The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  And suddenly she was moving, forcing her way into the bedroom even as the man in the tan overcoat snatched the blankets off Pussy and Pussy’s eyes flashed open on the ugly brutal slab of his face and she let out the first startled cry—he was the lawyer, Miriam’s lawyer, that was who he was, and for Olgivanna the realization was incendiary. She shoved him aside, actually shoved him, and in the next instant she had the baby pressed to her and she was the one who was shouting now. “You get out of here! You have no right! You stop this, this persecution!”

  But he wasn’t listening because he was already reeling back through the door, drunk with the imprimatur of authority, crying out in a towering voice, “Now, where’s the other one, where’s Hinzenberg’s kid?”

  The rest was chaos, Svetlana dragged in off the porch by some flat-faced goon, shocked out of her sleep and crying aloud in a series of ascending whoops, Pussy shrieking in counterpoint with all the shearing power of her developing lungs and Frank wrestling with the men at the door while the stenographer and cook looked on in horror and bewilderment. And worse: distaste. In all the confusion and the wrestling back and forth, the look Viola gave her came closest to breaking her down—and she wasn’t going to give way to tears, not now and not ever, because she was stronger than that. But here was this mild unremarkable woman who’d shared the house with them for six weeks now, day in and day out, their intimate, trusted and trusting, and her eyes showed nothing but contempt. It was as if she’d stepped on a snake while mopping the kitchen floor, taken hold of the broom and had it sprout teeth and bite her, and Olgivanna wanted to explain it all to her, tell her that they’d been forced to live like this, to lie and assume fictive personalities, to cower and hide like criminals when they were innocent, innocent of everything but persecution. Miriam, she wanted to shout, Miriam’s the criminal.

  But a man was there at her side and he was telling her that she had to come along—“No!” Frank roared. “Just me, just take me. Let them stay here, under guard if need be, but let them stay!”—and Svetlana broke free then and ran to her, screaming, and Olgivanna lost all control. Suddenly it was her voice and her voice alone that every person in that room was hearing. “Enough!” she shouted. “You men should be ashamed. Can you not see that you are terrifying this child—both these children?”

  The flat-faced one took a step back. The sheriff loosened his grip on Frank’s arm and Frank jerked it away, indignant, outraged. Both the children gasped for breath and the fire hissed and every man in the room looked down at his shoes.

  “Now,” she snapped as if she were shaking out a rug, “we will cooperate, but I want every one of you here to tell this child”—she swung Svetlana around to face them—“that everything is going to be all right. Well? Do you hear me? Is there a man in this room who does not have a little boy or girl at home right now? A niece? A nephew?” She glared at them. “Are you beasts?”

  There was a murmur, the rough voices muted, and then it was all right. The sheriff crossed the room to her, removed his hat to reveal a compressed tangle of sweat-soaked hair, and told her he was sorry and that if it was up to him he’d let her stay. “But you have to understand, ma’am, it’s my duty to serve the law and these warrants must be answered to.” His voice was soft, almost sweet, and for a moment she thought he was going to reach out and pat Svetlana’s head. “Now, we’ll give you time to gather your things and put aside some clothes for the kids, but they’re going to have to go into protective custody, you understand, at least till the morning.”

  Frank started back in then, his voice high and querulous—“Protective custody? Are you mad? Can’t you see these children need their mother? ”—and she saw the sheriff ’s face harden. It was no use. The mood of the room shifted back to animosity and they took Frank by the arm and then she and the children were in their coats and hats and the door opened on the night and the cold steps of the porch and the hot hard flash of the photographers’ cameras.63

  There was the night in prison, locked behind bars, a night without the children, without Frank—and they’d planned it this way, Miriam’s lawyer and the police and their accomplices in the press, to make the most of Frank’s suffering and humiliation, to bring him low—and then there was court and bail and a fresh assault of the cameras as they came down the steps of the courthouse in Minneapolis. She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t combed her hair or pressed her clothes or used a tube of lipstick or even brushed her teeth. The jail stank of the animal functions, of the communal toilet and the disinfectant they tried to cover it up with. The other inmates—drunks and prostitutes and morphine addicts, low people, uneducated, unwashed, ragtag and bobtail—moaned and gibbered through the night in a low hopeless drone and all she could think about was the children. Svetlana had been mortally frightened, clinging to her as the matron separated them, and the baby, alive to her sister’s distress, never stopped crying all the way down the long corridor and out of sight.

  “They’ll be all right,” the woman kept telling her, “I’ll be with them myself all night and I’m sure you’ll be out by tomorrow, all of you,” but they wouldn’t be all right, they’d never be all right, never again. How could they be? They’d been terrorized, brutalized, torn out of bed by strangers and locked away by strangers beyond any reason or justification that even an adult could begin to comprehend. “Mama, what’s happening?” Svetlana kept asking her as they wound along the dark roads in the police car, Frank reduced to a shadow in the vehicle ahead of them. “Mama, did Daddy Frank do something bad? Did you? Where are we going? What’s happening?”

  She had no answer for her—she could only hold her as the car lurched and the baby squirmed and sputtered and the headlights pulled them toward some final climactic panorama of debasement and disgrace—and she had no answer for the mob of reporters the next morning either. The arraignment was a public humiliation, no different in kind from what the Puritans had inflicted with their stocks and ducking stools, the whole procedure, from standing before the judge to the release on bail, a shame so deep she could barely breathe. When she passed through the courthouse doors and out into the daylight, she was disoriented. The flash blinded her. Her feet were unsteady. “Olga,” they shouted as if they knew her, as if they were her friends and intimates, as if they only wanted to help, crowding in on her en masse like some perverse scrummage. “Olga! Olga!” It was drizzling. The pavement shone. Frank had her by the arm and his lawyers were there, one on either side, trying to shield them both. “Olga! Olga! Will you give us a statement? Frank? Mr. Wright?”

  All she wanted was to hide herself away—she, the granddaughter of Marco Milanoff, Montenegro’s greatest general and patriot, daughter of Ivan Lazovich, chief justice of Montenegro, and Militza Milanoff, herself a general in the Montenegrin army, transformed into an outcast, a criminal, an adulteress—but Frank paused there on the steps in the rain to tell anyone who wanted to hear how abused he’d been and how contrived these charges were. She shrank. She died. And he talked on while the drizzle thickened and the pencils slipped across the page. She stared at the ground—“Olga! Olga!”—and he held tight to her even as he gestured with one arm and let his voice ride up and down the ladder, and then they were moving again, the reporters and a hundred or more hyenas with nothing better to do sweeping along in a train behind them.

  And where were they going? To a place with four walls and a friendly face, clean sheets, a bed with blankets to pull up over their heads for the duration? Some lightless cave a mile down in the earth where no one could get at them ever again? No. They were crossing the street to the municipal courthouse to answer the federal charges under the Mann Act because unbeknownst to them they’d been observed driving across the state line at La Crosse—by spies—which action indicated, to the dimness of the law, that Frank had coerced her to his will and that she was an accomplice in his depravity. When she realized what was happening—the spectacle, another flight of steps, another courtroom with another set of pale reproving faces—she felt her l
egs go weak. She couldn’t go on. She couldn’t endure it. The shame, the shame. Olga, Olga! But Frank held her up, the doors opened wide, the mob parted and she found herself in the temple of justice once again, heroic statuary rising up before her, fluted columns, marble floors, people turning to stare. Her footsteps echoed off the tiles. Boomed. Shouted out her guilt.

  Two men in dark suits intervened then, showing her into a side room off the main corridor despite Levi Bancroft’s puffing and hand-wringing—she saw a flag, a desk, half a dozen wooden chairs, but no judge, no spectators, no press—even as two others materialized to lead Frank off in the opposite direction. “Bear up,” he called over his shoulder, and he might have told her he loved her, but he was already gone. She clutched her bag to her. Shot a look at the windows and the dark varnished stain of the door at the far end of the room, and the sight of it, of that door, terrified her—it led to another cell, she was sure of it. “We’re federal agents, ma’am, and we have a few questions for you,” one of the men said, pulling out a chair for her. She held herself rigid while they sat heavily across from her. The one who’d spoken produced a cigarette case and offered it to her, but she wouldn’t look at it, wouldn’t move. There was the sound of a match striking, then the odor of tobacco, harsh and raw.

  For a long moment, none of them spoke. The room was dim, sterile, cold as an icebox. Here were these men, these strangers, who held her by force of compulsion, and they hadn’t even thought to turn on the lights or the radiator, and the idea of it, of their indifference, depressed her even further. She wanted her children. She wanted release. But the ritual must play itself out: they were federal agents and she was a fugitive, an undesirable alien, caught in a tangle of lies.

  The second man cleared his throat and said, “Let’s begin with your name. You are Olga Lazovich?”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes.” And then she bowed her head and in a very soft voice found herself telling them everything, telling them the truth and too much of the truth—“Puerto Rico? Do you mean to say you fled to Puerto Rico and then reentered the country without a visa?”—until it seemed as if she were bound up in her own chains and that nothing, no force of law or mercy or public opinion, could save her.

  Another night in the lockup. In the hoosegow. Isn’t that what they called it?

  Hoosegow64—she chanted it softly to herself through another sleepless night, frantic with worry and chewing over this absurd little degraded excuse of a two-syllable word as if it were a prayer. Hoosegow, hoosegow. It was cold. The single blanket was thin. She began to think she hated Frank—not Miriam, but Frank. Frank was the one who’d got her into this, Frank and Frank alone. Frank had destroyed her. Annihilated her. Brought her to the lowest level of the lowest seep of humanity. She pictured him in his cell somewhere in the other wing of the building, boasting, strutting, keeping up a face for his fellow convicts, the great man, the Master, even in his downfall. And then she began to think she hated herself. Because if she’d been stronger, if she’d resisted him—and Taliesin, the peace and beauty of it, the promise it held out of home, sanctuary, permanence—if she hadn’t gone to him on the recoil from Georgei, if she’d only waited, none of this would have happened.

  They woke her at dawn with a hard roll and a cup of coffee in a tin cup.

  They took her back to the courthouse.

  The cameras flashed.

  Flashed again.

  And then, to her amazement, though she expected the worst—prison, deportation, the loss of the children and Frank too—they set her and Frank free on surety of $15,000 each, supplied by Frank’s friends, who had rallied to him. Vlademar, after meeting at length with Frank and his attorneys,65 came to his senses and dropped the adultery complaint and the lawsuit as well. The sheriff of Sauk County was reportedly moving to release them from the charge of being fugitives from justice and the Mann Act charges were being reconsidered in light of the fact that Vlademar, who had furnished only sixty dollars that year toward child support, had stepped down, and it could be seen clearly that she and Frank were living as husband and wife and that Frank was providing for the children. This time there was a car waiting when they came down the courthouse steps. The children were in the backseat. The chauffeur slammed the door on the reporters and they were gone.

  One thing remained. And Frank started in on it the minute the car left the curb and wouldn’t let it go through the reunion with the children, through lunch and dinner and on into the night, his attorneys chiming in like parrots whenever they had the opportunity. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Frank kept saying till the sound of the phrase on his lips made her flinch as if she were being battered with a cudgel carved out of the worn remnants of the language, of English, the English language and all its laws and proprieties, and what was wrong with the woods, anyway? At least it was dark there. And deserted. “And”—with a look to whichever of the lawyers happened to be present—“while public sympathy has definitely swung in our favor, we do need to press our advantage. If Miriam can use the newspapers, so can we. Don’t you agree? Isn’t it time to tell our side of the story?”

  It was the day following their release. She was staying at the home of one of Frank’s friends, enjoined from leaving the state of Minnesota until all charges had been cleared. Her head ached, her stomach revolted. When she looked across the room, the intermediate distance seemed to blur and shift shape until nothing was recognizable. She thought of her mother, who’d been so fierce and uncompromising in battle that the Turks swore to bind her between two horses and tear the limbs from her body if they ever got hold of her. That was what she wanted now, two horses to tear her apart. It would be a joy compared to facing the press.

  “It won’t be a press conference, but just an interview. Right here. Right in this room. And with a single reporter. A female. What do you say?”

  She glanced past him to the depths of the room, palm fronds cut like the fingers of a monstrous grasping hand against the glow of the lamplight, the pattern of the Persian rug alternately dilating and shrinking away. She was so exhausted she could hardly form the reply in her head, let alone her throat. The lawyers—barely kempt and battle weary—leaned in. Frank went silent. “No,” she breathed.

  Frank had been seated beside her, solicitous, gently smoothing a hand over her forearm and wrist, but now he jumped up and began pacing the length of the rug. The light of the overhead lamp saturated his brow and seeped into his eyes so that they seemed like lights themselves, radiant, blistering. He was adamant. He was angry. And she knew what was coming, knew he was going to try to twist her to his point of view. “But all the filth, the lies Miriam’s spread—”

  Firmer now: “No.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “You must.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, absolutely yes.”

  And so she spent her third sleepless night in a row, this one in a bed the size of a tennis lawn, with a parade of pillows, a smell of lilac and a view down a tranquil moonlit avenue, all the while rehearsing what she would say, how she would explain herself, her family history, her nobility of purpose and the sanctity of her love for Frank and her children and Taliesin too. How she’d been wronged. Misrepresented at every turn by a vindictive and perhaps even mentally unstable woman. How everything that was pure had been willfully controverted so that good appeared evil and love was demeaned and envy elevated and all the rest. She made un-articulated speeches all night long, the words throbbing in her head till they wouldn’t stop and her eyes wouldn’t close and the light came hammering through the windows and she was still murmuring to herself through the breakfast she took alone in her room and her toilet and the long lingering sequence of combing out her hair, selecting a single strand of jet beads and dressing herself in an almost austere gown and shoes that were solid and respectable, last year’s shoes, shoes that would verify and underpin everything she had to say. She would right the record. She would defend herself. Make use of every high-flown phrase
and stirring sentiment she could muster. She was nothing low. She was high, higher than any of them.

  Still, when she walked into the room to see the solitary woman rising from the chair with her clenched face and painted nails and the pencil and pad she brandished like plated armor, all she could say was: “Please, can you—will you say that I am not a dancer?”

  CHAPTER 8 : VALE, MIRIAM

  Money was the problem. Cash. Spondulics. The means to pay for the necessities of life so that you didn’t have to live like some half-naked beggar in a loincloth on the streets of Calcutta. That was what she tried to impress upon Mr. Fake, because her husband—and he was still her husband—was most emphatically evading his obligations to her. He was vituperative. Mean. Petty. And he hadn’t paid out so much as a nickel for her upkeep since she’d filed the alienation of affection suit and what did he, Mr. Fake, expect her to subsist on? Wasn’t he her attorney? Wasn’t he being paid to look after her interests, to protect her from the vultures her husband employed? Did he realize that she’d been forced to move in with her daughter because the Southmoor had all but thrown her out in the street? And that the situation was intolerable? That she was ill, fatigued, depressed? That her son-in-law looked at her across the dining table as if she’d come to steal the bread from his mouth and that the room she’d been given was a repository of unwanted furniture and a broken bicycle and that it smelled of some deceased thing trapped in the walls?

  And what did Mr. Fake tell her? Settle. Settle now and get out while you can because public opinion had turned against her, and her husband’s friends66 were pulling strings to have all charges against him dismissed and the suit thrown out of court.