Loving Frank (25 page)

After a time, they walked back up the hill behind the workmen. Out in the courtyard, men stirred sand, lime, and water into a brown “mud” mix. A young plasterer carried a bucket inside and spread some onto a stretch of wall in the living room as an undercoat. While it was drying, Frank went to the car and retrieved some pigments he had bought in the city. He poured ocher and umber in varying amounts in different buckets of plaster, making an array of shades for use on different walls, “depending on the light they get,” he told the plasterer, who had watched the mixing cautiously.

“How will you get the same color again if you don’t measure and write it down?” the plasterer asked. “You’ve got six formulas going there.”

“I don’t have to fall into a vat of dye to know what color it is,” Frank said. “I can look at the shade on the wall and remix it.”

The plasterer raised his eyebrows, impressed.

Mamah spent the rest of the day helping move her boxes into a shed for storage, then cleaning, cleaning, trying to get the dust and debris out of the bedroom they were to sleep in. There were no windows in it yet. “Organic, indeed,” she teased Frank as she made up the bed.

That night when they lay down, Frank put out his arm to hold her. He pointed out Orion’s Belt through the open hole in the wall, then fell almost immediately to sleep. During the night, she got up to use the bucket he had placed by her side of the bed. As she lifted her nightgown to crouch, a bat whipped by within inches of her shoulder. She leaped back into bed and covered her head with the blanket.

Frank turned in his sleep, muttered, “Heigh-ho,” then commenced snoring.

CHAPTER
35

“
W
ell, shit. If that don’t beat all.”

“That’s what he said. She’s the one in charge when he ain’t here.”

“He ain’t here a
lot.
”

“He’ll be around more now she’s here. She’s a looker.”

“Shit, Murphy, you better not be lookin’.”

Mamah could hear the men moving around in the living room. Something dragged across the wood floor.

“Gad, I overslept.” Frank sat up and swung his legs around. “They don’t know we’re here,” he said as he reached for his trousers.

She grabbed his arm. “Shhh. It’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t say a word to them.” She knew Billy’s voice but had no faces for the other two.

“I don’t need a woman telling me how to drive a fuckin’ nail.”

Sawing drowned out their voices before they rose again.

“Don’t saw when you’re mad, Billy. You’re gonna cut off another finger.”

“Oh, he ain’t done that in near a month.” Laughter.

“At least my pecker ain’t been cut off, like some I know.”

“THERE ARE THIRTY-SIX
of them now,” Jennie Porter said. “It changes up or down, depending on what Frank’s working on. During the week, they sleep in shacks around here, then they go home on weekends.”

The two women stood between the kitchen table and the cooking range. Jennie and her son, Frankie, rolled chunks of beef in flour, then tossed them into sizzling oil in an iron pot. “Frank hired a woman from town to do the cooking, but it’s too much for one person,” Jennie said. “Somebody has to get things half ready for her, so the big meal can go on around one.”

“Frankie,” she said, “show Miz Borthwick where the carrots are, will you?”

That one sentence confirmed what Mamah had suspected. She was the somebody who would be taking over food duty from Jennie.

It was only right, of course. It wasn’t Jennie’s house they were building, Mamah thought as she pulled up carrots and potatoes from the big garden next to the Porters’ house. She didn’t mind the idea of riding herd over the operation, but she knew almost nothing about cooking.

“It’s written down,” Jennie assured her. “All my recipes feed forty now.”

AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD
returning to Boone for a visit, Mamah had gone with a cousin and aunt out into the fields during harvest. They rode in a wagon laden with bowls covered by dish towels. When they found the men, they set up the pots and jugs along the back of the wagon so the farmhands could fill their own plates. Mamah remembered her job that day—ladeling stew into tin cups. Even as a young girl, she had been stunned by how much food went into those men’s mouths.

“Harvest” was all her mother had said when Mamah described the scene once she got home. In Iowa everyone knew what that meant—men bent over pulling and hacking, tending horses, working their hands raw. Women doing the same in the kitchen—cooking, cooking, and then cooking some more.

Mamah ran Jennie Porter’s kitchen as if it were harvest time at Taliesin. There were two main meals, not one, as it turned out. The men ate oatmeal for breakfast, with plenty of coffee. At midday they ate heaps of stew and biscuits. At night they consumed another big meal—chicken, mashed potatoes, something green. Seconds of everything, and then dessert.

Lil, the tired-looking Spring Green cook, arrived from town every day with fresh supplies from the grocer. Only occasionally did they raid Jennie’s garden—there weren’t enough potatoes or greens in the plot for so many people. Mamah began dessert before Lil arrived. Usually, it was coconut cake or yellow cake with cocoa frosting, the two items she had mastered as a housewife. She had never been expected—none of the women she knew in Oak Park were expected—to have more than one specialty. A married woman in Mamah’s circle needed to master just one dish to trot out at dinner parties or to deliver to ailing friends. Everything else was done by a cook or house girl.

Lil taught Mamah the subtleties of pie crust—how you forked the lard, salt, and flour into just the right crumbly mix before you added very cold water. How you pressed your left thumb up and your index fingers down to make a handsome crimped edge.

The first week of meals, the workmen hardly spoke to her. Mamah, Lil, and Jennie hung back, watching as the men devoured one large pot of victuals after another. Mamah had placed a glass vase of flowers on the table and was pained by the amused looks the men shot at one another upon discovering the new frivolity. They ate the cakes and grunted their approval nonetheless, always saying “thank you” when they stood up. But that was all.

“Pie crusts,” she would say to Frank weeks later when he asked her at what point the men had begun actually conversing with her. It went without explanation, like “harvest.” Frank knew the value of a good pie crust in the Wisconsin countryside. A woman didn’t want to be known for making a bad one. But a woman who could make a really good one—now,
that
was worth something.

“LAST SUNDAY OUR
preacher warned about consorting with people who live in sin. He didn’t name no names, but…”

Mamah stood in the kitchen at the new house. In the days since her arrival, the kitchen had become a higher priority. It had been cleaned up, and she’d found a block of marble for a pastry board. She was rolling out her crusts there when the voices outside the window began. This time she recognized the young one. It belonged to a sweet-faced workman from a town a few miles over, newly married.

“You worry about the damnedest things,” she heard Murphy say in his thick Irish brogue.

“Well, people are talking.”

“You’re gone five days a week from that little girl of yours, Jimmy. She’s over there alone in Mineral Point with all them Cornish stonemasons. I’d be worryin’ about that, if I was you. Any man knows what a new bride wants. A good stiff prick as far-r-r-r as it will go.”

Men laughed wildly out in the yard.

People are talking.
It was to be expected. She had slipped into their midst, and not without notice. Frank had purposely resisted introducing her by name, even to Billy. But the men had only to observe how Frank treated her to know she was more than a housekeeper to him. They addressed her as “ma’am,” if they spoke to her at all.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way. You understand, don’t you?” Frank said to her later. “A newspaper story would be disastrous at this point. It’s not just our hides. Aunt Nell and Aunt Jennie are sensitive about publicity, what with their school nearby. I’m sure that’s why they and the rest of the Lloyd Joneses are keeping their distance.”

The locals probably knew there was a stranger among them—a particular stranger. Once, while riding out in the fields on Frank’s horse, Mamah had come upon two farmers cutting across the property. They had stopped to look at her, and she’d pulled her hat down and ridden off rather than greet them, for fear of making her identity known.

There would come a time when she would have to be presented officially in the community. In the back of her mind, she kept hoping that Catherine would agree to a divorce. Then Mamah and Frank would marry, though they both said it was not a necessity. But how much easier it would make life to have that piece of parchment.

For the time being, she avoided any car trips into Spring Green. When she decided work shoes were the only solution for the mud around the construction site, Frank took one of her shoes into town and bought a pair of men’s heavy boots for her.

The second week of her stay at Taliesin, Frank departed for his Chicago office. He had a project on his drawing table, a summerhouse in Minnesota for old clients, the Littles, that would bring in desperately needed money.

He left on a Saturday, so as to visit his children. On Sunday morning Mamah rose to have breakfast with Jennie and her husband Andrew, their children, and Anna Wright. Frank’s mother had avoided Mamah as much as possible, disappearing into her room at the Porters’ house for long periods during the day. Now they sat across the table from each other as Jennie slid eggs onto their plates.

“She won’t eat eggs,” Anna Wright said. She was thin, erect, and stern-looking, with steel-gray hair wrapped in a tight bun at her neck. Everything about her was sour, even her breath.

Mamah realized Anna was talking about her. The woman’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. The puckered skin just below the corners of her mouth was a measure of the offense Anna took at her presence.

“Oh, I will today,” Mamah said quickly.

Anna looked just to the side of her face as she spoke. “There’s too much work not to eat.”

Feeling chastised, Mamah salted and peppered the eggs on her plate.

“I don’t believe in pepper,” Anna said. “
Frank
won’t touch pepper. It’s bad for the digestion.”

At least she didn’t call me Mrs. Cheney,
Mamah later reflected, the way she had the first week whenever Frank was out of earshot.

“Anna, I have changed my name legally to Borthwick,” Mamah told her when it happened the third time. Now the old woman, like the workers, didn’t call her anything.

It didn’t take much cleverness to understand how the Wright family worked. Anna treated Jennie with a matter-of-fact familiarity. But when Frank entered the room, something in her seemed to brighten. She asked him questions as if he were a visiting celebrity, her cheeks—those sagging pockets—lifting at the sight of him.

Mamah knew her to be an intelligent woman, even witty; she had seen her present at the club in Oak Park.
That
Anna, cofounder of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club, “Madame Wright,” as she introduced herself, inhabited her body when Frank appeared. She pampered him, making up special plates of food for him, pointing out articles she’d read and wanted to share with him. And she told endless anecdotes about his childhood while he sat at the table chuckling at the old stories as if he were genuinely amused. Frank’s sisters, Jennie and Maginel, usually appeared as accessories in the tales, yet even Jennie smiled at the old stories.

Frank had grown up among women, and they all adored him. His sisters and Anna—especially Anna—had doted on him since he’d first appeared. Mamah felt like a mature bride coming into a household where the groom has long been the apple of the mother’s eye. It was a new experience, since Edwin’s mother had always deferred to her, for some reason.

Frank had prepared Mamah to be accepted by his mother, but that was clearly wishful thinking on his part. Even Mamah had imagined better relations, though. She had romanticized Anna as a wise mother—the kind of woman who let her child’s temperament and interests guide how she educated him. Having spent only a few hours with Anna, though, she wondered how on earth she was going to tolerate sharing a house with her, for Frank had earmarked one of the bedrooms in their home for his mother.

THE NEXT DAY,
Monday, was so humid and witheringly hot, it put everyone in a bad temper. Mamah was making bread and pies when Frank’s mother appeared in the kitchen. She landed a long cold stare on Mamah when she saw her rolling out crust. Anna didn’t believe in sugar except as it could be used in some home remedy, cough syrup, perhaps. She had expressed more than once the notion that “people” harmed others’ health by baking pies and cakes. Mamah had thought the grainy bread would please her, since it was from one of her own recipes. But the old woman gave no sign of approval when she saw it go into the oven.

Anna was boiling coffee when Lil arrived with the day’s supplies from town. When Mamah and the cook carried six boxes of produce into the house, Frank’s mother went straight to the vegetables to examine them.

“You can’t have paid actual money for this terrible cabbage,” she said, her voice as caustic as acid. “It’s full of bugs.”

“It’s all they had,” Lil said. “It’s a Monday. The food came in on Saturday.”

“You didn’t pay full price for that, did you?”

“Yes.”

“You bargain when it’s like this,” Anna snapped, “or you don’t buy it.”

Lil stopped in her tracks. “That’s all there was. What would the men eat if I didn’t buy it?”

Anna didn’t respond. She poked around the boxes further. “What is
this
?” She held up some onions. “They’re
damp,
like they’ve been sitting in water.” She picked up a bunch of small turnips with wilted greens. “How did you manage to find old vegetables in September? These have
mold
on them.”

Lil glared at the old woman. “Then we’ll peel off the skins.”

The remark infuriated Anna, who threw the turnips into the garbage barrel. “Anybody knows the skin’s the most important part.”

Lil’s eyes were puffy little slits that gave her face a dull look, but Mamah knew she wasn’t stupid. She was like a lot of country women, red-knuckled from a life of soapsuds and bone-grinding work. Tired out, maybe, but not someone you could push over. Lil pulled out the grocery bill from her pocket and slammed it on the counter. “You owe me five dollars.” She met Anna’s seething look with one of her own.