the city.”
“Nothing so grand.”
“You’d be surprised the number of people don’t know the first thing about how to use all those forks. You can tell the places a person’s been by the way he eats. You’ve been some fancy places.”
Mrs. Larsen left her. Catherine unpacked her things, hanging her pathetic, ugly dresses in the small closet, laying away her underclothes in a bureau. This would be home, she thought. These are my things and I am putting them away in my new home. The last thing in her suitcase was a small blue medicine bottle, and she sat for a long time in a chair by the window looking at it, before she put it back in a silk pocket inside the suitcase and slid the whole thing under the bed.
She opened the heavy curtains and immediately felt the pressing cold of the air outside. Tired as she was, it was a pleasant sensation, bracing, reminding her of her own flesh. The few lights from the house lit up the constant swirl of the snow outside. She sat in a small blue velvet chair and watched the storm, and drifted in and out of a light sleep accompanied by the clumping of Larsen’s boots in the room next door. Her own life was like that of a stranger to her.
Finally, the footsteps stopped. She waited until the house was completely quiet, and then she stood, and stepped out of her ruined skirt, undid the thirteen buttons of her awful dress. She could smell the hard iron smell of Truitt’s blood on her clothes, on her skin, and she used a linen cloth and the warm water in the night-stand washbasin to bathe as best she could.
She stepped into a plain nightgown she had sewn only two days before, and stood, as she so often did, looking at her face in the oval mirror.
This was not an illusion, here in this house in this storm. This was not a game. This was real. Her heart felt, all at once, that it was breaking, and tears stung her eyes.
It could have been different, she thought. She might have been the woman who dandled a child on her knee, or took food to a neighbor whose house had been visited by illness or fire or death. She might have smocked dresses for her daughters, read to them on nights like this. Worlds of fantasy and wonder on a night when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. She couldn’t exactly imagine the circumstances under which any of this might have come to pass, but, like an actress who sees a role she might have played go to someone with less talent, Catherine felt somehow the loss of a role more graceful, more suited to the landscape of her heart.
Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might come to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier’s severed arm that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? And why was she left out of the whole sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?
She wanted, for once in her life, to be at the center of the stage. The stakes therefore were higher in the game with Ralph Truitt than she had realized. Because what she was, standing before the mirror in a lonely farmhouse, was, in fact, all she was.
She was a lonely woman who answered a personal advertisement in a city paper, a woman who had traveled miles and miles on somebody else’s money. She was neither sweet nor sentimental, neither simple nor honest. She was both desperate and hopeful. She was like all those women whose foolish dreams made her and her friends howl with hopeless derision, except that now she was looking into the face of such a woman and it didn’t seem funny at all.
She turned out the overhead light, so that the room danced in the light from a single candle on the nightstand. She drew the heavy curtains against the storm, and slipped into the comfort of the ladylike bed.
As she leaned forward to blow out the candle, there was a sharp knock. She stepped quickly across the cold floor in the pitch-black darkness, and opened the door to find the pale, haggard face of Mrs. Larsen.
“He’s very hot,” she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
In his fever, the women came to him. They lifted his trembling body from the twisted sheets and lowered him into a tepid bath, still in his nightshirt. His eyes rolled wildly; his breaths came in gulping bursts. Then the chills came, and their strong hands held him.
After a long time, they raised him again, the cooling water running in thick rivers from the nightshirt that pressed on his flesh like a second skin. Then they stripped him, roughly toweled his naked body and dressed him again, and helped him to freshly laid sheets in his father’s bed. They had seen his body, which no woman had seen for almost twenty years.
He was never alone, never without a woman’s hand on his arm or his forehead or his shivering chest. They held his hand. They made poultices of snow and laid them on his head, waiting for the fever to break.
They held his head and chin as they tried to spoon dark broth into his slack mouth, and he could hear their quiet voices, but as though from far away. He was ill. He was not young, his flesh no longer sweet. The women touched him. They saw his body. They came and went, quietly, far away, except they never left together. There was always a woman by his side, a woman’s hand on his flesh.
He had not thought. Not true. He had never not thought of it, not one minute in all those years, but the weight and intensity of his thinking had stripped from the idea all possibility of its ever being a reality, this touch, and this faraway sibilance of the women’s voices. They were real, one known to him, one unknown, and they were there at every minute. In the dark. In the dim daylight. Every minute.
Mrs. Larsen prayed over him. The other one did not.
Their fingers touched him. Their fingers lifted the hair back from his eyes, held his waist when he coughed into the handkerchief they held gently against his mouth. They heard his groans.
They held packs of ice against his head, against the back of his neck. They wrapped his long legs tightly in heavy wool blankets, wrapped his whole body until he could not move a muscle.
So long in this house, and in the fever, so many lives around him. His mother and his father. His brother. His wife-although she had hated the house so much that even her ghost would not walk the floors. His children, gone into a void deeper than the blizzard.
It had been a dark house when he was a child, when he and his dead brother had played in the attic. He was twelve years old before he realized that his father was rich, sixteen before he realized the immeasurable breadth and depth of the wealth, how far it stretched, how many lives were held in the grip of his father’s money.
Yet still they lived on at the farm they began in, never changing one thing for a more luxurious thing, never painting the place, never planting a rose. They lived like poor people. It was immigrant country, and they lived like immigrants.
Inside the house, there was no mention or show of wealth. There was only God, the stern and terrible God his mother spoke of day and night, the God who burned, the God who blamed, the God who filled his mother’s brilliantly focused mind even while she slept beside the husband she considered no better than a demon, his mind on sex, on touching her, on getting inside her and wallowing there like a boat in shallow water, his mind on money and how to make more and more of it.
They went to meetings, one in the morning, one in the evening. Different churches on different Sundays. The services lasted for hours. His father dozed. His mother lit up like a fire. She said her husband’s soul was a lost cause.
They prayed at breakfast and every other meal. They prayed at odd times, when the children had been reckless or rude or prideful, prayed as though hell were right next door instead of far beneath the earth.
His father did not believe. His father winked. He was damned, although he didn’t seem to know it, or at least it didn’t seem to matter. His mother worked on him in public, and worked harder in secret, sure from the first breath he ever took that he was lost.
His mother was sewing at the kitchen table. “What is hell like?” Ralph asked her, and she paused and said to
