T. Boyle - The Women

“Olya, it’s getting late,” Frank said.

“Come on, Svet — it’s only me. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. Don’t worry.” Still nothing. “Do you not want to see your baby sister?”

“No.”

And somehow, there she was — Pussy — enfolded in the nurse’s arms, and who was this woman, this girl, thin-lipped and slouching, to whom Frank had entrusted their daughter? “Give her to me,” she demanded, and the girl looked to Frank and Frank nodded, and her daughter, already setting up a thin wail of distress, was handed over like a parcel from the grocery. “You see?” she said, holding up the baby for Svetlana. “You see how tiny she is? Her little fingers and toes? She is going to need her big sister to look after her — do you not want to look after her?”

“No.”

From Frank: “Olya.”

“We are going to Uncle Vlada, honey, for Christmas. Christmas in New York — will that not be charming?”

She knew her daughter. Knew her moods. The answer to this and all other questions posed at this hour in this place would be exclusively negative. The child didn’t even bother to respond. She just clamped her lips and looked away. Frank stepped in then and began giving orders — he was good at that — and the nurse took Iovanna back from her and the men helped her onto the stretcher and the corridor yawned and narrowed before her. There was the elevator, the night rearing over her, a breath of air that was like a taste of heaven compared to the medicated aridity of the hospital, and then they were at the station and in their compartment and Svetlana came to her to lay her head on her shoulder for a good cry and at some point the car lurched and they were moving, moving again.

For Frank’s part, there was no turning back. Olya wasn’t well — you didn’t have to be a medical man to see that. She was a young woman, younger than either of his daughters, and yet as she lay there in the shifting compartment, the baby and Svetlana asleep beside her, he had a glimpse of the way she would look as the years fragmented and fell away, and it startled him. The softness had gone out of her face, replaced by the rigidity you saw in the very old, the faintest lines tracing the hard angles of her face, her color faded, her hair thin and lusterless. She was anemic. She was exhausted. Frightened. Upset. He’d been talking to her in a low voice over the rattle of the rails, trying to keep her spirits up as the baby fidgeted and Svetlana cried herself to sleep, but finally he realized she’d drifted off, her breathing harsh and catarrhal, a single globe of moisture caught like a jewel in her right nostril.

He felt a stab of guilt. 42This was a mess and no two ways about it. He should never have moved her into Taliesin — not till Miriam’s hash was settled. He knew better. Knew from hard experience, and yet what had experience taught him? Nothing. He saw what he wanted and he took it. That was his nature. That was his right. And here she was, the object of his desire, pale and wasted and with a thin stripe of saliva painted across her cheek, wedged into a narrow railway berth with two needy children — a child herself — and no place to call home.

There was a sudden flurry of conversation in the passage outside the door — a man’s voice, a woman’s, fraught with venereal undertones and the giddiness of travel — and when they’d passed, he glanced back at Olgivanna and felt a kind of impatience rising in him. What was the matter with her? Was she somehow frailer than he’d imagined? He didn’t remember Kitty’s birthings as being as hard as this — and she bore him six children. 43

But he was exhausted himself. The wheels clattered on the tracks and he felt his stomach sink. He realized he hadn’t eaten since the night before. He checked his watch. It was quarter past nine in the morning, the train rolling through open countryside now, and though things were desperate, things were terrible and getting worse, the sight of the neat farmhouses and the solid red barns with their quilts of hay and the firewood stacked outside the kitchen door cheered him. He thought he would get up and fetch the nurse to come look after the baby and then make his way to the dining car to put something on his stomach, eggs and flapjacks, a slice of ham, gravy, fried potatoes, but he lingered, watching over Olgivanna and the children as they drew in air and expelled it, one breath after another, in the soft descending rhythms of sleep.

What he hadn’t told her, not yet, was that they couldn’t go home to Taliesin, even after their exile at her brother’s, because Miriam was on the attack like some sort of turbaned and bejeweled Harpy flapping through the air with her claws drawn and her jaws flung open in an otherworldly shriek of outrage, no quarter given or expected. Each day it was something new. She wasn’t content to harass a sick woman from her hospital bed. Oh, no, not Miriam. She went straight to the immigration authorities and compounded the mischief by filing a complaint to have Olgivanna deported as an undesirable alien. The affidavit named Olga as a foreign national who had come to Taliesin — to her home, Miriam’s home — under false pretexts, masquerading as a servant when in fact she was her husband’s “sweet-heart.” His inamorata. His whore.

He felt his heart clench with hate. All he could think of was Miriam, how he’d let her come into his life when his guard was down, how foolish he’d been, how weak and deluded. His mood soured. The farms began to look uglier, less tidy, in need of paint and upkeep. For a long while he watched them loom and vanish amidst the barren skeletons of the trees and the frozen bogs and the shrubs dead to their roots. And he didn’t get up for breakfast or for coffee or the nurse or anything else, but just sat there till the fields ran continuous and everything beyond the windows became a blur.

If the journey was a trial, arriving was worse. Queens was grim, a regular horror of a place, and Vlada’s apartment grimmer. But no official came knocking at the door, no agent from Immigration or newspaperman or spy of Miriam’s, and after the first few days Frank began to relax his guard. His lawyers had instructed him to lie low for a period, to travel, keep out of sight until matters could be arranged with the immigration authorities and the divorce negotiations concluded, and here he was, in exile in Queens, New York, frustrated and angry — and what was worse, Olgivanna showed no sign of improvement. She wasn’t eating. Her brow seemed warm to the touch. The baby clung to her, colicky and restive, draining her of what little vitality she had, and Svetlana threw one tantrum after another. And her skin — it was so pale it frightened him. All he could think of was the hide of a dogfish he’d once seen preserved in a jar of formalin, bleached round its folds and grinning its grin of death.

And talk of boxes within boxes: the rooms were close, stifling. They stank of whatever Vlada’s wife was continually boiling up in a battered pot in the kitchen, borscht or bozbash or whatever it was, and it maddened him. Just to get away, to get out of the hermetic box of the apartment and do something — breathe, walk, think — he found himself taking the train into Manhattan each day with Vlada and wandering the streets, sketching, or slipping into the public library to write up his impressions of the city, all the while shielding his face with his scarf and wide-brimmed hat, striving for anonymity. 44

It was Vlada who suggested Puerto Rico. Olgivanna needed warmth, sun, the clean white sand and endless horizon — and Florida wouldn’t do. They could still track her down in Florida, but in Puerto Rico no one would know them, no one would care. Even better: Puerto Rico was an American protectorate and you didn’t need a passport to travel there. Vlada made the arrangements. Passage for two adults and two children — Mr. and Mrs. Frank Richardson and family — out of New York bound for San Juan. They were moving again — and he’d never acquired his sea legs, sick in his stomach all the way down, sicker than Olya — but each hour of each day the winter fell away behind them and the sun rose higher in the sky.