by Nancy Horan
Mamah looked out the window. A drenching rain had begun to fall, and passersby held newspapers over their heads as they hurried along the street. “When I left,” she said, “I was reckless. I believed if I came and spent time with Frank, and if it worked, if it could work, I would understand what the next step would be.” She shook her head. “I never dreamed it would all come crashing in.”
Ellen patted her hand. “What would happen if you went back? Faced it head-on?”
“I could go back.” There was resignation in her voice. “I could go back. I’d be the humiliated harlot…I don’t know.”
“You need more time.” Ellen glanced at her watch, then called for the check. “Your journey has turned into a public shaming. That doesn’t erase the need you had in the first place to discover who you are and where you want to go. Let things calm down. Give yourself a couple of months.”
“But I worry about the children. And I’ll run out of money soon enough. Edwin certainly won’t send me any.”
“What about Frank?”
“He doesn’t talk much about money. But I think he has only enough to support himself through his project.”
“Children are always the main issue.” Ellen stood up and threw her coat on. “It seems to me, though, that you must find a way to be self-reliant before you commit yourself to a plan.”
Mamah bit the inside of her cheek. “I could translate your books.”
Ellen Key looked up from her bag. “Oh, I have an English translator in London.”
“I know. I read the English translation of Love and Marriage. It lacks soul.”
The woman stood still, the indignant look on her face giving way to curiosity. “Well.”
“I read parts of it to Frank. He said the translation is a poetry crusher. It’s too British, too stiff.” Mamah held her breath.
Ellen looked amused. “You speak German perfectly. What else?”
“French, Italian, Spanish. I read Greek and Latin as well. I completed a master’s degree in language studies.”
“And Swedish?”
“No one understands better than I your ideas. No one could translate for an American audience the way I can.”
“But Swedish?”
“It’s limited. I learned some from a servant girl in the boardinghouse where I lived when I taught school in Michigan. But I could master it—in a heartbeat.”
Ellen leaned in closer. “Where are you going next?”
“Paris, then Italy, I think.”
Ellen looked at her watch. “Will you walk with me to the gate?”
Mamah lifted her bag and followed her out of the café.
“You know,” Ellen said, “you appear before me at an interesting moment, Mamah. I’m at the end of my tour. In a couple of weeks, I will be sixty. My feet swell up whenever I stand at the lectern, and most mornings it takes an hour to get my legs and fingers moving. I’m tired of the nomad life.
“And I’m building a home now. Last year the Swedish government gave me a piece of land on a park reservation. It’s near a lake not unlike Lago Maggiore. I haven’t had a real home of my own since I left my parents’ house twenty years ago. Most of the past few years have been spent traveling around lecturing. I’ve given myself out in little pieces, and there’s not much left of me. When my house is completed, I intend to inhabit it.”
“How lovely,” Mamah said.
“Do you see where I am going? I’m not finished with my work, but my body feels as if it is. I’ve known for some time that America is next. It’s the American woman who is ready to hear what I have to say.”
“I have strong connections with the Woman Movement,” Mamah said breathlessly. “My heart has been in this fight since I was eighteen. I understand the American woman. I would do outstanding translations of your books. And I would get them distributed.”
They stood at a gate while crowds of people snaked around them. Ellen pulled out of her bag typed copies of three essays that she explained would be collected under one title: The Morality of Woman.
“Translate these and send them to me. If I like the work you do, I will consider letting you be my American translator.”
Mamah threw her arms around her.
“You must agree to one condition, though. I have learned your language already. You must learn Swedish to be a regular translator for me.”
Mamah’s heart was thudding. “Of course I will.”
“The University of Leipzig has a fine language program. I can pay you a small stipend while you bring yourself to full speed. Enough to eat on, at least.” Ellen Key scribbled her name and address on a piece of paper. “Here,” she said, “send me your translation. And let me know what you want to do.”
1910
CHAPTER 25
AWAITING YOU.
CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES PLAZA, ROOM 15.
FLW JAN. 19, 1910
The terseness of Frank’s telegram was a confession: He was miserable without her. She would give herself another whole day, then go to him on Friday. She missed him, too, but leaving Nancy was the last thing she wanted to do. Sitting in the hotel room translating Ellen’s essays, she had found more than peace of mind. She had discovered the state of her soul set down in ink.
While she translated, Mamah thought of her father off and on. During the months she and Edwin had lived with him in the old house, he would sit in his study and read the New Testament, a habit he had never bothered with while her mother was alive. From time to time he shuffled out of the smoky study in his slippers, talking and nodding to himself. Mamah had begun to behave in a similar way in her hotel room.
Just this morning she had tried to draft a letter to Ellen Key to thank her. She wanted to say that she truly understood. That she would bring Ellen’s ideas to America out of gratitude, never mind the compensation. Yet every word she wrote seemed badly chosen. She crossed out the sentence You have saved my life. It would probably frighten the woman away.
On Friday morning, a cold drizzle melted the skin of snow on the street as Mamah walked to the train station.
“Are you going to Paris?” a man said to her as she stepped into the ticket line.
“Yes.”
“Don’t bother waiting. There are no trains to Paris because it’s flooding there. Part of the city is underwater now. The stations are all closed.”
“But I had a telegram on Wednesday—”
The man shrugged. “It was very sudden. The Seine has filled up the subways, electricity is out. Everything’s disrupted. They won’t even estimate when the trains will start again.”
“Do you know the Champs-Élysées Plaza?”
“Yes,” the man said. “It’s new.” He shook his head. “It’s not far from the Seine.”
A newsboy on the street hawked papers with the headline INONDATIONS!
She had been holed up in her room, unaware.
Frank is resourceful, she thought; a flood won’t rattle him. Both of them had witnessed the Des Plaines River near Oak Park overflow time and again. If he were struggling, it would be because he was alone, his work disrupted once more.
In the absence of telegrams and trains, there was no choice. She would wait it out in Nancy and continue working. She went back to the hotel and put away the folded clothes.
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, rain pounded the sidewalks with a fury. It had been five days since the first news of the flooding, and the skies continued their barrage. At breakfast she caught the eye of a businessman with a newspaper who read her question in a glance. He shook his head. “It keeps going up,” he said. “There have been some deaths.”
She bought a newspaper, sat down in the hotel lobby, and studied the little map on the front page depicting the Seine snaking up from the southeast in a loop around the city. The situation had grown much worse. The basement of the Louvre was filled with water. A photo of the Gare d’Orsay revealed it to be a swimming pool, its locomotives drowned like sunken ships.
Have I grown numb to the point of stupidi
ty? Mamah felt oddly unworried about Frank. A strange new confidence had descended on her.
The peacefulness of Nancy had taken her by surprise. After a few days, she felt as if she had moved back one step and could look at her situation from the outside. At moments she could even imagine that everyone involved—Edwin, Catherine, the children—would someday be happy.
It felt callous to compare her public humiliations with the miseries of the desperate Parisians. Yet the flood’s allegory was there for the taking, if it was perspective one wanted.
On January 30 the papers announced that the siege had ended. Parisians were boating about in the sunshine, celebrating. When word came later that trains were scheduled to move again, Mamah raced to the station to buy a ticket.
In the crush of people and luggage along the platform, she held a small valise tightly beneath her arm. Inside were her handwritten translations of The Morality of Woman, The Woman of the Future, and The Conventional Woman. She felt fiercely protective, the way she imagined Frank felt carrying his portfolio of drawings—like a courier with a blueprint that was about to change the world.
The train slugged through Frouard, Commercy, Bar-le-Duc, and Vitry-le-François before it stopped for four hours in Chalons-sur-Marne. Mamah bought food from a man with a cart near the station, then climbed back on board and fell asleep. When she awoke, they were nearly to Paris. As they moved through its eastern suburbs, she saw battered little villages where rowboats were hitched to garden gates and ladders led up to second-floor windows.
Past muddy fields of dun-colored, matted grass, the train lurched forward. Mamah saw large shapes dotting a pasture up ahead in the distance. When the train drew closer, she realized the forms were the bloated carcasses of cows. Farther on, a small cemetery looked as if it had been turned upside down. Headstones and empty caskets lay scattered around a field nearby. She caught sight of what appeared to be the arm of a corpse hanging from one wooden box.
Alarm rippled through the train as passengers moved about to get better views. “Jesu Christe!” an old woman cried in a seat nearby. “The dead have been ripped from their graves.”
But the calm that had possessed Mamah in Nancy persisted. Sunlight breaking through gray clouds brought the scenes outside her window into sharp focus. She felt a clarity, even more than before, as if she were viewing everything, even herself, from a distance. How small we humans are, she thought. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.
How ridiculous it all seemed, when life itself was so short, so precious. To live dishonestly seemed a cowardly way to use up one’s time. For all the troubles life had meted out to her, she thought, it had given her more extraordinary gifts. Martha and John were that. And then, quite by chance and in the wrong order, life had bestowed on her another kind of love that was both erotic and nourishing. To embrace Frank, to accept the gift, seemed to be an affirmation of life.
How to reconcile the deepest loves of her soul? Staring out the window, she tried to imagine a time in the future when she would explain to her children this understanding. They would have to be adults to comprehend it. But she believed they would see that her choice to leave their father was not meant as a cruel self-indulgence geared to make them unhappy. Rather, it was an act of love for life.
Mamah remembered a line from Hymn to Nature: She turns everything she gives into a blessing.
Somehow she would turn this terrible mess into a blessing for the children. She believed it was possible that they could someday feel enlarged by the love all around them. People with children got divorced and remarried; it wasn’t the end of the world for them. Martha and John could actually end up better off, with four happy parents.
Mamah’s whole life seemed to be of a piece at that moment. Working for Ellen Key was simply more evidence of an impulse inside her that was growing up like a plant, stretching, seeking the light. With every word she translated, she leaned harder toward love and life.
Loud banter turned to whispers as the train pulled into the city. Mamah’s eye caught a clock stopped at 10:50. Then she saw another and another. All of the public clocks of Paris had halted at the same instant, marking the eerie moment when the river had rendered schedules irrelevant. The strangeness of the scene snapped her from her reverie.
“Champs-Élysées Plaza!” she said when she got a taxi. “Quickly, please.”
At the hotel, she dropped all her bags except the valise in the drenched, smelly lobby and raced up the stairs to the third floor. Her heavy coat tripped her, and she stopped to pull it off. At Room 15, she rapped and waited.
The door opened and Frank, his face unshaven, peered out into the dark hall.
She sighed when she saw him. “Thank you, thank you!”
“May-mah!” He laughed, lifting her off the floor in a swooping bear hug. “What a beautiful sight.”
“I would have come sooner if I could have.”
“I missed the worst of it. I went out into the country when the river came over the sandbags. I just got back yesterday.” He pulled her into the room. “Be careful where you step.”
They tiptoed through the drawings that were spread over the floor. Frank was using his portfolio cover as a drawing board on the carpet. A hard half-eaten loaf of bread sat on top of the dresser, along with an apple core and a jug of water. They sat down on the bed.
“I thought you were all right,” she said, “but then we got close to Paris, and I was frantic with this fear—”
“But I’m safe. Everything is fine.” He put his arm around her shoulders.
“—and I thought, What would I do if something happened to you? My life would end.”
“You’re trembling,” he said. “Here, lie down.” He drew a blanket over her on the bed.
Mamah eased her back against the pillows and sensed the tension in her body ebb. Light filtered through the window’s tracery and cast shadows on gray wallpaper printed with urns and draping vines. The quietness of the city struck her. Not a horse or car or voice could be heard from the sidewalk below.
There was so much to tell Frank, but she felt no hurry. She put her arms around him, then pulled his shirt up in back and slid her hands under it to feel the hot expanse of skin beneath. Her palms moved around to his chest, slowly, feeling the heart beneath the ribs, the rise and fall of muscle under her fingertips. She pressed her mouth to his neck and breast, exploring him unabashedly, gratefully. It was as if they were the first lovers, as if words had no use compared to this.
“I’M STARVING.” Frank was awake and getting dressed. She put out a hand, and he pulled her up. As they prepared to go out, he collected his cape and placed a jaunty beret on his head.
“You look wonderful,” she said, a little bewildered.
“I found a hatter over at the Place Vendôme,” he said. “The man can make anything.”
Outside on the street, the low sun yellowed facades and faces. Mamah approached a passerby and got the location of an open café. They walked eight or nine blocks before they found the little place, its white tile walls sparkling. Only the smell of bleach hinted that muddy water had filled it just days before.
The café was packed with diners chatting gaily. “Eggs,” the waiter said. “That’s all we have. Does that suit you?”
“Yes. Omelets would be marvelous,” she said.
When the wine arrived, Frank clicked her glass with his. “To Italy,” he said. “If we leave tomorrow, we can be there by Friday.”
Mamah’s shoulders fell.
He grabbed her hand. “You’re tired, aren’t you? We’ll go the day after. We can sleep late tomorrow.”
She saw an omelet pass on a tray and realized she was famished. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Leipzig just yet; he seemed so happy. She would present the idea tomorrow.
They drank the bottle of wine, Frank regaling her with stories of his Parisia
n encounters, she talking excitedly about what she had just translated.
On their way back to the hotel, they walked in the street next to the Seine.
“I feel a little woozy,” she admitted. Frank grabbed her elbow and navigated her around a large hole where the street had caved in.
“The French are a little woozy right now,” he said. “No one will notice.”
Naphtha flames lit the river’s edge, where workmen struggled to dislodge a wood pier that had wedged itself under a bridge.
“The studio in Florence is all arranged. Lloyd will be coming over to help with the drawings. And a young fellow from Salt Lake who’s worked for me—Taylor Woolley—he’s coming, too. I need both of them.”
“I thought Catherine would never allow Lloyd to leave school. That he couldn’t be in the same place I’m staying.”
“I’ve convinced her you won’t cross his path. I’ll find a room for him and Taylor apart from ours. They’re young—they’ll want to explore Florence on their own.”
“So you’ve heard from Oak Park.”
Frank stopped to squint at something across the river. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said.
BACK IN THE HOTEL ROOM, he gestured toward the dresser. “You have a letter. Wasmuth forwarded it.” Frank delivered the information as carefully as she would have delivered it to him—without emotion. Mamah stepped haltingly across the room and looked at the envelope from a distance. Edwin’s Wagner Electric logo was in the upper-left-hand corner. She knew what the envelope held. How could you? Come to your senses.
Frank made noise settling her luggage in a corner and kept his eyes averted. She knew he was tendering her a small mercy. It was the first mail she’d had since the newspaper clippings, and he was offering her what little privacy he could. She slit the envelope with her thumbnail, then set it down.
“I’ll read it in the morning,” she said.
WHEN SHE WOKE, Mamah felt her jaw clamped shut. She had been grinding her teeth, maybe all night. She slipped out of bed while Frank still slept, then pulled Edwin’s letter from the envelope. His words hit their mark—the household on East Avenue came into vivid, painful focus. His elderly mother was now living with them, trying to help. Lizzie was bearing up, assisting with Martha and John. Louise had been valiant, chasing away reporters when they showed up on Christmas Day. Edwin added at the end that young Jessie would be leaving the household to live with the Pitkins, her father’s family.
