T. Boyle - The Women

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 freedom 171—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. 172They 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.