The Women (17 page)
Her eyes were luminous, moist. She couldn’t seem to feel her feet, though she must have been standing on them. She had a sudden vivid recollection of her school days, Mrs. Thompson’s elocution class, the air sleepy with the scent of magnolia and she driving home her point about Tennyson’s use of the heroic simile with such force that the entire class came back to life and Margaret Holloway, the most popular girl in the school, gave her a look of such undisguised admiration from the second row left that the glow of the moment had stayed with her all these years. “I don’t know,” she said finally, steadying herself, “that I won’t be thrown out into the street.” But was this the moment for the photograph? Yes, and she posed for the flash before delivering the kicker:
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that she was left with no choice but to return to her rightful home—and that she intended to do so that very day.
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that she was left with no choice but to return to her rightful home—and that she intended to do so that very day.
“Mrs. Wright!” a reporter sang out, and she turned her eyes to him, a thin man in a gray suit with liverish eyes and hair that faded away from his brow in a pale blond crescent. “Can you give us some idea of your itinerary? ”
They watched her, these hounds of the press, ravenous, while she put a hand to her bosom and let a little Southern molasses accumulate in the lower reaches of her voice, on familiar ground now, the lady in distress—and she was in distress, she was, and they ought to recognize it, the self-serving sons of bitches. “Oh, I just don’t know. I really am all but indigent, I’m afraid.” And then the little dig she couldn’t suppress: “My husband may be able to afford a fine motor or the price of a first-class rail ticket, but I really am just as poor as a church mouse.”
Five minutes later, as Mr. Jackson led her to the elevator (Mr. Fake had had to excuse himself—he was in court that morning), the reporter caught up with her. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, nodding to Mr. Jackson, and she was thinking only of her pravaz, her nerves thoroughly jangled by the strain of the whole business, “but I was struck by what you had to say back there—you’ve had a pretty punk deal and no two ways about it—and I wondered if I might be able to help?”
She paused to take a good look at him, his jacket open now to reveal a fawn vest stippled with polka dots, the tight trousers hiked up over his glaring tan boots, and how old was he—twenty-five, thirty? Mr. Jackson didn’t say a word. Mr. Jackson was a friend of the press, a very good friend. She decided to be bemused. “And how do you propose to do that?”
“Well, listen—I’m Wallace, of the
Trib
? Mr. Jackson can vouch for me”—another nod for Jackson, which Jackson accepted and returned with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin—“and it just happens that me and my wife were planning on driving up to Baraboo this morning because her mother’s been having trouble with her feet and we’d be pleased if you’d—”
Trib
? Mr. Jackson can vouch for me”—another nod for Jackson, which Jackson accepted and returned with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin—“and it just happens that me and my wife were planning on driving up to Baraboo this morning because her mother’s been having trouble with her feet and we’d be pleased if you’d—”
“Sure,” Jackson said. “I don’t see why not.” He was staring at her now, calculating, and she didn’t especially like the look he was giving her. “What do you think, Mrs. Wright? It might be interesting if this fellow and his wife were able to help you out here, don’t you think?”
“That’s right,” the reporter said. “Myra and I’d be more than happy to do anything we could. And Mr. Jackson can vouch for me, right, Harold? ”
At least it was a sedan. At least there was that. The reporter drove, and his wife—pregnant with twins, it seemed, or maybe it was triplets—sat beside Miriam in the backseat while another man from the newspaper, whose name flew in and out of her head three or four times in the course of the morning and well into the afternoon, sat up front. He was the photographer, or so she gathered, and that was the only thing of significance about him. The roads, of course, were execrable, and the motorcar’s coils or springs or whatever they were didn’t seem to function in any capacity whatever so that for the entire drive she was thrown from one end of the seat to the other like a rag doll, and the wife—Myra—had to cling to her to keep from being flung out the window herself. Conversation was glacial. They passed through two thunderstorms, stopped twice at filling stations, once for sandwiches in Madison and once in the godforsaken precincts of Mazomanie, where she felt an urgent need to visit the washroom.
All four of them got out of the car there—the pretense of Baraboo, if that was what it was, had long since been abandoned: they’d gone west out of Madison on a road she knew all too well and no one had a said a word about the presumptive mother and her podiatric crisis—and the two men had a good stretch and made a show of examining the tires while she and Myra used the facilities at the railroad depot. A brass plaque on the wall inside the door of the depot informed her that the village had been named for an Indian chief whose name, when translated into English, meant “Iron That Walks.” There were three people in the waiting room, one of whom—a farmwife in a kerchief—seemed to have some sort of animal partially concealed in a wicker basket at her feet.
Miriam insisted that Myra use the facilities first—what a nightmare it must have been to be pregnant in that place, in that heat, in that car—and she stood there staring at the wall for what seemed an eternity while she listened to the trickle of water behind the closed door. It was June. Hot. Muggy. The season of bugs. And they were everywhere, crawling up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, beating round the ticket window as if it were the only place in the world they could breathe and exude their fluids and scramble atop one another so they could produce yet more bugs. In the distance—and maybe it was over Taliesin itself—there was a peal of thunder.
When it was Miriam’s turn, she locked the door behind her, lit a cigarette and immediately extracted her kit from her purse. She needed something—but not too much, not her usual dose, just a modicum—to quiet her nerves. They were close now, no more than fifteen miles or so, and the thought of confronting Frank made her stomach sink. In one corner of her mind she saw him falling on his knees to beg her forgiveness, wooing her all over again, just the way it was in the beginning when he would have died for the touch of her, the lamps and candles lit and everything aglow with the presence of fine art and fine minds too, the little Russian sent packing, booted out the back door with her bags and her babies while the lord and lady of the house made tempestuous love to the keening of violins on the victrola—or to jazz, the jazz she adored and he was indifferent to. But in another corner—a corner that grew disproportionately till it filled all the rapidly expanding space inside her skull with pulsing clouds of color, the red of hate, the green of envy—she knew she would fly at him the minute she stepped through the door.
She would . . . she would . . .
She looked down and saw that her hands were clenched and the pravaz still lodged in her thigh, the skin uplifted round a single bright spot of blood.
She would . . . she would . . .
She looked down and saw that her hands were clenched and the pravaz still lodged in her thigh, the skin uplifted round a single bright spot of blood.
The remainder of the journey was something of a fog. There was a side trip to Dodgeville, the county seat, to file the writs Mr. Jackson had arranged for in advance—a peace warrant for Frank, and just so she wouldn’t feel left out, one for his little Russian on a morals complaint. She might have called the justice of the peace by the wrong name and she seemed to recall something about a dog, but it was all inconsequential: she’d filed the complaints and the sheriff had been summoned to see them acted upon. The road curved and dipped and curved again. There seemed to be geese, ducks and chickens everywhere. Things flapped at the windows. The engine droned.
The conversation picked up as they got closer to Taliesin, that much she remembered, both men trying to get a rise out of her with questions about what she meant to do once they arrived and how she felt about her husband and about this dancer usurping her place, and one of them—the photographer, she thought it was—producing a flask of what he called “good Canadian whiskey”
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to take the edge off. “Here’s to Dutch courage,” somebody said, and the flask went round the car, the alcohol lodging like sand in her throat, and why was she so dry all of a sudden when everything around her was silvered and shimmering with the wet of the storm that blew over them in a burst and released the skies to a shattering sunstruck explosion of grace and eternal light? Why was that? And why did everything seem so much denser and richer than she’d ever imagined so that when the river flashed beneath them and the long low golden walls suddenly appeared as if they’d created themselves in that moment, just by her imagining them, she felt nothing but loss?
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to take the edge off. “Here’s to Dutch courage,” somebody said, and the flask went round the car, the alcohol lodging like sand in her throat, and why was she so dry all of a sudden when everything around her was silvered and shimmering with the wet of the storm that blew over them in a burst and released the skies to a shattering sunstruck explosion of grace and eternal light? Why was that? And why did everything seem so much denser and richer than she’d ever imagined so that when the river flashed beneath them and the long low golden walls suddenly appeared as if they’d created themselves in that moment, just by her imagining them, she felt nothing but loss?
“Here,” she said, “here, turn left. Now right. There, that’s the gate there.”
What was odd—and it struck her immediately—was the confluence of automobiles collected at the gate, three, four, five of them, and a group of men in shabby suits stationed beside them. To a man, they wore their hats cocked back on their heads and to a man they were watching the progress of the sedan out of narrowed reptilian eyes, unmoving, unflinching, and she would have thought they were statues but for the faint blue traces of smoke rising from their cigarettes and cigars. It came to her then that these were newspapermen, gathered there to document her grand entrance—and that Mr. Jackson must have put them up to it. Publicity, that was his byword. And Mr. Fake’s too.
Let the press do the work for us and you’ll see your husband come around smart enough.
Her hands went to her hair, tucking the loose strands of it up under her green velvet turban, and as the car slowed to pull in at the gate she was busy with her compact and a fresh application of powder and lipstick.
Let the press do the work for us and you’ll see your husband come around smart enough.
Her hands went to her hair, tucking the loose strands of it up under her green velvet turban, and as the car slowed to pull in at the gate she was busy with her compact and a fresh application of powder and lipstick.
Only then did she look up. The gate, which normally stood open, had been pulled shut and barred with a conspicuous padlock she’d never seen before. Standing there in front of it was Billy Weston and two of the other smirking inbred local morons who would have starved to death a generation ago if Frank hadn’t paid them to hang about the place and look busy. She saw the trouble in Billy’s eyes when she stepped out of the car and the reporters all snapped to attention as if they’d been reanimated, flinging down their cigarettes and converging on her in unison.
The shoulder of the road was a morass of dirty brown puddles—country life, how she hated it, and what had she been thinking?—and immediately her right heel sank into the soft earth so that she staggered momentarily before bracing herself against the fender. The reporters watched her with flat eyes, but none of them offered her a hand. The sun was in her face. She felt a finger of sweat trace the ridge of her spine. She took a moment to freeze them all with a sweeping look, then marched up to the gate.
“You, Billy Weston,” she snapped, “open this gate at once.” She’d been debating whether or not to cry out
What is the meaning of this?
in tones of high dudgeon, but there was no point: the meaning was clear. Frank—and his henchmen, these village idiots with their open collars, battered hats and filthy trousers—intended to keep her out.
What is the meaning of this?
in tones of high dudgeon, but there was no point: the meaning was clear. Frank—and his henchmen, these village idiots with their open collars, battered hats and filthy trousers—intended to keep her out.
From Billy Weston (a thin gawky man, so gray and pedestrian he was barely there at all, his eyes blunted and his mouth set): “I’m sorry, Mrs. Noel, but Mr. Wright says to admit no one.”
“The name is Mrs. Wright, as you know perfectly well—Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright—and I live here. This is my house, not yours. Or his. Now you open this gate and be quick about it.”
No reaction. He exchanged a glance with the other two, but that was the extent of it.
“Have you gone deaf? I said, open this gate. At once!”
Suddenly she seemed to have her hands on the cool iron panels and she was jerking the gate back and forth to the grinding accompaniment of its hinges and to hell with her gloves, to hell with everything. “Frank!” she screamed, focusing all her attention on the inert face of the house rising up out of the hill above the dark sheen of the lake. “I know you’re in there! Frank! Frank!”
It was useless. She was over-exerting herself. She could feel her heart going and the sweat starting up on her brow beneath the tight grip of her turban. This was what he’d wanted, the scheming bastard—he’d planned it this way, to humiliate her. Well, two could play at that game.
She let loose of the gate as suddenly as she’d taken hold of it, wheeled round on the reporters and saw the look of awe flickering from face to face as the puddles reproduced miniature portraits of the sky, and the moths and bees and grasshoppers sailed across the field in bright streamers of color. “Boys,” she said, addressing them all even as she threw her shoulders back and stalked to the sedan, “where I come from we like to say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If he thinks he can keep us out of here, he’s sorely mistaken.” She brushed by Wallace, who was just standing there watching her with his mouth agape, as if he were at a baseball game or a hypnotist’s ball, and threw back the door of the car herself. “Come on now, what are you waiting for!” she cried, and if she was flailing her arm like some soapbox preacher, well, so what? These were her troops, she saw that now, her men-at-arms, ready to storm the place at her command, and the thought exhilarated her. “Get in your cars, everybody. We’re going up the back road—and see if they can stop us!”
There was a burst of excitement, men squaring their hats and running for their cars, Wallace sliding into the front seat with the photographer and Myra lifting herself ponderously up across the running board and into the back, doors slamming, dust rising, a man’s voice echoing behind them—
Hey, wait for me!
—and they were off. Miriam held fast to the door handle, barking directions at the back of Wallace’s head. The green fields rushed past the window. The air was in her face. She was filled with a fierce joy, the joy of combat, of movement and action, her only thought to seize the initiative, catch Frank unawares, bring him to his knees. But when they arrived at the back entrance five minutes later, she had her second surprise: Frank had blocked the road with one of the farm trucks and there were three more men, men she didn’t recognize, standing before it with their caps pulled low and their arms crossed in a display of pugnacity. And obtuseness. And hatefulness. And, and—“Move this truck!” she commanded. “I insist that you move this truck right this minute!”
Hey, wait for me!
—and they were off. Miriam held fast to the door handle, barking directions at the back of Wallace’s head. The green fields rushed past the window. The air was in her face. She was filled with a fierce joy, the joy of combat, of movement and action, her only thought to seize the initiative, catch Frank unawares, bring him to his knees. But when they arrived at the back entrance five minutes later, she had her second surprise: Frank had blocked the road with one of the farm trucks and there were three more men, men she didn’t recognize, standing before it with their caps pulled low and their arms crossed in a display of pugnacity. And obtuseness. And hatefulness. And, and—“Move this truck!” she commanded. “I insist that you move this truck right this minute!”
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