The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “ ‘This is the poem of the air,’ ” Svetlana began in a soft aspirated voice, “ ‘Slowly in silent syllables recorded; / This is the secret of despair. / Long in its—’ ”

  “Yes,” she said. “Go on.”

  But Svetlana was no longer looking at the page. She was staring over her mother’s shoulder, her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth. Olgivanna turned to see a stranger with an oversized satchel striding up the drive as if he’d been invited, as if he belonged here, and her first thought was that he must be one of Frank’s lawyers, but what lawyer would wear a pair of trousers as tight as a high school sophomore’s? Or a polka-dot vest? Or go without a hat?

  “Olga,” he called out in a voice meant to be hearty and winning, a booster’s voice, his lips giving shape to an automatic smile, his right hand flapping over one shoulder in a simulacrum of greeting. Before she could rise from the chair, he was on them. “No need to get up”—he winked, shrugged, tugged at his sleeves—“I won’t be a minute.”

  She set down the teacup. Her hands went to her hair. And what was he—a salesman? A curiosity seeker? And how did he know her name?

  It all became clear in the next moment. He was digging into his satchel like some sort of deranged postman and she could see that he was trembling, his hands shaking, a twitch settling into his shoulders, until finally he produced a bundle of newspapers and laid them in her lap.

  “Name’s Wallace, from the Trib. You’ve seen these?”

  She looked to her daughter, but Svetlana gave her nothing. She could feel the color rise to her face, hot blood burning there with her shame, because that was what it was—shame. The newspapers bore dates from November through December—DEPORT OLGA? IT CANNOT BE DONE, WRIGHT ASSERTS—and then there was a more recent one, from February, the leaf turned down to a quarter-page photograph of herself, in a silk gown and her platinum filigree earrings and looking away from the lens as if she had something to hide, and under it the legend: ACCUSED. And, in smaller type: Olga Milanoff, to Whom Mrs. Frank Wright Charges Husband Fled.

  Frank had kept the papers from her. They would only upset her, he said. It was nothing, he said. It would blow over. It was nothing. When there she was, for all the world to see. And gloat over. Like some freak in a sideshow.

  “What we want,” the man was saying, “is your side of the story.”

  WRIGHT FLEES TO DODGE U.S. LAW, SAYS WIFE. Claims Architect Is with Russian Danseuse.

  He was chewing gum, his teeth working round the remnants of his smile. “Do you have anything to say? For the record?”

  CHAPTER 6 : MIRIAM AT THE GATES

  The windows were flung open wide to the sun, the curtains bowing with the sweet breeze coming in off the lake, and Miriam felt very settled, very content, as she sat at the escritoire the hotel had provided for her, writing. In the past week she’d gone through nearly a hundred sheets of fine mouldmade kid-finish paper, with deckled edges and matching envelopes, and had just that morning called down to the stationer’s to place her order for another hundred, these to be embossed with her initials: MMNW, Maude Miriam Noel Wright. Twice now she’d had to get up to rub hand crème over the second joint of her middle finger, where a callus had begun to develop as if she were some sort of grind, a nail-bitten secretary or bloodless law clerk who never saw the light of day, but she felt strong and her hand barely trembled over the paper. She’d had breakfast sent up to the room—coffee and a bun, nothing more—and then allowed the pravaz to take the tension out of her shoulders and free her hands for the day’s work.

  She was writing letters—angry, slanderous, denunciatory letters—and addressing them to anyone she could think of who might take an interest in her situation. She wrote to her husband’s creditors, to the Bank of Wisconsin and all his clients—past, present and prospective—to the newspapers, her lawyers, and to him, most of all to him. He was a scoundrel, a fraud, that was what she wanted the world to know, and she would be damned if she would live out of a suitcase like a—a carpetbagger—while he paraded around in luxury with his danseuse. Her bill had been owing now for more than two months and the people at the desk had begun to give her insolent looks—and that she should have to endure such looks, she, his lawful wife, was unconscionable. Especially in light of the fact that the Dane County Superior Court had ordered him to pay her attorneys’ fees and per diem expenses while the divorce was being contested and he most emphatically was not living up to his end of the bargain. What’s more, she wrote, she was being threatened with eviction if the account wasn’t settled, and where would she go then?

  She was in the middle of an urgent plea to the governor of Wisconsin, weighing a question of diction (should she use the term “blackguard” to describe her husband or did it sound too antiquated?; she wanted to call him a “heel,” because that was what he was, a heel and a son of a bitch, but then women of her class didn’t stoop to such language, not in letters to the governor, at any rate) when the telephone rang.

  Her attorney, Mr. Fake, was on the other end of the line. “Mrs. Wright, is that you?” He had a low, considered voice, deeply intimate, as if he’d been born to collusion.

  “Yes,” she returned, “I’m here,” and she couldn’t help adding a note of asperity. “And I’m doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. The looks I’m getting—”

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling. There’s been no movement on their side, none at all, we’re just simply deadlocked, and I think I may have a solution for you—”

  She held her breath. This was what she wanted to hear—tactics, movement, action, her forces gathering for the assault. “Yes?” she said.

  “There is simply no reason I can think of for you to have to continue living hand to mouth in some hotel when Taliesin remains community property. Taliesin is your rightful and legal home and I really do believe that if you were to move back in—”

  “Move back?” She was incensed at the thought of it, all those pastures reeking of dung, the dreary vistas opening up to yet more pastures mounded with dung, the yokels, the insects.

  “What I’m trying to say is that it might just force the issue.”

  “But he’s there. With her.”

  “Precisely.”

  All at once the image of Taliesin rose before her in such immediacy she might have been staring at a photograph. That yellow place on the hill—or of the hill, as Frank would say with all the pomposity of his ladies-of-the-club tones—that palace, that monument to himself. Oh, the idea warmed her. Taliesin wasn’t his to do with as he pleased—it belonged to both of them. Equally. That was what community property meant, the very definition of it. And if she’d been willing to allow him the use of it till the fair value of the estate was ascertained and they could make an equitable division of property, now she saw what a fool she’d been. How dare he try to exclude her when his prize breeding bitch was installed there, living in all the luxury he could afford her, sleeping in their bed, in their bedroom, commanding the place like some sort of upstart queen out of a Shakespeare play, Lady Macbeth herself?

  “All right,” she said, crossing her legs and leaning forward to reach for a cigarette, “and how do you propose I go about it?”

  A pause. Then the soft creeping tones, as smooth as kid leather: “Well, I’ve been thinking that you just might want to consider announcing a press conference.”

  They all gathered in the lobby like dogs early the next morning, dutiful dogs with their teeth sharpened and a smell of the meat wagon on the air, and she held herself erect, struggled briefly with her face—with her mouth and chin and the emotion welling up like a geyser there because this was her life, her very life she was fighting for—and let them all know how Frank Lloyd Wright had betrayed and abused her and how he was living in defiance of a court order with his foreign concubine in the house that was as much hers as his and how she was facing eviction from her modest rooms even as she stood there before them. “If my husband continues to defraud me, and I’m sor
ry to put it in such strong terms, but that’s what it amounts to”—she’d meant to pause here for dramatic effect, but now, in the heat of the moment, she rushed on instead—“I’m afraid I’ll have no resort but to sell off my jewelry, the prints we collected together in Japan, the jade necklace and earrings given to me as a keepsake by Baron Ōkura48 himself, my screens and shawls and the little inlaid rosewood tables that are practically the only things I have left of my home—just to pay my bills, my own meager upkeep, while he spares himself nothing.”

  Her eyes were luminous, moist. She couldn’t seem to feel her feet, though she must have been standing on them. She had a sudden vivid recollection of her school days, Mrs. Thompson’s elocution class, the air sleepy with the scent of magnolia and she driving home her point about Tennyson’s use of the heroic simile with such force that the entire class came back to life and Margaret Holloway, the most popular girl in the school, gave her a look of such undisguised admiration from the second row left that the glow of the moment had stayed with her all these years. “I don’t know,” she said finally, steadying herself, “that I won’t be thrown out into the street.” But was this the moment for the photograph? Yes, and she posed for the flash before delivering the kicker:49 that she was left with no choice but to return to her rightful home—and that she intended to do so that very day.

  “Mrs. Wright!” a reporter sang out, and she turned her eyes to him, a thin man in a gray suit with liverish eyes and hair that faded away from his brow in a pale blond crescent. “Can you give us some idea of your itinerary? ”

  They watched her, these hounds of the press, ravenous, while she put a hand to her bosom and let a little Southern molasses accumulate in the lower reaches of her voice, on familiar ground now, the lady in distress—and she was in distress, she was, and they ought to recognize it, the self-serving sons of bitches. “Oh, I just don’t know. I really am all but indigent, I’m afraid.” And then the little dig she couldn’t suppress: “My husband may be able to afford a fine motor or the price of a first-class rail ticket, but I really am just as poor as a church mouse.”

  Five minutes later, as Mr. Jackson led her to the elevator (Mr. Fake had had to excuse himself—he was in court that morning), the reporter caught up with her. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, nodding to Mr. Jackson, and she was thinking only of her pravaz, her nerves thoroughly jangled by the strain of the whole business, “but I was struck by what you had to say back there—you’ve had a pretty punk deal and no two ways about it—and I wondered if I might be able to help?”

  She paused to take a good look at him, his jacket open now to reveal a fawn vest stippled with polka dots, the tight trousers hiked up over his glaring tan boots, and how old was he—twenty-five, thirty? Mr. Jackson didn’t say a word. Mr. Jackson was a friend of the press, a very good friend. She decided to be bemused. “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “Well, listen—I’m Wallace, of the Trib? Mr. Jackson can vouch for me”—another nod for Jackson, which Jackson accepted and returned with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin—“and it just happens that me and my wife were planning on driving up to Baraboo this morning because her mother’s been having trouble with her feet and we’d be pleased if you’d—”

  “Sure,” Jackson said. “I don’t see why not.” He was staring at her now, calculating, and she didn’t especially like the look he was giving her. “What do you think, Mrs. Wright? It might be interesting if this fellow and his wife were able to help you out here, don’t you think?”

  “That’s right,” the reporter said. “Myra and I’d be more than happy to do anything we could. And Mr. Jackson can vouch for me, right, Harold? ”

  At least it was a sedan. At least there was that. The reporter drove, and his wife—pregnant with twins, it seemed, or maybe it was triplets—sat beside Miriam in the backseat while another man from the newspaper, whose name flew in and out of her head three or four times in the course of the morning and well into the afternoon, sat up front. He was the photographer, or so she gathered, and that was the only thing of significance about him. The roads, of course, were execrable, and the motorcar’s coils or springs or whatever they were didn’t seem to function in any capacity whatever so that for the entire drive she was thrown from one end of the seat to the other like a rag doll, and the wife—Myra—had to cling to her to keep from being flung out the window herself. Conversation was glacial. They passed through two thunderstorms, stopped twice at filling stations, once for sandwiches in Madison and once in the godforsaken precincts of Mazomanie, where she felt an urgent need to visit the washroom.

  All four of them got out of the car there—the pretense of Baraboo, if that was what it was, had long since been abandoned: they’d gone west out of Madison on a road she knew all too well and no one had a said a word about the presumptive mother and her podiatric crisis—and the two men had a good stretch and made a show of examining the tires while she and Myra used the facilities at the railroad depot. A brass plaque on the wall inside the door of the depot informed her that the village had been named for an Indian chief whose name, when translated into English, meant “Iron That Walks.” There were three people in the waiting room, one of whom—a farmwife in a kerchief—seemed to have some sort of animal partially concealed in a wicker basket at her feet.

  Miriam insisted that Myra use the facilities first—what a nightmare it must have been to be pregnant in that place, in that heat, in that car—and she stood there staring at the wall for what seemed an eternity while she listened to the trickle of water behind the closed door. It was June. Hot. Muggy. The season of bugs. And they were everywhere, crawling up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, beating round the ticket window as if it were the only place in the world they could breathe and exude their fluids and scramble atop one another so they could produce yet more bugs. In the distance—and maybe it was over Taliesin itself—there was a peal of thunder.

  When it was Miriam’s turn, she locked the door behind her, lit a cigarette and immediately extracted her kit from her purse. She needed something—but not too much, not her usual dose, just a modicum—to quiet her nerves. They were close now, no more than fifteen miles or so, and the thought of confronting Frank made her stomach sink. In one corner of her mind she saw him falling on his knees to beg her forgiveness, wooing her all over again, just the way it was in the beginning when he would have died for the touch of her, the lamps and candles lit and everything aglow with the presence of fine art and fine minds too, the little Russian sent packing, booted out the back door with her bags and her babies while the lord and lady of the house made tempestuous love to the keening of violins on the victrola—or to jazz, the jazz she adored and he was indifferent to. But in another corner—a corner that grew disproportionately till it filled all the rapidly expanding space inside her skull with pulsing clouds of color, the red of hate, the green of envy—she knew she would fly at him the minute she stepped through the door. She would . . . she would . . . She looked down and saw that her hands were clenched and the pravaz still lodged in her thigh, the skin uplifted round a single bright spot of blood.

  The remainder of the journey was something of a fog. There was a side trip to Dodgeville, the county seat, to file the writs Mr. Jackson had arranged for in advance—a peace warrant for Frank, and just so she wouldn’t feel left out, one for his little Russian on a morals complaint. She might have called the justice of the peace by the wrong name and she seemed to recall something about a dog, but it was all inconsequential: she’d filed the complaints and the sheriff had been summoned to see them acted upon. The road curved and dipped and curved again. There seemed to be geese, ducks and chickens everywhere. Things flapped at the windows. The engine droned.

  The conversation picked up as they got closer to Taliesin, that much she remembered, both men trying to get a rise out of her with questions about what she meant to do once they arrived and how she felt about her husband and about this dancer usurping her place, and one of them�
��the photographer, she thought it was—producing a flask of what he called “good Canadian whiskey”50 to take the edge off. “Here’s to Dutch courage,” somebody said, and the flask went round the car, the alcohol lodging like sand in her throat, and why was she so dry all of a sudden when everything around her was silvered and shimmering with the wet of the storm that blew over them in a burst and released the skies to a shattering sunstruck explosion of grace and eternal light? Why was that? And why did everything seem so much denser and richer than she’d ever imagined so that when the river flashed beneath them and the long low golden walls suddenly appeared as if they’d created themselves in that moment, just by her imagining them, she felt nothing but loss?

  “Here,” she said, “here, turn left. Now right. There, that’s the gate there.”

  What was odd—and it struck her immediately—was the confluence of automobiles collected at the gate, three, four, five of them, and a group of men in shabby suits stationed beside them. To a man, they wore their hats cocked back on their heads and to a man they were watching the progress of the sedan out of narrowed reptilian eyes, unmoving, unflinching, and she would have thought they were statues but for the faint blue traces of smoke rising from their cigarettes and cigars. It came to her then that these were newspapermen, gathered there to document her grand entrance—and that Mr. Jackson must have put them up to it. Publicity, that was his byword. And Mr. Fake’s too. Let the press do the work for us and you’ll see your husband come around smart enough. Her hands went to her hair, tucking the loose strands of it up under her green velvet turban, and as the car slowed to pull in at the gate she was busy with her compact and a fresh application of powder and lipstick.

  Only then did she look up. The gate, which normally stood open, had been pulled shut and barred with a conspicuous padlock she’d never seen before. Standing there in front of it was Billy Weston and two of the other smirking inbred local morons who would have starved to death a generation ago if Frank hadn’t paid them to hang about the place and look busy. She saw the trouble in Billy’s eyes when she stepped out of the car and the reporters all snapped to attention as if they’d been reanimated, flinging down their cigarettes and converging on her in unison.