T. Boyle - The Women

One afternoon she was in the kitchen with the cook and one of the draftsmen — a boy of twenty-three who’d come up from Chicago for the chance to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, a good boy with a ready smile and a croaking octave-splitting voice Frank liked to imitate when he took on the persona of Eeyore the donkey for Pussy’s benefit. His name was Herbert Mohl. He had eyes the color of rainwater, hair so fair it was nearly translucent. He was peeling potatoes — had been peeling potatoes since he’d washed and dried the breakfast dishes — and the job got away from him, a dull job, a job no boy would choose or want. Every time she glanced up he was sitting there motionless, the peeler in one hand, an unscathed potato in the other. “Herbert,” she said finally, glancing to the two tubs of potatoes — a bellying white mound in the one, a dirt-brown mountain in the other—“you know we’re going to need those potatoes for tonight, and then you’re on the wood detail and cleanup after that.”

He gave her a long look, the potato clutched like a grenade in his hand. The light was dim, the windows gray. “You know what? I don’t care. I just don’t care anymore.”

She was at the counter, on her feet, kneading the dough for tomorrow’s bread. Her feet ached. Her shoulders ached. Her nose was running and all morning she’d been surreptitiously wiping it on the sleeve of her sweater. She wanted to say something soft, mollifying, she wanted to cajole, but she wasn’t very good at cajolery and she was in no mood for argument or even, at this point, conversation. “You’d better care,” she said, “if you want to eat.”

He rose from the stool so swiftly it startled her. “I’m an architect, not a scullery maid,” he said, his face flushed. “I didn’t come here to peel potatoes and tend your precious fires and scrub pots and pans till my fingers go stiff. And what about pay? I’ve yet to see a single cent out of this place.” He was verging on insolence and insolence she wouldn’t tolerate. Mrs. Taggertz, busy at the stove, stiffened. Money was a sore point with her too, and what was this, the Bolshevik revolution all over again? “Didn’t you ever think I might have needs— we might have needs, all of us, George, Cy, Henry?”

“Only just peel.”

Predictably, he flung down the potato and the peeler with it. Then it was the apron and then he was at the door. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I didn’t sign on to be anybody’s slave. I’m going back to Chicago if I have to walk.”

She looked to Mrs. Taggertz, but Mrs. Taggertz wouldn’t return her gaze. The woman had never been particularly forthcoming — she didn’t seem to have much to say to anyone, but then she hadn’t been hired for her ebullience but rather for her ability to stretch one pot of soup into two — and when she did make conversation it was almost always couched in the form of gossip critical of someone or something. She was of the neighborhood and the neighborhood didn’t approve of Frank Lloyd Wright. Or of Olgivanna either. Even if they were married now. “I cannot believe my ears,” Olgivanna said, just to hear her own voice. She was furious, seething. How could this boy dare to speak to her like that? “Did you hear? Did you hear what he said to me?”

Only then, only because she was directly addressed, did Mrs. Taggertz look up. Her hands were busy — she was chopping onions with an easy effortless stroke, as if her arm worked on a hinge — and she paused to scrape the residue from the knife. “He never washes the dishes right, that one,” she said, scraping. “And the silverware,” she added, shaking her head. “Disgusting.”

Olgivanna thought of going to Frank, but she couldn’t bring herself to bother him when he was working. It was up to her to manage affairs around the house, just as she’d done at Fontainebleau with Georgei, and she was determined to do it. Without thinking, she set the dough aside to rise and took up the potato peeler.

For the next hour, she kept replaying the confrontation in her head, thinking of what she should have said, how she should have been firm and yet yielding at the same time. Frank had particularly liked Herbert — he was a precise and unerring draftsman and an accomplished flautist who’d enlivened their musical evenings — and she’d liked him too, and now they would be a man short when there was so much work to be done. It was a shame and she could only blame herself. She’d been in a mood, but that was no excuse — she was in charge here and she should have demonstrated more self-control, more reserve, dignity. Never let anyone see what you’re thinking, that was what her mother had told her. And her mother was as fierce and commanding as any woman on this earth. Finally, when she’d finished with the potatoes, she went looking for him.

By then, it had begun to snow. She’d smelled the change on the air early that morning, a premonitory scent of moisture riding high overhead in the steadily unfolding clouds, and she felt it too as an expectant softness that seemed to envelop her as she threw feed to the chickens and loaded lengths of split oak into a wheelbarrow and hauled it across the yard to the house, her breath streaming before her. Now the snow was beading down, swift and tightly wound, with a hiss you could hear the minute you opened the door. Herbert wasn’t in his room and the fire there had burned out. The bed was made, but his clothes, his suitcase and the flute were gone. She felt a pulse of alarm: Had he really meant it? Was he that head-strong? That foolish? She slipped into her coat and went out to the courtyard to find his tracks there, a draftsman’s unerring line heading off down the drive and into the gauzy curtain of the storm. Already, they were filling in.

In her haste — she had to get him back before Frank found out, and that was all there was to it — she’d neglected hat and mittens both. She found a cotton scarf in the pocket of her coat and wrapped it round her head to protect her hair, which was wet already, wet the moment she darted out the door, and she knew she should have gone back for the mittens, but she was in too much of a hurry to bother. Twice she slipped and fell going down the drive, her bare hands stinging in the cold. The wind picked up and threw pellets of ice in her face. Herbert’s tracks grew fainter. No matter: she knew where he was going.

It was three and a half miles to the station at Spring Green. In optimal conditions, with her long purposive stride, it would have taken her just over an hour to reach it, but the snow was already ankle-deep and slick beneath with a thin transparent layer of ice and she had to pick her way carefully. The road was deserted before her. The hills swept round and plunged to the river, the faded image of the bridge plumbing a line to the far shore. Nothing was moving, nothing animate, but for the birds exploding from the bristled crowns of the trees that rocked in the wind with a frictive moan like the keening of the dead. Halfway there her cough came up on her and she had to lean against a fencepost to catch her breath, the snow sifting down around her, granulating in the folds of her coat, whitening the ends of the scarf and the frozen hem of her dress. Her nose was tender where she kept wiping it with the back of her hand. Both hands had gone numb. She couldn’t feel her feet.

Still, she pressed on, telling herself she was just out for a stroll, thinking of the girls — they were with the housekeeper, ostensibly entertaining themselves, and by now they would have begged to go out of doors to sled down the drive, and perhaps they would have come looking for her, for their mother, for permission and assurances, and begun to wonder where she was. ( Has anyone seen Mama? Svet would ask and she’d poke desultorily through the rooms, the kitchen, the living room, the loggia, the bedrooms, but she wouldn’t dare burst in on Frank — that was verboten — and in that moment she’d shrug it off and pull on her boots and mittens and go out to the stall where the sleds were kept.) She held that picture in her mind as the snow climbed across the fields and the landscape lost its features and everything strove for a cold white uniformity. She wasn’t lost. There was no chance she could be lost because she knew this road as well as any road in the world and that stand of trees ahead would have marked the edge of the Perry property and soon she’d see their farmhouse and smell the smoke of their chimney and then she’d be past it and the buildings of Spring Green would begin to define themselves against the burden of the snow. She kept on, feeling light-headed, feverish — was she catching cold, was that it? — and when she coughed she brought up a sputum the color of tapioca.