T. Boyle - The Women

It was mid-afternoon, hotter than the front porch of the devil’s place down in Hades, and she took her by surprise, startling Anna up out of a nap in the armchair next to the bed. There were flies at the windows. A smell of camphor, ointment. Medicine bottles crowded the table beside her. Two of Frank’s prints were propped up on the bureau, gifts he’d brought back for her. The old lady’s head snapped up. “You get out of here,” she growled, her voice caught low in her throat.

Miriam dispensed with the preliminaries, because this was it, the battle joined at long last. “You know you’re destroying your son’s last chance for happiness, don’t you?” she demanded.

Anna made a shooing motion with the back of her hand and tried to push herself up out of the chair but fell back again. “I won’t talk to you. You’re a cheap woman. A tramp.”

“You will. You will talk to me. Because Frank is going to marry me whether you like it or not.”

A glare. A tightening of the mouth, as if a noose had been pulled tight. “Not while I’m alive.”

She loomed over the woman, so full of hate and rage and frustration it was all she could do to stop from snatching her up out of the chair and shaking her like a bundle of rags. The tremor ran up her spine and shivered the back of her neck. She felt as if she were going to faint but she fought it. She had to. Had to have this out once and for all. “Then you’ll just have to die,” she said. “Frank and I are engaged, do you understand that? Engaged to be married. As soon as the divorce is final — the very day, I promise you— I’ll be Mrs. Wright and I’ll be giving the orders around here. And I won’t let you or anyone else stand in my way.”

There was more. The old lady crying out like a parched peahen, struggling to get up out of the chair and nobody there to hear or help her either and Miriam acquainting her with the truth in all its unvarnished detail. Then it was the hotel and Frank running back and forth between the two of them, the biggest crisis of his life, the days burning into the sweated nights, and within the month Anna was gone and Miriam had Taliesin all to herself, triumphant at last. 135

And now, sitting beneath the avocado tree in Leora’s garden while Frank oversaw the construction of his block houses in Pasadena and Hollywood and Leora’s husband slapped a little white ball around a golf course, she took a moment to let the weight of it sink in. Her nemesis was dead. And she wouldn’t speak ill of the dead — or think ill of her either. All that was behind her, a bad dream dispelled in the light of day. “Yes,” she said finally, “there’s that, at least. And I was thinking of designing my own gown, something — oh, I don’t know, artistic, Grecian, a simple little thing. Not satin. Crepe de chine maybe. And not white. White’s for the first time around.” She paused to lift her eyes to the rich foliate canopy above her, the leaves dancing on the breeze. “Something in taupe maybe. Or pearl. And my furs, of course.”

Leora let out a little hoot of a laugh and treated her to her half smile, the one she used for intimacies, ironic or otherwise. “Amen,” she said. “Outdoors, at night, in Wisconsin? In November, no less?”

Miriam was feeling insuperable, at peace with herself and Frank and the specter of his dead mother too. All the stars were aligned. Everything was in place. She could indulge in the luxury of anticipation. “Yes,” she said, returning the smile, and she was almost giddy with the joy bubbling up in her, “it’s not exactly Palm Beach, is it?”

Later, after a light luncheon and a girlish frolic in the pool, they sent the Chinese houseboy in to mix another round of cocktails and had separately turned back to the magazines they’d been flipping through off and on all afternoon, when the gate from the drive swung open and Leora’s husband appeared in his golfing togs and crisp white cap, a bag of clubs slung over one shoulder. “Dwight!” Miriam sang out. “Come join us — we’re just about to have cocktails.” “Yes, do!” Leora called. “It’s that kind of day, don’t you think?” And for some reason, they both broke out in giggles.

Miriam watched him set down his clubs, prop them carefully against the fence and start across the lawn in his loose easy strides, his shoulders slumped in the conciliatory way of very tall men. She’d always liked Dwight. He was uncomplicated, stalwart, mild without being wishy-washy, and he treated Leora as if she were the only woman on earth.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, ducking in out of the sun. “Hot out there on the course, what with this devil’s wind. .” He stood a moment, arms akimbo, grinning down at them, and if Miriam had the sense that he was looking down the front of her bathing costume and admiring her bare legs, well, so much the better. He was a sweet man. And appreciative.

The conversation ran off on its own, light and amusing, the banter of three old friends united under an avocado tree on a late summer afternoon within sight of the distant sun-coppered crescent of the Santa Monica Bay, and the Chinese brought the beaded cocktails on a lacquered tray and Miriam felt her mood lift to yet a higher plane. They were midway through their second cocktail when Dwight suddenly leaned back in his chair and slapped his forehead. “Jeez,” he said, letting out a hiss of air, “I nearly forgot — did you hear the news? Because I thought of you right away, and Frank, because you were over there—”

“News?” Leora’s smile expanded till her lips drew tight. “How could we hear any news”—and she giggled again, this time in a thicker, throatier way, the gin at work—“when we’ve hardly moved between the chair and the pool all day?”

“The earthquake. In Tokyo. Everybody in the clubhouse was talking about it.”

Miriam felt her own smile fade. Frank had been obsessed with earthquakes the whole time they were in Japan, and there was the one that struck when they were in their rooms at the hotel, terrifying in its suddenness, as if a freight train had come right on through the door and out the window all in a minute’s time. “Was it — is it serious? I mean, do they know if there’s been damage—?”

Dwight turned to her, the wind rattling the stiff leathery leaves overhead. His eyes faded a moment and then flickered back to life. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They’re saying it’s bad. Buildings down, fires, the whole works.”

“And the hotel? Did they say about the hotel?”

In the next moment she was up out of her chair, the suit clinging damply to her as she hurried barefoot across the yard and into the house to call Frank. Her heart was pounding as she stood dripping on Leora’s carpet in the dim hush of the front hallway and waited for the operator to connect her — she was imagining the worst, the Imperial in ruins, Frank’s reputation destroyed, the Baron and the Ablomovs and Tscheremissinoff transformed into refugees, or worse, injured, killed — when Frank came on the line. “Hello? Miriam, is that you?”

She didn’t have to ask if he’d heard — his voice betrayed him. “Yes,” she said, and a calm came over her because she was going to stand by him no matter what, prove herself, defend him in the face of the whole world, “it’s me. I’ve just heard the news.”

There was a crackle of static. “They’re saying”—his voice sank so low she could barely hear him—“that it’s the worst earthquake in the history of Japan. And that Tokyo took the brunt of it.” 136

“Any word of the hotel?”

“No. Nothing.”

She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The receiver of the phone was dead weight in her hand — it took an effort of will just to hold it to her ear. “I don’t care,” she said, the words coming so fast she could scarcely get them out, “because I can see it standing there now, not a window shattered, a testament to you, to you, Frank, even if the whole city’s destroyed around it, and I don’t care what they say, I don’t—”