T. Boyle - The Women

Svetlana stopped drawing now, two pencils — the green and brown — bristling from the knuckles of her left hand, the red one arrested over the chimney even as the roof spread wide to enclose the stick figures she’d drawn beneath it: two of them, just two, mother and daughter in matching triangular skirts. Her eyes went distant a moment and maybe she was seeing the swans, Lionel and Lisette — that’s what they’d named them, wasn’t it? — or maybe she was just tired. What she said was: “Are we almost there yet?”

Frank and Kameki were waiting on the platform to greet them, their breath streaming, hats cocked low, collars pulled up high. They leaned into the wind, their eyes searching the windows of the train as it slowed with a seizure of the brakes, and then Kameki turned aside and cupped his hands to light a cigarette and Frank started forward, the skirts of his heavy twill cape fanning and fluttering round the tight clamp of his riding breeches and the sheen of his boots. He was right there, so close she could have reached out and touched him, but somehow he didn’t see her, and the train slid past him before it jerked to a halt just up the line. Svetlana couldn’t contain herself. She sprang up on the seat and pounded at the window, calling out his name over and over until finally he looked up and saw them and his face changed. Olgivanna waved then, her heart lifting.

But there was something wrong, she could see that the minute she stepped off the train. Frank was as brisk and energetic as ever and he was wearing his broad welcoming smile as he helped first her and then Svetlana down from the train, and yet he seemed distant. He didn’t look at her, not right away, and that was strange. He bent instead to Svetlana, gave her something, a sucker, and asked if she’d had a pleasant trip, but Svetlana, the drawing book clamped under one arm and Teddy under the other, was shy suddenly and could manage only a whispered “Yes.”

A savage wind swept the platform, crushed leaves and bits of refuse skittering before it, the sky roiling overhead, and Olgivanna had a moment to take in the deserted streets and battened-down buildings of the town — village, hamlet — where she’d be spending the immediate future and maybe longer, much longer, before he did look at her. The engine exhaled with a long shuddering hiss of steam. Kameki hustled off after the baggage. And Frank finally did acknowledge her, but he didn’t take her in his arms, didn’t kiss her — instead he held out his hand for a firm handshake, his glove to hers, as if she were a business acquaintance or a distant relative. . and still he hadn’t said a word, not a word, not hello or welcome or I’m glad to see you.

He dropped her hand then and leaned forward with a quick dip of his shoulders. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he said in a low voice, his breath caught up in the wind and gone. “It’s the neighbors. The papers. We can’t have a fuss.”

“Daddy Frank,” Svetlana cried, tugging at his scarf — and she’d recovered herself now, oriented to the cold and the moment of arrival and the town that wasn’t worth a second glance—“can we go see the swans?”

He seemed to wince at the sobriquet — Daddy Frank, Daddy —his eyes jumping from Svetlana to her and back. The smoke of the engine twisted in the wind and drove at them, harsh and poisonous. Something caught in her eye and she blinked. “Swans?” he repeated. “What swans?”

“I have told Svetlana”—and she was dabbing at her eye with her handkerchief—“that we would see the swans on the lake — and the ducks too.”

“Oh, yes, yes, the swans. Of course, honey, of course we will. But not now, not till summer. Now we have ice. You like ice, don’t you?”

“Can we go skating? Today? Right now?”

But Frank was distracted — two men in overcoats were disembarking now and behind them a beanpole of a boy who immediately snatched at his hat to stabilize it — and he didn’t answer. His eyes kept darting from Olgivanna to the far end of the platform where Kameki was in receipt of the trunk, the porter sliding shut the door and the conductor giving two admonitory toots of his whistle, and then, even as he said, “Yes, yes, certainly, Svet, once we get settled,” he suggested they wait in the car, out of the wind.

The car 21—long and sleek, with a canvas top, and was it new, was this the car that had picked her up in December? — stood at the curb, engine running, Billy Weston behind the wheel. It wasn’t till they were inside it, the door shut firmly behind them and Billy hurrying off to lend a hand with the trunk, that he gave her the embrace she’d been waiting for — and a kiss from his cold, cold lips. “God, it’s great to see you and to have you here — and you, Svet, you too, you’re going to love it — but you’ve got to understand, well, you know how this community is, all the hens clucking and the newspapermen warming up the road for us. . you know what I’ve been through—”

She didn’t say anything. And she couldn’t imagine what this was all about. Had she misread him, was that it? Was he rescinding the invitation? Was all the talk of love just another fantasy? She ducked his gaze to dab at her eye — soot there, a speck of coal dust.

“So we’ve concocted a fiction, and it’s nothing to me, really, you know how I feel about these biddies meddling and gossiping and trying to control people’s lives — what I mean is, I’m telling people you’re the new housekeeper.”

She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A Serb. Another impoverished immigrant, is that what you say? A cleaning lady?”

“Just till you get your divorce — and I, well, till I can quit Miriam officially.”

Svetlana was sitting beside her, feigning deafness. She kicked her legs rhythmically against the seat, out and in, out and in, and then began tracing a pattern in the scrim of ice on the window.

“Then,” he said, “then we marry and they can all go to hell.”

If anyone believed the imposture, Olgivanna couldn’t say. There were always people from the village around — from the countryside and surrounding towns, from Helena, Spring Green, Dodgeville, Arena, workmen, farmers, women to do chores — and while most of them wouldn’t speak two words to her face she was sure they had plenty to say out of earshot. But she was the housekeeper, that was the story, and if anyone wanted to check up on her they’d see her out there in the foulest weather, splitting wood for stove and fireplace alike, slopping the pigs and pacing off the frozen fields where the vegetable garden would go come the first hint of spring, getting the lay of the land, settling in. By the end of the first week she’d pretty well taken charge of the place, apportioning out the jobs to the household help and even involving herself in the kitchen whenever she could maneuver around Mrs. Taggertz, who fiercely resisted any encroachment on her domain — especially from a woman whose status was a matter of speculation no matter what story the head of the household might choose to circulate.

“And the father of your child”—Mrs. Taggertz would throw over her shoulder while she pounded meat on the cutting board, rolled out dough for piecrust, sent up a rolling thunder with her pots and pans for the simple authoritative pleasure of it, “what was his name again?” A pause. “He’s still in Chicago as I understand it?” “Yes,” she’d reply, hoping to leave it at that. But Mrs. Taggertz wouldn’t leave it at that. Mrs. Taggertz was on the offensive. “Any hope of reconciliation? Because, what I mean is, a child needs her father around — a girl especially and especially when she gets to that certain age, if you know what I mean?” “No,” she would say, and suddenly she remembered something that needed doing outside or down the hall, “no hope, none at all.” And then, almost apologetically, “I’m afraid.”