The Women

by T. C. Boyle

“Can we go skating? Today? Right now?”

  But Frank was distracted—two men in overcoats were disembarking now and behind them a beanpole of a boy who immediately snatched at his hat to stabilize it—and he didn’t answer. His eyes kept darting from Olgivanna to the far end of the platform where Kameki was in receipt of the trunk, the porter sliding shut the door and the conductor giving two admonitory toots of his whistle, and then, even as he said, “Yes, yes, certainly, Svet, once we get settled,” he suggested they wait in the car, out of the wind.

  The car21—long and sleek, with a canvas top, and was it new, was this the car that had picked her up in December?—stood at the curb, engine running, Billy Weston behind the wheel. It wasn’t till they were inside it, the door shut firmly behind them and Billy hurrying off to lend a hand with the trunk, that he gave her the embrace she’d been waiting for—and a kiss from his cold, cold lips. “God, it’s great to see you and to have you here—and you, Svet, you too, you’re going to love it—but you’ve got to understand, well, you know how this community is, all the hens clucking and the newspapermen warming up the road for us . . . you know what I’ve been through—”

  She didn’t say anything. And she couldn’t imagine what this was all about. Had she misread him, was that it? Was he rescinding the invitation? Was all the talk of love just another fantasy? She ducked his gaze to dab at her eye—soot there, a speck of coal dust.

  “So we’ve concocted a fiction, and it’s nothing to me, really, you know how I feel about these biddies meddling and gossiping and trying to control people’s lives—what I mean is, I’m telling people you’re the new housekeeper.”

  She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A Serb. Another impoverished immigrant, is that what you say? A cleaning lady?”

  “Just till you get your divorce—and I, well, till I can quit Miriam officially.”

  Svetlana was sitting beside her, feigning deafness. She kicked her legs rhythmically against the seat, out and in, out and in, and then began tracing a pattern in the scrim of ice on the window.

  “Then,” he said, “then we marry and they can all go to hell.”

  If anyone believed the imposture, Olgivanna couldn’t say. There were always people from the village around—from the countryside and surrounding towns, from Helena, Spring Green, Dodgeville, Arena, workmen, farmers, women to do chores—and while most of them wouldn’t speak two words to her face she was sure they had plenty to say out of earshot. But she was the housekeeper, that was the story, and if anyone wanted to check up on her they’d see her out there in the foulest weather, splitting wood for stove and fireplace alike, slopping the pigs and pacing off the frozen fields where the vegetable garden would go come the first hint of spring, getting the lay of the land, settling in. By the end of the first week she’d pretty well taken charge of the place, apportioning out the jobs to the household help and even involving herself in the kitchen whenever she could maneuver around Mrs. Taggertz, who fiercely resisted any encroachment on her domain—especially from a woman whose status was a matter of speculation no matter what story the head of the household might choose to circulate.

  “And the father of your child”—Mrs. Taggertz would throw over her shoulder while she pounded meat on the cutting board, rolled out dough for piecrust, sent up a rolling thunder with her pots and pans for the simple authoritative pleasure of it, “what was his name again?” A pause. “He’s still in Chicago as I understand it?” “Yes,” she’d reply, hoping to leave it at that. But Mrs. Taggertz wouldn’t leave it at that. Mrs. Taggertz was on the offensive. “Any hope of reconciliation? Because, what I mean is, a child needs her father around—a girl especially and especially when she gets to that certain age, if you know what I mean?” “No,” she would say, and suddenly she remembered something that needed doing outside or down the hall, “no hope, none at all.” And then, almost apologetically, “I’m afraid.”

  But Frank loved the dishes she concocted from the old recipes—nothing too extreme, of course, but something different for a change, something with flavor, he’d say, pointedly—Serbian specialties like pasulj and prebanac (with homemade sausage substituting for kielbasa) and the yeast nut-bread (povotica) everyone exclaimed over, and Mrs. Taggertz had to give way, at least occasionally. Plus there were cookies practically every night, molasses cookies, chocolate chip, raisin and plum, Pfeffernuesse from a recipe Dione’s mother had taught her and Nobu Tsuchiura’s bean cakes.22 It was a beautiful thing, welcoming and wonderful, to go into that kitchen after Mrs. Taggertz had left for the night with Dione, Sylvia Moser, Nobu and her daughter, sororal, an adventure, like being back with her sisters again.

  And if Frank was gone most of the week in Chicago overseeing his new offices or climbing aboard the Santa Fe California Limited to Los Angeles to make adjustments to the houses he’d built there,23 she didn’t notice his absence as much as she thought she would. She was busy. Furiously busy. If she wasn’t actually the housekeeper, if she was something more—mistress of the house, Mrs. Wright-in-waiting, major domo of the Taliesin enterprise—she might as well have been, and within the month Frank had let go of Mrs. Dunleavy, the square-shouldered farmwife who’d performed that function (without remuneration, as it turned out, or rather with an initial payment and the transient promise of more to come) for the past year. There was always work to be done, and of course everyone pitched in, even Svetlana, because no one was a guest here and Frank had a hundred improvement projects going simultaneously, winter and summer, everything in flux.

  Her divorce was granted during the second month—March—and she hardly noticed because she was devoted to a new regime now and Vlademar was nothing more than a memory in any case, a stooped too-thin little man crying out in the morning for his socks, where were his socks, and Get me coffee, Olgivanna, before I die. He was an architect. He was in Chicago. And she would deliver Svetlana to him for his visitation rights according to the terms set out in the divorce papers. That was it. That was all. But Frank was delighted by the news—“Miriam’s next,” he said, “one more swing of the pendulum and we’ll be free, both of us”—and they made an evening of it, gathering everyone round the fire while the wind cried in the treetops and they all had hot chocolate and coffee and cookies, singing the old songs round the piano till the night wound down and she found herself in bed with him, nestled in the recess of his shoulder beneath the goose-down comforter and with the coals glowing red in the grate.

  Spring blew up early out of the south that year, a succession of progressively warmer rainstorms scouring the snow from the ground and delivering up rhubarb sooner than he could ever remember—rhubarb pie, nothing better—and before long the flowerbeds were rife with color and the fruit trees in bloom and the barley sprouting in the long naked furrows of the fields. Every minute of every day he felt supercharged with energy, out of bed before dawn and sitting at his desk before breakfast, working over the drawings for the National Life Insurance Company skyscraper and the Nakoma Country Club, writing an article a month for the Architectural Record and still finding time to oversee construction around the place and get out into the fields and the garden and dig with his pitchfork till the ideas began to take hold and he’d have to scuttle back to his desk even as his apprentices looked up from their drafting tables in alarm until he sang out a joke and then another and another. He was so full of spirit—Olgivanna, bless her, was the foundation and impetus of it—that he just had to bounce up from his chair and show the boys what he’d done and look over their drawings and maybe pontificate a little here and there. Dinner was a treasure, the conversation and joy of it, and the Sunday evenings when they all dressed in their finest and sat round the living room or on the balmy nights under the big twin oaks in the courtyard making music or reading aloud from Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist . . .

  For years now—longer than he could remember—he’d been rolling a stone up a hill, a boulder that picked up weight on each
revolution like a ball of snow, and Miriam’s face was imprinted on the side of it—or no, hammered into the rock—so that every time he rolled it over there she’d be again. Miriam. Miriam of the cramps and headaches and rages, coming at him with her fists and her gaudy ring flashing like a weapon, everything in motion, the beads lashing round her throat even as she screamed and showed him her teeth as if she meant to swallow him whole. The psychiatrist—what was his name, Dr. Hixon—had diagnosed defective affectivity, whatever that meant, but the man had assured him there was violence on the horizon. All was quiet now, but wherever she was, Los Angeles, San Diego, Hollywood, he could feel the heat of her percolating up out of the ground beneath his feet like magma, white-hot and ready to incinerate everything, and every time the phone rang he felt his stomach sink. It had been months since he’d heard from her—six or seven months and counting. And Olgivanna was here now—and Svet and Richard and Dione and Kameki—and his life was moving forward. There were whole days when he never gave Miriam a thought, but she was there all the same, down deep, waiting.

  And then there was an evening toward the end of April when the phone did ring—once, an awkward discontinuous sort of buzzing rather than a ring per se—and he put it down to a fault in the wiring he’d rigged up to connect the bedroom phone with a buzzer in the kitchen, a simple device to communicate simple wants, as in a hotel.24 They’d just finished dinner, he and Olgivanna and Svet—the rest had all gone off to town, but for Kameki and Mel,25 the new driver—and they’d eaten in the little detached dining room on the hilltop because there was a storm building and he thought it would be something to watch it come across the hills. The cook had gone home. Olgivanna had served the meal herself and it was as if they were an ordinary family, husband, wife, daughter, gathered round the table for an ordinary meal. The wind came up while they were eating, branches beating against the windows, and there was a feeling of security, of shelter—let the storm do its worst: they were snug enough. “You see, Svet,” he’d said, pausing over a forkful of Montenegrin beans, “this is what organic architecture gives you—you’re indoors and you’re out at the same time, all this continuity of line, the views all around. You wouldn’t get that in one of your gingerbread houses in Chicago. You wouldn’t even know a storm was coming.”

  “Will there be lightning? I’m scared of lightning.”

  “Sure,” he said, “there’ll be lightning. But there’s no reason to be scared. It won’t hit here. And it won’t hit you as long as you stay inside.”

  The clouds were elongating, running with the wind in threads and stripes, and on the horizon the first shock of the lightning. They all three turned their heads to watch it tug at the sky.

  “And away from the lake,” Olgivanna put in. She was dressed in blue, a belted jacquette blouse and skirt ensemble he’d designed for her himself, simple and elegant at the same time. And stylish too. He’d seen something like it in a catalogue—and on any number of women in Chicago—and so he’d surprised her, delivering the pattern to the dressmaker himself and then bringing back the package on the train. There was color in her face—she’d been out of doors all afternoon, turning over the kitchen garden for planting because there would be no more frosts this year, he’d promised her, solemnly, he swore it, no more frosts—and he saw that her nails were faintly rimmed in black and her hands hardened with the work of the place. She looked healthy. Looked contented. And pregnant. Two months’ pregnant.26 She’d told him just that morning—in bed, before Svetlana was awake—and he was alive with the news. Tomorrow, he’d told her, tomorrow we celebrate, when everyone’s here.

  He’d just gone to the bedroom for something—the book he’d been reading, his glasses—when the phone began to buzz. He picked up the receiver and the line went dead. Mystified, already irritated, he went down to the kitchen, only to find that the buzzer there wouldn’t switch off no matter how many times he depressed the button. And where was the screwdriver? He was going to need a screwdriver to take the thing off the wall—and a pair of pliers too. For a minute he just stood there, the buzzer rasping in his ears, looking round him vaguely for a tool—anything, a butter knife, the thin edge of a dime—and he rifled the drawer and actually had the knife in his hand when a gust thumped at the windowpane and he glanced up to see smoke leaking out of the bedroom windows.

  Smoke. Dark tongues of it, torn by the wind and flung down into the courtyard. It was as if the steam locomotive had left the station, sailed out over the countryside and lodged itself there, in his bedroom, the stoker all the while feeding coal to the glowing mouth of the furnace. But that was impossible, that was absurd, the delirium of a disconnected mind—the fireplace, it must have been the fireplace, sure it was, the flue flipped shut by a gust of wind, that was what he was thinking, and yet even as he heaved himself down the corridor, he knew there’d been no fire laid because it had been warm all day, too warm for the season, the air heavy with the coming of the storm and no reason to waste good oak that had to be sawed, split and stacked.27

  By the time he got to the bedroom the wall behind the bed was riotous with flame, the curtains there come to life in red snapping ribbons and the bedclothes leaping up to join fire to fire. Two seconds, that was all it took, and then he was back down the corridor shouting “Fire!” and here was Olgivanna with her shocked eyes and blanched face and Kameki running mad in the wrong direction and would the hose in the courtyard stretch that far?—no, no, not even close. There were buckets in the stables and now Mel was involved, a bucket brigade, up the corridor to fling water at the wall to the shush of steam and the stink of incineration and then the next bucket and the next and no time for the taps or the hose bib, just plunging into the garden pool again and again and up the corridor and down the corridor to the long alliterative shush of steam . . .

  No thought for anything in those first minutes, no thought of the art treasures below or the specter of the first fire, the one that had raked the heart right out of his chest and baked it hard, no thought for Olgivanna or Svet—and here she was, straining under the weight, Daddy Frank, another bucket—or of his own safety or anything in this world but the flames on the wall and the bed and the curtains. After the first bucket flew from his hands he leapt to the casement windows and pulled them tight and latched them even as the wind beat at the roof and the lightning flashed over the hills and the flames climbed the wall. “The flue!” he shouted to Olgivanna, and she was right there, slamming it shut with a sharp grating of the hinges, starving the fire of air till the twentieth bucket, the thirtieth, he’d lost count, began to sizzle in a different way, the soft dying hiss of a snuffed campfire, and the flames fell back on themselves and collapsed.

  “There,” he shouted, his lungs heaving, his hair wild, his shirtsleeves blackened and his hands burned red where he’d folded the flames into the bedclothes and flung them to the floor beneath his stamping feet, “there, it’s done.” Olgivanna came surging through the door then, a bucket in each hand, and she barely glanced at him before heaving first one, then the other, at the dead black wall and the charred bedstead, two more buckets for good measure. He put a hand out to restrain her even as the water ran down the wall and into the cracks between the floorboards. “We got it, Olya, we got it,” he said. “I think we—”

  It was then that he became aware of a new sound, a ticking or scratching in the ceiling above the bed, as if the slats there had developed an itch or a squirrel had gnawed its way in and now wanted out, Svet and Mel and Kameki crowding into the room behind him with superfluous buckets and looping eyes and the wind skreeling over the roof and beating at the panes. Kameki, in shirtsleeves and galluses, breathing hard, let out a low exclamation: “What in God’s name?—” The scratching grew louder. No one moved. And then there was a long trailing whoosh, as of the gas in an oven reacting to the stimulus of the match, and he knew that the worst had come: the fire was in the dead space between the ceiling and the roof and the wind was feeding it through every crack and sliver. “Th
e roof!” was all he could say before he was down the hall and out the door, shouting for a ladder, more water, the fire department, somebody call the fire department!

  The wind was like a hurricane and it tore the door from his hands and hurled grit in his face as he flung himself across the courtyard for the ladder in the garage, Mel and Kameki at his heels. “No,” he roared, “no—water! Fetch the water!” And he had the ladder in both hands, running again, running still, and now the ladder was against the roof and he was scrambling up it, the roofing breached in half a dozen places, cedar shake going up like tinder—and it was tinder, shaved thin as bark and ten years dry. And this was the nightmare: leaping atop the shingles from one emergency to the next, the soles of his shoes seared with the fury of the heat, the water buckets coming up and down the ladder—pitiful, nothing at all, he might as well have been flinging teardrops into a volcano—and within minutes the roof over the bedroom collapsed with a roar onto the doomed bed and the condemned floor.

  Overhead, the sky darkened toward night, the storm running on the wind, squeezing closer, the lightning playing over the trees. He fought the flames, driving them back here as the wind seized them there, and his eyebrows were gone, his socks smoldering, shoes scorched, and though people were coming now, neighbors, coming at a run to help and gossip and gawk, he had to retreat, backing away from the living part of the house to the rear, where the working part was—his studio and the rooms for the apprentices and guests—and that was going to go too, he could see that now, no hope, none at all. The flames were gaining. He couldn’t breathe. The smoke thickened and the fire surged, hotter than any Fourth of July bonfire and fed on everything he held precious. “Get away, Frank!” somebody was shouting. “It’s no use! Get away!”

  Was it a judgment? Was it the God of Isaiah, the fateful, vengeful God, striking at him yet again for his hubris, his too-perfect creation, the spark that made him godlike himself? He couldn’t have helped wondering, if he’d had time to reflect, but he didn’t have time, not then, not till it was over, and by then he’d let it pass and accounted himself lucky. Because at that moment, twenty minutes into the ordeal, with the house an inferno and temperatures so intense the windows were reduced to puddles of molten silica and all his furnishings and peerless art destroyed, a blast of thunder sounded overhead, the wind suddenly shifted and the rain came like forgiveness.