T. Boyle - The Women

The major part of the exterior was finished — or at least as finished as it was going to be for a work in progress — by the time Mamah’s divorce came through at the end of the first week of August. The roof was up, the shinglers pounding away. The two Billys climbed like monkeys. The men shouted and joked and Johnnie Vaughn kept up a running patter over the curses of Ben Davis down below. Somebody produced the newspaper, which he declined even to glance at — more lies, innuendo, character assassination — and he had a few round things to say about the press at lunch that noon to the amusement of Billy Weston and some of the others, but after everyone had gone home he couldn’t help unfolding the thing and at least taking in the page at a glance. And there was Mamah, in profile, with some sort of amateurish Valentine’s heart sketched into the upper corner of the photo above a cameo of Edwin with his drawn mouth and scalped bulbous head. Her Spiritual Hegira Ends in His Divorce, the article announced, and then went on with all the authority of a blind seer to assure the diligent and disinterested reader that Mamah’s “affinity” had grown tired of her even as he’d vindicated his wife’s faith in him and returned happily to the bosom of his family.

He took dinner that night at Tan-y-deri with his sister and he never mentioned a word about it, nor did she. Dinner was exceptionally good and Jennie was good too — good company — and her husband, Andrew, as well, the conversation leapfrogging delightfully from one subject to another, just the way he loved it, repartee, thesis and antithesis, easy smiles and strong opinions, and the view of Taliesin on the ridge opposite was as fine a thing as he’d ever seen. But the newspaper was claptrap and the thought of it flared inside him like a bout of heartburn and he wanted to thrash the men who made their living sorting through people’s dirty laundry, these so-called journalists, because they were nothing more than panders. The cretins. They knew nothing and never would.

The painful thing was the thought of what it did to Mamah and her reputation — or whatever they’d left of it intact. Bad enough that they should drag her through the mud over her divorce, but to make it seem as if she’d been nothing more than a passing fancy to him was just plain cruel. And false, false to the core. For a moment, sitting there on the porch of Jennie’s place and looking out over the hills draped in shadow, he entertained the idea of hiring an attorney — one of these real balls of fire — and suing them for defamation. Let them crawl to him. Let them writhe and suffer and wring their hands. Let them print a retraction, tell the truth for a change. Of course, Mamah insisted that it meant nothing to her, that she — and he — stood so far above the gossipmongers it was as if they didn’t exist at all, but still he could hear the hurt and uncertainty in her voice when they spoke on the telephone on a line open all the way to Chicago. (And if the mighty men of the press were so prescient and all-seeing, how could they not have known she was there, a mere two hundred miles from him? Being discreet. And private. And biding her time.)

Three weeks later he left Taliesin and went into Chicago in the roadster, alone, maneuvering round the streets as inconspicuously as he could, given the coloration of the automobile and the way the tires seemed to cry out in surprise every time he negotiated a turn. He’d tried to dress inconspicuously as well, leaving the cape and jodhpurs at home and selecting the sort of narrow-brimmed hat and constricting tie he imagined any American Joe would have worn to a baseball game or fireworks display, but still he glanced round guiltily every time he had to stop for a pedestrian and twice he reversed direction for fear he was being followed. Eventually, after a series of evasive moves, he found his way to a nameless little boardinghouse where he was certain no one would recognize him — or the former Mrs. Cheney, who was registered there under her maiden name.

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.

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.