand.”
“I’m in pain, all the time. I hurt.”
“And I’m sorry for that. If there were anything…”
“There isn’t.”
“I know.”
It was a road without end, a conversation with no point. If you spend your days speaking to someone who speaks a foreign language, how are you ever to be understood? He could say the words, his father could listen, but the words had no weight for either of them. It was a way of passing the time, the mournful son and the compassionate father.
Let it go, Antonio would tell himself late at night, as he lay on the nursery room floor. Live a regular life, crippled, sorrowful, but sweetly ordinary. Speak to the girls from Chicago. Drive your car so that you can be the envy of the town. Learn the rules of business and give up the dark room and the thousands of women. It was like seeing a distant shore and knowing he would not reach it.
Catherine never left his mind. When he met her, he was a young boy, a young man, and she was an elegant courtesan pursuing opportunities. She had seemed glamorous. She had manners, and she knew things about the world. He knew nothing, nothing at all. She had bought him shirts. She had taught him how to dress, how to eat in restaurants and speak with his eyes lowered. She had shown him the intricacies of his own body. She had woven a circle around him and kept him safe for a time. Then the monsters returned to claim him, and he himself became a monster-cruel, unyielding, and conniving. He had turned on her because she had seen him in his innocence and hope, because she believed in these things, and he had hurt her again and again, and she had allowed it, and for this he felt a sorrow which burned like hot lead.
On a sober morning, when he happened to be awake, he went and sat by Truitt in the office. He listened and watched as Truitt increased his fortune, as he listened to the complaints of his workers and dealt with them fairly and compassionately. It was like watching a painting. There was no movement; there was no sound. Truitt thought his son was taking an interest. Truitt thought he was coming around to a kind of acceptance, the kind of bargain he himself had made so many years before. The next morning, Antonio couldn’t remember having been there, couldn’t recall a single word or picture one detail of the office.
His father, his real father had left his mother for a rich young widow. His father was the man who had no face. His father had taught piano, was named Moretti, had given him life. This Truitt was a remote stranger whose death was the only thing Antonio had lived for for more than a dozen years. This Truitt who bought and sold and disposed, who spoke to him in kind tones that Antonio could not bear.
Only Catherine was real, and she had become somebody else, someone unknown to Antonio. But beneath her clothes lay her skin, and, just as Antonio remembered in his skin every blow from Truitt’s hand, remembered every word spoken in anger, so there lay, in Catherine’s skin, the memory of who and what she had been. She had meant the world to him, and he couldn’t let go. Not now.
Not ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Antonio found her in the conservatory. It was late afternoon, and the songbirds twittered from branch to branch and the jasmine hung heavy with scent and the roses had begun to bud in the warm hothouse air. The late light fell through the fronds of giant ferns and palms she had bought in Saint Louis. The windows were fogged with moisture. Orchids grew in Chinese pots. She was sewing, folds of fine dark blue, almost black wool covering her lap, billowing out onto the red marble floor.
He sat at her feet, like a dog, patient, benevolent, longing to be loved. He was ashamed of his willingness to be humiliated. She showed him the picture of what the dress would look like when it was finished. It was almost done, a simple dress of elegant shape with buttons that ran from the floor to the neck, with white gauze collar and cuffs. It was pleated down the front to the waist, the pleats held in place by stitches so small they were almost invisible. The wool was thin and expensive, fluid in her hands. She moved the dark cloth swiftly through thin white fingers, the needle flashing in and out, the quiet click of the steel needle on the silver thimble she wore on her finger.
She deftly turned the dress, hauling in the yards of wool to work on the hem. Antonio’s knee grazed the fabric, and he was electrified. Beneath the dark blue was her shoe, and her white stockings, and beneath that her fresh skin, the map of her whole body. Beneath were her sweet scents and her secret places, places he had traveled and dwelt.
“Hattie Reno,” she said softly. “You had a letter from her. I recognized the handwriting.”
“I told them. I had to say something. I burned the letter.”
“She’s well.”
“They’re all well. They miss you. She said the theater was filled with dull people. She said the beer had gone flat since you left, all the bubbles gone away. You amused her. She misses you.”
“Don’t say anything about me. It was another life.”
“Was it, Mrs. Truitt?”
“People change, Antonio. People move on.”
“I don’t. I don’t move on.”
“Hattie Reno was my best friend. Now I hardly remember her. Not out of unkindness, it’s just that things are so different.”
“You’re pretending.”
She put down her sewing for a moment. “I don’t think I am. I got tired of being terrible, terrible to people.”
“You were never terrible to me.”
“We were terrible to each other. It was another time. It was like a madness. Antonio, it’s gone now. You have to make your peace with that. You have to make peace with your father.” She resumed her sewing, the swift stitches going through the dark hem.
“I’m too tired. I’m so tired, you can’t imagine.”
