The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  The dishwater man cleared his throat. “Uh, Mrs. Borthwick,” he said, and he was shuffling the toe of his shoe on the carpet as if he was all nerves too, “I’m sorry to disturb you but you said to bring the new help around, and I—”

  She started—a quick jump of the shoulders and the blood flushing those scallop-shell ears—and it was as if they’d burst in on her in the bath or in her bed, and she swiveled round in the seat and dropped the heavy book to the floor with a dull reverberant thump he could feel all the way across the room through the soles of his shoes (which he’d wiped up as best he was able, though the shine was dead and gone, maybe forever). “Oh, yes,” she said, up on her feet now, smoothing down her dress, two white hands fluttering to her hair, “hello.” And then again: “Hello.” She paused, drew in a breath. “But how you startled me—I was so deep in my work . . .” Her smile swept all three of them like a lighthouse beacon until it landed on the dishwater man. “But, Billy Weston, how you do creep up on a body.”

  They stood at the edge of the carpet. No one moved. Then she laughed in a way that was loose and unbridled, almost flirtatious, and let her gaze fall first on Gertrude and then on him. He watched to see her smile fade, but it didn’t. “And you must be the new people.”

  He heard himself say, “Yes, ma’am,” but he wasn’t fully present, or not yet, anyway. He was trying to gauge her, mental arithmetic, trying to add the sum of her parts and reach some sort of accounting because she was a young woman, younger by a good measure than the architect with his big head of gray hair who’d expended a whole three minutes of his precious time questioning them about the island before he hired them on . . . but she was old too, a kind of chameleon, he saw that now in the light that leached in through the window and trembled along her cheekbone—old as his mother but with the face and figure of a girl yet to bear children. And that was another conundrum, because she had borne children, that’s what he’d heard—two of them, by another man altogether—and she was standing here in her pretty dress and her silky pinned-up hair as if she were something high when she was nothing more than common, common and worn-out and old.

  And what sort of comment was that, or question or whatever it was: You must be the new people? Who else would they be, standing there on the edge of her carpet, their black faces shining with sweat above the servants’ costumes she’d hung on a hook in the bathroom?

  “Well,” she said, “good,” and she took a step forward as if to see them better. “You must be Julius, then—”

  “Julian,” he corrected her.

  “Julian, yes. And you are—?” She’d turned to Gertrude and she was young again, graceful, sweet.

  Gertrude was bunching her lips. For a minute he thought she was going to curtsey. “Gertrude, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course, Gertrude.” The way she said it, the way she pronounced his wife’s name as if she’d taken it up like a pewter pin she’d found in the dirt and then polished it on her sleeve so it glowed like silver, made something seize in him. “And you’ll be cooking for us, then. You’ve seen the kitchen?”

  Gertrude nodded, then dropped her eyes.

  “You do understand that you’ll be expected to serve as many as ten to twelve people at meals, three times a day—Mr. Wright told you as much, I take it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “And that you’ll have to handle the meats and the produce and make use of what we’re growing here on the farm, as well as take on all the housekeeping, you and your husband, that is. Do you think you’re capable of all that?”

  “Oh, she’s capable, ma’am.” He was standing there at the edge of the rug as if it were a precipice—and for a second it was, waves crashing on the rocks below, gulls screaming in the void. He held himself absolutely rigid. “She may be young, but she’s the best cook in all of Bridgetown, a real paragon.”

  The mistress—and what should he call her, certainly not Mrs. Wright, because she wasn’t married, was she?—ignored him. Her eyes were the color of week-old cider with the green flecks of mold still floating on the top of it. They never left his wife’s face. “What sort of things do you like to cook, Gertrude—what do you specialize in?”

  He tried to answer for her but he barely got the first word out of his mouth before the woman cut him off. And still she wouldn’t look at him. “I want to hear from you, Gertrude. What do you cook?” A dip of the shoulders, a laugh. “Practically anything’d be better than what I’m capable of . . .”

  Monkey lips, monkey lips. Gertrude gave him a look, squared her shoulders and lifted her eyes. “Jug-jug, pepper pot, fish any way you like it. And conkies. I make conkies they famous all up down Baxter Road.”168

  He couldn’t help himself. “And white people’s food,” he blurted, “—she makes white people’s food too. Of course.”

  “Mash potato,” Gertrude sang out. “Ham hock and black-eye pea, pig he feet, bee’steak in de pan, frittah, dat sort t’ing.”

  And here he was, not five minutes into that house and that job of work, and he was hotter than any iron in any smithy’s shop in the whole godforsaken country—peasant talk, low ignorance and the smart of humiliation like a stingaree lashed across his face—and he couldn’t contain himself to save his life. “Hush,” he hissed, jerking his face to hers, every line knitted, “you just shut that, woman! You don’t talk like that. You don’t ever.” He was going to add, Is that the way I taught you?, his right hand, his slapping hand, trembling so hard he had to shove it in his pocket, but he caught himself. This wasn’t the place. But what place was it? Where was he?

  The dishwater man rotated his toe. Gertrude stared at the carpet. In his head, sailing high in quick blooming bursts, were the rockets people sent up arcing over the night-black void of the sea on Empire Day, pop-pop, pop-pop. And the mistress—Borthwick, Mrs. Borthwick, was that what the dishwater man had called her?—puffed herself up like a crapaud frog and let her voice rise two levels. “And, you,” she said, pinning him with her eyes while the words rattled like steel blades in her throat, “you will not talk to her in that tone of voice, not in my presence, not in this house.” There was a silence. The earth stopped dead, transfixed on its axis. “Is that understood?”

  He could have said anything, could have lost all he’d wanted and dreamed of right then and there and found himself back on that yellow-hairedtrain again, disgraced and disrespected, his poor black peasant Bajan wife crying on his shoulder, but all he said was, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Out beyond her, beyond the carpet and the bookcase and the lobster-trap chair and all the rest, the sun suddenly exploded through the clouds in a fiery pillar that silhouetted her like some unearthly being, and he saw that sun and that room and the look on her face and fought himself down. He could never be sure afterward but he might even have bowed his head in the way those people in the bushes bowed and ducked away into the shadows when Mr. Brighton or one of the gentlemen or ladies sitting there under their parasols looked out across the lawn. He might have bowed his head. And for what? For what?

  He watched her face, saw her arm rise and fall in a dismissive sweep as she ordered the dishwater man to take them off to the kitchen, and then they were moving, he and his wife, following the twitch of the dishwater man’s shoulders across the floor and out of the room. And what did she say, Mrs. Borthwick-Wright, Mrs. High-and-Mighty, in her voice of scorn? “Woman,” she spat, two syllables flung at his back as he retreated and all the while the rockets going off in his head, pop-pop, pop-pop.

  She took a dislike to him the minute she laid eyes on him, and she hated to admit it to herself, hated to admit any kind of prejudice, but there it was. It wasn’t his looks. He was a good-looking Negro, light-skinned, with proportional lips and deep chocolate eyes, of medium height, slim and self-contained. No, it was something in his demeanor, the way he held himself, rigid as a pole, as if he’d just been shocked with an electric wire and was waiting for his torturer to throw the switch and shock him again. And the way he looked at her with
a kind of cool insolence, as if she were the one applying for the job, as if she had to meet his expectations. She’d never seen anything quite like it, though admittedly her experience of Negroes was limited—she’d seen them in people’s homes serving at table and the like, and she’d encountered a handful of them when she was a librarian in Port Huron in the days before Edwin, but those Negroes were the ones she approved of, hard-working people educating themselves on their own time. Or at least trying.

  And yes, this one—Carleton, Julian Carleton—was well-spoken, as Frank had said, and he seemed intelligent, perhaps too intelligent for his own good, but that he attempted to speak for his wife, to take the words out of her mouth, bully her right there in his first interview in the house, simply infuriated her. She had half a mind to telegram to Frank and tell him to find her someone else because she was sending them right back to Chicago on the morning train, but she didn’t. She needed them, needed somebody, anybody, to get her out of the kitchen and back to Ellen Key and her studies and her writing—the life of the mind instead of the scrub brush and the washboard—and perhaps she was being hasty in her judgment. The wife—Gertrude—had seemed sweet and shy. And so young. If Carleton was twenty-five or thereabout, she must have been five years younger, a girl still, eager to please, with real kindness in her eyes—there was a moment there when she actually thought the girl was going to curtsey to her. Her features were regular, almost pretty but for the exaggerated lips, her skin so dark and exotic it seemed to drink up the light. And the way she spoke, with the broad open vowels and the tripping syncopated rhythm that flowed like a song, like a sweet tropical melody played out spontaneously just for her, was perfectly charming.

  But could she cook? That would be the test. If she could cook—and the husband serve the way Frank had assured her he could, serve at table and take up the household chores with some of the rigor that had held him frozen there on the carpet—then she was sure she’d be able to get over the awkwardness of that first impression. It was probably nothing, she told herself. He was uneasy, that was all. Trying to make a good impression. She couldn’t really blame him for that, could she?

  She settled back in her chair. Took up her book again. Before long, she was immersed in her work, the afternoon absorbed in the flow of her hand and the rush of sentiments crowding her mind, and if she thought of the new help at all it was in the silences. Somewhere, at the margins of her consciousness, she might have heard a door open and shut again, might have detected the smallest sounds drifting in from the kitchen—a drawer sliding out, a knife at the whetstone, water running in the sink—but it was the long intervals of silence that made her feel that the house was in good hands, nothing amiss, the routine establishing itself by increments from one tranquil moment to the next. She took her dinner privately that evening, out on the little screened-in porch overlooking the lake, and he set the table and served her properly, without any fuss or a single wasted word. And the food—vegetable soup, tomato salad, a steak the wife had rubbed with a combination of exotic spices that managed to be piquant and savory at the same time, cob corn, potatoes braised in the pan with rosemary from the garden and a dessert of custard flavored with vanilla bean and cinnamon—was better than anything she’d tasted since she’d come back from Europe. She took two glasses of wine with her meal and had a brandy afterward, and for the longest while she just sat there staring off into the distance while the ducks and geese settled in on the lake and the shadows deepened and the fireflies traced their punctuated patterns across the night.

  The next morning she went to the kitchen after breakfast (which had been equally delicious and just as thoughtfully prepared as the previous night’s dinner), thinking to praise the cook and encourage her too—perhaps even engage in a little small talk. She was curious. She wanted to hear what the girl had to say, listen to her opinions, discover something of her life and where she’d come from. Barbados. It sounded so exotic. And the way she talked—bee’steak, pig he feet—was like a tonic to her, sweet and refreshing. And different. Above all, different.

  She eased open the door, a little speech forming in her head—Gertrude, I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am—and stopped dead. The place had been transformed. Where before the room had been close and rancid with the must of last year’s bacon and drippings immemorial, a real farm kitchen, now the windows were thrust open onto the courtyard and there was a scent of that piquant spice, of fresh fruit and vanilla. And everything had been rearranged, the cluttered oak table gone, the pots sorted by size, the fry pans hanging from hooks over the stove and shining like jewels, every last plate and saucer and piece of cutlery washed and dried and tucked away in the cupboard and not a fly to be seen anywhere. Gertrude was down on her knees, polishing the brass handles of the stove, and Carleton, up on a stepladder, was scrubbing the ceiling—the ceiling!—with long sweeping strokes of his arms, as if he were dancing in place with an invisible partner. She didn’t know what to say. Both of them were aware of her—they had to be—but they gave no notice of it. They went on with what they were doing, utterly engrossed, and she stood there a moment, feeling like a stranger in her own house, until she softly pulled the door to and went on down the hall to her books.

  That evening, she had Diana Milquist and her husband, Alvin, to dinner and asked Frank’s draftsmen, Emil Brodelle and Herbert Fritz, if they would join them to round out the party. She’d struggled with her work through the morning and into the afternoon, unable to concentrate, her thoughts repeatedly drifting away from Ellen Key and the woman movement to the Barbadians in the kitchen, the wonder of them, the strangeness, Negroes in the house and who were they, what were they thinking, what sort of bond held their marriage together? Though she wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, the fact was that with Frank gone she was growing bored. She’d begun her book with a thrill of anticipation, in full command of her materials and with an outline so considered and thorough it had stretched to some thirty pages, and yet now that she’d progressed from her introduction through the opening chapters, a certain sameness had begun to creep into the writing—and worse, each sentence seemed to erect a wall against the next, so that she found herself manipulating phrases instead of ideas till all the freshness had gone out of the task.

  The irony wasn’t lost on her. Here she’d chafed against the burden of the housework and cooking, and now that the Carletons were in charge and she had all the time in the world to devote to herself she couldn’t seem to recapture her enthusiasm. But, of course, all writers—even Ellen Key—had to struggle through the dry spots, and she would persist, absolutely, there was no question about that, and she had Frank to look forward to. Frank always enlivened things. Day after tomorrow, that was when he said he’d be back, for a few days at least. And in a matter of weeks, Martha and John would be there with her and everything would be new again.

  If anything, the meal was even better than the previous night’s. She’d suggested a menu—roast chicken stuffed with cornbread, white biscuits and gravy, boiled ham, deviled eggs, potato salad and vegetables, sliced melon, perhaps a peach cobbler or blackberry pie—and Gertrude had played her own variations on it. Masterfully. And her husband had impressed everyone with the way he’d served at table, holding himself with the unassailable dignity you’d expect from the head waiter at the finest restaurant in Chicago or New York, attentive to the smallest needs, silently whisking one dish away even as the next was set down in its place. Herbert Fritz—just nineteen and living at home with his widowed mother before Frank brought him and Emil Brodelle out from Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively169—had obviously never experienced anything like it. He was on his best behavior, shooting a quick glance round the table each time he was served as if afraid someone would find him out and snatch the plate away, and he ate with a growing and barely concealed enthusiasm, compulsively bringing the napkin to his lips beneath the trace of mustache he was straining to cultivate. “This is simply delicious,” he kept saying throughout the meal, f
irst to himself and then to the table at large. “Extraordinary. Really extraordinary. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted—”

  “Ever?” Brodelle put in. Emil was just thirty, but he liked to think of himself as a man of experience—he tended to lord it above the others when Frank was absent, and she could hardly blame him. There wasn’t much for him out here in the country, apart from a trip to the tavern or a solemn horseback ride along the dusty roads. He had a ready wit and a range of learning rare among draftsmen, who tended to be narrowly focused and—well, to her mind at any rate—dull. There was a moment of silence. When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, he went on. “Aren’t you afraid that comment just might possibly be construed as an implied criticism of our hostess”—and here he smiled at her—“who’s done such a heroic job in the kitchen ever since the last—not a whit lamented—chef de cuisine left us?”

  The boy ducked his head. When he glanced up at her, he was blushing. “I didn’t mean—I was only—”

  And it was all right. Everyone laughed. Except Carleton, of course, who remained in character, hovering against the wall like a revenant in his white jacket.

  “Yes,” she said, laughing still, “I know what you mean. Our new cook is such a paragon”—she was conscious of using Carleton’s term, wondering vaguely if it would please him—“I’m afraid we can all look forward to putting on weight up here at Taliesin.” She raised her glass. “Compliments to the chef!” she said, and everyone, even Alvin, whose profession seemed to have made him dubious about all things oral, lifted a glass in homage. She felt expansive, contented. “Well,” she said, setting down the empty glass, “is anyone ready for dessert?”