by Nancy Horan
At ten in the morning, the café was filled with intense-looking men huddled over coffee cups. Mamah searched the restaurant for some private spot where she might open the letter. Opposite her was a red telephone booth with a comical bust of Kaiser Wilhelm balanced on top. She walked over to a table near it. Except for an eccentric-looking woman wearing a lamb’s-wool fez and reading a book, the area was empty.
Mamah ordered a cup of tea, then took out the two letters from her bag, ripping open the flap of Edwin’s.
Mamah,
I regret that I cannot speak to you in person. Please afford me the dignity of not showing this letter to him.
How I wish I could see your face! Perhaps it would reveal to me what forces could move you to desert Martha and John in Boulder in such circumstances. This is the part I cannot fathom, Mamah. It is so unlike you that I can only assume you are in great mental distress. More than anger, I feel the deepest worry about you. Frank Wright is a liar to his core, and I fear you can’t see he has got your mind under his control. I can’t believe you are making choices out of your own will. How else can I explain this to myself?
Martha and John and Jessie believe you are on vacation. Louise, Lizzie, and Mother carry on, but none of them is a substitute. The children miss you. I beg you to return to us. I shall do whatever is required to make us a family again.
I haven’t stopped loving you.
Edwin
Mamah sighed deeply. He had mailed the letter from Oak Park on October 23. Today was November…what? November 10. Time enough for him to catch a train to New York, then a boat over here. What was he doing? Traipsing from hotel to hotel looking for her? Neither Frank nor she had told anyone where they were staying. Only Wasmuth.
Mamah opened the drawing Edwin had included from Martha. It was a crayoned figure of a woman, waving from a boat.
She studied Lizzie’s script on the other envelope. More bitter medicine. She let the letter sit unopened, glancing instead at the person across from her. The bohemian-looking woman fingered her beaded necklace as she read. She had one booted foot propped on the rung of a chair in front of her.
Mamah sipped her tea, then opened Lizzie’s letter.
Mamah,
I write with a heavy heart for many reasons, but especially for the terrible news it falls to me to convey. Mattie has died. Word came from Alden in a letter yesterday. Her heart must have begun to give out just after you left. By the time Edwin got to Boulder, her brother Lincoln had been called from Iowa…
No, she thought. This is a hoax.
She imagined Lizzie and Edwin sitting across from each other at the dining table, talking late into the night. Concocting some wrongheaded scheme—letters to get her to come home. Fueled by desperation or love, no doubt, but this…And now Edwin, somewhere in Berlin.
Her head began a palsylike shake. There wasn’t a thing wrong with Mattie.
The edge of a newspaper clipping protruded from Lizzie’s envelope. She pulled it out, read the penciled-in date at the top. October 15. Mamah’s eyes flew down the column, taking in phrases.
MRS. ALDEN H. BROWN
In the death of Mrs. Alden H. Brown yesterday, Boulder loses one of the finest characters among her public-spirited citizens…a resident of Boulder since the spring of 1902…Her unusual character and high mental attainments…the most devoted wife and mother…Her mind was too large to harbor a mean or selfish thought…University of Michigan…taught in the high schools of Port Huron…a shock to the entire community, her apparently excellent health giving no warning of this sudden ending to a useful career…Heart disease with lung involvement…Services at 404 Mapleton…Interment in Vinton, Iowa.
A moan rose from Mamah’s throat. She put her hands over her face. The woman with the book stood up and came toward her.
“Is there something I can do to help?” The woman’s face was next to hers.
“No, no one can help,” Mamah stuttered, weeping. “My friend is dead.”
CHAPTER 19
Frank sat on the floor of the hotel room with his legs crossed, making notes to himself on small white cards. Spread out in front of him were two rows of four drawings each that he had just received from Marion Mahony. He looked up when he noticed that she was standing next to him.
“Going out?”
“Yes, for a bit.”
“Good,” he said, standing up. “Good.”
“Shall I bring you anything?”
“No. I’ll be taking these in to Wasmuth later. I’ll get a bite while I’m out.” He stood and hugged the wool coat with her inside it. “How are we today?”
“We’re putting one foot in front of the other.” She managed a wan smile.
He rested his thumb sideways between her brows, then gently stroked the furrows there. “I wish you would talk about it.”
She shrugged sadly.
He lifted the brown shawl from her shoulders and wrapped it around her neck. “It’s cold out there.”
She walked through Pariser Platz onto Unter den Linden. Under the lime trees. The street name seemed a grim joke to Mamah as she walked east alongside the boulevard’s naked trees into an angled sheet of freezing rain. She hurried past the aquarium, averting her puffy face when she locked eyes with a haughty woman under an umbrella in front of the Grand Hotel de Rome. When Mamah spotted the copper dome of St. Hedwig’s Church, she felt something ease within her. Inside, old women in heavy black shawls fingered rosaries. In the near-darkness, Mamah found the smell she had hoped for, the scent of candle wax burning itself to nothingness in votive cups.
Mamah had wanted to sit alone with Mattie for three days now, ever since the woman from the café had put her into a taxi. Thankfully, Frank had been at the hotel to receive her, to try to comfort her. He would have gladly listened for hours, but he hadn’t known Mattie. How could he comprehend it? To spill too much of her sadness to him would be unfair, anyway. The hotel room reeked of worry already. The project was moving too slowly. Letters from Catherine and his mother kept arriving at Wasmuth’s. And then there was the specter of Edwin, who might at any moment knock on the door to create God knows what kind of scene. That is, if he was even in Berlin.
Their sojourn so far was surely not the spiritual adventure Frank had conjured up six months ago. Nor was it what Mamah had imagined. When she boarded the train to New York, she had expected to feel relief that the thing she had so longed for and worried over had finally begun, that at last she was moving out of a tunnel of indecision into the light.
At the moment, though, nothing was clear except that she wanted a few hours in a silent space of her own. Frank was working at a makeshift drafting table in front of the big window. When he was in the room, he was very present.
Mamah needed to say goodbye to Mattie, to somehow believe goodbye. But there was no still body to touch. Mattie’s cheeks had not been pink when Mamah had left her. But they had not been sallow, either.
For the past three days, Mamah had tried to piece together what might have happened. Heart disease with lung involvement. What did that mean? The newspapers never said, Another woman bled to death giving birth yesterday. Mattie had been weak after the birth, but women often are. Had she somehow failed to see that Mattie was losing ground? Had Mamah been too wrapped up in herself to look closely?
For the hundredth time, she berated herself. Had I been there, I would have gone to Denver for a better doctor. I could have saved her.
It was no use now. No use. She needed to think of Mattie, whole and clean, without her own sickening guilt coating every memory with a gritty film. She wanted to somehow honor Mattie’s life, if only in her own mind.
Burrowed deep in wool midday in an empty cathedral, Mamah cried and laughed into her scarf. Well, Mattie, your hair was a mess, I can admit that now. Mamah recalled how her friend would drag a brush through her thick mop as she tried to twist it into something stylish. “Why is it,” she had moaned once, “that when I walk into a room, somebody always has to say,
‘Oh, is it windy outside?’”
Mamah remembered the summer just after their graduation from the university. They’d both landed teaching jobs in Port Huron and had moved their belongings to the boardinghouse there. On a whim, they’d gone to a meeting of the local suffrage association that June, hoping to meet new friends. There was a woman passing out flyers when they arrived. Come to Colorado and help us pass the Women’s Suffrage Bill—that was the gist of it. Mamah remembered a phrase from the flyer: The harvest is white, but the reapers are few. By the end of the evening, they had signed up for a converting campaign. It was the possibility of hearing their heroes speak that had drawn them in—the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, even Frederick Douglass was scheduled to give a talk. The prospect of high adventure after a month of final exams held considerable appeal as well. Within a couple of weeks, they were going house to house in Denver, passing out pamphlets.
Organizers had put them up at the apartment of a volunteer. She was a thirty-six-year-old widow named Aldine who worked as a factory seamstress to support her three children. The first night there, Mattie and Mamah had stood around a table—there were no chairs—and eaten stale bread with watered-down coffee. They’d walked the poorest areas of town the next day and the days after, knocking on the doors of shacks, handing out pamphlets. At even the worst hovels, they were greeted by people who mostly favored enfranchisement.
But one afternoon, while leafleting on a street with taverns along either side, they were confronted by an angry tavern owner. He had come rushing out of his bar, waving a white towel to shoo them away. “Git!” he screamed at them. Mamah and Mattie had stopped in their tracks, stunned. It now occurred to Mamah that neither of them had ever been told to “git” before. The man’s yelling got louder. “We don’t need outsiders rilin’ people up.” Men from across the street came over to have a laugh. Mamah and Mattie soon found themselves surrounded by a circle of hostile men.
“Where you ladies from?” one of the better-dressed men asked. All of them smelled of beer and sweat.
Mamah lifted her chin defiantly. “Michigan.”
“You sure traveled a long way.” A drunk man spat a wad of tobacco on the ground not far from Mamah’s shoes.
“Seems like the ones that make the most ruckus is the ones got no man to keep ’em at home,” the first man said, raising his eyebrows, “and happy.” The men burst into hoots.
“Sir,” Mamah began, but the man pressed on, aiming his finger at her nose.
“And don’t tell me about ‘taxation without representation,’ lady. There’s only but one woman for every one hundred who pays taxes.”
“Sir,” Mamah said, “you are arguing for my cause rather than your own. That is a sign of how few women can find decent employment.”
“Pshaw,” the man said, waving her off.
Up to that moment Mattie had stood frozen at the center of the group. Prim as a minister’s wife in her white gloves and little straw hat, she slowly turned in a circle to look into their eyes. “Gentlemen, you are hardworking men, I can tell.” She was twenty-one, and her voice was high-pitched and sweet. “With wives and children you love, I’m sure of it. Is there a man among you who has thought what might be your family’s lot if you should die? Do you want your wives to be powerless, to be classed together politically with idiots, and criminals, and the insane? Do you want your wife to work for less money than a man can earn, when she has the mouths of your babies to feed? Look at that child over there.” She nodded in the direction of a boy who appeared to be about eight, mopping out a barroom floor across the street. They all turned to look at him. “Do you want your children to be forced out to work at a tender age, like that child?”
The men grumbled and dispersed then, leaving Mamah staring slack-jawed at her gentle friend.
You never lied, Mattie. You spoke from your heart.
Mamah had been nearly mute since she’d read Lizzie’s letter. For three days she had played and replayed in her mind what might have happened inside that house on Mapleton. She imagined John and Martha, aware of trouble, scared to death probably, waiting in a sick house for their father to come and take them home. She prayed that the nanny had had the sense to keep the children playing outside. Still, what had they seen or heard?
She pictured Mattie laid out in the parlor where troops of neighbors could examine her pale freckled hands, resting like spotted lilies on her chest. There were probably mourning cakes on the long dining room table, and crepe draped over the mirrors. Alden’s mother would have done things the old way. Never mind that Mattie despised funerals.
She could imagine Alden, grief-stricken and confused, suffering the hordes who shook his hand and said, “She’s in a better place now.”
That’s a lie the living tell one another, isn’t it, Mattie? What better place could there be for you than in your own living, breathing skin?
There had been no sign of a weak heart. Mattie had the strongest constitution and the greatest will to live of any woman Mamah knew. When Mamah had kissed her goodbye, Mattie’s freckled face was creased with joy, her frizzy blond hair a wild halo. She had been nursing the baby, smiling ear to ear.
Last night Mamah had tossed fitfully, troubled by her dreams. She saw a woman’s body in a clean nightdress, laid out as if she were sleeping. Mamah saw herself sit down on the bed and put out a hand to touch her friend’s arm. Or was it her sister’s? She woke up when she felt the coldness.
She remembered the hour just after Jessie’s passing, when she’d gone in to sit next to her sister one last time. The smells of bleach and candle wax had wafted uneasily in the bedroom air. Mamah already knew by then what death looked like. She had seen the lifeless body of her mother. She had touched it, as she touched her sister’s body, and she knew Mattie’s body would have been the same. When Jessie died, it felt as if her soul just whooshed away. And what was left behind was some empty useless thing, no more sacred a vessel than an old suitcase.
What had stunned Mamah about Jessie’s death was how quickly, how utterly, the flesh made that transition from life force to breathless rag. What it had carried inside of it before, that brew of tenderness, wit, fierce loyalty, intelligence—the essence of Jessie—had simply vaporized.
Mamah knew how loss worked. She would ache and grieve for Mattie, as she had for Jessie, and then wake up one morning feeling all right. She would pick up life where she left off. In a year the precious friend she’d mourned so deeply would have disappeared from her everyday thoughts. In two years, without a photo in front of her, she would have a hard time picturing Mattie’s nose or mouth. Of all the cruel truths death had to teach, that seemed to her the cruelest one of all.
Mamah stood up and hurried out of the church.
SHE AND FRANK WALKED along Unter den Linden late that afternoon. The rain had stopped. She felt a rush of longing when she noticed a pair of boys about John’s age feigning a boxing match outside an apothecary. She stopped to watch them playfully cuff each other, then pose boldly, like skinny little Jack Johnsons.
“The world keeps going,” she said as they continued walking. “Everybody who ever lost someone thinks that. It’s strange, though. It still comes as a surprise when you see people carrying on.”
Frank held her elbow, navigating her along the sidewalk as they stopped in front of one display window or another.
“I remember just after Jessie’s death,” Mamah said. “I was at a church picnic, and there was a potato-sack race going on. I looked around at all these people hopping crazily along, each with one leg in a potato sack. They were laughing, but they were also quite serious about winning that race. And I remember thinking, Don’t these people know they’re going to die?”
His eyes fixed on hers. “What would she have you do?”
“Mattie?”
“Yes.”
“She would have me go home this minute.” Mamah looked away, out into the street. “I know that’s not the answer you were looking f
or.”
He took her in his arms to comfort her. They were standing in front of the window of a milliner’s shop, J. Bister, where colorful scarves were splayed below the hats on stands.
“Come in here for a minute,” he said.
He had the salesclerk pull a red scarf out of the window. Frank draped it over her shoulders.
“It looks Spanish,” she said, “like the shawls the parrot woman wears.” She lifted the price tag, then shook her head. “Too expensive.”
“You look beautiful,” he said, “and you happen to need it.” He handed over twenty-five marks to the shopkeeper. “Now, wear it, won’t you, Mamah? For me.”
CHAPTER 20
“How long do you think it would take you to pack?”
The question came out of the blue. Frank had been agitated since he’d walked into the hotel room, pacing around in his coat as if he had come back to retrieve something.
When she looked up from her book, she was startled to find his feverish-looking eyes on her, waiting for an answer.
“Now?”
Frank sighed. “It wasn’t Edwin looking for us at Wasmuth’s office.”
“What do you mean?”
“The letter I had from my mother? The day you got news of Mattie? I couldn’t tell you then.” He stood over her, his fists pushed down hard into his coat pockets. “There’s been a reporter snooping around in Oak Park, asking questions. Looking for gossip. I think the Tribune put their Berlin reporter on to us. I think that’s who was at Wasmuth’s asking about you and me.”
“Did they tell him where we’re staying?”
“The receptionist over there said she didn’t give him anything. But I don’t believe her. Someone else told me the guy was back again yesterday.”
