The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  She felt something clench inside her. Suddenly she saw John in his pajamas and Martha in her nightgown, tumbling out of bed to race through the house chirping like birds and the tree standing there in all its array and the looks on their faces as they saw revealed what Saint Nick and the magic manipulations of his airborne sled and flying reindeer had brought them. Her children. Christmas. She didn’t know what to say.

  “We’re in contact with them, of course,” she heard Frank say at her shoulder.

  “In contact?” the blue-serge man threw back at him and there was no mistaking the sarcastic thrust of it.

  “And we’ve sent them gifts. And cards and the like. And my sons, my two eldest, Lloyd and John, will be coming to work in the Chicago studio with me before long—and Mrs. Borthwick’s children, uh—”

  Another of the reporters, a fleshy man with disarranged hair and a face the color of week-old grits, supplied the names for him: “John and Martha.”

  “Yes, John and Martha,” Frank went on and she felt stricken all over again. “We plan to have them up here to Taliesin this summer once school lets out. For a month, a month at least. Isn’t that right, Mamah?”

  Somehow—and she was having difficulty breathing all of a sudden—she managed to answer in the affirmative, but even as she did she could see that every man in the room was studying her as coldly as they might have studied a corpse laid out for dissection at the morgue.

  As soon as they’d left, Frank retreated to his studio and she buried herself in the kitchen, working side by side with the cook to prepare the goose, the gravy, stuffing, pudding and side dishes, determined to make a holiday of it despite the disaster of the morning. And it was a disaster, she had no doubt of that. She let the cook go at five to be with her own family and willingly took on the burden of the meal herself—she was glad for the activity, for anything to take her mind off the way those men had looked at her as if she were some sort of female Scrooge. Or worse, another species altogether—the mother who couldn’t seem to muster any affection for her children, even on the most sacrosanct day of the year. She took out her frustration on the chopping block, on the cutlery and the cookware. She rinsed and chopped and mashed and prodded the goose and poured the wine and did her best to braise the vegetables in the pan without burning them, and when they sat down to dinner, Christmas dinner (they were twelve, with the Porters and their children, Frank’s mother, a few of the workmen and a couple from Chicago who seemed to be the last of Frank’s friends who would have anything to do with him under his present circumstances), she tried her best to be equable and pleasant and to let her laugh conquer all, but it was the most miserable Christmas she’d ever spent.

  She tossed through a sleepless night, dreading the outcome—she was a fool to have gone to the press, an idiot, a dreamer; she should have hidden in the cellar, should have poisoned their coffee—while Frank, as unconcerned and artistically removed as ever, snored in his own distinctive way, as if a great wall of water were tumbling into a pit and then rising up to inundate a solitary man breathing through a piccolo. The next day’s papers gave a full accounting, and it was worse even than she’d imagined. The Spring Green Weekly Home News was savage, inflammatory, labeling Frank and her “a menace to the morals of the community and an insult to every family therein,” and the Tribune, right from the maddening qualifiers inserted into the headline—SPEND CHRISTMAS MAKING ‘DEFENSE’ OF ‘SPIRIT HEGIRA’162—managed to combine a tone of high dudgeon with outright mockery. They were seen as ridiculous. Pompous. Self-serving. And worse: unfit and uncaring parents.

  By the following day, it had turned ugly.

  She’d been working on her translation since early in the morning, working so intently she skipped lunch altogether and very nearly let the fire burn itself out, when Frank came through the door with her ice skates dangling from one hand. “Enough work for today,” he announced. “Time for some physical activity, something robust, eh? How about a little turn on the ice? What do you say?”

  It took her no more than ten minutes to dress and then they were out the door and crunching their way along the path Billy Weston had shoveled down the center of the courtyard. Everything was still, the air new-made, the house as settled and comfortable under its spreading eaves as a chalet in Kitzbühel. Smoke spiraled from the chimneys. A crow beat heavilyoverhead, its wings creaking like unoiled hinges. Frank led the way, dressed in lederhosen and a Tyrolean cap, the great trailing swath of his scarf slicing right and left with the sway of his shoulders, and he was in such high spirits he dodged away into the drifts to break off one of the great rippling icicles depending from the roof and prop it over his shoulder like a mock artillery piece.

  They made their way down the drive, crabwise, ice underfoot, the pale disk of the sun settling into the trees at their backs and the river opening out before them, and then they crossed the road and went down the narrow path on the other side, everything pristine and perfect under the sculpted banks of snow. She breathed in the scent of the pines, saw the way they stood ranged along the river like sentinels, rugged and alive and giving up their color to a monochromatic world, and felt a surge of joy. This was it exactly, the life she’d envisioned, work and play united, self-sufficiency, the out-of-doors, Ellen Key, Frank. It was too perfect. The ideal of any woman, of every woman. Every woman should feel like this.

  She paused a moment to brace herself against the bole of a tree and kick the snow from her boots, wanting only to shout out her joy to the world, and Frank stopped to look back at her. “Are you all right? ” he called. “Out of breath already?” He was a picture, a framed picture, and where was the camera to record it?

  “No,” she said, “not at all. In fact, I can scarcely wait to get down there on the ice and challenge you to a race, twice round the rink, and let no man—or woman—stand between us.” Her blood was singing. Her eyes jumped at him.

  “You’re on,” he said, and here was his grin. “It’s a bet. The winner—and I’m sorry to say it’s sure to be me—will receive one back rub, gratis, at the hands of the loser. Agreed?”

  Oh, yes, yes: even if she lost she couldn’t lose. “Agreed,” she said, and let her laugh carry the freight.

  As they came down the slope and through the trees she could see the figures of the skaters out on the river, dark forms sailing free or locked in tandem, their cries echoing across the ice. There was a bonfire going on the far bank, families gathered there with wieners, soda pop, flasks of something stronger. An Irish setter spun round in circles in the middle of the rink they’d cleared, yapping, while two boys flew past and then doubled back, urging it to chase them. It was a scene out of Brueghel. Or maybe Currier and Ives. She was just strapping on her skates when a black-haired man with fierce black eyebrows, in a bulky homemade sweater and patched trousers, sailed in close to the bank and growled something at her before shooting off again. And what had he said? Who was he?

  Frank was off to her left, as eager as a child to get out on the ice, entirely oblivious, one skate already on and now the other, and in the next moment he was gliding past her, crowing, “Come on, come on, what are you waiting for? ” Then she was up on her skates, unsteady yet, and he had her by the hand and the wind was in her face and here they were, weaving through the crowd, one grand circuit of the rink and then she began to understand—or no, she was made to understand. People—and she recognized some of them—were skating to the far shore, singly and in groups, bunching there on the foot-worn snow to remove their skates before climbing up the bank to the road. They were leaving, en masse. Turning their backs on them. Snubbing them. And then, just as the apprehension of it began to sink into Frank’s features, the black-haired man glided up to them and said, quite distinctly this time, “You should be ashamed.”

  “Ashamed of what? ” Frank shot back at him, but the man looped away from them and sailed far out across the river, only to come rocketing back a moment later, moving so fast she was afraid he meant to collide with her—she
’d actually raised her hands to cushion the blow—until he pulled up at the last moment in a slashing spray of ice. “Go back where you come from, you old pervert,” he shouted, his face red and his eyes bugged with rage. “You and your conkabine both.” Everything evaporated then, all the joy she’d felt in the simple pleasure of the day and all her hopes too, and though Frank cursed him and left her side to chase after him in a fury of his own, the man danced on ahead of him, just out of reach—by far the superior skater. “Pervert, pervert!” his voice rang out till the fire fell into itself and the banks were deserted and the two boys took their dog and ambled up the road and out of sight.

  When she and Frank got back—he’d insisted on skating till he’d had his fill, just the two of them alone on the ice with the scowling man—Billy Weston was waiting for them, looking like Doom and his brother. He had the newspaper in his hand and he laid it out on the kitchen table for them. ASK SHERIFF’S AID TO OUST WRIGHT, the headline read, and though she tried to ignore it, tried to recapture the feeling she’d had going down the drive and through the woods with Frank at her side, she couldn’t help herself and took it off into the bedroom to confirm what she already knew: the whole community had risen up against them. And worse: they’d petitioned the sheriff to arrest her and Frank on a morals charge. A morals charge, for God’s sake. It was like something out of the Dark Ages. Or Salem. A Salem witch hunt.

  She was devastated. She sat there in the armchair by the window, a blanket pulled up to her throat, staring at the cheap newsprint till the words no longer made any sense. The house ticked and groaned. The wind came up through the floorboards. Cold, so cold, the fire nothing more than a glow against the blackened stones of the hearth and the boiler in the cellar below might as well have been in another country for all the good it did.

  So much for Ellen Key. So much for enlightenment. She and Frank turned in early that night, listening for the errant footfall in the courtyard. For the second night running she couldn’t sleep. She lay awake for hours, staring into the darkness, thinking of that man on the ice, seeing him, the twisted lips, the burn of hate. Finally, at first light, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  There were no backrubs. Not that night. Or for many nights to come.

  As it turned out, the sheriff never did come for them.163 Nor did anyone else. The winter crawled on, Taliesin married its design and grew beyond it and Mamah remained quiet and productive and she gave up newspapers in all their complexity of motive and purpose and vowed that if she ever laid eyes on a reporter again she’d cross the street to avoid him. As for the townspeople, she drew back there too, scarcely leaving Taliesin for any purpose, even to go to the market. If they weren’t ready for advanced thought, if they felt compelled to insult her in the local paper and fulminate against her from the pulpits of their churches, well, so much the worse for them. They were the ones losing out to the forces of fear and ignorance and there was little she could do about it but pursue her work and let Ellen Key speak for herself—in as accurate and direct a translation as she could manage to produce.

  Very gradually, as the new year broke and wore on, people began to concern themselves with other things, their own families, the weather, with the lives of their farms, with milking and calving and the tilling of the fields and raising of the crops. She began to meet in a quiet way with a few of the more receptive women—an invitation to tea or to go for a hike over the hills, to pick wildflowers or portray them in watercolors—and though she might mention Ellen Key in the most casual way, she tried not to proselytize and no one, not even Diana Milquist, married to the dentist and her closest friend in the neighborhood, ever mentioned her living arrangements. John and Martha came for a month that summer—of 1912—and she tried her best to be a mother to them, though it was clear that Edwin had done his all to turn them against her and that they had little interest in country life. As she confessed to Diana, as much as she loved having them at Taliesin it was something of a relief to see them go, and did she think she was an awful mother for feeling that way? No, Diana said (childless Diana, whose reproductive organs had been damaged as a result of a childhood accident), no, not at all.

  In August, The Torpedo Under the Ark was published in an exquisite little edition by Ralph Fletcher Seymour of Chicago, and the press was largely favorable, though a number of papers invariably recycled the old news of her elopement with Frank and all the rest of the bilge that went with it (Former Mrs. Cheney, Who Eloped with Wright, Has New Book; Adopts Views of Ibsen and Swedish Author on Loveless Marriage). Still, the repercussions were relatively minor and Ellen Key went out into the English-speaking world all the same. She and Frank celebrated with a trip to Milwaukee and raised a toast (she with a glass of Liebfraumilch, he with a glass of eau vive, straight from the tap) to the success of the book and to the translations to come—and the book of her own, the ideas of which were just beginning to coalesce, a volume that would address questions of love, marriage and freedom in a plainspoken American way. For American women, women like herself and Diana and all the beleaguered Oak Park housewives forced into living a lie day after day through the fruitless course of their empty lives. And while she didn’t consider herself heroic or ambitious or even especially radical, the more she thought about it the more it grew in her mind. She couldn’t see the book’s title yet—it was just a blur of letters, like a word puzzle—but she saw her own name beneath it, Mamah Borthwick, or maybe Mamah Borthwick Wright, and she pictured a shifting series of ageless women in fashionable dresses absorbing her words in their parlors, kitchens and screened-in porches, their eyes shining, their faces rapt.

  The dog days set in. Haying time came and went. Color struck the trees. She found herself falling easily into the routine of life at Taliesin, writing at her desk in the morning, joining in the work of the household through the afternoon and early evening—trying to assume as much of the load as she could in order to free Frank to pursue his architectural projects 164—and contenting herself with quiet evenings at home. With Frank. With the man she loved. In fact, it got to the point, through that fall and into the winter, where she felt so at home she no longer had any desire to leave Taliesin at all.

  When Frank came to her about a trip to Japan in the spring, her first instinct was to deny him, not that she had anything against the Japanese. Quite the contrary: the Oriental culture intrigued her, with its iconography of dragon and crane and the exquisite sensitivity of its artistic design set against the fierceness of its samurai tradition and the bizarre subjugation of its women in their lacquered clogs and clinging robes till they were nothing more than playthings for men (and certainly they could use a dose of Ellen Key).165 It was just that she was settled finally. And content. She tried to tell Frank that but he wouldn’t listen. He needed the work, that was what it was. Needed to acquire his prints and screens and statuary in order to trade in them and make a profit to channel back into Taliesin because there were precious few commissions coming in. Because of her. He gave a long speech—a series of speeches—tiptoeing around the issue of blame, which was mutual, of course, and he assured her he had no regrets but there was the fact of it: he was being passed over, boycotted. And there was the promise of the biggest commission yet, the biggest of his life, a project that would erase all their financial concerns forever—a hotel, a Tokyo hotel to dwarf anything in Asia—and he simply had to go. Had to. And he wasn’t going anywhere without her. Ever again.

  The whole time they were away she missed Taliesin with an ache nothing would soothe, though the Japanese women were far different from what she’d supposed—the society very nearly matriarchal in some respects, the wives and mothers firmly in control while the men went off like so many schoolboys to play with their painted little geisha and drink rice wine till they lost consciousness—and the food, especially the fried dish they called tempura, appealed to her more than she’d thought it would. She was open-minded. She even asked for the recipe and tried to duplicate it once they got back home
to Taliesin, but the coated vegetables and strips of fish she dropped into hot oil in the cavern of her deepest pot seemed only to bloat up and absorb grease like miniature sponges till the blandest fritter or heaviest doughnut would have been a gourmet item in comparison.

  “The Asiatic experience was intensely interesting,” she said, summing it up for Diana Milquist over soggy fragments of what was meant to be tempura, “truly enlightening—if you could only see the way those people live. Nothing like here. Or Europe.” She poked at a limp bit of carrot that had shed its batter, thinking how primitive conditions were, especially in the countryside. She thought of the wooden pallets, paper walls, the toilet that was little more than a hole in the ground. “Nothing at all.”

  Still, if she’d found Japan a bit of a trial, Frank was invigorated. He bought up prints till their rooms were filled with them, working with money he seemed to draw out of a hat like a magician,166 and when they returned he began making preliminary sketches for the hotel project, though nothing had been confirmed. Another year—a blissful year—rolled by at Taliesin, and then, from an unexpected source, a major project for Chicago pleasure gardens modeled on those in Germany and Scandinavia came his way and he plunged into it with all his characteristic ferocity of purpose and vision. Spring came that year on a dizzying wave of perfume from the blossoms of the hundreds of fruit trees he’d planted, pear, apple, peach, apricot, plum, and if the pleasure gardens—Midway, they were calling the place Midway—kept him away from Taliesin a good proportion of the time, it was only for the better. Truly. It was. Because she loved him all the more now that he needed her in a practical way, not merely as soul mate and avatar, but as mistress of the house—she was in charge now that he was away so much of the time, and she consulted with the employees and worked to her utmost to make the place shine as it rightfully should, as a testament to him.