The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The street was all but deserted. A big soapy white cloud danced over the roof, sparrows clung to various appurtenances and a pair of rubber plants peeped out from behind the ground-floor windowpanes. If the house itself was a tricked-out eyesore that should have gone down in the great fire and the world a better place for it, he didn’t care about that, not today. He even whistled a little song to himself as he went up the walk, and he was the most discreet and innocuous man alive as he loaded her bags into the car, escorted her out the door and settled her into the seat beside him. Then he put the machine in gear and drove with elaborate care through the familiar grid of streets, as restrained and circumspect as a judge—until he reached the city limits, that is, when he opened the throttle wide and let the Yellow Devil live up to its reputation all the way back to Wisconsin.

  CHAPTER 5: MADE FOR THE AVERAGE

  It was snowing. Had been snowing, off and on, for most of the day. Frank was delighted, his face lit with the purest pleasure every time he sailed in and out of the room—boyish, brisk, talking of coasting, how they’d go coasting that night once the workmen had left, and was she warm enough, should he build up the fire for her?—and there was an easy slow languor to the course of the day that made her feel like a petted thing, like a cat in a spreading lap, though if it were up to her she’d rather be back in Italy, with the sun warming her shoulders and the trumpet flowers playing their bright colors off the wall behind her. It was cold. Cold outside and cold in here too. The carpenters and plasterers and all the rest were banging away in one of the back rooms—eternally banging—and the wind out of the north that carried those romantic snowflakes in suspension blew up between the cracks of the floorboards and passed right through the windows as if there were no glass in them at all. She sat by the fire, a rug over her knees, and warmed herself through the day with tea, cocoa, coffee and hot broth, Ellen Key’s The Torpedo Under the Ark in one hand, her lined notebook in the other, doggedly untangling the sense of the Swedish and letting her mind run free to find its English equivalent.159

  At some point—it was late in the afternoon, the light fading, the clamor of the workmen gradually dying away till for long intervals the house fell mercifully silent—she found her attention flagging. She kept lifting her eyes from the page to stare out the window to where the snow obliterated the walls Frank had put so much time and effort into constructing, all that linearity—that maleness, the science of the object—smoothed out under the soft contours of the feminine. The fields were gone too. The black spikes of the trees dulled and softened. Roundness. The world had achieved roundness overnight.

  A day earlier—just yesterday afternoon, though it seemed like an age—everything had looked harsh and sharp-edged, the grass a stiff hacked brown, the trees like daggers, and she’d asked Billy Weston to bring the car round and take her into Spring Green because she wanted to get out of the house for a few hours if only to see something new, anything. And of course Christmas was coming and she needed to find something for the children—that was the rationale, at any rate. She’d kept to herself most of the fall, striving to live quietly, productively, out of the glare of the press and out of sight of any of the rustic moralists who might tend to view her as a threat to decency. A scarlet woman. A husband hunter. A feminist. They had a hundred stock phrases at their command, as if they had the right to pass judgment, but she tried not to be bitter. For Frank’s sake. He had his heart set on living here amongst them, living self-sufficiently, growing his own food and raising his own animals for slaughter, generating electricity from the dam he intended to build at the base of the hill where the creek passed under the road, felling trees, diverting a stream for water and building, always building, and she wouldn’t be the one to upset the balance.

  She had Billy drop her on the outskirts of town—every man, woman and child within a hundred miles knew Frank’s automobile as well as they knew their own buggies and farm wagons, and she wanted, above all, to be anonymous. A woman in ordinary clothes, wrapped up against the cold, taking tea at the hotel and browsing the shops for Christmas gifts. It wasn’t to be. The minute she stepped out of the car the curtains parted in the house across the way and by the time she’d walked the three blocks to the general store every head was turned up and down the street. She selected a bow and a quiver of arrows for John, thinking he could practice target shooting in Oak Park and, looking ahead to the summer to come, perhaps hunt things in the fields at Taliesin—rabbits, she supposed, gophers, that sort of thing. She found a paint set and an easel for Martha, to encourage her in her artwork—she did seem to have a gift for composition, even Frank said so. That was fine. That was all right and pleasant enough in its way. But the woman who waited on her kept clenching her jaws as if it were a tic and wouldn’t look her in the eye. There was no pretense of small talk or even civility. And while she did take tea and a sandwich at the hotel, keeping strictly to herself, there were whispers and guarded glances and every time she looked up someone seemed to be staring at her.

  She didn’t mention it to Frank—no need to upset him over nothing. But the experience made her more determined than ever to push forward with her work. The world was in desperate need of Ellen Key—not simply these pigheaded farmers and their prudish wives, but the world at large. People—women, especially—absolutely must learn to think for themselves instead of blindly following the dictates of a patriarchal society that would deny them not only the right to vote but the right to love in their own instinctual way. She had a fleeting fantasy of herself as a sort of Joan of Arc of erotoplastics, wielding a radiant sword and cutting them all down to size, and then, though she was exhausted and the house was as cold as an igloo, she turned back to the book in her lap and there it was, right before her, in Ellen Key’s native tongue: till älska, to love. To love. There was no higher purpose in life, no greater duty—why couldn’t they understand that? She was just reaching for her pen to note it down, the house gone still, the snow at the windows and Ellen Key on her lips, when she heard Frank’s voice, raised in exasperation, drifting to her from the door that gave onto the courtyard. “No,” he was saying, “no, she isn’t.”

  There was the sound of stamping feet, someone knocking the snow from his boots in the anteroom, then a man’s voice, a stranger’s, rang clear: “But isn’t it true that she’s living here? Rumor has it—or more than rumor, reports, eyewitness reports—that she is. Just yesterday—”

  “That’s none of your business. Or anyone else’s.”

  “But will you at least confirm or deny it?”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  “The fact is that Mrs. Cheney is living here under this roof even as we speak, is it not?”

  There was a sudden sharp whine as the door pulled back on its hinges and Frank’s voice riding over it, firm but consolatory: “I’m very sorry you had to come all the way out here in this weather for nothing, but I’ll remind you that it wasn’t at my invitation and I’m sorry too that I can’t ask you in—I do hope you’ll find your way back to town in the midst of this glorious winter weather. Spirit of the season and all that, eh? Old Charles Dickens’ sort of weather.”

  “There isn’t anything I can do to induce you to—?”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  Then the door slammed shut and she heard a single set of footsteps coming down the hall—Frank’s, the rhythmic clack of his elevated heels giving him away. She set aside her work and got up from the chair as he strode into the room and bent automatically for the poker to stir up the fire, though she’d been tending it all afternoon and it was more than sufficient. “Did you hear any of that tripe?” he asked over his shoulder.

  She didn’t know why she should be upset, but she was. All at once she felt lost and abandoned, filled with a sorrow that ate right through her, Julia dead, her children estranged from her, her marriage wrecked, and for what? For this cowardice? This hiding behind a locked door? “Why can’t they just leave us alone?” she said, her voice catching i
n her throat. She was waiting for him to wrap her in his arms, but he didn’t, so she went to him and held him awkwardly, one arm draped round his shoulder, the other at his waist. “I feel like a criminal, like I’m being hunted. Persecuted. Like Jean Valjean.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He was sorry. Well, so was she, but what did they have to be sorry about? They were together, living true to their principles. It was the reporters—they were the ones fomenting this atmosphere of hate, and on Christmas nonetheless; they wouldn’t even let them celebrate Christmas in peace. She wasn’t thinking, didn’t even know what she was saying till the words were out of her mouth: “Why don’t we just tell them the truth?”

  She felt him stiffen and then he slid out from under her arm and bent again to poke needlessly at the fire. “I don’t know,” he said. “We should. God knows we should. But the neighbors . . . they’re such . . . they’re so locked into their self-righteousness, so rigid and just plain ornery—there’s no telling what they’d do.”

  She snatched at his wrist, made him look at her. “But don’t you see—that’s exactly the attitude that’s kept women down all these centuries. We have nothing to be ashamed of—are you ashamed? Because I’m not.”160

  His face lost its expression. He shifted his eyes away from her. “No, of course not. It’s just that—we need to be cautious, go slow. Give the neighbors time to adjust.”

  But she wasn’t listening. She was in the grip of an idea. “Why not, I don’t know, why not call them here—the reporters, all of them—make a statement, a formal statement? That way we could at least get our version in the papers, let Ellen Key speak for us, lay out the principles we stand for. Educate them. Isn’t that what this is about, at root?” She was elated. Her eyes were burning. “You do love me, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, let’s do it, then. Let’s trumpet it to the world.”

  He nodded again, but she could see he wasn’t convinced. For a long moment he stood there with the poker in his hand, as if he’d forgotten what to do with it, then he set it down carefully and excused himself to wash up for dinner.

  She wasn’t daunted. The feeling of euphoria carried her through the meal, Frank chattering away, the incident with the reporter already forgotten as he spun out his plans for half a dozen projects and Christmas dinner too—and they would go coasting, that very night, they would—but she was only half-listening. She knew what she was going to do now, what she had to do—she was going to take the initiative, step from the shadows, reveal herself to the world. She was already making speeches in her mind, addressing an audience that wasn’t there, shadowy men, their legs crossed, notepads balanced on their knees . . .

  The cook served dessert. Frank was still talking. Outside, the snow spun down out of the sky. It was a moment to treasure, domestic and true and loving and peaceful—until it was broken by the sudden sharp bleat of the phone. “You sit, Frank,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

  She made her way across the room, lifted the receiver from the hook and answered, “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Cheney?” The voice on the other end of the line purred at her, an oddly familiar voice, a man’s voice, and before she responded she identified it—this was the man who’d been to the house earlier, the newspaperman playing a little trick on them. She could have said “no” or “there is no such person here,” could have played right along. But there was no point in that, not anymore. “Yes,” she said, “this is she.”161

  On Christmas morning they were up early, stoking the fires, sweeping the rugs and dusting the statuary. She made breakfast herself, though the culinary arts were something of a mystery to her (eggs, ham and fried potatoes, the eggs runny, the ham seared and the potatoes blackened), and when the cook came at eight she helped her roll out the dough for three pies and then followed a recipe for two trays of raisin cookies. They’d had their Christmas at dawn, a simple exchange of gifts beneath the tree—a jade pin set in platinum for her and a new hat and scarf for him—and while it wasn’t exactly perfunctory, their first Christmas together in their new home, they were both hard at work within the hour. Frank must have spent half the morning arranging and rearranging the living room, twice stamping off through the snow to cut yet one more holly sprig or evergreen branch, and he was in a state, she could see that, flying from one room to the other, very nearly barking at her every time he tore through the kitchen. He was a perfectionist, she knew that—it was one of the things she loved about him, a testament to his artistic sensibility—but there were times when he could be just a bit excessive. Like this morning. Which only made things more difficult for her. And then there was the matter of what to wear, Frank settling finally on his country gentleman’s outfit of tweed jacket and matching knee breeches, with his artist’s tie and a pair of heavy woolen stockings, and she choosing a simple embroidered blouse in a shade of ecru over a skirt just a tone darker—she wanted to appear fashionable, of course, but proper too. Sober. Relaxed. The gracious hostess at ease in her own home.

  The first of the reporters came up the drive in a buggy from the Spring Green station just before eleven and she tried to make him feel welcome as Frank paced up and down the length of the room and the fire sparked and jumped and the fields lay icebound beyond the windows. Then two more appeared, sliding along the county road like skaters before edging their way gingerly up the slick incline of the drive. She served the cookies and fresh-brewed coffee, asked them about their families—Christmas morning, and here they were away from them, but it was all in the line of duty, wasn’t it?—and before long the entire contingent had arrived, eight men in all, of varying ages and temperaments, and each of them drinking in every detail of the place they’d be pressed to re-create from memory back at their desks in Chicago, Madison, Spring Green.

  When they were all gathered and comfortably seated, Frank, who’d been dissertating on some of his art pieces in his usual disarming way while she played the hostess and the exquisite beauty of the room exerted its spell, called them to attention and began reading from a prepared statement in his fine clear voice. It was a statement of principle, without apology, beautifully reasoned and presented and laying out the ideas of Ellen Key in the most practical way, as a method of living and loving truly. They’d worked it out together through half a dozen drafts the previous night, Christmas Eve dissolving in an intense fugue of diction, syntax and revolutionary rhetoric—he was a beautiful writer, really, and he would have made a striking politician too—and they both agreed that he would speak for the two of them and that what they had to say would once and for all put an end to the rumor and speculation. As she stood by his side, watching the reporters’ faces as he spoke, she felt so full of pride and vindication she could have led a parade from one end of the country to the other.

  He spoke frankly of his first marriage—how he’d married too young, how he’d grown apart from his wife intellectually as he matured into his art and how he’d always tried to live honestly and by the highest precepts. One of the men—and she immediately fastened on him, the narrow-shouldered one in the sagging blue-serge jacket with the soaked-through boots and running nose—nodded in approval. Good, she was thinking, bravo! And then Frank talked of her and the principles on which their love was founded—“Mrs. E.H. Cheney never existed for me; she was always Mamah Borthwick to me, an individual separate and distinct, who was not any man’s possession”—and she felt a thrill run through her, because this was it, this was it exactly: no man’s possession but an individual in her own right and the equal of any man on earth. And Frank standing there in public and declaring it. He used his walking stick to underscore his points, as fierce and assertive as any orator on the floor of the senate. Finally, in conclusion, he talked at some length of his art and what it meant to be held up before the public and judged by standards he’d never made or agreed to adhere to.

  Afterward—and they were interested, oh, they were, in the most engaged and broad-mind
ed way, every one of them a potential advocate for Ellen Key—there were questions, both for Frank and her, probing, earnest calls for clarification and instruction. She felt these men wanted to understand, wanted to help, wanted, above all, to send her message out to the world, and she let herself go till she was speaking purely from the heart. And so did Frank. He grew more magnificent by the moment, extemporizing now on the rigidity of the loveless marriage and the strictures society attempts to impose on the middling and the great spirits alike. “On the general aspect of the thing,” he said at one point, striding up and down the length of the room while all their eyes followed him as one, “I want to say this: laws and rules are made for the average. The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do.”

  And now the little blue-serge man raised his hand and interjected a question—blew his nose piteously, wrung and wiped it in his handkerchief, and asked in a thick dredging voice, “But what of your families, your children, separated from you on Christmas day, of all the days of the year? ” He paused to blow his nose once more while everyone waited patiently for him to go on. “Is this the way ‘the honest, sincere, thinking man’ creates rules for himself? What of them? What of the little ones?”

  There was a silence. One man stood up abruptly. Another, his voice ragged with emotion, echoed, “Yes, what of them?”