T. Boyle - The Women

The minute he walked into the house he was confronted by his mother. “This woman,” she said, all the lines round her mouth drawn tight. “I’m sorry to say it, but she’s not a lady, Frank — she’s not even civil. She’s vulgar and foulmouthed, is what she is. It may be that that sort of language passes among the French — for all I know it’s the fashion over there — but I won’t have it here in my own household, not in the hearing of my grandchildren or the servants either. I won’t. I tell you, Frank, I won’t.”

He wanted a bath — or no, a swim in the lake. His shirt was stuck to his back, his hands and forearms were filthy. He was exhausted. And in no mood. “I’m sorry, Mother, but we’ll all have to. . make adjustments. Miriam is under a great deal of strain, coming up here into the country, and—”

“She diminishes you. She’s beneath you. She puts on airs.”

And now Mrs. Breen appeared, her eyes savage, the ear trumpet clutched in one hand — and were they allies, had they declared a truce and joined forces to repel the invader in their midst? Had war been declared between lunch and dinner? He was stupefied and he stood there speechless, turning from one furious face to the other. “It’s a sorry thing,” Mrs. Breen roared, “to see such disrespect. Do you know what sort of vile names she’s been calling your own mother? And in my hearing, no less?”

He’d come in the kitchen door, desiring only a glass of water before pulling on his bathing costume and calling Llewellyn to head down to the lake, and here he was in the docket. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” he said. “Because Miriam—”

“Misunderstanding?” Mrs. Breen had elevated the hearing trumpet and now she dropped it to her side, her attenuated shoulder blades settling like bones in a sack. “To call your mother a meddling old hag? And me. To call me names I wouldn’t call the devil himself? And just because I wouldn’t jump at her every whim and command, because I have a household to run here if you don’t know it and I’m not hired on to be anybody’s handmaid — and who does she think she is to command me like I’m some slave out of her plantation in Tennessee or wherever her glorious ancestors hail from, and yes we all got a good earful of that too.”

“Frank,” his mother cut in. “Frank, now you listen to me—”

He held his hands up in surrender. “I’ll speak with her,” he said, irritated now, angry, all the satisfaction he’d taken in the day’s work driven out of him as if he hadn’t accomplished a thing — Sisyphus, this must be what Sisyphus felt like each time he got to the top of the hill. “Right now. Right this minute. Will that satisfy you? It’s not enough that I’ve worked all day under that sun with the laboring men, slaved out there in this heat, and all I want is to have a swim and some quiet before dinner. No. I have to be the one to make peace, when both of you—” he checked himself. His mother was biting her lip. Her eyes were wet. “Where is she?”

“Where is she?” Mrs. Breen threw back at him. “Where she ’s been the whole day — in her room. And she won’t let nobody in neither.”

She didn’t answer to his knock. He tried the knob but there seemed to be something blocking the door. “Miriam!” he called. “Miriam, are you in there?” Nothing. Not a whisper. He went round to the window, but she’d blocked that too, the casement locked, some sort of material — was that the bedspread? — tacked up so that he couldn’t see inside. He felt a flash of irritation. 107He pounded the glass with the flat of his hand, shouted her name again. People were watching him — two of the masons, on their way down the hill to the tavern, had paused by the garage to take in the spectacle, joined now by one of the housemaids swinging a pail of scraps for the hogs — and he cursed under his breath. Couldn’t he have a little privacy? Was that too much to ask? In the next moment he was at the door again and this time he put his shoulder to it and felt something give — a piece of furniture sliding back and the door cracking open just enough to give him a view of the darkened room.

At first he could see nothing. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that she’d nailed a series of shadowy objects to the walls, reckless with the plaster and the wood trim too — another flash of irritation — and what were they? Drawings? “Miriam!” he called again, and when she didn’t answer he lunged at the door with everything he had till the barricade — a bureau with the desk and two chairs stacked atop it — spilled forward with a splintering crash that could have wakened the dead, and he was in the room. Which was empty. He flicked on the lamp and the walls sprang to life — drawings, yes, dozens of them, each a sketch of his head as seen from every conceivable angle, the features monumental and rugged, hair snaking beyond the margins and his orbits as deep as Beethoven’s, but with the eyes left eerily null — and what was this? Clothes heaped on the bed as if laid out for a rummage sale, hats and shoes and undergarments scattered across the floor, a smashed teacup, a spill of roofing nails and the hammer with which she’d crucified each of the drawings. Her slippers. Her robe. The vertical plane of the bathroom door.

“Miriam? ”

He pushed open the door, the first stirrings of alarm working through him like a faint electric current, and there she was. Propped up in the tub. Asleep. Or meditating, perhaps she was meditating. Seeking the cool, the dark — she’d had a headache, hadn’t she? That was it, that must have been it. “Miriam?” he tried again.

Her eyes were shut fast, the lids faintly blue, lashes entwined, her head thrown back against the wall — and her mouth, her mouth was slung open over the dark canal of her throat. She was asleep, of course she was, asleep, that was all. His first thought was that she’d been bathing and dozed off, but she was dressed in her nightgown — the material sodden, painted to her limbs — and there was no more than an inch of water in the tub, softly gurgling round the plug. It was then — and it came as a shock, as if he’d been slapped — that he noticed the needle.

A needle. A syringe. The sort of thing the doctor used for injections. It was clinging to the smooth white flesh of her upper thigh, out of place, wrong, deeply wrong, and all he could think of was a parasite, some bloated tick or leech fastened there where it didn’t belong. Without thinking, he wrapped his fingers round the thing — cold metal and glass — and tugged it gently from her flesh, a speck of blood there, a yellowish contusion round the wound, and laid it on the sink. “Wake up,” he said softly, taking her by the wrist. “Miriam, wake up.”

She gave him nothing.

He pulled her toward him, slapped her once, twice, and then again, till her eyes began to flutter, and where were the smelling salts? Did they have smelling salts? Her breath was rank, flowering in his face with the odor of the swamp plants, the cattails and pickerelweed and the other things that grew with their feet in the water of the pond. He was frightened, his thoughts charging one way and then the other. Should he call the physician? His mother? Mrs. Breen? But this was a private matter, wasn’t it? Between him and Miriam? Some mistake with her medicine, nothing to worry over, really, but shouldn’t she be in bed?

He clasped her to him then and tried to lift her, dripping, from the tub, but she was surprisingly heavy, her limbs slippery, fish-cold, and it was a job to shift her weight and gather her up. Her head fell forward across his shoulder, her hair pressed wet to his cheek, and with a final sucking contortion she was in his arms and he was edging out the door and her lips were moving. “Frank,” she murmured, “what is it? What are you doing?”