by Nancy Horan
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Why are children always making hiding places? You tell me.”
John pondered it. “Because we like to have secret places that maybe only your best friend knows about.”
“Of course,” she said. “I had almost forgotten that.”
MAMAH COULDN’T RIDE a train without thinking of her father. He had spent forty years keeping the North Western’s rolling stock welded together, and moving its thousands of wheel pairs in unison over a vast web of tracks every day, all year round. When he died so suddenly, it took everyone by surprise. The whole company came to his funeral, from the president to the repairmen he oversaw to a half-dozen Pullman porters.
From her earliest years, she had understood that her father was solid and reliable. He had prized those qualities and recognized them in Edwin when he came into the household. Ed and her father had been not just family but good friends. What would Marcus Borthwick think of all this trouble if he were alive?
An image flashed in her mind just then of Lizzie and a bereft Edwin bumping around the empty house on East Avenue. Will they eat together still?
When she felt tears coming, she pushed her mind back to where it had been, to the place where she was twelve again, sprung from school and sitting next to a train window, the smell of wheat in her nostrils. A train whistle could make her pulse quicken in those days. It meant strangers with stories, and steak sizzling on heavy white china in the dining car. Now it was enough that the whistle could distract her from the mess she had left behind in Oak Park.
She thought of the Rock Island Line advertisement that had leaped out at her the morning after Mattie’s letter had arrived. In the illustration, a young woman reposed thoughtfully, chin in hand, gazing out a train window at mountains and fat white clouds.
Vacation upon the tableland of the continent, the ad had read. You will earn its cost out of the extra ideas you will gain and the extra vigor you’ll feel for the rest of the year.
Outside, Mamah glimpsed a stand of birches glowing yellow, electrified by the late-afternoon sun. If anyone ever needed an extra idea, she thought, it is I.
MARTHA WAS RESTLESS STILL, but refused to nap. John produced string from his pocket and indulged her with cat’s cradle. When she tired of it, she invented her own amusement. She began by pushing at John until he stood up. He rolled his eyes.
Now Martha was pushing Mamah’s legs. “Move, Mama,” she insisted. “You move.”
“No, I won’t move, Martha,” Mamah said. “These seats are for all of us.”
“You move!” Martha was shrieking now.
Mamah sat stoically as the three-year-old hurled herself at her mother’s legs, then rolled around the floor of the compartment in her yellow dress, wailing.
“John,” Mamah whispered close to her son’s ear. “Just let her be. She’ll tire out, and then it will be over.”
John smiled, pleased to be the good child.
Martha continued to wail until her small body shook with dry sobs.
“Would you like to come up, Martha?” Mamah asked.
She crawled up onto the seat and put her head in her mother’s lap. Mamah closed her burning eyes.
WHEN MARTHA WOKE, Mamah walked the children up to the locomotive, where the engineer pulled the whistle for their benefit. At dinner Martha complained of a stomachache and began crying again. Mamah retreated with her to their car, while John continued playing tic-tac-toe at the dinner table with a boy his size.
In their sleeping compartment, Martha wailed in pain. Mamah searched her memory, trying to remember the last hours at home. Had she moved her bowels before they left? Mamah hadn’t paid attention. Only Louise would know, because Martha wasn’t saying. Mamah carried her to the toilet compartment. The door latched and unlatched as the train swayed on the tracks. Martha took one look at the dark, smelly hole inside the wooden seat and howled.
What would Louise do?
“It will help you feel better, sweetie,” Mamah said, crouching down, securing the door with one foot while she held Martha so she wouldn’t fall in, as she feared. She didn’t even strain.
“I’ll give you a candy. Would you like that?”
Martha only screamed louder, holding on, terrified. When her cries turned to whimpers, Mamah gave up and took her back to bed.
By Nebraska, she felt betrayed by the romantic pull of advertising. She thought of the headline of another ad she’d seen: COLORADO MAKES NEW MEN. When she’d left Chicago, she had entertained a private hope that Colorado had the same effect on women.
The train rocked along, and the children slept through the bleakness of the Great Plains. Mamah had slept that way herself as a child on a train; the bump and clatter and sway of the sleeping car had been rough music to her. Now it kept her awake. Mamah thought about starting over, beginning the trip anew the next morning. She imagined a hearty breakfast for all of them, then fell, finally, into a numbing black sleep.
CHAPTER 10
Off the Rock Island Line at Denver, then onto the Union Pacific to Boulder.
“Are we close to where we are?” Martha asked forlornly as they boarded the train.
“Oh, so close,” Mamah said, lifting her up the steps.
She and the children felt pampered in the wide plush seats of the brand-new torpedo-shaped rail car. Martha consented to use the toilet compartment. John opened one of the oval windows and sat smiling with his hair whipping in the wind.
At the Boulder station, a crowd of people milled on the platform. Mamah wasn’t sure she would recognize Alden Brown. She hadn’t seen him in seven years—not since his marriage to Mattie. All at once a man in a neat suit, with a little pointed beard, let out a shout like a mule skinner, then smothered them in hugs.
“You’re not the only celebrity arriving today,” Alden said to her as they pushed through the crowd. He picked Martha up and put her on his shoulders. “The Reverend Billy Sunday should be pulling into town any minute now.” He winked. “Shall we stick around?”
Mamah laughed. “Absolutely not.”
Outside the station, he piled their luggage into his motorcar. Mamah observed Alden as he drove uphill away from the station. He looked more like a banker than a mining engineer, she thought.
There was a time when Mamah believed Mattie was crazy to marry a younger man who seemed all wrong. Alden Brown was accustomed to living in ten-shack gulleys near his latest mine project rather than a town with paved streets and a post office. Mattie had traveled to Paris and New York; she loved the theater. She’d been thirty-two when she’d married him, old enough to know better. How on earth was she to make a life with such a man?
A few years ago, Mattie had sent Mamah a picture of herself and her new husband in front of their house in Boulder. It was a handsome bungalow, clapboard and shingle, in a line of fine new homes. The photo had put Mamah’s fears to rest. Now they were pulling up to that very house on Mapleton Street. A towheaded boy and girl leaped from the porch and raced to the curb.
“Mattie’s upstairs,” Alden said. “She’s on doctor’s orders to rest in the afternoons.” He unloaded the bags. “Get on up there. She’s excited.”
Mamah vaulted up the steps and found her friend sitting upright in bed, grinning sheepishly. She rubbed her hands over her belly, then threw them up in the air in a “What can I say?” gesture.
“Mattie,” Mamah said when she saw her friend. “You look…”
“Like Lucretia after the rape?”
“Well, you are beginning to…ripen.”
Mattie leaned back against her pillows, chagrined.
“Poor Mattie.” Mamah’s brow wrinkled in sympathy. Then she felt herself snort a little laugh, and in an instant they were both weepy with laughter.
“Don’t make me wet this bed,” Mattie shouted.
“All right, then, down to business. I’ve brought medicine.” Mamah dug into the bag she carried and brought out a box of chocolates.
“How did you do it?”
“Well, persuading the dining car porter to put it on ice was the easy part. Do you know how many times I almost used that candy as a bribe to keep the peace?”
The door creaked, and Mattie’s son, Linden, stuck his head around it.
“Come in, sweetheart,” Mattie said.
Linden tiptoed in, followed by his sister Anne, and John and Martha.
Mamah lifted her daughter on her lap. “Meet your namesake, Mattie. Miss Martha Cheney.”
Mattie beamed. “How old are you?”
“Three,” said Martha. The sides and front of her brown hair were tied up in a white ribbon.
“Well, you’re big, then. And you look more like your mother than your mother does, child.”
“Nature has settled a score,” Mamah said. “I’m raising myself.”
“And you, young man, you are the picture of your father.”
“I know,” John said.
“Then you must despise chocolate.”
“No.” John’s eyes widened. “I love it.”
“Ah, so there’s a little bit of your mother in you, then.” Mattie opened the box, swung her legs out of bed, and stood to pass the box of half-melted chocolates around. When everyone had a piece, Mattie sank into a chair near the bed. “No Jessica this trip?”
“She’s with her father’s parents for a few weeks.”
“Linden, will you show John and Martha where they will be sleeping tonight?”
When the children had raced out of the bedroom, Mamah reached into her bag again and produced a book. “More medicine,” she said. “I bought it for the title—The Hermit and the Wild Woman. It reminded me of you.”
“You were the wild woman, as I recall. Does that make me the hermit?” Mattie took the book in her hands. “Short stories…perfect. I have the concentration of a flea.”
“I’ll read them to you.”
“Oh, Mamah. Believe it or not, I can still actually read.”
“I came to help.”
“I know. And you will, just by being here. I’m not an invalid—we can take walks. But I sleep a lot. You’ll need some diversions.”
“I thought I might hike in the hills.”
“There are a million things to do here. I want you to get out and about. My nanny can handle the children.”
WHEN MAMAH OPENED her eyes the next morning, she was relieved to find herself alone in Mattie and Alden’s guest room. The room was entirely white—walls, sheets, painted furniture. The only color came through the window that her bed faced, and it was the tan of the jagged Flatirons.
She realized she felt at home among these hills. The rises and falls suited her inner landscape, for better or worse. It was the promise of something just over the crest that appealed to her. So unlike the flat prairies of Illinois and Iowa, where everything as far as the eye could see was pretty much evident in a glance.
One day into her stay, life in Boulder was proving to be as she had hoped. Mattie’s girl and boy were closer in age to Martha, but John played with them as if he were three again rather than seven. When Mamah heard Alden’s auto pull away, she headed downstairs.
It didn’t matter where Mattie lived, Mamah reflected, a boarding room or a fine home. She had a way of placing a fern or hanging her landscapes to create a kind of homeyness Mamah envied.
On the stairway landing, she stopped to study two photos she had missed the day before. They were eerie images that appeared at first to be black-and-white paintings. In one, a bright snow-covered mountain gave off an otherworldly glow, in contrast to the deeply shadowed foreground, where a grazing mule was barely discernible. Mamah carried the photo down to the dining room. “Explain this to me.”
“Not even hello?” Mattie was eating toast, her blond hair pulled away from her freckled face. It was always this way with them, effortlessly picking up the thread of a years-long conversation they had never dropped. They saved their real talk for each other, sometimes for years.
I believe I have left Edwin, Mamah wanted to say. I love another man. Instead, she said, “Good morning, Mattie. Now tell me what this is.”
“It’s called ‘painting with light.’ It’s what I used to do when we first moved here. When I lived in New York, I studied photography with a man who used this method. After you print a picture, you paint it with a gummy mixture: gum arabic and potassium bichromate. A thick coat of the stuff will make it look grainy, dreamlike. A thin coat will look finer, but unreal still.” Mattie sighed. “I love making landscape photographs, but I haven’t done any since I had Linden.”
“Why not?”
“Too busy, I guess. ‘Spoiling my treasures,’ as Alden says. Do you think they’re spoiled?”
“Your children? Not at all.” Mamah held the picture up in the light. “But this. This is wonderful, Mattie. I want to go to this place.”
“It’s not far from here. I’ll take you one of these days.”
“You need to find a way to get back to this work. Because you have a gift.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s an admission of total envy. I would love to have some art of my own, something that sails me away.”
“Aren’t you translating anything?”
“Not lately.”
“But you’re active in your club.”
Mamah rolled her eyes. “Making origami decorations for Valentine’s Day.”
“Now, stop. Last time you wrote, you were preparing a reading. Taming of the Shrew?”
“Yes, for a crowd of women who had lunch on their minds. That’s a fine culmination of all those years at the university, isn’t it? And let’s not forget the paper I delivered last year on Goethe with Catherine Wright.”
“Your friend who’s married to the architect. Right?”
“That one.”
And there it was, the first crumb. Mamah knew that she would keep dropping more crumbs until there was a big pile between them. And then she would probably tell it all, because she had never been able to keep a secret from Mattie. But she had never held a secret so damning. I might lose the one friendship I cherish most.
That night she lay alone in the little white bedroom, imagining Mattie’s questions. How did it get to this point? She explained and reexplained it in her head, but it all sounded wrong.
Because it just did, Mattie. Because some things are inevitable.
CHAPTER 11
“When did it start?”
Mattie was sitting up in her bed. For the past few minutes, she had calmly questioned Mamah. Did Edwin know? Did Frank’s wife know? Except for sprigs of frizzy gold hair escaping from barrettes at the sides of her head, she was the picture of composure.
Mattie didn’t shock easily. Lightning had hit her so often that by the time she was ten, she’d grown impervious to surprise. Her mother had died when she was two. Then a brother and sister died, leaving her with one brother, a stepmother, and a father who seemed to shock as little as she did. Mamah had spent a good part of her college career trying to get a rise out of her roommate.
She had no desire to do that now. She paced along one wall of the bedroom, framing and reframing the story. “Our friendship just evolved. He would come over to discuss the plans, and we would end up someplace else entirely, talking about anything. He’s passionate about so many things—education, literature, architecture, music. He loves Bach.”
“Of course.” Mattie’s pale eyelashes blinked.
“He was easy to talk to, and he opened up. His father had died a couple of weeks before Frank started building our house. He mentioned the death one day in passing, though he didn’t seem upset about it. They weren’t close, because his father had left the family when Frank was about six or seven. I think his father’s passing made him reflective, though, because he talked a great deal to me after that.”
“About…”
“About his early years, summers, actually, on his uncle’s farm in southwestern Wisconsin. How he learned to love the prairie an
d hills there. How he decided to be an architect. And he talked about his marriage to Catherine. It has been bad for a very long time. They simply grew apart—she’s immersed in the children, and he in his work. Well, and so it went. I told him about myself, too.”
Mamah continued to pace, reliving aloud the day she had brought out the box some five years earlier. When she looked at Mattie, she saw her wince.
“You seduced him with little German readers?”
“No, no, it was another two years before…” Mamah collapsed in the chair and buried her face in the sheets at the edge of the bed. “Oh my Lord, Mattie, what a mess I’m in.”
“Whew.” Mattie whistled. “You are.”
“It was so easy to fall into,” Mamah said, shaking her head. “Frank has an immense soul. He’s so…” She smiled to herself. “He’s incredibly gentle. Yet very manly and gallant. Some people think he’s a colossal egoist, but he’s brilliant, and he hates false modesty. With me, though, he’s really very humble. And unpretentious.” Mamah searched her friend’s impassive features. Nothing. “He’s a visionary, Mattie, and he’s going to be famous someday for developing a true American architecture. He refuses to put up junk he hates, no matter how rich you are. He chooses clients as much as they choose him.”
Mattie raised her eyebrows. “Ah, I see how it works,” she said. “He makes you feel as if you’re brilliant for hiring him.”
“It’s not flattery, Mattie. He finds out who you are, the way any good architect does. Your habits and your tastes. He takes you on, and then he teaches you. It’s a process. Pretty soon you start to see the world through new eyes.”
Mattie looked skeptical.
“I know it all sounds like a lot of nonsense to you, but the truth is, he shows you how much better you can live. How much better you can be. You can’t have a conversation with Frank about architecture without it turning toward nature. He says nature is the body of God, and it’s the closest we’re going to get to the Creator in this life.” Mamah’s hands were tracing lines in the air. “Some of his houses look more like trees than boxes. He cantilevers the roof so it spreads its eaves wide like sheltering branches. He even cantilevers terraces out from the house in the same way, if you can picture it. His walls are bands of windows and doors, the most gorgeous stained-glass designs of abstract prairie flowers. All that glass gives you the sense that you’re living free in nature, rather than cut off from it.”
