A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page B

blood on her
     clothes, on her skin, and she used a linen cloth and the warm water in the nightstand 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

    I N 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