by Nancy Horan
“Mamah…” Frank said. He pulled her toward him.
“There are two of us in this,” she said. “Can’t you see how impossible it all is? I can’t pick up where we left off, sneaking around again. It wears too hard on me.” She shifted uneasily on the leather of the seat. “I’m going away for a while to Colorado to stay with some friends, Mattie and Alden Brown. Mattie is due in September, and she needs company. I’m going out there with the children as soon as John finishes school.”
Frank looked at her, stunned. “You’re not.”
“I am.”
“Jesus.” He sighed. “Look, I’ll wait until September if I know that—”
Mamah shook her head. “I need to get away, too, Frank, from Edwin and Oak Park. And you. I need to sort things out.” She wiped her eyes and shrugged. “I have to find the path that’s right for me.”
After a few minutes, Mamah watched him climb disconsolately into his car and wait while she lit her headlights and drove off. She had done the right thing, the hard thing. But there wasn’t an ounce of relief in it.
CHAPTER 8
Mamah and Edwin looked up at the same moment when they heard the hammering. The June sun was already blazing at eight A.M., and the concrete stoop was warm under her feet. Leaning against the Belknaps’ house was a tall ladder. On it, a carpenter carefully pieced clapboard strips into a second-floor window opening.
“How odd,” Edwin said, pulling off his suit coat and flinging it over his arm. “That’s a bedroom closet window, isn’t it? Why on earth would they want to board it up?”
Mamah gnawed at a cuticle. “I don’t know.”
He shrugged. “People are strange. A perfectly good window, even if it’s in a closet.” Edwin kissed her forehead, then walked out to the street.
She slouched on the stoop. A woodpecker drilled a tree somewhere in counterpoint to the hammering. She noticed that tiny box elder seedlings had sprung up in her flower bed from the winged seeds of the neighbors’ tree. She bent down and yanked them out of the soil.
I wish you were cruel, Edwin, she thought. I wish you were devious or lazy or selfish. Anything but kind.
Mamah looked up at the window and wondered what the neighbor girls had seen last summer. Was it Frank’s hand over hers, a kiss, or worse? And why were the Belknaps boarding up the window now? She pictured the girls continuing their watching through the winter, hoping to see more. Had they been caught by their mother and confessed?
Only three days left before she boarded a train for Boulder. Three days. But she saw clearly now what she needed to do. When Edwin comes home tonight, she thought, I’ll tell him the truth. Before someone else does.
Mamah’s sister Lizzie appeared from around the corner of the house, headed out somewhere. She came to a halt when she saw Mamah’s face. “Are you all right? You look ill.”
“No.”
“No what? Are you sick?”
“Do you have a minute to talk?”
Lizzie’s eyes traveled up the ladder to the boarded-up window. Her face registered guilt when she looked back at Mamah, as if she had been caught in a lie of her own. “Of course, Mame.” She put down her satchel and sat down on the stoop.
“I’m not sick, Liz, but I’m not well, either. There’s something…” Mamah backed up and started over. “Ed and I haven’t been happy lately. I suppose you know that.”
Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out her cigarettes. She handed one to Mamah, then took her time lighting it and one for herself. “Is it Frank Wright this is about?”
“So you know.” Mamah glanced at Lizzie’s face but could tell nothing. Clear of emotion as an alabaster egg. “Does Edwin know, too?”
“I’m not sure how he could miss it.” Lizzie’s tone was matter-of-fact. “But I suppose it’s possible.”
Mamah stared at the pavement, her stomach in knots. “I’ve lost myself, Liz.”
Her sister drew deeply on her cigarette. “People make mistakes. You can fix this.”
“No. I mean, it’s more than Frank. I married Edwin and slowly…” She shrugged. “Right now I feel as though if I stay in this house, if I go on pretending much longer, whatever is left of me is going to just smother.”
Lizzie looked into her eyes. “Frank Wright isn’t helping your situation.”
“But he is. Frank made me remember who I was before. I can talk to him, Liz. I could never really talk to Ed.” Mamah laughed sadly. “Sometimes I think the reason he and I have lasted as long as we have is because you are at the dinner table to keep the conversation going.” She wiped an eye with her wrist.
“Go clear out your head, Mamah.” Lizzie patted her shoulder. “If you want to leave the children back here with me, go have yourself a vacation.”
“No, I want them with me, and they’re excited about going. But thanks, Lizzie.”
“I have a feeling you’ll see things differently with a little distance.” Lizzie stubbed out her cigarette, then took the butt back to the alley trash can. When she returned, she ran her hand over Mamah’s tousled head. “I’m headed downtown for a while,” she said. Her voice was sad.
Mamah watched her sister walk toward the street. When she was out of sight, Mamah looked down at the flower bed along the porch stoop. She and Lizzie had planted it together last spring. Mamah had dug in plants donated by a neighbor—hollyhocks, spiky penstemon, huge-leaved rhubarb. Lizzie had gone out and bought low-growing alyssum plants that made a fragrant white blanket beneath Mamah’s raucous giants, somehow managing to pull together the whole crazy quilt with one soft stroke.
The alyssum was pure Lizzie. She was continually moving quietly in the background, making things work. Only three years older than Mamah, she’d always seemed a whole generation beyond her. She was reserved, ladylike, with the kind of cool grace their elder sister, Jessie, had had.
The two of them had been stars in the sky to Mamah when she was small. As the elder children, they’d had their own society, up to the day Jessie died giving birth. After that, when Mamah and Edwin took in Jessie’s newborn baby to raise, Mamah and Lizzie became a team. The space below the new house that Frank had envisioned as a built-in garage had become Lizzie’s apartment instead.
People shook their heads in puzzlement that Lizzie had not married. They wondered aloud if there was a worm inside that perfect apple, maybe a bitter heart from an early love affair. Mamah knew different.
There had been suitors, all right, but Lizzie preferred her independence. She had acquired a family by happenstance. What need had she of a husband? She liked going off every day to her job as a teacher at the Irving Elementary School. She liked coming home and smoking cigarettes to her heart’s content, with no one to apologize to. She did her part—more than her part—in raising little Jessie. After their sister’s death, she’d taken on the roles Jessie had played: organizer of holidays, maker of picture albums, rememberer of great-aunts’ names, keeper of Borthwick lore.
Lizzie was as grand an auntie to John and Martha and Jessie as any child could hope for. But family life happened upstairs. Without saying a word, she trained all of them to respect her privacy. Her rooms downstairs were sacrosanct—one visited only when invited.
At Christmastime, Mamah loved to enter Lizzie’s world. Every square inch of the apartment was covered with ribbons and paper and gift boxes that were wrapped or about to be. She was like that—wildly generous. She had paid for much of Mamah’s graduate school out of her meager salary; it was something she was proud of. But she was not the kind of person to loudly demand equal pay, even if she resented that her salary was lower than the male teachers’. She had never been a suffrage marcher, though her heart was in the cause. She guarded her opinions.
No, Lizzie preferred to live unobtrusively, going about her business pleasantly, her delicate antennae cueing her to slip out of a room when talk turned private or uncomfortable. She had lived with Edwin and Mamah nearly all of their married life. It struck Mamah for the first time that oth
er women might have found that trying. But not once had it been a burden. Everybody loved Lizzie, especially the children. Edwin showed her great deference, and she returned it.
She’s the one who should have married Edwin, Mamah thought. Lizzie would have made him a great companion.
She went inside then and composed a note to Mattie.
Good news. I’ve decided to stay longer than two weeks. Do you think you can find a boardinghouse for the children and me? If we stay the summer in Boulder, I refuse to burden you with company the whole time. Will you do that for us, dear Mattie? We’re all bursting to see you.
Fondly,
Mamah
CHAPTER 9
Edwin stood in a stripe of dusty light on the train platform. Like all the other men, he was dressed in a cool summer suit, but it appeared to Mamah as if he might combust. His scarlet face dripped sweat. His fists clenched and unclenched. He stared past her, down the boarding platform, where porters lifted bags and children up the silver steps of the Rocky Mountain Limited. John leaned against a post a few feet away, eyeing his parents.
“I’m sorry, Ed,” Mamah whispered. She held Martha, whose damp head rested on her shoulder. “A few months apart will bring some clarity.”
“Why are you doing this to us?” Edwin growled.
Mamah turned her back, but he continued in an angry whisper, talking at the back of her head. “Do you think you’re the first woman to fall for that jackass? For Christ’s sake, come to your senses.”
“Please, Ed. I need some time.”
“If he shows up out there, so help me God—”
A train whistle blasted. The last passengers were boarding. She pushed Martha into his arms for a hug, watched Edwin’s body soften as he kissed her head. He called John and bent down to him.
By the time they reached their seats, the train was moving. The children leaned out the window, waving. With one hand clutching his hat and his other raised in mute farewell, Edwin grew small, then disappeared as they pulled away.
Martha squirmed all over the compartment as the train clattered out of the city, past the stockyards where aproned men dragged on cigarettes outside long buildings. Mamah pointed to a dog lying in the shade of a grocery store awning, a barber pole spinning in the breeze, anything to engage her daughter as the train moved past the outlying suburbs where telephone poles ended and sagging barns buttressed with ricks of straw began, past wooded ravines and hay fields, through the small farm settlements where women stood next to clotheslines of billowing shirts, shading their eyes. When Martha’s agitation waned, Mamah sank back in her seat, exhausted.
A half hour out of town, Edwin’s stricken wave already haunted her. In the past week, she had punctured her good husband’s soul, and the cruelty of it wouldn’t go away. She replayed again and again in her mind the moment she had told him. He had nearly fallen over from the blow, the way a soldier might take a cannonball to the belly. He had sunk down on their bed, staring at her in disbelief.
When he began to talk in the following hours, he grilled her, trying to piece it all together. How could such a thing have happened? It didn’t make sense to him.
Neither Mamah nor Edwin had slept that night. They’d talked—argued—until midnight, when he stormed over to the liquor shelf, grabbed a bottle, and went out the side door. When she walked into the bedroom around three to get a blanket to sleep on the sofa, she saw the light of his cigar outside, flickering in the dark.
The next morning, they had sat across from each other in the backyard so as to talk in privacy. The children were still at home, though Louise had sniffed a sea change in the house the moment she’d arrived, and was set to take them to the park soon.
Mamah was doing better than he that morning. She’d managed a bath, a fresh shirtwaist, earrings. He was seated in the same garden chair he’d occupied all night, his bearlike shoulders rounded and bent forward, his elbows on his knees. One of his shoes was untied. Stubbed-out Preferidas lay around his chair, ground into leafy pulp.
From time to time he dabbed a handkerchief at his eyes. She had never seen Edwin cry, not once in ten years of marriage, and now he was sobbing intermittently.
“You were in love with me then, I’m sure of it,” he said.
Behind him, in the open window of their room, she could see the housekeeper pulling sheets off the bed. Mamah pressed her lips together.
“In college,” he said, “I knew I was the clumsy kid, and you were the…You were just so beautiful. I’d see you standing on the steps, talking with some other smart girl…” He shook his head. “All those years later, when I tracked you down in Port Huron? I really believed it was a new day. I believed I was rescuing you from that backwater town. I wanted to bring you to the city and give you everything you deserved.”
Edwin trained his eyes on hers. “Do you remember when we were first married? I’d had a couple of back teeth pulled by the dentist, and I came home and lay down on the couch afterward. I put my head on your lap, and you read to me—an entire book. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”
Mamah remained silent. If they were now who they had once been, she might have joked, “You were on morphine.” Instead, she breathed evenly, bore it. She owed him this and more.
“I can never remember the name of the book,” he went on, “but I remember the story was about a couple who lived on an island, alone. They grew all their own food and built their own house. You said you wanted to do that with me someday.” His eyes grew watery again. “I gave you the wrong things, didn’t I?” He waved his hand toward the house.
Mamah glanced at her hands in her lap, folded like a penitent’s. She unlaced her fingers. “It just happened, Ed. It’s not your fault.”
From Martha’s bedroom window, a shrill giggle echoed against the walls.
Edwin’s head was down, across from her knees, as he tied his shoe. The few strands of hair that he always combed back across his tender pate looked absurd now, like strings on a banjo. For a fleeting moment she wanted to put his head in her lap, stroke it. But when he lifted his eyes, he wore a baleful expression.
“You can take them to Colorado with you,” he said. “But don’t think for a minute you could ever get custody of them.”
ROWS OF ILLINOIS CORN fanned out from the horizon like green spokes in a wheel that kept turning. Across acres of farmland west of Chicago, the black earth divided itself from the sky in one flat pencil line.
“On to the Rockies,” she said softly.
John held Martha steady as she stood with her nose pressed to the window. He was behaving even more kindly to his sister than usual. Mamah was certain he was aware of the crisis in the house during the past week. At seven, John was the most empathetic, finely tuned creature she had ever known. Even as a baby, he’d been a watcher. Cautious, reserved. When he was six months old, he had sat on her lap, an exclamation of brown curls at the top of his otherwise bald head, and watched. She recalled the time she’d broken her ankle in a fall from a bicycle. John was four at the time. He had come to her room to find her in bed with her foot bandaged and elevated by a pulley. He had stood at the door with a pained look on his face and said simply, “It hurts me.”
She reached out and rubbed John’s back. “Grandpa was a train man, you know.”
“You always say that,” he said. “But what did he do?”
“Well, he wasn’t always a train man. First he was an architect, and then a carriage builder.” Mamah rallied, injecting cheeriness into her voice. “But when the Chicago and North Western train came through Boone, he took a job with the railroad. He could fix anything, and he got very good at repairing trains. Pretty soon they put him in charge of all the men who repaired North Western trains.”
“Is that why you moved away from Iowa?”
“I think so. Papa started working for the railroad around the time I was born. And I was six when we left. Maybe he was in charge of things by then.”
“What was Boone like?”
“There seemed to be a big event happening every half hour on that farm. Someone would call ‘Come see!’ and everyone would run over. Maybe a turtle was laying eggs, or a snake was shedding its skin, or someone had captured the biggest tadpole.”
“What else?”
“Well, a day or two before we left Boone, I put a note under a loose floorboard in my bedroom. It said, ‘My name is Mamah. I hope you are a girl.’ I signed my full name and my age.”
“Do you think she found it?”
“Oh, I don’t even know if there was a ‘she.’ But I surely hoped so. I wanted someone to know I had lived there. I was hoping a girl would look out the window at the path through the prairie grass and think, Maybe Mamah went down that path. And then perhaps she would follow it and find what I left there.”
“What did you leave there?”
“It’s a secret.”
“No,” he groaned.
Mamah laughed. “But I’ll tell you. I dragged a piece of old braided rug and a chair out in the field. We left in August, and the prairie was high—over my head. You wouldn’t have seen that rug and chair unless you went exploring. But if you did find it, and you sat down, you would discover a private little room there. When the grass got high, it made walls all around.”
