T. Boyle - The Women

She lay back and closed her eyes and tried to think only those thoughts that brought her closer to him, but it was no use. There was that thumping, that clamor, footsteps in the hall, and the other Frank came back to her, the hateful one, the beast, the mocker and belittler, the cheat and fraud and womanizer. At some point she tried to get up to shut the window, shut out the noise, but the potion the bald little Mexican had mixed for her was just too potent to overcome and she slept on and on in a dreamless void till the sun was pushing through the curtains and all the noise was focused in a sharp peremptory banging at the door.

It was Mr. Fake’s associate, Mr. Jackson—“Harold, call me Harold”—and he’d been worried about her. It was getting late. Could she come to the door?

Her voice was weak in her own ears, the voice of an invalid, an old woman croaking out her days in a rocker: “No, I’m afraid I can’t. I. . I’m just bathing and I won’t be — what time did you say it was?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

She pushed herself up from the bed, feeling cored-out, ashen, as if there were nothing left of her but a husk. And where were her slippers? Her robe? “I must have overslept, what with the journey, and the, the—”

He projected his voice, leaning into the crack where the door met the frame. “Have you seen the papers?”

She hadn’t.

“Well, you’ve made a sensation. The press is on our side in this, no doubt about it — and you look magnificent in the photographs. Very proper and attractive, very put-upon. And they’ve printed just about everything you’ve said. Verbatim.” There was a pause and she could hear him shuffling his feet, shifting something from one hand to the other — the papers, he had the papers with him. “You must see this,” he was saying — or no, he was crowing, his voice ringing with triumph. “Won’t you open up?”

She didn’t respond. She’d begun to cramp again and she was thinking she had to eat something, a soft-boiled egg, toast, a cup of coffee, anything, because she wasn’t feeling right, not at all, and the distance from the bed to the door might just as well have been a mile for all she was capable of. He shuffled his feet. Rattled the doorknob. “Mrs. Wright? Miriam — are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” The papers. She was in the papers.

He was saying something about meeting with her — soon, as soon as she was able, because time was of the essence, strike while the iron is hot, that sort of thing, but she wasn’t listening. There was more, his voice pinched with the strain of talking through the crack of the door, and she didn’t catch much of it, not that it mattered. She was in the papers. And then he came clear again, his parting words, stirring, redemptive, vengeful: “Because we’re going to go after separate maintenance and full payment of legal fees and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that we’ll win. Not after this. Not after the show you’ve put on.”

When he’d gone — footsteps fading down the hallway like the tread of an angel taking flight, her angel, Mr. Harold Jackson, Attorney at Law — she pushed herself up and went to the door. She looked through the peep-hole, listened a moment to be sure no one was present, then unlatched the door and bent to snatch up the newspapers. And it was all there, just as he’d said. She read through each of the articles twice and for a long while stared at her photograph — she did look charming and sad and trés chic too, and she’d have to clip it out and send it to Leora — and then she ordered up breakfast and began to think about what she might wear for her next press conference.

Five days later the newspapers ran another sort of article altogether, a simple birth announcement that had somehow been transmuted into the stuff of headlines, and she didn’t even know about it, didn’t even see it till late in the afternoon and then only because Leora called her long distance from Los Angeles. And then her daughter Norma called. And then Mr. Jackson. And then a man from the press, wanting her reaction, but by that time she’d got hold of the Tribune and the Daily News both and she cut the connection and left the phone off the hook.

She’d been eating a late lunch or early dinner or whatever you wanted to call it when Leora phoned and she’d been out earlier for a walk in the frozen air hoping the exercise would clear her head, but as it happened she’d felt utterly drained when she got back to the hotel and laid her cheek down on the pillow for a nap that must have stretched on for hours. She was exhausted, run-down, miserable. Because she wasn’t sleeping well at night. Wasn’t eating well either. And so she was in her rooms, staring numbly at a plate of suprême de volaille and stewed carrots when Leora’s call came through.

“Oh, hon,” Leora blurted without waiting for any of the usual blandishments, and it was as if she were right there in the room with her. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? For what? What’s happened?”

A pause, just to let her heart skip a beat. “Haven’t you seen the newspapers? ”

“No. Not today. Not yet. I was out walking and then I, well, I — why, what did they say?”

What they’d said was burned into her brain now, in eighteen-point type: DANCER GIVES BIRTH TO WRIGHT’S LOVE CHILD. 38 Gives birth. Love child. Frank’s love child. Six pounds, seven ounces. A girl. They’d named her Iovanna. And what kind of name was that? Iovanna, Olgivanna, Russian names, names with treacly little foreign suffixes as if this were some suburb of Moscow — but this wasn’t Moscow, not the last time she’d looked. This was Chicago, in the U.S.A. There was no Volga here, no windblown steppes and Bolshevik revolutions — and what was he thinking? What was Frank thinking?

Oh, she’d known it was coming — she’d been bracing for it since that weasel of a detective called to annihilate her afternoon, her holiday, her autumn, her winter, her year — and yet she’d never dreamed it would come to this, cheap headlines, cheap sensation, a mockery of everything she was in her deepest self. Everyone she knew would be laughing at her now, Maude Miriam Noel, wife of the adulterer, the woman who couldn’t satisfy the great architect or even appease him, who couldn’t give him a child because she was too old, because she was broken down, over the hill, cast out and abandoned. She was dirt. Lower than dirt. She was nothing.

Even as she flung the papers across the room and took up the first thing to hand — a vase, a hotel vase with an arrangement of dried flowers that infuriated her, that made her feel as if she were dried up and dead too — just for the satisfaction of seeing it explode against the near wall, she knew that the pravaz would give her no release, not today, not the way she was feeling. It took her no more than five minutes to see to her face in the mirror and wrap herself in her furs, and then she was downstairs and out on the street in the air that hit her like a dose of smelling salts. The whole world opened up then. The doorman. The cabbie. Streets, pigeons, a crust of snow. And where to? The hospital. The one named in the paper, where mother and child were reported to be doing well. And resting. Resting comfortably.

She’d show them rest, oh, yes, she would, and already she could picture it, another scene like the one in the hotel lobby, and let them come, let the reporters come. I want to see the baby! she would scream until there was no one in all that towering edifice with its gleaming corridors and sheltered rooms who couldn’t hear her loud and clear, I want to see my husband’s baby!

There was a taint of antiseptic — of carbolic acid or rubbing alcohol or whatever it was — emanating from every corner of the room, suffusing the air, choking her till she felt she could barely breathe. The shades were drawn. There was a dull hum of electricity, lights flickering and brightening and flickering again. Infants mewled, trays rattled, someone somewhere was stewing tomatoes, beets, cabbage. And meat. Meat that stank of the pan and the icebox and the slaughterhouse. She kept asking the nurse to open the window and the nurse kept telling her to lie back and rest and not to worry herself — rest, that was what she needed. “Just close your eyes now,” the nurse whispered in her liminal tones. “You want to regain your strength, don’t you? For the sake of your baby? And your husband?”