T. Boyle - The Women

“To say?” she echoed. “Concerning what?”

“Your husband.”

The smallest tick of unease began asserting itself somewhere deep inside her. She felt a vein pulse at her throat. “My husband? What about him?” And then — she couldn’t help herself — she made a leap of intuition and knew that he was dead. Or injured. Gravely injured. She saw the crushed bone, blood on the pavement. Her eyes jumped to her daughter’s. “He isn’t—?”

The man’s expression hardened. “Is he at home?”

“Why, no. He’s away on business. Has been these past. . why, is anything the matter?”

“No,” he said, “no, nothing at all,” and Catherine, poor Catherine, gave her a look that made her feel as if she were being roasted over the coals by a party of savages with bones stuck through their noses. “I was just hoping for some”—and here he reached into the folds of his coat and extracted a newspaper, the Chicago Tribune , and handed it to her as if it were a copy of the Bible to swear on before the judge—“clarification.”

The headline screamed at her, mute letters, black and white, but screaming all the same, loud as the siren at the firehouse: ARCHITECT WRIGHT IN BERLIN HOTEL WITH AFFINITY. And the subheading, in a louder pitch yet: Mrs. Cheney Registered as Wife.

Just then the telephone rang. It was all she could do to hold on to the paper, to keep from dropping it to the floor, flinging it into the fire, shrieking out her rage and hate. “Catherine,” she said, struggling to control her voice, “would you please see who that is.” And she watched her daughter’s every step as she crossed the room, made her way to the telephone in the hall and lifted the receiver. Only when Catherine was gone, when she was out of range — and harm’s way too — did Kitty turn back to the reporter. She lifted her head even as she unconsciously retreated a step so that her back was to the mantel and the inscription Frank had carved above it, TRUTH IS LIFE, 148because what she was about to say wasn’t the truth at all. “Yes,” she said, “yes, he wrote us just last week from his publisher, Wasmuth Verlag, to say that he would be detained there in Berlin while working up the drawings for his portfolio.”

She drew in a breath. The man was scribbling something in his pad, eternal words, her official statement, her testimony. But she wasn’t done yet. “Of course,” she went on, “there must be some sort of mistake. You see, Mrs. Cheney — she’s his client, you know — Mrs. Cheney is in Colorado.”

Two days later, the phone ringing so continuously she had to disconnect the wires to keep from going mad and the children slinking about as if they’d been whipped, afraid to show their faces in their own house and as glum and pale and put-upon as she was herself, she agreed to meet with the newspapermen. If only to put an end to the siege they’d laid. They were everywhere, as ubiquitous as flies, a whole host of them swarming over the property no matter how many times she sent the maid out to ask them to leave — she’d glance up from the stove to see some stranger gesticulating from the street, cross the living room and find herself staring into the face of a man waving a notepad and mouthing speeches from the flowerbed. People were peering in at windows and ringing the bell day and night till she thought she would have to disconnect that too just to silence the buzzing in her head.

She’d canceled her kindergarten. Kept her own children out of school to spare them — and that was the cruelest thing. To think that her children had to be sullied in this way was intolerable — how could he have done this to them? How could he have been so selfish? Frances was in tears — the whole class was reciting “Hiawatha” and the teacher had warned that each of them, no matter how shy or reluctant, had to be present and have his or her lines committed to memory or let the whole group down. “But, Mama, I have to go,” she kept insisting. “I have to be Minnehaha. And, and”—she broke down, twelve years old and sobbing her heart out, “Roger McKendrick is Pau-Puk-Keewis!” Catherine’s life was disrupted. And John’s and David’s too, the school abuzz with whispers, and she could picture it all, the cruelty of youth, conversations dying as they entered the room, fingers pointing, eyes snatching at them. .

But she had to put those thoughts strictly out of mind because the reporters were gathering downstairs and she wouldn’t fall into their trap, she promised herself that. They wanted scandal, they wanted the vituperative housewife, the madwoman scene, but she wasn’t going to give it to them. She combed out her hair — and it was her glory still, the color of a new copper penny and without a single streak of gray to tarnish it — and dressed herself in one of the straight-lined gowns with the Dutch collar he’d designed for her, the blue one, to complement her eyes. It was his dress, his mark on her, and she would wear it proudly, modestly, and answer their questions without bitterness or irony. He was her husband and she would defend him, no matter what it cost her.

The bell — the infernal bell — rang and rang again while she dressed and it kept on ringing until Reverend Kehoe came to knock softly at the bedroom door. He’d been kind enough to offer his services as intermediary, greeting the reporters at the front door and leading them austerely down the hallway and into the playroom, the largest public space in the house and its domestic heart. 149She’d decided on facing them here, rather than the living room or Frank’s studio — it was a playroom, after all, devoted to family and built for the children by their loving father, who was no philanderer, no deserter, but a soul led astray by the forces of temptation. Though she was sick at heart and sick in her stomach too — she’d brought up her breakfast not an hour ago — that was the line she was going to take.

She pulled back the door and the reverend stood aside for her. “They’re ready for you,” he said, his eyes flaring with conviction in the darkness of the hall even as the clerical collar cut a ghostly slash beneath his chin. He was the father of eight, deeply pious, rigid as iron. She’d sat through his dull droning sermons over a decade of Sundays as he picked away at the fine points of biblical exegesis, gave to his charities, attended various stifling teas and bake sales at his behest — or his wife’s — and now he was here to repay her. He was a minister of God and he was going to stand by her side throughout this ordeal, because she had no husband to support her, not any longer. Was this the way it was going to be, living like a widow the rest of her days? Or would Frank tire of Mamah and come back to her? She had a fleeting vision of him bent over a plate of dumplings in some Prussian palace with bear rugs on the floors and stags’ heads arrayed over the fireplace, Mamah sipping champagne from a crystal flute and throwing her chin back to laugh her rippling carefree laugh that was calculated to freeze every woman to the core and make every man turn his head.

“Are you quite all right, Catherine? Are you prepared for this?”

“Yes,” she said, so softly she wasn’t sure if he’d heard her.

“Because we can cancel it. Just say the word and I’ll send them all home.”

But she had to go through with it, had to do what she could to meliorate the situation, put an end to the rumors and speculation — for her children’s sake and her own too. And for Frank’s. The children needed to go back to school. She needed to go about her business. And though she felt like an outcast, felt as if she were walking into a public stoning and wanted to be anyplace else in the world, she told him no and strode into that room with her spine straight and her head held high. 150