Free A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick Page B

she had never been. Like a studious schoolgirl, she sat in the waning light of a vast municipal library, and she learned things.
    She imagined them in Venice, herself and her useless child of a lover, sleeping until afternoon, their rooms at the Danieli
     a riot of half-eaten sweets and empty champagne bottles and exquisite lingerie. She had studied Italian, the light slanting
     down from the library’s high windows.
    She saw them rising languidly, the morphine a dull film across his black eyes, swathed in silks and cigarette smoke, drinking
     Chianti in a gondola as it moved across the black water toward the lights of the Lido, and the gondolier would sing of love
     and every door would open to them, revealing infinite ancient rooms of luxury and beauty and charm where aristocrats, princesses,
     and counts and kings would kiss them on both their cheeks and they would never grow old and they would never die. She would
     never be alone. She would have her lover’s beauty and her own, and she would have Ralph’s money, and surely the two together
     would be enough. That at least was the plan.
    She would marry Ralph Truitt, and then, one day, almost imperceptibly he would begin to grow old and die. And then, one day,
     not long after, he would be dead and she would have it all.
    “Mrs. Larsen?”
    “Yes, Miss?”
    “Where does this food come from?”
    Mrs. Larsen laughed, spooning sauce over a breast of duck.
    “Come from? I make it.”
    “But . . .”
    “You thought we ate beef jerky? Corned beef and cabbage? Ham from October to May? Like hicks? Well, some do. We don’t. There’s
     an icehouse where we keep most things. Some things he sends for, from Chicago. Some of it came on the same train you came
     on.”
    “You cook like an angel.”
    “I learned it a long time ago. I was just a girl. In the other house. It was another time. And, I have to say, it’s nice to
     do it again. Do it properly.”
    “Another house?”
    “Yes. It was a long time ago.”
    “Where was it?”
    “Is. It’s still there.”
    “Where is it?”
    “It’s nearby. No more than a mile. We never go there.”
    “What’s it like?” Perhaps this other house was where the beautiful things with the names on the bottom had come from.
    “It doesn’t matter. We never go there. Snow doesn’t stop, we’ll be at the end of the fancy food soon enough.” Mrs. Larsen
     left her alone at the long table with the gleaming silver.
    Catherine knew about cooking, French cooking. She had read about it in the library. She had never actually done it, but she
     knew recipes for sauces by heart. She tried not to appear overly curious. It made Mrs. Larsen nervous.
    It was amazing the things you could learn in a library, just by looking them up. Poisons, for instance. Page after page after
     page of poisons. As simple as a cookbook. If you could read, you could poison somebody in such a way that nobody would ever
     know.
    Ralph Truitt’s house had no books. There was an old upright piano covered with an embroidered Spanish shawl, and between her
     nursing chores, before every meal, she practiced her little pieces. Mostly, though, she didn’t know where she belonged here,
     and there was no one to tell her. Not Mrs. Larsen, who was jolly and honest and assumed the same of her, assuming, along with
     the rest of it, that comfortable people somehow made themselves comfortable. She was enormous and kind, Mrs. Larsen, unlike
     her tiny thin husband, who watched Catherine’s every move with suspicion and treated her with only barely disguised contempt.
    “Oh, Larsen,” she heard Mrs. Larsen say, “Leave it go. Give the poor girl a chance.”
    A chance at what, exactly? If only they knew, she thought. She couldn’t find a chair to sit in, couldn’t figure out where
     she was meant to stand. She looked out across the frozen landscape and could see her jewels beneath the snow. She wept for
     no reason.
    Mrs. Larsen said to her one day, out of the blue, as