She shrugged. “I’m not that hungry.” She pulled the strap of her tattered pocketbook onto her shoulder and hopped down from the stool. “Why don’t you come with me? Studio’s just around the corner. I’ll show you my paintings.”
The zipper on her dress was on the front instead of in the back, and it went from her sternum all the way down to the hem. I swallowed. “That sounds … really interesting—I’d love to see them—but unfortunately, duty calls.”
“Time to push the papers, eh?”
“Time to push the papers.”
She found a pen behind the bar and wrote her telephone number on a napkin. Then she wrote MAE and drew a sketch of a woman with a cigarette hanging from her lips, pushing against a mountain of paper with all her might.
“Let me know if you change your mind.”
Chapter Nineteen
December 17, 1933
A few days later, I returned to the hotel late in the evening from a meeting in Red Wing to find three phone messages waiting for me at the front desk. One was from Tommy telling me I’d better call Nora quick. The other two were from Nora herself.
I took the elevator up to my room and set down my things. Then I picked up the extension. It was very late, and the telephone operator at the White House seemed to be under instructions to put me through to Nora immediately.
“Hello, stranger,” I said when I heard her voice.
“Hick. I am so furious I can hardly speak. What in the world were you thinking?”
“About what?” I said, though of course I knew.
“You have no idea what a headache you have caused. Ickes will not let up on the budget. He thinks our plans are too extravagant— bathtubs and refrigerators and electricity—he complains to Franklin every day. Someone from his office told the press I am spending like a drunken sailor. And now he thinks I am meddling in the selection process, something we all agreed was off-limits.”
I said nothing.
“And all for this Ruth Johnson, Hick? Did you really think I would let her, or anyone else, be sent back to those tents?”
“I didn’t know what to think, Nora. It has been months since you and I have really talked. And Ruth said in her letter that there weren’t enough houses for all the families that were selected.”
Nora sighed. “Rumors. There are always rumors. When things slow down, when they don’t go to plan, people start to talk … But you should know better than that.”
“So does that mean Ruth’s family will be taken care of?” Nora had the luxury of objective distance, of thinking in terms of policy, cost projections, long-term outcomes. She could not understand the connection I felt to Ruth, how easily I could have been in her shoes: poor and uneducated, dripping with hungry children. I had only thwarted that destiny by the skin of my teeth.
“Hick, are you listening to me? Yes. The construction is behind schedule, and the houses probably won’t be finished before the spring. But everyone who is living in the temporary quarters in the mansion can stay there as long as they need to. No one is going back.”
“Well,” I said, and felt a rush of relief. “As it should be. Poor Ruth—she has been through so much.”
“Poor Ruth? Hick, do you know that we have hundreds and hundreds of families in West Virginia—thousands across the country— who need a place like Arthurdale? Do you know how hard the conservatives are fighting me on these plans, how eager they are to turn supporters against me? And now I find you going behind my back. Honestly, you should be fired, Hick. You forged a document.”
“Then fire me,” I said. I stretched out on the bed with the phone pressed to my ear and closed my eyes. “I’m tired.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Hick.”
“Do you miss me at all, Nora?”
“Of course I do. You have no idea what my life is like now. Every day is scheduled down to the minute. I can barely find time to breathe. I wish you could spare some of your sympathy for me.”
“I went to Bowdle,” I said. I wanted so badly to stay angry enough that I would resist confiding in her, but the part of me that longed to connect with her was breaking through.
“Bowdle! Why?”
Something in her voice was so cold, so detached, I clammed up. She wasn’t going to give me an inch. “Never mind.”
“Did you finally get rid of that awful necklace?”
The sentence felt like a slap. She couldn’t have found a better way to hurt me, to treat that part of my past as if it were merely a nuisance to her, an item on a checklist waiting to be crossed off. I thought of the day she had scraped me off the floor of my apartment, washed my hair so tenderly while she listened to my sad tale. Where was that woman? What in the world had happened to us?
“Now, are you coming back for Christmas?” Nora’s voice had brightened and I was startled by how easily she could toss off her hurtful comment and then change direction. “I am making my schedule today. If it’s all right with you, I have the twenty-second saved for us. The children won’t be in yet, and Franklin will be busy with something, I’m sure.”
I struggled to follow the thread. “You want me to come?”
“Of course I do. Don’t be ridiculous. We can have London broil.”
I laughed at the mention of the menu, as if settling on the dish could counteract everything that was going so spectacularly wrong. “I don’t know, Nora. We don’t have a very good track record on Christmas.”
“What do you mean? Christmas Eve last year was one of the most wonderful nights of my life.”
My hand flew to my brow and I covered my eyes, recalling the disgust on Marcus’s face when he barged into my Mitchell Place apartment and found us entwined. After that lighting bolt of a moment was the long unbearable stretch of waiting for the storm that would mean humiliation, ruined careers, and reputations. The fact that the storm never came almost made no difference.
“Most wonderful? That was a terrible night.”
“Oh, before that part.” Her voice changed again and this time it was tender. “When we were together. When you gave me my ring.” I pictured her gazing down at it in her study, wondered if her long hair hung loose down the back of her nightdress. She had brought up the ring, but I noticed she had said nothing about the gift she had given me—the promise of a future together. “And even with that dark spot, everything came out all right in the end, didn’t it?” she said.
“Things certainly have come out all right for you, Nora,” I said bitterly.
She didn’t take the bait. “Please say you’ll come on the twentysecond.”
“I’ll think about it.”
When we hung up, as I lay alone in the darkening room, I thought, I don’t want to be alone in a darkening room anymore. So I got up and turned on the light and found Mae’s napkin where I’d laid it on the dresser.
Her studio was in the tower room of a dilapidated church. The room had two enormous windows, one that looked out over the street and one that looked down on the sanctuary. Mae turned on the lamp to reveal a table with brushes in glass jars, crimped tubes of paint, and, on an easel in the center of the room, a ten-foot-tall canvas.
I whistled in genuine amazement. An enormous impressionistic tree spanned the canvas, bare roots curling to the bottom edge, and leaves splayed at the top. It was a free-form idea of a tree, more light and shadow than realistic detail. But scattered throughout its boughs were sharply drawn figures: Two men lunging at each other, one with a cocked fist. A woman wearing a coat made of layers of money. A Negro man being lynched not far from where a couple was entangled, the woman’s red gingham dress pushed up above her hips.
“I call it Tree of Life,” Mae said.
“It’s …” I trailed off. I didn’t want to say beautiful—that seemed condescending. The stylistic contrast between the soft brushstrokes that made up the tree and the precise detail of the figures’ faces was striking, and the raw depiction of the violence and sex made me feel uneasy. “It’s remarkable.”
Mae wore her hair tied back with a pink ribbon and reached to tighten it. “Thanks. I’m not very good at explaining the paintings. I suspect I wouldn’t make it too far as a paper pusher.”
She climbed the ladder that stood beside the enormous canvas. At the top, she lifted the lid on a box perched on the open rafters and took out a bottle of clear liquor. “Guess I don’t have to hide this anymore, now that we have repeal. Though I don’t think the Holy Rollers are going to change their view overnight.”
I offered my hand to help her down, and she took it. She’d recently had a manicure, and her fingernails were painted red, like cherryflavored candies. I thought about how a woman artist on the make could not afford to walk around with bare nails marred with paint, could never really be free the way a male painter probably could. Men could fall headlong into the tunnel of their work, but women would constantly be called back to the surface: show a little leg to get some dinner, get your hair done so no one starts to wonder whether you’re off your rocker, go home to check on a father who is getting on in years. The world had no tolerance for a woman who wanted to make a life out of her interests alone, to be an intact thing instead of a loose collection of fragments.
“Brave girl, keeping liquor in a church. But does this one still have a congregation? It looks like an ancient ruin.”
“Oh, yes. They still come every Sunday, but it’s a dwindling lot and the minister mopes around complaining about it the rest of the week.” She gestured to two tattered armchairs beneath the window. I took one while she went to fix our drinks. “He takes it very personally, says the preacher at Good Shepherd a few blocks away has charisma, says he is stealing the parishioners away.”
I laughed. “Well, I guess it’s hard to be passed over,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and took two glasses from a cupboard. “Mixed or straight?”
“Mixed,” I said, the aroma of the gin already filling my nostrils. Mae added a splash of juice and handed me the glass.
“Everybody gets passed over at some point,” Mae said. “Do you know how many times I have been rejected from competitions, classes, grants? The trick is not to get stuck. That minister is stuck something awful. He feels so wronged, keeps waiting for somebody to come around and fix things.”
She sat down in the opposite chair and we touched the rims of our glasses; I took a long drink. Mae sat straight and still like a rabbit; she balanced her glass on her knee. She wore slim black trousers and a man’s oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. I liked the ease of this outfit but had been hoping for a second appearance of the endless zipper on the pink dress from the other night. I tried not to fidget, but I couldn’t stop myself. One of the lapels on my jacket did not lie quite flat, and I smoothed it with my free hand, wishing I had a cigarette.
I looked up at Tree of Life again. “It’s really something—thank you for showing me. Are you usually shy about letting people see your work?”
Mae leaned forward and set her drink on the cold slate tile at her feet. She placed her hand on my knee and left it there. “I’m not shy about much. How about you?”
I laughed and, with my cheeks growing warm, I threw back the rest of my drink. I felt surprise, but this was what I had come for, wasn’t it? I took in her broad cheekbones and dark eyes, the curved smile. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she had the confidence of a doyenne. With one little tug I knew I could pull the ribbon from her hair.
“You seem like someone who could meet anyone she likes,” I said in a quiet voice. Her hand still rested on my knee. “Why in the world would you invite me here?”
She thought about it for a moment, her head cocked to the side. “I guess because you were friendly but you seemed sad,” she said. “And because I could tell you were thinking about what it would be like to be with me.”
She stood and pulled me to my feet, and with her body pressed against mine she began to kiss me. My mind flashed with alarm—this was going too far—and I thought of Nora and her ring, Nora standing beside me in the cold as we listened to the aria from Aida. Nora’s kiss, always more chaste than this one, more chaste at first, until I could coax the wolf of her hunger out into the light.
Mae threaded her fingers beneath the lapels of my jacket and eased it down my shoulders while I stood very still, watching her arms move. I’m spoken for, I should have said. I’ve made a promise to somebody. I thought about where my purse hung on a hook by the door. How I should walk across the room and take it, go back out into the cold.
But Mae’s fingers trailed the bare skin of my arms. She dragged her warm lips along the line of my jaw. A woman can only take so much, I thought, half laughing, half full of grief, and I pulled the tail of her pink ribbon, until it fell, loose, to the floor.
Chapter Twenty
December 18–21, 1933
I returned to my room around one and fell into a restless sleep in which I dreamed of rain falling on the unfinished homes of Arthurdale until a flood coursed through the rooms and the water rose up the freshly painted walls. Furniture bobbed down the hallway. Then came Ruth with a big white belly that floated like a buoy and made her captive to the current. On her face was a serene smile, and she floated on her back headfirst down the hallway so that she could not see what was coming up ahead.
My eyes blinked open. I sat up and gulped the stale air of my hotel room, relieved that I could make the dream disappear. Then, as I registered my aching head and the throbbing in my jaw around my sore tooth, I remembered what I had done.
With a moan of remorse, I threw off the covers and shuffled toward the bathroom but stopped when I saw the top half of a telegram someone had slipped under the door. I opened it:
DARLING, WHEN THEY WRITE ABOUT YOU (AND THEY WILL), IT WILL BE TO SAY HOW YOU HELPED THE RUTHS OF THE WORLD. I THANK GOD FOR YOUR STUBBORN HEART AND I AM SORRY. LET’S BEGIN AGAIN AT CHRISTMAS. —N
Oh no, oh no, oh no rang like a bell between my ears. I switched on the light to see the clock—it was four in the morning—and then threw on my clothes and grabbed my purse and room key. Rushing to the elevator, I shoved pins into my hair. At the front desk, I had to ring the bell to rouse the night manager from his office, and he staggered out, his collar unbuttoned and a red crease bisecting his cheek. Along his chin was a line of yellow mustard, and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep on his sandwich.
“Is everything all right, ma’am?”
“I need to send a message,” I said, breathless. Let him think someone is dying. Someone is!
He pulled a form from a cubby beneath the desk and a pencil from the pocket of his uniform shirt and passed them across the desk.
Mia Regina, I scribbled, I was a fool to flounder. If you’ll have me, I’ll be there with jingle bells on. —H.
I gave him the form, with my recipient’s infamous name and address at the top. He peered at it and then at me. Certainly he had been trained never to comment on messages, but perhaps his sleepiness had rolled back the curtain of his discretion. He was giving me the same look the bartender had fixed me with the night I met Mae: puzzlement and pity. How deranged must I be to be sending a love note to the first lady of the United States, to be sending a love note to anyone at all? Love was the reserve of the beautiful, or at least the common— love was a reward bestowed upon women and men who shaped their desires in the mold the world provided. Clearly I had strayed from the path and, to him, that made it impossible a real person could be waiting on the other end of this telegram. Love was not for someone like me. This narrow world, this disdain was the ocean I’d been swimming in my entire life, and I was goddamned sick of it.
“Is there a problem?” I barked.
“No, ma’am. Not at all. I’ll send this right away.”
While I stood waiting at the desk to make sure he did, I swung from righteousness back to remorse. Mae had been a moment of weakness, but I shouldn’t tell Nora about it, should I? I wanted badly to be forgiven, but it seemed selfish to ask for that. And
what if she wouldn’t give me forgiveness? Better to tell myself it hadn’t happened, to leave it behind in Minnesota and start driving east. Maybe it was not too late for us.
The man came back to the desk. “Would you like to pay now, or when you check out?”
I pulled my wallet from my purse and opened the flap that held my cash. When I stuck my hand in, I winced.
Mae hadn’t taken it all. She had left enough for meals on the road, cigarettes, bourbon, fuel. But the rest of my money—all I had to my name until I could get back to Washington—was long gone. I thought back on the tender things she’d said about my smile and the curve of my sturdy hips, things I’d found hard to believe, and I saw now that I had been right to doubt them. While I had lain on her bare mattress, she had slipped over to my purse where it dangled from the hook by the door and made me pay for my delusions.
Good, I thought, standing before the night manager as he waited to be paid, my eyes prickling with tears and shame scraping my lungs until I could hardly breathe. This hurt is what I deserve.
Two monotonous days on the road later, I pulled into a mechanic’s garage in Indianapolis and asked him to give Bluette a once-over. I had put hundreds of miles on her over the last few months and it was my kind of luck to be sidelined by car trouble just as I was finally making my way back to Nora.
I walked across the tree-lined street to a lunch counter to wait. My knees were stiff and the muscles around my eyes were sore from squinting at the road. Indianapolis was merely chilly compared with the biting cold of the upper Midwest, and I was glad to leave that place behind. The further east I traveled, the more I started to feel like myself.
“Soup du jour is corn chowder,” said the waitress as she poured my coffee.
“I’ll take a cup,” I said.
The waitress wiped an invisible drip of coffee from the counter.
“Anything else?”
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