T. Boyle - The Women

“What I’m trying to say is that it might just force the issue.”

“But he’s there. With her. ”

“Precisely.”

All at once the image of Taliesin rose before her in such immediacy she might have been staring at a photograph. That yellow place on the hill — or of the hill, as Frank would say with all the pomposity of his ladies-of-the-club tones — that palace, that monument to himself. Oh, the idea warmed her. Taliesin wasn’t his to do with as he pleased — it belonged to both of them. Equally. That was what community property meant, the very definition of it. And if she’d been willing to allow him the use of it till the fair value of the estate was ascertained and they could make an equitable division of property, now she saw what a fool she’d been. How dare he try to exclude her when his prize breeding bitch was installed there, living in all the luxury he could afford her, sleeping in their bed, in their bedroom, commanding the place like some sort of upstart queen out of a Shakespeare play, Lady Macbeth herself?

“All right,” she said, crossing her legs and leaning forward to reach for a cigarette, “and how do you propose I go about it?”

A pause. Then the soft creeping tones, as smooth as kid leather: “Well, I’ve been thinking that you just might want to consider announcing a press conference.”

They all gathered in the lobby like dogs early the next morning, dutiful dogs with their teeth sharpened and a smell of the meat wagon on the air, and she held herself erect, struggled briefly with her face — with her mouth and chin and the emotion welling up like a geyser there because this was her life, her very life she was fighting for — and let them all know how Frank Lloyd Wright had betrayed and abused her and how he was living in defiance of a court order with his foreign concubine in the house that was as much hers as his and how she was facing eviction from her modest rooms even as she stood there before them. “If my husband continues to defraud me, and I’m sorry to put it in such strong terms, but that’s what it amounts to”—she’d meant to pause here for dramatic effect, but now, in the heat of the moment, she rushed on instead—“I’m afraid I’ll have no resort but to sell off my jewelry, the prints we collected together in Japan, the jade necklace and earrings given to me as a keepsake by Baron Ōkura 48himself, my screens and shawls and the little inlaid rosewood tables that are practically the only things I have left of my home — just to pay my bills, my own meager upkeep, while he spares himself nothing.”

Her eyes were luminous, moist. She couldn’t seem to feel her feet, though she must have been standing on them. She had a sudden vivid recollection of her school days, Mrs. Thompson’s elocution class, the air sleepy with the scent of magnolia and she driving home her point about Tennyson’s use of the heroic simile with such force that the entire class came back to life and Margaret Holloway, the most popular girl in the school, gave her a look of such undisguised admiration from the second row left that the glow of the moment had stayed with her all these years. “I don’t know,” she said finally, steadying herself, “that I won’t be thrown out into the street.” But was this the moment for the photograph? Yes, and she posed for the flash before delivering the kicker: 49that she was left with no choice but to return to her rightful home — and that she intended to do so that very day.

“Mrs. Wright!” a reporter sang out, and she turned her eyes to him, a thin man in a gray suit with liverish eyes and hair that faded away from his brow in a pale blond crescent. “Can you give us some idea of your itinerary? ”

They watched her, these hounds of the press, ravenous, while she put a hand to her bosom and let a little Southern molasses accumulate in the lower reaches of her voice, on familiar ground now, the lady in distress — and she was in distress, she was, and they ought to recognize it, the self-serving sons of bitches. “Oh, I just don’t know. I really am all but indigent, I’m afraid.” And then the little dig she couldn’t suppress: “My husband may be able to afford a fine motor or the price of a first-class rail ticket, but I really am just as poor as a church mouse.”

Five minutes later, as Mr. Jackson led her to the elevator (Mr. Fake had had to excuse himself — he was in court that morning), the reporter caught up with her. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, nodding to Mr. Jackson, and she was thinking only of her pravaz, her nerves thoroughly jangled by the strain of the whole business, “but I was struck by what you had to say back there — you’ve had a pretty punk deal and no two ways about it — and I wondered if I might be able to help?”

She paused to take a good look at him, his jacket open now to reveal a fawn vest stippled with polka dots, the tight trousers hiked up over his glaring tan boots, and how old was he — twenty-five, thirty? Mr. Jackson didn’t say a word. Mr. Jackson was a friend of the press, a very good friend. She decided to be bemused. “And how do you propose to do that?”

“Well, listen — I’m Wallace, of the Trib ? Mr. Jackson can vouch for me”—another nod for Jackson, which Jackson accepted and returned with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin—“and it just happens that me and my wife were planning on driving up to Baraboo this morning because her mother’s been having trouble with her feet and we’d be pleased if you’d—”

“Sure,” Jackson said. “I don’t see why not.” He was staring at her now, calculating, and she didn’t especially like the look he was giving her. “What do you think, Mrs. Wright? It might be interesting if this fellow and his wife were able to help you out here, don’t you think?”

“That’s right,” the reporter said. “Myra and I’d be more than happy to do anything we could. And Mr. Jackson can vouch for me, right, Harold? ”

At least it was a sedan. At least there was that. The reporter drove, and his wife — pregnant with twins, it seemed, or maybe it was triplets — sat beside Miriam in the backseat while another man from the newspaper, whose name flew in and out of her head three or four times in the course of the morning and well into the afternoon, sat up front. He was the photographer, or so she gathered, and that was the only thing of significance about him. The roads, of course, were execrable, and the motorcar’s coils or springs or whatever they were didn’t seem to function in any capacity whatever so that for the entire drive she was thrown from one end of the seat to the other like a rag doll, and the wife — Myra — had to cling to her to keep from being flung out the window herself. Conversation was glacial. They passed through two thunderstorms, stopped twice at filling stations, once for sandwiches in Madison and once in the godforsaken precincts of Mazomanie, where she felt an urgent need to visit the washroom.

All four of them got out of the car there — the pretense of Baraboo, if that was what it was, had long since been abandoned: they’d gone west out of Madison on a road she knew all too well and no one had a said a word about the presumptive mother and her podiatric crisis — and the two men had a good stretch and made a show of examining the tires while she and Myra used the facilities at the railroad depot. A brass plaque on the wall inside the door of the depot informed her that the village had been named for an Indian chief whose name, when translated into English, meant “Iron That Walks.” There were three people in the waiting room, one of whom — a farmwife in a kerchief — seemed to have some sort of animal partially concealed in a wicker basket at her feet.