The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  They stopped for luncheon in Cross Plains, after which she grew calmer still, so much so she might have been comatose—or lost in a deep waking sleep. He kept shooting glances at her, her hair fluttering in the breeze, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her frame in perfect equipoise as if she were balancing on an invisible wire, and eventually he fell silent himself. A thought had occurred to him. A nagging unsettling thought, one he’d tried to suppress through the course of these running days. It had to do with what he knew of Miriam’s temperament, how easily it could shift from light to dark, from this calm to sudden fury, and how that might accord with his mother’s moods, not to mention Mrs. Breen’s. Mrs. Breen ran the household the way the Kaiser ran his army. And his mother, no wilting flower herself, had taken exception to the housekeeper on any number of grounds (“Don’t you dare call that woman Mother, not while I’m in this house”).104 Since the construction was progressing rapidly he’d moved her into the new wing—at her insistence—if only for an extended visit till the renovation was completed and the design fully realized, and that was fine. At least for the first day or so, until she and Mrs. Breen began feuding about everything from how to boil an egg to the proper way to make up a bed, set the table and polish silverware. How would they react to Miriam? More to the point: how would Miriam react to them? Distracted, he laid his hand atop hers and she turned to give him a vague smile as the wind took her hair and the sun tugged them forward and the road melted like butter under the glow of it. Like any gambling man, he could only hope for the best.

  Miriam seemed to come to life as they made their approach along the Wisconsin River and Taliesin suddenly materialized on the brow of the hill before them. “Is that it?” she asked, straining forward in the seat as he rolled to a stop at the main gate so she could have a chance to admire the house in its proper perspective. “And this is the lake you’ve talked of? And the dam? And what’s that over there to the left?”

  “Tan-y-deri,” he said. “My sister Jennie’s place. And see beyond it? That’s Romeo and Juliet.”

  Her face was flushed. She took hold of his arm at the biceps and pulled him to her for a kiss. “One of your earliest designs,” she murmured. “How sweet.”

  “Sweet?” he said. “I don’t know if I’d call it sweet.”

  “What I mean is the sentiment, of course, the sense of tradition. Your first windmill preserved here on your property and now this grand house, this palace of light and air. It’s beautiful. More beautiful than I could have dreamed.”

  “You like it?”

  “Like it? I adore it.”

  He left the car running as he got out to swing open the gate, seeing the small things, the way the ditch along the drive had eroded in the previous week’s storms, the weeds crowding out the wildflowers, the iridescent blue of the damselflies threading the air, and then he was back in the car, shifting into gear and winding on up the hill, thinking he’d send Billy Weston or one of the others down to shut the gate behind him because he didn’t want to spoil the moment, intent instead on watching Miriam’s face as the house revealed itself by stages. Llewellyn, his youngest—twelve years old that summer and adapting to the life of the farm as if he’d been born to it—appeared out of nowhere to chase the car up the drive in a propulsion of flashing limbs, head down, elbows pumping and gaining on them even as Frank slowed to let him catch up. And that was a joy to him too, a pleasure Kitty had denied him as long as Mamah was mistress of the place, Mamah her sworn enemy, her nemesis, dead now and gone so that he could have his children back with him for the long stretch of summer, Lloyd and John married and settled but here to pitch in with the rebuilding, Frances home from college, Catherine and David running back and forth between Taliesin and Oak Park.

  It was perfect. Ideal. The crowning moment of his life. Everyone together and Miriam here too and how could Kitty possibly object to a woman she’d never met and would never meet because she had to understand that things were dead between them and he had to live his own life in his own way? This was the start of something new, he could feel it, something better, and he pulled into the courtyard riding a wave of hope and optimism.

  Everyone crowded round—the children, Billy Weston, even Mrs. Breen—and while the help unloaded their things he took Miriam out on the hilltop to give her a moment to breathe and take in the prospect. He didn’t want to overwhelm her. She must have been exhausted from the journey—she wasn’t well, he was aware of that—but she was superlatively calm and graceful and full of praise for the place and she had a hundred questions that took them through tea and a leisurely tour of the rooms and artwork before she felt she might want to rest prior to dinner.

  Were there ominous signs? His mother claimed to be indisposed and wouldn’t emerge from her room. The children—Catherine, especially, who was the neediest and most sensitive and so the one most poisoned by Kitty’s invective—drew long faces all around. They were well-bred enough to conceal their feelings, of course, but he could see it would be a struggle to win them over—Miriam was an unknown quantity, perhaps not the ogre and housebreaker Kitty had made Mamah out to be, but she wasn’t their mother either, and he would feel the sting of that in a thousand ways. But worst of all, right from the start, was Mrs. Breen. The minute Miriam had gone in to lie down, she was at his elbow, bellowing out a whole catalogue of questions to which she apparently required no answers, as her ear trumpet was nowhere in sight. She was stalwart, furious, her face compressed and her eyes jumping at him. Where was the lady to sleep? she wanted to know. Would she require anything special in the way of comestibles because she, Mother Breen, was as run-down and worn-out as a woman could be what with feeding all these workmen and the family too, and she was at the end of her tether. And why hadn’t the lady removed her shoes at the door because who did she think would wipe up her muddy tracks after her? Did she speak French? Would she eat pork? Was she married? Did she expect maid’s service?

  He talked all through dinner, talked so steadily and with such a tailing edge of desperation he barely touched his food, and that wasn’t like him—not to eat—and they all took notice. His mother sat across from him, icily silent, and while Paul Mueller tried heroically to make general conversation, Llewellyn chirped out an anecdote about the frogs in the upper pond and Miriam was on her best behavior, there was something distinctly off about the whole evening. After dinner he sat at the piano105 and led them through a medley of songs, but Miriam wouldn’t join in—was the scene too homely for her, a Parisian sophisticate, was that it?—and his mother lacked enthusiasm. Distinctly. In fact, she seemed to do nothing all night long but stare at Miriam so intently she might have been making a charcoal study of her. They went early to bed, Miriam settled in one of the guest rooms to maintain a sense of propriety, though he didn’t give a damn for propriety, not under his own roof, and he had to find his way to her bed in the dark.

  The following day began auspiciously enough, Miriam up early and looking alert at breakfast while Mrs. Breen confined herself to the kitchen and let one of the maids serve at table. Conversation mainly revolved around the weather—the dew lay heavy on the grass that morning and there was the breath of a breeze out of the north, which he took to mean that the heat wave of the past weeks was finally dispelling, though both Paul and Lloyd disagreed with him, citing some nonsense out of the Farmer’s Almanac about woolly bear caterpillars and the paucity of their coats. Still, to his mind it was undeniably cooler and that was a beneficence—Miriam would be more comfortable and if she was more comfortable she would find it easier to embrace the natural life in the countryside. That was what he was thinking, as she seemed abnormally sensitive to extremes of temperature—abnormally sensitive to practically everything, for that matter—but then that was only to be expected of a highly refined artistic temperament like hers.

  He ate with a good appetite—he’d been up since four-thirty, busy in the studio, walking the grounds, tending to the garden and seeing to the horses, afire with energy and the fla
re of ideas that came to him almost unbidden, at the oddest times, as if inspiration were a vagary of the unconscious and not something to be earned through effort and focus and the application of pencil and T-square. The main house was largely finished now, but there was a whole lot of work yet to be done on the new wings and of course there were always projects on the boards, moneymaking projects, because the costs of rebuilding had exceeded even his wildest estimate and, as usual, he was woefully short106. . .

  As the day wore on—and it did get hot, above ninety by noon, though he worked alongside the laborers, loudly insisting that it was cooler by far than yesterday—he lost track of Miriam. He’d taken her on his rounds in the morning, explaining as much as he could about the workings of the place, but she’d developed a headache or heat exhaustion or some such thing and had begged off. “You want me to walk you back?” he’d asked, and she’d given him a smile that shaded into a grimace. “I’m not an invalid,” she said firmly, though her voice betrayed her. “I do think I can manage, what is it, three hundred yards on my own?” By the time he gave her another thought it was past five in the afternoon.

  The minute he walked into the house he was confronted by his mother. “This woman,” she said, all the lines round her mouth drawn tight. “I’m sorry to say it, but she’s not a lady, Frank—she’s not even civil. She’s vulgar and foulmouthed, is what she is. It may be that that sort of language passes among the French—for all I know it’s the fashion over there—but I won’t have it here in my own household, not in the hearing of my grandchildren or the servants either. I won’t. I tell you, Frank, I won’t.”

  He wanted a bath—or no, a swim in the lake. His shirt was stuck to his back, his hands and forearms were filthy. He was exhausted. And in no mood. “I’m sorry, Mother, but we’ll all have to . . . make adjustments. Miriam is under a great deal of strain, coming up here into the country, and—”

  “She diminishes you. She’s beneath you. She puts on airs.”

  And now Mrs. Breen appeared, her eyes savage, the ear trumpet clutched in one hand—and were they allies, had they declared a truce and joined forces to repel the invader in their midst? Had war been declared between lunch and dinner? He was stupefied and he stood there speechless, turning from one furious face to the other. “It’s a sorry thing,” Mrs. Breen roared, “to see such disrespect. Do you know what sort of vile names she’s been calling your own mother? And in my hearing, no less?”

  He’d come in the kitchen door, desiring only a glass of water before pulling on his bathing costume and calling Llewellyn to head down to the lake, and here he was in the docket. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” he said. “Because Miriam—”

  “Misunderstanding?” Mrs. Breen had elevated the hearing trumpet and now she dropped it to her side, her attenuated shoulder blades settling like bones in a sack. “To call your mother a meddling old hag? And me. To call me names I wouldn’t call the devil himself? And just because I wouldn’t jump at her every whim and command, because I have a household to run here if you don’t know it and I’m not hired on to be anybody’s handmaid—and who does she think she is to command me like I’m some slave out of her plantation in Tennessee or wherever her glorious ancestors hail from, and yes we all got a good earful of that too.”

  “Frank,” his mother cut in. “Frank, now you listen to me—”

  He held his hands up in surrender. “I’ll speak with her,” he said, irritated now, angry, all the satisfaction he’d taken in the day’s work driven out of him as if he hadn’t accomplished a thing—Sisyphus, this must be what Sisyphus felt like each time he got to the top of the hill. “Right now. Right this minute. Will that satisfy you? It’s not enough that I’ve worked all day under that sun with the laboring men, slaved out there in this heat, and all I want is to have a swim and some quiet before dinner. No. I have to be the one to make peace, when both of you—” he checked himself. His mother was biting her lip. Her eyes were wet. “Where is she?”

  “Where is she?” Mrs. Breen threw back at him. “Where she’s been the whole day—in her room. And she won’t let nobody in neither.”

  She didn’t answer to his knock. He tried the knob but there seemed to be something blocking the door. “Miriam!” he called. “Miriam, are you in there?” Nothing. Not a whisper. He went round to the window, but she’d blocked that too, the casement locked, some sort of material—was that the bedspread?—tacked up so that he couldn’t see inside. He felt a flash of irritation. 107 He pounded the glass with the flat of his hand, shouted her name again. People were watching him—two of the masons, on their way down the hill to the tavern, had paused by the garage to take in the spectacle, joined now by one of the housemaids swinging a pail of scraps for the hogs—and he cursed under his breath. Couldn’t he have a little privacy? Was that too much to ask? In the next moment he was at the door again and this time he put his shoulder to it and felt something give—a piece of furniture sliding back and the door cracking open just enough to give him a view of the darkened room.

  At first he could see nothing. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that she’d nailed a series of shadowy objects to the walls, reckless with the plaster and the wood trim too—another flash of irritation—and what were they? Drawings? “Miriam!” he called again, and when she didn’t answer he lunged at the door with everything he had till the barricade—a bureau with the desk and two chairs stacked atop it—spilled forward with a splintering crash that could have wakened the dead, and he was in the room. Which was empty. He flicked on the lamp and the walls sprang to life—drawings, yes, dozens of them, each a sketch of his head as seen from every conceivable angle, the features monumental and rugged, hair snaking beyond the margins and his orbits as deep as Beethoven’s, but with the eyes left eerily null—and what was this? Clothes heaped on the bed as if laid out for a rummage sale, hats and shoes and undergarments scattered across the floor, a smashed teacup, a spill of roofing nails and the hammer with which she’d crucified each of the drawings. Her slippers. Her robe. The vertical plane of the bathroom door.

  “Miriam? ”

  He pushed open the door, the first stirrings of alarm working through him like a faint electric current, and there she was. Propped up in the tub. Asleep. Or meditating, perhaps she was meditating. Seeking the cool, the dark—she’d had a headache, hadn’t she? That was it, that must have been it. “Miriam?” he tried again.

  Her eyes were shut fast, the lids faintly blue, lashes entwined, her head thrown back against the wall—and her mouth, her mouth was slung open over the dark canal of her throat. She was asleep, of course she was, asleep, that was all. His first thought was that she’d been bathing and dozed off, but she was dressed in her nightgown—the material sodden, painted to her limbs—and there was no more than an inch of water in the tub, softly gurgling round the plug. It was then—and it came as a shock, as if he’d been slapped—that he noticed the needle.

  A needle. A syringe. The sort of thing the doctor used for injections. It was clinging to the smooth white flesh of her upper thigh, out of place, wrong, deeply wrong, and all he could think of was a parasite, some bloated tick or leech fastened there where it didn’t belong. Without thinking, he wrapped his fingers round the thing—cold metal and glass—and tugged it gently from her flesh, a speck of blood there, a yellowish contusion round the wound, and laid it on the sink. “Wake up,” he said softly, taking her by the wrist. “Miriam, wake up.”

  She gave him nothing.

  He pulled her toward him, slapped her once, twice, and then again, till her eyes began to flutter, and where were the smelling salts? Did they have smelling salts? Her breath was rank, flowering in his face with the odor of the swamp plants, the cattails and pickerelweed and the other things that grew with their feet in the water of the pond. He was frightened, his thoughts charging one way and then the other. Should he call the physician? His mother? Mrs. Breen? But this was a private matter, wasn’t it? Between him and Miriam? Some mistake with h
er medicine, nothing to worry over, really, but shouldn’t she be in bed?

  He clasped her to him then and tried to lift her, dripping, from the tub, but she was surprisingly heavy, her limbs slippery, fish-cold, and it was a job to shift her weight and gather her up. Her head fell forward across his shoulder, her hair pressed wet to his cheek, and with a final sucking contortion she was in his arms and he was edging out the door and her lips were moving. “Frank,” she murmured, “what is it? What are you doing?”

  Something grabbed at his feet—one of her balled-up dresses—and he nearly stumbled.

  “Frank.” Her voice was stronger now, the voice he knew, Miriam’s voice, piqued and challenging. “Put me down. What are you thinking?”

  His lower back was on fire suddenly and he very nearly dropped her in that shambling half-hobbled moment, but he made it to the bed and let go of her even as she rolled away from him and the mattress gave with a long hissing groan.