T. Boyle - The Women

As soon as they’d left, Frank retreated to his studio and she buried herself in the kitchen, working side by side with the cook to prepare the goose, the gravy, stuffing, pudding and side dishes, determined to make a holiday of it despite the disaster of the morning. And it was a disaster, she had no doubt of that. She let the cook go at five to be with her own family and willingly took on the burden of the meal herself — she was glad for the activity, for anything to take her mind off the way those men had looked at her as if she were some sort of female Scrooge. Or worse, another species altogether — the mother who couldn’t seem to muster any affection for her children, even on the most sacrosanct day of the year. She took out her frustration on the chopping block, on the cutlery and the cookware. She rinsed and chopped and mashed and prodded the goose and poured the wine and did her best to braise the vegetables in the pan without burning them, and when they sat down to dinner, Christmas dinner (they were twelve, with the Porters and their children, Frank’s mother, a few of the workmen and a couple from Chicago who seemed to be the last of Frank’s friends who would have anything to do with him under his present circumstances), she tried her best to be equable and pleasant and to let her laugh conquer all, but it was the most miserable Christmas she’d ever spent.

She tossed through a sleepless night, dreading the outcome — she was a fool to have gone to the press, an idiot, a dreamer; she should have hidden in the cellar, should have poisoned their coffee — while Frank, as unconcerned and artistically removed as ever, snored in his own distinctive way, as if a great wall of water were tumbling into a pit and then rising up to inundate a solitary man breathing through a piccolo. The next day’s papers gave a full accounting, and it was worse even than she’d imagined. The Spring Green Weekly Home News was savage, inflammatory, labeling Frank and her “a menace to the morals of the community and an insult to every family therein,” and the Tribune , right from the maddening qualifiers inserted into the headline — SPEND CHRISTMAS MAKING ‘DEFENSE’ OF ‘SPIRIT HEGIRA’ 162—managed to combine a tone of high dudgeon with outright mockery. They were seen as ridiculous. Pompous. Self-serving. And worse: unfit and uncaring parents.

By the following day, it had turned ugly.

She’d been working on her translation since early in the morning, working so intently she skipped lunch altogether and very nearly let the fire burn itself out, when Frank came through the door with her ice skates dangling from one hand. “Enough work for today,” he announced. “Time for some physical activity, something robust, eh? How about a little turn on the ice? What do you say?”

It took her no more than ten minutes to dress and then they were out the door and crunching their way along the path Billy Weston had shoveled down the center of the courtyard. Everything was still, the air new-made, the house as settled and comfortable under its spreading eaves as a chalet in Kitzbühel. Smoke spiraled from the chimneys. A crow beat heavilyoverhead, its wings creaking like unoiled hinges. Frank led the way, dressed in lederhosen and a Tyrolean cap, the great trailing swath of his scarf slicing right and left with the sway of his shoulders, and he was in such high spirits he dodged away into the drifts to break off one of the great rippling icicles depending from the roof and prop it over his shoulder like a mock artillery piece.

They made their way down the drive, crabwise, ice underfoot, the pale disk of the sun settling into the trees at their backs and the river opening out before them, and then they crossed the road and went down the narrow path on the other side, everything pristine and perfect under the sculpted banks of snow. She breathed in the scent of the pines, saw the way they stood ranged along the river like sentinels, rugged and alive and giving up their color to a monochromatic world, and felt a surge of joy. This was it exactly, the life she’d envisioned, work and play united, self-sufficiency, the out-of-doors, Ellen Key, Frank. It was too perfect. The ideal of any woman, of every woman. Every woman should feel like this.

She paused a moment to brace herself against the bole of a tree and kick the snow from her boots, wanting only to shout out her joy to the world, and Frank stopped to look back at her. “Are you all right? ” he called. “Out of breath already?” He was a picture, a framed picture, and where was the camera to record it?

“No,” she said, “not at all. In fact, I can scarcely wait to get down there on the ice and challenge you to a race, twice round the rink, and let no man — or woman — stand between us.” Her blood was singing. Her eyes jumped at him.

“You’re on,” he said, and here was his grin. “It’s a bet. The winner — and I’m sorry to say it’s sure to be me — will receive one back rub, gratis, at the hands of the loser. Agreed?”

Oh, yes, yes: even if she lost she couldn’t lose. “Agreed,” she said, and let her laugh carry the freight.

As they came down the slope and through the trees she could see the figures of the skaters out on the river, dark forms sailing free or locked in tandem, their cries echoing across the ice. There was a bonfire going on the far bank, families gathered there with wieners, soda pop, flasks of something stronger. An Irish setter spun round in circles in the middle of the rink they’d cleared, yapping, while two boys flew past and then doubled back, urging it to chase them. It was a scene out of Brueghel. Or maybe Currier and Ives. She was just strapping on her skates when a black-haired man with fierce black eyebrows, in a bulky homemade sweater and patched trousers, sailed in close to the bank and growled something at her before shooting off again. And what had he said? Who was he?

Frank was off to her left, as eager as a child to get out on the ice, entirely oblivious, one skate already on and now the other, and in the next moment he was gliding past her, crowing, “Come on, come on, what are you waiting for? ” Then she was up on her skates, unsteady yet, and he had her by the hand and the wind was in her face and here they were, weaving through the crowd, one grand circuit of the rink and then she began to understand — or no, she was made to understand. People — and she recognized some of them — were skating to the far shore, singly and in groups, bunching there on the foot-worn snow to remove their skates before climbing up the bank to the road. They were leaving, en masse. Turning their backs on them. Snubbing them. And then, just as the apprehension of it began to sink into Frank’s features, the black-haired man glided up to them and said, quite distinctly this time, “You should be ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what? ” Frank shot back at him, but the man looped away from them and sailed far out across the river, only to come rocketing back a moment later, moving so fast she was afraid he meant to collide with her — she’d actually raised her hands to cushion the blow — until he pulled up at the last moment in a slashing spray of ice. “Go back where you come from, you old pervert,” he shouted, his face red and his eyes bugged with rage. “You and your conkabine both.” Everything evaporated then, all the joy she’d felt in the simple pleasure of the day and all her hopes too, and though Frank cursed him and left her side to chase after him in a fury of his own, the man danced on ahead of him, just out of reach — by far the superior skater. “Pervert, pervert!” his voice rang out till the fire fell into itself and the banks were deserted and the two boys took their dog and ambled up the road and out of sight.

When she and Frank got back — he’d insisted on skating till he’d had his fill, just the two of them alone on the ice with the scowling man — Billy Weston was waiting for them, looking like Doom and his brother. He had the newspaper in his hand and he laid it out on the kitchen table for them. ASK SHERIFF’S AID TO OUST WRIGHT, the headline read, and though she tried to ignore it, tried to recapture the feeling she’d had going down the drive and through the woods with Frank at her side, she couldn’t help herself and took it off into the bedroom to confirm what she already knew: the whole community had risen up against them. And worse: they’d petitioned the sheriff to arrest her and Frank on a morals charge. A morals charge, for God’s sake. It was like something out of the Dark Ages. Or Salem. A Salem witch hunt.