T. Boyle - The Women

She could feel it all boiling up in her, a stew of rage and hate and despair, and she fed on it till there was no coming back. The sign was there at her feet and she kicked it till it skittered away from her and suddenly she was whirling around on them all, shouting now, the veins rigid in her throat. “You!” she cried, focusing on the nearest man, a farmer in overalls. “Aren’t you ashamed? All of you, all of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Isn’t there a man among you? Nobody to aid a lady in distress against these, these—” but another sign caught her eye, the Taliesin sign itself, set in glass, and she was snatching up the first thing that came to hand, a stone the size of her fist, and here she was battering the glass till it shattered in a rain of bright hard nuggets and she flung the stone away from her in a single savage gesture.

“Miriam!” somebody called. “Here, Miriam, pose for a picture!”

She wanted to wreck it all, tear the place down, see it in ashes. The dirt leapt at her, the sky collapsed. And what was this? A stick. She had a stick in her hand— Miriam, a picture! — and the photographer was setting up his tripod for the flash, Wallace scurrying to help him, the farmwives gaping, Myra swelling and swelling till she was ready to burst like a soap bubble, and at the very moment, the moment she was posed there with the stick held high, vengeful, heroic, imbued with the power of Diana the Huntress and Queen Elizabeth and every other woman who’d stood up for herself against the tyranny of men, Billy Weston and his minions sprang in front of her with a canvas tarp and the flash flashed on nothing.

“Yes,” she was saying, “yes, I’m sure he was in there all the while, laughing up his sleeve. That’s what insults me more than anything else — to think of him thinking he’s got the best of me, and truly, Leora, I’ve never been so mortified in my life—”

There were flowers on the table, two dozen long-stemmed roses in a shade of red that edged toward violet, a color that reminded her of the sacred heart of Jesus glaring from the statue outside St. Mary’s Church in Memphis. Frank had paid for the flowers — indirectly, at any rate — because Mr. Fake and Mr. Jackson had got him to cough up some of what he owed her, and given the mood she was in she felt she needed flowers. Just to cheer her. And she needed a glass of champagne too, and strawberries in cream and a piece of smoked sturgeon to pick over till her fingertips smelled of the smokehouse and the sweet imbricate slabs of flesh.

Leora made a sympathetic noise on the other end of the line, a noise so faint and vague you would have thought she was in California still and not just across town, on Lakeshore Drive, visiting her sister.

“And the newspaper account was disappointing too. Didn’t you think so? Really, ‘Miriam Storms Taliesin; Repulsed,’ and that sort of thing. Or what was the other one? ‘Miriam Lifts Taliesin Siege; Returns Home.’ Makes me out to be — oh, I don’t know. Pitiful.”

“Or sympathetic,” Leora said. “People can’t help but sympathize—”

“And the photograph. They blocked the one that would have done me justice — I told you that, didn’t I? And this one they printed. .” She was staring down at the newspaper, open to the picture of her posed against an anonymous backdrop of twigs and shrubs instead of the gate itself, her cape flaring, her face distorted under the burden of her hat. You couldn’t even make out her features — and was her face really that wide? There seemed to be a glowing white ball descending from the turban and nothing more than two poked holes for eyes and a slash for the mouth as if in some child’s drawing. “I don’t know, do you like it?”

“Honestly? No. It doesn’t quite. . but what do you expect from the newspapers? ”

Very slowly, as if it represented all the wealth of the world, Miriam poured herself a second glass of the wine, for which she’d had to bribe two bellhops and the man at the desk — the real stuff, they told her, the finest, when in fact it was no better than the rotgut they served in the speakeasies. But it bubbled and frothed and it reminded her of better times. “I did like this,” she said, “in the second column? ‘You are nothing but a bunch of blackguards,’ she shouted to the defenders grouped in front of the locked gate. There’s a certain courageousness to that, don’t you think?” 52

“Do you know what I think? I think you should consider a suit—”

“I am. We are. Mr. Fake said just this morning—”

“No, no — I mean against her. For alienation of affection. Margery Mc-Caffery sued her husband’s secretary that time I was telling you about. .” Leora lowered her voice to a whisper. “The secretary disappeared the very next day — probably ran to her mother in Barstow or some such place. And when he came crawling back, Margery just laughed.”

The odor of the fish rose to her nostrils, vital and strong, blunting the perfume of the roses. She lifted her forefinger to her lips and idly licked it. Alienation of affection. She hardly knew what it meant beyond the literal meaning of the phrase, but the idea of it appealed to her. She closed her eyes and saw the blanched naked face of that woman in the hospital, childlike and afraid, little Olga, put-upon and harassed. And how did she rate Frank? She didn’t. Nobody did. Nobody.

“Don’t you see? That’s the way to flush them out.”

She filed the suit at the end of August in the amount of $100,000, Mr. Fake arguing that Mrs. Olga Milanoff, the Montenegrin dancer, had deprived her of her husband’s society for the past eighteen months, a society she valued, after careful consideration, at some $5,500 a month. The only response from Frank was through the press. He dismissed the suit out of hand, claiming it was just one more attempt on his wife’s part to annoy and harass him, and he refused to divulge the whereabouts of Olgivanna — it was no business of his wife or her lawyers either, he informed a reporter from the Chicago Tribune by long-distance telephone from Taliesin. Which only confirmed what Miriam had known all along — that he was hiding her there. He might have managed to pull his strings and get the warrants dismissed, both of them, but if he thought she was going to give in, he was as deluded as the fools who thought the Great War would last no more than six months. Oh, his little dancer was there, all right — of that Miriam had no doubt. She could picture her cowering someplace in that labyrinth of moldy rooms and reeking outbuildings, afraid of the light of day, confined to the kitchen and the pantry with the servants and the mice, jumping at every sound, and not just the reporters after her now but the process server too.

Yet the fact remained that the summons hadn’t been served and you couldn’t very well sue an apparition. Miriam brooded over that as August gave way to September, her resources dwindling even as Frank reneged on the hotel bill and Messrs. Fake and Jackson began to press her with statements for services rendered and the walls of her rooms seemed to close in on her as if she were the one caught in a snare and not Olgivanna. It rained for two days and she did nothing but sit at the window and watch the patterns the water made in the street. The black cars streamed by like hearses. People huddled beneath umbrellas — but at least they were going somewhere, doing something, anything, even if it was hateful. She was not one for stasis. She needed movement, action, excitement, and who didn’t but the dead or the soon-to-be-dead? She called Mr. Fake. Repeatedly. He had no news for her. Mr. Jackson would take the phone. He had no news for her either. And then they were both out and the secretary was very sorry.