T. Boyle - The Women

Something grabbed at his feet — one of her balled-up dresses — and he nearly stumbled.

“Frank.” Her voice was stronger now, the voice he knew, Miriam’s voice, piqued and challenging. “Put me down. What are you thinking?”

His lower back was on fire suddenly and he very nearly dropped her in that shambling half-hobbled moment, but he made it to the bed and let go of her even as she rolled away from him and the mattress gave with a long hissing groan.

“Miriam, for God’s sake,” he said, standing over her, breathing hard, his shirt wet and his eyes jumping in his head till they felt like ball bearings. “This, this needle —”

She’d sat up against the headboard, her arms wrapped round her knees. Wet, the hair fell across her face like strands of moss, like Spanish moss, and what was he thinking, where was he? “My medicine, Frank,” she said. “You know how ill I am. You know I’m exhausted, mentally and physically, and that any, any”—her voice thickened, dredged with emotion—“ upset, any cruelty or animosity is bound to, to. . destroy me. .”

He could only stare at her. He was utterly bewildered, adrift without oars or rudder, the seas piling and shifting beneath him. “I know it’s difficult,” he heard himself say, “but this heat won’t last forever. .”

“They have to go, Frank.” Her voice was steady now, aimed true, homing on him. “Both of them.”

For a moment the room was silent and he could hear the distant percussion of the axe on the chopping block, one of the workers splitting wood for the stove, and then the sudden harsh crackling shriek of a jay, so close it might have been in the room with them. He was grappling with the pronoun, third-person plural. Them?

“It’s them or me, Frank. Them or me.”

If that was how they wanted to play, rough and tumble, cats with their claws drawn, well, she could play at that game too. For three full days she lay in that sweltering room, in the dark, while Frank pleaded with her and the little half-witted housemaid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, ugly as a turnip and graceless and stupid into the bargain, brought her iced tea, lemonade and cakes. Plenty of time to brood, and brood she did. The gall of that crone, Mrs. Breen, that bag, that sack of bones with her lace-curtain Irish accent tripping around as if she were the lady of the house — and what had she had the effrontery to say in response to the simplest request for a salad properly dressed and a sandwich of cold chicken with a bit of mayonnaise and a slice of cheese that didn’t stink of the barnyard? “I’m nobody’s handmaid, ma’am, and if you want your victuals outside of the regular dining hours you’ll just have to help yourself like anybody else.” Victuals. Dining hours. It was all she could do to stop herself from snatching the hearing trumpet out of the odious reptilian claw and snapping it over one knee.

And the mother. There was an old dragon crouching over her hoard if ever she’d seen one. From the very instant they’d laid eyes on each other, in that exquisite living room with all of Frank’s things on display as if it were a museum — and it was, it was a museum, as fine and profoundly moving as any in the world — there’d been a mutual antipathy. A chill. As if a wall of ice, a thousand-year-old glacier, had sprung up between them. Frank had escorted her into the room on his arm and before she’d had a chance to catch her breath — all that rare beauty — his mother was there like one of the risen dead, tall, bony, white-haired, with a scouring look in her eye and a mouth that clamped shut so tightly it was a wonder she had any teeth left. “Enchantée,” Miriam had murmured, taking her hand, but the old woman said nothing in reply, merely looking to Frank and commenting, in the sort of tone she might have used while kicking the mud from her boots, “So this is the Parisian?” Only then did she look Miriam in the eye. “Or should I say, Parisian by way of Tennessee?”

Three days. To hell with them. To hell with everybody. She’d rather be back in Taos if it came to it, free of all this embroilment and animus, and she closed her eyes against the void of the ceiling and saw herself gamboling through a field of wildflowers in the cool pellucid sculptor’s light of the high mountains, her arms outspread, the pure white silk dancing round her on the breeze. But Frank wasn’t in Taos, Frank was here. This was his abode, his refuge, his poet’s tower shining out over the waste-land of boorishness and diminished taste, and her place was beside him. And he was concerned for her, she could see that, his face heavy, his voice soft and chagrined, the most caring man in the world. He must have come twenty times a day to inquire after her — Did she need anything? Was she feeling better? Wouldn’t she like to come in to dinner? — and at night he let all his need spill over her.

In the darkness, as they lay there side by side, she praised him, praised his vision and his genius and the way his great and giving soul was reflected in the beams that rose over them and the holy space he’d created within. She took his hand. Squeezed it. And gave praise, because praise was her main theme and her modus, but there was another theme here and it began to emerge even as his breathing slowed and the night wheeled overhead. “Frank,” she whispered, “Frank, are you awake?”

Snatched from sleep, his voice thick: “I’m here.”

“Your mother, Frank. And that dreadful housekeeper. I cannot”—her voice rising—“ will not endure this sort of abuse much longer. Who is to be the mistress of this house? Tell me that, Frank. Tell me.”

On the evening of the third day she emerged from her room in time for dinner, taking her place at the table beside Frank as if she’d been sitting there amongst them each night since the roof had been raised and the table brought in through the door. This time — and she didn’t give a damn whether anybody liked it or not — she entangled herself in the conversation, letting no point pass unchallenged, whether it had to do with politics, pasturage, Paris fashion or the weather, and she let them know, all of them, Frank’s mother and his grown children, his adolescent boy with the open honest look Frank must once have worn in the long-ago, the draftsmen, the visiting architect and his wife and whoever else was there, that she was the equal of anyone and that from now on the entire establishment would dance to a new tune, her tune, hers and hers only.

She knew something they didn’t. She knew that Nellie Breen would be sent packing within a matter of days, as soon as Frank could find someone to replace her, and that in the morning he’d be having a long talk with his mother, emphasizing the fact that her rooms weren’t yet completed — why, the building itself — and wondering, especially with the season changing and the cold sure to come on soon, if she wouldn’t find it more comfortable back in Oak Park. At least temporarily. And she knew that when she went back into that pinched and darkened room this time it would be only to pack her things up and direct the maid to take them across the courtyard, through the loggia and into Frank’s rooms.

What she hadn’t taken into account was the tenacity of Nellie Breen. Nellie Breen wouldn’t go quietly because Nellie Breen was a fire-breather of the first stripe, a shallow crude vituperative woman who’d somehow gotten her claws into Frank and wasn’t about to let go. There was a scene, Frank’s voice raised against the high rasping complaint of the old woman cornered in the kitchen like a badger in its den so that everybody on the estate must have heard it and the pig farmer down the hill too, and Miriam, lying abed with a pot of coffee and a novel propped up on the shelf of her abdomen, felt her own blood beginning to rise. This was a servant, for Christ’s sake, a nobody. Give her the boot, that was what she was thinking, have her physically removed from the premises, and why should Frank have to bother? Why shouldn’t his estate manager 108take care of it? Or his mother? But then she checked herself — she wouldn’t want her stepping into the line of succession, even for five minutes, even to do the dirty work.