T. Boyle - The Women

Olgivanna couldn’t help smiling. Her husband was the last person she wanted to see, but how would the nurse know that? Unless she read the papers. But of course she did read the papers. They all did and they all knew that Iovanna — Pussy, her Pussy 39—the most perfect and exquisite infant in the world, in the history of the world, was born out of wedlock, an illegitimate child, a bastard, a bastard for people to sneer at and revile. Olgivanna didn’t read the papers. And she didn’t want her husband. Her ex -husband. She wanted Frank, but Frank was working in his studio and he’d promised to be back to see her in the evening, yet wasn’t it evening now? And why was it so stifling in here and why, why, why couldn’t anyone throw open the window or even raise it an inch, half an inch, anything — anything to dissipate the staleness of the air? “Nurse!” she called out, and she tried to sit up but felt nauseous, felt weak, and let her head sink back into the pillow.

Later — how much later she couldn’t say, but it seemed to be darker now, didn’t it? — the nurse appeared at the door with Iovanna. Her daughter. Her newborn. The light of her life, the reason for all of this, for this room with the flowers Frank had sent over, a private room with a window and a reek of carbolic acid, and the weakness she felt too. She could barely lift her arms to accept the baby, the bundle of her, light as a thought and yet heavy suddenly, impossibly heavy, miniature hands clenching and flying open again, and then the feel of the suction at her breast, a long sweet release that brought her up out of the bed and the room and out into the ambient night, soaring.

In her dream she flew high over the embracing roofs of Taliesin, the baby clutched in her arms, and there was Frank, dwindling below her, and he was shouting to her, his hands cupped to his mouth, Look out, watch out, be careful. . And then there was a noise, a sudden sharp thump and rattle, something clattering in the hall, a woman’s voice rising up out of a confusion of voices, and what was it? “I’m sorry, ma’am”—her nurse, Alice, straining against a whisper—“but visiting hours are over.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Get out of my way!”

“I’m sorry, but — Dinah, Dinah, would you come here, please?”

“Which room? I insist you tell me which room—”

“Please, please, ma’am, won’t you hold your voice down? The infants are — Dinah, will you please tell this lady that we just cannot accept—”

Pussy began to stir, kicking out her legs in a spasm even as her eyes flashed open, two pinpoints of light in the muted darkness of the room. She wasn’t fussing, not yet, just lying there orienting herself, awakening to the world once again. Olgivanna’s eyes went to the door. Which stood ajar — or half-open, actually, because the nurses liked to be within earshot in the event of an emergency, but this wasn’t an emergency, was it?

The voices rose, tangled, fell back again. There was a brief tap dance of heels on the linoleum flooring, renewed protests, and then the sounds receded down the hall in the opposite direction. Though she wasn’t feeling particularly alert — it was as if she’d been drugged, and why couldn’t she regain her strength, what was wrong with her? — she had a moment of clarity that allowed a single pulse of alarm to flash through her. What if it was Miriam? Frank’s wife. Miriam. The madwoman. He’d warned her about how irrational Miriam could be, how violent and unpredictable. 40And she could still hear the tortured cry that had come at her over the telephone wire, that choked mad searing expostulation that was like no human sound she’d ever heard. She drew Iovanna to her and held her breath.

Suddenly there was a clatter of footsteps, bold and rapid, hurrying down the hall toward her. She heard Alice cry out “Stop!” in a breathless gasp and then there were more footsteps and a man’s voice was repeating the injunction even as the door of the room across from hers was flung open and a woman entered her line of vision, all skirts and hat and angry flailing shoulders. A thought darted in and out of her head — should she try to hide the baby, tuck her in under the bedclothes, the pillows, slip her down on the floor beneath the bed? — and then the door flew back and there she was, Miriam, her face bloated and red, her eyes set close as an animal’s, Miriam in the flesh, her mouth twisting round the only word she could summon: “You!” she shouted. “You!”

By the time Frank arrived — out of breath, his hair windblown, his face drained — the danger had passed, or the immediate danger, at any rate. The orderly had seen to that. Miriam was gone now, long gone, ushered out the door in a whirlwind of threats and insults, and the corridors were hushed as in the aftermath of some natural disaster, but Olgivanna could see her still. Feel her. Feel her hate and envy and fear radiating out of the very atmosphere itself. There’d been a moment of suspended time as the door struck the wall and rebounded in slow motion, this woman, Frank’s wife, poised on the threshold of the room, her features working through the shadings of her emotions, a moment in which Olgivanna, as weak as she was, as terrified and humiliated, could see into her, the abandoned wife come face-to-face with her successor, her bugbear, the succubus that had stolen her husband away. She felt something move inside her. Not aggression or the will to defend herself — though there was that if it came to it — but something akin to pity.

It was short-lived.

Because even as the orderly vaulted into the frame, even as he seized Miriam by the arm and Miriam turned on him like a cat tossed in a bag, the vile words began to spew out. “Slut!” she shrieked, jerking away from him and thrusting her face back into the room. “Vampire! Whore! You leave my husband alone!” But then Alice was there, slipping past them to secure the door and press her weight against the impervious slab of oak while Iovanna, compromised on the third day of her inchoate life, began to cry with a sharp sudden intake of breath, her face suffused with blood and her hands grasping at the air as if she could possess it.

“I know you’re weak,” Frank was saying. He was pacing the room, five steps to the right and pivot, five steps to the left and pivot again. “It was a difficult birth. You need your rest. But I can’t let this sort of thing go on — it’s just too risky. And the newspapers—”

“She has frightened me. And the baby. The baby has started crying.”

“Damn her. Damn that woman.”

The bedclothes pressed down on her like the lid of a tomb. She’d never felt wearier in her life. “She is your wife, Frank. But how could she be? How could you have loved her?”

He didn’t come to her, didn’t take her hand or put his arm around her or smooth her hair away from her face — he just kept pacing, and the question, the question of love, then and now, went unanswered. All at once the room seemed to shrink, dwindling before her eyes. She felt as if she were in a prison cell, and who was the jailer? He was. Frank was. “She’s vengeful,” he said, “that’s all. A spurned woman — and she was the one who left me, let me remind you. . But we’ve got to get you out of here, which is why I telephoned to your brother.”

“My brother?”

“It’s all arranged. First thing in the morning, hours before Miriam or her spies are even out of bed, we’re taking you to the train — on a stretcher, if need be. I’ve reserved a compartment for us, and Vlada 41will meet us at the other end, in New York.”

And so, like thieves, like refugees, like cowards, they stole away in the dark.

At some unfathomable hour a pair of orderlies appeared with a stretcher, as promised, along with the nurse Frank had engaged to look after the baby. Olgivanna remembered waking to the shuffling of feet and the sudden glare of the lamp at her bedside. And to Frank. He was leaning over her, rumpled and worn from a night spent dozing in the straight-backed chair in the corner, and Svetlana was there too, standing awkwardly in the doorway with her suitcase and a new toy, looking somber. Or frightened, she looked frightened, the poor thing, uprooted yet again. Olgivanna held out her arms. “Darling, come here,” she whispered, her own voice sounding strange in her ears. Svetlana hesitated. She was going to be difficult, Olgivanna could see that. She patted the bed beside her. “Come on. It’s all right.”