T. Boyle - The Women

Frank started back in then, his voice high and querulous—“Protective custody? Are you mad? Can’t you see these children need their mother? ”—and she saw the sheriff ’s face harden. It was no use. The mood of the room shifted back to animosity and they took Frank by the arm and then she and the children were in their coats and hats and the door opened on the night and the cold steps of the porch and the hot hard flash of the photographers’ cameras. 63

There was the night in prison, locked behind bars, a night without the children, without Frank — and they’d planned it this way, Miriam’s lawyer and the police and their accomplices in the press, to make the most of Frank’s suffering and humiliation, to bring him low — and then there was court and bail and a fresh assault of the cameras as they came down the steps of the courthouse in Minneapolis. She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t combed her hair or pressed her clothes or used a tube of lipstick or even brushed her teeth. The jail stank of the animal functions, of the communal toilet and the disinfectant they tried to cover it up with. The other inmates — drunks and prostitutes and morphine addicts, low people, uneducated, unwashed, ragtag and bobtail — moaned and gibbered through the night in a low hopeless drone and all she could think about was the children. Svetlana had been mortally frightened, clinging to her as the matron separated them, and the baby, alive to her sister’s distress, never stopped crying all the way down the long corridor and out of sight.

“They’ll be all right,” the woman kept telling her, “I’ll be with them myself all night and I’m sure you’ll be out by tomorrow, all of you,” but they wouldn’t be all right, they’d never be all right, never again. How could they be? They’d been terrorized, brutalized, torn out of bed by strangers and locked away by strangers beyond any reason or justification that even an adult could begin to comprehend. “Mama, what’s happening?” Svetlana kept asking her as they wound along the dark roads in the police car, Frank reduced to a shadow in the vehicle ahead of them. “Mama, did Daddy Frank do something bad? Did you? Where are we going? What’s happening?”

She had no answer for her — she could only hold her as the car lurched and the baby squirmed and sputtered and the headlights pulled them toward some final climactic panorama of debasement and disgrace — and she had no answer for the mob of reporters the next morning either. The arraignment was a public humiliation, no different in kind from what the Puritans had inflicted with their stocks and ducking stools, the whole procedure, from standing before the judge to the release on bail, a shame so deep she could barely breathe. When she passed through the courthouse doors and out into the daylight, she was disoriented. The flash blinded her. Her feet were unsteady. “Olga,” they shouted as if they knew her, as if they were her friends and intimates, as if they only wanted to help, crowding in on her en masse like some perverse scrummage. “Olga! Olga!” It was drizzling. The pavement shone. Frank had her by the arm and his lawyers were there, one on either side, trying to shield them both. “Olga! Olga! Will you give us a statement? Frank? Mr. Wright?”

All she wanted was to hide herself away — she, the granddaughter of Marco Milanoff, Montenegro’s greatest general and patriot, daughter of Ivan Lazovich, chief justice of Montenegro, and Militza Milanoff, herself a general in the Montenegrin army, transformed into an outcast, a criminal, an adulteress — but Frank paused there on the steps in the rain to tell anyone who wanted to hear how abused he’d been and how contrived these charges were. She shrank. She died. And he talked on while the drizzle thickened and the pencils slipped across the page. She stared at the ground—“Olga! Olga!”—and he held tight to her even as he gestured with one arm and let his voice ride up and down the ladder, and then they were moving again, the reporters and a hundred or more hyenas with nothing better to do sweeping along in a train behind them.

And where were they going? To a place with four walls and a friendly face, clean sheets, a bed with blankets to pull up over their heads for the duration? Some lightless cave a mile down in the earth where no one could get at them ever again? No. They were crossing the street to the municipal courthouse to answer the federal charges under the Mann Act because unbeknownst to them they’d been observed driving across the state line at La Crosse — by spies — which action indicated, to the dimness of the law, that Frank had coerced her to his will and that she was an accomplice in his depravity. When she realized what was happening — the spectacle, another flight of steps, another courtroom with another set of pale reproving faces — she felt her legs go weak. She couldn’t go on. She couldn’t endure it. The shame, the shame. Olga, Olga! But Frank held her up, the doors opened wide, the mob parted and she found herself in the temple of justice once again, heroic statuary rising up before her, fluted columns, marble floors, people turning to stare. Her footsteps echoed off the tiles. Boomed. Shouted out her guilt.

Two men in dark suits intervened then, showing her into a side room off the main corridor despite Levi Bancroft’s puffing and hand-wringing — she saw a flag, a desk, half a dozen wooden chairs, but no judge, no spectators, no press — even as two others materialized to lead Frank off in the opposite direction. “Bear up,” he called over his shoulder, and he might have told her he loved her, but he was already gone. She clutched her bag to her. Shot a look at the windows and the dark varnished stain of the door at the far end of the room, and the sight of it, of that door, terrified her — it led to another cell, she was sure of it. “We’re federal agents, ma’am, and we have a few questions for you,” one of the men said, pulling out a chair for her. She held herself rigid while they sat heavily across from her. The one who’d spoken produced a cigarette case and offered it to her, but she wouldn’t look at it, wouldn’t move. There was the sound of a match striking, then the odor of tobacco, harsh and raw.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. The room was dim, sterile, cold as an icebox. Here were these men, these strangers, who held her by force of compulsion, and they hadn’t even thought to turn on the lights or the radiator, and the idea of it, of their indifference, depressed her even further. She wanted her children. She wanted release. But the ritual must play itself out: they were federal agents and she was a fugitive, an undesirable alien, caught in a tangle of lies.

The second man cleared his throat and said, “Let’s begin with your name. You are Olga Lazovich?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.” And then she bowed her head and in a very soft voice found herself telling them everything, telling them the truth and too much of the truth—“Puerto Rico? Do you mean to say you fled to Puerto Rico and then reentered the country without a visa?”—until it seemed as if she were bound up in her own chains and that nothing, no force of law or mercy or public opinion, could save her.

Another night in the lockup. In the hoosegow. Isn’t that what they called it?

Hoosegow 64 —she chanted it softly to herself through another sleepless night, frantic with worry and chewing over this absurd little degraded excuse of a two-syllable word as if it were a prayer. Hoosegow, hoosegow. It was cold. The single blanket was thin. She began to think she hated Frank — not Miriam, but Frank. Frank was the one who’d got her into this, Frank and Frank alone. Frank had destroyed her. Annihilated her. Brought her to the lowest level of the lowest seep of humanity. She pictured him in his cell somewhere in the other wing of the building, boasting, strutting, keeping up a face for his fellow convicts, the great man, the Master, even in his downfall. And then she began to think she hated herself. Because if she’d been stronger, if she’d resisted him — and Taliesin, the peace and beauty of it, the promise it held out of home, sanctuary, permanence — if she hadn’t gone to him on the recoil from Georgei, if she’d only waited, none of this would have happened.