T. Boyle - The Women

“What is it?” she threw back at him, even as Pussy’s screams climbed up the register and then stalled while she spat up a pale sour wad of pabulum on her mother’s shoulder. “Have you looked out the window? It is that woman. Your wife. Miriam. She is here”—she felt the warm seep of the baby’s fluids through the fabric of her dress, and it would have to be washed now, and Pussy’s dress too—“right outside at the gate. With, with, I don’t know— reporters ! They look like reporters.”

He didn’t get up from the desk, didn’t offer to take the baby, didn’t even bother to turn his head and look out the window to the sloping lawn that gave onto the lake and the meadow and the gate crowded with cars. “I’m aware of the situation,” he said in a quiet voice.

Aware of the situation? She was stunned. And though she was a linguist, though she had French and Russian at her command in addition to her native language, as well as her English, which, if heavily accented, was nonetheless perfectly fluid and intelligible, she didn’t know what to say. He was aware —and he was just sitting there?

His face was composed, his eyes locked on hers even as the baby kicked and struggled and let out a thin mewl of protest, and she could see that he was willing himself to stay seated, to project an air of coolness and indifference — for her sake. So as not to alarm her. He let out a sigh. “It seems Miriam has been up to her mischief. She claims to have some sort of court order — I’ve been on the phone to Levi 58over it — but I can guarantee you that she’ll never set foot on this property again, no matter what it takes. I’ve got both roads blocked. And Billy’s in charge. You know Billy. He would die before he’d give us up.”

“Court orders? What sort of court orders? What do they say?”

“It’s nothing. Legal wrangling, that’s all.”

“Yes, and that is what you are telling me with the reporters too, till that horrid man from the newspaper came here, and — I don’t like it. I hate this, Frank. I hate it.”

“Now listen,” and he was out from behind the desk now, moving across the carpet to her, to take her and the baby in his grip that was like the grip of a Titan, a hero who could hold the whole world up in his two arms, “there’s nothing to worry over, nothing, nothing at all.”

But he was wrong.

Within the hour they were both of them cowering like criminals in the hilltop garden, crouching over wooden stools in the dirt and whispering stories to Svetlana and the baby as if nothing in the world were the matter, while the sheriff, armed with his warrants, poked through the living room, the Blue Loggia, the kitchen, the bedroom and the studio. Within a day Miriam would be back on the attack. And within two months’ time they would have to run yet again, packing up so hastily the beds had to be left unmade and the clothes strewn across the floor, breakfast abandoned on the dining room table to draw flies and the garden left to the crows, the gophers and the pulsating hordes of insects with their clacking mandibles and infinite mouths.

Frank tried to make it seem like an adventure, just as he had when they’d gone to Puerto Rico, but it was no more an adventure than fleeing the hospital when she could barely lift her head from the pillow or enduring the ragged have-nots of Coamo with their splayed dirty feet and toothless smiles and their emaciated goats and pustular dogs and the fried bananas that tasted like cardboard soaked in grease when she wanted only to be home at Taliesin with the baby beside her and the smell of fresh bread rising from the oven. He steered the vast gleaming hulk of the Cadillac across the countryside, heading west, terrifying her at every turn because he was always going too fast, as if the whole purpose of driving wasn’t to get someplace in comfort and safety but to defy every law of the road, and he kept up a running monologue the whole time. For Svetlana — to keep her spirits up — but for her too. That was one thing about Frank — you never had to worry about a lull in the conversation.

“You’re going to love it, Svet,” he kept saying, “our own little cottage in the woods. On a lake. Lake Minnetonka. Can you say Minnetonka? Come on. You can say it. And I’ll tell you, this isn’t just a little puddle like the pond at Taliesin, but a true and veritable lake, full of fish, pike perch and suchlike. You like pike perch, don’t you? And bears in the woods, wolves, and what else? — moose. You’ll see moose too. Probably hundreds of them. And you know what? They’ve got a miniature canoe there, just the right size for a little girl — what do you think of that?”

Trees arched over the road, denser here, the woods alternately thickening and thinning as they drove west through Montfort, Mount Hope and Prairie du Chien and then north along the Mississippi to La Crosse and on into Minnesota, one hamlet after another falling away behind them and the farms losing themselves in palisades of timber. Svetlana played along—“Moose? How big are they? Bigger than an elephant?”—and if she was upset she didn’t show it. But how could she fail to be upset? How could anyone, let alone a child? Perhaps Frank had seen all this coming — the lawsuits, 59Miriam’s seizure of Taliesin, the foreclosure and pending eviction, the sheriffs and the lawyers — perhaps he’d kept his own counsel and planned ahead, finding them this refuge that lay somewhere up the road, but here was the vagabond life all over again, everything they’d need for a month — two months, three, who could say? — packed into the trunk of the car in an early-morning panic when every squeak of the hinges, every thump and rattle, was the furtive annunciation of the police come for them. And not just to serve writs or argue fine points of the law, but to arrest them both and take them to prison, lock them up behind bars like anarchists or bank robbers, and what then? More newspapers? More humiliation?

She tried to put the best face on it she could, tried to control herself for Frank’s sake and the children’s, but all she could think of was her garden, the flowers, the horses and chickens and cows — was everything to be sold off at auction? Would the tomatoes rot on the vine and the hydrangeas go brown for lack of water? It didn’t improve her outlook when they stopped for dinner in La Crosse and Svetlana developed one of her moods, refusing to eat because she didn’t like steak and didn’t want pork and she hated fish and hamburger too, and no, she didn’t want wieners or even ice cream or anything — and then the baby had diarrhea and it was one diaper after another and would they run out before they got to where they were going? And Frank, all the while the gayest, most carefree man in the world, chanting, “Minnesota, Minnesota, where the fish ’re bigger ’n Dakota!”

If she was abrupt with the Thayers, who’d arranged the rental for them, well, she was sorry, she never meant to be rude with anyone, not the woman who owned the place or the cook cum housemaid she’d left behind, but her nerves were strung tight and the first few days in the new house were a trial. There were the usual tribulations associated with moving in — getting the children settled, stocking the larder, dealing with a new servant, going through the charade of making a home out of some stranger’s house filled with a stranger’s things — and the whole affair was complicated by the imposture of their new identities. She couldn’t be Olga anymore and Svetlana couldn’t be Svetlana. They were the Richardsons 60all over again, Frank and his wife, Anna (a good ethnic name to account for her accent), their daughter Mary and the infant who wasn’t Iovanna or even Pussy any longer but simply the baby.

What to say? She’d been in a state of perpetual dislocation since she was a girl of eleven when she was sent to live with her sister on the Black Sea in Russia, learning a new culture and a new language, and then having to abandon it all at nineteen when the revolution broke out. She’d barely had time to make a home in Tiflis with Vlademar and her infant daughter when they had to flee in advance of the White Army, Georgei courageously leading them and a small band of his followers through Constantinople to safety, and then she’d found a home at Fontainebleau until Georgei’s accident, and then at Taliesin, and was it too much to ask to have some peace, to sleep in the same bed two nights in a row? To be part of something? To live a normal life like anyone else?