The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was remarkable how quickly that wooden structure went up, the flames climbing the walls to the roof like pent-up things given their heads all in a moment, a swarm of gnawing animals with irradiated teeth. Within minutes the frantic leapings of the violin (or fiddle, I suppose) were lost to the clamor of the fire, the hiss and the roar, struts collapsing, bottles of liquor exploding in the depths like the bombs of war—and this was a war, Wrieto-San’s war on the topers and wastrels and bumpkins who’d turned out to stand idle as Taliesin burned and burned again, cycling from renewal to ash, and here they were, sprinting through the weeds and jumping from automobiles with their features distorted and their shouts rising on the air. The fiddle skreeled. The fire raged.

  Soon there was no roof to that place, and soon after, the skeleton of it, the frame that gave it life, was a fiery X-ray of the interior. The skies darkened, the flames leapt and fell, and Wrieto-San, his face illuminated and his cane pumping, stood there and watched till it was full night and the stars shone and what had been erected and joined and carpentered fell away to coals.

  CHAPTER 1: LADIES’ MAN

  Kitty was seated on the familiar hard-backed sofa before the Roman brick fireplace in the living room of the house that was so familiar it might have been her own, but of course it wasn’t. It was Mamah’s.138 And Edwin’s. Or perhaps she should call it Frank’s, since all his interiors reflected one another as if he were simultaneously living in a hundred rooms, rooms scattered across the countryside but somehow, in the architecture of his mind, continuous. It was Frank’s house, sure it was, just as the house they shared was his. Everything was his. He’d put his stamp on inanimate things and people alike—on her, his own wife, just as surely as he’d put it on Mamah and Mrs. Darwin Martin and all the rest of the women who came under his purview. He’d even gone so far as to design their clothes, as he’d designed hers, and until this moment, in this room, on an oppressive iron-clad Oak Park winter’s afternoon, she’d never felt it strange or out of the way or even remarkable. That was just the way it was. The way Frank was.

  And now she sat here watching the fire wrap its volatile fingers round the log set on the andirons, hearing it, hearing the sleet shush the neighborhood and the faintest murmur from little Martha in her crib in the bedroom below. It was very still. There were tea things on a low table before the fire, but no one had touched them. Mamah was perched on the edge of the seat opposite, trying not to look at her. Edwin—as mild and soft-voiced as a rector transported from the pages of an English novel—stood silently behind his wife, his eyes downcast, the broad bald stripe of his head glowing in the light of Frank’s art-glass lamps. And Frank—he was hateful to her in that moment, execrable, hideous, an icon crushed beneath the wheel of a tractor—Frank had backed up against the mantel decorated with the Oriental statuary he’d bought with the Cheneys’ money, the brass Buddhas and carved ivory figurines no civilized household should be deprived of. His arms were folded across his chest, his feet planted, his eyes hard and metallic, two darts pinning first Edwin and then her to the heavy fabric of the stiffened air. And what had he just said, what had he said? Mamah and I are in love.

  In love. As if he would know anything of love. As if he hadn’t trampled all over the memory of what they’d had together these past twenty years and pulled it up by the roots, so absorbed in his work—in his self—he hardly gave her a glance anymore, treating her like a servant and the children like strangers, a collective irritant and nothing more.139 Love? She was the one who knew love and she loved him still, loved him in spite of herself, loved him so fiercely she wanted to leap to her feet and tear his hair out, gouge his eyes, batter him. And her. Her too, the vampire.

  He was in love. Her husband was in love. And with someone other than his wife, with a woman she’d always considered her special friend. Was it a revelation? Did he expect her to fall to her knees, beat her breast and rend her clothes? Or was she supposed to make the sign of the cross and bless them? This wasn’t news—it wasn’t even a surprise. He and Mamah had been skulking around for months now, wearing artificial smiles, ever discreet in public, except when he was squiring her about in the glaring yellow automobile that might as well have had a sign that screamed LOOK AT ME! pinned to the hood. But then her husband was a ladies’ man, always was and always would be, and he even had a rationale to excuse it—he had to work his charms on the women of the neighborhood because the women were the ones who held the purse strings, the women were the ones who would nag their husbands into taking the leap and how else did she imagine he earned a living to keep her and her six children clothed and fed and housed, and yes, yes, so there was the grocery bill and the livery bill and all the rest, which just went to prove how necessary it was to court these women, these clients. She’d accepted that. She’d believed him. Trusted him. Hoped he would get over his infatuation, as he’d gotten over infatuations in the past. But now it was too late. Now he’d spoken the words aloud and there was no going back.

  “We didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said, breaking the silence. “And we don’t mean to hurt anyone, least of all you, Kitty—and you, Edwin. That’s not what this concerns. Not at all.”

  Mamah—with her cat’s eyes and showy movements—rose suddenly and crossed the room to stand beside him like some sort of ornament. Edwin glanced up sharply. “Then what does it concern?” he asked, his voice barely rising to a whisper.

  Mamah’s high fluting tones came back at him. “Freedom,” she said.

  “Freedom? To do what?” Edwin’s eyes went to Frank. “To break up two households—and for him? For this architect? This sawed-off genius? ”

  All Kitty could think was that she wanted to be out of this, out in the cold, on the familiar streets, and she thought of Llewellyn, just five years old and in want of her, in want of his father, and dinner, his playthings and his coloring books. What about Llewellyn? What about the house? And Frank’s mother, installed in the cottage out back? What of her? Was it all going to come crashing down?

  Mamah stiffened. “There’s no need to be uncivil, Edwin.”

  “Please,” Frank was saying, and he actually took Mamah’s hand in his own as if they were two children lining up for a school trip, “you have to understand how difficult this is for us, but there is no higher law than the freedom to love—”

  “Ellen Key,”140 Edwin said acidly. He hadn’t moved save to clamp his hands together as if he were praying. Or crushing something.

  “That’s right,” Mamah snapped. “Ellen Key. ‘Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.’ ” She delivered the line like an actress, as if it had been rehearsed, and it came to Kitty then that it had, the whole scene, the two of them—she and Frank—iterating their lines in some back parlor or bedroom against the hour of performance. “I never loved you, Edwin, you should know that, and I never pretended to. Not in the way of a true and deep and binding love”—and here she gave Frank a fawning treacly look—“not in the way of soul mates. Or destiny.”

  There was nastiness on the air, a thrusting and parrying, cruelty suppurating out of an ordinary afternoon here in the teetotal suburb of Chicago known as Saints’ Rest for its profusion of churches, its conventionalism and placidity—its normalcy and decency—and Kitty wanted no part of it. She was too humiliated even to speak. Without thinking, she rose to her feet and they all three gave her a look of astonishment, as if they’d forgotten she was there, one more wife and mother sacrificed on the altar of free love.

  “Kitty,” she heard Frank say. And Mamah, Mamah too: “Kitty.” That was the extent of it, that was all they could summon, two worn syllables, as if by naming her they could bring her back to what she was when she came up the walk fifteen minutes ago.

  She didn’t answer. She went directly to the closet for her coat and shrugged away from Frank as he tried to help her on with it and in the next moment she was out in the stinging air, fighting her way round the maze of walls and turnings Frank ha
d put up to protect the Cheneys from the life of the street out front. She heard him call after her, but she didn’t turn. And when she got to the motorcar—the chromatic advertisement of self and self-love, because that was the only kind of love Frank was capable of, and she knew that now, would always know it—she kept on going.

  Weeks went by, months, and nothing changed. Except that she couldn’t see the Cheneys again—wouldn’t—despite the fact that they lived just blocks away and the social fabric of Oak Park was woven so tightly any loose thread would be sure to show. Had there been a rift? Her friends, perfectly respectable women she’d been acquainted with for years wanted to know, all of them sniffing round after the scent of scandal like vultures circling a corpse. No, she said, no, not at all—it was just that she was so busy with the children. Oh, she really had her hands full there, especially with Catherine a young lady now and Frances not far behind. Her smile was tired. And they knew, they all knew. Or guessed.

  She kept up appearances as best she could, regularly attending the meetings of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club as she always had, though with a wary eye out for Mamah—and she still couldn’t believe it was she who’d befriended her and she who’d introduced her to her husband, the architect, thinking to do her part to drum up business. The irony of it, as grim as anything in a French novel. Did she hate Mamah, with her French and German and her college degrees and knowing air and the way she bossed everyone—or seduced them—and always got what she wanted, whether it was as trivial as the date of a card party or as momentous as choosing an architect to build her a house? Yes, yes, she did hate her, though she tried to put it out of her mind as much as possible. And she kept on washing and sewing and cooking and overseeing the servants and giving her every ounce of energy to the children, who seemed more needy than ever, as if they divined what was going on behind the scenes. She never could tell just how much they knew and so she couldn’t help quizzing them in a roundabout way—especially the little ones, Llewellyn and Frances—but she wasn’t very good at subterfuge. And Frances was smart, clever beyond her years—she was coming up on eleven in the fall—and Kitty had to be careful when she asked, as casually as she could, about John Cheney, if she’d seen him at school because it had been such a long while since the Cheneys were over, and how was he, a good boy, took after his father, didn’t he? But yes, of course, he was only seven, just a baby. Llewellyn’s age. Or no: a year and a half older. And why would such a big girl want to play with a baby—or even notice him?

  It was all tentative, her life an unspooling string waiting for the blade to sever it, and each night when Frank came in from the studio he’d walled off from the house as if it were a bunker she felt a rush of relief and gratitude—and yes, love. True love. Not love of an object or love out of a book, but the deepest ache of wanting that had been there since she was sixteen years old and she’d collided with him at the costume party in his Uncle Jenkin’s church, everyone in character from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables , she dressed as Cosette and he as Marius, and their two heads coming together so hard she wore the bruise for a week. You’re too young to marry, they told her, everyone did, but he came for her with all his irresistible force and though her parents held back and his mother rose up like a harpy with her wings spread in opposition, she was Catherine Lee Tobin with the flaming hair and rocketing eyes and nothing could stop her. She wasn’t yet eighteen when she was married. And now, two years short of forty, she was a castoff.

  Spring that year—1909—brought a succession of cloudless days that stretched through late May and into the middle of June. Out in the countryside the farmers might have been scratching their heads, but in Oak Park, with its shade trees and enveloping lawns dotted with birdbaths and recliners, people welcomed the dry spell. The pace of things seemed to slow. Shopkeepers took the odd afternoon off, the children swam or played ball when school let out, flowers bloomed, cicadas sent up their soporific buzz from the dense nests of leaves. There were picnics, cookouts, horseshoe matches. Hammocks swung indolently in the backyards and the birds held their collective breath through the somnolence of the noon hour. One afternoon, when the boys were off somewhere and Catherine and Frances occupied with a play they were rehearsing, Kitty decided to get out of the house and take advantage of the weather—she needed a few things at the grocery and that was excuse enough. She made Llewellyn change his shirt and combed his hair for him, then put on a straw bonnet, gathered up her purse and parasol, and went down Forest, past all the grand houses Frank had designed and worked on there till it might have been his own private development, and out onto Lake, where the shops were.

  The grocer wasn’t rude, but he did mention the bill outstanding in the amount of some nine hundred dollars,141 even as he toted up her purchases and she assured him Frank would be in that very night to pay on account, but the experience made her feel cheap, as if she were a shirker or a thief. She tried to put it out of her head, tried to enjoy the sunshine and the sustaining warmth of the day—it must have been eighty degrees, with the gentlest breeze off the lake, just perfect—and she looked at dresses, bought Llewellyn an ice cream and then started for home. She’d just turned the corner at Kenilworth, thinking to go home the back way if only to refresh the view, when the Cheneys’ maid came down the walk opposite, both children in tow.

  “Look,” she said, bending to Llewellyn, whose hand was sticky in hers, “there’s John and Martha. Should we say hello?” She gave a wave and the maid dutifully crossed the street to her, John skipping on ahead, while Martha—she was three, or just about—clung to the woman’s hand. She let go of Llewellyn and the two boys immediately converged and darted behind a tree, playing at some spontaneously invented game, and here was the maid. And Martha. “Good afternoon,” Kitty said.

  “Afternoon, ma’am.” The maid was an Irish girl, slight and stooped, with black hair that blanched her face and two unblinking eyes. It had been a long while and Kitty couldn’t seem to recall her name.

  “My, how they’ve grown,” she heard herself say, the conventional housewife, dealer in platitudes, and what else was there?

  “Yes, ma’am,” the maid said. “The two of them. And it’s a blessing, isn’t it.”

  She was about to observe that it was indeed, just a blessing, when she made the mistake of going down on one knee to look into little Martha’s face and coo over how she was all grown up now, wasn’t she? It was a mistake because when she got a good look at the child, at her coloring, the shape of her nose—and her ears, especially her ears—she saw Frank there and it gave her a jolt. But it couldn’t be. There was too much of Edwin in the girl, wasn’t there? Those were his eyes exactly. Or were they Mamah’s? The way she held herself—even suspended from the maid’s hand like an appurtenance—was like Mamah, the small-featured prettiness, the feasting eyes. But not Frank. Not Frank. They couldn’t have been—could they? But then he’d built the Cheneys’ house in 1904, there all day, every day, with his carpenters and workmen and his plans, and Martha wasn’t born till two years later, as if that were evidence enough. She remembered Mamah pregnant, the gestating swell of her, and how she complained all the time as if she were a martyr, the first woman on earth to experience morning sickness and gas. She didn’t care about children, that was what it was—not in the way Kitty did. She cared about ideas, her books, her precious freedoms.

  “Yes,” Martha said in her child’s squeak, “all grown up. And I want a teddy bear. Lucy’s going to get me a teddy bear. Did you know that?”

  “That’s very nice,” she said absently. “I’m sure it’s—” and then, overcome, she called out to Llewellyn in a kind of bleat, excused herself to the maid and went on up the street, silently adding up the months and the years and hating Mamah Cheney with all her heart.

  At first glance, Frank seemed his old self that night. He joked with the children at dinner and afterward he sat at the piano a long while, reprising his stock of Gilbert and Sullivan songs, and the girls and Llewellyn sang along
and she did too, though her spirit wasn’t in it. And Frank’s wasn’t either. He was pretending—it was all a pretense, she could see that, see right through him—slipping into the role of father the way he would have slipped into a client’s handshake or the latest suit he’d ordered from the tailor so he could shine and shine and let all the world marvel till the commissions piled up like drift and his name went round the world.

  He was on his way back to the studio—he worked at night now, every night, later and later—when she caught up with him in the passageway, thinking to say something about the grocer, though she didn’t want to nag and the financial matters were solely his concern, his and his alone, but couldn’t he cut back on expenses just till they’d paid down some of the bills? That was what she meant to say, because it was on her mind and the look the grocer had given her made her feel common and she was upset in some way she couldn’t name, but instead she blurted, “I saw the Cheney children today, little Martha and John, and I couldn’t help thinking . . . of you.”

  She saw the look in his eyes—he wanted no part of it, no confrontations, no arguments, and he had work to do, couldn’t she understand that? Work. Work to sustain this whole tottering circus. He said, “Me? Why on earth—? ”

  “She looks just like you.”

  And suddenly he was furious, exasperated, rocking up off the balls of his feet and glaring till the flesh knotted between his eyes. “Who?” he spat. “Martha? Is that what you mean?”