T. Boyle - The Women

Miriam seemed to come to life as they made their approach along the Wisconsin River and Taliesin suddenly materialized on the brow of the hill before them. “Is that it?” she asked, straining forward in the seat as he rolled to a stop at the main gate so she could have a chance to admire the house in its proper perspective. “And this is the lake you’ve talked of? And the dam? And what’s that over there to the left?”

“Tan-y-deri,” he said. “My sister Jennie’s place. And see beyond it? That’s Romeo and Juliet.”

Her face was flushed. She took hold of his arm at the biceps and pulled him to her for a kiss. “One of your earliest designs,” she murmured. “How sweet.”

“Sweet?” he said. “I don’t know if I’d call it sweet.”

“What I mean is the sentiment, of course, the sense of tradition. Your first windmill preserved here on your property and now this grand house, this palace of light and air. It’s beautiful. More beautiful than I could have dreamed.”

“You like it?”

“Like it? I adore it.”

He left the car running as he got out to swing open the gate, seeing the small things, the way the ditch along the drive had eroded in the previous week’s storms, the weeds crowding out the wildflowers, the iridescent blue of the damselflies threading the air, and then he was back in the car, shifting into gear and winding on up the hill, thinking he’d send Billy Weston or one of the others down to shut the gate behind him because he didn’t want to spoil the moment, intent instead on watching Miriam’s face as the house revealed itself by stages. Llewellyn, his youngest — twelve years old that summer and adapting to the life of the farm as if he’d been born to it — appeared out of nowhere to chase the car up the drive in a propulsion of flashing limbs, head down, elbows pumping and gaining on them even as Frank slowed to let him catch up. And that was a joy to him too, a pleasure Kitty had denied him as long as Mamah was mistress of the place, Mamah her sworn enemy, her nemesis, dead now and gone so that he could have his children back with him for the long stretch of summer, Lloyd and John married and settled but here to pitch in with the rebuilding, Frances home from college, Catherine and David running back and forth between Taliesin and Oak Park.

It was perfect. Ideal. The crowning moment of his life. Everyone together and Miriam here too and how could Kitty possibly object to a woman she’d never met and would never meet because she had to understand that things were dead between them and he had to live his own life in his own way? This was the start of something new, he could feel it, something better, and he pulled into the courtyard riding a wave of hope and optimism.

Everyone crowded round — the children, Billy Weston, even Mrs. Breen — and while the help unloaded their things he took Miriam out on the hilltop to give her a moment to breathe and take in the prospect. He didn’t want to overwhelm her. She must have been exhausted from the journey — she wasn’t well, he was aware of that — but she was superlatively calm and graceful and full of praise for the place and she had a hundred questions that took them through tea and a leisurely tour of the rooms and artwork before she felt she might want to rest prior to dinner.

Were there ominous signs? His mother claimed to be indisposed and wouldn’t emerge from her room. The children — Catherine, especially, who was the neediest and most sensitive and so the one most poisoned by Kitty’s invective — drew long faces all around. They were well-bred enough to conceal their feelings, of course, but he could see it would be a struggle to win them over — Miriam was an unknown quantity, perhaps not the ogre and housebreaker Kitty had made Mamah out to be, but she wasn’t their mother either, and he would feel the sting of that in a thousand ways. But worst of all, right from the start, was Mrs. Breen. The minute Miriam had gone in to lie down, she was at his elbow, bellowing out a whole catalogue of questions to which she apparently required no answers, as her ear trumpet was nowhere in sight. She was stalwart, furious, her face compressed and her eyes jumping at him. Where was the lady to sleep? she wanted to know. Would she require anything special in the way of comestibles because she, Mother Breen, was as run-down and worn-out as a woman could be what with feeding all these workmen and the family too, and she was at the end of her tether. And why hadn’t the lady removed her shoes at the door because who did she think would wipe up her muddy tracks after her? Did she speak French? Would she eat pork? Was she married? Did she expect maid’s service?

He talked all through dinner, talked so steadily and with such a tailing edge of desperation he barely touched his food, and that wasn’t like him — not to eat — and they all took notice. His mother sat across from him, icily silent, and while Paul Mueller tried heroically to make general conversation, Llewellyn chirped out an anecdote about the frogs in the upper pond and Miriam was on her best behavior, there was something distinctly off about the whole evening. After dinner he sat at the piano 105and led them through a medley of songs, but Miriam wouldn’t join in — was the scene too homely for her, a Parisian sophisticate, was that it? — and his mother lacked enthusiasm. Distinctly. In fact, she seemed to do nothing all night long but stare at Miriam so intently she might have been making a charcoal study of her. They went early to bed, Miriam settled in one of the guest rooms to maintain a sense of propriety, though he didn’t give a damn for propriety, not under his own roof, and he had to find his way to her bed in the dark.

The following day began auspiciously enough, Miriam up early and looking alert at breakfast while Mrs. Breen confined herself to the kitchen and let one of the maids serve at table. Conversation mainly revolved around the weather — the dew lay heavy on the grass that morning and there was the breath of a breeze out of the north, which he took to mean that the heat wave of the past weeks was finally dispelling, though both Paul and Lloyd disagreed with him, citing some nonsense out of the Farmer’s Almanac about woolly bear caterpillars and the paucity of their coats. Still, to his mind it was undeniably cooler and that was a beneficence — Miriam would be more comfortable and if she was more comfortable she would find it easier to embrace the natural life in the countryside. That was what he was thinking, as she seemed abnormally sensitive to extremes of temperature — abnormally sensitive to practically everything, for that matter — but then that was only to be expected of a highly refined artistic temperament like hers.

He ate with a good appetite — he’d been up since four-thirty, busy in the studio, walking the grounds, tending to the garden and seeing to the horses, afire with energy and the flare of ideas that came to him almost unbidden, at the oddest times, as if inspiration were a vagary of the unconscious and not something to be earned through effort and focus and the application of pencil and T-square. The main house was largely finished now, but there was a whole lot of work yet to be done on the new wings and of course there were always projects on the boards, moneymaking projects, because the costs of rebuilding had exceeded even his wildest estimate and, as usual, he was woefully short 106. .

As the day wore on — and it did get hot, above ninety by noon, though he worked alongside the laborers, loudly insisting that it was cooler by far than yesterday — he lost track of Miriam. He’d taken her on his rounds in the morning, explaining as much as he could about the workings of the place, but she’d developed a headache or heat exhaustion or some such thing and had begged off. “You want me to walk you back?” he’d asked, and she’d given him a smile that shaded into a grimace. “I’m not an invalid,” she said firmly, though her voice betrayed her. “I do think I can manage, what is it, three hundred yards on my own?” By the time he gave her another thought it was past five in the afternoon.