The Women: A Novel Part 15

"Look," she said, bending to Llewellyn, whose hand was sticky in hers, "there's John and Martha. Should we say h.e.l.lo?" 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 plat.i.tudes, 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 pa.s.sageway, 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 la.s.so 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.142 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.

At 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. Julia143 was dead and the baby dead too, and she hadn't been spared the b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

The thought spurred her and she sat up abruptly. The moment of crisis had come. She had to move, act, see to the children. And her bags-she must get her bags packed, because she wouldn't stay here, not another moment. And Frank. She had to telegram to Frank. At the thought of it, of what she would say to him-how she could even begin to tell him what she felt, the shock of the words on the nurse's lips, Julia's blood that couldn't be stanched, a whole wide coursing river of it infusing every towel and sheet and garment till they were stained like the relics of the saints, the stillborn child as twisted and gray as a lump of wax propped against his dead mother's shoulder, the night she'd spent, the fear and hurt and anger-she could feel the grief rising in her till everything shaded to gray and the mountains beyond the window fell away into the void. But she wouldn't cry. She wouldn't. There was no time for that.

The first thing was to change out of her clothes-she was still in the dress she'd worn yesterday-and put something on her stomach. But then she didn't want to ring for one of the maids. The thought of that froze her. If she rang, they'd remember she was here still, they'd come to the door and enter the room and stare at her and speak and nod and put impossible questions to her-did she want soup, a sandwich, b.u.t.ter with her bread, jam?-and she couldn't allow that. And she certainly didn't want to go down to the dining room or the kitchen where she'd be exposed to him or the servants or the relatives who must have gathered by now or anyone else-and she realized, in that moment, that she didn't want to see the children either. The thought of them, John and Martha, with their multiplicity of needs, their wants and fears and the onus that was on her to meliorate whatever they'd been able to glean from the maids when they learned that Teddy and Joe were strictly enjoined from playing and that their own mother was indisposed and not under any circ.u.mstances to be disturbed, made her feel paralyzed all over again. She had a vivid fantasy of slipping out the window, shimmying down the nearest tree and stealing away across the grounds that led to the street into town and the sidewalk that led to the train that led . . . to where?

To Frank. That was where the train led. To Frank.

She unfastened the b.u.t.tons of her dress, pulled it up over her head and dropped it to the floor beside her, then went into the bathroom to run the water in the tub. The tiles were cold under her bare feet. She could smell herself, the dried sweat under her arms and between her legs, the odor of fear and uncertainty. When she reached for the faucet her hand trembled and she saw that and noted it and tried to look at it dispa.s.sionately as if this were someone else's hand, but she couldn't. Why was her hand trembling? she had to ask herself. Because of Julia? Because life had failed her and the shock of that was so insupportable she could scarcely stand to go on living herself? Because she couldn't stay here and couldn't go back to Edwin? Or was it something else, something she couldn't name, the dark climactic moment of her life clawing for release? She twisted off the faucet and stood up. What was she thinking? She had no time for a bath. A bath was insane, ludicrous. The indulgence of a woman who couldn't make up her mind.

She stepped out of her undergarments and sponged herself quickly, not daring to look into the mirror for fear of seeing someone else there, someone who would comfort the children and wait out the funeral, linger over her feelings as if they were beads on a rosary, subsume herself in someone else. Order flowers. Hide behind a black veil. That sort of person. As she dressed and began folding her clothes and arranging them in the suitcase, she was composing the telegram to Edwin in her mind-and the letter that would follow. Julia's dead, Edwin. Or no: There has been a terrible tragedy. Julia died in childbirth. I cannot remain here in this house one minute longer. It is too painful. Come for the children on the next train. Your wife.

When the suitcase was packed, she put on her hat and coat and went to the door to peer out into the hallway. Julia's husband had made his fortune in silver-he had his own mining company somewhere off in those labyrinthine mountains144-and the house was a testament to his parvenu yearnings, a great rambling cloyingly decorated Queen Anne with twenty bedrooms and a congeries of shadowy hallways. It was the ant.i.thesis of what Frank had achieved in her own house, and she'd always loathed it. Until now. Now it was just the thing, dim lights in sconces creeping along the walls, staircases to nowhere, a subterranean feel to the hallways as if the architect were trying to replicate the tunnels of the mines themselves. There was no one in the hall. All was quiet.

The children's room was on the second floor, just below hers. They would have had their dinner by this time and on an ordinary evening they might have been in the parlor, playing at games round the fire, reading, drawing, but with the house thrust into mourning, chances were they'd be in their room. It was getting dark, and in any case John wasn't especially enthusiastic about the outdoors and Martha was too little yet to be without supervision, which was why she'd brought Lucy along to look after them. Lucy would be with them. And they'd be in their room. Martha would already be tucked in and Lucy would be reading her a fairy story while John sat at the miniature desk before the darkened window, sketching, and pretending not to listen. The thought calmed her as she slipped down the staircase, her ears attuned to the slightest sound-there were whisperings, a door slammed somewhere-and made her way up the hall to the children's room.

To this point, she'd pushed herself forward, not daring to think beyond the impetus of the moment and the idee fixe that had taken hold of her, but now, her hand on the doork.n.o.b, she hesitated. For a long moment she stood there, listening, until Lucy's voice came to her in the soft undulating murmur of storytelling. There was a pause, then Martha's voice, a half-formed squeak of interrogation. Mamah pictured her, her daughter, not yet four and right there on the other side of the door, five seconds away from her arms, her miniature face pinched in concentration-Why? she always wanted to know. Why do they live in a shoe? Why did the blackbirds? Why?-and felt herself giving way. She was a disgrace as a mother, heartless, a failure, worse than any evil stepmother in any of the tales the Brothers Grimm could conceive. She was going away. Deserting her own children. Leaving them here, in this death-stricken house, with an Irish maid who wasn't much older than a child herself.

Very carefully, so as not to make the slightest sound, she set down the suitcase and positioned it flat to the wall just out of sight of the door. Lucy's voice went on, rich and sonorous, the sweetest sound in the world, the sound of comfort and security, maternal-maternal-and what was wrong with her? Why couldn't she push open the door and take her rightful place there with her children? Because she didn't love Edwin, that was why. Because she'd married him on the eve of the great precipice that marked her thirtieth birthday, even as both her parents had pa.s.sed on that very year and he stepped back into her life and she thought she could bury herself in the ordinary and never know the difference. But Ellen Key knew the difference. Ellen Key, whom she knew by heart because Ellen Key was the true light and liberator and wisdom of the world and she was translating her work into English so that all women in America could know her and follow her to their own release. No one should live in a doll's house, no one. And if a woman becomes a mother without knowing the full height of her being in love, she feels it as a degradation; for neither child nor marriage nor love are enough for her, only great love satisfies her. And where was that great love? Where was that soul mate? In Oak Park. Waiting for her.

John said something then, his voice twining with Lucy's to make a song of the story, the nursery rhyme he'd grown beyond, and his tone was mocking and impatient, though he was listening, listening still, the colored pencil arrested in his hand. And Martha spoke up-Why?-but the door was thick, solid parvenu mahogany, and she couldn't hear the substance or the answer either. Just the murmur of it. Guiltily, shamefully, she withdrew her hand and examined the pale flesh and the scorings of her palm a moment in the dim subterranean light. It wasn't trembling. Not anymore. Her hand was as steady and decisive as any killer's, any woodcutter's with his axe poised over the belly of the wolf or witch's with the oven ablaze, and it went to the handle of the suitcase even as she whispered her valediction in the new language, the language of heroism and sacrifice, and slipped away down the hall.

The sky hadn't yet gone fully dark-it was a deep glowing tincture of cobalt shading to black in the east, a western sky, poked through with the glittering holes of the stars-but the grounds were dense with shadow. No one had seen her in the back hallway, though every time she heard a foot-step or one of the servants' voices she froze in place. She had no desire to have to contrive explanations-she was beyond explanations now-and the suitcase would have given her away regardless. There was a moment at the back door when she thought all was lost, the housekeeper swinging through the kitchen doors with a tray of cut sandwiches and tea things for the husband and whatever mourners had gathered in the parlor, but she managed to duck behind one of the ma.s.sive highboys along the wall till the woman, preoccupied with the tray and already garbed in funereal black, pa.s.sed on by. Then it was a quick dash for the door and out into the gathering night.

A motorcar and two carriages stood in the drive and she gave them a wide berth, though it wouldn't have mattered if the drivers had seen her. She was nothing to them-an anonymous woman with a suitcase, wrapped in her best coat and with her face shaded by the brim of her hat, bisecting the drive behind them and stepping out into the street. Her plan, and she was formulating it even as she shifted the weight of the suitcase from one hand to the other, was to go to the hotel and see if there was a car there to take her into Denver. From Denver she could catch a train east, to Chicago-and Frank would be there at the station to sweep her up in his arms. He'd have a suitcase with him too, and he'd board the train with the mob of pa.s.sengers and ride with her through the hills and stubblefields of Indiana and Ohio and upstate New York, all the way down along the Hudson to Manhattan. They'd find a boat there, a great high-crowned steamer rising up out of the tide at one of the piers on the lower West Side, a boat to Bremen, and once they reached German soil they'd board a train to Berlin, where he was to meet with Herr Was.m.u.th to prepare his portfolio for publication and spread his fame throughout Europe. That was what they'd talked about, time and again: Berlin. And here it was, right before them.

She held that image, sidestepping the ruts of the street and pa.s.sing from light to darkness beneath the streetlights as a wind off the mountains ruffled the collar of her coat: the two of them, together, turning their backs on all these . . . complications. If he was willing, that is. If he was brave enough. If he loved her the way he said he did. She was afraid for a moment-she was risking everything, every sort of censure and embarra.s.sment, and what if he stalled? What if he wouldn't stand up and do what he had to? What if he couldn't raise the money? What if Kitty's hold on him was stronger than she'd supposed? But no, no, none of that mattered. And if it did, it was too late now. She hurried down the street, feeling like a fugitive.

She stopped at the telegraph office to wire Edwin about the children and she forced herself to be cold and precise and to think of nothing but the matter at hand, and then she wired Frank. She told him she was coming. That everything they'd dreamed of in their letters was unfolding before them. That she was his. And that the time had come to prove that he was hers in return. Then she found a man to take her into Denver and when she got to Denver she bought a one-way ticket to New York via Omaha, Burlington, Chicago, Elkhart, Cleveland, Buffalo and Albany, and settled herself in at the station to wait.

It was just past nine in the evening and the station was all but deserted. She looked up at the lunar face of the clock and watched the second hand creep round, tick by tick, as if reluctant to let go of each of the hash marks in turn, her mind accelerating far beyond it, expanding in ever-widening coils that spiraled from one subject to another even as her stomach contracted round a shriveled nugget of fear and excitement. And hunger. Because she hadn't eaten. Couldn't eat. Didn't have the stomach or the time. The clock crawled. There was a woman standing at the ticket window clutching the hand of a girl of Martha's age. Two men, dressed identically in cheap gray suits, sat on the high-backed bench across from hers, cradling their hats in their laps and surrept.i.tiously studying her. One of them absently stroked the nap of his hat as if it were a kitten, and what was he-a Pinkerton? A dry-goods man? A husband deserting his wife?

She had an hour and a half till the train came-or was scheduled to come-and she couldn't settle herself, couldn't stop the racing of her mind and the propulsive beat of her heart, and she wouldn't be able to relax or even think properly till the porter led her to her compartment and she shut herself in. She gazed beyond the two men to the doors leading to the street, half-expecting Lucy to burst in with the children on either side of her, all three of them sobbing aloud and imploring her to stay. Or Julia's husband. Or the sheriff. Wasn't she breaking some sort of law? She must have been.

Finally, just to do something, to distract herself, to rise up off the bench where it seemed she'd spent her entire lifetime though she saw with a sinking feeling that it had been no more than five minutes, she decided to go into the restaurant. She felt the eyes of the two men on her all the way across the expanse of the marble floor, her footsteps echoing in her ears like gunshots, each step a cry for solace, and then she was pushing through the door and into the restaurant. Which was a cavernous place, poorly lit. At first she couldn't see much beyond the door, but then a waiter emerged from the gloom and showed her to a table backed up against the wall. A scattering of people, mostly men, were seated at the other tables, drinking and gnawing away at sandwiches and chops, and a couple-middle-aged, gaudily dressed-were grinning at each other amidst a clutter of plates and sauce bottles at the table across from hers. Everyone looked up as she came in and set her suitcase down beside her, and the drama of the moment both shamed and exhilarated her. She wasn't used to going out in public alone. She'd always had Edwin there, breathing propriety at her side, the children shielding her, Frank strutting up and down as if he owned every square inch of every place he stepped into. Now she was on her own.

She'd thought she might have a cup of tea and a bun perhaps, but once she was seated and looking over the menu, she realized how hungry she was. The waiter set down a plate of celery and olives, then a basket of bread with b.u.t.ter. She dispatched it all without thinking and then ordered a steak, medium-rare, with fried potatoes, a vegetable medley and a green salad with Roquefort dressing. Did she care for anything to drink? Beer, perhaps? A gla.s.s of wine?

The waiter-a man in middle age with a paunch swelling against the b.u.t.tons of his jacket and hair that looked as if it had been barbered in the dark-stood over her. He was dressed in a well-worn and faintly greasy suit he might have borrowed from an undertaker and he was giving her a knowing, even insolent look, as if he knew all about her, as if every night married women who were deserting their children to run off with their lovers paraded before him, one after the other, drinking deeply to deaden their thoughts and the guilt that weighed them down like a leaden jacket. She held his eyes-she wouldn't be intimidated. The man was an oaf, a servant, no one she'd seen before or would ever see again. "Wine," she said. "A bottle of Moselle."

She'd learned to appreciate wine the first time she'd gone to Europe, on her honeymoon, when she and Edwin had toured Germany, and while she was hardly a sophisticate, she knew enough to rely on the German wines with which she was familiar. And this one, as cool and cleansing as the issue of an alpine spring, had an immediate effect on her, taking the tenseness from her shoulders and warming her where she was coldest, in her heart. And if she was a woman drinking alone in a public place, what of it? She was independent, wasn't she? Would Ellen Key have thought twice about it? Or any European woman, for that matter? She was having wine with her meal, absolved of guilt, worry, the panic that had gripped her earlier, and she cut her meat and tipped back her gla.s.s and never once dropped her eyes. Let them look at her. Let them have a good look. Because soon she would be on the train, hurtling through the night, and all this would be behind her.

When the train pulled into the station at Chicago, Frank was waiting for her on the platform. Despite herself, despite the wine and the gentle swaying of the compartment and the purely positive and loving thoughts she'd struggled to summon, she'd spent a restless night and a day that enervated her with a thousand pinp.r.i.c.ks of conscience and uncertainty, and when she saw him there, st.u.r.dy and shining and undeniable, she felt the relief wash over her. They would be together now and tonight she would sleep the sleep of the possessed, her skin pressed to his so that every cell and pore of her could drink him in from head to toe . . . The brakes hissed. The station rocked and steadied itself. She caught his eye then and he gave her his world-conquering grin and started across the platform for her and she was so overcome with the tumult of her feelings that it took her a moment to realize that his hands were empty.

He didn't take her in his arms-there was no telling who might be watching, she understood that-but he seemed so stiff and formal she very nearly lost her nerve. "Mamah," was all he said and then she felt his hand at her elbow and he was guiding her through the crush of people, down a corridor and into an office of some sort, a single room with desk and filing cabinets and a fan fixed overhead, and she realized with a start that he must have hired the room for an hour so that they could have a private interview. But why? Why didn't he have a suitcase with him? Why hadn't he boarded the train with her?

He shut the door behind her and she felt afraid suddenly, certain he was going to deny her, construct a wall of excuses, abandon her as she'd abandoned Edwin and her own motherless children. "Frank, what is it?" she demanded, breathless now, her blood surging with the chemical sting of panic, iodine running through her veins, acid, liquid fire. "Where's your suitcase? What's going on?"

"It's all right," he said, pulling her to him. He kissed her. Held her so tightly she could barely breathe. "I just need more time, that's all, just two days, three at the most-to, to raise the money. Good G.o.d, this is all so sudden . . ."

She held to him, her chin resting on his shoulder, the smell of him-of his hair, his clothes, the body she knew so well-working on her like a tranquilizer. She trusted him. Absolutely. He was hers, she was his. But still, she pulled back. "Sudden? We've been talking about this for a year now and more. I left Edwin in June."

"Your telegram, I mean. I've been-I was, well, since you telegrammed all I've done is run from one place to another, selling prints, soliciting clients for advance funds, trying to do something, anything, with the projects on the boards. I need more time, that's all."145 She softened momentarily, then hardened all over again. "And what of me? What am I to do?"

"Go on to New York as planned. There's a hotel there I know-I've already reserved rooms. And I've booked pa.s.sage for two on the Deutsch-land for Friday. Don't worry. Don't worry about anything-I'll be there as soon as I can. Do you need money?"

"Yes," she said, "yes, I do," and the implications roared in her ears with all the opprobrium of a cheap novel, and what did that make her, a woman who takes money in exchange for her favor?

"Here," he said, and he opened his wallet to her and they kissed till she felt the rigid heat of him ready to run right up inside of her and then he was sitting with her in her compartment on the train, holding her hand in his, and the conductor gave his shout and Frank stepped back on the platform and waved at the gla.s.s as the wheels jerked and the station fell away behind her.

If there was a moment that made it all worthwhile, a single moment she might have captured with a photograph and pressed into an alb.u.m of memories, it was when she stepped through the door of the stateroom high out over the roiling sun-coppered waters of the Hudson and saw him standing there, his arms open wide to receive her. He'd kept her waiting three days in that hotel in New York and she'd never left the room, not once, for fear of discovery. Her thoughts had weighed on her. She missed the children. She slept poorly. Edwin would have been back in Oak Park by that point and the alarm would have gone up, every gossip and scandalmonger in town putting two and two together, and would he send a detective out after her? Would he be that petty, that vindictive? Even Kitty, poor dull Kitty, must have known the truth by now. And, of course, though Frank had come to her the night before, they were constrained to go aboard separately-to take separate taxis even-so as not to show their hand. She'd been in a state all morning, everyone she laid eyes on a potential betrayer, the desk clerk, the doorman who showed her to the cab, the driver himself, and she felt all but naked as she stood there on the pier waiting for them to see to her luggage before she could go up the gangplank and vanish amidst the crowd. Until she was there, until she felt the ship plunge and rise majestically beneath her feet, she kept bracing for the moment that someone would shout, There she is! The deserter! The adulteress! Stop her!

Frank had decorated the room, flowers everywhere, pottery, a selection of his j.a.panese prints propped artfully in the corners. She saw the sunlight caught in the portholes as if in a private universe, the scent of the flowers supercharging her senses, the geisha in their elaborate robes smiling benevolently on her from the confines of their frames and Mount Fuji, distant and white-clad,146 lending its aura of solidity to the delirium of happiness that washed over her. "There's no stopping us now," Frank said, his smile widening. He s.n.a.t.c.hed her arm before she could think and whirled her round the room to the strains of an imaginary orchestra, all the while humming in her ear. Then he showed off the appointments as if he'd designed them himself, fretted over her as she put her things away, insisted on a promenade of the decks while the horn sounded and the ship pulled back from the pier and the gulls rode a fresh breeze out over the river. "And let's eat," he cried. "Let's have a feast to celebrate. Anything, anything your heart desires. Because this is the first day of all the days to come, the first day of freedom to do as we please. Isn't it grand?"

And she felt it too, thinking of Goethe, the translation she'd been making for him as the hours ground themselves out like cinders in that lonely hotel room, Faust, thinking of Faust: " 'Call it happiness!' " she recited, holding tight to his arm, " 'Heart! Love! G.o.d! / I have no name / For it! Feeling is everything!' "

And it was, till the second day out when Frank turned the color of liverwurst and couldn't get out of bed. "I'll never make a pirate," he told her, his voice faint and throttled. She watched him hang dazed over an enameled pan, his stomach heaving, watched him contort his limbs and walk shakily to the toilet, watched him sleep and groan and pull the blankets up over his head as if he could hide away from the pitch and yaw of the heavy seas that blew up around them for the entire two weeks of the journey. She sat by him all the while, nursing him, reading aloud, drilling him on basic German phrases-Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch; Ein Tisch fur twei, bitte; Moment! Es fehlt ein Handkoffer!-and he was utterly childlike, like John when he had the grippe, like Martha. He would take broth only. He was always cold, wrapped miserably in his blankets. He complainedincessantly. Edwin-that stone, that block-was like an admiral compared to him. But none of that mattered, because feeling was all and Frank was a repository of feeling, a bank of feeling, fully invested. She read to him till the words went numb on her tongue, she laid a wet compress on his brow, ma.s.saged his shoulders and the cramped tight muscles of his calves. He was miserable, but she was strong and each day getting stronger.

When they arrived in Bremen, he recovered himself. He ate so much in one sitting-dumplings, Spatzle, Sauerbraten, Schmierkase, pickles and kraut and rich thick slices of pumpernickel slathered with b.u.t.ter-she thought he would burst. By the time they got to Berlin, he was his old self, prancing at her side, his cane twirling and the tails of his cape flapping in the brisk breeze he generated all on his own, and when they entered the Hotel Adlon on Unter den Linden, everyone turned to stare as if the Chancellor himself had arrived. He strode up to the desk, pulling her along in his wake, spun the register round with a flourish, and in his slashing geometric hand signed Frank Lloyd Wright and Wife without thinking twice about it.

CHAPTER 3: THE SOUL OF HONOR.

That it had to have been one of the children who answered the door-Catherine, with her young lady's poise and eagerness, expecting good news, a letter from her father, a parcel she'd sent away for, a friend from school come to gossip over the boys-only made the situation all the worse. "Mama," Catherine had called, making her way through the house to the kitchen. "Mama, there's a man here to see you. Says he's from the Tribune."

She'd been busy with dinner, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the roast, mashing potatoes, peeling carrots and onions and running from the icebox to the sink and stove and back again, and she was in her housedress and ap.r.o.n, her hair pinned up hastily to keep it out of her way. She wasn't expecting guests. Certainly not a stranger. And certainly not a man from the newspaper.

"What does he want? It's not the subscription, is it?" And then, as if she were talking to herself, "Are we behind on that too?"

Catherine stood in the doorway, an expectant look on her face. She shrugged. "He didn't say."

Kitty looked at her for a long moment, her daughter leaning against the doorjamb now, insouciant, pretty, with her mother's eyes and her father's stature, in her school clothes still, a ribbon in her hair, the locket at her throat catching the last fading streak of sunlight through the window. She was fifteen years old, almost sixteen-nearly as old as she'd been when she met Frank. The thought arrested her a moment, made her feel nostalgic and protective all at once, and then Frank was ringing in her thoughts like a tocsin. Was it Frank? Was this about Frank?

The man was waiting for her in the entranceway, just inside the door. He was in his twenties or perhaps early thirties, in an ill-fitting suit in some sort of checked pattern, and his tie was sloppily knotted. He gave her the smile of a small child presented with a rare gift. "Mrs. Wright?" he said.

"Yes," she answered, giving him a puzzled look in return. And though she had a premonition that whatever he wanted would be unwelcome-she could see it in his eyes, a flutter of superiority, as if he knew something she didn't-she heard herself say, "Won't you come in?" She led him to the inglenook and the fire laid there. The light was dulling outside. A wind scattered leaves across the yellowed remnants of the lawn. It was November seventh, a date she would never in all her life forget.

"Well," he said, moving forward to warm his hands over the fire while she stood there rigid and Catherine edged into the room, lifting her eyebrows in consternation, "I don't want but a minute of your time." He extracted a notepad and pencil from his pocket and turned to her. "My name is Adler, Frederick Adler, and I'm from the Tribune." He paused a moment to let the weight of the a.s.sociation sink in. "And I was just curious-we were; that is, my editors and I-if you had anything to say. For the record, that is."147 "To say?" she echoed. "Concerning what?"

"Your husband."

The smallest tick of unease began a.s.serting itself somewhere deep inside her. She felt a vein pulse at her throat. "My husband? What about him?" And then-she couldn't help herself-she made a leap of intuition and knew that he was dead. Or injured. Gravely injured. She saw the crushed bone, blood on the pavement. Her eyes jumped to her daughter's. "He isn't-?"

The man's expression hardened. "Is he at home?"

"Why, no. He's away on business. Has been these past . . . why, is anything the matter?"

"No," he said, "no, nothing at all," and Catherine, poor Catherine, gave her a look that made her feel as if she were being roasted over the coals by a party of savages with bones stuck through their noses. "I was just hoping for some"-and here he reached into the folds of his coat and extracted a newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, and handed it to her as if it were a copy of the Bible to swear on before the judge-"clarification."

The headline screamed at her, mute letters, black and white, but screaming all the same, loud as the siren at the firehouse: ARCHITECT WRIGHT IN BERLIN HOTEL WITH AFFINITY. And the subheading, in a louder pitch yet: Mrs. Cheney Registered as Wife.

Just then the telephone rang. It was all she could do to hold on to the paper, to keep from dropping it to the floor, flinging it into the fire, shrieking out her rage and hate. "Catherine," she said, struggling to control her voice, "would you please see who that is." And she watched her daughter's every step as she crossed the room, made her way to the telephone in the hall and lifted the receiver. Only when Catherine was gone, when she was out of range-and harm's way too-did Kitty turn back to the reporter. She lifted her head even as she unconsciously retreated a step so that her back was to the mantel and the inscription Frank had carved above it, TRUTH IS LIFE,148 because what she was about to say wasn't the truth at all. "Yes," she said, "yes, he wrote us just last week from his publisher, Was.m.u.th Verlag, to say that he would be detained there in Berlin while working up the drawings for his portfolio."

She drew in a breath. The man was scribbling something in his pad, eternal words, her official statement, her testimony. But she wasn't done yet. "Of course," she went on, "there must be some sort of mistake. You see, Mrs. Cheney-she's his client, you know-Mrs. Cheney is in Colorado."

Two days later, the phone ringing so continuously she had to disconnect the wires to keep from going mad and the children slinking about as if they'd been whipped, afraid to show their faces in their own house and as glum and pale and put-upon as she was herself, she agreed to meet with the newspapermen. If only to put an end to the siege they'd laid. They were everywhere, as ubiquitous as flies, a whole host of them swarming over the property no matter how many times she sent the maid out to ask them to leave-she'd glance up from the stove to see some stranger gesticulating from the street, cross the living room and find herself staring into the face of a man waving a notepad and mouthing speeches from the flowerbed. People were peering in at windows and ringing the bell day and night till she thought she would have to disconnect that too just to silence the buzzing in her head.

She'd canceled her kindergarten. Kept her own children out of school to spare them-and that was the cruelest thing. To think that her children had to be sullied in this way was intolerable-how could he have done this to them? How could he have been so selfish? Frances was in tears-the whole cla.s.s was reciting "Hiawatha" and the teacher had warned that each of them, no matter how shy or reluctant, had to be present and have his or her lines committed to memory or let the whole group down. "But, Mama, I have to go," she kept insisting. "I have to be Minnehaha. And, and"-she broke down, twelve years old and sobbing her heart out, "Roger McKendrick is Pau-Puk-Keewis!" Catherine's life was disrupted. And John's and David's too, the school abuzz with whispers, and she could picture it all, the cruelty of youth, conversations dying as they entered the room, fingers pointing, eyes s.n.a.t.c.hing at them . . .

But she had to put those thoughts strictly out of mind because the reporters were gathering downstairs and she wouldn't fall into their trap, she promised herself that. They wanted scandal, they wanted the vituperative housewife, the madwoman scene, but she wasn't going to give it to them. She combed out her hair-and it was her glory still, the color of a new copper penny and without a single streak of gray to tarnish it-and dressed herself in one of the straight-lined gowns with the Dutch collar he'd designed for her, the blue one, to complement her eyes. It was his dress, his mark on her, and she would wear it proudly, modestly, and answer their questions without bitterness or irony. He was her husband and she would defend him, no matter what it cost her.

The bell-the infernal bell-rang and rang again while she dressed and it kept on ringing until Reverend Kehoe came to knock softly at the bedroom door. He'd been kind enough to offer his services as intermediary, greeting the reporters at the front door and leading them austerely down the hallway and into the playroom, the largest public s.p.a.ce in the house and its domestic heart.149 She'd decided on facing them here, rather than the living room or Frank's studio-it was a playroom, after all, devoted to family and built for the children by their loving father, who was no philanderer, no deserter, but a soul led astray by the forces of temptation. Though she was sick at heart and sick in her stomach too-she'd brought up her breakfast not an hour ago-that was the line she was going to take.

She pulled back the door and the reverend stood aside for her. "They're ready for you," he said, his eyes flaring with conviction in the darkness of the hall even as the clerical collar cut a ghostly slash beneath his chin. He was the father of eight, deeply pious, rigid as iron. She'd sat through his dull droning sermons over a decade of Sundays as he picked away at the fine points of biblical exegesis, gave to his charities, attended various stifling teas and bake sales at his behest-or his wife's-and now he was here to repay her. He was a minister of G.o.d and he was going to stand by her side throughout this ordeal, because she had no husband to support her, not any longer. Was this the way it was going to be, living like a widow the rest of her days? Or would Frank tire of Mamah and come back to her? She had a fleeting vision of him bent over a plate of dumplings in some Prussian palace with bear rugs on the floors and stags' heads arrayed over the fireplace, Mamah sipping champagne from a crystal flute and throwing her chin back to laugh her rippling carefree laugh that was calculated to freeze every woman to the core and make every man turn his head.

"Are you quite all right, Catherine? Are you prepared for this?"

"Yes," she said, so softly she wasn't sure if he'd heard her.

"Because we can cancel it. Just say the word and I'll send them all home."

But she had to go through with it, had to do what she could to meliorate the situation, put an end to the rumors and speculation-for her children's sake and her own too. And for Frank's. The children needed to go back to school. She needed to go about her business. And though she felt like an outcast, felt as if she were walking into a public stoning and wanted to be anyplace else in the world, she told him no and strode into that room with her spine straight and her head held high.150 "Mrs. Wright!" one of them called out, but the reverend silenced him with a glare and she wouldn't look at them, so many of them, utter strangers gathered here in the inner sanctum of her house with the sole purpose of destroying her and her family, and they were hateful to her, no better than murderers, all of them. She took a minute to compose herself-whiskers, all she saw was whiskers, a rolling sea of facial hair-and in a clear unflagging voice began reading from the statement she'd spent the better part of the past two days composing.

"My heart is with my husband now," she began. "He will come back as soon as he can. I have a faith in Frank Lloyd Wright that pa.s.seth understanding, perhaps, but I know him as no one else knows him. In this instance he is as innocent of wrongdoing as I am." Was her heart slamming at her ribs like a spoon run round the bottom of a pot? Were they all, to a man, giving her looks of incredulity, distrust even? It didn't matter. Because these were her words and they would report them, that was what they were there for, that was their purpose, their function in life-to report. They'd reported the dirt gleefully enough and now they could report the sweeping clean of it too.

The room was very quiet. One man tamped his pipe against the palm of his hand and made as if to rise and dispose of the ashes in the fireplace, but thought better of it. She glanced to the windows, wishing she could float up across the room and escape like a vapor, but they were shut and locked, dense with a strange trembling light, as if a biblical flood had in-undated Oak Park while she'd been speaking, the silent waters seeping in till they were all of them sunk here forever. Perhaps it was that thought-the thought of water abounding-that made her realize how thirsty she suddenly was. She swallowed involuntarily, swallowed everything, fear, hope, shame, and went on.

She talked about Frank's struggles as a young architect who'd come to Chicago with nothing and become the great man he was through hard work and application, about how his present predicament was simply another b.u.mp along the road, one he was fighting to overcome with all the fierceness of his will. "Frank Wright has never deceived me in all his life," she said, and believed it too, at least in the grip of the moment. "He is honest in everything he does. He is the soul of honor."

There was a silence. She could see that they were all trying to digest this last bit of information, their faces strained and flummoxed. And then they started in with their questions, Reverend Kehoe recognizing first one and then another. "Are you planning to start divorce proceedings?" a man in front wanted to know, and she answered him spontaneously, pa.s.sionately, with real conviction, as if she'd become a convert in the course of these past ten minutes and had never in her life had an untoward thought for her husband. "Whatever I am as a woman," she averred, "aside from my good birth, I owe to the example of my husband. I do not hesitate to confess it. Is it likely then that I should want to commence court action?" And she a.s.sured them that he'd be back once he was able to master himself and win the battle he was now heroically fighting on her behalf and on behalf of his children. And that when he returned-and this she truly believed, the pa.s.sion of the moment aside-all would be as it had been before.

"But what of Mrs. Cheney?" a rangy insolent young man in the rear wanted to know, and who was he? Mr. Adler. The one who'd broken the story and caught her unawares in her own house. Well, she wouldn't be caught twice, that was for certain.

"Yes, what of her?"

"When he comes back-your husband, that is-how will she fit into the picture?"

Here it was: the moment of truth. She could see them all take in a breath. There was a collective flipping back of note pages, a tightening grip on the stubs of pencils. This was what they'd come for.

Mamah, showy Mamah, with her dance hall laugh and high tight girlish figure, rose up and tripped through her consciousness, and she very nearly slipped up, but she didn't. "With regard to Mrs. Cheney," she said, and Reverend Kehoe gave her a sharp glance, which she ignored, "I have striven to put her out of my thoughts. It is simply a force against which we have had to contend. I never felt I breathed the same air with her. It was simply a case of a vampire-you have heard of such things?"