T. Boyle - The Women

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-minded 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?”

She felt something clench inside her. Suddenly she saw John in his pajamas and Martha in her nightgown, tumbling out of bed to race through the house chirping like birds and the tree standing there in all its array and the looks on their faces as they saw revealed what Saint Nick and the magic manipulations of his airborne sled and flying reindeer had brought them. Her children. Christmas. She didn’t know what to say.

“We’re in contact with them, of course,” she heard Frank say at her shoulder.

“In contact?” the blue-serge man threw back at him and there was no mistaking the sarcastic thrust of it.

“And we’ve sent them gifts. And cards and the like. And my sons, my two eldest, Lloyd and John, will be coming to work in the Chicago studio with me before long — and Mrs. Borthwick’s children, uh—”

Another of the reporters, a fleshy man with disarranged hair and a face the color of week-old grits, supplied the names for him: “John and Martha.”

“Yes, John and Martha,” Frank went on and she felt stricken all over again. “We plan to have them up here to Taliesin this summer once school lets out. For a month, a month at least. Isn’t that right, Mamah?”

Somehow — and she was having difficulty breathing all of a sudden — she managed to answer in the affirmative, but even as she did she could see that every man in the room was studying her as coldly as they might have studied a corpse laid out for dissection at the morgue.