The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  He picked up his spectacles and fiddled with them a moment before clamping them over the bridge of his nose as if to examine her more closely.112 He looked like a bank examiner, a livestock appraiser, his eyes distorted and rinsed of color. “Of course not, but that’s not at issue, not at all.”

  She cut him off. “What is, then?”

  “I simply cannot afford—and you know this as well as anyone, Miriam—another blowup. In this neighborhood especially, not after what happened here summer before last—”

  “The dead woman again. It always comes down to her, doesn’t it, Frank? Well, I tell you, I am not going to hide myself away. I’m going to proclaim the truth of what we are and I don’t give two figs for what anybody thinks. Including you.”

  “Damn it, Miriam!” He stood so abruptly the chair pitched over behind him. In his excitement he began waving his arms as if he were trying to shoo a cow out of the garden and the gesture froze her inside. She wouldn’t be intimidated. She wouldn’t. “You don’t understand. You talk about—”

  “I love you, Frank.”

  “—love, yes, love, but that’s not what this concerns. This concerns scandal, Miriam, the kind of scandal that will destroy all the goodwill I’ve patiently built up among my neighbors here . . .”

  She held herself perfectly rigid. “That’s the only truth, Frank. That’s all anyone needs to know.”

  “No, Miriam, no, it’s not. They’re going to publish the letters and Clarence says it’s too late to stop them.”

  The letters. To bloody hell with the letters. She never flinched. Never took her eyes from his. “Good,” she spat. “Let them. Let the whole world know what I feel for you. Let them see what a true and good and noble love is, a love for the ages, a love that shines like the brightest star in the firmament.”

  And then (was she catching cold?) she brought her handkerchief to her face to dab at her eyes—and let him fume, let him rage at her—and very gently, very softly and delicately, blew her nose.113

  CHAPTER 6: THE SERPENT OF HYPOCRISY

  That night they ate a subdued meal, latterly shot-gunned duck in its own oleaginous juices, with half a dozen insipid side dishes, the only recognizable one of which seemed to be some sort of potato concoction buried in strips of what looked to be roadside weed, prepared by the lumbering swollen wife of one of the workmen and served in uncovered tureens by the graceless little sixteen-year-old. There were just three place settings at the table, which would make this the smallest group she’d presided over since coming to Taliesin. Not that it mattered to her one way or the other, simply that a larger party made for gayer conversation, and gay conversation helped fight down the crushing tedium of the place. Frank’s sons had long since returned to their wives, as the major part of the construction was completed now, and the visiting architect and his wife had gone back to Germany—or was it Austria? Paul Mueller was overseeing things in the Chicago offices and Russell Williamson and the other draftsmen had gone off to a concert in Madison. The third setting was for Frank’s mother, but Frank’s mother was in a funk over the newspaper reports and wouldn’t come out of her room.

  “Well, I guess it’s just the two of us, then,” Frank said, lifting his glass—of plain unadulterated eau de vie—for a toast. “To us,” he offered, and she dutifully clinked her glass against his, making her best effort to hold on to a smile. In her glass, which she’d seen to personally before Frank came into the room, was a crisp dry Chablis she’d got from her wine merchant in Chicago, the palate and aroma of which momentarily took her back across the Atlantic to the vineyards of Burgundy on a long-ago autumn day when she was newly in love with René,114 who’d been so wonderfully kind to her after Emil’s death. Until he turned rotten, that is. And unfaithful. Like any man, if you gave him half the chance. The thought soured her and her smile abruptly vanished. She gave him a hard look.

  “As I was saying earlier, we can’t afford to stir up the press any more than we already have, thanks to Mrs. Breen—and damn that woman. I’m sorry to have to say it, but there it is. She’s the one at fault, clearly, and these Mann charges will certainly be dismissed as the absurdity they are. What rankles me—no, what infuriates me—is this sordid effort to impeach your character, and it’s got to stop.” He looked up from his duck, the worry lines lashing at his eyes, and let out a sigh. “Which is why I’ve asked my mother to stay on. At least until this has blown over.”

  “It’s false, Frank, and you know it.”

  “False or not, I won’t have the press making sport of you—and me. Me, all over again. If I’m to get work, and you know perfectly well how tight things are for me right now, then there simply cannot be any more talk or even the breath of a scandal. God knows the letters will be embarrassment enough.”

  She was calm, utterly composed, and she sipped her wine and watched him over the rim of the glass until he was done. “I want to speak with them,” she said, setting the glass down and taking up knife and fork. The duck lay there before her. She gave it a single glance—folds of luteous fat and dull dun flesh, steam rising, gravy—and laid down the fork, carefully realigning it with the plate, before going on. “I’ll explain it all. I tell you: I will not hide.”

  “You will.” His tone was curt and despotic and she didn’t like it at all. He might have been speaking to one of his draftsmen over a poorly executed section or a farmhand who’d dared to express an opinion on the application of fertilizer. “You’ll stay here at Taliesin, away from the reporters, until I say different. Do you understand me?”

  Understand him? He was speaking English, wasn’t he? But did he understand her? She didn’t like to be dictated to. Emil had tried it and she was just a girl then. He lived to regret it. And René too. She lifted the glass to her lips, let the taste of the cold clear liquid—the taste of France, of civilization—soothe her throat and her nerves and her temper too. She didn’t bother to answer.

  The next morning they saddled up two of the horses and rode out over the hills together and everything seemed new-made and fine, the air and exercise dispelling the bad odor of the day before. He was a splendid horseman and that made her proud of him all over again. They cantered across the fields, the breeze in their faces, absolutely removed from the world, and they might have been Heathcliff and Catherine pounding over the turf in all the wild excess of their fraught and doomed love. It was bracing. Exhilarating. And when Frank’s mother crawled out of her burrow to take luncheon with them she barely minded. The afternoon was pleasant too. She spent most of it reading before the fire while Frank and one of the men went into Madison to run errands, and she was so engaged with her book, so caught up in the momentum of the unfolding story (two men and a woman, the midnight assignation, blood and honor and the fierce crack of the vaquero’s lariat as the lovers fled into the fastness of the Argentine night)115 she hardly glanced up when he returned. It took a moment, a minor irritation, his shadow falling across the page as he stood there silently in front of the chair, before she acknowledged him. He was still in his hat and coat. His face was grim. “They’ve printed the letters,” he said, dropping the newspaper in her lap. Then he turned on his heel and stalked out of the room without another word.

  Irritated, she tried to read on, but the words began to meld and elongate so that she could make no sense of them, and after a moment she set down the book and took up the paper.

  The headline—it exploded across the page, sending sparks and rockets high into the farthest reaches of her scrambled brain—made her catch her breath: “MIRIAM” LETTERS TO WRIGHT RANGE FROM JOY TO DESPAIR. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced. To see her name there, reproduced in canonical ink, was a shock—of course it was—but it was something more too, something indefinable, and even as she glanced over the subtitle (The Shunned Woman: Her Cry, Her Pains) she could feel the glow of it. Suddenly, overnight, in a single stroke, she was famous. Known to thousands, hundreds of thousands. She was Frank Lloyd Wright’s love and all the world knew it,
shunned no more. She thrilled with the knowledge, every cell and fiber alive with it, and if she was in exile, if the sky outside the window was as dull and dirty and depressing as an old tin pot in the kitchen sink, what did it matter? These were her words, her very words, broadcast to the world!

  Of course, as she read on—and she did have a literary gift, a real way with the turn of a phrase, she had to credit herself there—she couldn’t help regretting certain small infelicities. Had she really called Frank “a pathetic, bitter, aging man”? Had she actually said “I am going—the ‘menace’ to your safety no longer exists. Live your life as pitifully as you desire”? Or this: “You do not wish to be POSSESSED (OWNED) by love, by tenderness, kindness, devotion, but you ARE possessed by a tyranny whose sway is disastrous to the happiness of those who love you.” The words hardly made sense. And she would have taken them back if she could. But she’d been overwrought at the time, spurned, cast out of the fold, people had to understand that—and the thought of it, of how beastly he’d been, how sharp-tongued and sarcastic and purely petty and mean, made her anger shine out all over again. She read through it all, column after column, weighing each word with a mixture of euphoria and heartache, and then she read it through a second time.

  When she was finished she sat a long while staring into the fire, struggling to get hold of her emotions. The initial elation was gone now, replaced by doubt. This wasn’t right—it wasn’t right at all. The overall impression a casual reader of the Tribune would take away with him would be ungenerous, she could see that now. Instead of a true and noble cri de coeur from one great and giving soul to another—stars equally aligned and equally potent—these letters, these very private and personal letters, would be seen as the maunderings of a scorned woman, defeated in love, desperate and pitiful. Some people—the mean-spirited ones—might even laugh at them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d signed herself “Thine,” and even worse, “Love me all you can.”

  Finally, the windows gone black with the fall of night and the house settling into a quiet that dwindled down to nothing but the tick and crepitus of the fire, she pushed herself up and went looking for Frank. He wasn’t in the bedroom and she traced her way back through the loggia to the dining alcove and on to the living room, but she didn’t encounter him along the way. There was a smell of cabbage emanating from the kitchen—peasant fare, as poisonous as it was bland—and the cook and serving girl, busying themselves over chopping block and stove respectively, barely glanced up when she peered through the door. No one else seemed to be stirring. And that was odd—or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was the way it was out here in the country, everyone battened down to survive the interminable winter, all human hopes and joys and aspirations buried under a heap of quilts, to bed at dark and up with the cows. The thought made her seize with anxiety, and where was Frank? Didn’t he realize that she needed him, that the letters were all wrong, that she was the one who’d been exposed to public censure and maybe even ridicule—that it was she who bore the burden, not he?

  She thought perhaps Frank had gone outside—whenever he was wrought up, no matter the weather, he’d pull on his boots and go tramping round the place, as if he were impervious to heat, cold, rain and snow alike. Frank the farmer, Frank the Welshman, the manure spreader and hog appraiser, a peasant for all his genius. She’d actually stuck her head outside in the intemperate air and bleated his name down the length of the courtyard before she thought of the studio. Which was where she found him, seated at one of the drafting tables beneath the oil portrait of his mother—the sole picture in the room—and the motto he’d affixed to the wall: WHAT A MAN DOES, THAT HE HAS. And what does a man do? she was thinking. Lock up his amante in a dungeon? Silence her? Let the newspapers make a mockery of her spirit, her love, her life? “This won’t stand, Frank,” she said.

  He looked up from what he was doing—his eternal drawing, and he was like a child, exactly like a child, an infant, that was what he was—and gave her a sour look.116 “I know it, Miriam. Believe me, we’re doing everything we can to put a stop to it.”

  “A stop to it? It’s too late already, isn’t it? Do you know what those letters make me seem like?” He was watching her out of his shrewd little eyes, glaring at her, blaming her. “Like a ruined woman, Frank. Like a fool. A fool for loving you.”

  And what was his response? The little man, the cold fish who wouldn’t even rise from the stool to take her in his arms and swear his love to her, who couldn’t take a cue? “I can’t help that, Miriam. What’s done is done.”

  She woke next morning to a dull changeless light and a preternatural silence, as if the whole world had lost its hearing. The bed was empty beside her. Beyond the windows, a slant of gray wet snow, and of course there were no curtains to shut it out—Frank didn’t believe in curtains—so that the outdoors plunged right into the room. She might as well have been camped in Alaska or some such place, the fire dead in the hearth, her breath suspended before her face and a rime on the water glass she’d set out on the bedside table. It was too cold even to get up and use the bathroom. Too depressing. The thought of the letters came to her suddenly, the shame, the stupidity, and then she thought of her pravaz, but she never moved, and if the housemaid came in to see to her she never knew it. Sleep was like a stone pressing down on her chest. She closed her eyes. When she woke again it was still snowing, still cold, but someone had lit the fire and her bodily needs spoke to her in a way she could no longer ignore. She found her slippers and her robe and made her way to the bathroom.

  And this was primitive too, despite the bronze Buddha and the Han vases and the Oriental carpets, because the water from the tap was like liquid ice and if she wanted to bathe—and she did—she’d have to send someone out to fetch wood and fire up the boiler in the cellar. She made her toilette as best she could, feeling out of sorts, thinking she might have some tea and toast to settle her stomach, but as she brushed her hair before the mirror—a hundred strokes, morning and night, just as her mother had taught her—she felt the weakness in her bowels and had to sit down a moment. Almost accidentally—idly, certainly—her hand came into contact with the cosmetics case in which she kept her pravaz and it took only a moment to decide that what she needed was an injection to set her right. It was the cold, she told herself, the dreary unrelenting winter that gave everyone chilblains and ague, the same as in Paris, but at least there she could find refuge in a gallery or a concert hall or one of the cafés or salons artistiques. Paris, she was thinking, Paris, and felt the warmth spread through her.

  It was then that she heard the voices. Frank’s voice and another man’s—or no, two others—twined and murmurous. They seemed to be drifting across the loggia from the direction of the living room, and that struck her as odd—Frank hadn’t mentioned anything to her about guests arriving, though with one thing and another it may have slipped his mind. Suddenly her heart leapt up—here was the possibility of a reprieve, a release from the nullity of country life if only for an hour or two. But who could it be? Frank always surrounded himself with stimulating people, artists, musicians, architects and writers, many of them quite well-connected, and if his gatherings never quite approached the brilliance of the Parisian salons, they were often charming and diverting. And diversion was what she needed right now, above all else.

  She cracked the door to hear better. Frank’s voice predominated—he seemed to be delivering some sort of speech, but then he was always giving extempore speeches on an inexhaustible range of subjects, “pontificating,” as one of his ex-draftsmen liked to say, and not very charitably she was sure—his fine mellow tenor sharpening now, even as the voices of the two men broke in to challenge him, and what was going on? Was he showing some of his prints for sale, was that it? Could Clarence Darrow have come all the way out from the city? A client? And then suddenly, through some trick of the air currents, one of the stranger’s voices rang clear—“So what you’re saying is that there is no romantic attachment whatever betwee
n you and Madame Noel? She’s merely a spiritual affinity like Mrs. Borthwick?” —and she understood. Reporters. The reporters were here.

  Frank said something that she couldn’t quite catch—he must have been pacing up and down the room—and then his voice came clear too. “Yes, that’s right, I’ve hired on Madame Noel in the capacity of housekeeper, as Mrs. Breen has been dismissed, as you know—”

  Housekeeper? She a housekeeper? What was he thinking?

  “But surely,” the voice returned—a thin voice, reedy and wheedling—“you can’t deny that these letters give quite the opposite impression.”

  She didn’t hear what Frank had to say next because she was in motion suddenly, hurriedly dressing—the silk gown, the white one, a pearl choker and her rings—thinking that this was her chance to make them see the truth of the matter, to know what she was in her deepest self, in her heart, and to let the world know too. She felt almost as if she were dreaming as she drifted through the loggia with its windows giving onto the gray frozen drifts, her feet bare as a maid’s and the gown flowing across her abdomen and her limbs with the simple elegance the Greeks had brought to perfection. Cytherea. She was violet-crowned Cytherea, the foam-risen, a goddess gliding across the carpet and into the living room where the two strangers, one bald and one not, their eyes flying to her, practically ruptured themselves jumping up out of their chairs to make obeisance to her, and “Yes,” she was telling them, enchanted by the sound of her own voice. “Yes, it’s all true: I love him!”

  The denouement wasn’t quite everything she’d expected. Frank was angry with her, at least at first, but he stood by her and the two of them, the fire leaping and the storm raging beyond the windows to produce an air of romance even the most gifted scenarist would have been hard-pressed to duplicate, made their defense of a love that defies the conventions, that dares strive for the sublime no matter the niggling concerns of the hidebound and unenlightened. First she made her thoughts known, then he, back and forth in counterpoint until they were both singing the same sweet song and the newspapermen scratched at their pads till their fingers went numb. Of course, the photograph they ran beneath the headline “I LOVE HIM!” SAYS MRS. MAUDE MIRIAM NOEL OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, beautiful and doe-eyed though it was, revealing one bared and lovely shoulder and a faraway look of the most fetching appeal, left something to be desired. Namely, despite the fact that the caption read This is her first published photograph, it wasn’t her likeness. Amazingly. Though she was certainly the equal of this model, whoever she was, and the accompanying article was flattering in the extreme.