The Women (46 page)
Somewhere in there—and in looking back on it she could never be quite sure which trip it was
130
—Frank fell seriously ill. It was springtime, that much she remembered, because they were out in the country with Baron Ōkura, the princess and some of the others (and here the name Olga Krynska rose up in her memory in a dark gnarl of hate and envy) viewing the cherry blossoms, which were then at the height of their beauty. For the Japanese, a quaint diminutive people so much in tune with nature and the change of the seasons they might have been a nation of satyrs and wood nymphs, the
sakura
bloom was one of the high points of the year, and everyone, from the murkiest slum dweller to the Emperor himself, made a point of celebrating the occasion. When the Baron proposed a blossom-viewing party at his country house, Frank—who’d been working himself to death in a din of noise and dust as his army of masons pounded away at the peculiar volcanic rock he insisted on using for the hotel’s superstructure—agreed to take a hiatus. “How would you like a little ramble in the country?” was the way Frank put it to her. “Why not?” she said, because for all its brilliant company, Tokyo was an ugly squat over-bursting city, and its smells and sounds were beginning to weigh on her, especially now that she found herself compelled to leave the windows open in order to keep from stifling. A jaunt in the country sounded like just the thing.
130
—Frank fell seriously ill. It was springtime, that much she remembered, because they were out in the country with Baron Ōkura, the princess and some of the others (and here the name Olga Krynska rose up in her memory in a dark gnarl of hate and envy) viewing the cherry blossoms, which were then at the height of their beauty. For the Japanese, a quaint diminutive people so much in tune with nature and the change of the seasons they might have been a nation of satyrs and wood nymphs, the
sakura
bloom was one of the high points of the year, and everyone, from the murkiest slum dweller to the Emperor himself, made a point of celebrating the occasion. When the Baron proposed a blossom-viewing party at his country house, Frank—who’d been working himself to death in a din of noise and dust as his army of masons pounded away at the peculiar volcanic rock he insisted on using for the hotel’s superstructure—agreed to take a hiatus. “How would you like a little ramble in the country?” was the way Frank put it to her. “Why not?” she said, because for all its brilliant company, Tokyo was an ugly squat over-bursting city, and its smells and sounds were beginning to weigh on her, especially now that she found herself compelled to leave the windows open in order to keep from stifling. A jaunt in the country sounded like just the thing.
The sky was brilliant that first day, the cherry trees marshaled in rows of pink clouds that softened the horizon as far as she could see or standing solitary on a sculpted slope where they seemed to concentrate the light, flaming out against the dull grays and greens of the surrounding landscape as if on a stage, and the entire party made a picnic of the occasion, the Baron providing boxed lunches and champagne, various people sketching or reading, lying stretched out on mats in the sun, chatting in the soft revolving tones of perfect contentment. In short, it was an idyll. And she was enjoying herself despite Madame Krynska, the little unattached Pole the Lubienskys had brought along for what seemed the express purpose of separating her from Frank, as if she would ever allow that to happen, even for a minute . . . The champagne was chilled, the sandwiches were of white bread, butter and cucumber instead of rice and raw fish, the servants attentive. She was just communing with the Baron over their mutual love for things Gallic and reflecting aloud on how much the blossoms reminded her of spring in Paris, particularly in the urban oases, the Tuileries, the Jardin des Plantes, the Luxembourg Gardens (and he was as much under her spell as Hayashi-San, leaning forward over his tented knees, his black eyes fixed on her so as not to miss a single syllable), when Frank, who hadn’t uttered a word in the past five minutes, suddenly let out a gasp as if the wind had been knocked out of him.
He’d been sitting beside her, or rather just behind her, in a circle that included the Lubienskys and Countess Ablomov, and as she turned round in alarm she could see immediately that he was in trouble—he seemed shrunken all of a sudden, deflated, his skin bleached and bloodless, his legs drawn up under him like a child’s. He gasped again, but before she could reach out to him or even call his name he buckled over on his side, both hands clutching his abdomen, his face pressed awkwardly into the grass at the edge of the mat. Her first thought was that he must have had an attack of some kind—only that week Leora had written her in excruciating detail about her husband’s heart problems—and even as she scrambled to him on her knees she felt the loss of him, the future closing over her like a dark engulfing cloud, and she would be nobody’s widow because she was nobody’s wife. She pulled him to her, already in tears, as he attempted, feebly, to push her away. “Frank, what’s wrong, what is it?”
He was wincing. He kicked his legs out. Writhed on the grass. He was trying to say something, but she couldn’t make out the words.
The others were on their feet now, gathered round in a constellation of apprehensive faces, and no one seemed to know what to do. Someone said it was appendicitis and then someone else said that if it was he’d have to be operated on, but weren’t they getting ahead of themselves? Shouldn’t someone call for a doctor? That was when La Krynska—slim, young, butter-haired, dressed in some sort of athletic costume and with a badminton racket still clutched in one hand—appeared on the scene, pushing her way through the circle to kneel beside him. “He needs water,” she said. “Ice. Here”—and she rose to dip her handkerchief in the ice bucket and press it to Frank’s brow—“try this. Does that feel better?”
Miriam felt the champagne float to her head. Here she was on her knees on the lawn of a baronial estate in the mountains overlooking the Kantō Plain and this Pole was kneeling beside her as if they were praying over a corpse, Frank’s corpse, and it was the strangest thing in the world. Fear seized her. Loathing. Terror. He was going to die, she was sure of it.
“I need,” Frank gasped, and she could see how weak he was, how reduced and mortified, “I want, if someone could help me . . .”
“What, Frank?” she heard herself cry out. “What do you need?”
Krynska let her fingers slip behind his ears a moment, to feel in the hollows there, then pulled back his eyelids to peer into the whites of his eyes. When finally she lifted her head, she let her gaze sweep over Miriam and take in the faces gathered round them. “I’m afraid he’s got what we all contract here in Japan at one time or another, we non-Asiatics, that is”—a glance for the Baron, who was shouting over his shoulder for one of the servants to go and fetch the doctor—“and what he needs, most immediately, is a little privacy.” She pressed one hand to the cloth on his forehead and looked back down at him. “And a bathroom.”
Dysentery was common enough in the Far East, where primitive sanitary practices encouraged its spread, and the Japanese Isles were no exception. No matter how often Frank sang the praises of the cleanliness of the country and its people, the rituals involved in the washing of the hands, the scouring of the public baths, the simplicity and purity of the
tatami
mats and the robes they wore, there was no denying it. Plumbing was nonexistent. Flush toilets unheard of. For all the rustic charm of the lavatories in the inns and private homes—the bamboo screens, the ferns, pottery, flowers—you were nonetheless squatting over a hole in the ground, no different from the hillbillies in the mountains of Tennessee. Miriam could only account herself lucky that she hadn’t come down with the scourge.
tatami
mats and the robes they wore, there was no denying it. Plumbing was nonexistent. Flush toilets unheard of. For all the rustic charm of the lavatories in the inns and private homes—the bamboo screens, the ferns, pottery, flowers—you were nonetheless squatting over a hole in the ground, no different from the hillbillies in the mountains of Tennessee. Miriam could only account herself lucky that she hadn’t come down with the scourge.
The Baron summoned the local physician, who tapped and auscultated and peered into Frank’s ears and up his nose and confirmed Krynska’s diagnosis, after which Frank slept for the better part of two days while Miriam sat beside him in a state of nervous exhaustion and the others took rambles over the hillside, observed the farmers at work in their paddies, played parlor games and watched the cherry blossoms shimmer in the breeze. Then it was back to Tokyo—the driver stopping at intervals so that poor Frank could be helped out to relieve himself—and on to the premier physician in all the country, who tapped and auscultated and peered into Frank’s ears and up his nose and put him on a strict diet of water and rice balls and nothing else.
She was shocked. And she took the man aside and told him so. “Is that all you’re going to do? Give him rice balls? Can’t you see he has a fever?”
The man was tall for a Japanese, with a black brush of the chin whiskers they all seemed to affect. His English was minimal. They stood outside the door of the bedroom, surrounded by the artifacts Frank had collected.
“Hai,”
he said, bowing. “Rice ball.”
“Hai,”
he said, bowing. “Rice ball.”
“But he’s delirious, soaked in sweat. He’s—he’s been calling out in the night, talking nonsense.” She had a sudden vision of her son Thomas, stricken with influenza when he was boy, the sticks of his legs beneath the sweated sheets, the hair pasted to his forehead, his lips cracked and dry. She’d been sure he was going to die and she was so paralyzed by the thought she couldn’t nurse him, couldn’t look at him, couldn’t even pass by his door without breaking down.
The doctor glanced across the room to where Hayashi-San, who’d attempted to act as interpreter, but with limited success, clutched his hands before him and bowed. “Dysentery,” the doctor said. “Very serious.”
“But aren’t you going to give him anything? Any treatment, any medicine? You do know medicine, don’t you?” In exasperation, she turned to Hayashi-San. “Tell him medicine—what is the word for medicine?”
Hayashi-San bowed again and said something to the doctor in Japanese, to which the doctor replied with his own bow before turning back to her. “Rice ball,” he said. “Only rice ball.”
It must have been a month or so later when she came back from a shopping expedition, feeling as Japanese as she ever would, having haggled with various dealers over a brocade screen, a statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin Frank had had his eye on and a beautiful little inlaid rosewood table, to find Frank sitting up in bed, looking pleased with himself. Over the past weeks he’d made a steady improvement, graduating from the rice balls to broth, tea and finally noodles with bits of fish and vegetables, but he’d been irritable, frustrated, cursing his foreman, the houseboy, the diet and the delay in construction this was costing him, and, of course, taking it out on her whenever he could. But now he was propped up against the headboard, the bed strewn with books and papers, whistling one of his music hall tunes.
“You look like you’re feeling chipper,” she said, removing her wrap and draping it over a chair.
He didn’t answer. Just kept whistling.
“I got the most adorable little table”—she held off telling him of the bodhisttva, knowing what a fuss he’d make of it, criticizing the smallest flaws, badgering her over the price no matter what she’d paid—“and a screen I thought was quite . . . What’s that I smell? Perfume?”
The whistling abruptly died.
There was a tray beside him, the tea things laid out, two cups, English biscuits,
mochi.
“And what’s this? You didn’t wait tea for me?”
mochi.
“And what’s this? You didn’t wait tea for me?”
His smile flashed and faded just as quickly. She saw that his hair had been carefully combed and that he was wearing his best robe and one of his stiff high-collared shirts. And a tie. “Oh, yes,” he said, as if it were an afterthought, “Olga stopped by to see how I was doing, and we—”
“Olga?”
she repeated.
131
she repeated.
131
It was at that moment that the bathroom swung open and Madame Krynska—La Krynska,
Olga
—appeared, a washcloth in her hand. “Oh, Miriam,” she chirped, “I didn’t know you’d come back. How nice to see you.” And she proceeded across the floor of the bedroom as if she were in her own Polish hovel to bend over Frank and lay the wet compress on his forehead, just as she had that day in the country. “Isn’t it a marvel how well he’s looking?” she said, still bent at the waist and glancing over one shoulder, her petite pretty manicured hand pressed to Frank’s brow and Frank looking like a Pomeranian with a belly full of chopped liver.
Olga
—appeared, a washcloth in her hand. “Oh, Miriam,” she chirped, “I didn’t know you’d come back. How nice to see you.” And she proceeded across the floor of the bedroom as if she were in her own Polish hovel to bend over Frank and lay the wet compress on his forehead, just as she had that day in the country. “Isn’t it a marvel how well he’s looking?” she said, still bent at the waist and glancing over one shoulder, her petite pretty manicured hand pressed to Frank’s brow and Frank looking like a Pomeranian with a belly full of chopped liver.
Miriam was astonished. Slack-jawed. So stunned at the audacity of this woman—of Frank, the cheat, the liar, the adventurer—that she couldn’t speak a word.
“There,” La Krynska was cooing, her yellow hair burgeoning round her like some unnatural growth, like fur grafted to her head above the yellow paste of her Polish eyebrows, “does that feel better?”
In her own room, in the drawer where she kept her pravaz—right beside it—Miriam also kept a pistol. It was a small shiny thing that held two shots only and she’d bought it in Albuquerque the day she arrived, when she was feeling low, and she couldn’t have said why she’d thought to buy it—she wasn’t suicidal, not at all, no man could make her sink to that level and no man was worth it, not even the high and mighty Frank Lloyd Wright—except that having it near her, in her purse or in the desk drawer, gave her a sense of security, of power in reserve. She’d never fired it. Never even given it a thought. Till now.
“Miriam,” Frank called out in the voice of a dog, the petted voice, false and callow, “come join us. The tea’s hot still.”
But she was already out the door, already crossing the hall to her own room and the drawer there. She was utterly calm. She fit the key in the lock and pulled out the drawer to reveal the pravaz and the pistol beside it and her hand never trembled the way it sometimes did when she was upset and needed a shot for relief. The pistol—it was called a derringer and she’d known women in Paris who carried such things in their purses in the most casual way—was cold to the touch, as if its shiny nickel plating had just been dug from the earth. She took it in one hand and crossed the hall to Frank’s bedroom, all the world solidly in place, his prints and rugs and statues, and La Krynska just bending to the teapot, a thumb pressed to the lid as she lifted it and poured.
It took a moment. Frank’s eyes leapt at her and retreated. “Miriam, what are you—?”
“I’ll kill her, Frank,” she said, and she was pointing the gun now, her finger on the miniature trigger, a sudden tide of emotion gushing up in her so that she was no longer calm, even as her voice rose and rose till it was a shriek, “and you. I’ll kill you too. I’ll kill both of you!” she screamed. “And myself! Myself too!”
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