The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She took a long walk next morning, then settled into work. Despite the heat—it must have been ninety by half-past ten—she found she was able to see the book afresh and resolve some of the problems that had dogged her the day before. She read over the completed pages, making small emendations— and they truly were good, the prose sharper and clearer than anything she’d been able to extract from Ellen Key, whose language had a tendency to bog down in a Swedish morass of misplaced modifiers and parenthetical phrases. She was in another place altogether, moving forward with a subtle refinement of Key’s ideas on the evolution of love and the way men often desire a woman before they know her while women are too often obligated to develop sexual desire after the fact, thinking of Frank, Frank and her, and how she’d been the one to reveal herself first, a rainy autumn day, the children in school and Edwin at the office and she in her robe and nothing under it—when she became aware that someone else was in the room with her.

  There was a smell of some caustic solution—muriatic acid? gasoline?—and when she looked up she saw Carleton bent over the fireplace with a bucket and scrub brush. He was wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of heavy trousers, far too heavy for this heat. His back was to her. She watched him go down on one knee, the brush working rhythmically over the upper surface of the stone where the soot stains reached almost to the ceiling like long grasping fingers, but was it wise to use a flammable solution? Even if it would have evaporated, whatever it was, by the time fall came around and the fireplace was in use again? She wanted to say something, wanted to interfere, but she didn’t. Let him show some initiative. Certainly Mrs. Swenson, the housekeeper who’d preceded him, wouldn’t have dreamed of scrubbing the fireplace—or anything else, for that matter, except at distant intervals and then only under compulsion. Just the night before, as Diana was gathering up her things to leave, she’d taken Mamah aside and told her how lucky she was. “These Negroes of yours are just too good to be true. I’m envious. I am. If I could only get Alvin to loosen his purse strings I’d march right over here and steal them away.”

  For a long moment she simply sat there, watching him. There was something intrinsically fascinating about the Negro’s movements—he was so fluid and athletic—and he wasn’t so much dancing, she realized, as conducting, as if the brush were his baton and the stone of the fireplace his orchestra. But that was a foolish thought, the stone an orchestra. What was she thinking? She had work to do. She turned back to the page before her (For many men, too many men, sexual attraction precedes any notion of love, and this too often leads to . . .), but the rhythmic swish of the wire brush distracted her and before long she was staring out the window. He truly was a good worker, she thought, glancing up at him again. She watched his shoulders dip and rise, the brush sweeping to and fro like a hypnotist’s watch, thinking she’d been too harsh on him that first day, too judgmental, too quick to take offense . . . but then she saw the rage in his face all over again, the way he’d snapped at his wife, and thought how wrong it was, how inadmissible, how primitive.

  He needed education, that was all. There were cultural differences at work here, just as there were in Japan and even Germany, but still, beneath it all, the attitudes were the same. Male attitudes. Archaic. Barbaric. Suddenly she felt herself go out to him—she could help, she could, not simply him but Gertrude too. Her eyes fell on the low table before her, and there, amidst a scatter of books and notepaper, was one of her presentation copies of The Woman Movement, still in its wrapper.170 She took it up on an impulse and rose to her feet. He was an intelligent man, she was sure of it, the sort of man who would welcome the gift of knowledge, thank her a thousand times over, because now, for the first time, he would see the other side of the coin, the woman’s side, see how his wife felt and should be made to feel.

  The only problem was that she didn’t know what to call him, not under the circumstances—Julian was too familiar and Carleton too formal. She saw the muscles clench in his shoulders as the sound of her footsteps drew closer, noticed the briefest hesitation before both arms swung back into motion, and then she was standing over him, the reek of the gasoline fumes in her face, clearing her throat. “Excuse me,” she said, “Mr. Carleton, Julian.”

  He turned at the sound of his name, a slow rotation of his head, the hair there cut short so that it clung to his skin in dark whorls like some extraneous growth wheeling out across the expanse of his skull, but he remained in his crouch, one knee braced against the coping, the brush arrested. And here were his eyes coming into play, dark eyes, so dark she could scarcely distinguish iris from pupil. He stared up at her, his eyes fixed, his features immobile.

  She held the book in both hands as if it were a missal, her fingers playingover the wrapper. “I just wanted to say,” she began, “what a splendid job you and your wife are doing. I’m very pleased. Very pleased indeed. And I’ll be sure to tell Mr. Wright.” She hesitated. His eyes were dead, his lips pressed tight. “I’m sure he’ll be—well, he’ll be pleased too. I’m sure.”

  If the moment was awkward it was made even more so by the fact that he was kneeling, as if he were bowing to her in subjugation, as if he were a slave in the old South—a darkie—and she the overseer’s wife. Mrs. Legree, Mrs. Mamah Borthwick Legree, her whipping boy at her beck and call. He didn’t smile, he didn’t nod, didn’t utter a word. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know why or what she had to apologize for, “—to, to interrupt you like this. You’re doing a very fine job there. But I just wanted to say—about that first interview—well, I’d like you to have this.” She held out the book to him, and without coming up out of his crouch, he shifted the brush to his left hand and took it from her with his right, his gestures so slow and deliberate he might have been moving underwater. He didn’t even glance at the book. Just held her eyes, as if to await further instructions. Or any instructions.

  “I think you’ll find this rewarding,” she went on. “Enlightening too, I hope. You see, no matter what our various cultures proclaim, marriage is almost everywhere the same. And, by and large, the women are the ones to suffer—under the current system, the system under which we’ve had to live from time immemorial, from the time of Moses and beyond, the Egyptians, I suppose, the Mesopotamians—women have been unequal partners and must live out their lives unfulfilled, in either love or work. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Nothing. He knelt there in his fumes.

  “I’m speaking of Gertrude. Of your wife.”

  Suddenly his face opened up. “Oh, don’t you worry about her,” he said, and he was grinning now. “I’ve got that under control.”

  “No, I don’t think you understand—she needs to express herself.” The grin faded. He was shaking his head side to side. “I know that, ma’am, and that’s why I work her day and night to stop her talking like a bush nigger and use the King’s English. And she will. She will.” His eyes stared out past her, as if he were addressing someone across the room. His voice went cold. “I promise you that.”

  When Frank came home for two days at the weekend, he was every bit as pleased as she was with the new help. Billy Weston fetched him from the station an hour before dinner, and he blew into the house like a cool breeze, taking her in his arms and dancing round the room with her before thrusting a foil-wrapped box of chocolates at her and disappearing into the drafting room to confer with Emil and Herbert. Of course, he couldn’t help shifting a vase from one shelf to another along the way or sliding a chair six inches to the right before deciding to move it back again—it was a compulsion with him—but the house seemed to have passed muster. The next she saw him was when she went out to her garden to cut flowers for the table and he was striding across the courtyard with Billy Weston in tow, firing off instructions to Lindblom, the landscaper, and his foreman, Thomas Brunker (a big-bellied man with a corona of white hair who always gave her a sour look, as if he disapproved of h
er, and so much the worse for him because she was the mistress of this house now and she was here to stay). “Dinner in ten minutes, Frank,” she sang out, and he smiled and waved and went on round the corner, never breaking stride.

  When they finally did sit down to dinner she saw that he seemed to have lost weight—fretting over the loose ends at Midway, sleeping irregularly and to all appearances dining on the fly or not at all—but he tucked into everything Carleton brought out of the kitchen on the silver tray he held high over one shoulder and manipulated with a flourish that managed to be neither subservient nor showy, but just precisely right. Gertrude surpassed herself with the cuisine, serving up one of her spicy stews (“ ‘Hotter de day, hotter de spice,’ dat what my mama say. ‘You got to sweat to cool off ’ ”), with cornbread, cucumber salad and mint yogurt made from a culture she’d brought with her from Barbados via Chicago, fresh-picked melon and a berry tart. The next day she spent the whole morning preparing a picnic lunch, which Carleton, ever proper in his white jacket, served them on blankets down by the lake. Frank was enraptured, declaring the day a holiday from work and inviting all his employees, right on down to the field hands, to join in the festivities. The plates circulated. Carleton went up and down the hill a dozen times and every time he came back the platter was laden and everybody agreed that they’d never tasted better fried chicken or potato salad or pork chops and greens. They were lying there on their blankets, content, when one of the men pulled out a mouth organ and Frank started the singing and before anyone knew it the stars were showing overhead.

  The next day Frank went back to Chicago, but not before putting away a two-fisted farmer’s breakfast and raising such a hosanna of praise to Gertrude’s buttermilk pancakes that she sidled out of the kitchen to give him a shy smile and one of her Barbadian homilies (“Nothin’ better den you eat well and purge clean”), and when he came back in the middle of the following week, she slaughtered a turkey for him and stuffed it with a mixture of smoked sausage and something she called cou-cou. And then Frank was gone again and the work of the farm went on and Mamah found herself counting down the days till the first of August, when John and Martha were due for their visit.

  She was there at the station an hour early on the appointed day. Billy Weston parked the automobile at the curb and made use of the time to bring out the sheen of its finish with a nappy cloth and a can of wax, always thinking of Frank and how particular he was about the condition of his machines, while she paced up and down the platform in the rising still heat of mid-morning. She hadn’t seen the children since Christmas when she and Frank had gone into Chicago to a hotel and she tried to make up for the past two Christmases by taking them out to a restaurant and the symphony and burying them in gifts they seemed entirely indifferent to. Ellen Key had liberated her and she knew she should feel nothing but joy in her present circumstances—she was one of the chosen ones, a woman living her life in love’s freedom171—and yet still, the looks on their faces, wary and hopeful at the same time, always seemed to flood her with guilt. Each time she saw them she expected them to deny her, to lash out and declare their independence—or worse, to tell her about Edwin’s new bride and how she was their mother now. Because their old mother wasn’t fit. Had never been fit and never would be.

  The train pulled into the station, one more arrival, and there they were, looking like strangers, John too adult now at twelve to take her hand and Martha gazing up at her in bewilderment, as if she were having difficulty placing her. “Children,” she cried, “John, Martha, come to your mother,” and they did come, with some prompting by their nanny (Edwin’s employee and no love lost there), because they had no choice. “How was your trip?” she asked as they waved their goodbyes to the nanny and settled themselves in the automobile, and both immediately answered “Fine,” in unison, as if they’d rehearsed it. “Well, good,” she said. “We’ve got all sorts of things planned for you—horseback riding, swimming, of course, and, John, did I tell you there’s a new rowboat for the lake? And, Martha—we’ve got peacocks now, two of them, and they have the most wonderful call or squawk or whatever it is . . .”

  It was hot. The children were withdrawn. She found herself nattering on inanely, hoping to spark some sort of reaction in them, but they seemed joyless, as if coming to the country were a rare form of punishment. John perked up a bit over the details of Frank’s motorcar, comparing it (unfavorably) to the new red Abadal Stephen Pennybacker’s father had just bought, and Martha seemed gratified to discover the dolls she’d left behind last summer lined up all in a row on the shelf beside the bed, and yet it wasn’t until after they’d gone down to the lake for a swim that they began to resemble the children Mamah remembered. There was something in that scene—bare legs and feet, the skipping of stones and chasing after the geese, frogs erupting in their chorus, the smell of hair gone wet and dry and wet again—that had a deeply calming effect. By suppertime, both children were complacent, replete with their hamburger sandwiches, Coca-Cola and paper-thin Barbadian potato crisps. By bedtime, she was able to look in on them and offer a goodnight kiss, and Martha, though she announced that she was almost nine now and perfectly capable of reading on her own, allowed her to sit in the rocker by the bed and read aloud from The Wind in the Willows as if the past five years had been merely an interruption.

  In the days that followed, as the children gradually acclimated themselves to Taliesin and she began to feel more at ease with them, her work seemed to come easier to her, because she was a mother—their mother—and no use in denying it or avoiding it or whatever she’d been doing. When they were away from her, home in Oak Park with their nanny and their schoolfellows and the new wife Edwin had been so quick to acquire, she pictured them as incorporeal, ghost images on a photographic plate.172 They were distant and so was she. But now that they were here, she realized how much she enjoyed seeing them ambling about the rooms or draped over Frank’s furniture, handsome open-faced children who made her proud. Of course, the situation wasn’t ideal and never would be—they were forever bursting in on her, squabbling over one thing or another, pale children, indoor children who had no appreciation of the countryside and little capacity for entertaining themselves, but that wasn’t their fault, it was Edwin’s.

  More than anything, she looked forward to seeing them at meals, where there were no distractions and she could tease out their thoughts. She was amazed at the change in them in just a year’s time. They seemed so mature, especially John, who was on the verge of young manhood, but Martha too, Martha who should have been Frank’s child, but wasn’t and anyone could see that in the set of her eyes—even Kitty, as grasping, jealous and vindictive as she was, should have been able to recognize that in an instant and allow Frank to have his divorce without hesitation. Very gradually, Mamah began to acquaint them with the ideas of Ellen Key—and Frank was a help here, when he was home, the two of them holding a sort of Socratic dialogue for the benefit of the children, never lecturing, but rather letting the subject of the conversation shift naturally from the events of the day to love and the soul and the right—the compulsion—of women everywhere to stand up and take charge of their lives.

  She wasn’t going to remake the children in a single summer, she knew that, but her hope was to educate them in the way she was educating Carleton, with the ultimate aim of making the world a better and more equitable place. And, on another level, to ease her guilt, to offer a rationale for what had happened on that awful night in Colorado when she’d stolen away without a word because she had to save her own life before she could save theirs. At any rate, the children were there and Frank was there (when he wasn’t in Chicago) and the Carletons were in the kitchen and Billy Weston came up the hill each morning to see that every little detail fell in place, the peacocks gave out with their desolate cries, the cattle lowed and the horses nickered at the rail because they wanted an apple and they wanted to be mounted and spurred through the fields and out over the hills, and she was there too, as deeply
and fully as she could ever remember being anywhere.

  Then there came a morning, breakfast done with and the children quietly occupied in their rooms—reading, she supposed, or hoped, at any rate—when she settled down to work with a cup of coffee and realized she’d forgotten something, and what was it? She gazed out on the yard, trying to recollect, the dense moist air drifting in through the open casement windows along with the faintly acid scent of the lady ferns Frank had clustered against the yellow stone of the foundation. For contrast. And there was genius in that too, his vigilance for the telling detail, the flowerbeds of the courtyard alive with color—coreopsis, phlox, hollyhocks and tiger lilies, and she really did need to get out more and tend them—even as the outer walls denied it, the simplest chromatic scheme there, green against yellow and the yellow fading to gold. She saw Billy Weston down below at the base of the hill conferring with Brunker over the lawn mower, the sun shearing them so that their features were annulled, two irregular shining spheres cut loose from the dark shadow of their gestures, and beyond them the lake and the road and the distant smudge of grazing cattle. She took a sip of coffee. Glanced down at her notes.

  And then she remembered: she’d meant to speak to the cook, to Gertrude, about baking something special that afternoon for Martha. Or rather Martha’s friend Edna, who was planning on riding her pony over so the two of them could put on their party dresses and have tea like little ladies out on the screened-in porch. Some finger cakes, maybe, something with coconut and crème—Gertrude was a marvel with coconut. And if John promised not to pester the girls, she supposed he could join the party at some point—and Billy Weston’s son, Ernest, who was a year older than John and more rough and tumble, more a country boy, but who at least gave John someone to tag along with. Or maybe that wasn’t such a good idea—the boys could have a separate party, yes, that would be better, perhaps down by the lake where they could work off some of their high spirits.