The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “My brother?”

  “It’s all arranged. First thing in the morning, hours before Miriam or her spies are even out of bed, we’re taking you to the train—on a stretcher, if need be. I’ve reserved a compartment for us, and Vlada41 will meet us at the other end, in New York.”

  And so, like thieves, like refugees, like cowards, they stole away in the dark.

  At some unfathomable hour a pair of orderlies appeared with a stretcher, as promised, along with the nurse Frank had engaged to look after the baby. Olgivanna remembered waking to the shuffling of feet and the sudden glare of the lamp at her bedside. And to Frank. He was leaning over her, rumpled and worn from a night spent dozing in the straight-backed chair in the corner, and Svetlana was there too, standing awkwardly in the doorway with her suitcase and a new toy, looking somber. Or frightened, she looked frightened, the poor thing, uprooted yet again. Olgivanna held out her arms. “Darling, come here,” she whispered, her own voice sounding strange in her ears. Svetlana hesitated. She was going to be difficult, Olgivanna could see that. She patted the bed beside her. “Come on. It’s all right.”

  “Olya, it’s getting late,” Frank said.

  “Come on, Svet—it’s only me. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. Don’t worry.” Still nothing. “Do you not want to see your baby sister?”

  “No.”

  And somehow, there she was—Pussy—enfolded in the nurse’s arms, and who was this woman, this girl, thin-lipped and slouching, to whom Frank had entrusted their daughter? “Give her to me,” she demanded, and the girl looked to Frank and Frank nodded, and her daughter, already setting up a thin wail of distress, was handed over like a parcel from the grocery. “You see?” she said, holding up the baby for Svetlana. “You see how tiny she is? Her little fingers and toes? She is going to need her big sister to look after her—do you not want to look after her?”

  “No.”

  From Frank: “Olya.”

  “We are going to Uncle Vlada, honey, for Christmas. Christmas in New York—will that not be charming?”

  She knew her daughter. Knew her moods. The answer to this and all other questions posed at this hour in this place would be exclusively negative. The child didn’t even bother to respond. She just clamped her lips and looked away. Frank stepped in then and began giving orders—he was good at that—and the nurse took Iovanna back from her and the men helped her onto the stretcher and the corridor yawned and narrowed before her. There was the elevator, the night rearing over her, a breath of air that was like a taste of heaven compared to the medicated aridity of the hospital, and then they were at the station and in their compartment and Svetlana came to her to lay her head on her shoulder for a good cry and at some point the car lurched and they were moving, moving again.

  For Frank’s part, there was no turning back. Olya wasn’t well—you didn’t have to be a medical man to see that. She was a young woman, younger than either of his daughters, and yet as she lay there in the shifting compartment, the baby and Svetlana asleep beside her, he had a glimpse of the way she would look as the years fragmented and fell away, and it startled him. The softness had gone out of her face, replaced by the rigidity you saw in the very old, the faintest lines tracing the hard angles of her face, her color faded, her hair thin and lusterless. She was anemic. She was exhausted. Frightened. Upset. He’d been talking to her in a low voice over the rattle of the rails, trying to keep her spirits up as the baby fidgeted and Svetlana cried herself to sleep, but finally he realized she’d drifted off, her breathing harsh and catarrhal, a single globe of moisture caught like a jewel in her right nostril.

  He felt a stab of guilt.42 This was a mess and no two ways about it. He should never have moved her into Taliesin—not till Miriam’s hash was settled. He knew better. Knew from hard experience, and yet what had experience taught him? Nothing. He saw what he wanted and he took it. That was his nature. That was his right. And here she was, the object of his desire, pale and wasted and with a thin stripe of saliva painted across her cheek, wedged into a narrow railway berth with two needy children—a child herself—and no place to call home.

  There was a sudden flurry of conversation in the passage outside the door—a man’s voice, a woman’s, fraught with venereal undertones and the giddiness of travel—and when they’d passed, he glanced back at Olgivanna and felt a kind of impatience rising in him. What was the matter with her? Was she somehow frailer than he’d imagined? He didn’t remember Kitty’s birthings as being as hard as this—and she bore him six children.43

  But he was exhausted himself. The wheels clattered on the tracks and he felt his stomach sink. He realized he hadn’t eaten since the night before. He checked his watch. It was quarter past nine in the morning, the train rolling through open countryside now, and though things were desperate, things were terrible and getting worse, the sight of the neat farmhouses and the solid red barns with their quilts of hay and the firewood stacked outside the kitchen door cheered him. He thought he would get up and fetch the nurse to come look after the baby and then make his way to the dining car to put something on his stomach, eggs and flapjacks, a slice of ham, gravy, fried potatoes, but he lingered, watching over Olgivanna and the children as they drew in air and expelled it, one breath after another, in the soft descending rhythms of sleep.

  What he hadn’t told her, not yet, was that they couldn’t go home to Taliesin, even after their exile at her brother’s, because Miriam was on the attack like some sort of turbaned and bejeweled Harpy flapping through the air with her claws drawn and her jaws flung open in an otherworldly shriek of outrage, no quarter given or expected. Each day it was something new. She wasn’t content to harass a sick woman from her hospital bed. Oh, no, not Miriam. She went straight to the immigration authorities and compounded the mischief by filing a complaint to have Olgivanna deported as an undesirable alien. The affidavit named Olga as a foreign national who had come to Taliesin—to her home, Miriam’s home—under false pretexts, masquerading as a servant when in fact she was her husband’s “sweet-heart.” His inamorata. His whore.

  He felt his heart clench with hate. All he could think of was Miriam, how he’d let her come into his life when his guard was down, how foolish he’d been, how weak and deluded. His mood soured. The farms began to look uglier, less tidy, in need of paint and upkeep. For a long while he watched them loom and vanish amidst the barren skeletons of the trees and the frozen bogs and the shrubs dead to their roots. And he didn’t get up for breakfast or for coffee or the nurse or anything else, but just sat there till the fields ran continuous and everything beyond the windows became a blur.

  If the journey was a trial, arriving was worse. Queens was grim, a regular horror of a place, and Vlada’s apartment grimmer. But no official came knocking at the door, no agent from Immigration or newspaperman or spy of Miriam’s, and after the first few days Frank began to relax his guard. His lawyers had instructed him to lie low for a period, to travel, keep out of sight until matters could be arranged with the immigration authorities and the divorce negotiations concluded, and here he was, in exile in Queens, New York, frustrated and angry—and what was worse, Olgivanna showed no sign of improvement. She wasn’t eating. Her brow seemed warm to the touch. The baby clung to her, colicky and restive, draining her of what little vitality she had, and Svetlana threw one tantrum after another. And her skin—it was so pale it frightened him. All he could think of was the hide of a dogfish he’d once seen preserved in a jar of formalin, bleached round its folds and grinning its grin of death.

  And talk of boxes within boxes: the rooms were close, stifling. They stank of whatever Vlada’s wife was continually boiling up in a battered pot in the kitchen, borscht or bozbash or whatever it was, and it maddened him. Just to get away, to get out of the hermetic box of the apartment and do something—breathe, walk, think—he found himself taking the train into Manhattan each day with Vlada and wandering the streets, sketching, or slipping into the public library to write up his impres
sions of the city, all the while shielding his face with his scarf and wide-brimmed hat, striving for anonymity.44

  It was Vlada who suggested Puerto Rico. Olgivanna needed warmth, sun, the clean white sand and endless horizon—and Florida wouldn’t do. They could still track her down in Florida, but in Puerto Rico no one would know them, no one would care. Even better: Puerto Rico was an American protectorate and you didn’t need a passport to travel there. Vlada made the arrangements. Passage for two adults and two children—Mr. and Mrs. Frank Richardson and family—out of New York bound for San Juan. They were moving again—and he’d never acquired his sea legs, sick in his stomach all the way down, sicker than Olya—but each hour of each day the winter fell away behind them and the sun rose higher in the sky.

  They put up at the Coamo Inn,45 which featured hot-sulfur springs and endless plates of beans and rice and platanos graced with a skewer of marinated goat or pork, they bathed in the mornings and took long drives in the afternoons, and each day he joked and paraded up and down the patio in his bathing costume, keeping up the pretense that this was just what Olgivanna needed. Was she improving? Not visibly. Not that he could see. He hired a woman to look after the baby, had their meals brought to them in their rooms, read aloud to her and Svetlana at night. It was restful, almost like a vacation. But it wasn’t a vacation, it was exile, and they both knew it.

  Beneath the shimmering surface, beneath the glaze of the banana plants, the primavera aflame with blood-red blooms and the nocturnal perfume of the jasmine, the place was corrupt in the way of the tropics, deeply wanting, a reverse image of Wisconsin. At night the mosquitoes descended like a black rain. There were open sewers. Emaciated dogs skulked in the shadows and roaches the size of field mice clung to the ceilings and clattered beneath the bed. “We are living like the Gypsies, Frank,” Olgivanna kept telling him, something harsh in her tone he’d never registered before, the tan on her cheeks like rouge on a corpse, her limbs thin as the stalks of sugarcane greening in the fields, “and I cannot have one degree of peace until I am home where I belong. And Svetlana—what of Svetlana? She must have a proper life. She must have schooling—you can see that. And this is no country for her. It is a poor place. It saddens me to have to be here and see these degraded people in their rags.”

  “This is their home,” he countered, though he privately agreed with her. If only Puerto Rico could exist, like a kind of paradise, without the people. “This is the only thing they know.”

  Her voice was thick, a lashing of blunted consonants. “Yes, but I do not want to know it.”

  They lasted a month. On the final day, the day before they booked passage to New York and from there to Chicago, Madison and Spring Green, come what may, he was on his way back from the plaza when he was startled to see a man on horseback leaning forward to shout something unintelligible into the low casement windows of the hotel kitchen. He was very dark-skinned, this man—almost black—and for one crashing irremediable moment the image of Carleton46 came into his mind, Carleton as he would have been in middle age, and he pulled up short. There was a rising fecal odor. A pair of electric-green dragonflies settled in a puddle and chased away again. The man’s horse rocked in place, so twisted and starved it was like the ghost of a horse, its eyes vacant and its coat dulled with the dust of travel, and he saw now that the man had something cradled in one arm—a chicken bound up in a scrap of torn red cloth. “Gallina,” the man was shouting, “se vende una gallina. Muy barata.”

  There was the sound of clattering pans from the kitchen. No one responded.

  If it hadn’t been for the light, the way it etched the geometry of the near wall and sliced into the angles of the outbuilding as if to create something new altogether, something fluid and independent of concrete block and stucco, something created entirely by the sun in that moment, he would have moved on—he was in a hurry, arrangements to be made, suitcases to be packed, lawyers to be consulted and retained by wire and some sort of lunch served up for Olya and Svet—but he stayed, fascinated by the play of movement and shadow and the strangeness of the scene. It was then that one of the waiters from the hotel came hurtling out the door and began berating the man in a high strained voice. The man immediately slumped over in the saddle as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Barata,” he pleaded. “Barata.”

  “What is it?” Frank said, addressing the waiter. “What does he want?”

  The waiter was a round-faced man in a white jacket, sweating titanically round his soiled collar, and he’d been sweating since they arrived and would go on sweating after they’d left. “It’s nothing, Don Frank,” he said, giving an elaborate shrug. “He comes down from the mountains, that is all”—and he pointed a finger over the red-tiled roof to the hazy crags of the central cordillera, at least ten miles distant. Another shrug. He gave the man on horseback an embittered look. “To sell this chicken that has less meat on its bones than a pigeon, a sparrow even.”

  “But why? Why would he come all this way just to sell one chicken?”

  Both men fixed their eyes on him now.

  “Because he has nothing. Because he needs the money.”

  Suddenly he felt very dense. He stood there in the glare of the sun, picturing the one-room shack thrown together without benefit of blueprints, without nails or hammers or any tool but a worn machete, the porous roof, the rude furniture, no electricity, no water, no glass for the solitary window and not a single object of beauty anywhere in sight. “Tell him I will buy his chicken,” he said.

  “You? What do you want with it?”

  “Just tell him.”

  The money was exchanged, a few coins, the man’s hand fluttering delicately against his own. And then he had the thing in his grasp, the rag over its eyes, the feel of the withered reptilian feet against his knuckles—a pitiful thing, a runt, half the size of one of Taliesin’s birds—and immediately he tried to give it back, thrusting the warm bundle up across the sweated neck of the horse, but the man wouldn’t take it. He just held up his spanned fingers and open palm, then nodded and turned the horse back down the road.

  Early the next morning, before the sun had climbed up out of the sea to cut away the shadows and illuminate the shanties in the hills, Frank took Olgivanna and the children and caught the boat for home.

  So she had to endure another trip, reverse logic, running to instead of from, the sea mutating from a fragile turquoise to verdigris to a deep metallic gray as they steamed back into winter, Svetlana pestering her with her interminable questions—“Where’re we going, Mama? Uncle Vlada’s? Where’re we now, do you think? Can I have a sweet? ”—and then the thundering headache of the steel wheels pounding over the icebound rails all the way to Spring Green, Wisconsin, the Richardsons peregrinating as if it were their profession. Or fate. There was the car at the station. The familiar road. The river, the bridge, the lake. The long penstroke of the walls and the flourish of the roofs. Were they home? Were they really home?47

  At first she felt relief, the interior opening up to her with its familiar smells—brass polish, the wax Frank used on the woodwork, linseed oil, the sourness of the ash spread cold across the stones of the hearth all this time and a lingering hint of the charred remains beneath the floors—her bed, her things, the kitchen and its promise of homemade meals and bread and cakes and cookies, cookies like the ones she’d baked with Dione, Sylvia and Nobu, but by the time she rose the next morning, she could feel nothing but the heaviness of the place. Mrs. Taggertz reappeared to do the cooking; a skeleton staff moped round the corridors. They were burning green wood. Everything was out of place. She wanted to get up and take charge, but she was weak and ill and all the color seemed to have gone out of the world. And Frank—he wasn’t himself either, stealing around like a burglar in his own house, peering out the windows as if he expected a cordon of sheriffs, marshals and federal agents to come marching up the drive at any moment. What good were the windows, what good were the views, when all they did was make you feel na
ked?

  “You can’t be seen,” Frank told her the day after they’d arrived, “not till this is settled,” and immediately went off to consult with his lawyers.

  Then there came a morning in April when the sun edged up over the southern flank of the house to warm the stones of the courtyard and she moved a chair outside to sit beneath the awakening oaks and read to Svetlana. If her daughter couldn’t go to school—if she had to be kept out of sight too—then at least Olgivanna was determined to educate her in her own way. Each day there would be dance, art, music, readings from the great books in Frank’s library—the American poets, Wilhelm Meister, The Man Without a Country, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris—both of them improving their command of the spoken and written language. And Svetlana was very good about it, an angel—she really did seem to want to learn. Or maybe she was just bored, and who could blame her? She felt the tension too—they were all waiting for something indefinable, a point of release that seemed as if it would never come.

  The housekeeper had just brought them each a cup of hot chocolate. The grass was greening on the hill behind them and there were birds everywhere, their chirrups and catcalls dampening the eternal thump of construction from the far end of the house. Frank was down there somewhere, his shirtsleeves rolled up, banging away with Billy Weston and the others. She handed the book to Svetlana. “Now you read—here—the last stanza.”