The Women Read online

  The shoulder of the road was a morass of dirty brown puddles—country life, how she hated it, and what had she been thinking?—and immediately her right heel sank into the soft earth so that she staggered momentarily before bracing herself against the fender. The reporters watched her with flat eyes, but none of them offered her a hand. The sun was in her face. She felt a finger of sweat trace the ridge of her spine. She took a moment to freeze them all with a sweeping look, then marched up to the gate.

  “You, Billy Weston,” she snapped, “open this gate at once.” She’d been debating whether or not to cry out What is the meaning of this? in tones of high dudgeon, but there was no point: the meaning was clear. Frank—and his henchmen, these village idiots with their open collars, battered hats and filthy trousers—intended to keep her out.

  From Billy Weston (a thin gawky man, so gray and pedestrian he was barely there at all, his eyes blunted and his mouth set): “I’m sorry, Mrs. Noel, but Mr. Wright says to admit no one.”

  “The name is Mrs. Wright, as you know perfectly well—Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright—and I live here. This is my house, not yours. Or his. Now you open this gate and be quick about it.”

  No reaction. He exchanged a glance with the other two, but that was the extent of it.

  “Have you gone deaf? I said, open this gate. At once!”

  Suddenly she seemed to have her hands on the cool iron panels and she was jerking the gate back and forth to the grinding accompaniment of its hinges and to hell with her gloves, to hell with everything. “Frank!” she screamed, focusing all her attention on the inert face of the house rising up out of the hill above the dark sheen of the lake. “I know you’re in there! Frank! Frank!”

  It was useless. She was over-exerting herself. She could feel her heart going and the sweat starting up on her brow beneath the tight grip of her turban. This was what he’d wanted, the scheming bastard—he’d planned it this way, to humiliate her. Well, two could play at that game.

  She let loose of the gate as suddenly as she’d taken hold of it, wheeled round on the reporters and saw the look of awe flickering from face to face as the puddles reproduced miniature portraits of the sky, and the moths and bees and grasshoppers sailed across the field in bright streamers of color. “Boys,” she said, addressing them all even as she threw her shoulders back and stalked to the sedan, “where I come from we like to say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If he thinks he can keep us out of here, he’s sorely mistaken.” She brushed by Wallace, who was just standing there watching her with his mouth agape, as if he were at a baseball game or a hypnotist’s ball, and threw back the door of the car herself. “Come on now, what are you waiting for!” she cried, and if she was flailing her arm like some soapbox preacher, well, so what? These were her troops, she saw that now, her men-at-arms, ready to storm the place at her command, and the thought exhilarated her. “Get in your cars, everybody. We’re going up the back road—and see if they can stop us!”

  There was a burst of excitement, men squaring their hats and running for their cars, Wallace sliding into the front seat with the photographer and Myra lifting herself ponderously up across the running board and into the back, doors slamming, dust rising, a man’s voice echoing behind them—Hey, wait for me!—and they were off. Miriam held fast to the door handle, barking directions at the back of Wallace’s head. The green fields rushed past the window. The air was in her face. She was filled with a fierce joy, the joy of combat, of movement and action, her only thought to seize the initiative, catch Frank unawares, bring him to his knees. But when they arrived at the back entrance five minutes later, she had her second surprise: Frank had blocked the road with one of the farm trucks and there were three more men, men she didn’t recognize, standing before it with their caps pulled low and their arms crossed in a display of pugnacity. And obtuseness. And hatefulness. And, and—“Move this truck!” she commanded. “I insist that you move this truck right this minute!”

  No one budged, not even so much as to shift weight from one foot to the other.

  Wallace was there now (and what was his given name? Rudyard? Yes, Rudyard, after the English writer, or so he claimed), his jacket thrown casually over one shoulder, leaning into the fence as if he belonged there, as if he were a rube and hayseed himself. “Say, fellas, can’t you see your way to letting us up the road here for just a minute? We won’t be a bit of trouble—just want to take a picture maybe for the Saturday edition—and you know Mrs. Wright here, don’t you? Come on, be white about it.”

  They might as well have been posts, stones, piles of dung stacked up and molded into the shape and form of men. “Bah!” she spat. “Don’t waste your time. Forget them. Lowlifes, lackeys, country morons.” She swung round, furious, even as both her heels sank into the muck. “Back to the front gate, boys—we’ll let the sheriff handle this!”

  The evening shadows were deepening when they pulled back up to the gate, and where had the time gone? As soon as she flung open the car door she could hear the bullfrogs starting up in the lake, eh-lunk, eh-lunk, a sound so dismal she wanted to cry,51 wanted to tear her hair out and fall down on her knees and beat the earth with her fists—to be locked out, locked out of her own house, and in the evening no less, at suppertime, when she’d stood behind those commanding windows in her best clothes more times than she could count, entertaining brilliant and celebrated people while the whole countryside could do nothing more than whip up their buggies and shovel their manure and gape and wonder—but she told herself she had to be strong. And she was strong, stronger than he was, Frank, the milksop, the little man, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. Billy Weston was still there with the other two, though, looking tense. And the gate was still locked. She looked up at the windows of the house glazed with the declining sun till they were like blind eyes and even if she’d had binoculars she couldn’t have seen inside—not from here, not from the road—and the thought of that made her furious all over again.

  But who was this? A beery calabash-headed man in some sort of uniform that was distended like sausage casings round the midsection and down the tubes of the legs, and he was coming forward now, separating himself from the crowd—and it was a crowd, the yokels gathering for the show with their chew and their cigars and their big-knuckled pasty faded women as if they’d been summoned by the fire whistle, Frank Lloyd Wright and his locked-out wife the best entertainment in town—and suddenly it dawned on her that this was the sheriff himself. “Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.

  She should have been pleased to see him, should have thanked him for turning out at such an hour to do his duty and succor her in her time of distress, but the very look of him infuriated her even more. This was her hero? Her knight? Her paladin? His shoulders sagged. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “They’ve locked me out of my own house,” she said. “And he’s up there right now, gloating. Him and his, his”—she wouldn’t say “whore,” not here, not in front of these people, though that was what she was—“his slattern.”

  He smacked his lips, dug with one delicate finger at something lodged between his teeth. “Who would that be, ma’am?”

  “Who? What do you mean ‘who’? Frank Lloyd Wright, the man named on the peace warrant. Are you going to go up there and arrest him?” She let her eyes rove over the crowd, then gestured angrily at Billy Weston. “And these men? They’re, they’re . . . obstructing, that’s what they’re doing. Obstructing justice. Arrest them. Arrest them right this minute.”

  Someone let out a laugh and then the laughter became general, rising abruptly and then dying out when she swung round on them, furious. “Laugh,” she snarled. “Laugh, you idiots. And you”—pointing a finger at Billy Weston—“I’ll have you fired, the whole lot of you, the minute I get control of Taliesin.”

  “Well, ma’am, I don’t, uh”—the sheriff was fumbling in his breast pocket for the warrants, two thumbed-over slips of paper that could have been used as wadding at this juncture—“wel
l, these men say he ain’t up there. And her, neither.”

  She was astonished: Wasn’t he going to do anything? Had he been bought off, was that it? Had Frank somehow got to him?

  “You mean to tell me you’re just going to take their word for it?” she said, fighting to control her voice. She was glaring at him now, and he was a small man too, for all the puffed-up flesh of him, a conniver, a fool, a coward. “Well?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to look for yourself? Aren’t you going to do your duty? Your sworn duty? Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

  He snatched a look at her, then dropped his eyes and began working at the dirt with the toe of one worn boot. “I suppose I”—he glanced up at Billy Weston—“well, I guess I could, maybe, well, just take a look around the place, considering these warrants and all.”

  They all watched him gather himself up and shuffle to the gate, watched Billy Weston produce a key to release the padlock and swing back the bars to admit him, and they all watched as he trudged along the road and on up the hill to the house, the weariest man in the world. A feeling of anticlimax settled in—they’d wanted action, a raw burn of emotion, the seigneur on the hill exposed and humiliated, handcuffs, protestations, the puff of flash powder—but there was only this, this heavy-haunched, slope-shouldered figure receding in the distance and the frogs eh-lunking and the sun stuck fast in the treetops. People began to stir. One woman produced a sandwich. The newspapermen convened over cigarettes, and the farmers, trained to patience, squatted in the dirt and began to talk in soft voices. Before long the birds would go to roost, bats would flicker over the water and the whole countryside would become comatose as if a switch had been thrown.

  Miriam was having none of it. Her shoes were ruined. Mosquitoes had bitten her—were biting her even now. She’d come all this way, produced the warrants, summoned the sheriff, endured more abuse and humiliation than any woman could be expected to take for even a single minute of a single day in an entire lifetime, and still she was locked out! Before she could think she was at the gate, a sign there—NO VISITORS ALLOWED—and she was jerking at it till the screws gave and she flung the thing down in the dirt and stamped on it with both feet as if it were the effigy of Frank himself. And now they were roused, all right, everybody on their feet—this was what they’d come for and she was going to give it to them. “You see!” she cried. “You see how it is? The sheriff can pass through these damned stinking gates and I can’t? I, the legal owner of the property, of the gates themselves? Is that right? Is that what this country has come to?”

  She could feel it all boiling up in her, a stew of rage and hate and despair, and she fed on it till there was no coming back. The sign was there at her feet and she kicked it till it skittered away from her and suddenly she was whirling around on them all, shouting now, the veins rigid in her throat. “You!” she cried, focusing on the nearest man, a farmer in overalls. “Aren’t you ashamed? All of you, all of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Isn’t there a man among you? Nobody to aid a lady in distress against these, these—” but another sign caught her eye, the Taliesin sign itself, set in glass, and she was snatching up the first thing that came to hand, a stone the size of her fist, and here she was battering the glass till it shattered in a rain of bright hard nuggets and she flung the stone away from her in a single savage gesture.

  “Miriam!” somebody called. “Here, Miriam, pose for a picture!”

  She wanted to wreck it all, tear the place down, see it in ashes. The dirt leapt at her, the sky collapsed. And what was this? A stick. She had a stick in her hand—Miriam, a picture!—and the photographer was setting up his tripod for the flash, Wallace scurrying to help him, the farmwives gaping, Myra swelling and swelling till she was ready to burst like a soap bubble, and at the very moment, the moment she was posed there with the stick held high, vengeful, heroic, imbued with the power of Diana the Huntress and Queen Elizabeth and every other woman who’d stood up for herself against the tyranny of men, Billy Weston and his minions sprang in front of her with a canvas tarp and the flash flashed on nothing.

  “Yes,” she was saying, “yes, I’m sure he was in there all the while, laughing up his sleeve. That’s what insults me more than anything else—to think of him thinking he’s got the best of me, and truly, Leora, I’ve never been so mortified in my life—”

  There were flowers on the table, two dozen long-stemmed roses in a shade of red that edged toward violet, a color that reminded her of the sacred heart of Jesus glaring from the statue outside St. Mary’s Church in Memphis. Frank had paid for the flowers—indirectly, at any rate—because Mr. Fake and Mr. Jackson had got him to cough up some of what he owed her, and given the mood she was in she felt she needed flowers. Just to cheer her. And she needed a glass of champagne too, and strawberries in cream and a piece of smoked sturgeon to pick over till her fingertips smelled of the smokehouse and the sweet imbricate slabs of flesh.

  Leora made a sympathetic noise on the other end of the line, a noise so faint and vague you would have thought she was in California still and not just across town, on Lakeshore Drive, visiting her sister.

  “And the newspaper account was disappointing too. Didn’t you think so? Really, ‘Miriam Storms Taliesin; Repulsed,’ and that sort of thing. Or what was the other one? ‘Miriam Lifts Taliesin Siege; Returns Home.’ Makes me out to be—oh, I don’t know. Pitiful.”

  “Or sympathetic,” Leora said. “People can’t help but sympathize—”

  “And the photograph. They blocked the one that would have done me justice—I told you that, didn’t I? And this one they printed . . .” She was staring down at the newspaper, open to the picture of her posed against an anonymous backdrop of twigs and shrubs instead of the gate itself, her cape flaring, her face distorted under the burden of her hat. You couldn’t even make out her features—and was her face really that wide? There seemed to be a glowing white ball descending from the turban and nothing more than two poked holes for eyes and a slash for the mouth as if in some child’s drawing. “I don’t know, do you like it?”

  “Honestly? No. It doesn’t quite . . . but what do you expect from the newspapers? ”

  Very slowly, as if it represented all the wealth of the world, Miriam poured herself a second glass of the wine, for which she’d had to bribe two bellhops and the man at the desk—the real stuff, they told her, the finest, when in fact it was no better than the rotgut they served in the speakeasies. But it bubbled and frothed and it reminded her of better times. “I did like this,” she said, “in the second column? ‘You are nothing but a bunch of blackguards,’ she shouted to the defenders grouped in front of the locked gate. There’s a certain courageousness to that, don’t you think?”52

  “Do you know what I think? I think you should consider a suit—”

  “I am. We are. Mr. Fake said just this morning—”

  “No, no—I mean against her. For alienation of affection. Margery Mc-Caffery sued her husband’s secretary that time I was telling you about . . .” Leora lowered her voice to a whisper. “The secretary disappeared the very next day—probably ran to her mother in Barstow or some such place. And when he came crawling back, Margery just laughed.”

  The odor of the fish rose to her nostrils, vital and strong, blunting the perfume of the roses. She lifted her forefinger to her lips and idly licked it. Alienation of affection. She hardly knew what it meant beyond the literal meaning of the phrase, but the idea of it appealed to her. She closed her eyes and saw the blanched naked face of that woman in the hospital, childlike and afraid, little Olga, put-upon and harassed. And how did she rate Frank? She didn’t. Nobody did. Nobody.

  “Don’t you see? That’s the way to flush them out.”

  She filed the suit at the end of August in the amount of $100,000, Mr. Fake arguing that Mrs. Olga Milanoff, the Montenegrin dancer, had deprived her of her husband’s society for the past eighteen months, a society she valued, after careful consideration, at some $5,500 a month. The onl
y response from Frank was through the press. He dismissed the suit out of hand, claiming it was just one more attempt on his wife’s part to annoy and harass him, and he refused to divulge the whereabouts of Olgivanna—it was no business of his wife or her lawyers either, he informed a reporter from the Chicago Tribune by long-distance telephone from Taliesin. Which only confirmed what Miriam had known all along—that he was hiding her there. He might have managed to pull his strings and get the warrants dismissed, both of them, but if he thought she was going to give in, he was as deluded as the fools who thought the Great War would last no more than six months. Oh, his little dancer was there, all right—of that Miriam had no doubt. She could picture her cowering someplace in that labyrinth of moldy rooms and reeking outbuildings, afraid of the light of day, confined to the kitchen and the pantry with the servants and the mice, jumping at every sound, and not just the reporters after her now but the process server too.

  Yet the fact remained that the summons hadn’t been served and you couldn’t very well sue an apparition. Miriam brooded over that as August gave way to September, her resources dwindling even as Frank reneged on the hotel bill and Messrs. Fake and Jackson began to press her with statements for services rendered and the walls of her rooms seemed to close in on her as if she were the one caught in a snare and not Olgivanna. It rained for two days and she did nothing but sit at the window and watch the patterns the water made in the street. The black cars streamed by like hearses. People huddled beneath umbrellas—but at least they were going somewhere, doing something, anything, even if it was hateful. She was not one for stasis. She needed movement, action, excitement, and who didn’t but the dead or the soon-to-be-dead? She called Mr. Fake. Repeatedly. He had no news for her. Mr. Jackson would take the phone. He had no news for her either. And then they were both out and the secretary was very sorry.