The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Two months. A gap in the calendar. Slow minutes, slower hours.

  Each day was a replica of the last, but she was never bored. The everlasting tranquility of the saints came to dwell in her and she lived as if she were floating free out over the earth in some aeroplane or dirigible—or no, on her own fledged wings. Still, there was the impenetrability of the language, the harshness and abruptness of it, nothing at all like the silken play of French. And the fish, the eternal fish, their opaque eyes staring up at her out of the multiplicity of the days, their sliced flesh raw as a wound, their tails, their lips, their appendages. And the mud. And the rain. Two months. She was ready for a change.

  And so when, one evening after her bath, the maid’s soft swishing footsteps stirred on the wooden planks of the anteroom, followed by a heavier tread, a man’s tread, she sat up, fully alert. And when the shoji slid back with a soft click and he stood there grinning in the doorway, she was already on her feet, already moving across the tatami to him, her arms rising of their own volition to pull him to her. “Miriam,” he said, as the maid ducked away like the shadow of a bird and she fell into his arms, her blood surging so violently she was afraid she was going to crush him. But oh, the smell of him! The touch of his lips at her throat! “Frank,” she cried. “Oh, Frank, Frank, Frank.”

  They stayed on there together for five days. She showed him the trails on the hillside, the temple, the shops, pointed out the little yellow birds and the funny old man at the tobacconist’s who’d cut a perfect pie slice out of his conical hat so he could see the sky above him. Frank found a trove of prints in an out-of-the-way shop even the Tokyo dealers didn’t seem to know about, haggling over a dozen rare specimens, including at least one he immediately inaugurated into the pantheon of his favorites—it was a Shunshō, very colorful, dating from 1777, of the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V in a red robe. When the money changed hands, he looked as if he wanted to get up and caper round the room, but she held him back because he had to save face for the dealer and his children and everyone else who came out to stare as they all but minced up the street, arm in arm.

  They bathed together. Sat out in their kosode in the evening and watched the sun plunge into the hills. They ate and laughed and made the futon rock on the tatami as if it were a creaking four-poster under the weight of the newest newlyweds in the oldest inn in Wisconsin. And when they left to go back to Tokyo—together—she had a shining promise to hold out before her, rarer and more beautiful than all the prints in the world: Kitty had relented after all these years and they were going to be married.

  Just as soon as possible.

  Three years later, as she sat fanning herself in the shade of an avocado tree in the back garden of Leora’s little Spanish villa in Santa Monica, she was still waiting. Frank had been true to his word, she couldn’t fault him there—or yes, she could, because he’d dragged his feet through every conceivable delay and evasion till she thought she was going to die unwed like some sad deluded cast-off little strumpet in a morality play. But at least he was free now, at least he’d seen to that. The divorce had been granted back in November and all that remained was to wait out the twelve-month probationary period before Frank could remarry, and the clock was ticking down on that too—in just over two and a half months she would be Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright.

  “What are you going to wear? For the wedding, I mean?” Leora tipped the ash from her cigarette against the lip of the urn Miriam had brought her from Japan and then looked away, as if they’d been discussing the length of the grass or the color of the drapes in the guesthouse. She was in her bathing costume, a blue woolen suit with a ruffled white skirt, her wet hair bound up in a towel, and she idly stretched her legs and flexed her toes to admire her pretty feet and freshly painted toenails. “You don’t still have—? ”

  Miriam let out a laugh. “Lord, no. God, it’s been so long. I was just a girl then. A child.” She smiled at the memory. “No, I envision a small private ceremony, something unconventional, spiritual—midnight, maybe.”

  “Midnight? Well, I guess that would be unconventional. People will think—”

  “That’s just it—we don’t care what people think. And I don’t want the press there. You know what a nuisance the newspapers have been.”

  Leora didn’t have anything to say to that. She set her legs back down on the wooden slats of the chaise, lifted her drink from the table. The wind—some sort of Californian sirocco, dry as dust—chased a scatter of spade-shaped avocado leaves across the patio and into the pool. She let out a sigh. “At least you don’t have to worry about the mother,” she said.

  The old dragon’s face rose up briefly in Miriam’s consciousness—Don’t you dare call me by my given name: I’m Mrs. Wright to you and don’t you ever forget it—like a lump of driftwood bobbing in the murk of the Wolf River. “Yes,” she said, “and thank God for small mercies.”

  Of course, now that the war had been won, she could be facetious about it, not that she’d ever disrespect the dead. But there was a time when it was no laughing matter. Taliesin had always been a trial to her, but when they came home from Japan for good134 and Frank insisted on dragging her all the way across America to play at being the country grandee, his mother was entrenched there, undisputed mistress of the house, and she wasn’t about to give an inch. From the minute they arrived, the old lady had started in, carping about her accent, her mannerisms, her dress, contradicting everything she said out of pure spite. If she said she’d like to open the windows to get a breath of air, the old dragon practically nailed them shut. Mention the menu—hadn’t anyone ever heard of a salad?—and she’d have the cook boil the lettuce. If Miriam wanted Frank to take her to Chicago or out to a restaurant or even into Spring Green to watch the dust settle in the street, the old lady suddenly developed the flu or her sciatica flared up and if her boy wasn’t there to cluck his tongue over her she’d just about curl up and die. It was as if they’d never left. It was 1916 all over again.

  And Miriam wouldn’t tolerate it. She told Frank that point-blank. But this time she wasn’t going to lie up in her room like some dog he’d abused—oh, no, she’d had enough. She directed Billy Weston to bring the car around and take her into Spring Green, where she was going to put up at the hotel until Frank could give her an answer to the question she’d put to him back then—“Who’s it going to be: her or me?”—and hang the expense, because hitting him in the pocketbook was the only thing he could seem to understand. The mama’s boy. The waffler. And before she left, with the car standing in the drive and the motor running and Frank wringing his hands in the studio or out in the stable or wherever he was, she marched right into the old lady’s room to give her a piece of her mind.

  It was mid-afternoon, hotter than the front porch of the devil’s place down in Hades, and she took her by surprise, startling Anna up out of a nap in the armchair next to the bed. There were flies at the windows. A smell of camphor, ointment. Medicine bottles crowded the table beside her. Two of Frank’s prints were propped up on the bureau, gifts he’d brought back for her. The old lady’s head snapped up. “You get out of here,” she growled, her voice caught low in her throat.

  Miriam dispensed with the preliminaries, because this was it, the battle joined at long last. “You know you’re destroying your son’s last chance for happiness, don’t you?” she demanded.

  Anna made a shooing motion with the back of her hand and tried to push herself up out of the chair but fell back again. “I won’t talk to you. You’re a cheap woman. A tramp.”

  “You will. You will talk to me. Because Frank is going to marry me whether you like it or not.”

  A glare. A tightening of the mouth, as if a noose had been pulled tight. “Not while I’m alive.”

  She loomed over the woman, so full of hate and rage and frustration it was all she could do to stop from snatching her up out of the chair and shaking her like a bundle of rags. The tremor ran up her spine and shivered the back of her neck. She felt as i
f she were going to faint but she fought it. She had to. Had to have this out once and for all. “Then you’ll just have to die,” she said. “Frank and I are engaged, do you understand that? Engaged to be married. As soon as the divorce is final—the very day, I promise you—I’ll be Mrs. Wright and I’ll be giving the orders around here. And I won’t let you or anyone else stand in my way.”

  There was more. The old lady crying out like a parched peahen, struggling to get up out of the chair and nobody there to hear or help her either and Miriam acquainting her with the truth in all its unvarnished detail. Then it was the hotel and Frank running back and forth between the two of them, the biggest crisis of his life, the days burning into the sweated nights, and within the month Anna was gone and Miriam had Taliesin all to herself, triumphant at last.135

  And now, sitting beneath the avocado tree in Leora’s garden while Frank oversaw the construction of his block houses in Pasadena and Hollywood and Leora’s husband slapped a little white ball around a golf course, she took a moment to let the weight of it sink in. Her nemesis was dead. And she wouldn’t speak ill of the dead—or think ill of her either. All that was behind her, a bad dream dispelled in the light of day. “Yes,” she said finally, “there’s that, at least. And I was thinking of designing my own gown, something—oh, I don’t know, artistic, Grecian, a simple little thing. Not satin. Crepe de chine maybe. And not white. White’s for the first time around.” She paused to lift her eyes to the rich foliate canopy above her, the leaves dancing on the breeze. “Something in taupe maybe. Or pearl. And my furs, of course.”

  Leora let out a little hoot of a laugh and treated her to her half smile, the one she used for intimacies, ironic or otherwise. “Amen,” she said. “Outdoors, at night, in Wisconsin? In November, no less?”

  Miriam was feeling insuperable, at peace with herself and Frank and the specter of his dead mother too. All the stars were aligned. Everything was in place. She could indulge in the luxury of anticipation. “Yes,” she said, returning the smile, and she was almost giddy with the joy bubbling up in her, “it’s not exactly Palm Beach, is it?”

  Later, after a light luncheon and a girlish frolic in the pool, they sent the Chinese houseboy in to mix another round of cocktails and had separately turned back to the magazines they’d been flipping through off and on all afternoon, when the gate from the drive swung open and Leora’s husband appeared in his golfing togs and crisp white cap, a bag of clubs slung over one shoulder. “Dwight!” Miriam sang out. “Come join us—we’re just about to have cocktails.” “Yes, do!” Leora called. “It’s that kind of day, don’t you think?” And for some reason, they both broke out in giggles.

  Miriam watched him set down his clubs, prop them carefully against the fence and start across the lawn in his loose easy strides, his shoulders slumped in the conciliatory way of very tall men. She’d always liked Dwight. He was uncomplicated, stalwart, mild without being wishy-washy, and he treated Leora as if she were the only woman on earth.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, ducking in out of the sun. “Hot out there on the course, what with this devil’s wind . . .” He stood a moment, arms akimbo, grinning down at them, and if Miriam had the sense that he was looking down the front of her bathing costume and admiring her bare legs, well, so much the better. He was a sweet man. And appreciative.

  The conversation ran off on its own, light and amusing, the banter of three old friends united under an avocado tree on a late summer afternoon within sight of the distant sun-coppered crescent of the Santa Monica Bay, and the Chinese brought the beaded cocktails on a lacquered tray and Miriam felt her mood lift to yet a higher plane. They were midway through their second cocktail when Dwight suddenly leaned back in his chair and slapped his forehead. “Jeez,” he said, letting out a hiss of air, “I nearly forgot—did you hear the news? Because I thought of you right away, and Frank, because you were over there—”

  “News?” Leora’s smile expanded till her lips drew tight. “How could we hear any news”—and she giggled again, this time in a thicker, throatier way, the gin at work—“when we’ve hardly moved between the chair and the pool all day?”

  “The earthquake. In Tokyo. Everybody in the clubhouse was talking about it.”

  Miriam felt her own smile fade. Frank had been obsessed with earthquakes the whole time they were in Japan, and there was the one that struck when they were in their rooms at the hotel, terrifying in its suddenness, as if a freight train had come right on through the door and out the window all in a minute’s time. “Was it—is it serious? I mean, do they know if there’s been damage—?”

  Dwight turned to her, the wind rattling the stiff leathery leaves overhead. His eyes faded a moment and then flickered back to life. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They’re saying it’s bad. Buildings down, fires, the whole works.”

  “And the hotel? Did they say about the hotel?”

  In the next moment she was up out of her chair, the suit clinging damply to her as she hurried barefoot across the yard and into the house to call Frank. Her heart was pounding as she stood dripping on Leora’s carpet in the dim hush of the front hallway and waited for the operator to connect her—she was imagining the worst, the Imperial in ruins, Frank’s reputation destroyed, the Baron and the Ablomovs and Tscheremissinoff transformed into refugees, or worse, injured, killed—when Frank came on the line. “Hello? Miriam, is that you?”

  She didn’t have to ask if he’d heard—his voice betrayed him. “Yes,” she said, and a calm came over her because she was going to stand by him no matter what, prove herself, defend him in the face of the whole world, “it’s me. I’ve just heard the news.”

  There was a crackle of static. “They’re saying”—his voice sank so low she could barely hear him—“that it’s the worst earthquake in the history of Japan. And that Tokyo took the brunt of it.”136

  “Any word of the hotel?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The receiver of the phone was dead weight in her hand—it took an effort of will just to hold it to her ear. “I don’t care,” she said, the words coming so fast she could scarcely get them out, “because I can see it standing there now, not a window shattered, a testament to you, to you, Frank, even if the whole city’s destroyed around it, and I don’t care what they say, I don’t—”

  They were in limbo for twelve interminable days.

  The papers were full of the story, headlines trumpeting disaster, the least detail pried from the wreckage by the ghouls of the press, but nothing was certain, no one could be trusted till the full accounting was in. Frank was so distracted he couldn’t seem to sit in a chair for more than two minutes at a time. He paced endlessly. Lost his appetite. Let his work lag while he twisted the radio dial and worried the newspapers. The cruelest moment was when they were awakened by the phone ringing in the middle of the night only to have a reporter from the Examiner, full of himself, full of the joy of Schadenfreude, crow over the line that the Imperial had been destroyed and wondering if Frank had a statement to make. Miriam came up out of the morass of sleep, groggy, drugged, buried in a river of oneiric mud, saying, “What? What?” And his voice was there, in the dark, crackling with outrage, truth against the world: “On what authority? How do you know? Have you been there and back on a magic carpet? No, no: you listen to me. The Imperial Theater might have gone down, the Imperial Hospital, the Imperial University and all the thousand other buildings that trumpet the Emperor’s connection, but if there’s a structure standing in all that torn country it will be my hotel. And you can print it!”

  How she loved him for that—for his fierceness and certainty. Get his back up against the wall and he’d fight like a lion. She lay there that night listening to his breathing decelerate, declining through the layers of consciousness till he was asleep beside her, her man, her fiancé, her very own personal genius, Frank Lloyd Wright, creator of the Imperial Hotel, may it stand ten thousand years. And even as
she drifted off she heard the workers chanting all the way across the spill and tumult of the waves, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai!

  The telegram finally reached them on the evening of September 13. It had been forwarded through the Spring Green office to their apartment in Hollywood just as they were sitting down to dinner. Frank’s hands quivered as he tore it open. And then his face flushed and he was reading it aloud:

  FOLLOWING WIRELESS RECEIVED FROM TOKIO TODAY

  HOTEL STANDS UNDAMAGED AS MONUMENT OF YOUR

  GENIUS HUNDREDS OF HOMELESS PROVIDED BY PERFECTLY

  MAINTAINED SERVICE SIGNED OKURA IMPEHO137

  And now the press could feed on him to its heart’s content. Now she and Frank could open the doors and stand there arm in arm for the photographer’s flash and Frank could prance and crow and sermonize and she, in the shadows no longer, could stand at his side and broadcast his genius to the wide world. She was so proud of him. And he—beaming, glowing like a one-hundred-watt bulb and offering up his grandest smile—he was proud of her.

  In the wake of that—the tumult of the press and the international outpouring of awe and gratitude and congratulation that rocketed Frank so far ahead of his competitors and critics that he became, in a single heroic stroke, the most famous architect in the world and no one even to raise a whisper to deny it—the next two months slipped by so quickly she scarcely knew where they went. She kissed Leora on both cheeks, in the French way, her eyes full and her heart luminous, and then she and Frank returned to Wisconsin to make themselves ready, one more shriving of the soul and the flesh too. She was a new person altogether, newborn, and she stood at the tall living room windows looking down the long avenues of light and felt herself open up inside, lifting higher and higher till she was a bright fluttering pennant on a breeze that could never chill her again. The trees gave up their leaves. The weather turned bitter. The lake froze so hard it could have supported the weight of every automobile and tractor in the county. And the night sky was clear all the way to the rooftop of the universe, the stars strung from its beams in a cool white shatter of bliss. For her. For her and Frank.