The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was glorious. She was his right hand and his left hand too and everything fell into place as the days lengthened and warmed and the vines climbed up the sunstruck walls and the honeybees charged the air with a current so alive she could feel it in her veins. Glorious. Just glorious. Until the housekeeper abruptly quit. And then the cook.

  “I won’t come to work here no longer,” the cook told her, “not for no pay—or pay whenever he feels like giving it out. And not with what people are saying.” The woman stood there before her in the kitchen that had been her exclusive domain, arms akimbo, big-bosomed and thick-waisted, with her sagging chins and loveless marriage, thankless and heedless both. “It’s sinful, that’s what it is. And sin and pay is one thing, but sin and no pay I just can’t abide, and I’m sorry, ma’am, I truly am.”

  Mamah went straight to her desk and scraped together every coin and bill she could find there, wrapped it all up in a handkerchief and dropped it into the woman’s hands, but still she wouldn’t stay and she wasn’t about to beg her, that was for certain. But now suddenly she was the servant, she was the drudge—the daily accumulation of tasks far beyond her—and though she put out a call to the community, to Diana Milquist and the few women she could call friends, no one came up the drive to work for Slow-Pay Frank and his tarnished mistress.

  She did the best she could, but she began to feel as if she were out of breath all the time, as if dusk followed dawn without an interval, without surcease, and the first thing to suffer was her writing. She simply didn’t have time for it. Or for reading either. Or reflection. Or even walks over the hills or a swim in the lake or anything else, her every waking moment focused on keeping the household from collapse while Frank ran to Chicago and back again. Somehow she managed to make it through the month of June, wielding mop, broom and scrub brush in a fury that took her right out of her body and doing her utmost to maneuver around the big pots in the kitchen and prepare the meals for Frank and the men he had working the place. But she was no cook and she’d be the first to admit it, her bread as flat as her flapjacks and her flapjacks charred and rubbery at the same time and the weather too hot for standing over the oven so that the chops were reduced to jerky and all the color seared out of the steak and rump roast. And then one evening in the middle of July, when she’d begun to despair, her hands coarsening, her skin darkening like a peasant’s, every joint and muscle aching day and night and the sweat thick at her hairline and gummed up under her arms and between her legs till she was permanently chafed and simply to move was an agony, Frank came in off the train from Chicago with his grin alight and said, “You know, I think I just may have a solution to this little domestic problem.”

  She’d gone down to the station to meet him in the automobile, with Billy Weston at the wheel, and it seemed to her even hotter at seven in the evening than it had been at noon. She brushed her hair away from her face, trying to look fresh for Frank—and she’d changed her dress, though it was already wet through where she’d leaned back in the seat. Frank was handing his suitcase into the car while Billy saw to his baggage—pottery wrapped in brown paper, yet another carved Buddha, the broad plane of the Oriental brow and the flat unresisting nose poking through the package. He was lively and full of himself and though he hadn’t embraced her—he wouldn’t till they were out of sight of prying eyes—he’d already managed to brush up against her twice and she could see he was in urgent need of her. He was grinning. Ducking his head and shuffling his feet on the pavement and tugging at the brim of his hat as if he meant to snatch it right out from under the crown.

  “Yes,” she said, letting out a long slow breath while fanning herself with the palm of one hand, “and what is it? What’s your solution?”

  “Say, Billy,” he called, turning his head away a minute just to keep her in suspense, “I think I might want to drive tonight and you can climb in back or just go on home to your wife if you like. She’s missing you, you know she is. And that boy of yours too. Doesn’t he ever wonder where’s his daddy? ”

  Billy was bent over one of the statues and he stood up now and gave an elaborate rolling shrug. “Sure, whatever you say, Mr. Wright. An evening at home? Well, I guess that’ll just about hit the spot, then.” He was grinning too now. “And Mother”—why did married men of a certain age insist on calling their wives Mother?—“I don’t suppose she’ll mind seeing me around. Or not too much, anyway.”

  “All right, then. Good,” Frank said. “Careful with that, careful!”

  It wasn’t until they were in the car and he had the machine in gear and started hurtling up the street with a great tromboning blast of the exhaust that he returned to the subject at hand. “You remember John Vogelsang, the caterer down there at Midway?”

  She did. Vaguely.

  “Big fellow. Heavy build. Blond hair, cropped close?”

  She made a noise of assent, but it didn’t really matter. He could have been talking about the emperor of China and it was the surest thing in the world that he would fill in the details, all the details, without stint.

  “Well”—his hand at the shift, the wind beating like a hurricane and she holding on to her hat for dear life—“I told him about your little problem, our problem, that is, and he recommended a couple to me, good workers, husband and wife. She cooks and he serves at table and does repairs and what have you. A kind of handyman/butler all in one.”

  “They’re in Chicago?”

  “Yes. They’re Negroes. From somewhere in the Caribbean, he says. One of the islands.”

  “And they’re willing to come up here and”—she let out a laugh—“cultivate the Emersonian virtues of country living?”

  The roar of the engine, the startled looks on the faces of the cows, the clouds shredding overhead. He shrugged. “Apparently. But they’re educated people—at least he is. Very well-spoken for a Negro. Name’s Julius, I think it was. Or no, no: Julian. Julian something.”

  CHAPTER 6: ENTER CARLETON

  The man who met them at the station, all elbows and knees and dressed in denim trousers and an open-collared shirt, wore a mask for a face. No smile, no frown, no expression of any kind. He had dishwater eyes, and that was no surprise—all of them had that washed-out look to them up here in the country, like so many duppies, as if the gloomy dead ashpit of the sky had sucked all the life out of them, and this one hid his behind a pair of wire-rim spectacles. He wore a little sand-colored mustache under the jut of his nose and short-clipped hair the same color and all Julian could think of was river sand, dirty with the rains. At least it wasn’t yellow. Yellow hair was an aberration on a human being and he swore he’d never seen so much yellow hair in his life all the way up on the train and everybody staring at him as if he was the freak and he never raised his eyes once except to look out on the unbroken scroll of green, too much green, green enough to bury anybody—they should have called this place Greenland and not that Eskimo island in Canada. But here he was, the dishwater man. He didn’t say hello or welcome or anything at all civil or even human other than “You must be the new help” and “I’ve come to fetch you up to Taliesin,” and he stood apart from them at the station, as if he was afraid the color of their skin would rub off on him.

  In the rain that seemed to have started up the minute the train left them on the platform in a volcano of smoke and cinders, Julian struggled with the weight of the steamer trunk and Gertrude’s overstuffed suitcase and when she went to help him, with that struck-dumb frog-eyed look of sympathy and hopefulness on her face, that look he hated because it demeaned him, made him into a puny slack little boy all over again, he shrugged her off. “I can handle it myself, woman. I don’t need a bit of your help. Now you just stand over there at the wagon and then you climb in and see if you can’t open that umbrella.” That was what he heard himself say, simple instructions, but his voice was choked with a kind of awakening rage she recognized in the space of one second and she stepped lively and that was that.

  And what had this dish
water man come to fetch them in when any fool could see it was going to rain like the deluge itself? An open wagon pulled by a little sorrel team that looked as spoiled as household pets—a wagon, as if this was the nineteenth century still, and here he’d been telling Gertrude how they were improving themselves by going to work for a rich man in the country. He’d had enough of Chicago, where the black people acted just like they were slaves still and the whites were as ignorant and tightfisted and blunted as the Hunkies and Polacks and dumb doughy Irish Micks they were. The country. That was what he’d yearned for, thinking of the island, where at least you could get away into a field of sugarcane and talk to the sky when you had to.

  But this country was different, he could see that already, see it before he climbed down off the train and hauled the trunk and suitcase to the wagon and settled in beside the dishwater man and watched the horses grind their pretty flanks. This country was desperate. Wild. They’d tried to break it with their mules and plows and axes, but it was a very hell pit of trees and bristling hilltops that ran all the way back as far as you could see, a place where bears roamed and wolves howled and the spirits of the red Indians murmured through the ghost hours of the night. And where the only black face he’d see besides Gertrude’s was when he looked into the mirror and he never looked into the mirror because he didn’t particularly like what he saw there.

  So they went up the road past the blood-colored barns and planted fields in the rain that chopped and drove and hissed against the inadequacy of the umbrella, across a bridge with the river spread out under it like a mother’s lap and right into the reek of hogs. He saw the place before she did, a collection of stained sheds and a little clapboard house, a man out there in the downpour with his shovel trying to open up a ditch so the discolored waste of the animals could flow out of the pen, and he felt his heart sink when the dishwater man tugged at the reins and they started through the yard. “Is this the place?” he heard himself say, and he wouldn’t turn his head to the dishwater man but just let the words tumble out of his mouth like something he was afraid of losing.

  Here were the hogs poking their mud-crusted snouts through the slats of the fence, the stink cataclysmic, Gertrude looking woebegone and trying to keep herself from taking in a single breath, and the dishwater man let out a laugh. A laugh. As if any of this was comical. “No,” the man said. “No, this is Reider’s place.” And he pointed on up the hill through the web of the trees and there it was, the biggest house in the world creeping out of the hillside like a wounded beast, like the tail of a big golden dragon, and then they rocked through the ruts and the house came at them and Julian stepped out into the mud boiling up round the flagstones of the courtyard and ruined the shine of his new leather shoes even as his best suit of clothes drank in the wet and clung to his flanks and lay bloated and heavy across his shoulders.

  “Hey, Billy!” A voice stabbed at them out of the shadows of an open stall and he saw the man whose voice it was and the motorcar at the same time, a fine expensive machine pulled up safe from the rain and painted just exactly the color of a boatload of bananas. The man was tall, with broad shoulders and a waist narrow as a girl’s, with the swollen lips and wet eyes of a sensualist. Maybe he was thirty, maybe that, no more. “Mrs. Borthwick told me to tell you to take them to their quarters to get settled and then have them come into the house so she can show them what needs to be done.”

  The dishwater man was standing in the mud himself now, as unhurried as if he were bathed in sunshine. “Yeah, sure, Brodelle, just as soon as we unload here and I can get the horses unhitched—but it’s a hell of a glorious day, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the other man said and he never moved to lend a hand, never even acknowledged that there were two people here, a man and his wife, strangers in need of assistance, “I guess so—as long as you’re a duck.”

  They both of them had a laugh over that, Gertrude trying to climb down out of the wagon without getting her skirts wet and what did she think, he was going to carry her? Well, he would have, just to show them, but then she was down in the mud, trying to shield him with the umbrella, and he had hold of the trunk with everything they owned inside and they were following the dishwater man across the courtyard and into a room that smelled of old lye soap the mold had got the better of and he was so furious with himself for ruining his shoes and letting his wife down he just dumped the trunk on the floor and stalked back out across the courtyard for the suitcase and when he got back the dishwater man was gone out into the rain to see to the horses and still nobody had offered a word of kindness or welcome or even bothered to introduce themselves. They were cold haughty people, that was what they were—even the lowliest cum rum-shop Bajan idler would have got up and lent a hand. And nobody on the island would have let a stranger walk by without calling out a good day to him. Nobody. It was the smallest courtesy and if you didn’t have courtesy then you were no better than an animal.167

  “Ah, Julian, honey, you all soaked t’rough.” Gertrude was standing in the middle of the room, her muddy shoes already wiped clean and set neatly against the wall. She’d found a towel in the drawer of a bureau that stood half-open and was working it at the nape of her neck where her hair had fallen loose. “Here, honey, you take it and dry yourself,” she murmured, handing him the limp towel, which he took without seeing it or feeling the nap of the cloth because for just an instant there the novelty of the situation took him out of himself and he was thinking I don’t know this place or these people and nothing smells right here, nothing smells, nothing smells at all except for lye soap and mold and the dead cold ashes in the hearth, and then he was running it over the crown of his head so furiously it was as if he was trying to rub the hair right off his scalp.

  There was a white service jacket hanging on a hook on the inside of the bathroom door—rich man’s plumbing, toilet and sink, at least there was that—and if it was two sizes too big for him, he didn’t give a damn. “Let me put de iron to dat,” Gertrude said, fussing over him, and first he said no but then he relented because he was going to go in there ramrod straight and no wrinkle on him and show this rich mistress of the house that he was no shuffling black fool like half the niggers in Chicago but an educated man with his diploma from Combermere School in Bridgetown, Island of Barbados—Little England, they called it, Little England—and an accent as cultivated as the late King himself, even if his wife did speak like a barefoot Bajan peasant and that was no fault of his. They wanted a proper butler, he would give them a proper butler. So yes, put de iron to it, woman.

  It wasn’t fifteen minutes and there was a knock at the door and the dishwater man standing there to lead them through the maze of that house and into the presence. Gertrude kept her eyes down the whole way. She’d changed into her best dress and the white apron she’d found hanging beside the jacket and she had her lips bunched in that monkey way of hers that showed she was nervous and he called her out on it, hissing “Monkey, monkey” till she shot her eyes at him. They went back out into the rain, across the courtyard, quickstepping to keep out of the mud—cows lowing, and a smell of them too—then into a door on the other side, which led through a sitting room for the workers. Then there was the long expanse of the studio and two men—he recognized the one from the courtyard—seated there at their big desks with their drawings on sheets of paper the size of tablecloths spread out before them and neither one even bothered to look up. Outside again, but with a roof over their heads—the loggia—and on into the main house and a big pot-cluttered kitchen there with a greasy wood range and a mess of plates and dirty silverware in the sink and the lazy fat bluebottle flies clinging to the walls and windows as if they didn’t have a care in the world. “This is the kitchen,” the dishwater man said and they made one rotation of the room and followed the bony twitch of his shoulders out the door and through a dining alcove festooned with enough artworks, statues, rugs and animal skins—and what was that, a badger?—to stock a museum, and then took a sharp lef
t turn into a great grand room crammed with even more foolery and bric-a-brac and the lake livid as a bruise out there beneath the windows.

  They saw her before she saw them. She was sitting at the window in a strange kind of high-backed chair slatted like a lobster trap, her rum-colored hair pinned up in a coil so that her ears stood out like scallop shells, white as white. There were books stacked round her, both on the low table to her left and on the floor at her feet, and she seemed to be inscribing something in the ledger in her lap. He shifted his eyes to Gertrude and there she was making those monkey lips again, her hands knitted in front of her as if she were in the side pew of the church, her eyes gaped wide at the sight of all the fine things in the room—the grand piano, the fabrics and paintings and colored-glass lamps and the books in their polished wooden cases that fit them just so—and he wanted to hiss at her but he didn’t.

  He was feeling the same thing she was: they were inside, in the inner sanctum, the place where the white elite lived at their leisure, and it was a new world to both of them, as fantastic as Captain Nemo’s submarine or that spaceship H.G. Wells sent off to the moon. What did they know? They were Bajans. Ignorant and small. And even as the thought came to him he saw himself as a boy filled with shame and excitement as he crouched in the horse nicker and thatch palm outside the grand big house of the landowner, Mr. Brighton, and half the village there ducking down shamefaced to see how he and his white guests took their tea out on the patio, how they lifted their little fingers over the thimble-sized teacups and how the ladies arched their backs and cooed in their little birds’ voices and took their tea cakes up to nibble at them without dropping a crumb or staining their perfect white gloves with even the smallest single spot of sweet cream butter or a granule of sugar. So that was how it was done, they were all thinking and thinking too of their banged-together wood-slat houses listing over the white limestone foundations and picturing their neighbors sitting there, all black, black as the night of the hurricane, lifting their little fingers over the cups that were no bigger than the ones in a dollhouse.