The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Eventually, the party began to break up, the children drifting off to their rooms, to their books and lessons, till only Llewellyn remained. Her youngest seemed both puzzled and fascinated by his father, this apparition he’d heard so much about over the course of the past year, six years old and trying his best to reconcile the shadowy figment of his memory with the real presence of this self-consciously zany figure in the inglenook, and why wouldn’t he be confused? He insisted on sitting in Frank’s lap the whole time, demanding his attention, touching his face and hands and pressing his head to his chest again and again as if to make sure of him—she could see that Frank was finding it a strain, and under other circumstances she might have spoken out. “Stop fussing,” she would have said. Or: “Isn’t it time for bed?” But she said nothing. Just watched. Until Frank, exasperated, gave her a look. “Shouldn’t he be in bed by now?”

  “Yes, he should be,” she said, but she didn’t get up to lift the child in her arms like the dutiful wife and mother, didn’t coo or cajole or even crack a smile.

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” Llewellyn put in. “I want to stay here with Papa.”

  Frank let out a sigh. “Well, why don’t you take him, then?”

  “Why don’t you? You’re his father, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t start in,” he said, and she wanted to laugh in his face. Who was he to tell her what to do? She was the one stuck with the bills, stuck with the house, the children, his mother.

  “Llewellyn,” she snapped, “get to bed. Now!”

  The child looked startled—sleepy, cranky—but startled too. He wanted to raise a fuss, she could see that, but the tone of her voice warned him off. Very slowly, as if he were climbing down from an impossibly high and treacherous place, feeling for footholds all the way, he left his father’s lap and started across the room, head down and shoulders slumped in defeat. “I’ll be up shortly,” she said, softening. And she looked at Frank. “I must speak with your father a minute.”

  But Frank was already on his feet, shying away from her, and she had to come up out of the chair and take hold of his arm to keep him there in the room with her. “You tell me,” she said, trying to keep her voice under control, “just what’s going on here. And you tell me now.”

  The look he gave her was absolutely empty. He wasn’t annoyed or angry, only indifferent. “As soon as I can make the arrangements, I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Leaving? What do you mean? You just got here—”

  She thought she heard footsteps in the hallway. There was a thump from the floor above. The house ticked and hummed around her like some alien space, a place she’d never inhabited, never been happy in.

  He jerked his arm away from her. “I want a divorce,” he said.

  She ignored him. She wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t hear him. “But where will you go?” she heard herself say. “Where will you live?”

  His face went secret. She saw that he’d been planning this a long time—the break, the final break, all the fanfare of his homecoming just a pretense so he could appear properly contrite for the public so the public would give him commissions and go on lionizing him rather than suffer him like the pariah he was. “My mother,” he said.

  “Your mother? You’re going to move in with your mother? Are you mad? Have you lost your mind?”

  “She’s selling her house. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She”—and he hesitated over the lie—“she wants to go back to the country, to Wisconsin. To be close to her people, her sisters and brothers.”

  She was silent a moment, trying to take it all in. There was a calculation here, an algebra of the emotions as abstruse as anything in any of the textbooks on her children’s desks. Stupidly, she said, “You’re not serious. You’re joking. Tell me this is some kind of cruel joke.”

  “There’s a plot of land she’s buying there—near the Hillside School. She’s asked me to build her a house on it”—and he repeated himself, the surest sign of a liar—“so she can be close to her people. In her old age. She wants a place for her old age.”

  And now, suddenly, the equation came clear: solve for y when x equals Mamah. “It’s for her, isn’t it? You’re going to build a place for her, for your, your—”

  “Go ahead, say it. Call her what you will. Because she’s something you could never in your life imagine, and I’m sorry to say it, Catherine, but that’s how it is.”

  She could feel everything turning inside of her as if she were caught in a mangle and she was flushing red, she knew it, and her face was ugly, hot and ugly and hateful. “What is she, then? Huh? You’re the great saint, the great spirit—you tell me!”

  He was calm now and that calmness frightened her more than anything—it meant he didn’t care, meant he was already gone. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Her voice flew out away from her and she didn’t want to make a scene, didn’t want the children to hear, but she couldn’t help herself: “No, no. You tell me, what is she that I’m not? Tell me!”

  The house went silent. The night came down and lay across the roof like a presence out of the forest primeval that had once stood here, on this lot, while Indians beat their squaws and stripped the flesh from their enemies with knives of stone. He drew himself up. Leveled his eyes on her. “She’s my soul mate, Catherine. Can’t you understand that? My soul mate.”

  CHAPTER 4: TALIESIN

  It was the same old conundrum: how to build what he saw in his mind’s eye, how to raise a thing of beauty from the earth so that people would look at it and marvel for a century to come, without first raising the money to see it to fruition. Money. It was always a question of money. He’d borrowed from Sullivan to buy the lot for the Oak Park place all those years ago,153 and while he couldn’t very well sell it out from under Catherine, he’d already hit on the expedient of remodeling the place so she could rent out half of it and at least have a reliable income. He would provide for her and the children too, that was his responsibility and he would meet it—no one could say he was neglectful there, though they might whip him over Mamah all they wanted, pinching their noses and crossing the street to avoid him as if he were a leper. And he’d just have to find a means of raising money, not only for the remodeling, but for the new house that was already taking shape in his dreams and his waking hours too, a place away from all this confusion, a place where he could live and work in peace till it all blew over.

  And that was something he just couldn’t understand, the way the whole community had gone after him as if he were an axe-murderer or Kropotkinite or some such. He’d left a prosperous practice a year ago to go off to Europe and improve himself and now he had nothing, and how was he to get work if no one would negotiate with him in good faith or even look him in the eye for fear of catching his moral contagion? How did they expect him to live, these moral paragons trapped in their own miserable little lives and marriages as dead and loveless as the rugs on the floors of the insipid boxes they called home? There was no Christian charity—a sad joke, that was all it was—and no forgiveness either. He hadn’t been home three days when the Reverend George M. Luccock of the First Presbyterian Church, a man he scarcely knew, preached a sermon against him, which was, of course, duly reported in the papers. He still had it seared in his memory—When a man leaves his wife and family and goes over to this other woman, such a man has lost all sense of morality and religion and is damnably to be blamed—though he’d crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the fire like the rag it was. Damnably to be blamed. Why couldn’t they leave him alone to live his life as he saw fit? Who made the rules to contain him? Rules were for other people, ordinary people, people who had neither insight nor originality or any sense of the world but what they’d been force-fed by the Reverend Luccocks and their ilk.

  Well, he’d played out the charade in Oak Park as long as he could stand it, the loving father and repentant husband come home to his family, manfully unfurling the Christmas tree, splitting wood for the hearth, throttling t
he goose and gathering his children to his bosom, but he saw much further than any of them could ever imagine. And as the year turned and he put out inquiries everywhere for work, commissions or outright loans and his mother’s house went up for sale and Kitty burned and the newspapers flapped away over some fresh scandal, he could think of nothing but that property in Wisconsin, the hill there, his vantage and his refuge. He’d roamed its flanks as a boy, sat atop the crest of it to contemplate the valley spread out below him while the clouds ran across the sun and the insects chirred and deer slipped out of the shadows to browse in the long grass at the edge of the woods. It was a magical place, as serene and uncluttered and pure as the open skies above and the glacial till underfoot, with views to the Wisconsin River on one side and the far end of Paradise on the other. And it was set squarely in the middle of the valley his grand-parents had settled, just over the slope from his aunts’ school and the home he’d built for his sister, the most perfect site in all the world for the house and farm and workshop he saw rising there, a place of native wood and amber stucco and stone, yellow dolomite limestone laid rough, just as it had come from nature. A place to catch the light. To surround with orchards and gardens. To dwell in as if it had been there forever.

  Darwin, good old Darwin, had come up with the money—a loan, that is, secured by a trust deed on the Oak Park property. Twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth, enough to redeem the print collection he’d left with Little,154 pay for the work in Oak Park, buy back the American rights for the Wasmuth portfolio and free him to break ground at Hillside. On the house for his mother. Or that was what he told Darwin, at any rate. And he swore too to give up Mamah, because Darwin was every bit as condemning as the rest of them, though he should have known better. Still, he was a fine and generous man and good-hearted too. And he recognized genius when he saw it.

  But Mamah. Give up Mamah? No one could begin to understand what existed between him and Mamah, certainly not Darwin Martin staring blearily across the dining room table at his all but extinguished hausfrau, or Kitty, whose concept of marriage never seemed to rise above the kitchen and the laundry and the children’s clothes and looks and moods. All the while he was back he missed her with an ache that was irremediable, a steady burn of regret as omnipresent and physical as the loss of a limb—he couldn’t step outside the door or breathe the air without thinking of her, longing for her, worrying over her—and as soon as he had the money in hand he fled back to Germany to be with her. Of course, he couldn’t admit this to Darwin or Kitty or anyone else for that matter—he was returning to Berlin to shepherd the portfolio into print, a purely onerous task but absolutely necessary if a whole year’s work wasn’t going to go up in smoke, and God knew how he detested ocean travel . . .

  This time they were discreet. He met her in a hotel near the Tiergarten that was as unfashionable and private as the Adlon was chic and public. It took him the better part of an hour even to find the place, stopping passersby to ask directions in his tortured and rapidly dwindling German while the rank animal odor seeped down the alleys and various creatures chirped and howled in the distance, and when he finally arrived, when he marched into the lobby and announced himself at the desk, he was so wrought up, so impatient and angry with himself—and lustful, mad for the touch of her—that he had to take a minute to collect himself before following the bellman up the three flights of stairs to her door. To lift his hand and knock, to fumble with the unfamiliar currency and grease the man’s palm—what was the fool staring at and why the sick parody of a grin, or was it a grimace?—was nearly impossible. But he did it. And the door opened. And she was there.

  “Frank,” she said, and he said her name too, but there was a moment’s hesitation before he took her in his arms, a strangeness they both felt, an airiness, as if there were no walls to the building and the wind was blowing right through it and the sky shifting crazily overhead—she looked different, so different, her color high, her hair lighter than he’d remembered it . . . All the way across the Atlantic he’d pictured this moment, the scent and feel of her, the look of her face and the way she tilted her head back when she laughed, how he’d lead her to bed, straight to bed, but that wasn’t the way it was. He felt disoriented, uncertain of himself. A shudder of suspicion ran through him—she’d been seeing somebody else, of course she had, an attractive woman, a sensuous woman, alone in a European capital and flying the banner of free love . . .

  What did she say, what was the first thing? It’s good to see you, yes, of course. I’ve missed you. How I’ve missed you. Sure, likewise. But then, out of nowhere, she said, “I’ve been learning Swedish.”

  They were standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, still holding on to each other, but now she led him to the couch and the low table there, where she’d arranged flowers, sandwiches, a bottle of wine, though he wasn’t thirsty and he didn’t drink, or hardly ever. “Swedish?” he echoed. And then it hit him: “For Ellen Key?”

  Her eyes shone. “I’ve met her. And she’s the most astonishing—did I tell you she’s calling me her American daughter? Can you imagine that?”

  It was dusk when he’d arrived, the gray weathered city grayer yet under a winter sky, and the darkness of night crept gradually over the room until she had to get up and turn on the lamps. She came and sat beside him on the couch then and took his hand in hers and they talked about the small things, catching up, keeping all the rest at bay. Free love had been convenient for him, hadn’t it, but if it was convenient for him, why not for some other man, some Lothar or Henning or Heinrich?

  She was laughing her rich laugh over a story he’d been telling her about his mother and her ongoing feud with Kitty and Kitty’s mother and even her grandmother, her throat thrown back and her eyes rolling with the pleasure of it, when he said, “You haven’t been seeing anyone, have you?”

  Her face went cold. “What are you talking about? Seeing who? Who do you expect me to see? I go from my rooms to the library and back. I see my students. The concierge—Frau Eisermann, did you notice her? The little woman with the mustache?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant—”

  “Men? ”

  “No,” he said, “no. I was just—inquiring. After your social life. You must be lonely. I worry about you.”

  She leaned away from him as if to get a better look. “I have no social life.” He watched her lift the wineglass to her lips, take a sip of the pale yellow liquid—it was a Johannisberger, she’d said, a special wine for a special occasion, though it was all the same to him—and set it down again. “I’m waiting for my divorce, if that’s what you mean,” she said, measuring out each word. “And for you.” She held him with her eyes. “Only you.”155

  “I don’t want you to wait, not here, anyway.” He leaned forward in his seat. Now was the time for affirmation, now was the time to kiss her, but he held back. “I want you to come home. As soon as possible.”

  Her smile was fragmentary, bitter round the edges. She dropped her voice. “Have you seen my children?”

  “No. I can’t bring myself even to drive past the street—”

  “They don’t answer my letters. It’s Edwin. He’s turned them against me. I’m sure of it.” She looked off into space a moment, then came back to him. “And where am I to go when I do come back? I can’t—I’ll never set foot in Oak Park again, I’ll swear to it.”

  “I’ve taken care of that,” he heard himself say, and suddenly it was all right—it was a building problem, that was all, salvaged by design, materials, plans. “That hill in Wisconsin? It’s ours. Two hundred acres, free and clear. I’m building for you—a place that’ll put to shame anything I’ve done to this point. Something new, entirely new.”

  “I miss them. The little one especially, little Martha. I keep asking myself what they must be thinking—that I’m in prison or something? Or dead? That I don’t love them anymore?”

  He had the solution, all the solutions. “Bring them to Hillside. Anytime you want.�
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  “Edwin wouldn’t allow it. Never. He’d die first. I know him.”

  “For school vacations. For the summer. They’ll adore it there—and you will too.”

  There was a silence. No one was going anywhere. Everything was in stasis, and the moment—their reunion—began to sag under the weight of it. He felt lost all over again. Two weeks across on the boat and two weeks back for these few days, these precious minutes that were slipping away and Mamah all but a stranger to him. It was hopeless. The room shrank. He didn’t know what to say. But then—and it was the strangest thing, a thing he’d remember all his life with a mixture of gratitude and wonder—a lion began to roar from the grounds of the Tiergarten, a furious belligerent racketing noise that tore through the night in defiance of walls, bars, cages and all the safe people sitting down to dinner in their safe apartments along the tree-hung boulevard. Truth against the world. “Mamah,” he said, and all at once he felt supercharged with energy, with power—and love, love too. “Think of it, think of how it’ll be, the two of us together again . . .” His hands spun before him, as if he were trying to capture the image before it fluttered away.

  “Listen to me,” he said, insistent now. “Think of the Villa Medici in Fiesole. Remember how the walls looked as if they’d grown up out of the ground like the trees and the feeling we had there, the contentment, the way the light struck them and everywhere you looked there were vistas, and they were different through each turning of the sun, eleven o’clock a miracle, three o’clock, six in the evening? That’s what I’m going to give you. That’s your refuge. With me. And who gives a damn what anybody says.” He was trembling, burning up with it, the vision of that place to come rising before him in a luminous shimmer of conception. “I want you back,” he said, and if his tone was sharp and peremptory it was because he wasn’t pleading anymore, wasn’t making excuses—excuses were for little people, frightened people, people without command or direction. “This is ridiculous, this separation. I want you there. Soon. As soon as the roof’s up. Promise me. Enough of this.”