T. Boyle - The Women

She had an hour and a half till the train came — or was scheduled to come — and she couldn’t settle herself, couldn’t stop the racing of her mind and the propulsive beat of her heart, and she wouldn’t be able to relax or even think properly till the porter led her to her compartment and she shut herself in. She gazed beyond the two men to the doors leading to the street, half-expecting Lucy to burst in with the children on either side of her, all three of them sobbing aloud and imploring her to stay. Or Julia’s husband. Or the sheriff. Wasn’t she breaking some sort of law? She must have been.

Finally, just to do something, to distract herself, to rise up off the bench where it seemed she’d spent her entire lifetime though she saw with a sinking feeling that it had been no more than five minutes, she decided to go into the restaurant. She felt the eyes of the two men on her all the way across the expanse of the marble floor, her footsteps echoing in her ears like gunshots, each step a cry for solace, and then she was pushing through the door and into the restaurant. Which was a cavernous place, poorly lit. At first she couldn’t see much beyond the door, but then a waiter emerged from the gloom and showed her to a table backed up against the wall. A scattering of people, mostly men, were seated at the other tables, drinking and gnawing away at sandwiches and chops, and a couple — middle-aged, gaudily dressed — were grinning at each other amidst a clutter of plates and sauce bottles at the table across from hers. Everyone looked up as she came in and set her suitcase down beside her, and the drama of the moment both shamed and exhilarated her. She wasn’t used to going out in public alone. She’d always had Edwin there, breathing propriety at her side, the children shielding her, Frank strutting up and down as if he owned every square inch of every place he stepped into. Now she was on her own.

She’d thought she might have a cup of tea and a bun perhaps, but once she was seated and looking over the menu, she realized how hungry she was. The waiter set down a plate of celery and olives, then a basket of bread with butter. She dispatched it all without thinking and then ordered a steak, medium-rare, with fried potatoes, a vegetable medley and a green salad with Roquefort dressing. Did she care for anything to drink? Beer, perhaps? A glass of wine?

The waiter — a man in middle age with a paunch swelling against the buttons of his jacket and hair that looked as if it had been barbered in the dark — stood over her. He was dressed in a well-worn and faintly greasy suit he might have borrowed from an undertaker and he was giving her a knowing, even insolent look, as if he knew all about her, as if every night married women who were deserting their children to run off with their lovers paraded before him, one after the other, drinking deeply to deaden their thoughts and the guilt that weighed them down like a leaden jacket. She held his eyes — she wouldn’t be intimidated. The man was an oaf, a servant, no one she’d seen before or would ever see again. “Wine,” she said. “A bottle of Moselle.”

She’d learned to appreciate wine the first time she’d gone to Europe, on her honeymoon, when she and Edwin had toured Germany, and while she was hardly a sophisticate, she knew enough to rely on the German wines with which she was familiar. And this one, as cool and cleansing as the issue of an alpine spring, had an immediate effect on her, taking the tenseness from her shoulders and warming her where she was coldest, in her heart. And if she was a woman drinking alone in a public place, what of it? She was independent, wasn’t she? Would Ellen Key have thought twice about it? Or any European woman, for that matter? She was having wine with her meal, absolved of guilt, worry, the panic that had gripped her earlier, and she cut her meat and tipped back her glass and never once dropped her eyes. Let them look at her. Let them have a good look. Because soon she would be on the train, hurtling through the night, and all this would be behind her.

When the train pulled into the station at Chicago, Frank was waiting for her on the platform. Despite herself, despite the wine and the gentle swaying of the compartment and the purely positive and loving thoughts she’d struggled to summon, she’d spent a restless night and a day that enervated her with a thousand pinpricks of conscience and uncertainty, and when she saw him there, sturdy and shining and undeniable, she felt the relief wash over her. They would be together now and tonight she would sleep the sleep of the possessed, her skin pressed to his so that every cell and pore of her could drink him in from head to toe. . The brakes hissed. The station rocked and steadied itself. She caught his eye then and he gave her his world-conquering grin and started across the platform for her and she was so overcome with the tumult of her feelings that it took her a moment to realize that his hands were empty.

He didn’t take her in his arms — there was no telling who might be watching, she understood that — but he seemed so stiff and formal she very nearly lost her nerve. “Mamah,” was all he said and then she felt his hand at her elbow and he was guiding her through the crush of people, down a corridor and into an office of some sort, a single room with desk and filing cabinets and a fan fixed overhead, and she realized with a start that he must have hired the room for an hour so that they could have a private interview. But why? Why didn’t he have a suitcase with him? Why hadn’t he boarded the train with her?

He shut the door behind her and she felt afraid suddenly, certain he was going to deny her, construct a wall of excuses, abandon her as she’d abandoned Edwin and her own motherless children. “Frank, what is it?” she demanded, breathless now, her blood surging with the chemical sting of panic, iodine running through her veins, acid, liquid fire. “Where’s your suitcase? What’s going on?”

“It’s all right,” he said, pulling her to him. He kissed her. Held her so tightly she could barely breathe. “I just need more time, that’s all, just two days, three at the most — to, to raise the money. Good God, this is all so sudden. .”

She held to him, her chin resting on his shoulder, the smell of him — of his hair, his clothes, the body she knew so well — working on her like a tranquilizer. She trusted him. Absolutely. He was hers, she was his. But still, she pulled back. “Sudden? We’ve been talking about this for a year now and more. I left Edwin in June.”

“Your telegram, I mean. I’ve been — I was, well, since you telegrammed all I’ve done is run from one place to another, selling prints, soliciting clients for advance funds, trying to do something, anything, with the projects on the boards. I need more time, that’s all.” 145

She softened momentarily, then hardened all over again. “And what of me? What am I to do?”

“Go on to New York as planned. There’s a hotel there I know — I’ve already reserved rooms. And I’ve booked passage for two on the Deutsch-land for Friday. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything — I’ll be there as soon as I can. Do you need money?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I do,” and the implications roared in her ears with all the opprobrium of a cheap novel, and what did that make her, a woman who takes money in exchange for her favor?

“Here,” he said, and he opened his wallet to her and they kissed till she felt the rigid heat of him ready to run right up inside of her and then he was sitting with her in her compartment on the train, holding her hand in his, and the conductor gave his shout and Frank stepped back on the platform and waved at the glass as the wheels jerked and the station fell away behind her.