T. Boyle - The Women

But Frank loved the dishes she concocted from the old recipes — nothing too extreme, of course, but something different for a change, something with flavor, he’d say, pointedly — Serbian specialties like pasulj and prebanac (with homemade sausage substituting for kielbasa) and the yeast nut-bread (povotica) everyone exclaimed over, and Mrs. Taggertz had to give way, at least occasionally. Plus there were cookies practically every night, molasses cookies, chocolate chip, raisin and plum, Pfeffernuesse from a recipe Dione’s mother had taught her and Nobu Tsuchiura’s bean cakes. 22It was a beautiful thing, welcoming and wonderful, to go into that kitchen after Mrs. Taggertz had left for the night with Dione, Sylvia Moser, Nobu and her daughter, sororal, an adventure, like being back with her sisters again.

And if Frank was gone most of the week in Chicago overseeing his new offices or climbing aboard the Santa Fe California Limited to Los Angeles to make adjustments to the houses he’d built there, 23she didn’t notice his absence as much as she thought she would. She was busy. Furiously busy. If she wasn’t actually the housekeeper, if she was something more — mistress of the house, Mrs. Wright-in-waiting, major domo of the Taliesin enterprise — she might as well have been, and within the month Frank had let go of Mrs. Dunleavy, the square-shouldered farmwife who’d performed that function (without remuneration, as it turned out, or rather with an initial payment and the transient promise of more to come) for the past year. There was always work to be done, and of course everyone pitched in, even Svetlana, because no one was a guest here and Frank had a hundred improvement projects going simultaneously, winter and summer, everything in flux.

Her divorce was granted during the second month — March — and she hardly noticed because she was devoted to a new regime now and Vlademar was nothing more than a memory in any case, a stooped too-thin little man crying out in the morning for his socks, where were his socks, and Get me coffee, Olgivanna, before I die. He was an architect. He was in Chicago. And she would deliver Svetlana to him for his visitation rights according to the terms set out in the divorce papers. That was it. That was all. But Frank was delighted by the news—“Miriam’s next,” he said, “one more swing of the pendulum and we’ll be free, both of us”—and they made an evening of it, gathering everyone round the fire while the wind cried in the treetops and they all had hot chocolate and coffee and cookies, singing the old songs round the piano till the night wound down and she found herself in bed with him, nestled in the recess of his shoulder beneath the goose-down comforter and with the coals glowing red in the grate.

Spring blew up early out of the south that year, a succession of progressively warmer rainstorms scouring the snow from the ground and delivering up rhubarb sooner than he could ever remember — rhubarb pie, nothing better — and before long the flowerbeds were rife with color and the fruit trees in bloom and the barley sprouting in the long naked furrows of the fields. Every minute of every day he felt supercharged with energy, out of bed before dawn and sitting at his desk before breakfast, working over the drawings for the National Life Insurance Company skyscraper and the Nakoma Country Club, writing an article a month for the Architectural Record and still finding time to oversee construction around the place and get out into the fields and the garden and dig with his pitchfork till the ideas began to take hold and he’d have to scuttle back to his desk even as his apprentices looked up from their drafting tables in alarm until he sang out a joke and then another and another. He was so full of spirit — Olgivanna, bless her, was the foundation and impetus of it — that he just had to bounce up from his chair and show the boys what he’d done and look over their drawings and maybe pontificate a little here and there. Dinner was a treasure, the conversation and joy of it, and the Sunday evenings when they all dressed in their finest and sat round the living room or on the balmy nights under the big twin oaks in the courtyard making music or reading aloud from Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. .

For years now — longer than he could remember — he’d been rolling a stone up a hill, a boulder that picked up weight on each revolution like a ball of snow, and Miriam’s face was imprinted on the side of it — or no, hammered into the rock — so that every time he rolled it over there she’d be again. Miriam. Miriam of the cramps and headaches and rages, coming at him with her fists and her gaudy ring flashing like a weapon, everything in motion, the beads lashing round her throat even as she screamed and showed him her teeth as if she meant to swallow him whole. The psychiatrist — what was his name, Dr. Hixon — had diagnosed defective affectivity, whatever that meant, but the man had assured him there was violence on the horizon. All was quiet now, but wherever she was, Los Angeles, San Diego, Hollywood, he could feel the heat of her percolating up out of the ground beneath his feet like magma, white-hot and ready to incinerate everything, and every time the phone rang he felt his stomach sink. It had been months since he’d heard from her — six or seven months and counting. And Olgivanna was here now — and Svet and Richard and Dione and Kameki — and his life was moving forward. There were whole days when he never gave Miriam a thought, but she was there all the same, down deep, waiting.

And then there was an evening toward the end of April when the phone did ring — once, an awkward discontinuous sort of buzzing rather than a ring per se — and he put it down to a fault in the wiring he’d rigged up to connect the bedroom phone with a buzzer in the kitchen, a simple device to communicate simple wants, as in a hotel. 24They’d just finished dinner, he and Olgivanna and Svet — the rest had all gone off to town, but for Kameki and Mel, 25the new driver — and they’d eaten in the little detached dining room on the hilltop because there was a storm building and he thought it would be something to watch it come across the hills. The cook had gone home. Olgivanna had served the meal herself and it was as if they were an ordinary family, husband, wife, daughter, gathered round the table for an ordinary meal. The wind came up while they were eating, branches beating against the windows, and there was a feeling of security, of shelter — let the storm do its worst: they were snug enough. “You see, Svet,” he’d said, pausing over a forkful of Montenegrin beans, “this is what organic architecture gives you — you’re indoors and you’re out at the same time, all this continuity of line, the views all around. You wouldn’t get that in one of your gingerbread houses in Chicago. You wouldn’t even know a storm was coming.”

“Will there be lightning? I’m scared of lightning.”

“Sure,” he said, “there’ll be lightning. But there’s no reason to be scared. It won’t hit here. And it won’t hit you as long as you stay inside.”

The clouds were elongating, running with the wind in threads and stripes, and on the horizon the first shock of the lightning. They all three turned their heads to watch it tug at the sky.

“And away from the lake,” Olgivanna put in. She was dressed in blue, a belted jacquette blouse and skirt ensemble he’d designed for her himself, simple and elegant at the same time. And stylish too. He’d seen something like it in a catalogue — and on any number of women in Chicago — and so he’d surprised her, delivering the pattern to the dressmaker himself and then bringing back the package on the train. There was color in her face — she’d been out of doors all afternoon, turning over the kitchen garden for planting because there would be no more frosts this year, he’d promised her, solemnly, he swore it, no more frosts — and he saw that her nails were faintly rimmed in black and her hands hardened with the work of the place. She looked healthy. Looked contented. And pregnant. Two months’ pregnant. 26She’d told him just that morning — in bed, before Svetlana was awake — and he was alive with the news. Tomorrow, he’d told her, tomorrow we celebrate, when everyone’s here.