Free A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

vocabulary
     to comprehend such darkness. All she knew was that she had been raised to be sold, and being sold to Ralph was certainly not
     the worst of her options.
    While waiting for her elaborate trousseau to be sent from Paris and then fitted and refitted, while the endless negotiations
     about the dowry were being completed with such cruel acumen by Emilia’s father that not a single tradesperson went unpaid,
     the telegrams came. Your father is ill, the first one said, come at once, but he could not leave. Your father is dying, said
     the second, and still he waited for Emilia to be ready.
    Your father is dead, said the third telegram. So he married Emilia in haste and boarded a train and then a boat and then a
     train and traveled until he arrived at the farm in Wisconsin with his wife, the prodigal son come home.
    Emilia was pregnant before they got home. Ralph welcomed and dreaded the birth. He remembered kneeling by his father’s grave,
     Emilia beside him, her voluminous pearl gray skirt from Paris shimmering in the sun. Her face, so angelic in Florence, seemed
     merely peculiar here, too exotic for the flat landscape.
    It was all so long ago. They were all dead now, his father, Emilia, the little girl she gave birth to in that first Wisconsin
     spring, his brother. All dead, even, finally, his relentless mother, who never forgave him.
    He had thought it would fade, but it never did. For twenty years not one soul had touched him with affection or desire, and
     he had thought his need would fade, and he was amazed, at the turning of every year, how the lust that had gripped his youth
     gripped him still in all its ardor, all its rage. It had hardened around his heart, more every year, and it never let him
     go.
    Yet he leaned away from the soft voices of the few women who spoke to him, knowing he could have any one of them, yet choosing
     none. Instead, he chose solitude, or he was chosen by it, and it was horrible and unbreakable. For still, at any moment, every
     night and day, his flesh itched with desire, his mind turned constantly on the sexual lives of the men and women around him,
     and this turning caused him to loathe and cherish other people in equal measure. His love died with Emilia, and with the child,
     but his desire flourished in the barren soil of his heart and its soft whispering never ceased in his ear.
    In his fever, now, the women came to him. In his fever, they touched him. Their touch both burned and cooled.

CHAPTER SIX

    I T SNOWED FOR THREE DAYS. Catherine was so bored she was sometimes afraid she would lose her mind, or at least lose her way.
     In the midst of this crisis, she must not lose sight of her plan. Every night she turned the blue bottle in her hands and
     watched the blizzard through the liquid. Like a scene in a snow-globe; she saw it unfold. Every night she prayed he wouldn’t
     die.
    When she wasn’t nursing Ralph, she roamed the rooms, looking at everything, touching every object, every piece of furniture.
     She turned over every plate, picked up every piece of silver to see the hallmarks stamped there. Limoges, France. Tiffany
     & Co., New York. Wedgewood. She calculated the worth of each piece, the value of the whole.
    The few conversations she had with Mrs. Larsen either concerned Ralph’s treatment, or seemed to her like snatches grasped
     from a dim understanding of a foreign language.
    “His shoes is never there, by the door. His shoes is by the chest of drawers. He gets them from New York City.”
    “I’ll move them.”
    “No. Leave them be. I’ll move them. I know how he likes things.”
    Deep in the night, as they sat by his side, “Sleeping like a baby now. His head is big as a watermelon. He ain’t going to
     die.”
    Catherine never knew whether some response was required. She had slight knowledge of how to talk to other people.
    She slept sitting in a chair in his room. She wore her plain black dress and heard the wind howling outside. She nursed