The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She couldn’t abide that moment, couldn’t live through it and keep her sanity—because if it was true, and she was testing him, pressing him, forcing him out into the open—she’d kill herself. Shriek till the shingles fell off the house and run howling down the street to throw herself into the lake and stay there, deep down, till there was no trace of her left.

  “You’re a foolish woman, Kitty. No—you’re delusional. That’s what you are: delusional.”

  “Why? Because I expect my husband to love me or at least live up to his vows? Is that delusional? Is it?”

  But he didn’t answer her. He just turned his back on her and strode down the passage and into his studio that was all lit up like the break of day.

  Nothing changed as the summer wore on and then school started up again and the weather turned abruptly damp. To keep herself occupied she started a kindergarten at the house, a development which only seemed to alienate Frank further, as if the exuberance—and sweetness, sweetness too—of a dozen young children for a few hours a day would annihilate his creativity and drive him penniless into the street. It was early October, the leaves beginning to turn, a smell of smoke on the air, when she heard the news that Mamah had taken John and Martha away with her and gone off to Colorado to nurse a friend who was gravely ill—or at least ill enough to be in need of nursing. They’d gone sometime over the summer, apparently, and hadn’t come back for the start of school. Kitty didn’t know the friend, didn’t wish her ill or good or anything else, but she felt nothing but relief. Mamah was gone. The threat was past. And Edwin—she must have broken with Edwin, that was the only explanation, the story of the sick friend nothing more than a ruse. Or maybe not. Maybe it was legitimate. But in any case—and the thought lifted her like a sweet fresh breeze blowing all the way across the sodden plains from the painted peaks of the Rockies—Mamah was no more. Let Colorado keep her. Let her preach free love to the ranch hands and lasso all the husbands in the state right out of their saddles. Let her be a cowgirl. Let her wither.

  Still, something wasn’t quite right. She’d had it out with Frank—he said he’d never let go of Mamah, that he wanted a divorce, that their marriage was a sham and worse, a form of slavery—but she hadn’t given in to him and he was still living under her roof and going about his business, even if his smile had died and he looked ten years older. He was grieving, that was what it was. So much the worse for him. He would get over it. And she would take him back to her heart and her bed, magnanimous and loving, a true wife, so that in time he would be transfigured into a semblance of his old self and everything would go on as before.

  Was she delusional? He announced at dinner one evening that he was going into Chicago on business in the morning—he’d stay over a few days—and she didn’t think a thing of it, beyond the fact that he was taking a suitcase with him and a raft of his prints to sell (could it be that he was actually going to pay off the grocery bill?) or that Union Station was an infestation of tracks that could have taken him anywhere—west, even, to Colorado. It was nothing. He put in more miles than a traveling man. He was in Chicago half the time as it was—and he ran off to South Bend, Buffalo, Rochester, Madison, Mason City, anyplace his clients could be found. He’d even drawn up plans for a house in California.142

  Delusional. Yes, she was delusional. She didn’t see anything in his face that morning but a kind of numbness, and when he didn’t call, didn’t telegram, even from New York or the steamer that would take him across the Atlantic to Germany, she still couldn’t seem to get a grasp on the situation, not till the reporters began to knock at the door and the grocer and the tailor and the liveryman crowded in behind.

  CHAPTER 2: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, MEINE KINDER

  At first, Mamah couldn’t seem to lift her head from the pillow. She felt as if she were paralyzed from the neck down, strapped to the mattress like one of those ragged howling women in the madhouse, buried under an avalanche, a rockslide, the deepest waters of the deepest sea. If the house had suddenly gone up in flames she couldn’t have moved, not to save her own life or Martha’s or John’s either. It must have been late in the afternoon now, judging from the light, and she’d been lying here through the stations of the sun since it rose up blazing out of the dun slab of the mountains and all the yellow-leafed poplars or aspens or whatever they were started to jump and twist in the breeze. She’d slept and dreamed and woken, the cycle repeating over and again, but nothing had changed. Julia143 was dead and the baby dead too, and she hadn’t been spared the bloody sheets and the hopeless frantic pacing of the hour before dawn or the look in the eyes of the doctor with his masked face and invisible mouth.

  She could hear the house settling in around her as the sun poised a moment on the fulcrum of the tallest mountain and then flickered out, the dry cold of elevation settling into the walls, the roof, the resisting panels of the windows. Soon it would be dark and then she’d have the night to lie through and another day after that. And what about the children? They would have been home from school by now—Julia’s Teddy and Joe and her own son—but the maids would have seen to them, Julia’s boys especially. And the husband. It came to her then that she was alone in the house with the husband, a man she’d never liked, a man like Edwin, closemouthed and inexpressive, as if to think and feel and reconnoiter the soul were a violation of some manly vow, as if to be insensate were the key to life. Well, she wasn’t insensate. She was alive. And she’d come here to get away from a man with no more feeling than a stone and to be with Julia, her dearest friend, a graceful high-spirited woman in the prime of life whose last pregnancy had been such a trial and who needed someone to be with, to laugh with, to feel with, and was it a surprise that in these last months she’d felt at home, truly at home, for the first time in years?

  And now Julia was dead and she was a stranger in another man’s house.

  The thought spurred her and she sat up abruptly. The moment of crisis had come. She had to move, act, see to the children. And her bags—she must get her bags packed, because she wouldn’t stay here, not another moment. And Frank. She had to telegram to Frank. At the thought of it, of what she would say to him—how she could even begin to tell him what she felt, the shock of the words on the nurse’s lips, Julia’s blood that couldn’t be stanched, a whole wide coursing river of it infusing every towel and sheet and garment till they were stained like the relics of the saints, the stillborn child as twisted and gray as a lump of wax propped against his dead mother’s shoulder, the night she’d spent, the fear and hurt and anger—she could feel the grief rising in her till everything shaded to gray and the mountains beyond the window fell away into the void. But she wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. There was no time for that.

  The first thing was to change out of her clothes—she was still in the dress she’d worn yesterday—and put something on her stomach. But then she didn’t want to ring for one of the maids. The thought of that froze her. If she rang, they’d remember she was here still, they’d come to the door and enter the room and stare at her and speak and nod and put impossible questions to her—did she want soup, a sandwich, butter with her bread, jam?—and she couldn’t allow that. And she certainly didn’t want to go down to the dining room or the kitchen where she’d be exposed to him or the servants or the relatives who must have gathered by now or anyone else—and she realized, in that moment, that she didn’t want to see the children either. The thought of them, John and Martha, with their multiplicity of needs, their wants and fears and the onus that was on her to meliorate whatever they’d been able to glean from the maids when they learned that Teddy and Joe were strictly enjoined from playing and that their own mother was indisposed and not under any circumstances to be disturbed, made her feel paralyzed all over again. She had a vivid fantasy of slipping out the window, shimmying down the nearest tree and stealing away across the grounds that led to the street into town and the sidewalk that led to the train that led . . . to where?

  To Frank. That was where the train led.
To Frank.

  She unfastened the buttons of her dress, pulled it up over her head and dropped it to the floor beside her, then went into the bathroom to run the water in the tub. The tiles were cold under her bare feet. She could smell herself, the dried sweat under her arms and between her legs, the odor of fear and uncertainty. When she reached for the faucet her hand trembled and she saw that and noted it and tried to look at it dispassionately as if this were someone else’s hand, but she couldn’t. Why was her hand trembling? she had to ask herself. Because of Julia? Because life had failed her and the shock of that was so insupportable she could scarcely stand to go on living herself? Because she couldn’t stay here and couldn’t go back to Edwin? Or was it something else, something she couldn’t name, the dark climactic moment of her life clawing for release? She twisted off the faucet and stood up. What was she thinking? She had no time for a bath. A bath was insane, ludicrous. The indulgence of a woman who couldn’t make up her mind.

  She stepped out of her undergarments and sponged herself quickly, not daring to look into the mirror for fear of seeing someone else there, someone who would comfort the children and wait out the funeral, linger over her feelings as if they were beads on a rosary, subsume herself in someone else. Order flowers. Hide behind a black veil. That sort of person. As she dressed and began folding her clothes and arranging them in the suitcase, she was composing the telegram to Edwin in her mind—and the letter that would follow. Julia’s dead, Edwin. Or no: There has been a terrible tragedy. Julia died in childbirth. I cannot remain here in this house one minute longer. It is too painful. Come for the children on the next train. Your wife.

  When the suitcase was packed, she put on her hat and coat and went to the door to peer out into the hallway. Julia’s husband had made his fortune in silver—he had his own mining company somewhere off in those labyrinthine mountains144—and the house was a testament to his parvenu yearnings, a great rambling cloyingly decorated Queen Anne with twenty bedrooms and a congeries of shadowy hallways. It was the antithesis of what Frank had achieved in her own house, and she’d always loathed it. Until now. Now it was just the thing, dim lights in sconces creeping along the walls, staircases to nowhere, a subterranean feel to the hallways as if the architect were trying to replicate the tunnels of the mines themselves. There was no one in the hall. All was quiet.

  The children’s room was on the second floor, just below hers. They would have had their dinner by this time and on an ordinary evening they might have been in the parlor, playing at games round the fire, reading, drawing, but with the house thrust into mourning, chances were they’d be in their room. It was getting dark, and in any case John wasn’t especially enthusiastic about the outdoors and Martha was too little yet to be without supervision, which was why she’d brought Lucy along to look after them. Lucy would be with them. And they’d be in their room. Martha would already be tucked in and Lucy would be reading her a fairy story while John sat at the miniature desk before the darkened window, sketching, and pretending not to listen. The thought calmed her as she slipped down the staircase, her ears attuned to the slightest sound—there were whisperings, a door slammed somewhere—and made her way up the hall to the children’s room.

  To this point, she’d pushed herself forward, not daring to think beyond the impetus of the moment and the idée fixe that had taken hold of her, but now, her hand on the doorknob, she hesitated. For a long moment she stood there, listening, until Lucy’s voice came to her in the soft undulating murmur of storytelling. There was a pause, then Martha’s voice, a half-formed squeak of interrogation. Mamah pictured her, her daughter, not yet four and right there on the other side of the door, five seconds away from her arms, her miniature face pinched in concentration—Why? she always wanted to know. Why do they live in a shoe? Why did the blackbirds? Why?—and felt herself giving way. She was a disgrace as a mother, heartless, a failure, worse than any evil stepmother in any of the tales the Brothers Grimm could conceive. She was going away. Deserting her own children. Leaving them here, in this death-stricken house, with an Irish maid who wasn’t much older than a child herself.

  Very carefully, so as not to make the slightest sound, she set down the suitcase and positioned it flat to the wall just out of sight of the door. Lucy’s voice went on, rich and sonorous, the sweetest sound in the world, the sound of comfort and security, maternal—maternal—and what was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she push open the door and take her rightful place there with her children? Because she didn’t love Edwin, that was why. Because she’d married him on the eve of the great precipice that marked her thirtieth birthday, even as both her parents had passed on that very year and he stepped back into her life and she thought she could bury herself in the ordinary and never know the difference. But Ellen Key knew the difference. Ellen Key, whom she knew by heart because Ellen Key was the true light and liberator and wisdom of the world and she was translating her work into English so that all women in America could know her and follow her to their own release. No one should live in a doll’s house, no one. And if a woman becomes a mother without knowing the full height of her being in love, she feels it as a degradation; for neither child nor marriage nor love are enough for her, only great love satisfies her. And where was that great love? Where was that soul mate? In Oak Park. Waiting for her.

  John said something then, his voice twining with Lucy’s to make a song of the story, the nursery rhyme he’d grown beyond, and his tone was mocking and impatient, though he was listening, listening still, the colored pencil arrested in his hand. And Martha spoke up—Why?—but the door was thick, solid parvenu mahogany, and she couldn’t hear the substance or the answer either. Just the murmur of it. Guiltily, shamefully, she withdrew her hand and examined the pale flesh and the scorings of her palm a moment in the dim subterranean light. It wasn’t trembling. Not anymore. Her hand was as steady and decisive as any killer’s, any woodcutter’s with his axe poised over the belly of the wolf or witch’s with the oven ablaze, and it went to the handle of the suitcase even as she whispered her valediction in the new language, the language of heroism and sacrifice, and slipped away down the hall.

  The sky hadn’t yet gone fully dark—it was a deep glowing tincture of cobalt shading to black in the east, a western sky, poked through with the glittering holes of the stars—but the grounds were dense with shadow. No one had seen her in the back hallway, though every time she heard a foot-step or one of the servants’ voices she froze in place. She had no desire to have to contrive explanations—she was beyond explanations now—and the suitcase would have given her away regardless. There was a moment at the back door when she thought all was lost, the housekeeper swinging through the kitchen doors with a tray of cut sandwiches and tea things for the husband and whatever mourners had gathered in the parlor, but she managed to duck behind one of the massive highboys along the wall till the woman, preoccupied with the tray and already garbed in funereal black, passed on by. Then it was a quick dash for the door and out into the gathering night.

  A motorcar and two carriages stood in the drive and she gave them a wide berth, though it wouldn’t have mattered if the drivers had seen her. She was nothing to them—an anonymous woman with a suitcase, wrapped in her best coat and with her face shaded by the brim of her hat, bisecting the drive behind them and stepping out into the street. Her plan, and she was formulating it even as she shifted the weight of the suitcase from one hand to the other, was to go to the hotel and see if there was a car there to take her into Denver. From Denver she could catch a train east, to Chicago—and Frank would be there at the station to sweep her up in his arms. He’d have a suitcase with him too, and he’d board the train with the mob of passengers and ride with her through the hills and stubblefields of Indiana and Ohio and upstate New York, all the way down along the Hudson to Manhattan. They’d find a boat there, a great high-crowned steamer rising up out of the tide at one of the piers on the lower West Side, a boat to Bremen, and once they reached German soi
l they’d board a train to Berlin, where he was to meet with Herr Wasmuth to prepare his portfolio for publication and spread his fame throughout Europe. That was what they’d talked about, time and again: Berlin. And here it was, right before them.

  She held that image, sidestepping the ruts of the street and passing from light to darkness beneath the streetlights as a wind off the mountains ruffled the collar of her coat: the two of them, together, turning their backs on all these . . . complications. If he was willing, that is. If he was brave enough. If he loved her the way he said he did. She was afraid for a moment—she was risking everything, every sort of censure and embarrassment, and what if he stalled? What if he wouldn’t stand up and do what he had to? What if he couldn’t raise the money? What if Kitty’s hold on him was stronger than she’d supposed? But no, no, none of that mattered. And if it did, it was too late now. She hurried down the street, feeling like a fugitive.

  She stopped at the telegraph office to wire Edwin about the children and she forced herself to be cold and precise and to think of nothing but the matter at hand, and then she wired Frank. She told him she was coming. That everything they’d dreamed of in their letters was unfolding before them. That she was his. And that the time had come to prove that he was hers in return. Then she found a man to take her into Denver and when she got to Denver she bought a one-way ticket to New York via Omaha, Burlington, Chicago, Elkhart, Cleveland, Buffalo and Albany, and settled herself in at the station to wait.

  It was just past nine in the evening and the station was all but deserted. She looked up at the lunar face of the clock and watched the second hand creep round, tick by tick, as if reluctant to let go of each of the hash marks in turn, her mind accelerating far beyond it, expanding in ever-widening coils that spiraled from one subject to another even as her stomach contracted round a shriveled nugget of fear and excitement. And hunger. Because she hadn’t eaten. Couldn’t eat. Didn’t have the stomach or the time. The clock crawled. There was a woman standing at the ticket window clutching the hand of a girl of Martha’s age. Two men, dressed identically in cheap gray suits, sat on the high-backed bench across from hers, cradling their hats in their laps and surreptitiously studying her. One of them absently stroked the nap of his hat as if it were a kitten, and what was he—a Pinkerton? A dry-goods man? A husband deserting his wife?