The Women Read online

“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 whore and whores 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 anticipating 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 snatch 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 Dickens—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 pass 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 balls 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 bitch. 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 pro
perty. 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 cocktail 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 glass 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 cocktail, 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 hell. “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 illustrate 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 bastard. 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 Francisco because 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 assured 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 prick into the little Russian’s cunt and fuck her and fuck her just as if they were goats, two fucking 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-dink 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 fucking—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 fucking.