The Women (21 page)
She was in the kitchen brewing a pot of tea one morning, Frank at work in his makeshift study on the pages he would dictate that evening to Mrs. Devine, the stenographer, the baby asleep, Svetlana playing some sort of game in the canoe (which was firmly tethered to the dock and under no circumstances to be untethered—or paddled—without an adult present) and Viola busy at the stove, when a man in his thirties with a high vegetal crown of yellowish hair came up the back steps and entered the house without knocking. Before she had a chance to protest or even open her mouth, he was holding out his hand to her, simultaneously apologizing for the intrusion and introducing himself. “I’m Mrs. Simpson’s son?”
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he said, making a question of it. “And I’m so sorry to bother you, but I happened to be out from Minneapolis for the day—I’m an attorney, I don’t know if my mother told you?—and I was just, uh, well, I mislaid my fishingpole and I had an appointment to go fishing this afternoon with one of my clients. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind? I’m sure it’s in the attic.”
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he said, making a question of it. “And I’m so sorry to bother you, but I happened to be out from Minneapolis for the day—I’m an attorney, I don’t know if my mother told you?—and I was just, uh, well, I mislaid my fishingpole and I had an appointment to go fishing this afternoon with one of my clients. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind? I’m sure it’s in the attic.”
He had an eager look to him, as if he were a boy still—tall enough to graze the doorframe but without the excess flesh so many men put on as they drift into middle age, his face as bland as a fried egg and his eyes unwavering and clear—so that the request carried with it an automatic stamp of plausibility. He’d lived here, grown up in the house. His fishing apparatus was in the attic. What could be more reasonable?
“Oh, I’m sorry, hello, Viola,” he said, addressing the cook before Olgivanna could muster a reply. “I didn’t see you there. Are you well?”
“Yes, Jimmy. Very well, thank you. And your mother?”
A glance for Olgivanna, just to see how far he could go. “She’s enjoying her vacation—thanks to you, Mrs. Richardson. She went up Duluth way to visit with my aunt, but you know Mama, Viola, she’s back with me and my wife now—and just loving looking after Buddy and Katrina.”
Frank must have heard the male voice echoing round the kitchen because he came out of his study then, looking neutral—not alarmed, not yet—and said, “Well, well, who do we have here? Is it Mrs. Simpson’s son, is that what I hear?”
The man gave a visible start before he recovered himself, his voice rising to a kind of yelp as he moved forward to take Frank’s hand, “Yes sir,” he said. “Jim Simpson, at your service.” And then he explained his errand. “You wouldn’t mind if I just dashed up the stairs—it won’t be a minute. Of course, I didn’t mean to . . . well, I guess I’ve already put you out—”
Frank didn’t demur. He stood there a moment, looking up into the man’s face, trying hard to read him. “You do much fishing, Mr. Simpson? ” he asked finally.
“Oh, yah—but not as much I’d like. You know how it is, busy, busy, busy all the time.”
“And what are you after—pike perch?”
“Yah, mostly.”
“Panfish, I suppose?”
“Yah.”
“Any whitefish in the lake? That’s the fish I prefer”—and he turned to her then—“isn’t it, Anna? Best-eating fish around.”
“Well, you know, Mr.—Richardson, right?—I’m not sure on that. Don’t know if I’ve ever—well, listen, I’ve taken up enough of your time already.”
“Go on ahead,” Frank said, “go get your fishing rod. And I’ll say goodbye to you now, sir.” They shook hands again, as if sealing a bargain. “I’m right in the middle of something,” Frank added, by way of explanation. He winked. Grinned. “Work, you know. No rest for the weary.”
“Or the wicked either. But if you don’t mind my asking, what is it you do?”
“Philately.”
“Stamps? ”
Frank nodded. “That’s right.”
“Well, that must be—interesting, I suppose. Is there a living in it?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
The man shot a glance round the room, showing his teeth in a quick smile. “Well, all right, then, as I say, I don’t want to keep you—”
There was a murmured thank you and then the pounding of feet on the stairs, the slamming of a door, the squeak of hinges—one of those pull-down things, she imagined, with the ladder attached—and then the odd rattle and thump from above. Frank went back into his study without a word. She listened briefly for the baby, glanced out the window to see Svetlana sitting on the dock now, rocking the canoe with her feet, then she poured herself a cup of tea, sat down at the table with the book she’d been reading, and forgot all about Jimmy Simpson until the hinges squeaked again, the door slammed and the footsteps thundered on the stairs. Then he was in the kitchen, his face riding high across the room as if he were carrying it on a platter right on out the door with a holler of “Thank you, Mrs. Richardson” and “See you later, Viola.”
The footsteps retreated across the porch and fell off into a well of silence. “Nice boy,” Olgivanna said, just to say something, but she didn’t feel the truth of it. Just the opposite, in fact. There was something, well,
fishy
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about him. And if she wasn’t mistaken—she couldn’t be sure, he’d gone by so fast—he wasn’t carrying a fishing pole either.
fishy
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about him. And if she wasn’t mistaken—she couldn’t be sure, he’d gone by so fast—he wasn’t carrying a fishing pole either.
“Oh, yah,” Viola returned, “salt of the earth.”
There was a chill in the air that evening—it was the third week of October now, the trees dropping their leaves, geese crying out overhead like lost souls in the ether—and she’d come back from a long walk round the bay to the rich astringent odor of Viola’s sauerbraten and a fire of oak and sweet-scented apple from a windfall tree Frank had cut and stacked earlier in the day. Outside, beyond the windows, the sky was tied up end to end with pink ribbons of cloud under a cold red sunset. Svetlana was busy over a drawing, the baby asleep, Frank in his study. Olgivanna helped Viola with the table, setting out the plates and cutlery, tucking a red-flecked leaf into the fold of each napkin and taking her time over an arrangement of dried flowers and pinecones she’d collected on her walk, a simple thing, but Frank would like it. He was a great one for bringing nature into the house—they’d already made an expedition in the Cadillac to a local farmer for their Halloween pumpkins and the cornstalks to frame them, and practically everything in the place that could serve as a vase sprouted a sprig of cattails or yarrow or Queen Anne’s lace.
As they ate, they watched the lake transmuted from copper to silver to lead, and then the windows began to give back the light of the room and Frank went round the house, turning on the lamps one after the other. Afterward, Mrs. Devine came in to take Frank’s dictation while the cook washed and stacked the dishes and Olgivanna put the children to bed, the baby in the master bedroom and Svetlana on the glassed-in porch. Then she sat by the fire with her knitting—she was making matching caps and scarves for the children in a snowflake pattern she’d devised herself—and listened to Frank’s voice as it rose and dipped through its modulations. She loved listening to him, even when he backtracked to correct himself or when he lost his patience and began wisecracking or broke into song, because he was telling a story, his own story, the narrative of his boyhood when he was sent to his Uncle James’ farm each summer to labor from dawn to dusk. “ ‘Whosoever would sow must hoe,’ ” he dictated in his strong clear tones, then paused to glance over his spectacles. “Paragraph break. And continue: ‘And if he who hoes would reap—he must weed.’ ”
It was ten o’clock, Mrs. Devine stifling a series of yawns, Frank as indefatigable as ever, the wind up in the trees and the clock on the mantel-piece announcing the hour in a sleepy repetitive drone, when there was a knock at the kitchen door. The first thing that came into Olgivanna’s head was Mrs. Simpson’s son—was he returning the fishing pole? Still looking for it? But then she glanced at Frank and went cold. He’d come up out of his chair so fast the pages of his notes looped away from him to spill at his feet and he stood poised there, every fiber of him straining toward the kitchen, where Viola, in carpet slippers and a gray cardigan buttoned up over the glossy floral print of her dress, rose heavily to answer the door.
A man’s voice carried in out of the night—“Is Mr. Richardson at home?”—and Viola, innocent of everything, murmured, “Yes, I believe he is.”
In the next instant half a dozen men in hats and overcoats shouldered their way into the room even as Frank took a step back as if he were uncertain on his feet, and Olgivanna saw the fear in his eyes, real fear, for the first time since she’d known him. The room filled. There were more men in the kitchen, on the porch. Their faces were tight and waxen as they blinked against the light and they brought a smell with them, a harsh odor of the night, the primeval mud on their shoes, cigar smoke. Mrs. Devine, the stenographer, let out a gasp so sharp and sudden it was as if someone had punctured a tire. And all Olgivanna could think was
We’re the Richardsons, that’s all, just the Richardsons. We’re nobody. We’re harmless. They can’t touch us.
We’re the Richardsons, that’s all, just the Richardsons. We’re nobody. We’re harmless. They can’t touch us.
“You’re all under arrest!” one of them shouted, the one in the middle, with the massive jaw and the brutal shining oversized boots and the eyes that chewed up and spat out everything in the room, and she saw that he was brandishing a badge. There was another one beside her, crowding her, breathing his beer or whiskey or whatever it was right in her face—and somehow she seemed to have gotten up out of her chair without being aware of it, the baby’s cap dangling by a thread from one hand, the other at the collar of her dress, the sudden assault scrambling her senses, strangers, hateful strangers right there in her house as if she were under the whip of the Cheka, as if she were in Russia still and all the rest had been a dream.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Frank snapped, trying to brave it out. “On what charges? And what do you mean bursting in here like this?”
It was then that another man shoved his way into the room, a jowly tall looming presence in a tan overcoat that fanned out behind him like an Indian blanket. “Well, here they are,” he bellowed, “—at last. Now, where’s the kid?” And then, before anyone could stop him, he jerked open the bedroom door and burst in on Iovanna with a shout. “Yeah, here it is, in here, the baby!”
That was when Frank made a move for him and the big one, the sheriff, took hold of him—“No violence now,” he said, “and you come quietly”—and Frank said, “Get that man out of there or I’ll—”
And suddenly she was moving, forcing her way into the bedroom even as the man in the tan overcoat snatched the blankets off Pussy and Pussy’s eyes flashed open on the ugly brutal slab of his face and she let out the first startled cry—he was the lawyer, Miriam’s lawyer, that was who he was, and for Olgivanna the realization was incendiary. She shoved him aside, actually shoved him, and in the next instant she had the baby pressed to her and she was the one who was shouting now. “You get out of here! You have no right! You stop this, this persecution!”
But he wasn’t listening because he was already reeling back through the door, drunk with the imprimatur of authority, crying out in a towering voice, “Now, where’s the other one, where’s Hinzenberg’s kid?”
The rest was chaos, Svetlana dragged in off the porch by some flat-faced goon, shocked out of her sleep and crying aloud in a series of ascending whoops, Pussy shrieking in counterpoint with all the shearing power of her developing lungs and Frank wrestling with the men at the door while the stenographer and cook looked on in horror and bewilderment. And worse: distaste. In all the confusion and the wrestling back and forth, the look Viola gave her came closest to breaking her down—and she wasn’t going to give way to tears, not now and not ever, because she was stronger than that. But here was this mild unremarkable woman who’d shared the house with them for six weeks now, day in and day out, their intimate, trusted and trusting, and her eyes showed nothing but contempt. It was as if she’d stepped on a snake while mopping the kitchen floor, taken hold of the broom and had it sprout teeth and bite her, and Olgivanna wanted to explain it all to her, tell her that they’d been forced to live like this, to lie and assume fictive personalities, to cower and hide like criminals when they were innocent, innocent of everything but persecution. Miriam, she wanted to shout, Miriam’s the criminal.
But a man was there at her side and he was telling her that she had to come along—“No!” Frank roared. “Just me, just take me. Let them stay here, under guard if need be, but let them stay!”—and Svetlana broke free then and ran to her, screaming, and Olgivanna lost all control. Suddenly it was her voice and her voice alone that every person in that room was hearing. “Enough!” she shouted. “You men should be ashamed. Can you not see that you are terrifying this child—both these children?”
The flat-faced one took a step back. The sheriff loosened his grip on Frank’s arm and Frank jerked it away, indignant, outraged. Both the children gasped for breath and the fire hissed and every man in the room looked down at his shoes.
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