The Women (20 page)
It was Miriam. It had to be. She was certain of it even as she shifted the binoculars to focus on the woman’s face, but then the figure ducked out of view, erased momentarily by the torsos of the converging men before coming up triumphant to fling something down in the dirt in a dull blur of color. Another shout. The men smirking. Easing forward. A photographer there, setting up his tripod, the sun exploding against the windows of the cars and the woman whirling away from them all to stamp furiously at that thing in the dirt as if she were killing it. Only then did she stand still long enough to reveal herself.
Olgivanna had seen Miriam in the flesh just once—in the corridor of the hospital—but she must have studied the photographs of her a hundred times, fixated on her, fascinated, every line of her rival’s face as familiar to her as her own, and now here she was, unmistakable, Miriam in all her belligerent glory, come to claim her own. She recognized the pug nose, the set of the jaw, the clamped insatiable mouth and the outsized hat slipped down over the eyebrows—and the eyes themselves, so startled and wide it was as if she’d been pricked with a pin every minute of her waking life. It gave Olgivanna a strange thrill to see her this way, reduced at the end of a long optical tunnel, flattened and derealized, but it was short-lived. Any minute now—she was sure of it—Billy Weston would stand back and Miriam would pass through the gates and sally up the drive with her horde of reporters, and what then? Would they have to run out into the fields and hide? Crawl under the beds? And where was Frank?
Svetlana’s rope beat and beat and beat again, echoing through the open door that gave onto the courtyard. There was a dull ringing from the direction of the kitchen, the cook rapping a spoon against the lip of a pot. And Olgivanna, absorbed in the spectacle of Miriam, forgot all about Pussy until something came crashing down behind her and she spun round to see the baby tangled up in the cord of one of Frank’s lamps, the glass shattered, the frame bent
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—Frank would be furious, that was her first thought—and Pussy expelling the first startled shriek of breath. Panic swept over her then—the electricity, the shards of glass—and she dropped the binoculars, sprang to her feet and snatched up her daughter and she didn’t care who was watching. In the next moment she was in the corridor, Pussy raggedly wailing—startled, but no blood, and the lamp hadn’t hit her, had it?—and calling for Frank in a voice that was a bitter distillate of rage and fear and impatience. “Frank! Frank! Where in God’s name are you?”
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—Frank would be furious, that was her first thought—and Pussy expelling the first startled shriek of breath. Panic swept over her then—the electricity, the shards of glass—and she dropped the binoculars, sprang to her feet and snatched up her daughter and she didn’t care who was watching. In the next moment she was in the corridor, Pussy raggedly wailing—startled, but no blood, and the lamp hadn’t hit her, had it?—and calling for Frank in a voice that was a bitter distillate of rage and fear and impatience. “Frank! Frank! Where in God’s name are you?”
He was in his studio, drawing, always drawing, no matter what the crisis, and he looked up sharply when she burst in on him—the children, especially bawling, red-faced infants, were strictly interdicted from distracting him while he was working because how could she expect him to earn a living if he was to be forever interrupted every time Svetlana skinned her knee or the baby passed gas?
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“What is it now?” he demanded.
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“What is it now?” he demanded.
“What is it?” she threw back at him, even as Pussy’s screams climbed up the register and then stalled while she spat up a pale sour wad of pabulum on her mother’s shoulder. “Have you looked out the window? It is that woman. Your wife. Miriam. She is here”—she felt the warm seep of the baby’s fluids through the fabric of her dress, and it would have to be washed now, and Pussy’s dress too—“right outside at the gate. With, with, I don’t know—
reporters
! They look like reporters.”
reporters
! They look like reporters.”
He didn’t get up from the desk, didn’t offer to take the baby, didn’t even bother to turn his head and look out the window to the sloping lawn that gave onto the lake and the meadow and the gate crowded with cars. “I’m aware of the situation,” he said in a quiet voice.
Aware of the situation? She was stunned. And though she was a linguist, though she had French and Russian at her command in addition to her native language, as well as her English, which, if heavily accented, was nonetheless perfectly fluid and intelligible, she didn’t know what to say. He was
aware
—and he was just sitting there?
aware
—and he was just sitting there?
His face was composed, his eyes locked on hers even as the baby kicked and struggled and let out a thin mewl of protest, and she could see that he was willing himself to stay seated, to project an air of coolness and indifference—for her sake. So as not to alarm her. He let out a sigh. “It seems Miriam has been up to her mischief. She claims to have some sort of court order—I’ve been on the phone to Levi
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over it—but I can guarantee you that she’ll never set foot on this property again, no matter what it takes. I’ve got both roads blocked. And Billy’s in charge. You know Billy. He would die before he’d give us up.”
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over it—but I can guarantee you that she’ll never set foot on this property again, no matter what it takes. I’ve got both roads blocked. And Billy’s in charge. You know Billy. He would die before he’d give us up.”
“Court orders? What sort of court orders? What do they say?”
“It’s nothing. Legal wrangling, that’s all.”
“Yes, and that is what you are telling me with the reporters too, till that horrid man from the newspaper came here, and—I don’t like it. I hate this, Frank. I hate it.”
“Now listen,” and he was out from behind the desk now, moving across the carpet to her, to take her and the baby in his grip that was like the grip of a Titan, a hero who could hold the whole world up in his two arms, “there’s nothing to worry over, nothing, nothing at all.”
But he was wrong.
Within the hour they were both of them cowering like criminals in the hilltop garden, crouching over wooden stools in the dirt and whispering stories to Svetlana and the baby as if nothing in the world were the matter, while the sheriff, armed with his warrants, poked through the living room, the Blue Loggia, the kitchen, the bedroom and the studio. Within a day Miriam would be back on the attack. And within two months’ time they would have to run yet again, packing up so hastily the beds had to be left unmade and the clothes strewn across the floor, breakfast abandoned on the dining room table to draw flies and the garden left to the crows, the gophers and the pulsating hordes of insects with their clacking mandibles and infinite mouths.
Frank tried to make it seem like an adventure, just as he had when they’d gone to Puerto Rico, but it was no more an adventure than fleeing the hospital when she could barely lift her head from the pillow or enduring the ragged have-nots of Coamo with their splayed dirty feet and toothless smiles and their emaciated goats and pustular dogs and the fried bananas that tasted like cardboard soaked in grease when she wanted only to be home at Taliesin with the baby beside her and the smell of fresh bread rising from the oven. He steered the vast gleaming hulk of the Cadillac across the countryside, heading west, terrifying her at every turn because he was always going too fast, as if the whole purpose of driving wasn’t to get someplace in comfort and safety but to defy every law of the road, and he kept up a running monologue the whole time. For Svetlana—to keep her spirits up—but for her too. That was one thing about Frank—you never had to worry about a lull in the conversation.
“You’re going to love it, Svet,” he kept saying, “our own little cottage in the woods. On a lake. Lake Minnetonka. Can you say Minnetonka? Come on. You can say it. And I’ll tell you, this isn’t just a little puddle like the pond at Taliesin, but a true and veritable lake, full of fish, pike perch and suchlike. You like pike perch, don’t you? And bears in the woods, wolves, and what else?—moose. You’ll see moose too. Probably hundreds of them. And you know what? They’ve got a miniature canoe there, just the right size for a little girl—what do you think of that?”
Trees arched over the road, denser here, the woods alternately thickening and thinning as they drove west through Montfort, Mount Hope and Prairie du Chien and then north along the Mississippi to La Crosse and on into Minnesota, one hamlet after another falling away behind them and the farms losing themselves in palisades of timber. Svetlana played along—“Moose? How big are they? Bigger than an elephant?”—and if she was upset she didn’t show it. But how could she fail to be upset? How could anyone, let alone a child? Perhaps Frank had seen all this coming—the lawsuits,
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Miriam’s seizure of Taliesin, the foreclosure and pending eviction, the sheriffs and the lawyers—perhaps he’d kept his own counsel and planned ahead, finding them this refuge that lay somewhere up the road, but here was the vagabond life all over again, everything they’d need for a month—two months, three, who could say?—packed into the trunk of the car in an early-morning panic when every squeak of the hinges, every thump and rattle, was the furtive annunciation of the police come for them. And not just to serve writs or argue fine points of the law, but to arrest them both and take them to prison, lock them up behind bars like anarchists or bank robbers, and what then? More newspapers? More humiliation?
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Miriam’s seizure of Taliesin, the foreclosure and pending eviction, the sheriffs and the lawyers—perhaps he’d kept his own counsel and planned ahead, finding them this refuge that lay somewhere up the road, but here was the vagabond life all over again, everything they’d need for a month—two months, three, who could say?—packed into the trunk of the car in an early-morning panic when every squeak of the hinges, every thump and rattle, was the furtive annunciation of the police come for them. And not just to serve writs or argue fine points of the law, but to arrest them both and take them to prison, lock them up behind bars like anarchists or bank robbers, and what then? More newspapers? More humiliation?
She tried to put the best face on it she could, tried to control herself for Frank’s sake and the children’s, but all she could think of was her garden, the flowers, the horses and chickens and cows—was everything to be sold off at auction? Would the tomatoes rot on the vine and the hydrangeas go brown for lack of water? It didn’t improve her outlook when they stopped for dinner in La Crosse and Svetlana developed one of her moods, refusing to eat because she didn’t like steak and didn’t want pork and she hated fish and hamburger too, and no, she didn’t want wieners or even ice cream or anything—and then the baby had diarrhea and it was one diaper after another and would they run out before they got to where they were going? And Frank, all the while the gayest, most carefree man in the world, chanting, “Minnesota, Minnesota, where the fish ’re bigger ’n Dakota!”
If she was abrupt with the Thayers, who’d arranged the rental for them, well, she was sorry, she never meant to be rude with anyone, not the woman who owned the place or the cook cum housemaid she’d left behind, but her nerves were strung tight and the first few days in the new house were a trial. There were the usual tribulations associated with moving in—getting the children settled, stocking the larder, dealing with a new servant, going through the charade of making a home out of some stranger’s house filled with a stranger’s things—and the whole affair was complicated by the imposture of their new identities. She couldn’t be Olga anymore and Svetlana couldn’t be Svetlana. They were the Richardsons
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all over again, Frank and his wife, Anna (a good ethnic name to account for her accent), their daughter Mary and the infant who wasn’t Iovanna or even Pussy any longer but simply the baby.
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all over again, Frank and his wife, Anna (a good ethnic name to account for her accent), their daughter Mary and the infant who wasn’t Iovanna or even Pussy any longer but simply the baby.
What to say? She’d been in a state of perpetual dislocation since she was a girl of eleven when she was sent to live with her sister on the Black Sea in Russia, learning a new culture and a new language, and then having to abandon it all at nineteen when the revolution broke out. She’d barely had time to make a home in Tiflis with Vlademar and her infant daughter when they had to flee in advance of the White Army, Georgei courageously leading them and a small band of his followers through Constantinople to safety, and then she’d found a home at Fontainebleau until Georgei’s accident, and then at Taliesin, and was it too much to ask to have some peace, to sleep in the same bed two nights in a row? To be part of something? To live a normal life like anyone else?
Perhaps so. But she was nothing if not adaptable and the house did have its charms, Tonka Bay struck with light from early morning till late in the afternoon, loons calling across the water, the weather holding through September in a long lazy spell of Indian summer, and when it did turn in the first week of October the frost came at night to fire the trees in a display of color as rich as she’d ever seen. And they were together, just the four of them, with no battery of workmen hammering away, no clients to mollify, the outside world forbidden to them and their inner world all the richer for it. She adjusted to the cuisine of the new cook (a Miss Viola Meyerhaus, thick-legged and spinsterish, of indeterminate age, with her blond hair worn in an inflexible braid looped atop her head, whose dishes were invariably heavy with gravy,
Kartoffeln,
kraut and sausage, though she did make a wonderful
Himmel und Erde,
a mixture of mashed potatoes, apple sauce, onions, diced bacon and roast pork even Svetlana seemed to like), and on the cook’s day off Olgivanna took the time to prepare soups and stews and bake confections till the house smelled the way a house ought to smell. Every day they went sailing on the lake, and in the evenings there were rambles in the countryside and then hours spent by the fire. Frank, ever restless, hit on the idea of writing his autobiography—if he was denied architecture, he could at least use his time fruitfully, couldn’t he?—and she loved to sit and listen as he dictated the book aloud to the stenographer he hired on the strictest confidence.
Kartoffeln,
kraut and sausage, though she did make a wonderful
Himmel und Erde,
a mixture of mashed potatoes, apple sauce, onions, diced bacon and roast pork even Svetlana seemed to like), and on the cook’s day off Olgivanna took the time to prepare soups and stews and bake confections till the house smelled the way a house ought to smell. Every day they went sailing on the lake, and in the evenings there were rambles in the countryside and then hours spent by the fire. Frank, ever restless, hit on the idea of writing his autobiography—if he was denied architecture, he could at least use his time fruitfully, couldn’t he?—and she loved to sit and listen as he dictated the book aloud to the stenographer he hired on the strictest confidence.
All went well, aside from the occasional slipup—neither of them could seem to remember to call Svetlana “Mary” when there were people about, and the Cadillac, with its Victoria top and Wisconsin tags, had to have been fairly conspicuous, especially as the newspapers were running photographs of both Frank and her and trumpeting the not-inconsiderable reward for information leading to their arrest and prosecution—and if she were to look back on this period in the years to come, she would have seen it as being as close to a pure idyll as anything she’d ever experienced. Given the circumstances, that is. She was happy, genuinely happy, and again, just as she had at Taliesin that spring, she began, despite herself, to relax.
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