The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She had an hour and a half till the train came—or was scheduled to come—and she couldn’t settle herself, couldn’t stop the racing of her mind and the propulsive beat of her heart, and she wouldn’t be able to relax or even think properly till the porter led her to her compartment and she shut herself in. She gazed beyond the two men to the doors leading to the street, half-expecting Lucy to burst in with the children on either side of her, all three of them sobbing aloud and imploring her to stay. Or Julia’s husband. Or the sheriff. Wasn’t she breaking some sort of law? She must have been.

  Finally, just to do something, to distract herself, to rise up off the bench where it seemed she’d spent her entire lifetime though she saw with a sinking feeling that it had been no more than five minutes, she decided to go into the restaurant. She felt the eyes of the two men on her all the way across the expanse of the marble floor, her footsteps echoing in her ears like gunshots, each step a cry for solace, and then she was pushing through the door and into the restaurant. Which was a cavernous place, poorly lit. At first she couldn’t see much beyond the door, but then a waiter emerged from the gloom and showed her to a table backed up against the wall. A scattering of people, mostly men, were seated at the other tables, drinking and gnawing away at sandwiches and chops, and a couple—middle-aged, gaudily dressed—were grinning at each other amidst a clutter of plates and sauce bottles at the table across from hers. Everyone looked up as she came in and set her suitcase down beside her, and the drama of the moment both shamed and exhilarated her. She wasn’t used to going out in public alone. She’d always had Edwin there, breathing propriety at her side, the children shielding her, Frank strutting up and down as if he owned every square inch of every place he stepped into. Now she was on her own.

  She’d thought she might have a cup of tea and a bun perhaps, but once she was seated and looking over the menu, she realized how hungry she was. The waiter set down a plate of celery and olives, then a basket of bread with butter. She dispatched it all without thinking and then ordered a steak, medium-rare, with fried potatoes, a vegetable medley and a green salad with Roquefort dressing. Did she care for anything to drink? Beer, perhaps? A glass of wine?

  The waiter—a man in middle age with a paunch swelling against the buttons of his jacket and hair that looked as if it had been barbered in the dark—stood over her. He was dressed in a well-worn and faintly greasy suit he might have borrowed from an undertaker and he was giving her a knowing, even insolent look, as if he knew all about her, as if every night married women who were deserting their children to run off with their lovers paraded before him, one after the other, drinking deeply to deaden their thoughts and the guilt that weighed them down like a leaden jacket. She held his eyes—she wouldn’t be intimidated. The man was an oaf, a servant, no one she’d seen before or would ever see again. “Wine,” she said. “A bottle of Moselle.”

  She’d learned to appreciate wine the first time she’d gone to Europe, on her honeymoon, when she and Edwin had toured Germany, and while she was hardly a sophisticate, she knew enough to rely on the German wines with which she was familiar. And this one, as cool and cleansing as the issue of an alpine spring, had an immediate effect on her, taking the tenseness from her shoulders and warming her where she was coldest, in her heart. And if she was a woman drinking alone in a public place, what of it? She was independent, wasn’t she? Would Ellen Key have thought twice about it? Or any European woman, for that matter? She was having wine with her meal, absolved of guilt, worry, the panic that had gripped her earlier, and she cut her meat and tipped back her glass and never once dropped her eyes. Let them look at her. Let them have a good look. Because soon she would be on the train, hurtling through the night, and all this would be behind her.

  When the train pulled into the station at Chicago, Frank was waiting for her on the platform. Despite herself, despite the wine and the gentle swaying of the compartment and the purely positive and loving thoughts she’d struggled to summon, she’d spent a restless night and a day that enervated her with a thousand pinpricks of conscience and uncertainty, and when she saw him there, sturdy and shining and undeniable, she felt the relief wash over her. They would be together now and tonight she would sleep the sleep of the possessed, her skin pressed to his so that every cell and pore of her could drink him in from head to toe . . . The brakes hissed. The station rocked and steadied itself. She caught his eye then and he gave her his world-conquering grin and started across the platform for her and she was so overcome with the tumult of her feelings that it took her a moment to realize that his hands were empty.

  He didn’t take her in his arms—there was no telling who might be watching, she understood that—but he seemed so stiff and formal she very nearly lost her nerve. “Mamah,” was all he said and then she felt his hand at her elbow and he was guiding her through the crush of people, down a corridor and into an office of some sort, a single room with desk and filing cabinets and a fan fixed overhead, and she realized with a start that he must have hired the room for an hour so that they could have a private interview. But why? Why didn’t he have a suitcase with him? Why hadn’t he boarded the train with her?

  He shut the door behind her and she felt afraid suddenly, certain he was going to deny her, construct a wall of excuses, abandon her as she’d abandoned Edwin and her own motherless children. “Frank, what is it?” she demanded, breathless now, her blood surging with the chemical sting of panic, iodine running through her veins, acid, liquid fire. “Where’s your suitcase? What’s going on?”

  “It’s all right,” he said, pulling her to him. He kissed her. Held her so tightly she could barely breathe. “I just need more time, that’s all, just two days, three at the most—to, to raise the money. Good God, this is all so sudden . . .”

  She held to him, her chin resting on his shoulder, the smell of him—of his hair, his clothes, the body she knew so well—working on her like a tranquilizer. She trusted him. Absolutely. He was hers, she was his. But still, she pulled back. “Sudden? We’ve been talking about this for a year now and more. I left Edwin in June.”

  “Your telegram, I mean. I’ve been—I was, well, since you telegrammed all I’ve done is run from one place to another, selling prints, soliciting clients for advance funds, trying to do something, anything, with the projects on the boards. I need more time, that’s all.”145

  She softened momentarily, then hardened all over again. “And what of me? What am I to do?”

  “Go on to New York as planned. There’s a hotel there I know—I’ve already reserved rooms. And I’ve booked passage for two on the Deutsch-land for Friday. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything—I’ll be there as soon as I can. Do you need money?”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, I do,” and the implications roared in her ears with all the opprobrium of a cheap novel, and what did that make her, a woman who takes money in exchange for her favor?

  “Here,” he said, and he opened his wallet to her and they kissed till she felt the rigid heat of him ready to run right up inside of her and then he was sitting with her in her compartment on the train, holding her hand in his, and the conductor gave his shout and Frank stepped back on the platform and waved at the glass as the wheels jerked and the station fell away behind her.

  If there was a moment that made it all worthwhile, a single moment she might have captured with a photograph and pressed into an album of memories, it was when she stepped through the door of the stateroom high out over the roiling sun-coppered waters of the Hudson and saw him standing there, his arms open wide to receive her. He’d kept her waiting three days in that hotel in New York and she’d never left the room, not once, for fear of discovery. Her thoughts had weighed on her. She missed the children. She slept poorly. Edwin would have been back in Oak Park by that point and the alarm would have gone up, every gossip and scandalmonger in town putting two and two together, and would he send a detective out after her? Would he be that petty, that vindictive? Even Kitty, poor dull
Kitty, must have known the truth by now. And, of course, though Frank had come to her the night before, they were constrained to go aboard separately—to take separate taxis even—so as not to show their hand. She’d been in a state all morning, everyone she laid eyes on a potential betrayer, the desk clerk, the doorman who showed her to the cab, the driver himself, and she felt all but naked as she stood there on the pier waiting for them to see to her luggage before she could go up the gangplank and vanish amidst the crowd. Until she was there, until she felt the ship plunge and rise majestically beneath her feet, she kept bracing for the moment that someone would shout, There she is! The deserter! The adulteress! Stop her!

  Frank had decorated the room, flowers everywhere, pottery, a selection of his Japanese prints propped artfully in the corners. She saw the sunlight caught in the portholes as if in a private universe, the scent of the flowers supercharging her senses, the geisha in their elaborate robes smiling benevolently on her from the confines of their frames and Mount Fuji, distant and white-clad,146 lending its aura of solidity to the delirium of happiness that washed over her. “There’s no stopping us now,” Frank said, his smile widening. He snatched her arm before she could think and whirled her round the room to the strains of an imaginary orchestra, all the while humming in her ear. Then he showed off the appointments as if he’d designed them himself, fretted over her as she put her things away, insisted on a promenade of the decks while the horn sounded and the ship pulled back from the pier and the gulls rode a fresh breeze out over the river. “And let’s eat,” he cried. “Let’s have a feast to celebrate. Anything, anything your heart desires. Because this is the first day of all the days to come, the first day of freedom to do as we please. Isn’t it grand?”

  And she felt it too, thinking of Goethe, the translation she’d been making for him as the hours ground themselves out like cinders in that lonely hotel room, Faust, thinking of Faust: “ ‘Call it happiness!’ ” she recited, holding tight to his arm, “ ‘Heart! Love! God! / I have no name / For it! Feeling is everything!’ ”

  And it was, till the second day out when Frank turned the color of liverwurst and couldn’t get out of bed. “I’ll never make a pirate,” he told her, his voice faint and throttled. She watched him hang dazed over an enameled pan, his stomach heaving, watched him contort his limbs and walk shakily to the toilet, watched him sleep and groan and pull the blankets up over his head as if he could hide away from the pitch and yaw of the heavy seas that blew up around them for the entire two weeks of the journey. She sat by him all the while, nursing him, reading aloud, drilling him on basic German phrases—Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch; Ein Tisch für twei, bitte; Moment! Es fehlt ein Handkoffer!—and he was utterly childlike, like John when he had the grippe, like Martha. He would take broth only. He was always cold, wrapped miserably in his blankets. He complainedincessantly. Edwin—that stone, that block—was like an admiral compared to him. But none of that mattered, because feeling was all and Frank was a repository of feeling, a bank of feeling, fully invested. She read to him till the words went numb on her tongue, she laid a wet compress on his brow, massaged his shoulders and the cramped tight muscles of his calves. He was miserable, but she was strong and each day getting stronger.

  When they arrived in Bremen, he recovered himself. He ate so much in one sitting—dumplings, Spätzle, Sauerbraten, Schmierkäse, pickles and kraut and rich thick slices of pumpernickel slathered with butter—she thought he would burst. By the time they got to Berlin, he was his old self, prancing at her side, his cane twirling and the tails of his cape flapping in the brisk breeze he generated all on his own, and when they entered the Hotel Adlon on Unter den Linden, everyone turned to stare as if the Chancellor himself had arrived. He strode up to the desk, pulling her along in his wake, spun the register round with a flourish, and in his slashing geometric hand signed Frank Lloyd Wright and Wife without thinking twice about it.

  CHAPTER 3: THE SOUL OF HONOR

  That it had to have been one of the children who answered the door—Catherine, with her young lady’s poise and eagerness, expecting good news, a letter from her father, a parcel she’d sent away for, a friend from school come to gossip over the boys—only made the situation all the worse. “Mama,” Catherine had called, making her way through the house to the kitchen. “Mama, there’s a man here to see you. Says he’s from the Tribune.”

  She’d been busy with dinner, trimming the roast, mashing potatoes, peeling carrots and onions and running from the icebox to the sink and stove and back again, and she was in her housedress and apron, her hair pinned up hastily to keep it out of her way. She wasn’t expecting guests. Certainly not a stranger. And certainly not a man from the newspaper.

  “What does he want? It’s not the subscription, is it?” And then, as if she were talking to herself, “Are we behind on that too?”

  Catherine stood in the doorway, an expectant look on her face. She shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

  Kitty looked at her for a long moment, her daughter leaning against the doorjamb now, insouciant, pretty, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s stature, in her school clothes still, a ribbon in her hair, the locket at her throat catching the last fading streak of sunlight through the window. She was fifteen years old, almost sixteen—nearly as old as she’d been when she met Frank. The thought arrested her a moment, made her feel nostalgic and protective all at once, and then Frank was ringing in her thoughts like a tocsin. Was it Frank? Was this about Frank?

  The man was waiting for her in the entranceway, just inside the door. He was in his twenties or perhaps early thirties, in an ill-fitting suit in some sort of checked pattern, and his tie was sloppily knotted. He gave her the smile of a small child presented with a rare gift. “Mrs. Wright?” he said.

  “Yes,” she answered, giving him a puzzled look in return. And though she had a premonition that whatever he wanted would be unwelcome—she could see it in his eyes, a flutter of superiority, as if he knew something she didn’t—she heard herself say, “Won’t you come in?” She led him to the inglenook and the fire laid there. The light was dulling outside. A wind scattered leaves across the yellowed remnants of the lawn. It was November seventh, a date she would never in all her life forget.

  “Well,” he said, moving forward to warm his hands over the fire while she stood there rigid and Catherine edged into the room, lifting her eyebrows in consternation, “I don’t want but a minute of your time.” He extracted a notepad and pencil from his pocket and turned to her. “My name is Adler, Frederick Adler, and I’m from the Tribune.” He paused a moment to let the weight of the association sink in. “And I was just curious—we were; that is, my editors and I—if you had anything to say. For the record, that is.”147

  “To say?” she echoed. “Concerning what?”

  “Your husband.”

  The smallest tick of unease began asserting itself somewhere deep inside her. She felt a vein pulse at her throat. “My husband? What about him?” And then—she couldn’t help herself—she made a leap of intuition and knew that he was dead. Or injured. Gravely injured. She saw the crushed bone, blood on the pavement. Her eyes jumped to her daughter’s. “He isn’t—?”

  The man’s expression hardened. “Is he at home?”

  “Why, no. He’s away on business. Has been these past . . . why, is anything the matter?”

  “No,” he said, “no, nothing at all,” and Catherine, poor Catherine, gave her a look that made her feel as if she were being roasted over the coals by a party of savages with bones stuck through their noses. “I was just hoping for some”—and here he reached into the folds of his coat and extracted a newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, and handed it to her as if it were a copy of the Bible to swear on before the judge—“clarification.”

  The headline screamed at her, mute letters, black and white, but screaming all the same, loud as the siren at the firehouse: ARCHITECT WRIGHT IN BERLIN HOTEL WITH AFFINITY. And the subheading, in a louder pitch yet: Mrs. Chen
ey Registered as Wife.

  Just then the telephone rang. It was all she could do to hold on to the paper, to keep from dropping it to the floor, flinging it into the fire, shrieking out her rage and hate. “Catherine,” she said, struggling to control her voice, “would you please see who that is.” And she watched her daughter’s every step as she crossed the room, made her way to the telephone in the hall and lifted the receiver. Only when Catherine was gone, when she was out of range—and harm’s way too—did Kitty turn back to the reporter. She lifted her head even as she unconsciously retreated a step so that her back was to the mantel and the inscription Frank had carved above it, TRUTH IS LIFE,148 because what she was about to say wasn’t the truth at all. “Yes,” she said, “yes, he wrote us just last week from his publisher, Wasmuth Verlag, to say that he would be detained there in Berlin while working up the drawings for his portfolio.”

  She drew in a breath. The man was scribbling something in his pad, eternal words, her official statement, her testimony. But she wasn’t done yet. “Of course,” she went on, “there must be some sort of mistake. You see, Mrs. Cheney—she’s his client, you know—Mrs. Cheney is in Colorado.”

  Two days later, the phone ringing so continuously she had to disconnect the wires to keep from going mad and the children slinking about as if they’d been whipped, afraid to show their faces in their own house and as glum and pale and put-upon as she was herself, she agreed to meet with the newspapermen. If only to put an end to the siege they’d laid. They were everywhere, as ubiquitous as flies, a whole host of them swarming over the property no matter how many times she sent the maid out to ask them to leave—she’d glance up from the stove to see some stranger gesticulating from the street, cross the living room and find herself staring into the face of a man waving a notepad and mouthing speeches from the flowerbed. People were peering in at windows and ringing the bell day and night till she thought she would have to disconnect that too just to silence the buzzing in her head.