T. Boyle - The Women

There was a burst of excitement, men squaring their hats and running for their cars, Wallace sliding into the front seat with the photographer and Myra lifting herself ponderously up across the running board and into the back, doors slamming, dust rising, a man’s voice echoing behind them— Hey, wait for me! — and they were off. Miriam held fast to the door handle, barking directions at the back of Wallace’s head. The green fields rushed past the window. The air was in her face. She was filled with a fierce joy, the joy of combat, of movement and action, her only thought to seize the initiative, catch Frank unawares, bring him to his knees. But when they arrived at the back entrance five minutes later, she had her second surprise: Frank had blocked the road with one of the farm trucks and there were three more men, men she didn’t recognize, standing before it with their caps pulled low and their arms crossed in a display of pugnacity. And obtuseness. And hatefulness. And, and—“Move this truck!” she commanded. “I insist that you move this truck right this minute!”

No one budged, not even so much as to shift weight from one foot to the other.

Wallace was there now (and what was his given name? Rudyard? Yes, Rudyard, after the English writer, or so he claimed), his jacket thrown casually over one shoulder, leaning into the fence as if he belonged there, as if he were a rube and hayseed himself. “Say, fellas, can’t you see your way to letting us up the road here for just a minute? We won’t be a bit of trouble — just want to take a picture maybe for the Saturday edition — and you know Mrs. Wright here, don’t you? Come on, be white about it.”

They might as well have been posts, stones, piles of dung stacked up and molded into the shape and form of men. “Bah!” she spat. “Don’t waste your time. Forget them. Lowlifes, lackeys, country morons.” She swung round, furious, even as both her heels sank into the muck. “Back to the front gate, boys — we’ll let the sheriff handle this!”

The evening shadows were deepening when they pulled back up to the gate, and where had the time gone? As soon as she flung open the car door she could hear the bullfrogs starting up in the lake, eh-lunk, eh-lunk, a sound so dismal she wanted to cry, 51wanted to tear her hair out and fall down on her knees and beat the earth with her fists — to be locked out, locked out of her own house, and in the evening no less, at suppertime, when she’d stood behind those commanding windows in her best clothes more times than she could count, entertaining brilliant and celebrated people while the whole countryside could do nothing more than whip up their buggies and shovel their manure and gape and wonder — but she told herself she had to be strong. And she was strong, stronger than he was, Frank, the milksop, the little man, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. Billy Weston was still there with the other two, though, looking tense. And the gate was still locked. She looked up at the windows of the house glazed with the declining sun till they were like blind eyes and even if she’d had binoculars she couldn’t have seen inside — not from here, not from the road — and the thought of that made her furious all over again.

But who was this? A beery calabash-headed man in some sort of uniform that was distended like sausage casings round the midsection and down the tubes of the legs, and he was coming forward now, separating himself from the crowd — and it was a crowd, the yokels gathering for the show with their chew and their cigars and their big-knuckled pasty faded women as if they’d been summoned by the fire whistle, Frank Lloyd Wright and his locked-out wife the best entertainment in town — and suddenly it dawned on her that this was the sheriff himself. “Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.

She should have been pleased to see him, should have thanked him for turning out at such an hour to do his duty and succor her in her time of distress, but the very look of him infuriated her even more. This was her hero? Her knight? Her paladin? His shoulders sagged. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “They’ve locked me out of my own house,” she said. “And he’s up there right now, gloating. Him and his, his”—she wouldn’t say “whore,” not here, not in front of these people, though that was what she was—“his slattern.”

He smacked his lips, dug with one delicate finger at something lodged between his teeth. “Who would that be, ma’am?”

“Who? What do you mean ‘who’? Frank Lloyd Wright, the man named on the peace warrant. Are you going to go up there and arrest him?” She let her eyes rove over the crowd, then gestured angrily at Billy Weston. “And these men? They’re, they’re. . obstructing, that’s what they’re doing. Obstructing justice. Arrest them. Arrest them right this minute.”

Someone let out a laugh and then the laughter became general, rising abruptly and then dying out when she swung round on them, furious. “Laugh,” she snarled. “Laugh, you idiots. And you”—pointing a finger at Billy Weston—“I’ll have you fired, the whole lot of you, the minute I get control of Taliesin.”

“Well, ma’am, I don’t, uh”—the sheriff was fumbling in his breast pocket for the warrants, two thumbed-over slips of paper that could have been used as wadding at this juncture—“well, these men say he ain’t up there. And her, neither.”

She was astonished: Wasn’t he going to do anything? Had he been bought off, was that it? Had Frank somehow got to him?

“You mean to tell me you’re just going to take their word for it?” she said, fighting to control her voice. She was glaring at him now, and he was a small man too, for all the puffed-up flesh of him, a conniver, a fool, a coward. “Well?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to look for yourself? Aren’t you going to do your duty? Your sworn duty? Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

He snatched a look at her, then dropped his eyes and began working at the dirt with the toe of one worn boot. “I suppose I”—he glanced up at Billy Weston—“well, I guess I could, maybe, well, just take a look around the place, considering these warrants and all.”

They all watched him gather himself up and shuffle to the gate, watched Billy Weston produce a key to release the padlock and swing back the bars to admit him, and they all watched as he trudged along the road and on up the hill to the house, the weariest man in the world. A feeling of anticlimax settled in — they’d wanted action, a raw burn of emotion, the seigneur on the hill exposed and humiliated, handcuffs, protestations, the puff of flash powder — but there was only this, this heavy-haunched, slope-shouldered figure receding in the distance and the frogs eh-lunking and the sun stuck fast in the treetops. People began to stir. One woman produced a sandwich. The newspapermen convened over cigarettes, and the farmers, trained to patience, squatted in the dirt and began to talk in soft voices. Before long the birds would go to roost, bats would flicker over the water and the whole countryside would become comatose as if a switch had been thrown.

Miriam was having none of it. Her shoes were ruined. Mosquitoes had bitten her — were biting her even now. She’d come all this way, produced the warrants, summoned the sheriff, endured more abuse and humiliation than any woman could be expected to take for even a single minute of a single day in an entire lifetime, and still she was locked out ! Before she could think she was at the gate, a sign there — NO VISITORS ALLOWED — and she was jerking at it till the screws gave and she flung the thing down in the dirt and stamped on it with both feet as if it were the effigy of Frank himself. And now they were roused, all right, everybody on their feet — this was what they’d come for and she was going to give it to them. “You see!” she cried. “You see how it is? The sheriff can pass through these damned stinking gates and I can’t? I, the legal owner of the property, of the gates themselves? Is that right? Is that what this country has come to?”