T. Boyle - The Women

She was devastated. She sat there in the armchair by the window, a blanket pulled up to her throat, staring at the cheap newsprint till the words no longer made any sense. The house ticked and groaned. The wind came up through the floorboards. Cold, so cold, the fire nothing more than a glow against the blackened stones of the hearth and the boiler in the cellar below might as well have been in another country for all the good it did.

So much for Ellen Key. So much for enlightenment. She and Frank turned in early that night, listening for the errant footfall in the courtyard. For the second night running she couldn’t sleep. She lay awake for hours, staring into the darkness, thinking of that man on the ice, seeing him, the twisted lips, the burn of hate. Finally, at first light, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

There were no backrubs. Not that night. Or for many nights to come.

As it turned out, the sheriff never did come for them. 163Nor did anyone else. The winter crawled on, Taliesin married its design and grew beyond it and Mamah remained quiet and productive and she gave up newspapers in all their complexity of motive and purpose and vowed that if she ever laid eyes on a reporter again she’d cross the street to avoid him. As for the townspeople, she drew back there too, scarcely leaving Taliesin for any purpose, even to go to the market. If they weren’t ready for advanced thought, if they felt compelled to insult her in the local paper and fulminate against her from the pulpits of their churches, well, so much the worse for them. They were the ones losing out to the forces of fear and ignorance and there was little she could do about it but pursue her work and let Ellen Key speak for herself — in as accurate and direct a translation as she could manage to produce.

Very gradually, as the new year broke and wore on, people began to concern themselves with other things, their own families, the weather, with the lives of their farms, with milking and calving and the tilling of the fields and raising of the crops. She began to meet in a quiet way with a few of the more receptive women — an invitation to tea or to go for a hike over the hills, to pick wildflowers or portray them in watercolors — and though she might mention Ellen Key in the most casual way, she tried not to proselytize and no one, not even Diana Milquist, married to the dentist and her closest friend in the neighborhood, ever mentioned her living arrangements. John and Martha came for a month that summer — of 1912—and she tried her best to be a mother to them, though it was clear that Edwin had done his all to turn them against her and that they had little interest in country life. As she confessed to Diana, as much as she loved having them at Taliesin it was something of a relief to see them go, and did she think she was an awful mother for feeling that way? No, Diana said (childless Diana, whose reproductive organs had been damaged as a result of a childhood accident), no, not at all.

In August, The Torpedo Under the Ark was published in an exquisite little edition by Ralph Fletcher Seymour of Chicago, and the press was largely favorable, though a number of papers invariably recycled the old news of her elopement with Frank and all the rest of the bilge that went with it (Former Mrs. Cheney, Who Eloped with Wright, Has New Book; Adopts Views of Ibsen and Swedish Author on Loveless Marriage). Still, the repercussions were relatively minor and Ellen Key went out into the English-speaking world all the same. She and Frank celebrated with a trip to Milwaukee and raised a toast (she with a glass of Liebfraumilch, he with a glass of eau vive, straight from the tap) to the success of the book and to the translations to come — and the book of her own, the ideas of which were just beginning to coalesce, a volume that would address questions of love, marriage and freedom in a plainspoken American way. For American women, women like herself and Diana and all the beleaguered Oak Park housewives forced into living a lie day after day through the fruitless course of their empty lives. And while she didn’t consider herself heroic or ambitious or even especially radical, the more she thought about it the more it grew in her mind. She couldn’t see the book’s title yet — it was just a blur of letters, like a word puzzle — but she saw her own name beneath it, Mamah Borthwick, or maybe Mamah Borthwick Wright, and she pictured a shifting series of ageless women in fashionable dresses absorbing her words in their parlors, kitchens and screened-in porches, their eyes shining, their faces rapt.

The dog days set in. Haying time came and went. Color struck the trees. She found herself falling easily into the routine of life at Taliesin, writing at her desk in the morning, joining in the work of the household through the afternoon and early evening — trying to assume as much of the load as she could in order to free Frank to pursue his architectural projects 164—and contenting herself with quiet evenings at home. With Frank. With the man she loved. In fact, it got to the point, through that fall and into the winter, where she felt so at home she no longer had any desire to leave Taliesin at all.

When Frank came to her about a trip to Japan in the spring, her first instinct was to deny him, not that she had anything against the Japanese. Quite the contrary: the Oriental culture intrigued her, with its iconography of dragon and crane and the exquisite sensitivity of its artistic design set against the fierceness of its samurai tradition and the bizarre subjugation of its women in their lacquered clogs and clinging robes till they were nothing more than playthings for men (and certainly they could use a dose of Ellen Key). 165It was just that she was settled finally. And content. She tried to tell Frank that but he wouldn’t listen. He needed the work, that was what it was. Needed to acquire his prints and screens and statuary in order to trade in them and make a profit to channel back into Taliesin because there were precious few commissions coming in. Because of her. He gave a long speech — a series of speeches — tiptoeing around the issue of blame, which was mutual, of course, and he assured her he had no regrets but there was the fact of it: he was being passed over, boycotted. And there was the promise of the biggest commission yet, the biggest of his life, a project that would erase all their financial concerns forever — a hotel, a Tokyo hotel to dwarf anything in Asia — and he simply had to go. Had to. And he wasn’t going anywhere without her. Ever again.

The whole time they were away she missed Taliesin with an ache nothing would soothe, though the Japanese women were far different from what she’d supposed — the society very nearly matriarchal in some respects, the wives and mothers firmly in control while the men went off like so many schoolboys to play with their painted little geisha and drink rice wine till they lost consciousness — and the food, especially the fried dish they called tempura, appealed to her more than she’d thought it would. She was open-minded. She even asked for the recipe and tried to duplicate it once they got back home to Taliesin, but the coated vegetables and strips of fish she dropped into hot oil in the cavern of her deepest pot seemed only to bloat up and absorb grease like miniature sponges till the blandest fritter or heaviest doughnut would have been a gourmet item in comparison.

“The Asiatic experience was intensely interesting,” she said, summing it up for Diana Milquist over soggy fragments of what was meant to be tempura, “truly enlightening — if you could only see the way those people live. Nothing like here. Or Europe.” She poked at a limp bit of carrot that had shed its batter, thinking how primitive conditions were, especially in the countryside. She thought of the wooden pallets, paper walls, the toilet that was little more than a hole in the ground. “Nothing at all.”