T. Boyle - The Women

They woke her at dawn with a hard roll and a cup of coffee in a tin cup.

They took her back to the courthouse.

The cameras flashed.

Flashed again.

And then, to her amazement, though she expected the worst — prison, deportation, the loss of the children and Frank too — they set her and Frank free on surety of $15,000 each, supplied by Frank’s friends, who had rallied to him. Vlademar, after meeting at length with Frank and his attorneys, 65came to his senses and dropped the adultery complaint and the lawsuit as well. The sheriff of Sauk County was reportedly moving to release them from the charge of being fugitives from justice and the Mann Act charges were being reconsidered in light of the fact that Vlademar, who had furnished only sixty dollars that year toward child support, had stepped down, and it could be seen clearly that she and Frank were living as husband and wife and that Frank was providing for the children. This time there was a car waiting when they came down the courthouse steps. The children were in the backseat. The chauffeur slammed the door on the reporters and they were gone.

One thing remained. And Frank started in on it the minute the car left the curb and wouldn’t let it go through the reunion with the children, through lunch and dinner and on into the night, his attorneys chiming in like parrots whenever they had the opportunity. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Frank kept saying till the sound of the phrase on his lips made her flinch as if she were being battered with a cudgel carved out of the worn remnants of the language, of English, the English language and all its laws and proprieties, and what was wrong with the woods, anyway? At least it was dark there. And deserted. “And”—with a look to whichever of the lawyers happened to be present—“while public sympathy has definitely swung in our favor, we do need to press our advantage. If Miriam can use the newspapers, so can we. Don’t you agree? Isn’t it time to tell our side of the story?”

It was the day following their release. She was staying at the home of one of Frank’s friends, enjoined from leaving the state of Minnesota until all charges had been cleared. Her head ached, her stomach revolted. When she looked across the room, the intermediate distance seemed to blur and shift shape until nothing was recognizable. She thought of her mother, who’d been so fierce and uncompromising in battle that the Turks swore to bind her between two horses and tear the limbs from her body if they ever got hold of her. That was what she wanted now, two horses to tear her apart. It would be a joy compared to facing the press.

“It won’t be a press conference, but just an interview. Right here. Right in this room. And with a single reporter. A female. What do you say?”

She glanced past him to the depths of the room, palm fronds cut like the fingers of a monstrous grasping hand against the glow of the lamplight, the pattern of the Persian rug alternately dilating and shrinking away. She was so exhausted she could hardly form the reply in her head, let alone her throat. The lawyers — barely kempt and battle weary — leaned in. Frank went silent. “No,” she breathed.

Frank had been seated beside her, solicitous, gently smoothing a hand over her forearm and wrist, but now he jumped up and began pacing the length of the rug. The light of the overhead lamp saturated his brow and seeped into his eyes so that they seemed like lights themselves, radiant, blistering. He was adamant. He was angry. And she knew what was coming, knew he was going to try to twist her to his point of view. “But all the filth, the lies Miriam’s spread—”

Firmer now: “No.”

“Yes,” Frank said. “You must.”

“No. ”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, absolutely yes.”

And so she spent her third sleepless night in a row, this one in a bed the size of a tennis lawn, with a parade of pillows, a smell of lilac and a view down a tranquil moonlit avenue, all the while rehearsing what she would say, how she would explain herself, her family history, her nobility of purpose and the sanctity of her love for Frank and her children and Taliesin too. How she’d been wronged. Misrepresented at every turn by a vindictive and perhaps even mentally unstable woman. How everything that was pure had been willfully controverted so that good appeared evil and love was demeaned and envy elevated and all the rest. She made un-articulated speeches all night long, the words throbbing in her head till they wouldn’t stop and her eyes wouldn’t close and the light came hammering through the windows and she was still murmuring to herself through the breakfast she took alone in her room and her toilet and the long lingering sequence of combing out her hair, selecting a single strand of jet beads and dressing herself in an almost austere gown and shoes that were solid and respectable, last year’s shoes, shoes that would verify and underpin everything she had to say. She would right the record. She would defend herself. Make use of every high-flown phrase and stirring sentiment she could muster. She was nothing low. She was high, higher than any of them.

Still, when she walked into the room to see the solitary woman rising from the chair with her clenched face and painted nails and the pencil and pad she brandished like plated armor, all she could say was: “Please, can you — will you say that I am not a dancer?”

Money was the problem. Cash. Spondulics. The means to pay for the necessities of life so that you didn ’t have to live like some half-naked beggar in a loincloth on the streets of Calcutta. That was what she tried to impress upon Mr. Fake, because her husband — and he was still her husband — was most emphatically evading his obligations to her. He was vituperative. Mean. Petty. And he hadn’t paid out so much as a nickel for her upkeep since she’d filed the alienation of affection suit and what did he, Mr. Fake, expect her to subsist on? Wasn’t he her attorney? Wasn’t he being paid to look after her interests, to protect her from the vultures her husband employed? Did he realize that she’d been forced to move in with her daughter because the Southmoor had all but thrown her out in the street? And that the situation was intolerable? That she was ill, fatigued, depressed? That her son-in-law looked at her across the dining table as if she’d come to steal the bread from his mouth and that the room she’d been given was a repository of unwanted furniture and a broken bicycle and that it smelled of some deceased thing trapped in the walls?

And what did Mr. Fake tell her? Settle. Settle now and get out while you can because public opinion had turned against her, and her husband’s friends 66were pulling strings to have all charges against him dismissed and the suit thrown out of court.

“What do you mean, ‘public opinion’?” she spat back at him. She was seated across the desk from him in his offices on a damp ironclad day in early December, feeling out of sorts, and not simply because of the pain-fulness of the situation or because he’d kept her waiting in the anteroom a good half hour, but in a deeper way, a way of malaise and physical depletion. It was the flu. It was her heart. Her liver. She wasn’t well, wasn’t well at all.

“You’ve seen the newspapers,” he said in his soft conspiratorial tone. He’d made a cradle of his interlocked fingers and he was resting his chin on it and giving her a look that was meant to be Solomonic. A framed oil painting — a bucolic lacustrine scene in atrocious taste and worse execution — hung on the wall behind him. His wife must have been the artist — it was the only explanation Miriam could think of, because no one in his right mind would actually seek out and purchase something as offensive to the sensibilities as that. Or perhaps an adolescent daughter. Did he even have children? She realized she didn’t know a thing about him, whether he was married, divorced, a widower, bachelor or monk — but then what difference did it make? He could have been Joseph Smith himself with half a hundred wives so long as he put the screws to Frank.