The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  She’d canceled her kindergarten. Kept her own children out of school to spare them—and that was the cruelest thing. To think that her children had to be sullied in this way was intolerable—how could he have done this to them? How could he have been so selfish? Frances was in tears—the whole class was reciting “Hiawatha” and the teacher had warned that each of them, no matter how shy or reluctant, had to be present and have his or her lines committed to memory or let the whole group down. “But, Mama, I have to go,” she kept insisting. “I have to be Minnehaha. And, and”—she broke down, twelve years old and sobbing her heart out, “Roger McKendrick is Pau-Puk-Keewis!” Catherine’s life was disrupted. And John’s and David’s too, the school abuzz with whispers, and she could picture it all, the cruelty of youth, conversations dying as they entered the room, fingers pointing, eyes snatching at them . . .

  But she had to put those thoughts strictly out of mind because the reporters were gathering downstairs and she wouldn’t fall into their trap, she promised herself that. They wanted scandal, they wanted the vituperative housewife, the madwoman scene, but she wasn’t going to give it to them. She combed out her hair—and it was her glory still, the color of a new copper penny and without a single streak of gray to tarnish it—and dressed herself in one of the straight-lined gowns with the Dutch collar he’d designed for her, the blue one, to complement her eyes. It was his dress, his mark on her, and she would wear it proudly, modestly, and answer their questions without bitterness or irony. He was her husband and she would defend him, no matter what it cost her.

  The bell—the infernal bell—rang and rang again while she dressed and it kept on ringing until Reverend Kehoe came to knock softly at the bedroom door. He’d been kind enough to offer his services as intermediary, greeting the reporters at the front door and leading them austerely down the hallway and into the playroom, the largest public space in the house and its domestic heart.149 She’d decided on facing them here, rather than the living room or Frank’s studio—it was a playroom, after all, devoted to family and built for the children by their loving father, who was no philanderer, no deserter, but a soul led astray by the forces of temptation. Though she was sick at heart and sick in her stomach too—she’d brought up her breakfast not an hour ago—that was the line she was going to take.

  She pulled back the door and the reverend stood aside for her. “They’re ready for you,” he said, his eyes flaring with conviction in the darkness of the hall even as the clerical collar cut a ghostly slash beneath his chin. He was the father of eight, deeply pious, rigid as iron. She’d sat through his dull droning sermons over a decade of Sundays as he picked away at the fine points of biblical exegesis, gave to his charities, attended various stifling teas and bake sales at his behest—or his wife’s—and now he was here to repay her. He was a minister of God and he was going to stand by her side throughout this ordeal, because she had no husband to support her, not any longer. Was this the way it was going to be, living like a widow the rest of her days? Or would Frank tire of Mamah and come back to her? She had a fleeting vision of him bent over a plate of dumplings in some Prussian palace with bear rugs on the floors and stags’ heads arrayed over the fireplace, Mamah sipping champagne from a crystal flute and throwing her chin back to laugh her rippling carefree laugh that was calculated to freeze every woman to the core and make every man turn his head.

  “Are you quite all right, Catherine? Are you prepared for this?”

  “Yes,” she said, so softly she wasn’t sure if he’d heard her.

  “Because we can cancel it. Just say the word and I’ll send them all home.”

  But she had to go through with it, had to do what she could to meliorate the situation, put an end to the rumors and speculation—for her children’s sake and her own too. And for Frank’s. The children needed to go back to school. She needed to go about her business. And though she felt like an outcast, felt as if she were walking into a public stoning and wanted to be anyplace else in the world, she told him no and strode into that room with her spine straight and her head held high.150

  “Mrs. Wright!” one of them called out, but the reverend silenced him with a glare and she wouldn’t look at them, so many of them, utter strangers gathered here in the inner sanctum of her house with the sole purpose of destroying her and her family, and they were hateful to her, no better than murderers, all of them. She took a minute to compose herself—whiskers, all she saw was whiskers, a rolling sea of facial hair—and in a clear unflagging voice began reading from the statement she’d spent the better part of the past two days composing.

  “My heart is with my husband now,” she began. “He will come back as soon as he can. I have a faith in Frank Lloyd Wright that passeth understanding, perhaps, but I know him as no one else knows him. In this instance he is as innocent of wrongdoing as I am.” Was her heart slamming at her ribs like a spoon run round the bottom of a pot? Were they all, to a man, giving her looks of incredulity, distrust even? It didn’t matter. Because these were her words and they would report them, that was what they were there for, that was their purpose, their function in life—to report. They’d reported the dirt gleefully enough and now they could report the sweeping clean of it too.

  The room was very quiet. One man tamped his pipe against the palm of his hand and made as if to rise and dispose of the ashes in the fireplace, but thought better of it. She glanced to the windows, wishing she could float up across the room and escape like a vapor, but they were shut and locked, dense with a strange trembling light, as if a biblical flood had in-undated Oak Park while she’d been speaking, the silent waters seeping in till they were all of them sunk here forever. Perhaps it was that thought—the thought of water abounding—that made her realize how thirsty she suddenly was. She swallowed involuntarily, swallowed everything, fear, hope, shame, and went on.

  She talked about Frank’s struggles as a young architect who’d come to Chicago with nothing and become the great man he was through hard work and application, about how his present predicament was simply another bump along the road, one he was fighting to overcome with all the fierceness of his will. “Frank Wright has never deceived me in all his life,” she said, and believed it too, at least in the grip of the moment. “He is honest in everything he does. He is the soul of honor.”

  There was a silence. She could see that they were all trying to digest this last bit of information, their faces strained and flummoxed. And then they started in with their questions, Reverend Kehoe recognizing first one and then another. “Are you planning to start divorce proceedings?” a man in front wanted to know, and she answered him spontaneously, passionately, with real conviction, as if she’d become a convert in the course of these past ten minutes and had never in her life had an untoward thought for her husband. “Whatever I am as a woman,” she averred, “aside from my good birth, I owe to the example of my husband. I do not hesitate to confess it. Is it likely then that I should want to commence court action?” And she assured them that he’d be back once he was able to master himself and win the battle he was now heroically fighting on her behalf and on behalf of his children. And that when he returned—and this she truly believed, the passion of the moment aside—all would be as it had been before.

  “But what of Mrs. Cheney?” a rangy insolent young man in the rear wanted to know, and who was he? Mr. Adler. The one who’d broken the story and caught her unawares in her own house. Well, she wouldn’t be caught twice, that was for certain.

  “Yes, what of her?”

  “When he comes back—your husband, that is—how will she fit into the picture?”

  Here it was: the moment of truth. She could see them all take in a breath. There was a collective flipping back of note pages, a tightening grip on the stubs of pencils. This was what they’d come for.

  Mamah, showy Mamah, with her dance hall laugh and high tight girlish figure, rose up and tripped through her consciousness, and she very nearly slipped up, but she didn’t. “With re
gard to Mrs. Cheney,” she said, and Reverend Kehoe gave her a sharp glance, which she ignored, “I have striven to put her out of my thoughts. It is simply a force against which we have had to contend. I never felt I breathed the same air with her. It was simply a case of a vampire—you have heard of such things?”

  They had. Of course they had. They made their living off of them, scoured the alleys and brothels and the dirtiest, lowliest dens to dig them up and show them in the light of day—for profit. For a good story. And here it was, as good a story as they were going to get: Frank was innocent of anything more than falling under the spell of a vamp, and she, Catherine, Kitty, his wife, stood behind him with all her heart.

  For all that, though, she’d been abandoned, and she knew it. Frank didn’t write her. Didn’t cable or communicate in any way, though he must have known about the newspapers, must have known the position she’d been put in—but apparently she was a stranger to him now, worse than a stranger, because he wrote strangers all the time on one matter of business or another, bartering his precious prints or ordering so many custom-made suits or hats or board feet of cypress or a new saddle for the horse he couldn’t ride because he was away in Europe. What had she done to deserve such treatment? Such disdain? And this silence—above all, this maddening silence?

  It was just after Christmas when he did finally write—to Lloyd, begging him to come over to Europe and help him work on the drawings for his portfolio—and Lloyd came directly to her because he was dutiful and loyal and took her side (all the children did, and Frank, when he returned to them, would just have to face the consequences of that). At first she was opposed to the idea. Outraged, in fact. Frank had run out on her and now he wanted to take her eldest son away from her too? What next, ship the whole family to Germany or Italy or wherever he was and install Mamah Cheney as their mother in her stead? No, she told him, absolutely not, and she spent a dismal afternoon in bed, alternately sobbing into the pillow and staring at the ceiling, feeling as lost and desolate as she ever had in her life. She might have stayed there the rest of the week if Llewellyn hadn’t come to the door dragging one of his battered toys behind him and asking her in one breath why she was so sad and informing her in the next that he was hungry. “Mama, will dinner be ready soon?” he asked her, and he was Frank entirely, not a trace of Tobin in him, Frank’s image exactly. “Because I’m hungry. I want a piece of cake. Can I have a piece of cake?”

  After a while—dinner helped settle her, seeing the children gathered round the table chattering on about the events of their own lives, lives that had nothing to do with marital discord and the empty place at the head of the table—she began to see things in a different light. This was a positive sign, wasn’t it? At least Frank was reaching out—he must have been missing his family as much as they were missing him, their first Christmas apart, the house cheerless without him, every gift and song a sham, every ornament hung on the tree weighted with absence. Lloyd was nineteen, the age Frank was when he first apprenticed as an architect, and this would be his chance for employment, advancement, an association with his father and an opportunity to see the world—she couldn’t deny him that.151 And another thought occurred to her too, and if it was purely selfish, who could blame her? Lloyd would be her spy. He would bridge the silence, become her ears and eyes, shrink the gulf that lay between her and Frank, give her reason to hope again because Mamah was nothing, a fancy and nothing more, and he would be coming home, she knew he would. And Lloyd—how could he resist him, his own son?—would be the one to bring him back.

  Lloyd left in mid-January, on a day so bleak and gray the sky might have been the lid of a coffin for all the light that shone through. How the newspapers found out about it she would never know, but there was a reporter waiting for them at the Oak Park station, insinuating himself between her and her son, Just a few questions if you don’t mind. Well, she did mind, of course she did, and so did the children, standing there on the platform looking stricken while she dabbed at her eyes and Lloyd sagged under the weight of his suitcases. She told him to wire her when he got to New York and then again when he reached Florence, because that was where Frank was apparently, basking under the Italian sun with his mistress while his family shivered through a thankless Chicago winter.

  The article in the following day’s paper—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S SON MAY REPAIR FAMILY BREACH; Boy Sails for Italy Today at Request of Father, Who Eloped with Mrs. Edwin Cheney—was one more intrusion, yet another humiliation in an ongoing series. She felt dirty. Felt as if she were the guilty one. And what would that be like, to take another man, feel him between her legs, his lips at her throat, her breasts? She couldn’t imagine. As hard as she tried to picture it, she could imagine only Frank, her husband, the only man she’d ever known. But then she thought of him with Mamah, and the whole scene dissolved in shame. She couldn’t face her neighbors, couldn’t bear the thought of encountering them on the street or at church or the grocery, of seeing the way they fabricated their pitying faces or shifted their eyes away from her as if she were contaminated, and so she stopped going out.

  Very gradually, as the weeks and months began to accumulate, she found herself adjusting to his absence. Spring crept softly into the trees, the days warming and the sun painting stripes across the lawn, and she went out and turned over her flower garden like any other widow or spinster or deserted woman—and there must have been thousands of them out there somewhere, legions, a whole army, only not in Oak Park, not in Saints’ Rest where every woman had a man on her arm and every pew was filled with the upright and the true—and then it was June and the children matriculated and the long high-crowned days of summer settled in. She had regular letters from Lloyd, but even he seemed distant to her now, someone she’d known in a previous life. Like Frank. Who was living in Fiesole with his son and a hired draftsman, working steadily on converting his designs to the format required by the publisher, while Mamah had stayed on in Berlin, teaching English at a school there. Could it be that he’d tired of her already? She wouldn’t let herself hope because before she knew it, it was fall again, the children returned to school and her husband gone out of her life for nearly a year now. A year. A year entire. And how many years did anyone have, any couple, that they could be squandered like that?

  She wouldn’t hope, wouldn’t believe, but here came the letter from her son to say that Frank was coming home, alone, first to New York and then to Chicago and the house he’d built in Oak Park for her and the children, his children, his and hers. He was coming home. He was already on his way. He’d be back before the leaves changed and the frost rimed the lawn. She had to catch her breath—the frost had already built up inside of her, ice, a rigid wall of it, and the letter, two thin sheets of paper, melted it in a rush that swept everything away before it, the sweetest abstersion. Home. He was coming home. And when he did arrive, finally, in the automobile of one of his clients who tried to hide his face for shame and wouldn’t get out of the car,152 he strode up the walk as if he’d never been away and the children rushed to him, Llewellyn clinging to his waist and Frances dancing in his arms as the reporters scribbled on their ragged sheets and she held her smile till it burned.

  If she had any illusions they were soon crushed, because once he was out of sight of the reporters he barely glanced at her, and after dinner—their first family dinner in a year—he set himself up to sleep in the studio. Not in her bed—not their bed—but the studio. She’d thought about that for a long while, about the sleeping arrangements, because she wasn’t just going to roll over and let him have his way with her after taking that slut to his bed—she was going to give him a good piece of her mind, a real verbal thrashing, and it would take time to heal the wounds, of course it would—but this was her husband, the man she loved, and in time there would be reconciliation, tenderness, forgiveness. She foresaw taking him to her, the old Frank, and he’d be contrite, needy—he’d beg her, beg for it. But she was delusional, wasn’t she? He wasn’t the old Fra
nk and never would be. He was like an enemy combatant, cold as death in the winter, and if he stayed under her roof it was for show only. And while the newspapers crowed out their headlines—WRIGHT RETURNS TO OAK PARK WIFE, Family Welcomes Architect Who Went to Europe with Neighbor’s Spouse—it was all an imposture. He used the children as a buffer, wouldn’t look her in the eye. And every time she tried to dig deeper, assay the ground, look into his face to see where she stood, he’d jump up and leave the room.

  There came a night a week into it when the first cold spell blew down out of Canada and they all sat round the hearth after dinner to listen to his fine voice as he spun out one story after another, now rhapsodizing the play of the morning light on the olive trees at Fiesole or describing the way the fishermen flung their nets into the waves for sardines at Piombino, now breaking into song and making up a nursery rhyme on the spot for Llewellyn. She never took her eyes from him. She smiled a false smile, laughed for the sake of the children, but the look of him—the mobile face, the easy grin, the posturing of a confidence man, utterly at his ease, unrepentant, murderous in his intent—infuriated her. She would have it out with him. She was determined. And she wasn’t going to leave the room, not even to put Llewellyn to bed, until she caught him alone.