T. Boyle - The Women

“You’re dismissed,” she heard Frank shout suddenly, his voice echoing down the courtyard through the open kitchen window, in full roar. “Can’t you understand that? You’re no longer wanted. Period. Must I repeat myself over and over?” The old woman came right back at him, her words chopping through the dull haze of the morning like so many swirling blades: “You think you can just toss me out? Without cause? So you can lie here with your—” Frank’s voice swelled to drown hers, there was a sharp tumbling explosion shot through with metallic tones, a clatter and tintinnabulation of cook pans, implements, perhaps even cutlery, and then the thunderous slamming of the door. In the next moment she saw him stalking across the courtyard, his shoulders clenched in fury, and she rushed to the window, her emotions surging— the bitch, the bitch, he was her hero, shining and golden, couldn’t the whole world see it? — and called his name as if her life depended on it.

He stopped in his tracks, spinning round to see where this new challenge was coming from. There was something about his posture, the shoulders, the fists, the gnomic big-headed stocky Welsh look of bellicosity, that brought her back to the scenes between them at 25 East Cedar Street before she’d gone off to New Mexico in capitulation, and that gave her pause. He was glaring at her, the compass of his fury expanding to include her now, as if she were to blame, and he cried out as if she’d just stuck a dart in his back. “What? What do you want from me?”

The moment was emblematic. She knew it, felt the knowledge run through her like a long shiver, but she was there at the open casement, not fifty feet from him, and without thinking, she just opened her arms to him. “Frank,” she crooned, drawing out the single syllable in the continental way—“Frahhnnk”—and she saw his face change. “Come here. Come to me.”

In the next moment he was there at the window, reaching out to wrap his arms around her, rigid with the residue of his anger. “Good, Frank,” she murmured, hugging him to her, and it was as if they were on a stage, because wasn’t that his mother’s face hanging in the window across from them? Yes. Yes. The ghost of an image, already fading. She gripped him, squeezed him, pressed him to her. “Good,” she said. “Good for you.”

Six weeks later, the scandal broke, and everything had to be recalibrated.

They were in Chicago at the time, he on his business, she doing a bit of shopping, hoping to find something suitable for winter in this last dreary outpost of civilization, which was, at least, preferable to the sheer barbarism of rural Wisconsin, Spring Green, for God’s sake — and no, she wouldn’t go to see Norma, not on her life, because Norma was now apparently the moral guardian of the state of Illinois, excoriating her mother both by mail and over the telephone wires for living openly with a married man, as if such a child chained to such a joyless belittling marriage with a man who was her inferior in every regard could know anything about passion and the higher life of the mind. She’d just come back to the hotel after stops at the milliner, her tailor and half a dozen of the less absurd shops that nonetheless featured things they were wearing in Paris two years ago, when there was a knock at the door. It was Leora. 109Looking flushed. “I must have missed you — I don’t know how, I’ve been waiting in the lobby for hours. . ”

“But why? Whatever’s the matter?”

She could only sigh and draw her face down, throwing a quick glance up the corridor to where two men in bright ties, their voices jocularly entwined, were just stepping into the elevator, before she ducked through the door and fell into the nearest chair as if she’d been stricken on the spot. “He’s not here, is he?” she whispered, puckering her lips in a show of concern, her eyes jumping to the bedroom door and back again.

“Who? Frank?”

“He’s not, is he?”

“Why, no — he’s at the office. Working. You know that — he works all the time, works like a stoker, day and night, the vigor of the man”—and here she had to smile a not-so-private smile because she’d already informed Leora, in some detail, about their nights together.

“Have you a cigarette?”

Without answering, she went to where her purse lay open on the table by the window, extracted her cigarette case with an absent glance at the mosaic of sun-splashed roofs below her and the great blue void of the lake beyond, and came back across the room with her hand extended, thinking of the hats she’d bought — and the shoes — and thinking she might model them for Leora, because she respected her opinion, though if truth be told Leora was hardly original in her dress. In the next moment, she’d lit Leora’s cigarette and one of her own — Frank be damned: she’d smoke if she pleased, anytime, anywhere — and settled into the armchair beside Leora’s. “So,” she said, exhaling a rich blue cloud of Turkish tobacco, “what is all this about Frank? Something in the papers?”

“It’s that maid,” Leora said, her voice a whisper still, as if she were afraid someone might overhear her, though Frank was gone and the walls were as reasonably thick as one could expect from an American hotel. “Mrs. Breen?”

“Yes? What about her?”

“It seems she’s got hold of some letters, letters you wrote to Frank when you were separated? And gone to the press with them.”

“But how would she—?” The answer came to her before the question was out of her mouth — and, of course, she was thinking aloud in any case — the hateful pinched face of the puffed-up little woman invading her mind’s eye even as she saw her rifling Frank’s drawers under the pretext of dusting or mopping or whatever it was she did at Taliesin when she wasn’t presiding over her reeking pots of greasy bland overcooked victuals. But the treachery of the woman — and how could Frank associate himself with people like that? Defend them, even? Mother Breen, he called her, and before she’d laid down the law for him he’d actually praised the woman for her efficiency and, astonishingly, her cuisine.

“I’ve got the clippings here for you, in the event you hadn’t seen the papers.” Leora, head bent beneath the stiff shelf of her hat, was digging through her purse. “Here they are,” she said, handing her a neatly folded section of the morning paper and then focusing her big blinking eyes on her as if she expected her to collapse under the weight of a few lines of newsprint. “She’s accusing Frank under the Mann Act. 110And reporting you as an undesirable alien, if you can believe the nerve of this woman — the newspaper says they want to deport you.”

The fact was, she couldn’t really make out much more than the headlines — NEW SCANDAL AT WRIGHT LOVE BUNGALOW — without her spectacles, but before she could rise from the chair to go search them out, she heard herself say, “Deport me? But my passport states quite clearly that I’m an American citizen. It’s ridiculous. I might have got the thing at the consulate in France, but. . you know I’m an American. Everybody does. What in God’s name are they talking about, deport me?” 111

Leora’s voice went cold. “Frankly, Miriam, I don’t know. But they’re dragging your name through the mud. And your reputation too.” She cleared her throat, tapped the ash from her cigarette and reached for the clipping. “They’re saying that you and Frank — they call you ‘the noted sculptress from Paris,’ by the way — have been cohabiting at his ‘love bungalow’ in defiance of any conventional notions of morality and that Mrs. Breen felt she had to come forward as a matter of conscience. She’s quite devout, it appears. Roman Catholic — the worst, the very worst. And she said—” Leora hesitated. Blinked her eyes. Blinked till Miriam thought she must have developed some sort of tic like the dropsical old man who used to sit all day at La Rotonde, contorting his face and spitting into a handkerchief, and who was very likely dead by now, dead of blinking and quivering and spitting. Or maybe exasperation. Maybe that was what killed him.