The Women: A Novel Part 6

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, fishy62 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 gla.s.sed-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 repet.i.tive 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 b.u.t.toned 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 n.o.body. We're harmless. They can't touch us.

"You're all under arrest!" one of them shouted, the one in the middle, with the ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sault 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed the blankets off p.u.s.s.y and p.u.s.s.y'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, p.u.s.s.y 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 a.s.sume 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.

"Now," she snapped as if she were shaking out a rug, "we will cooperate, but I want every one of you here to tell this child"-she swung Svetlana around to face them-"that everything is going to be all right. Well? Do you hear me? Is there a man in this room who does not have a little boy or girl at home right now? A niece? A nephew?" She glared at them. "Are you beasts?"

There was a murmur, the rough voices muted, and then it was all right. The sheriff crossed the room to her, removed his hat to reveal a compressed tangle of sweat-soaked hair, and told her he was sorry and that if it was up to him he'd let her stay. "But you have to understand, ma'am, it's my duty to serve the law and these warrants must be answered to." His voice was soft, almost sweet, and for a moment she thought he was going to reach out and pat Svetlana's head. "Now, we'll give you time to gather your things and put aside some clothes for the kids, but they're going to have to go into protective custody, you understand, at least till the morning."

Frank started back in then, his voice high and querulous-"Protective custody? Are you mad? Can't you see these children need their mother? "-and she saw the sheriff 's face harden. It was no use. The mood of the room shifted back to animosity and they took Frank by the arm and then she and the children were in their coats and hats and the door opened on the night and the cold steps of the porch and the hot hard flash of the photographers' cameras.63 There was the night in prison, locked behind bars, a night without the children, without Frank-and they'd planned it this way, Miriam's lawyer and the police and their accomplices in the press, to make the most of Frank's suffering and humiliation, to bring him low-and then there was court and bail and a fresh a.s.sault of the cameras as they came down the steps of the courthouse in Minneapolis. She hadn't slept. Hadn't combed her hair or pressed her clothes or used a tube of lipstick or even brushed her teeth. The jail stank of the animal functions, of the communal toilet and the disinfectant they tried to cover it up with. The other inmates-drunks and prost.i.tutes and morphine addicts, low people, uneducated, unwashed, ragtag and bobtail-moaned and gibbered through the night in a low hopeless drone and all she could think about was the children. Svetlana had been mortally frightened, clinging to her as the matron separated them, and the baby, alive to her sister's distress, never stopped crying all the way down the long corridor and out of sight.

"They'll be all right," the woman kept telling her, "I'll be with them myself all night and I'm sure you'll be out by tomorrow, all of you," but they wouldn't be all right, they'd never be all right, never again. How could they be? They'd been terrorized, brutalized, torn out of bed by strangers and locked away by strangers beyond any reason or justification that even an adult could begin to comprehend. "Mama, what's happening?" Svetlana kept asking her as they wound along the dark roads in the police car, Frank reduced to a shadow in the vehicle ahead of them. "Mama, did Daddy Frank do something bad? Did you? Where are we going? What's happening?"

She had no answer for her-she could only hold her as the car lurched and the baby squirmed and sputtered and the headlights pulled them toward some final climactic panorama of debas.e.m.e.nt and disgrace-and she had no answer for the mob of reporters the next morning either. The arraignment was a public humiliation, no different in kind from what the Puritans had inflicted with their stocks and ducking stools, the whole procedure, from standing before the judge to the release on bail, a shame so deep she could barely breathe. When she pa.s.sed through the courthouse doors and out into the daylight, she was disoriented. The flash blinded her. Her feet were unsteady. "Olga," they shouted as if they knew her, as if they were her friends and intimates, as if they only wanted to help, crowding in on her en ma.s.se like some perverse scrummage. "Olga! Olga!" It was drizzling. The pavement shone. Frank had her by the arm and his lawyers were there, one on either side, trying to shield them both. "Olga! Olga! Will you give us a statement? Frank? Mr. Wright?"

All she wanted was to hide herself away-she, the granddaughter of Marco Milanoff, Montenegro's greatest general and patriot, daughter of Ivan Lazovich, chief justice of Montenegro, and Militza Milanoff, herself a general in the Montenegrin army, transformed into an outcast, a criminal, an adulteress-but Frank paused there on the steps in the rain to tell anyone who wanted to hear how abused he'd been and how contrived these charges were. She shrank. She died. And he talked on while the drizzle thickened and the pencils slipped across the page. She stared at the ground-"Olga! Olga!"-and he held tight to her even as he gestured with one arm and let his voice ride up and down the ladder, and then they were moving again, the reporters and a hundred or more hyenas with nothing better to do sweeping along in a train behind them.

And where were they going? To a place with four walls and a friendly face, clean sheets, a bed with blankets to pull up over their heads for the duration? Some lightless cave a mile down in the earth where no one could get at them ever again? No. They were crossing the street to the munic.i.p.al courthouse to answer the federal charges under the Mann Act because unbeknownst to them they'd been observed driving across the state line at La Crosse-by spies-which action indicated, to the dimness of the law, that Frank had coerced her to his will and that she was an accomplice in his depravity. When she realized what was happening-the spectacle, another flight of steps, another courtroom with another set of pale reproving faces-she felt her legs go weak. She couldn't go on. She couldn't endure it. The shame, the shame. Olga, Olga! But Frank held her up, the doors opened wide, the mob parted and she found herself in the temple of justice once again, heroic statuary rising up before her, fluted columns, marble floors, people turning to stare. Her footsteps echoed off the tiles. Boomed. Shouted out her guilt.

Two men in dark suits intervened then, showing her into a side room off the main corridor despite Levi Bancroft's puffing and hand-wringing-she saw a flag, a desk, half a dozen wooden chairs, but no judge, no spectators, no press-even as two others materialized to lead Frank off in the opposite direction. "Bear up," he called over his shoulder, and he might have told her he loved her, but he was already gone. She clutched her bag to her. Shot a look at the windows and the dark varnished stain of the door at the far end of the room, and the sight of it, of that door, terrified her-it led to another cell, she was sure of it. "We're federal agents, ma'am, and we have a few questions for you," one of the men said, pulling out a chair for her. She held herself rigid while they sat heavily across from her. The one who'd spoken produced a cigarette case and offered it to her, but she wouldn't look at it, wouldn't move. There was the sound of a match striking, then the odor of tobacco, harsh and raw.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. The room was dim, sterile, cold as an icebox. Here were these men, these strangers, who held her by force of compulsion, and they hadn't even thought to turn on the lights or the radiator, and the idea of it, of their indifference, depressed her even further. She wanted her children. She wanted release. But the ritual must play itself out: they were federal agents and she was a fugitive, an undesirable alien, caught in a tangle of lies.

The second man cleared his throat and said, "Let's begin with your name. You are Olga Lazovich?"

"Yes," she said, "yes." And then she bowed her head and in a very soft voice found herself telling them everything, telling them the truth and too much of the truth-"Puerto Rico? Do you mean to say you fled to Puerto Rico and then reentered the country without a visa?"-until it seemed as if she were bound up in her own chains and that nothing, no force of law or mercy or public opinion, could save her.

Another night in the lockup. In the hoosegow. Isn't that what they called it?

Hoosegow64-she chanted it softly to herself through another sleepless night, frantic with worry and chewing over this absurd little degraded excuse of a two-syllable word as if it were a prayer. Hoosegow, hoosegow. It was cold. The single blanket was thin. She began to think she hated Frank-not Miriam, but Frank. Frank was the one who'd got her into this, Frank and Frank alone. Frank had destroyed her. Annihilated her. Brought her to the lowest level of the lowest seep of humanity. She pictured him in his cell somewhere in the other wing of the building, boasting, strutting, keeping up a face for his fellow convicts, the great man, the Master, even in his downfall. And then she began to think she hated herself. Because if she'd been stronger, if she'd resisted him-and Taliesin, the peace and beauty of it, the promise it held out of home, sanctuary, permanence-if she hadn't gone to him on the recoil from Georgei, if she'd only waited, none of this would have happened.

They woke her at dawn with a hard roll and a cup of coffee in a tin cup.

They took her back to the courthouse.

The cameras flashed.

Flashed again.

And then, to her amazement, though she expected the worst-prison, deportation, the loss of the children and Frank too-they set her and Frank free on surety of $15,000 each, supplied by Frank's friends, who had rallied to him. Vlademar, after meeting at length with Frank and his attorneys,65 came to his senses and dropped the adultery complaint and the lawsuit as well. The sheriff of Sauk County was reportedly moving to release them from the charge of being fugitives from justice and the Mann Act charges were being reconsidered in light of the fact that Vlademar, who had furnished only sixty dollars that year toward child support, had stepped down, and it could be seen clearly that she and Frank were living as husband and wife and that Frank was providing for the children. This time there was a car waiting when they came down the courthouse steps. The children were in the backseat. The chauffeur slammed the door on the reporters and they were gone.

One thing remained. And Frank started in on it the minute the car left the curb and wouldn't let it go through the reunion with the children, through lunch and dinner and on into the night, his attorneys chiming in like parrots whenever they had the opportunity. "We're not out of the woods yet," Frank kept saying till the sound of the phrase on his lips made her flinch as if she were being battered with a cudgel carved out of the worn remnants of the language, of English, the English language and all its laws and proprieties, and what was wrong with the woods, anyway? At least it was dark there. And deserted. "And"-with a look to whichever of the lawyers happened to be present-"while public sympathy has definitely swung in our favor, we do need to press our advantage. If Miriam can use the newspapers, so can we. Don't you agree? Isn't it time to tell our side of the story?"

It was the day following their release. She was staying at the home of one of Frank's friends, enjoined from leaving the state of Minnesota until all charges had been cleared. Her head ached, her stomach revolted. When she looked across the room, the intermediate distance seemed to blur and shift shape until nothing was recognizable. She thought of her mother, who'd been so fierce and uncompromising in battle that the Turks swore to bind her between two horses and tear the limbs from her body if they ever got hold of her. That was what she wanted now, two horses to tear her apart. It would be a joy compared to facing the press.

"It won't be a press conference, but just an interview. Right here. Right in this room. And with a single reporter. A female. What do you say?"

She glanced past him to the depths of the room, palm fronds cut like the fingers of a monstrous grasping hand against the glow of the lamplight, the pattern of the Persian rug alternately dilating and shrinking away. She was so exhausted she could hardly form the reply in her head, let alone her throat. The lawyers-barely kempt and battle weary-leaned in. Frank went silent. "No," she breathed.

Frank had been seated beside her, solicitous, gently smoothing a hand over her forearm and wrist, but now he jumped up and began pacing the length of the rug. The light of the overhead lamp saturated his brow and seeped into his eyes so that they seemed like lights themselves, radiant, blistering. He was adamant. He was angry. And she knew what was coming, knew he was going to try to twist her to his point of view. "But all the filth, the lies Miriam's spread-"

Firmer now: "No."

"Yes," Frank said. "You must."

"No."

"Yes," he repeated. "Yes, absolutely yes."

And so she spent her third sleepless night in a row, this one in a bed the size of a tennis lawn, with a parade of pillows, a smell of lilac and a view down a tranquil moonlit avenue, all the while rehearsing what she would say, how she would explain herself, her family history, her n.o.bility of purpose and the sanct.i.ty of her love for Frank and her children and Taliesin too. How she'd been wronged. Misrepresented at every turn by a vindictive and perhaps even mentally unstable woman. How everything that was pure had been willfully controverted so that good appeared evil and love was demeaned and envy elevated and all the rest. She made un-articulated speeches all night long, the words throbbing in her head till they wouldn't stop and her eyes wouldn't close and the light came hammering through the windows and she was still murmuring to herself through the breakfast she took alone in her room and her toilet and the long lingering sequence of combing out her hair, selecting a single strand of jet beads and dressing herself in an almost austere gown and shoes that were solid and respectable, last year's shoes, shoes that would verify and underpin everything she had to say. She would right the record. She would defend herself. Make use of every high-flown phrase and stirring sentiment she could muster. She was nothing low. She was high, higher than any of them.

Still, when she walked into the room to see the solitary woman rising from the chair with her clenched face and painted nails and the pencil and pad she brandished like plated armor, all she could say was: "Please, can you-will you say that I am not a dancer?"

CHAPTER 8 : VALE, MIRIAM.

Money was the problem. Cash. Spondulics. The means to pay for the necessities of life so that you didn't have to live like some half-naked beggar in a loincloth on the streets of Calcutta. That was what she tried to impress upon Mr. Fake, because her husband-and he was still her husband-was most emphatically evading his obligations to her. He was vituperative. Mean. Petty. And he hadn't paid out so much as a nickel for her upkeep since she'd filed the alienation of affection suit and what did he, Mr. Fake, expect her to subsist on? Wasn't he her attorney? Wasn't he being paid to look after her interests, to protect her from the vultures her husband employed? Did he realize that she'd been forced to move in with her daughter because the Southmoor had all but thrown her out in the street? And that the situation was intolerable? That she was ill, fatigued, depressed? That her son-in-law looked at her across the dining table as if she'd come to steal the bread from his mouth and that the room she'd been given was a repository of unwanted furniture and a broken bicycle and that it smelled of some deceased thing trapped in the walls?

And what did Mr. Fake tell her? Settle. Settle now and get out while you can because public opinion had turned against her, and her husband's friends66 were pulling strings to have all charges against him dismissed and the suit thrown out of court.

"What do you mean, 'public opinion'?" she spat back at him. She was seated across the desk from him in his offices on a damp ironclad day in early December, feeling out of sorts, and not simply because of the pain-fulness of the situation or because he'd kept her waiting in the anteroom a good half hour, but in a deeper way, a way of malaise and physical depletion. It was the flu. It was her heart. Her liver. She wasn't well, wasn't well at all.

"You've seen the newspapers," he said in his soft conspiratorial tone. He'd made a cradle of his interlocked fingers and he was resting his chin on it and giving her a look that was meant to be Solomonic. A framed oil painting-a bucolic lacustrine scene in atrocious taste and worse execution-hung on the wall behind him. His wife must have been the artist-it was the only explanation Miriam could think of, because no one in his right mind would actually seek out and purchase something as offensive to the sensibilities as that. Or perhaps an adolescent daughter. Did he even have children? She realized she didn't know a thing about him, whether he was married, divorced, a widower, bachelor or monk-but then what difference did it make? He could have been Joseph Smith himself with half a hundred wives so long as he put the screws to Frank.

"Mrs. Wright? Miriam? Are you listening to me?"

She was, of course she was. She gave a little wave of her hand. Public opinion. The fools, the idiots. To favor some little adventuress, some adulteress, a husband-stealer, over her . . . She could still see the headlines: WRIGHT'S OLGA BARES LIFE STORY; Public Misled; Begs Merciful Heart for Baby; and then, down the page: Not a Dancer; Toils Without Luxuries. Oh, it was all there, the whole sob story-how the little Russian had cooked and scrubbed and chopped wood at Taliesin till her fingers had practically fallen off, how she'd only come to Frank after Miriam had deserted him, and how she wasn't a dancer any more than Frank was a piano player because he liked sometimes to sit at the keyboard to play an air for the family and that the press had stuck her with the sobriquet only as a means of cheapening her as if she were some cabaret performer or cigarette girl when in fact she came from the most distinguished family in all of Montenegro-but it didn't matter a whit. The pretty pictures, the downcast look, the naked cry for sympathy. Anybody could see she was a wh.o.r.e and wh.o.r.es qualified for nothing, not mercy or sympathy or credibility or even notice.

"You can't go on expecting the impossible," he was saying, leveling that look on her. "Now-and let me remind you once again-his most recent offer, totaling twenty-three thousand dollars, including five thousand in cash and an additional three thousand for expenses and attorneys' fees to be paid out immediately as a means of discharging your obligations, including the one thousand and some odd dollars owing to the Southmoor, seemed perfectly reasonable to me, as you well know-"

"Seemed reasonable to you? I suppose it would, because at this point I can only imagine you're more concerned with your own welfare than with mine. You want your fee-that's the long and short of it, isn't it? But this is my life we're considering here. I'm the one who's been dragged through the mud. I'm the one who has no means of support and no hope of it."

"Even your children . . ." he began, taking another tack. And was he debating her now? Was that what she was paying him for? Debates?

"What have my children to do with it?"

"They're in agreement with me. Settle, that's what they say. You can't expect them to-well, I know this is a delicate matter and perhaps none of my business beyond antic.i.p.ating the timely remuneration of your legal fees to this firm-but you can't expect them to continue taking on your debt in the hope of . . . I don't know what." He paused to remove his spectacles so that his eyes floated up at her like two faintly greenish fish in a yellowed aquarium. "What is it that you want exactly, Mrs. Wright-Miriam? Vengeance? Do you want to see him destroyed, is that it?"

It came to her then that he was a small man too, self-serving, narrow-minded, a coward like all the rest. She was so angry all of a sudden, so inflamed and eruptive and just plain irritated she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. "I won't settle," she said finally, her voice as dry as two husks rattling in the wind. "Never," she said. "Not till I die."

He looked away, shifted in his seat, impatiently clamped the spectacles back over the bridge of his nose. "You don't want an attorney," he said, and he was the one struggling to control his voice now, "you want an avenging angel."

She rose abruptly from the seat, all the listlessness scorched right out of her. Her hands were trembling as she reached down to s.n.a.t.c.h up her bag and for a fraction of a second everything seemed to blur as if she'd been punched in the face. She was halfway to the door before she swung round on him. "That's right," she said. "That's exactly right."

The days began to flicker at her like a motion-picture film on a screen she couldn't reach-somehow she was stuck in the back row, in the cheap seats, watching her own life transpire with a foreign logic until, inevitably, it sank into melodrama. And sorrow. A sorrow so deep she couldn't bear to get out of bed half the time. There was that smell in the walls, the stench of fatality, of rot. The wallpaper was hideous-where was Norma's taste? The broken bicycle. A table with three legs, propped up on an overturned wastebasket and a volume of d.i.c.kens-Bleak House, and how bleakly appropriate. Most mornings she was sick in her stomach, the cramping there, sick in her bowels, as if nothing would ever pa.s.s through her again. She found herself sweating, even outside in the arctic blast that reanimated the dead limbs of the trees and scoured the gutters. Her son-in-law irritated her. Norma irritated her. The idea of Christmas drove her into a frenzy of loathing, the spangles and the b.a.l.l.s and the phony good cheer dispensed by every grinning hostess and street-corner drunk. Merry Christmas. It was like a war cry to her. Chicago: she hated it. Winter: she hated it. And here she was, forced to spend half her time out in the full fury of the season tramping from her lawyer to the doctor and then on to the next doctor and the next, the only thing that gave her comfort in the shortest supply.

And where was Frank while she was stuck here living hand to mouth? He was in California, released finally from Minnesota pending a grand jury investigation into the Mann Act charges, living off his friends, his bounteous friends, no doubt sitting at that very moment beneath a tangerine tree with the sun on his face. And her beside him. The b.i.t.c.h. The breeder. She couldn't recall which day it was-one dead ice-bracketed eternal afternoon of that week between Christmas and New Year's-when she decided to go to Leora, who was back now in Santa Monica as any sensible person would be. She'd just made use of the pravaz, the elixir seeping through her veins while the radiator belched and Norma's husband tramped by in the hall as if his feet were encased in lead, when she had a sudden incandescent vision of the red bougainvillea climbing the bleached white stucco wall of Leora's guesthouse while hummingbirds hovered and the Chinese tiptoed out of the house holding his tray aloft in a pillar of sunlight. The next day she was on the train.

She hadn't followed Frank to California, that was what she told herself-and Leora agreed with her. She'd come for her health. For the air. The sun. And if Jesperson had tracked down Frank's address for her (and he wanted to be paid too, the four-flusher, because in his profession that was all that mattered, money), there was no reason she shouldn't use it to see him prosecuted. At the first opportunity, as soon as she was rested from her trip, she went downtown to the police and filed a charge of desertion against him, then made another foray to Tijuana and the very accommodating little brown man in the farmacia there. That was good, that was fine. But just then Frank wasn't in Los Angeles-she got wind of the fact that he'd gone to New York to oversee the sale at auction of his precious prints as a stopgap to save Taliesin from the bank. Immediately she wired her new attorney67 and her new attorney wired a colleague in New York to appear on the scene with a warrant of attachment for the prints, which were, after all, community property. For two days she sat with Leora at the dining room table, in the living room, in the twin chaise longues on the back lawn, smoking cigarettes and calculating her share and how it would clear her debts in a single stroke, and for those two days she was happy, genuinely happy for the first time in months, till the news came back that the collection had sold for a fraction of what it was worth-less than $40,00068-and that even worse, the auction house had put in a legal claim on the entire proceeds to cover past loans against the worth of the collection. Once again, and she couldn't help feeling the hand of fate in this, Frank had outmaneuvered her, even if he'd managed to outmaneuver himself in the bargain.

"I don't know, Leora, I just don't know," she said after the news had sunk in. "Sometimes it seems as if the whole world is against me." She was sipping a c.o.c.ktail and the sun was bleeding through the windows, brightening the carpet in a long narrow strip and picking individual flowers out of the pattern on the chintz sofa. "He'll lose Taliesin now, that's for certain"-she paused, drew in a sigh, because she was feeling something, truly feeling it, though she'd have been hard-pressed to put it in words, something to do with Frank and the way he was when she first met him, his enthusiasm for the place and for her and her in it-"but it just doesn't give me much satisfaction to think about it. Or not as much as I thought it would." She traced her finger round the rim of the gla.s.s and watched the sun slice Leora's face as she leaned forward, her lips compressed in a moue of sympathy, and then she let out a bitter little laugh. "I suppose it's the shock of having gone from fifty thousand dollars in the clear to zero-zero dollars and zero cents-don't you think?"

Leora's eyes-and strange she'd never noticed this before-were as pinched and slanted as the Chinese servant's, but maybe that was only the effect of the light. And her powder. Leora had got to an age where she really couldn't seem to exercise any judgment when it came to combating the erosion round her eyes and mouth, canyons there, craters, whole deltas of tributaries. And her nose-it looked as if it had been dredged in flour. Miriam had always congratulated herself on having inherited her mother's complexion, but now she strained to catch a glimpse of her face in the reflectionof the curio cabinet-all of this turmoil must certainly have begun to show round her eyes, and what if she should end up looking like Leora?

Oblivious, Leora took a sip of her c.o.c.ktail, removed the olive and sucked at it meditatively. "You're not getting soft on him, are you?"

"Me? Soft?" She considered the accusation a moment, observing the way Leora was watching her in that satirical posture that was so much a feature of her, perhaps the defining feature, the arched eyebrows, the southward slant of the mouth. Another sip of the shaken gin, fragrant as heaven, cold as h.e.l.l. "Never. Believe you me, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright-Mr. Philandering No-Good Wright-hasn't seen anything yet."

"Good for you," Leora said. "I was beginning to worry."

Still, as the days wore on and Leora began dropping hints-Charles was coming to dinner, Charles Schumocker, the producer, the widower, just fifty-eight years old and without doubt the wittiest man she'd ever met and really, Miriam, you should have heard what he said the other night at the Derby, Charles this, Charles that, Charles ad nauseam-and the local judge, another little man, a pygmy, a dwarf, threw out the desertion charge on the grounds that the infraction hadn't occurred in California, Miriam felt herself losing control, very gradually, gradient by gradient, in the way of the slippage the geologists said was causing the earthquakes that made the guesthouse a veritable percussion section once a week or so. Deep down-and Charles tried to explain this one night at dinner, making use of the china to ill.u.s.trate his point-the rock plates were grinding against one another like saucers, if only saucers weren't smooth-edged but rough. That was what was happening to her, slippage, and everything that was smooth was abrading under the placid sun until it was too much for her to bear.

The negotiations went on through the spring and into the summer of 1927, Miss Levin wiring her periodically with offers and counter-offers, Norma dunning her by post and long-distance telephone, Charles, with his high forehead and emperor's (usually dripping) nose practically installed in the house now and Leora chattering on like a girl about the inexpressible romance of second marriages. Miriam felt-well, depleted. She was at loose ends. She needed money. There was no place for her at Leora's, at least not during the reign of Charles, and she couldn't afford a hotel. Finally, though it was like driving spikes right through the palms of both hands, like self-crucifixion, she gave in.

She instructed Miss Levin, by wire, to accept her husband's latest offer-$5,000 in cash plus payment of all legal fees, a trust fund of $30,000 and a $250 monthly allowance for life69-on one condition: that he renounce Olga for a period of five years. Word came back a day later. He refused. Categorically. Oh, she could see right through him, the coldhearted b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He had the upper hand now and he knew it. He was going to wait her out, that was what he was going to do-starve her, if need be, see her turned out in the streets like a beggar. And the minute the divorce was finalized he would start counting off the days till he could marry his little Russian, just as he'd done with her as soon as he'd got free of Catherine.70 But she wouldn't give in, she wouldn't. Not yet, anyway.

She took the train to San Francis...o...b..cause she couldn't think of anything else to do and Alvy Oates, an old friend from her Chicago days with Emil, had offered her a place to stay just as long as she wanted. All the way up the coast, as the train beat along the tracks, she cursed Frank and cursed him again. And when she got there and saw the way Alvy's face had aged-all those pouches and wrinkles, the dewlaps of an old woman who sits in a corner all day sopping up gravy with a crust of bread-she took a good hard look at herself and went directly into a clinic there where a truly wonderful doctor who understood her every need and a.s.sured her that she had the most beautiful skin he'd ever seen on a woman of her age gave her a face-lift that would make her look ten years younger than the ten years younger she already looked. Which her husband would pay for. Soon. Very soon.

She sipped liquids through a straw while her face healed and never changed out of her dressing gown. None of her children would return her wires. Alvy went off to club meetings, bridge parties, events at the museum, the symphony, the yacht club, and she stayed behind, working cross-word puzzles and reading detective novels. It was a time of excruciating and limitless boredom. One afternoon, after spending what must have been a full hour watching a lizard creep along the wall beneath the trellis on Alvy's patio, she wired her attorney to accept terms without proviso and on August 27 she was granted a divorce from Frank Lloyd Wright on grounds of desertion, Miss Levin submitting her testimony by deposition. It hurt her as nothing had ever hurt her before, but the money was paid out and she immediately booked a one-way fare to Chicago, where she planned to stop in to bid farewell to Norma on her way to New York and then Paris. Yes, Paris. Where she could forget all about Frank Lloyd Wright and his machinations, where she could focus on her own art for a change and grow and develop and spread her wings and maybe, once she was settled and moving in the circles she was accustomed to-or had been accustomed to before the war-she'd even remarry.

All well and good. But things bog down, things muddle. At the end of September, unaccountably, she found herself in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, writing to Frank to tell him just what she thought of him and if her language was harsh so much the worse because he was the one in violation of the divorce order, not her, he was the one sneaking back up the hill to his "love nest"71 so he could stick his p.r.i.c.k into the little Russian's c.u.n.t and f.u.c.k her and f.u.c.k her just as if they were goats, two f.u.c.king goats, and she knew what was going on and it wasn't right. A week later she hired a car and drove out to Dodgeville with Tillie Levin and went right on up the steps of the rinky-d.i.n.k town hall and demanded to see the district attorney, another weasel by the name of Knutson. "Do you have any idea what kind of filth is going on in this county?" she shouted the moment he came through the door of his office. He looked startled. Looked as if he'd had his hide exchanged for something that didn't fit quite right, and he was a man too, with a belly and braces and a tie stained with whatever he'd had for lunch, and no, he said, he didn't have any idea. "Frank Lloyd Wright!" she shouted. "Frank Lloyd Wright! Does that ring a bell?"

And what was Tillie saying-"No, no, stay calm, Mrs. Wright"-and why in Christ's name was this moron just standing there gaping at her?

"Listen, ma'am," he was saying, trying to back into his office with the firmest intent of shutting the door on her, and he wasn't going to get away with that, he wasn't-"I've told you over the telephone that this office will not revive those charges and that those charges are dead-"

"He's fornicating!" she screamed. "Immoral purposes, the Mann Act, in violation . . . everywhere. Of, of-of everything!"

There was breakage, and she couldn't help that, because the coward ducked back into his office and shut the door on her and he wouldn't do his duty, wouldn't serve the writ, wouldn't stop the f.u.c.king-and things spun out of control after that no matter how Tillie tried to mollify her. And what next? What next? At dinner that very night, as she tried to summon the desire even to lift the fork to her mouth over the miserable excuse for a meal the Lorain Hotel of Backwardsville, Wisconsin, put before her, a man with a face like boiled meat and two little pig's eyes identified himself as a federal agent and put her under arrest on a charge of sending obscene material through the mails on account of the letter she'd sent Frank to just tell him off because who did he think he was, and they put her in her room and guarded the door as if it were a prison cell. She beat on that door till her hands were raw and she screamed, oh, she screamed. Five hundred dollars, the judge said. And she fired Tillie. And Paris was a dream. And she went right to the governor of Wisconsin himself, Fred R. Zimmerman, over the way she'd been treated and he wouldn't see her and she went back to Chicago and that room with the broken bicycle and found the governor there for some sort of convention and she marched directly through the dining room of his hotel crying out that she demanded to see him on urgent business and he was the littlest of little men because he actually got up from the table when she was still twenty feet from him and scuttled sideways through the kitchen and out the service entrance into the street and he was probably still scuttling. And Frank went to Arizona72 to get away from her and she just had no choice in the matter but to follow him there and demand that somebody put a stop to this f.u.c.king.

Where next? Well, she was beaten down and exhausted and she had her money in hand, but she took out a warrant in Arizona charging him with whatever she could think of and when he went off to California she went there too. It was fall now, Leora married to Charles, the palms up and down Sunset Boulevard whipping in the winds that tore like cellophane over the dun mountains, sere days, chilly nights, a smell of smoke on the air. She called Jesperson, a man happy in the knowledge that he'd been paid for services past and would be paid again and paid well, and Jesperson gave her an address down south near San Diego, in La Jolla, where he said he'd found her husband holed up with his little dolly. In a cottage. On a quiet street. With a prospect of the ocean.

She wasn't reasoning. Reasoning was for little people, lawyers, architects, district attorneys. In the train on the way down from Los Angeles she went into the washroom and injected herself. Everything was very bright. She watched the ocean solidify outside the window till it might have been verdstone, shingled all the way to the horizon. People got on and off. She smiled at them all. When they arrived at the station, the conductor had to help her off the train because she didn't recognize a thing-palm trees, the ocean glare, it was all the same to her-and there was nothing the porter could a.s.sist her with, thank you, as all she had with her was her purse and in the purse nothing but her pravaz, half a sandwich and a sc.r.a.p of paper with the address on it.

The man in the cab-and why did he look so familiar?-said he knew the place, and after they lurched up and down a farrago of streets that were indistinguishable one from the other, various dogs darting out to yap at the wheels, skinny boys in undershirts and baseball gloves flitting past on the parched lawns and all the stumpy tile-topped haciendas rushing at her with their fangs bared, they were there. She saw an open lot, a scattering of trees, sand, the bright spank of the water. "Wait here," she said to the cabbie, and she crossed the lot unsteadily, struggling for balance in her heels. She had no plan. She just knew that he was there and she was there and that it had to end. The ocean smelled of decay. A gull sailed in out of nowhere and settled on the roof in a disclosure of feathers so marmoreal and bright it hurt her eyes. Sand leaked into her shoes. There were clumps of dune gra.s.s and they brushed her legs and the feel of them took her all the way back to the beach at Tokyo73 and she remembered how she and Frank would picnic on the cool wet sand just beyond the breakers to escape the mugginess of the city, everything fresh in the golden light on the other side of the world. He adored picnics, Frank. Adored adventure and spontaneity like the boy he was and would always be. Frank. Frank. How she'd loved him. She had. She truly had.

But here was the house. His house. Their house. No one answered her knock. The front door-she tried it-was locked, and that wasn't like Frank at all. Was this the right house? Across the lot, out on the street, the cabbie sat watching her from behind the windscreen of his car. She thought of going back to him, to make certain he'd got the address right, but perhaps if she just . . . peered through the window to see . . . if she might happen to recognize- One of his prints was staring back at her. The actor. The one with the sword and the bold pattern of squares within squares on the front fold of his robe, the Shunsh, and what was it called? Ichikawa. The Actor Ichikawa-Something. Yes. She'd know it anywhere. And there was one of his screens on the wall behind the sofa. And that table-that table wasn't his. She'd gone to the shop to buy it herself, haggling with the shopkeeper like some fishwife in rudimentary j.a.panese-"Tburu, tburu," she kept saying, Kore-wa ikura desu-ka? and he kept pretending he didn't understand her-and now Frank had it, now she had it.

The back door was open. And where was Frank, the criminal, the lecher? Out and about, no doubt, eating lobster somewhere with his wh.o.r.e, telling jokes, making demands. The thought of it made her seethe. She went through the house, room by room, everything strange and familiar to her at once. The little Russian's petticoats, her perfumes. Children's toys. The bric-a-brac Frank loved to surround himself with, as if he were the lady of the house. But it was all too much and before she knew what she was doing she was at the cupboard-a cup of tea, that was what she wanted-and she couldn't help it if all those jars and bottles were in the way and the merest touch of her hand sent them hurtling to the floor in an explosion of sound and color and texture. She couldn't help it. She couldn't. In fact, it was so satisfying, that simple act, that primal clatter, that she ran her hand over the next shelf and the next, till everything there was splayed out across the floor, flour, sugar, catsup, oats and vinegar, all the crude farmer's fare Frank glutted himself with like the rube he was. Her hands were trembling when she put the kettle on to boil and they trembled when she brewed the tea and sat at the table and lifted the cup to her lips.

At first all she'd meant to do was reclaim her property-her table and that fan and the enamel box-but once she was there, once she was inside, sitting in his kitchen with the teacup in her hand, the old feeling came over her, a rising counterweight of violence and hate. The teacup flew at the wall. And then she was up and jerking violently round the room, slamming at things as if each and every one of them-each plate and saucer and cruet-were the face of Frank himself, of his mistress, of their pinch-faced pig-tailed little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. She paused, barely winded, the wreckage of the kitchen lying at her feet. Then she went into the living room.

She picked up the table first-an end table of rosewood, intricately carved-and the sound it made when it tore the screen from the wall was like the overture to a symphony. Cloth gave. Wood. Plaster. Gla.s.s rang and chimed and hit all the high notes ascending the scale. She found an axe propped up against the fireplace and brought it down on the dining room table, the bookshelf, the chairs, the divans, the desk, Frank's desk. There was the whoosh of a ceramic vase grasping at the air, the shriek of splintering wood, the ba.s.so profundo of the andirons slamming to the floor. And who was it who alerted the police-a neighbor? The cabbie? The guardian angel of philanderers? Of fornicators?

Oh, but she fought those apes in uniform, with their locked-up faces and blistering eyes, giving as good as she got, and if there was blood-and flesh, flesh too-caught beneath her fingernails, well so much the worse for them. She was at the window with the axe when the first of them came through the back door, a boy, a puny shoulderless wisp of a boy in a uniform two sizes too big for him. "Ma'am," he said, "ma'am," as if that were her name. "Now calm down, ma'am, please."

She swung round on him in her rage, and who could blame her? And it was a good thing for him that he ducked out of the way when she flung the axe because that axe was nothing more than an extension of herself, of her will, and if she had a thousand axes it would only be a beginning. "What right have you to accost me here!" she demanded. "This is my house, mine, and I'll do with it as I please. Now, get out of here. Out!"

There was another one now, older, settled into his flesh and the dog pouches round his eyes, shanty Irish, and low, lower than low, she could see that at a glance. He shouted out a whole blathering garble of threats and admonitions as if he were under the misapprehension that she was hard of hearing, but she ignored him because at that moment her eyes lighted on the most intriguing little Chinese vase . . .

The judge lectured her and he couldn't see how ill she was, didn't care, because men stuck together and he was a man and Frank was a man and so was the policeman who'd taken hold of her arm as she flung the vase out onto the lawn through the shattered window and the Shunsh on its heels. Thirty days, the judge intoned, and then suspended the sentence on condition that she stay away from her ex-husband and from La Jolla and refrain from any and all criminal malfeasance whatsoever. She held herself erect. Never so much as blinked her eyes. And though it took all her strength to keep from throwing it back at him-criminal malfeasance indeed, and who was the real criminal here?-she never offered a word but for a murmur of acquiescence. Yes, she understood. Yes, she agreed to the conditions. And no, she had no intention of returning to La Jolla. Afterward, at her press conference, she looked into the faces of the reporters and felt as serene as she'd ever felt in her life. Something had shifted deep inside her, the plates slipping and grinding until now, finally, they were interlocked, and the pravaz-the pravaz would fix them there with a new kind of permanence. Frank-and all that life as Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright-was behind her now, and that was what she told them. "I'm moving forward with my life," she said, her voice breathing in her own ears like a second voice, an ingenue's voice, a coquette's. "I've had another offer of marriage."

The room went quiet.

"Who is it, Miriam?" a voice rang out. "Who's the lucky man?"

"Oh, I can't reveal that," she said, and she was Maude Miriam Noel all over again, the Belle of Memphis, each word sweetening on her lips till it had the intensity of pure cane sugar, "but I will say he's a European gentleman of conspicuously high pedigree-heir to a throne, in fact-and that I've recently borne him a daughter who is now in her father's care. In Europe." 74 She faltered, lost her train of thought-or very nearly, and where was she, where was she?-but the morfina whispered in her ear and it came back to her. "Across the sea."

"Can you give us her name? The child's name?"

"Miriam," another called, "Miriam-"