The Women (54 page)
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.
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,
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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.
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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.
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?”
She couldn’t abide that moment, couldn’t live through it and keep her sanity—because if it was true, and she was testing him, pressing him, forcing him out into the open—she’d kill herself. Shriek till the shingles fell off the house and run howling down the street to throw herself into the lake and stay there, deep down, till there was no trace of her left.
“You’re a foolish woman, Kitty. No—you’re delusional. That’s what you are: delusional.”
“Why? Because I expect my husband to love me or at least live up to his vows? Is that delusional? Is it?”
But he didn’t answer her. He just turned his back on her and strode down the passage and into his studio that was all lit up like the break of day.
Nothing changed as the summer wore on and then school started up again and the weather turned abruptly damp. To keep herself occupied she started a kindergarten at the house, a development which only seemed to alienate Frank further, as if the exuberance—and sweetness, sweetness too—of a dozen young children for a few hours a day would annihilate his creativity and drive him penniless into the street. It was early October, the leaves beginning to turn, a smell of smoke on the air, when she heard the news that Mamah had taken John and Martha away with her and gone off to Colorado to nurse a friend who was gravely ill—or at least ill enough to be in need of nursing. They’d gone sometime over the summer, apparently, and hadn’t come back for the start of school. Kitty didn’t know the friend, didn’t wish her ill or good or anything else, but she felt nothing but relief. Mamah was gone. The threat was past. And Edwin—she must have broken with Edwin, that was the only explanation, the story of the sick friend nothing more than a ruse. Or maybe not. Maybe it was legitimate. But in any case—and the thought lifted her like a sweet fresh breeze blowing all the way across the sodden plains from the painted peaks of the Rockies—Mamah was no more. Let Colorado keep her. Let her preach free love to the ranch hands and lasso all the husbands in the state right out of their saddles. Let her be a cowgirl. Let her wither.
Still, something wasn’t quite right. She’d had it out with Frank—he said he’d never let go of Mamah, that he wanted a divorce, that their marriage was a sham and worse, a form of slavery—but she hadn’t given in to him and he was still living under her roof and going about his business, even if his smile had died and he looked ten years older. He was grieving, that was what it was. So much the worse for him. He would get over it. And she would take him back to her heart and her bed, magnanimous and loving, a true wife, so that in time he would be transfigured into a semblance of his old self and everything would go on as before.
Was she delusional? He announced at dinner one evening that he was going into Chicago on business in the morning—he’d stay over a few days—and she didn’t think a thing of it, beyond the fact that he was taking a suitcase with him and a raft of his prints to sell (could it be that he was actually going to pay off the grocery bill?) or that Union Station was an infestation of tracks that could have taken him anywhere—west, even, to Colorado. It was nothing. He put in more miles than a traveling man. He was in Chicago half the time as it was—and he ran off to South Bend, Buffalo, Rochester, Madison, Mason City, anyplace his clients could be found. He’d even drawn up plans for a house in California.
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Delusional. Yes, she was delusional. She didn’t see anything in his face that morning but a kind of numbness, and when he didn’t call, didn’t telegram, even from New York or the steamer that would take him across the Atlantic to Germany, she still couldn’t seem to get a grasp on the situation, not till the reporters began to knock at the door and the grocer and the tailor and the liveryman crowded in behind.
CHAPTER 2: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, MEINE KINDER
A
t first, Mamah couldn
’
t seem to lift her head from the pillow. She felt as if she were paralyzed from the neck down, strapped to the mattress like one of those ragged howling women in the madhouse, buried under an avalanche, a rockslide, the deepest waters of the deepest sea. If the house had suddenly gone up in flames she couldn’t have moved, not to save her own life or Martha’s or John’s either. It must have been late in the afternoon now, judging from the light, and she’d been lying here through the stations of the sun since it rose up blazing out of the dun slab of the mountains and all the yellow-leafed poplars or aspens or whatever they were started to jump and twist in the breeze. She’d slept and dreamed and woken, the cycle repeating over and again, but nothing had changed. Julia
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was dead and the baby dead too, and she hadn’t been spared the bloody sheets and the hopeless frantic pacing of the hour before dawn or the look in the eyes of the doctor with his masked face and invisible mouth.
t first, Mamah couldn
’
t seem to lift her head from the pillow. She felt as if she were paralyzed from the neck down, strapped to the mattress like one of those ragged howling women in the madhouse, buried under an avalanche, a rockslide, the deepest waters of the deepest sea. If the house had suddenly gone up in flames she couldn’t have moved, not to save her own life or Martha’s or John’s either. It must have been late in the afternoon now, judging from the light, and she’d been lying here through the stations of the sun since it rose up blazing out of the dun slab of the mountains and all the yellow-leafed poplars or aspens or whatever they were started to jump and twist in the breeze. She’d slept and dreamed and woken, the cycle repeating over and again, but nothing had changed. Julia
143
was dead and the baby dead too, and she hadn’t been spared the bloody sheets and the hopeless frantic pacing of the hour before dawn or the look in the eyes of the doctor with his masked face and invisible mouth.
She could hear the house settling in around her as the sun poised a moment on the fulcrum of the tallest mountain and then flickered out, the dry cold of elevation settling into the walls, the roof, the resisting panels of the windows. Soon it would be dark and then she’d have the night to lie through and another day after that. And what about the children? They would have been home from school by now—Julia’s Teddy and Joe and her own son—but the maids would have seen to them, Julia’s boys especially. And the husband. It came to her then that she was alone in the house with the husband, a man she’d never liked, a man like Edwin, closemouthed and inexpressive, as if to think and feel and reconnoiter the soul were a violation of some manly vow, as if to be insensate were the key to life. Well, she wasn’t insensate. She was alive. And she’d come here to get away from a man with no more feeling than a stone and to be with Julia, her dearest friend, a graceful high-spirited woman in the prime of life whose last pregnancy had been such a trial and who needed someone to be with, to laugh with, to feel with, and was it a surprise that in these last months she’d felt at home, truly at home, for the first time in years?
And now Julia was dead and she was a stranger in another man’s house.
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